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 Issues.
This is Dave Orton, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live from the lower east side of Manhattan. Nastasia Lopez is coming to you from Stanford, Connecticut. And we got John Nahoul coming to you from what do you call that? Murray Hill? What is that?
Yep, Murray Hill. And Matt is in his Brooklyn booth, right? You're not back in the Rhode Island, are you in Providence Plantation? Yeah, Sunset Park, baby. Yeah.
Where the hell is Sunset Park exactly? What is that? Uh South Park Slope. And why do they call it Sunset Park? Since they're like, like to me, like all sunset things need to be in California where the sun sets.
Where when you're on the water, the sun sets. Yeah, but we have we have an elevated park that is like legit the best place to watch the sunset. Uh-huh. So outside of California. Nastasia is a connoisseur of uh the sun going up and down.
Uh have you ever been on like I'm sure like the north side of Long Island is also a good place to watch the sunset because you can pretend you're you can pretend that there's no land to your to your west, right? Well, then you have the buildings like outlining the sunset, which is nice when you're in Long Island City. No, not Long Island City, the actual Long Island, when you're on the sound looking over, you can kind of pretend that it's the ocean, right? Yeah. Whatever.
Uh Nastasia once sent me a oh no, was she had said what a nice sun. No, she was going to look at a sunset, and I said to her, hey, how is the sunset? And then before she could answer, what did I say, Nastasia? You said, you know what? Never mind.
I've seen every sunset. Yep. That's my friend and business partner. Yeah. Yeah.
So that's occasionally when she wants to show that I have no uh no heart, she'll be, she'll bust out the I've seen every sunset. Um so uh last week, by the way, uh we took a week off. Uh as you know, we were um out at the uh rallies and protests here in New York. Um for uh in support of Black Lives Matter and in support of uh George Floyd, Brianna Taylor, uh and their families. Uh so I just want to say obviously all of that stuff is still going on.
Uh we're doing the radio show this week uh anyway, and uh because I guess you know, John and and Nastasi, we figured this is gonna be a a long, long, long, long, long road. So uh we want you to know we s we still um want you to go out and support, do what you can to support Black Lives Matter, go out to rallies. Uh I know there's gonna be a number of rallies this weekend. We're gonna go to um what do you guys have anything to add? Go to Marches and protests if you can, and if you feel safe and comfortable doing it in light of the COVID.
Um, and if you're able to, you know, I don't know about speaking for you and Nastalfia, but you know, if you can donate to some funds, donate to some bailout funds, donate to the NAACP, donate to Black Lives Matter. There are a lot of really great organizations out there right now where your money will make a difference. Right. And uh yeah, I feel extremely fortunate in that because I'm antibody positive, uh, I don't, I'm not personally worried about going um going out and and protesting. But when you do go out and protest, please, you know, try to maintain um, I mean, it's impossible out there to maintain a safe distance, but you know, try to make sure you wear your masks and try to stay safe when you when you're out there.
And an excellent point that was brought up on one of the um at one of the rallies was if you have a business, uh you know, try try to think about doing business with black-owned businesses as a as a as a thing that um allies can do uh who have businesses, try to make a point of seeking out black-owned businesses to do work with. Um what do you what do you guys have uh anything else you want to uh you want to add? I think that's great. If you want to support both Heritage Radio and uh the Flando Castile Foundation, Heritage is donating well, heritage is like giving uh 10% of the proceeds that come into heritage this week um to Flando Castile Foundation. So uh, you know, I did not I did not know that.
Um I did not know that. And also obviously, you know, uh in a related note, the museum of food and drink. This is like this is a plea for a plea for help uh at the beginning, but uh Museum of Food and Drink, obviously, uh, which you know John is still working for while he works for us at Booker and DAX. We're still working hard on getting our African slash American uh exhibit up. More on that later, because I thought I'd do for classics in the field today, one of uh Dr.
Jessica Harris's, who's our lead curator, one of her uh best known books, and the one that introduced me to her, but that's for later in the program. Um so any of you guys, uh any of you guys eat anything interesting, do anything interesting this week from a food standpoint? Um I'm fermenting out some kiwis to make into vinegar. Why kiwis? They're already so high in acid.
So, like in other words, like my question is why why choose something that's already so high in acid to do your fermentation on? I don't know. I saw them at Fairway, and for some reason I just felt like doing it. I don't know, I've been fermenting or fermenting out a lot of different fruits to make into vinegars. I've got rhubarb, blueberry, cranberry, uh, strawberry, I've got some mead vinegar.
I don't know, and it's just it's fun to see what they all turn out to be. So I figured why not try kiwi. Now are you doping the kiwi with sugar to get the alcohol level up so that you get a higher uh higher vinegar percentage? Yes, I am. Yeah.
So like what percentage sugar are you taking it up to, roughly? I I'm really just kind of eyeing it out. Um I should probably start taking some measurements and getting things to be a little bit more consistent, but I'd probably say it looks like a quarter of the weight of the of the kiwis that I put in. Well, that's that's very techy there, John. I know, isn't it?
I don't know, like a quota, like something like a quota. I don't know. Exactly. Yeah. Um, and uh we didn't get a chance because it happened uh it too recently.
You want to discuss your fish feast, your tinned fish feast? Oh, yeah, that was really excellent. Um, I had one of my friends Brian over. He works uh for Jose Andres, and he came over and um we had some really nice wines, and then these awesome tinned fish. Uh La Brujula is the brand, they're from Galicia, Spain, and say that again because that was it that was unintelligent.
You gotta say that slowly. La brujula, I think is how it's pronounced. B-R-U-G-U-L-A. Um, and I got every type of, and I've been collecting these for a couple months now, and I finally got every type of tinned seafood product that is available in the US. So it was razor clams, cockles, uh, large clams, whole bunch of different types of sardines, scallops and sauce, octopus and paprika sauce, uh sea urchin.
That's the crazy one right there. Tinned sea urchin row. It was very good. What do you think about that? Conceptually, Nastasi, what do you think?
Doesn't sound that great. Nastasi also remember, not a fan of razor clams, is the only person I know who does not like razor clams. And it's it's you actually don't like it. It's not that you're worried about sand, it's just you don't like it, right? But it's not the sand.
No, it's not the sand. Is it that they're too sweet and you don't like sweet clams? No, I just don't like shellfish in general. I just really don't like shellfish. What about like steamed mussels with oh, you don't like french fries?
I forgot. Oh my god. I can do without. It's not like that's the thing. I can eat it all.
I just I would rather not order it. Do you know what you're not like? I'm averse like scallops though. Oh, all scallops? Yeah.
I ate so many of them as a kid. Like we would boil them and then I just eat them and well, boil them. First of all, I mean, I've when was the last time you gave a scallop a chance? Like a real chance. A lot, because that's the dish that most restaurants will comp will like send out from the chef and you're like, oh, and then I just eat it.
Yeah. So I feel like a lot. I feel like I mean, I feel like to really be like the sc you gotta need to do the East Coast scallop thing, but I mean if you've done it now, if it's been ruined for you, it's ruined for you. There's nothing I can do about it. No, I've had amazing scallops, like the ones that Pasternek does at ask like the you know.
Are you gonna do his you're gonna you're gonna imitate his voice for me if you're gonna I need to scratch my balls while doing it. But um yeah, I mean I understand what a good scallop tastes like. I understand all about it, but I just don't like it. I just feel bad that it got ruined for you by your your childhood as well scallops. I ate them a lot as a like well, they were like special, you know, so they were special or you ate them a lot or both.
Well, like they were the special occasion food, like Mother's Day. And boiled. So your dad cooked them for your mother on Mother's Day and he boiled them. Is this what I'm getting? Yeah, something like that.
Were they at least in some sort of a soup? Was it a tomato situation? Oh. What? But why would you boil?
I don't know. I'm trying to understand, like, I'm in a kitchen, I have scallops, and I'm like, what am I gonna do? I'm gonna throw them in boiling water. And I just I didn't eat. I just think this is not what comes to my head.
Yeah, I understand. It might, you know we were yeah, we were shake and bake household. I mean, I could see scallops in a bag, shake and bake, and then like very quickly like like like roasted, like that I can see. If you're a shaking bag, shake and bake scallops, I could design my whole life around a shake and baked scallop. But like, well manga, I spent a lot of money on this for special occasion.
I'm gonna throw it in boiling water. I mean, I don't know. John, what do you think, man? What do you think, Matthew? I mean, I wouldn't boil a scallop like if that's how Nastasia and her family enjoyed them as when she was growing up, like sure.
I don't know. I mean, I have you tried a boiled scallop? Like, do you have the right to crap all over it the way you are? I've had scallop in soups. Okay.
Right? But if you're gonna put a scallop into a soup situation, right? That's the kind of shit stuff, excuse me, that's the kind of stuff where you you make like a fume or whatever, or you know, you make your shellfish stock, and then you reserve all of the fish parts, and then you throw the scallops in at the end. You basically toss them in at the end and let the carryover cook them as you take them to the table. Every time I've ever done like a fish stew or a fish thing, and it involves scallops, the scallops, I I steam cook all of the shellfish over, like with white wine, and take the steaming liquids, add those to the pot to make the base soup, use the bones from the fish to make a fume, combine those two things, make the stock, and then fold the actual seafood products, especially something like scallops and at the end.
That's the way for decades and decades and decades that I have done any fish stew or any fish like liquid fish product that wasn't meant to be cooked forever, like a like a I don't really care what I'm doing. I mean, that's not how I do uh what's it called? Clam chowder, because they're supposed to be little rubbery garbages there. That's the whole concept is rubbery garbages. So you hack them up and you do it.
You know what I mean? But your way is very not shake and bake. No, but I'm saying like I could just see, like, I could see some sort of a shake and bake situation. Having, like, am I the only person here who has actually made shake and bake in the 70s? Yes, I've caught obviously I'm the only one who's done it in the 70s because I'm the only one that was alive during the 70s.
But I remember actually doing it. It was a real thing that we we did back in the day. That that is real. That happened. That is not like just like a myth, the shake and bake.
Um did you actually do shake and bake in your house, Nastasi, or are you just saying? Oh, all the time, yeah. So they had it in the 80s as well? Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Really? You can still go buy shake and bake? Yes. When you were growing up, did they have that commercial? Shake and bake and I help.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I help. Kid did not. Well, the kid, it was a help, I guess. It was a help.
Uh did they have the hamburger helper commercials when you were a kid? Mm-hmm. Do they have the riceroni commercials? Oh, yes. So we we we basically, even though we're like, you know, more than 10 years apart, we're basically had the same kind of commercial-based childhood.
That's why Dave and I need to enter a game show together. I I really think that that would pay for our next product. The game show together. Well, if we have money. We have code words that we say with each other that no one else would, no one else would get.
Right. It's gotta be like the newlywed game, but for colleagues. Yeah. For like business partners, yeah. Yeah.
We we would kill. We would kill. Yeah, we would, we would, we would wipe them out. We would wipe them out. It's true.
Um, but I I still now can't get all of these dang commercials out of my head that I just brought up. Did they have the um you know you can't have cookies for breakfast, but you can have Cookie Crisp commercial when you were a kid? Yes, yes. Yeah. We weren't allowed Cookie Crisp though, because that was pushing it.
Yeah. Well, first of all, it's garbage. And it's all it's all sugar. So Booker's here, by the way. Booker's not in the case.
Where's my cake? He can't he can't hear you because I got the headphones on. Nastasi wants to know when she when you're gonna bring her cake up now that we've entered phase one and you can get on Metro North. End of months. Um I'll think of a time sometime at the towards the end of this month.
No, there you go, towards the end of this month. So Booker has made Nastasia's red, white, and blue sprinkle cake. And made? The cake is made, it's in the freezer. Okay.
It needs to be thawed and iced. Ask Nastasia why did she move out of New York City? It's the best place in the world. Okay, so this is not the forum for this kind of discussion, Booker, but I appreciate it. Like Booker's the only person who's like still a hundred percent New York all the time.
He's still like, yeah, New York, hell yeah, New York. What about when in like three weeks when it's gonna be a hundred degrees with a hundred percent humidity? He isn't with a mask. Yeah, the mask already. Booker spends twenty-three and a half out of every 24 hour period in his room, which has an air conditioner.
So it's like But he's gonna start ranting the subway again, I thought. Not anymore. I started taking the subway again. Yeah, so he started taking the subway now. So now he's gonna well, we'll see.
Booker has endured many a New York summer on subway platforms. So, and he for whatever reason. On the mask. He f yes, that's true. For whatever reason, Booker prefers like cloudless days.
One tiny wispy cloud at 32,000 feet. Oh, no. Did we talk about that on the air? Have we talked about that on the air? Probably.
There's a whole city. Well, I'm not going to get into it. Not going to get into nuclear warfare and cloud cover right now. We can do that. Yeah, that'll just take us straight to the end of the show.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll just keep going on. Chat starts to revolt after about 25 minutes of non-cooking related stuff. Also, they said don't cook tonight called Chicken Delight or something. See, did I get Chicken Delay?
Chicken Delight. I'll have to Google that one, Google that one later. I mean, like, I can still picture that creepy hand though from Hamburger Helper and like be and like the super like that It was like uh I don't even want to get into it. I don't even want to get into the the gender politics of the hamburger helper helping her help her hamburger help her make a great meal. It's just like it's garbage.
Anyway, but uh nothing against the product. I don't even remember what it tastes like. It's fundamentally a hamburger macaroni casserole product. Am I right? Mm-hmm.
Oh, here's a question for you. What happened to the sloppy Joe? Does anyone still make the sloppy joe? No, but who is this Joe? There's a restaurant in New York City that does.
Well it's like a fast casual kind of thing, but Schnippers. Got the big red logo. They follow the sloppy Joe. Also, Brooks's vegan sloppy Joe. Oh my god, that's so good.
Yeah. Delicious. Now listen, listen, listen. Where are you with knife and fork on sloppy Joe? Are you a pickup, drip, 8,000 napkins, and then fork up the stuff that falls on your plate?
The latter. You gotta put the sloppy in sloppy joe. Are you kidding me? So you don't pull a de Blasio, you don't fork your knife and fork your sloppy joe. What well, open face turkey sandwich, you're allowed to eat with a knife and fork because it's not a sandwich.
It's a lie. Right? Sure, that makes sense. Yeah. Um, so what about you, John?
You you pick up your sloppy joe and have it go everywhere? Yeah, I think so. I mean, I haven't had a sloppy joe in a little while. That's when I probably have is Brooks's, but yeah, I think so. And yeah, you can just kind of pick it up and eat it.
Yeah. Have I ever told you my uh my multi-zillion dollar uh food idea? Maybe. So it feels like a good one to share. You probably should have told Nastasia that one at some point.
That we're never maybe not on the air, but we're never gonna do it anymore. No, no, you like it. We're never gonna do anything. So here's what it is here. That's why we don't have any money.
Here's what it is, here's this. So Nest, I think it was Stas, you were already working. Remember when the Stoners came and they wanted to make burrito tape? Oh, yeah. So these stoners, self uh self-styled stoners, wanted to make a uh an edible tape so that they could tape their burritos shut so that when they ordered their burritos when they were stoned out of their mind, they uh you know they wouldn't drip the product everywhere.
You remember this, Nastasia, right? And I said to them, Well, I'm not gonna make you a tape, but I did invent my thing, which is the semi-changa. Have I discussed the semi-changa? Yes, you have. On the air.
Well, I will say it again because no one has served me one yet. So what it is is it's half burrito, or maybe even two-thirds burrito, and one-third to one half chimichanga. So you have the hard base to hold the burrito with, and then you pick it up, you eat the soft burrito, and then you finish the hard chimichanga section, much like an ice cream cone. That is all kinds of winning. I would just look at that.
I think the edible burrito tape is the bajillion dollar idea. I'm not gonna pass any judgment on you uh for saying that, but like what are you gonna make this edible tape out of? With they we were working with Agar scripts. Me, why do I want edible tape on my burrito? I'll tell you what I do hate.
I do hate chewing on paper. When you buy like a sandwich that's goopy or goopy burrito and you peel back the paper and it gets all goop over the paper and you can't see the paper line anymore, and you start chewing on the paper, unpleasant. Yes. Unpleasant. What do you think about eating the rice paper on a white rabbit candy?
Like it. Yeah, I do too. Do you know white rabbit in the 80s was slightly softer, different. They changed the recipe at some time in like the either in the sometime in the 90s, I think in the all through the 80s it was the same. But I love a white rabbit candy.
You guys like uh Matt and John, you white rabbit candy people? Never had well, you've never had a white rabbit candy? No, man. What the hell? Send me one.
Remember in the what was it, early 2000s, when those ginger candies all of a sudden became the rage? No. The super hot ginger candies. God, I gotta get you guys on the candy train. I love those things.
That's not really Nastasia's jam, though, right? Alright, uh, quick note on bread making before uh in the wake of the Adam Leonty thing. I've been experimenting a lot with bread. I've got people uh Instagramming me stuff and twittering me stuff on bread and milling. Uh maybe we'll just do another show.
I've been working a lot with um with milling and uh different sifting technologies, so I have a lot to say. I've been plowing through uh a bunch of the wheat that I've uh bought. I've been experimenting mainly with um uh hard red uh winter. I don't have any hard red spring yet, and with software hard hard red winter. That's what we made our whole grain pasta out of.
Didn't you use some you didn't use some durum? Hard I'd have to look at the exactly some sort of durum. I want to try some hard red spring, but it's just not available, and I want to try some hard white. So, I mean, I I I could I will not because I have questions to get to, but like I could talk about like what I have learned over the past month in terms of flour tastes, and like here's the here's how this is gonna work. So, so Nastasia, I don't want you to worry.
Here's what's gonna happen. Here's what's gonna happen. I am going to probably do this for three or four months. I'm gonna go through all of the wheat I have, plus I'm gonna buy some hard white wheat and some red spring when I when it's available again. I'm gonna be testing a bunch of different stuff because I honestly like I love the product that I'm making and I think it's different.
But I also like roller milled, I also like bread made from roller milled white flour, right? So I don't dislike bread made from roller milled white flour, and I don't eat foods based on whether or not I think they're healthy. I eat them based on whether I think they're delicious. I do want to tell you if you have not milled your own flour or had very freshly milled flour or somebody else's freshly milled flour bread, it is way different and way better and way more interesting than any other whole wheat product that I've ever had. And I'm having having fun working with it.
But it's kind of like, you know, when I roast coffee, I'll roast coffee for like a year, then I'll take a pause for a year or two, then I'll do it for a year or two. I feel the same thing's gonna happen to me with milling my own flower. So you don't need to worry about me doing it all the time because Nastasia believes anything that I get into, even slightly, that that's gonna be my new my new thing that I'm gonna become a civil war reenactor. What else do you think I was gonna do? Uh Leatherman.
Well, that's gonna happen. Like if my family ever leaves me, my whole life has been centered on it. Broadway. Yeah, well, you know. What about Broadway?
What was Dave doing? Oh god, Dave belt out a show too. I will not. I'll be right back. Oh my god.
You guys are so you're not sure. You've heard me do it on the air a million times. Nobody knows Dave Arnold who haven't heard him belt out a freaking show channel. Oh man, we're just we're just leaving fly today. I'm gonna spend hours sleeping this show.
So Booker, Booker was saying he wanted to sell uh Booker was saying he wanted to sell his brother like it, like I don't know where this came up, but he was a very anti his brother. And uh, you know, as he and so I started singing Boy for Sale from Oliver, and then Booker did not enjoy that very much. But you know, of course, I of course I know Oliver by heart. I mean, who doesn't know Oliver by heart? You also know Leigh Ms.
You do Fiddler on the Roof. I used to I used to literally know Fiddler on the Roof uh by heart because in sixth grade I was Tevya. And back then, when I had nothing else on my mind, I memorized the entire play. I mean, it's yeah. I mean, how hard is didledeidle deedle diddle deedle didle dumb?
You go around the room all day long at bitty bitty bum. Come on, man. I mean, this is something that stays with you forever. You never lose. By the way, I think he lived very close to where I was.
Also, Dave, you and I were saying we were gonna start a band last week, and I was like, I can't sing, and you were like, that's okay. Don't worry about it. It's not important. Not important. Yeah.
Yeah. Why were we gonna do that? Uh I don't know, just something other than what we were doing, which doesn't appear to be working. Uh hey, by the way, uh cooking questions. By the way, hey, we've been talking about bread baking, man.
Hamburger helped me. I don't want to go back. I don't want to, I don't want to go back to bread baking. He just asked you to. I just heard him do it.
I just heard him do it. Oh, but I have to say though, not about bread in particular, but I am loving this pseudo Detroit pizza I've been working on. Loving it. Loving the pseudo Detroit pizza. I wouldn't mind going back to Detroit.
Not just for the pizza, though. I do miss their hot dogs. They have such good, or as they call them conies. Inexplicably, they call them conies. They're very good.
Uh but you didn't you didn't care about it, right? You just got the chili. You didn't even get the dog. Did you even try one of those dogs? Yeah, you broke me off a piece.
Speaking of, are you eating one right now? Old stamps. Old stamps? How do stamps make the noise of thumbtacks? They're in like a thing.
See, you're doing to us what you hate for people to do to you. This is why you don't go to movie theaters. Because you don't like the popcorn bag. That's true. I didn't know if you could hear it.
Okay. Okay. Okay. From Thomas Zernigan via email. I recently tried to make Orja.
I started by blending my hot water and almonds. Then I pour this mix directly into the rotor, presumably the rotor of a spinzall or our centrifuge, and spun it for 20 minutes or so. There was no clarification or separation. Yeah, that's not the way. That's not the way the orja's uh work for the rotor for the spinzole.
In general, I you know, I'm usually making such a large quantity of those things that I go through a nut bag and then a press is actually how I do those things in in real life. But when I do uh nut milks in the spinzole, I do it around the quantity of nuts. So I always have the quantity of nuts in the recipe be roughly 400 miles. D's nuts. That is that what you're looking for?
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But if you um if you're uh oh my god, now I have that whole song going through my head. Um uh so if you if you do that, the idea is is that all of the liquid that you blend in will get filtered through the nuts, through these nuts as they go through um as they're in the rotor, and you'll get because the first like the first like couple hundred milliliters you get off are gonna look almost clear in a continuous uh situation, but you're not gonna get a decent separation out of those hard puree uh nuts like that. Uh, even in a big center, if you you know, you will get it when you're running it at 4,000 G's for like 20 minutes.
But with this one, it's really more about uh trying to fill the rotor with these nuts solids, uh, and then uh and then getting the the stuff out, but in general, like nut bags, uh nut milk bags, and uh there are are I think the way to go, but they're endeth the their endeth the suggestive nut bag talk. Um Aaron Holbeck from Instagram. Okay, now Nastasia's gonna hate this one. You're gonna hate this one, Nastasia. Well, which is because it's like highly technical and like all tweaked out.
You hate it. Anyway. Uh hey Dave, I'm building a proofing box, so we're back on bread. You happy about that, Nastasia. For those of you that don't know, uh sometimes if people can't control uh the environment in their kitchen, the humidity or the temperature, they build a proofing box.
The proofing box is usually a higher temperature than you would have in your normal house or kitchen, but it's consistent, so you can kind of guarantee the proofing rates, and you need a relatively high humidity and a relatively high temperature, but also a relatively large volume because you're gonna be putting a bunch of bread into it. I am building a proofing box by retrofitting a Coleman cooler with an immersion circulator and closet shelving. I intend on uh mapping the bull, i.e. the bread bull, uh the bread bull's height through uh through its proofing by using a laser ping range finder with one millimeter resolution. How you like that, Stas?
Okay, okay. Yeah, I was wondering if the appropriate time to bake is when the bull's maximum height has uh plateaued. Uh I'm just getting into the modernist bread and I've yet to find a conclusive answer to this question. I would say no, that's probably too late. Uh thank you, Aaron Holbach.
And then as a follow-up, follow-up, I found that measuring the height proportional to volume is an unreliable gauge of fermentation. In fact, at either maximum, the dough would be over fermented. I use the finger dent technique, and I'm now exploring ways to uh quantify this qualitative test. For those of you that don't know, the finger dent technique when you're proofing bread is if you push on the bread as it's proofing. So you've you've done the shape, and by the way, by far and away, the thing that when you're beginning in bread that you're that you're gonna probably f up is the shaping part of it.
So much of the structure of the final bread is because think about this. You do what's called bulk fermentation, it ferments, and then often you kind of you punch it down or you do whatever you're gonna do after bulk fermentation, then you divide it into whatever its final uh loaves and or buns are, and then you do the shaping, and so much of the texture and structure of the bread are done in that shaping thing, I think that's where a lot of people uh mess up. Anyway, um so I use so the finger dent technique after you've done your final shaping and you're and you're proofing it. That's my large dog being happy that uh Jen just got home from work. So uh when you push in, if you push and you tap, you push on it a little bit, and when if it pops right back at you, like if it's very elastic, it means it hasn't inflated enough to reach anywhere near the edge of the gluten's kind of extent.
If you push it in and your finger goes into it and it starts collapsing, well, you waited too long, because at that point, any kind of hit's gonna make it deflate. What you want is for it to still be going up when you put it into the oven, the oven hits it, the temperature goes up, boom, you get your oven spring, but it doesn't collapse, and then boom, you get your your perfect bread. So that's the dent test. Anyway, uh, so here's Nastasi's gonna hate this even more. Uh I intend to use a series of linear servos to emulate a finger impression while mapping the rebound volume through a 3D depth sensor.
If I'm unif If I'm able to automate calling the proof, it may be interesting to design a consumer model with more economical components. My inspiration for this project is no kitchen get quotes, no kitchen gadget can simplify calling proof for you, which is a quote from Modernist Bread 3-220. With that said, I fear that I'm innovating for innovation's sake. How would you proceed? FYI, my summer uh research plans were foiled by the pandemic, so I've turned to experiment at home.
Thank you, Aaron Hoback. I would definitely say that this is something that you should do, Aaron, for your own edification. I don't know anyone's gonna buy a proof tester. What do you guys think? Even with the sudden popularity of bread baking at home, I think this is a stretch.
There's also, I'm gonna put it to you this way, Aaron. I think this is kind of fascinating, and I'd love to know. Like, I like there's a huge uh long history in industrial um cooking of testing things that are kind of untestable and coming up with standards, and then those standards become kind of the standard. So in the pea industry, there's a thing called the tenderometer, and they they they have a very specific shaped instrument that crushes a very specific amount of peas and measures the the very specific weight that it takes to crush that, and that's turned into a tenderometer reading for peas. And a lot of things have these very strange uh kind of standards uh that are built up.
So who knows? Maybe you'll come up with the maybe you'll come up with the um with the proof standard. But I will also say I watched uh recently a video where someone did the same recipe at four different proofs, under, just right, or under, a little bit under, just right, and like a lot over to show the difference between them. And the difference in uh whether they proofed it correctly or incorrectly is not as dramatic as you might think. But it's instructive to go look at their videos to see what the effect of proof is on bread.
Okay. Uh Brian Yurko writes in, hey, hope you're well. Uh had a question about vacuum pumps. Uh any suggestions on what Nastas is like, uh geez, vacuum pumps. Uh any suggestions on what to do to get a seized pump going again.
And just because I know Dave likes the details, it's a Bush R5RB0021C. Um with an elect uh electric motor uh all inside of an ultra source ultravac 250. Uh Brian, so most likely what is happening. Luckily for you, the Bush pumps are well, unluckily for you, bush pumps are fantastically expensive. Luckily for you, they're also completely rebuildable.
The odds that there's something wrong with the electric motor are probably zero. Those motors are a beast. Almost certainly, what has happened, and by the way, you can go online uh and if you look up the R series Bush pumps, there's a complete rebuild guide online that's available for them. Um let me see if I can get you the title for it. Uh the rebuild guide is titled Maintenance and Repair Matal uh uh Manual, R5 series, and the things all there and it complete down to like how to get the taper pins out without damaging them.
It's very good document. Undoubtedly, what has happened is this inside of a an oil-based uh vacuum pump, there is a spinning wheel, uh like an eccentric spinning wheel. On that spinning wheel is a vein that it pops up and it's spring-based. And that vein, I think they're carbon, I'm not sure. That vein, I forget exactly what they're made out of.
That vein pushes up against the outside of uh of the pump and sweeps through the oil and acts like a highly scoop, going back to the 70s. Acts like a high-lye scoop and scoops the air out from the low pressure area through the oil and out the high pressure area. And if you shatter one of those veins, it'll seize the pump right up. Most likely you have a thrown or shattered or stuck vein. So you need to drain the pump, you know, get rid of the oil.
That oil is ruined, clean all that stuff out, and either repair or fix the veins, which is a very small price to pay compared to the price of that bush vacuum pump. Was that a blessedly short enough answer for you, Nastasia? Yes. All right. Uh Rachel Meyer wrote in, and I don't have an answer for this one, but more of a throwing it out there.
Maybe uh maybe we have in the listening uh audience a pectin expert, maybe one of the people from CP Kelco, because I don't know that I still have our contacts at CP Celco. Piper Christianson, uh, who used to work with us, his family is part of CP Celco, but he doesn't talk to us anymore. Now we don't we still talk to him, he doesn't he doesn't talk to us anymore, right? Right, right, Sas? Yeah.
But anyway, he's got the Celco contacts. 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. So I got my France box, and one of the things in it was the lavender blackberry rhubarb jam from V Smiley. So what I recommend you do with this, bread it on toast. And for toast, if you got the bend to table uh essentials box, in that box, you may find a main grains red fife wheat flour, and you can make a delicious, very full-flavored whole wheat bread from the from the main grains red fife.
I will say this if you're not used to baking with whole grains, realize that you're gonna need to have a uh a much higher hydration ratio. It's gonna take more water than normal. I would let it ferment for a relatively long time so that everything gets absorbed, and it's gonna feel a little bit different in your hand. If you want great flavor but want a more traditional kind of fluffy loaf, and you're not used to baking with whole grains, it's okay to mix that with uh 5050 that flour and either a bread flour or even an AP flour, and then you can do what's closer to a uh uh a Jim Leahy uh no need uh a bread kind of a recipe. And then when we had stuff left over, we toasted it, and guess what?
We spread on it the V Smiley lavender blackberry rhubarb jam from the Bend a Table box. So that's what I would do. Go to BentaTable.com to start your 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 HRN, which stands for Heritage Radio Networks programming. Um it's Rachel Meyer from Shoots and Roots.
By the way, Shoots and Roots is a uh bitters business that was formed by uh three uh PhD botanists uh women. I I think the only one on them I really know is Rachel, but it's kind of a cool concept company. They make interesting bitters with uh, you know, very kind of non standard botanical flavors like pine forest and whatnot. It's Rachel Meyer from Shoots and Roots. I accidentally made a jello shop by mixing 350 milliliters of Everclear with a whole barbecued orange through muddling.
And the jello that it produced is delicious. Would you be willing to work with me on making this a thing? The chemistry, uh, average pectin per orange and presentation, etc., etc. Uh, too good to pass up on this grilling season. So, what has happened, pectin, which is the setting uh uh thing that's in oranges, is um not soluble in highly alcoholic uh mediums.
So you've gotten this pectin, you've muddled it, and then because of the alcohol, for some reason you've got the set just right such that it sets up in the um in the glass. I don't know how to reproduce that because pectin is, as they say in French, fiddly. So, like it's real fiddly. So, like I I would say I'm gonna pass this off. Hopefully, someone else in the listening crew has a way to kind of make this more uh predictable.
Uh, you know, some way to measure it or some way to bulletproof uh the recipe such that it always works. But um, you know, pectin destabilization and alcohol is something that you know obviously I've known about for many years and have used in, for instance, in the book Liquid Intelligence, I use for doing auto Houstinos, but I've never tried to actually create a gel with it on a time after time basis. But hopefully, someone in the audience uh knows something about it. Um we actually we had somebody send in a voicemail out. I you want do you wanna try this question?
When I play this, there's a chance that you're gonna hear it at some sort of weird speed. Just let's see if we could roll with it. What's up, Dave, Nastasia, Matt, and any other road crew? This is Paul from Seattle, longtime listener. I've noticed the rage barometer has gone down on the show lately.
So I'm calling in with some questions about things you hate, uh, mainly cold brew coffee. I recently bought a spinzole. Right now, cold brew is my only substitute for not having AC, as the apartment that I'm quarantined in, is slowly warming up this summer. And I'm also looking to make some low-quality individuals' versions of some of the coffee drinks from Liquid Intelligence. I know that you and Paul Adams have argued a lot about cold brew.
I remember from a back episode you said your current like current cold brew process is slightly different from what's in the spinzall recipe book. I was just wondering what your current cold brew process is right now. Also, in case you and Nastasia are running out of things to fight about, bonus question. How do you partially clarify the preserved lemon juice for the Corsair? Do you undercut the enzyme amounts or do you run it for less time or what?
Thanks everyone. Be safe. Well, Paul increased my rage meter just by by having that, like Nastassi couldn't even let me listen to the question. I didn't even hear it. I thought you were going to be a good one.
Oh, you couldn't hear it. Oh weird. Oh, that makes more sense. Yeah. So Nastasi's like talking to me in the middle of the question.
And I'm like, Nastasi, what the hell? I'm trying to listen to the guy talk. Yeah, that's weird. So weird that you could. Okay, well.
Did you hear it, John? Yeah, I'm not sure. Okay. So I thought you're just going to be able to do that. You don't get to hear that one, Nastasia.
Well, you wouldn't have liked it anyway. But I was like, I was like, I was like, what the hell is she doing? The guy's like, you don't have enough rage anymore. And like literally in the middle of him saying I don't have enough rage anymore. Nastasi is sitting there, like just like talking over him like he's not talking.
And I'm like, what the hell? His plan worked perfectly. We didn't know exactly what would happen, but he did establish rage. Even for Nastasia, that was hardcore. I mean, I'm I you didn't know you did it.
You didn't know you did it, which makes it a little bit different. But I was like, whoa, dude. Whoa. Um. So uh on cold brew, uh, look, here's the here's the here's the what I do now.
I forget what I did in the in the in the recipe manual, but really with the cold brew, it's all about forcing the liquid through the product under pressure, right? So, like if I was going to build my own cold brew machine, what I would do is uh take a tube, a high pressure tube, and put the water in at the top and force it at a high pressure, uh almost like espresso uh style through the through the puck and then over and over and over again. And that's kind of what you're doing when you're doing cold brew in the spinzole, is you're putting the cold brew in, it's going in the tubes, it's getting fed into the into the spinzall uh rotor, getting forced out to down to the bottom, being held there under pressure, and then getting forced up by the weight of the new liquid coming in, and it's cycling out uh cold brew. Uh and so you know, if I was ever going to build a cold brew machine, it would be built on uh kind of a pressure, a pressure situation. Um but yeah, I don't like cold brew.
I just don't like it. It's not that I don't want you to like it, it's just I don't I don't like it. Do you like it, John? Alright. What was the other part of the question?
What's the other part of the question, man? I forget what the biggest is. Oh clarification. Oh, not luminicello, yeah, uh preserved lemons. So the trick with the preserved lemons, uh run it, run your stuff continuously and don't use first of all, there's so much we're blending the liquid and the pith and everything.
So just if you use just the normal amount of SPL, it's not enough to fully clarify it because there's just so much pectin and garbage in it that it's not going to clarify anyway. So just don't let it fully clarify. So you're gonna run it continuous and you're gonna do it. Don't use um, don't use wine finding agents, just use SPL and let it stay cloudy. Uh because you're you're you don't have a lot of um in the corsair, which is uh preserved lemon, uh Moroccan preserved lemon, um, simple syrup, lime juice, uh tequila, and hot stuff of your choice.
Um you don't have that much lime juice in there, and so you really want there to still be some body in that lemon juice to give it a nice kind of uh shaking texture. Good enough answer. I don't know if I answered that. All right. Speaking of lemons, speaking of lemons, I'll get back to Matt Matthias Matthias's uh uh question.
Uh Nastasia, your mom wrote in uh answers for the for the lemon person. You want to you want to tell them? I don't have it. So I have to read your answers from your mom. Your mom, your mom gave you answers, said that you can attribute them to your dad, and then sent them to you, and then you emailed them to me, and yet I have to read them.
I don't have them in front of me, I'd have to dig it. And it was a text, so I'd have to look right. Just read it. All right, don't water the tree. Uh wait, don't water the tree only the bottom of the trunk.
Remove all the leaves from the bottom of the trunk so it will be like a topiary, fruit is on top, like a basket filled with fruit. Shake the tree to get rid of bugs. Really? Shake a tree to get rid of how big is this tree? Pick lemon.
My mom is very strong. It's not the tree. I believe that. Yeah, yeah. So you're like, it's not the tree.
She's like an al-she's like an almond harvesting machine. She we're like, you ever seen those almond harvesting machines? They're like it's like a skid steer, and you drive it up to the tree, and this arm comes out and it's like, I told you to drop the romance. And the almonds hit the ground. Yeah.
Now that's how I'm gonna picture your mom. The almonds hit the ground. And I think some of the almond shakers also have like giant nets that they can put out. Anyway, um shake the tree to get rid of bugs, but only if you're only if you're only if you're low. Yeah, yeah.
If you're if you're if you're Nastasia's mom's strength, you can shake the tree to get rid of bugs. She's like, I chewed ice when I burned you. And I was like, all right. Yeah, yeah. First of all, she's not even, it's not like she's shaking them out.
She's just shaking the tree so hard that the bugs are like, the hell with this. The hell with this. Yeah. Four. Pick the lemons in the cool of the morning.
I feel like this is like an advice that could be used. It sounds like a 60s song, does it not? Pick the lemons in the cool of the morning. Yeah. We also think that she's trolling us on Instagram.
Yeah, yeah, she is. Nastasia's mom, right? Has like a garden and she lives in uh they're still in Covina? Yeah. Yeah.
So they're in Covina, which you know has like sunlight and whatnot, like, and they have a garden, they're growing stuff. So she's like, everyone should get out and garden. You're like, hey, thanks, Nastasia's mom. So what am I gonna my bedroom faces a brick wall in New York? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like, like my windowsill gets like, you know, half hour of sunlight a day. And it's not even direct. You know what I mean? I'm on the fourth floor of a 20-story building. Anyway, um, you know, the the the shade I get is from like, you know, the trucks outside, you know, the very anyway.
Um pick the lemons in the cool of the morning. Using clippers to cut a small amount of stem with the lemon. That now you're too lazy to do that stuff. You're a you're a ripper. Yeah, yeah.
Oh, twist. Well, at least you're nice. Twist and pull. Speaking of the big thing. But we have to try the lemon chair.
I got it. So. How is it? You're gonna send me some. I don't want to know.
No, no, I'm waiting for you to try it. All right. And remove any yellow or discolored leaves daily. Speaking of picking, let me get to let me get to uh let me get to this uh real quick. Who who wrote it in?
Someone wrote it in something about ah, Andy Shipman wrote in. Hey Dave, what would you do with 20 pounds of sour cherries? For the first year I harvested, I made jam. The second year I made wine. Uh uh, it had a low ABV and too acidic to drink straight up.
Yeah, that makes sense. I used it as a mixer, mixer for a year. Last year I soaked them in brandy for a couple of months and had great cherry brandy for late summer cocktails. Going to pick next weekend. Have any thoughts?
I don't have a spinzall. Well, first thing you should do, uh, Shipman is go buy yourself a spinzall. I mean they're cheap now. I mean, come on, please. Uh, second is uh we should go pick uh cherries.
Uh like I'm gonna go up with my um, I'm gonna go up with my sister and my brother-in-law, who are both positive when they have the cherries at Fishkill Farms, because this will be the first year ever that I can pick cherries and not die. You want to do it? You told me I couldn't. Well, you can just have to stay six feet away from me. Why?
I don't care if I get it. All right, and you're not gonna visit anyone who's at risk? Alright, fine, whatever, man. Whatever. But anyway, we should totally do it.
Here's some things you should do. You should go look at Pie Marches on and follow any of uh Monroe's recipes on cherry pie. How did you not make cherry pie in all of these things? You talked about cherries and not make cherry pie. That's crazy.
John, is that crazy? Yeah, crazy. Also, when you're making brandy cherries, may I suggest that this makes an excellent gift for people? Here's something I've always wanted to test and I've never done. Get yourself some pectin methyl esterase, which is the pectin strengthening enzyme.
Add a little bit of calcium chloride and a little bit of uh pectin methylesterase, do a pre-soak uh in that to try to strengthen the pectin in the cherry so that they don't get soft, right? Now I'm I'm not which is I believe how they actually also do it for the fake the faky maraschino cherry ones. Uh, you don't want that much, but it would be nice to keep them firmer than they are when they're brandied normally, and then you want to get the the sugar level up slowly over time in your cherries so that they don't shrink. Look up any one of the like the the great guides on this because you don't want them to shrink, and then this makes the perfect gift for anyone who likes cocktails. If you make so Toby Cicchini, uh, you know, uh, you know, one of the uh contenders and an absolute gives him this as the as the creator of of the Cosmo uh and you know from Long Island Bar, writer for the New York Times, etc.
etc. Uh Toby uh has a sour cherry tree, and he takes and makes them all into uh brandy cherry cherries, which he then gives out as gifts. And what's gonna happen is is that over time, every year people will be like, oh, I can't wait. Shipman's gonna give me his his brandy cherries again this year. I can't wait.
And then one year someone's gonna tick you off. You're gonna have a sign of the cross against somebody, right, Sas? And then, and then that person's not gonna get the cherries, and you're not gonna have to say to them, you're not gonna have to say, yo, Billy, I'm pissed at you, right? That's not how it's gonna work because there's gonna be like, yo, Andy didn't give me my cherries this year. What did I do?
And so you're gonna be able to use these cherries as a lever against your uh friends, enemies, and acquaintances for the rest of your life. What do you think, Nastasia? I love that. You know what I think about enemies and signs of crosses. Yeah, so I have a new one.
I'm reading uh this book. So we've explained sign of the cross. Nastasi's a big fan of sign of the cross. It always works. Oh, yeah, we could talk about it again later.
We don't have time to fully get into the sign of the sign of the cross. And we don't even have time to get into sealing sealing your enemies in cubes and throwing them into the deepest holes of the year. We should uh we should definitely devote the appropriate amount of time to the classic. It's already 1256. Yeah, hold up, hold up, hold up.
Uh wait, wait, oh second. Jessica Harris. Yeah, hold on, wait. I I can actually finish this. I've only got two quick questions.
Let me just get them. Okay. From uh Matthias Sexton via Instagram or Matthias. Uh, I've been reading through modernist cuisine books over the lockdown period, and after reading the section on reductions, I found the last paragraph about reverse osmosis. I did a little further reading on this and found that the fruit juice industry has been leveraging forward osmosis to concentrate fruit juices.
Also think uh maple syrup has been doing it. I found some of the filters are relatively affordable. Um I was wondering if you had any information regarding this as I've been thinking of recreating this for myself. I don't, but uh showing on the on the chat room has some good videos to point to, and this is something that DIY people do do initial concentration, not the full concentration, because it's hard to get uh very, very, very um high concentrations using uh RO just because the pressures aren't high enough. But there's a lot of stuff out there.
Look at what the maple syrup people are doing. Um, and um there's DIY people out there, and you can follow the videos, and hopefully, someone in the chat room will send me some more information on it. Josh writes in on uh liquid nitrogen. I'm trying to get started working with liquid nitrogen, specifically nitrile muddling. I've been watching some old YouTube videos uh with Dave at Booker Index.
He has a small handheld container that he uses to transfer the liquid nitrogen from the large tank to the shaker or glass. What is it? Where can I buy one? Almost looks like a small handheld thermos. Well, Josh, you know what it is?
Small hand held thermos, but tell him what you can't do with it. Ding ding ding. You cannot close it. That's how that German dude blew himself up, almost killed himself, almost wiped out his girlfriend too. So anytime you're gonna have a liquid nitrogen thermos, two things.
Don't get one with glass in it, get one that's all stainless steel. We use Stanley's at the bar. Uh and the black ones that we used to use at the bar were Stanley's. Uh stainless steel Stanley's with you know black painted outsides. Uh the misfits sticker that uh Tataguchi put onto ours is optional but encouraged.
Uh and then they last almost uh forever. So don't seal it. Well, as soon as you get it, take the lid and throw the lid away. This way, no one can seal it because you've thrown the lid away. So whenever we get one into the bar, we take the top lid and throw it away and the bottom lid and throw it away, and that's it.
And if you need to cap it, you can get like a styro plug and like like let it rest over the top, but don't, don't, don't plug them. And remember, you don't want to let them go all the way dry before you refill them because once they warm up, you have to spend all of that energy in the form of boiling liquid nitrogen to re chill it down to liquid nitrogen temperature. So try to keep it, uh try to keep it nice uh and and full. And uh, you know, if it should break, you'll notice the outside frosts over. That's how you tell if a doer is broken or if your thermos is broken.
All right. So, so and we're actually gonna almost make it because we started a little bit late because of technical issues, so here we go. You ready for us actually to do this? To be done? Yes.
All right. Classics in the field, yeah. All right, we got Jessica Harris. Dr. Jessica Harris has been a long time friend of uh, well, you know, I've known her for a long time personally, but of the museum, and is currently the head curator, the lead curator of the show that has was supposed to open in March.
And we all know how opening things in March uh happened of um African/slash American Making America's Table, which is an explor making the nation's table, which is uh an exploration. John, of course, you know, uh one of the creators of the uh one one of the museum staff uh people working on it, so it has my back on the corrections of uh things like that. Uh is an exploration of the um the contributions, the kind of widespread systemic and largely unknown contributions of uh African Americans to American foodways um in general. So things that you might not might not know. Um you want to give a couple, John?
Yeah, Alfred Crowell in 1896 or 1897 was the second African American in Pittsburgh to receive a patent, and he patented like the clicker lever mechanism on the side of ice cream scoops, which is kind of my favorite thing to point out. I know Dave, your favorite example is Frederick McKin and shipping foods around the case. The guy invented the reefer truck. The guy invented the reefer truck, and his company, right? The company that he founded, he co-founded, he was the inventor, and then there was a money guy, and they co-founded this company.
And they still make all of the they still make all of the the reefer trucks and the reefer boxcars. So if you've ever had a piece of food that was brought to you, it was most likely brought to you by a truck, even if it got on a rail or got on a boat, it was most likely went from the from it's to the final place to the market in a truck. That truck was refrigerated and that refrigerator is a direct result of his work. So like the entire food system as we know it would not make sense without him. Anyway um built the very first kind of uh portable portable refrigerator compressor um we tried to get one and the company wouldn't give it to us I was so pissed they had one that they had kind of had decommissioned it looked like we were going to get it for the exhibit and then for some reason they just crapped out did they ever give us a reason why they cracked out on that?
No they just kept kind of saying it was too big to move and yeah. They instead recommended we get little toy truck replicas. Oh yeah Joey yeah I really want to go to a museum so I can see a toy truck replica right the the toy truck even Nastasia wanted to start the mashbox cars uh museum when you were a kid did you collect mashbox cars or were you more of a hot wheels both both I felt like when I was growing up you had to choose hot wheels or mash box anyway whatever I'm not gonna get into it. Um so anyway so Jessica Jessica Harris uh is the lead curator I've known her for a long long time and even before I knew her I I knew her work. So she she is, I would say, the kind of foremost scholar on um cooking of the African diaspora in in the United States and also Africa itself.
And I remember the first trip I ever took with her was to Senegal with also a friend of the show, Pierre Cham. And I'll tell you, if you ever get a chance to travel through Senegal with Dr. Harris, it is a real treat. But well before I knew her, when I was first researching foods from Africa, there was very, very, very, very little written about it. And most of the stuff that was written about it was written from a very kind of white and European perspective.
And so she wrote, she had been writing books. I guess she started writing books at the late 80s, early 90s. But I think one of her most influential uh kind of middle books was 1998, The Africa Cookbook, Taste of a Continent. And it's one of the first books I was able to find that really dealt with uh the subject of uh African food from uh I think a good perspective. So you should go uh check that out.
You should check her out, and you should check out the exhibit that she curated as soon as we are able to open that thing again. We don't have a date. Wait, I want to say one thing. Her book, My Soul Looks Back, I enjoyed because it wasn't about food, it was about like growing up, I mean uh living in the in New York in the 60s and how she was friends with James Baldwin and um Maya Angelou, and it's really cool. And she gives a playlist uh to listen to while you're reading it.
Yeah, there's a section in that book where she talks about how mean Nina Simone was to her, which is kind of funny, right? Yes. Nina Simone was so mean to her. Yes, so mean. Yes.
But anyway, Dr. Harris is a treasure. I'll get I'll give you one more story about. So, like uh Dookie Chase, a very famous New Orleans restaurant. Um, Nastasia had organized for them to come do the um the Mofad's gala.
If you don't know who they are, like get out from under your rock and look up who they are. Uh, but they for years, forever, they've never done anything outside of their restaurant. They've never needed to. They've been very kind of New Orleans focused, and even within New Orleans, within kind of their restaurant and the community that went to their restaurant. And uh, you know, the last time I went to New Orleans, uh, you know, Dr.
Harris called, told me I had to go talk to them about cocktails. I'm like, I don't really know why they want to hear from me, but I'll do it because you told me to. And then when I got there, I found out she had called them and told them that they needed to talk to me. And it's just the kind of thing, it's like, well, why'd you do it? She's like, well, Dr.
Harris said to, and that was all you needed to say because people just don't say no to her. You know what I mean? Uh, but it was, you know, she wanted them to come uh to do something at the gala, and they were actually gonna come up to New York and I hope make shrimp clements so, which is my favorite thing that I had when I was there. They still, when we get back to whatever, they I think they still will. Yeah, but just to show how much weight, she's the kind of person that could just tell someone of that stature, please do it, and they will do it.
So she is someone who uh she is someone whose word can be trusted. Uh and that's it. Cooking issues. Cooking issues is powered by Simplecast. Thanks for listening to Heritage Radio Network.
Food radio supported by you. For our freshest content, subscribe to our newsletter. Enter your email at the bottom of our website, Heritage Radio Network.org. Connect with us on Instagram and Twitter at heritage underscore radio. You can also find us at Facebook.com slash Heritage Radio Network.
Heritage Radio Network is a nonprofit organization driving conversations to make the world a better, fairer, more delicious place. And we couldn't do it without support from listeners like you. Want to be a part of the food world's most innovative community? Subscribe to the shows you like, tell your friends, and please join the HRN family by becoming a member. Just click on the beating heart at the top right of our homepage.
Thanks for listening.
Timestamps may be off due to dynamic ad insertion.