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Alright, here we go. Oh and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of cooking issues coming to you live from the Lower East Side. Nastasia the Hammer Lopez from Stamford, Connecticut. John from Nahoul from uh the Murray Hill.
Uh Matt from his Brooklyn booth, Boothette. And today's special guest, Adamal. Auto Millon G-Where are you hanging out at? Upper West Side. Upper West Side.
Oh, yeah? You live in the Upper West Side? Yeah. And you work down in you work down in the in the so that's kind of a crap commute. Am I right?
I just ride my bike, so I don't have to take the train. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. How long is how long is that bike? Is that a 30 35 minute ride?
What is it? A little less, like 25, probably. I like that. I like a b- I love a bike ride. I don't have my bike, my real bike anymore.
Now I am a city bike guy. So are you like I used to be where you hate locking your bike? So it's just it goes from inside to inside and you never lock it anywhere. That's exactly how I do it. It goes inside the restaurant or inside my house, and that's it.
Yeah, my old chain used to weigh as much as my bike, and so I just never carry it around with me, which is why actually City Bike makes it kind of more convenient for running errands where I'm not allowed to bring my bike in. For those of you that don't know, have never ridden a bike in New York City, there's all of these buildings with all these crazy anti-bike policies. And when you ride your Stas, you remember this when you had the folding bike? Up. Yeah, yeah.
And so what you do is is like you ride up to the door, and then you're like because you know you're about to have an argument with this fool. You know what I mean? At the front of the building, and then you're you know, you get all you get all bent. Stas, how many arguments did did the both of us get into with people about our bikes? Oh, so many.
But Dave, what's worse on a city bike? Uh seat that keeps falling or sticky handles? Which one would you rather? But I can only have one. Yeah.
I I can't get both the falling seat and the sticky hand. But see, I think actually, like the falling seat is maybe worse. Like, I the slow falling seat on like a relatively long ride where you're like, it's gonna hold, it's gonna freaking hold, it's gonna hold, and then like, and then you're like, you're going, you're going, you're you're going, and then like all of a sudden you're like, I'm I'm that old man who has the poorly adjusted seat with my knees in my chest. What the hell? You know what I mean?
Like, because I I hate those dudes. Like, yeah, you know what I mean? Whenever I see someone and their knees, their legs never go almost straight as it like look around people. Like, if you don't know how to adjust a bike seat, look, like, look it up on the internets, and then look around you, and so many people have their seats too low. Guys, back me up on this.
I thought you were gonna say look around you for examples, I was like, nah, man, so many people are wrong. Yeah, dude. Everyone, dude, everyone, not everyone, a lot of people have their seats too low, and you're just giving up power. That's why, and you know, it's probably we should we need to come up with a non-offensive term for for granny gear. Because I know some grannies that can kick most people's behinds.
But that's true. You you see these people in in in these in these gears where they're they're they're they're pedaling like a mile a minute and going one mile an hour, and you could get the extra power and spend less of your own energy if you just adjusted your bike seat right. Nastasia, what's my other big gripe? Um, for the for the window. No helmet fix the uh earphones in.
Oh, I I hate that. Any any combination of not paying attention while you're on the streets of New York, like gets me real bent. Now, underinflated tires. I hate I hate seeing people with underinflated tires. I hate it.
You know what I mean? I mean, look, it's on them. It's for them, but like, why are they wasting their energy? What do you guys think? You guys with me on the underinflated tire thing?
120 psi, it's the only way to roll. Man, although I used to go, well, whatever. This is not biking issues. I wish we could get the bike snob on, though, and just like, is the bike snob still have a blog, or is that is that over years ago? I never know.
What was the what was the bike snob? The bike snob was a like a mystery, a mystery New York City biker who just went on. I don't remember whether it was a blog or a Twitter account, and they would just post pictures and vitriol and hate. Just pictures, vitriol, and hate. Hey, do you Nastasia?
Do you remember the time that you uh you remember the time that you were biking home from the radio show? And like for those of you that don't know, like, regardless of what Neil Diamond says, Brooklyn roads are the worst, are the worst. It's a good Neil Diamond song, but the actual Brooklyn roads are terrible. So we used to have to ride up Bushwick, which was just one big concrete mogul after the next, because the concrete trucks would drop their concrete and aggregate on the right where the bikes were supposed to drive. And then remember we would turn on on on uh whatever that is, grand, and we would go up towards the bridge, and there was that life-ending pothole that you took and it and it flipped your bike.
You remember that? Yeah. Well, and it sucked is it was right in the bike lane. Like pothole in how do you even get a pothole in a bike lane? Because potholes are supposed to be caused by big trucks with their tires.
You know what I'm saying? Like, how do you even get how do you even get a pothole in the bike lane? That person just laughed. Like, that's gonna really that's gonna screw somebody up. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You think like they came out with a jackhammer in the in the middle of the night, we're like speaking of middle of the night, in New York City over the past couple of nights, and we'll get to cooking in a minute, people. Over the past couple of nights in New York City, people have been setting off fireworks in all of these neighborhoods. Where are all these fireworks coming from? I'm not against it. I love fireworks, but like what what is this all about?
Jersey, Jersey opened up like uh their mark they writ they they made their market less restrictive, basically. Wait, so people I saw on some of your bartenders like Instagram stories that it's like the police that are creating bomb scares for people late at night. Well, I mean, I've heard that. I've I've heard that. However, like I I just like I don't think anyone's a I mean, like, I don't know, maybe I don't know.
It doesn't sound frightening. They're doing it in my neighborhood, and um, it doesn't sound frightening to me. I'm like, someone is setting off fireworks. The very first one you hear, you're like, is that a gunshot? But then no one has that many bullets.
Nobody. Yeah, you know what I mean? Well, and the last couple nights, I've had a perfect view of them from my apartment. It's like I live at an amusement. Oh man, I can't see them.
They're setting them uh in my neighborhood, they're setting them off uh on a park that I don't have a direct view of, which is kind of depressing. But wait, so you're telling me I can buy real fireworks in New Jersey now, mortars the whole nine? Yeah, I mean, I don't know exactly what they did, but there were two states that were close by that have risk like loosened up the rules, and that's basically the supply side reason for why this is happening. Oh, well, see, the the the way that Nastasi and I have had to run our lives is like, are we going to New Hampshire or are we going to Pennsylvania? Those are the two choices.
So, you know, Jersey, you know, I I grew up there, I'm gonna take back anything negative I've said if you've allowed mortars, like real fireworks. The weird thing is New Hampshire, the live free or die state, you can have the full size or as you know, as big as is federally allowed, mortars. For those of you that are a mortar is, I mean, aside from military, a fireworks mortar is uh a charge where they set off a launch charge, but as soon as it leaves the tube, it's no longer powered. It works like a bullet, it's ballistic, right? Now, those are legal in New Hampshire, but nothing that has power once it leaves the ground is legal in New Hampshire.
So you can have this giant mortar that you could, you know, blow your entire face off with, fine, but you can't have bottle rockets in New Hampshire. How dumb is that? Okay. Yeah. Okay, yeah, yeah.
I because I remember my brother talking about going to Tennessee because like Tennessee was the closest state where there were basically just no rules. Yeah, but Pennsylvania, as far as I can tell, Pennsylvania is open for business in fireworks. Hey, Stas, remember when we went to Wisconsin and we landed and we realized see, this is the problem. When people, when when people like I understand that why we shouldn't have fireworks in New York City. I'm not, come on.
I'm semi-reasonable here. But it's like as soon as Nastasi and I landed, we looked it up and Nastasi's like, fireworks are legal legal here. We're going. And so we went and we bought how many fireworks did we buy, Nastasia? Is she gone?
Where'd she go? No idea. So many. Yeah. And then we set them off in the middle of Madison, Wisconsin, which was not a good idea.
I think we really ticked off our hosts. We went right in between where the like where the two lakes are, whatever the two lakes are named in Madison. Okay. And we set off this like big fireworks show, and everyone was like, What are you stupid? And we're like, Yeah, pretty much.
They're legal here. And then that was it. Yeah, it was good news. All right. All right.
So let's get to uh by the way. Anything uh anything to report over the last week? Food-wise? You do. I do, but we're not talking about me yet.
I will talk about my stuff in a second. But you guys have anything? No. And then, alright. Well, you know, for those of you that listened last week, uh, last week was my 25th uh wedding anniversary.
And so because I you know we couldn't have a party, and also, you know, Jen, my wife couldn't have a 50th birthday party. I was like, I wanted to make a nice meal. Although, as Nastasi pointed out, making a nice meal is not the same thing as doing something. Am I right? That is true.
Because it's more for you, too. Because what you made like some special brand you were super excited about, which was I believe Jen's game for her 25th anniversary. Wow. Wow, that's so mean. So mean.
I've been baking a lot of bread, which we're gonna get to uh in a minute. I'm trying to remember what bread I did make bread for that night, but I can't remember which one of the loaves. Uh I did. That might have been you remember as the one that Jen specially requested for me. She's like, please, please make this one.
She's like, I'm dying for the red fife, Dave. Can you give me the red fife? Can you give me the red fife? Because you haven't yet baked with the red fife that you've milled, so I'm so excited for it. That's what no.
She actually she asked for uh steaks. So I went to um I went to Japan Premium Beef. You know that shop? There's one in Brooklyn now, but there's one in uh in you know in Soho, and they're open now, you know, social distancing rules and whatnot. But you can go in and get your get your uh your wagyu on.
So I I got some A5 uh Mizuyaki uh I got a fillet. Now listen, for those of you that hate on filet mignon, right? You're hating on it. Why? Why are you hating on it?
Because it doesn't have a lot of fat and right, it's relatively neutral. But in this kind of meat, dude, it's a big fat block, an A5, like an A5 filet, you know, is an amazing texture. And Jen, Nastas, even though I'm not a fillet guy, Jen likes the filet, so I got a fillet, not a bad guy, right? Yep. Yeah, you're like, yeah, bad guy.
And then I also got uh a piece of the sirloin cap. You know how they chop it into that kind of square, like that's that kind of rectangle, like flat thing, and then some pre-sliced short ribs that they intended for you to flat grill. I took the short rib pieces, I cooked them at 54 or 5 Celsius for about 20 hours, chilled them, refrigerated them, uh so that I could sear them fresh and have them be tender. I then did the the sirloin cap at uh 545 for an hour, dropped it to 52 for an additional uh four and a half hours. I then did the fillet at 52 for an hour, dropped everything to 50, pulled out, seared, served, and I did uh to serve with it, uh Jen requested Brussels sprouts because that's her favorite vegetable.
I also got me some fiddleheads and did the blanch. Why does the blanch water on fiddleheads turn so disgusting? Do any of you guys have any ideas? Never blanch fiddle head, but I don't know. Adam, you ever blanch fiddleheads?
I have, it gets pretty gross. Yeah, but it why how why does it get so gross? What do you mean? Well, first of all, smells bad. No, it looks crazy disgusting.
Like, like blanch water, like sometimes. Really? Yeah, it blend gross, like bl like like dark, like crazy. And I know that, like, look, fiddleheads, for those of you that don't have fiddle heads, some people I guess call them crozures, but I've never met anyone who calls them crozures. They're called fiddleheads, you know.
Uh, and they're they're baby ferns. They come up and they're so if you've ever seen a fern come up, it comes up and it looks like the top of a violin fiddlehead. And uh, if you get the wrong ones, they're mildly poisonous, right? And um, they don't raise them, right? Adam, they're all wild.
All wild crafted. Yeah, all wild. And so uh, and they were big in the 70s, went back out, came back out, back out. They come in and out, they come in and out. Um, and uh they're all semi, because like ferns like aren't really designed for humans to eat them, so they're all kind of semi not good for you until you blanch the stuff out of it.
Would you say it's accurate, Adam? Absolutely. Yeah, but so you blanch them, and also you have to buy them fresh. They they get really crappy fast. You know how like a you know how a bag of herbs starts turning crappy and black and slimy and nasty?
Fiddleheads do that real quick, so you don't want to have them sitting around. Would you agree with this, Adam? Agree. Yeah, it's because they have all of the pre-leaves, which are leaves, and they're packed up, right? So if they don't unfurl, they tend to rot really quickly.
Anyways, I don't know why, but the blanching water turns disgusting, and then you gotta like you gotta blanch them. Are you a believer, by the way, Adam? In the in the uh ice water after the blanch. I'm a believer in it. Big time.
And I like to salt the ice water and the blanching water, both water and salted. Ooh, what's up, fancy McFancy? What's up? I like the blanching the the ice water. That's some strength right there.
But uh, for those of you that don't know, uh, I know modernist cuisine said something about how like cold water doesn't no, listen, on a small vegetable, right? But like you you take it until you take it under the limit. Don't take it to the limit this time. Take it under the limit, pull it real fast. You want to wrap it up.
This is one of those things where old school I think is right. Rapid boil, very salty water, and then you shock it in the ice water to stop the cooling, and that's the only way I know to have the color not turn gross. You know what I'm saying? Absolutely. Or to overcook it.
Anyway, then quick sauteing out. And then I served them kind of cool. You know what I didn't buy? They sell a Japan premium beef. They sold there was uh I'm supposed to not spend that much money.
And they were selling you ever use the campot pepper. Any of you guys ever use the campot black pepper? Never. It's apparently the world's fanciest like Cambodian pepper, and it was there, and I passed, and the minute I got out, I was like, I regret it. I regret not buying that pepper.
How much was it? I don't know, it was a lot. It was like $14, and I was already spending so much more than I was supposed to spend on the beef, that I was like, I mean, you know what the thing where you're there and you know that you're gonna regret it, and you yet you don't do it anyway, and you get out, and now I've been looking on the internet for like the best deal on campot pepper, but I know that if I had bought it there, I know I would have it would have been fresh because they only carry really good stuff there. And then if I order on Amazon, like some idiots probably had in an unair conditioned warehouse for like a year and a half, waiting to push campot pepper on somebody, and so it's just some some garbage in a warehouse. You know what I'm talking about?
Absolutely. Uh the minute, but while I was on the bike, I had the mask on, I had the meat, everything on my back. I wasn't gonna go back and be like some campot pepper. You know what I mean? Fourteen dollars, Dave.
I mean, come on. I believe it's gonna go. If you're gonna sink, you might as well drown. I agree, Adam, completely. Yeah.
Yeah. I guess. I'm gonna use that phrase, Adam, if you don't mind. If you're gonna sink out. And then I did some baking.
So uh I made for the first time because Booker has been making cake. So Booker, that happened in the last week, right? Nastasia? Booker brought you your cake, or was that two weeks ago? No, that was last week, yeah.
See how something happened? Like Nastasia asked for her patriotic red, white, and blue sprinkle cake, and then Booker brought it, but what did he do? He smashed first of all, did we did we talk we talked about the sugar explosion last week, right? Yeah, yeah. So maybe you already had the cake.
So the sugar explosion happened. He had not enough icing, but he did a decent job anyway. And then he just the cake was taller than the carrier, so he just like and smashed the carrier into the cake and was like, you know what? To hell with it. To hell with it.
And then he got here, he you know, he wants to sit in the back of the car and he just flings flings the cake into the back seat, like it does like you know, a 360 in the air and then lands on the on the other seat. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Um, anyways, so I haven't been baking uh sweets because Booker's been, you know, interested in making cakes, but for the Oh, but I must say, Dave, I had people over on Saturday and they thought it was a milk bar cake. Oh, did you um did you do the uh Angela Gabot's uh goldenrod pastry technique and slice and then freeze it?
No, I should. Yeah, come on, man. Good idea. Yeah, because it cause cake, the problem with like even you know, how are you gonna eat a whole cake? It's just a lot.
Yeah. You know what I mean? Like a lot. Yeah. So uh, and and and it there's nothing worse than eating that cake, like right, like there's that line where it's starting to go a little bit hard.
You know what I'm saying? But it's not, yeah, it's not hard yet, but it's like right. Don't you don't you hate that? I do. I want it to be, yeah.
Yeah, so yeah. So uh anyway, so I took Frederick wheat, which is my is my favorite standard soft wheat. How would you Adam? What do you think of the Frederick? It's great, great flavor, like you said, soft wheat, which is really good for cakes and pastries.
Yeah, so that's my standard biscuit. That's my standard, um, that's my standard uh I've made the pie crust with it, and it's uh it's also my liège waffle. Yeah, I know brioche is supposed to have a harder flour uh flour, but um I I use it for my uh Liege Brioche because I don't need a lot of rise out of out of a waffle. Do you know what I'm saying? Yeah, I mean like uh what do you use for brioche?
What do you like to use for brioche? Um I've been doing a combination of uh a couple things. I've been using uh Durham wheat to make it a little bit extra golden, so like 20% durum, and then I'll do something um with a good amount of protein to give it some strength, so either like a red fife or um redeemer or something like that. So you're going for a harder, you're going more traditional, like a harder thing, but you're trying to make actual brioche that rises up, I guess, right? Yeah, and I'll push the butter up to 85%.
So it kind of needs some of that protein in there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, speaking of protein, uh, I'll get back to the pie in a minute, but uh and what we'll talk. Should we talk wheat later? I I finally got some uh Sonoran white, which I know is one of your favorite.
You want to talk about that later in the later in the program? You you drive wherever wherever you want to talk about. Well, so all right, so let's do the pie first. So I had Frederick Wheat, and I made the first recipe. You need to go to Pie Marches on, find that thing online.
I'm so glad I got a copy of that book. Monroe Boston Strauss wrote this thing before World War II and did one reprint afterwards. And this is the this pie book, which was brought to the attention of the modern world by Shirley Corriger, who we're gonna have do at the classics in the field at some point. Uh you you read her uh read her stuff, Adam? You like her work?
Yeah, she did a talk once at Fonte's in Philadelphia, and she's incredible. Yeah, right? And she's still going, she's still writing a book, I think, right now. That's so cool. Yeah, yeah, for real.
Um, and anyway, so uh he came up with a bunch of awesome techniques and recipes, some of which you've heard of, the chiffon pie, but then other ones that literally is his inventory he invented the chiffon pie, believe it or not. Uh, but he had this recipe for dried apricot pie and a gram cracker crust, and there are three things in this that are genius. First of all, he takes a standard pie crust, and his pie crust recipe is on point, right? Very on point, awesome. He does a full blend in, so none of these like coarse pebbly crap.
He's talking fully blend in the freaking fat into the flour, fully blended in. He's like, because he tells you how to make like a what he calls a long a long flake, which is kind of what you would think of as an American flaky pie crust. He's like, but the average person actually really just wants it to break under the fork nicely and not be really tough. And so he's like, just fully incorporate the the fat, which I thought was an interesting, was an interesting uh point. What do you think about that, Adam?
Yeah, kind of like are you talking about like a frassage style, like really push it onto the like stone or anything, and like really push in the butter hard the flour. Yeah, push it in hard. So it's like almost biscuicy looking, like hard. That's it. Yeah, and so I was like, dang, all right.
So and so he's like, in a way, like pretty modern in the 30s when he's when he's writing. So then uh you add, you know, you add it the um the water, you get it all, you get it all done. And he has a lot of interesting things to say about hydration and pie doughs, anyway, and about what wheat he calls out, he doesn't call out flowers, he calls out soft wheat flour, which is I thought cool. He called out a soft white uh white wheat flour. And uh, so then he this is a genius thing.
So he takes the pie crust, then he smashes up, makes graham crackers, and then he dusts his his board in gram crackers and then rolls it out in gram crackers, and you can either do graham cracker on one side or graham cracker on on both. So you have real pie crust with graham crackers rolled in. How sick is that, Adam? That's pretty sick, right? And then get this.
He takes the pie pan and he turns it upside down and he blind bakes it upside down on the on the pie pan, which by the way, makes forming the edge freaking trivial because you can just cut around the pie pan, right, to get rid of the to get rid of the extra, and then it doesn't puff up or anything, it just bakes perfectly upside down on the pie pan, and then as it after you cool it a little bit, you invert it into another pie pan. It because it shrinks as it cools, it fits in the other pie pan when you flip it, and you have a perfect blind baked thing without any freaking weights, without any docking, without means when you poke holes. Brilliant. Yeah, you're very freaking genius, right? And so then here's the here's the filling he does.
It's he does a dried apricot pie. So he takes dried apricots. I used uh California blendums because they're my favorite, soak them in water, hot water overnight, soak it overnight, blend it. He passes it through with Tammy, which of course I don't need to do because I have a Vitaprep. He didn't have a Vitaprep, right?
So I I blend the heck out of it, then you combine that with sugar, you hold some back, and you get your you make a cornstarch slurry with some of the apricot paste, and then you heat the rest of it up almost to the boil with some sugar, whip egg whites, some sugar to stabilize it, then you dump the cornstarch, bring it up to the boil, wait till the cornstarch clears out, fold it into the egg white mixture, then into the pie into the pie crust. And that's his apricot whip, and it is completely stable and delicious, and it freezes really well. That like that kind of like uh heat set meringue with cornstarch, the texture of that when it's frozen is sick. So I'm gonna go ahead and say that you uh our boy Monroe Boston Strauss, definitely worth reading. Someone should replace that sucker.
Yeah, it's good stuff, right? Uh Adam, I'm gonna need some help from you here because the name of the one that I used to use is out of my head. Ready? Uh Angelina uh Baltazar wrote in via Instagram a couple of weeks ago. I need some uh help with questions on blast chillers.
Do you have any experience with them? Yes. Uh, any ideas which manufacturers are best? And the name of it just went out of my head, the one that everyone uses, the overpriced European brand. What is it?
Do you remember, Adam? Oh god, no. I I don't know. Do you know what I'm talking about though? It's like I can see the image of their logo.
I've used them, I've worked with them. Nastasi, do you remember? Yeah, uh, I can look through our email because I feel like we had someone request one. You know what I mean? Yeah, I mean, it's the one that Rationale partners with them.
They're way overpriced, but they're so awesome. And I've also got Electrolux, is it? No, I've used Electrolux, and so Electrolux. So, one of the things when you're getting a blast chiller is you got to ask yourself what you're gonna do with it most often. So uh a lot of people invest in the in the combi.
Do you know, John, which one I'm talking about? No, I hear I've never used a blast chiller. The the the combination combi oven blast chiller, and so what Electrolux used to claim was that they sized their blast chillers to fit their combi ovens because the the important thing in a blast chiller is the load size that fits into it. So you want your kind of oven and your blast chiller to match because it costs a lot of money. Blast freezers cost a lot of money, and if you have one that's too big, that's gonna take a lot of energy and it's gonna take up a lot of space.
But if you have it too small, then you can't chill your stuff down in time. Then kind of what's the point? But if your question is, do I it do I want a blast chiller? Answer is oh yeah. Blast chillers are freaking amazing, right?
Because they chill things down. I mean, you would not believe how much faster they chill things down than regular things. So we used to use them to um speed set our uh uh like if you have Paco Jack containers, we used to speed set our Paco containers in them. We would speed cool stuff down, we par freeze stuff before grinding in our blast chillers because the cool thing about blast chillers is they don't have to freeze, they can do a super fast, hard chill as well, and they can they they can also freeze uh a lot of times based on probe, so they can drop stuff down just where you want it, and they can handle immense amounts of vapor. So, like if you if you want to get French fries down really quickly, boom, you can put them in.
Or, for instance, bread, Adam, true, true or false, the faster you freeze bread, the less stale it's gonna be when you thaw it out. Very true. Yeah, so you blast freezing on bread that you're gonna freeze, or if if you I mean, you you know, if if you're one of these people who does par bake situations, like blast freezing is gonna be a lot better on par frozen stuff, but I can't remember the name of it. They're all relatively overpriced, but they're all amazing once you have them. Eranox, that's the name of it.
Just came to me. What'd you say? I just said that. Oh, I didn't hear you. I couldn't hear you because the way Zoom works.
Anyway, well, there you beat me to it. Yeah, Eranox makes good products, they're just really expensive. You know, I think they're all really expensive, though. Adam, do you ever did you ever any of the restaurants have one you really liked? Um, I think we had the Electrolux uh when I was working in Italy because they're made in Italy, those were probably like 12,000 euro.
Pretty pretty pricey. But we use it like cooking in reverse. Everything was timed as if you were baking it. It was kind of crazy. So we would do macaroons in the blast chiller.
Um, just to keep the vapor up, you know, keep the water off. So yeah, no, I love it, but who's got the money? You know what I mean? And the and and the power, they take a lot of power, but god, I love them. You know what?
The one thing I remember, we used to use the Electrolux, and this was I don't know, 10 years ago. Estasi used to go down and use it with me. Do you remember us sitting there, like pushing the button? And the problem with it was it like if you're impatient like I am, like you push two buttons, but you have to wait for it to go through its cycle because it to protect its compressor, like it had that program. And so we we would sit there and go, remember this?
Yes. And you used to sit there like, like, I depending on what mood you're in, either laughing at me or shaking your head in disgust, depending. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Good, good, good times, good times.
But anyway, I love it. Uh all right. Uh uh Fabrizio wrote in uh via Instagram as well. I hope everything's okay. Wondering if you found any source of kamu camu in the United States.
Unfortunately, in the UK, it is all powder or capsules. Thanks in advance for your help. No, no, Fabrizio, I did not. Camacamo is a delicious uh, unfortunately, what they call a super fruit from South America, and because it's a super fruit, people do all kinds of terrible things to it other than preserve its awesome uh flavor quality. So I've only ever had crappy stuff here in the States.
Gotta go. I mean, I could be, you know, I'm happy to be proven false, but I've not found a good supply. Uh Josh wrote in Nastasia. Uh I'm sure you already did you already read it, or did you just pump it without reading it so it'll be fresh in your mind? Uh this is a DM.
So you read it. All right. So, but you you gave it to me to read, so it's a DM, but it's not really private. Right. Okay.
It's my DM. What? Yeah. Yeah. When are DMs private and when are they not private?
I don't think that's a thing. It's not? No. Okay. Uh it's a DM, whatever.
Okay, uh, this is uh from uh from Josh. Uh Jess, my wife, made us go vegan for a bit. Made you, huh, Josh? Made you. You just went vegan because she wanted you to go vegan.
She didn't force you, right, Stas, or maybe she did. I don't know. What do you think about that? What do you think about the wording? Like blaming it on the wife.
Derogatory, no? Yeah, right? No. I don't know. Uh Jess, my wife made us go vegan for a bit, and Indian cooking saved my sanity.
Josh, what do you think about that, Nastasia? Yeah, I th I told him that's a good idea. I hadn't thought about I hadn't thought about that cuisine. Well, are you are you reassessing your views on Indian cuisine in general, that spice mix? Because you're not a fan of in general American Indi like Americ Indian food in America, this the spice mixes that you normally get, you're not a big fan of, right?
Right. Yeah, I don't like curry. But I would like to look at the recipes and maybe not add the the spices, you know. Well, I mean to me, like that's just you you like that my mind just went like the like like the like literally the last sentence you just said in my head. I understand what you're saying, but it was just like my head just went a little bit.
Yeah. Yeah. What do you guys think? I actually don't under what was that suggestion? Because like I hear I would like to make the Indian food, but without the spices, and what I heard was I don't want to make the Indian food.
Oh I didn't want to say that, but that's exactly what I was thinking. Disgusts. I mean, you know. Alright, all right, Matt, I'll I'll just let that leave there. I'll let that go.
I love how like every once in a while, like Matt goes hard in the paint. Anyway. This episode is brought to you by Bend to Table, a monthly food subscription service for Abbott Home Cooks focused on delicious and sustainable pantry items. For the past few months, Dave and I have been trying out Bent to Table subscription boxes, and I got the chance to sample some of the conservas they have available. Some of my favorite bend to table items were the squid in its own ink and the sardines and butter.
And I wish that I had gotten the faro that Dave got in his box. With New York and Connecticut stay-at-home orders in effect, it was really handy to have these panthey staples on hand. Another great thing about Bend to Table is that they've been supporting independent businesses impacted by the pandemic. Many of the ingredients in their subscription boxes are made by companies that do a lot of business with restaurants and needed to quickly ship their supply chain and sell more product direct to consumer. When you set up a Bend to Table subscription, you're supporting small independent producers and stocking your kitchen with delicious pantry ingredients.
Go to benditable.com to start your own monthly subscription. Use the discount code HRN to get $20 off a new subscription, and Bend to Table will donate $10 to support cooking issues and all of HRN's programming. Serena writes in Khalifia Farms Barista Blend is the best oat milk in her opinion. It foams really, really nicely. Yes.
What do you think of it compared to the Oatly? No, I don't think it's I don't think it's close to Oatley, but it's fine. It foams. Foams? Yeah.
What's the difference in flavor having not tried the I don't mean? I think Khalifa's a bit chalky. I think oat milk can be very chalky, and there's different chalkiness levels. Well, they they add calcium carbonate to it, don't they? Which is in fact chalk.
Let me see. Let me uh I'll look at the uh I'll I'll look at their at their ingredient list here. Uh the one advantage of doing this stuff uh from your home is that my computer exists. Let me see. Oat milk.
Your iPad also exists in Brooklyn. Yeah, but there's no internet there, you know that. You know we don't have internet in the uh in the studio. Uh oat oat milk, sunflower oil, dye potassium phosphate, calcium carbonate, and tricalcium phosphate. I wonder why they add the carbonate.
It's gonna adjust the pH a little bit, but it also probably makes it a little whiter. I don't know. So there is in fact chalk in it. Yeah, well, there you go. So yeah.
I s uh back to Serena. I still prefer dairy milk and coffee, but uh that blend is a good tasty alternative. I find Oatly to be too thin tasting. What do you think about that? Yeah, I don't agree, but like what whatever she tastes, she tastes.
Yeah. Also, Dave has gotten meaner in quarantine, at least on the radio, but got your backgirl, Serena. Nice. Well we have one we have one, well, well, we have one more, Matt. Michelle writes in, Nastasia.
I've listened to the show for years. Tell Dave to stop picking on you. I'm a fan of the banter, but he's not being nice lately. Michelle, now listen, listen. Uh as Nietzsche famously said, you cannot look around your own corner.
So I don't know, you guys discuss. Maybe maybe it's because I'm not with Nastasi in person anymore. So like all of our frustrations get worked out, like, you know, on the radio. I don't know. No, I I I think that people enjoy the ribbing.
I just think well, based off this coming from two women, I feel like you can often mansplain things to me, like how I should feel about XY or Z or how I should think about, you know, what I'm doing, or air conditioning or oat milk, whatever. And that's probably the rub. Not the like, we can be really mean to each other, but it's it's the white mansplaining that I'm I imagine women aren't crazy about. It's got to be well, call me on event. Like you've I don't know.
This isn't. Well, call me on in real time so we can have the discussion then. We'll do it. Okay. Alright.
I mean, like I don't know, what do you like because I don't sense any more or less mean. So maybe, yeah, maybe Nastasi, maybe uh I think it's when I and I I know that women hate being called or hearing another woman be called crazy by a man. And so when you're like you're crazy, like that's it's like immediately derogatory, write you off. Yeah, so it's like a it's like a dog whistle word you're saying. Um like the word crazy is just like an instant.
It's just not great. It's like, yeah, it's not great. Yeah. All right, so what word can I use to describe what you know I'm talking about? In terms of like the way that you and I both are.
Uh I I well, I don't I think when you call me crazy, it's specific to I I don't know. I don't know, Dave. It's just not a good word. Well, help me figure out a new word. That's like we I don't want to get into it because it's the family show, but we've switched years and years ago.
I told you that there's certain, you know, if you're going to insult someone, I have preferred insults, right? We went through this many years ago. We can't get them on on on the air because they're all I mean, I'm switching one bad word for another, put it that way. Yeah. You know what I mean?
But yeah. Yeah. Like uh I like I don't I don't like whatever, I don't want to get into it. I don't want to get into it. Switch the C word for the A word.
No, I mean, yes, obviously. No, but switch the B word for the A word. Oh. Like you, like you know, you used to use that more, and I was like, please just call them an A-hole. You know what I mean?
Yeah. I think we should degender our insults as much as possible. Although there are certain words that it's hard for me to let go of because the alliteration is so good. The C sucker word is an amazing alliterative English word. You know what I'm saying?
And so, and I know you love that word too, Nastasia. And so it's Yeah, one time a cop, a cop cut me off on my bike, and I said that word, and then I thought if he pulled me over, I would say I called him a cop sucker. And with that, okay. Yep. He's like, and that's better.
He's like, I'm it's just a little more confusing, but I still feel it's offensive. It's not, but he wouldn't like you, it's not a word in the lexicon that he can be that I can be pulled over for that I can like, you know. I'm pretty sure that like if they want to F with you, they're gonna F with you no matter what. You could probably say hello, and if they want to F with you, they will. You know what I'm saying?
Yes. Uh you want a question from the chat? It has nothing to do with bad words. All right, does it have to do with baking? I hope.
I hope, I hope. Uh no. Does Adam want to? Is this something that Adam wants to answer? This feels like a very you question.
Is it fast? Yeah, yeah, I don't know. All right, do it. How much convection do you naturally get from heated water without a circulator, i.e., a crock pot with a PID attachment? It depends on the temperature.
I wouldn't trust it for because the problem is is that you're gonna get movement of the of the temperature, but it's gonna stratify, especially once you add foods, you create dead zones. And so those dead zones are never gonna really even out in temperature. So there's always going to be temperature stratification, even with the convection that you get in water. So like uh measuring an empty pot of water is not a valid way to tell whether something's gonna cook evenly or not. Uh, you know, filling something with foods uh isn't valid.
And so I would always say circulate those suckers or stir them. It doesn't take a whole boat ton, but it uh it's definitely uh helpful. Now, if you're boiling something, hell yeah, boiling is you know convection on on steroids, so that's gonna go. So that's my that's my take on it. Good enough.
Is that good enough? Yeah. All right. Let's get some user questions for uh user, listener questions for uh Adam, and then uh you know I'll go off on all my weak questions at the end. Although I will ask you this right away.
So red fife is the darling uh red spring spring, right? Spring Adam? Yes. Yeah. So there's spring wheat and there's winter wheat, right?
And the like what they and you tell me why. Everyone says the Cadillac of bread yeast is the is the red spring. Why? Why spring and not and not the winter? Why is it the Cadillac?
Um, I don't know. I never really heard that before. I think as far as like the East Coast is concerned, that grain has just done well. Um there's certainly a lot of other options that can do even better, but I guess it's really um flavor. It's got a lot of good immediate, like you can grasp the flavor.
It tastes for lack of a better term, weedy. It just tastes like what you imagine grain to taste like. Um and you know, I think that's a good start for people. Um I will say that the grain itself does you have to, as from a farmer's perspective, you have to replant and get new seeds every uh two generations or sorry, every two seasons. Um otherwise it um starts uh break down and no longer be f useful for like bread making applications.
You have to keep getting used to eat every couple of years. So that's weird. Yeah. So my my feeling was that we're in a situ I baked a loaf with it, the same as I've been baking the Redeemer and the Warthog, you know, for red wheat stuff, right? Yeah.
And I was like, this tastes really good, but I'm not shooting myself in the foot to go get this wheat as opposed to the warthog or the redeemer. I'm not like, oh my god, if I if I don't have red fife again, I will never feel the same again. I thought it was good. But I think, you know, are you with me on this or no? I am.
That's why I was trying to kind of hint at it. Really just kind of tastes like weedy, very one-dimensional, kind of like, you know, if you were to compare it to just something store-bought, certainly an improvement, but uh it's not um not thrilling. Do you think this is another case where because it is an East Coast wheat and grown by East Coast farmers, that the East Coast food intelligentsia has pumped it up beyond what it necessarily maybe should be? Yeah, I think there's like um different Italian food or different Italian different different food mafias um for each part of the country. And I think the East Coast grain mafia is super into it.
What do you think about the uh the Rhode Island food mafia? You like that? I do. I love uh Rhode Island um fried uh calibre. Yeah, what what about the alzatian food mafia?
That's like all the old school Alzation sheds like Jean George and and uh Andre Sultner and all that I love I love mini food mafias by the way love yeah I think they should have like a whole family get together like you know the the five families of uh food mafia yeah I know right that'd be amazing like like uh what was that what was that that gathering of the different mafias that got rated by the feds in like the 50s or 60s that's in every every movie you know what I'm talking about oh yeah like in analyze this or whatever like the started that movie yeah amazing uh all right so uh and we'll talk more about different wheats in a minute let's get to some questions Mary Swanson wrote in uh I've been developing a sourdough starter but how can I dial up the sour? The starter smells great but the bread could be more sour. Um well that's uh very easy because it just negligence will help there um I always try to go for the opposite not to um criticize your desire for more sour but I like the the grain to come up more um prominently so I am always constantly feeding my starter and and giving it new um new additions so that way the the pH um goes up or goes down rather um and the way to to make it more sour is to starve it to let everything um that's so to go past its prime spot of fermentation so when your flour and water mixture in your Levan has hit its peak use it after its peak um is one way so when it starts to fall down when it starts to fall down add it then into your into your dough and then also um higher temperature fermentation so if you ferment say above 77 degrees Fahrenheit you start getting into like 90 degrees it'll get really sour so higher temperature will do that. What about we're retarding in the fridge is that dial up or dial down the sour? Sour down dial down the sour.
So all out out of the fridge fermentation if you want to be more sour. And then also you can improve do a longer um time you could also do less of your Levan and let it go longer. So instead of say adding 20% Levan to your dough do five percent and then instead of letting it ferment for six hours in total let it go for like nine or ten. And then it'll get really sour. I've noticed that when I pull my starter out if I do just one feed you know like uh like I I I keep I keep my starter in 150 so 50 50 50 50 of starter 50 water 50 flour right so uh if I do one feed and then wait for it then to to go up then if I dope that as you said it's super sour because it hasn't fully beefed up yet it's still kind of spent it hasn't fully like the yeast haven't fully come back yet but at that point right there if I don't want it to be too sour I actually dope it with a little bit of uh of uh saf red commercial yeast there and then I can do that bake and then I can feed it once more and then the next you know the next day make a full sourdough loaf that has no commercial yeast do you think that's a terrible idea I don't.
I think that's a good idea um that's kind of how um a lot of bread making changed in Italy over the last um couple of centuries is really making basically you're making like a pool each um uh when you're using a little bit of the the the store bought yeast. Um but it still has that same effect, you still have like a nice flavor, but that's a good way to do it. Do you want to talk about like how people maybe it once it's there's a line? So that the thing people think about is they they think about acid in bread or in general as being kind of a uh a a one like one direction only, whereas like a small amount of acid is actually beneficial from a dose structure standpoint, but then a little bit more acid and it suddenly goes slack and you lose all structure. Like uh do you think people don't really think about you know how like when something's too sour and you pick it up, it's like and it has that weird feeling, you know what I'm talking about?
Oh yeah, definitely. So like is there any way to like are at once it's at that point, once it's gone so sour and she's lost all the structure in her loaf. Are you are you one of these people that will like put it out thin and dust a little bit of baking soda on it, roll it back up and pray, or are you just like you're just deal with the hand you've been dealt? Um I I at this point I um try to do everything to avoid that situation, but um are you talking about it after it's baked, like what what the bread looks like after it's baked um going through that process, or no, like you like let's say you throw it in the fridge and you uh retard it or you leave it because you think you have a 20, you think you have like an 18 or 20 hour rise, you come back and you smell it, it's obviously smells sour, it tastes sour, and when you poke it, it has that slack feel of of the acid killing the gluten, and you know it's gonna be a brick. You know what I mean?
You you know it's gonna be a brick. Like, do you just like like make three loaves out of that with a little commercial yeast, or do you try to like fix it somehow? Um, usually there's no way to fix it. So I'll take a piece of it and use it as a biga and then make another bread. Um, so say you've got uh one kilo dough that's just a little long in the tooth, and you know it's not gonna make a great loaf.
You can use that as your yeast culture for a bigger batch, and then maybe you didn't intend to have three loaves, but you can freeze those, and then it just kind of extends what you've got. So I'll take like that, something say it's overfermented, and you know it's gonna come out that great, and then use it to make maybe three or four loaves, um, and then freeze them. Right. So, like, you know how like in the old school, like in the 80s or whatever, like some San Francisco people who were going real sour, they wanted that hyper sour flavor. They would literally put some some soda in with their stuff in a risen bread.
So you hate that. I don't, yeah, not for me. I think of it um like coffee and the first and second and third waves of coffee um in the since like the 90s or 80s, and how when you go to Italy or France or anywhere in Europe that has had a longer coffee or espresso culture, rather, you know, the sourness starts to go down in your flavor like enjoyment. Like I think that coffee tastes so good when it's like chocolatey or hazelnuty instead of just sour, and I think the American palate is still very new with some of these things as far as not as the existence in the US, but as far as it being prevalent and being in every household. So sour coffee, sour bread, you know, kind of amped up umami bombs, the all that stuff, I think will just continue to even itself out over time.
Matt Smith writes in, I live in Brazil with a very limited flour selection, maybe two brands, no bread flour, probably 10% protein max. Thought on adding a couple percent vital wheat gluten to improve texture. Uh and then we had someone already write in Robert saying in Rio, Robert Lacks said he can find higher higher gluten bread pizza flowers imported from Italy in Casas Pedro. Uh and then someone else wrote in and said they have the same flour sourcing problem in Portugal. Um they use vital wheat gluten.
I'm a fan of what vital wheat gluten. What do you think? And then they said, is there a limit on the percentage of gluten you should add? That that was from As I Please. Well, the the reality is that you can make bread with something at 8% protein, eight or nine.
Um, you know, you just are gonna sacrifice, or not sacrifice, you're gonna have to have a different perception on what you want the bread to look like. So you may not have this massive uh whole structure, you'll have a tighter crumb. But if you're in Brazil and you can find something that may have a lower protein content, but actually is um has some flavor, I would prefer to have the lower protein um tighter crumb with a lot of flavor. The wheat gluten um isn't, you know, it's not harmful, but it does, you know, there's there's no reason to increase the gluten other than really aesthetics, if you want the bread to be like lighter looking. Well, texture, I mean, people want that texture.
Yeah, I would say then then add it, go for it, or or get something imported. Um the Portugal thing is interesting because Italy is right there. Also, there's so many other places in Europe that grow um higher protein uh wheats, if if that's what they're looking for. Speaking of Portugal, what do you think of the cooked cornmeal Brella style breads? I think that's so cool.
I love them. I think they're great. Yeah. I haven't for for like for like five years, I thought bro was gonna become the next big thing, and then disappeared. I haven't seen it in years.
You? I haven't seen it either. Um you just reminded me of it and how much I like it. Yeah, it's delicious. Yeah.
Um anyway, all right. So uh so on gluten for a minute, uh, you know, I'm not above cheating, right? Like you're more of a purist, right? I mean, you are interested in getting the itness out of the grain, not just flavor, but texture and the whole the whole McGilla, right? I mean, that's the like so for me, like using gluten and like I did 100% rye loaf the other day.
Uh really finely ground rye, really, you know, put it through my 60 mesh, and uh and I doped it with gluten. It was delicious. Nice, you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, of course. You know, full sourdough starter gluten, delicious.
I'm I'm for everybody doing their own thing. I think just for for my own personal philosophy, it's not even necessarily about being a purist, but about how exciting in the new world, if you want to call the Western Hemisphere, um we still don't have extremely defined um like food heritage because we've you know grew up in the industrial revolution, and if you want, you know, anything that you want, you can have. Um, but if we were to limit ourselves a little bit and not deprive ourselves of deprivation, we could treat get some regional foods. So I would love if New York was known for like rye and soft wheat, and when you go to the east coast or the northeast, and you're like, oh, the bread's like kind of like a more dense things, and so they put more dense things on it. And if you were out in the west and they were like big airy breads and lighter with you know lighter ingredients.
It would be cool if things took shape that way just by kind of going with what agriculturally makes sense. Um and that's why I'm uh I guess a purist in that sense is that if you if you start working with what is available around you, it just kind of works with the whole food system better. Yeah, you're gonna hate this then. I just uh literally for the radio, I uh I did an Eincorn uh an Eincorn loaf, and I know that you I know you love Eincore, but I jacked that sucker with gluten tubes. You know what I'm saying?
Like uh speaking of it, when you have a denser bread, counterintuitively takes longer to bake. Well, maybe not counterintuitively. I don't know what your intuition is, people, but it's like it takes a lot longer to bake something that's denser than something that's bigger. So it's not that um you'd think maybe that because the volume is bigger, it takes longer to get the the heat into the center to bake it, but the exact opposite is true. Like, isn't that the only thing that's c a little counterintuitive Adam?
Well, I guess the water conductivity, right? Isn't that the the way that the heat travels? The the modernist cuisine people make an interesting point. Uh the modernist bread, uh uh that I never really thought about is that and this to me that in the whole book, this was the most kind of interesting revelation, is it's all one big hole that's an open cell foam, and so yeah, the steam can like kind of rocket around on the inside and cook relatively quickly, which is I think kind of a cool cool thing. Um, uh as I please said, is there a max I wouldn't go over 10% on on the vital wheat gluten?
Um that's on something that has zero of its own gluten. I would not go above 10. Would you agree? If you were gonna do it, you'd stay below well, we'd stay well below 10, right, Adam? But you wouldn't ever go above 10.
Yeah, I don't think it's necessary. Yeah, all right. Uh Frank Mosca writes in sourdough final shaping tips would be helpful. How do I achieve maximum rise and a good looking loaf? Um, well, it's not gonna be related to the final shape.
Um, that's the most important thing. It's like the Escoffier saying, like, um, good sauces come from good stocks. It's the same with beginning with your starter, and then all the little steps along the way. Final shaping certainly will have an effect on your final volume, but um I would say if you had to put it in percentage-wise, it would contribute maybe 15% instead of uh the 85 along the way, um, which is all the other processes of fermentation before you get into final shape. So do you think the final the final shape, don't you think though it helps it stand up taller, not be a bigger volume overall, but to helps it stand taller by like stretching the theoretical gluten sheets around, or no?
You don't know if um that that would be correct as long as every other step beforehand got you to that point, because if you were to say um overwork the dough in the beginning, and overwork is gonna be relative as well, but say it was a dough that needed eight minutes of uh kneading, and you needed it for 10, um, because it's developed more strength, and as you're fermenting it, it's developing more strength through fermentation, and all the handling for pre-shape and maybe folds in between, you've put so much strength into the dough that it can't expand. So it's a it's a balance between extendability and elasticity, um, and which are two different things. And so to achieve the extensibility and have you have to have elasticity, so that's going to be a flower choice and also hydration choice and uh a technique choice, and then over the course of fermentation, um, you can create a scenario where the final shape would give you a bigger volume. But if any of those things are any of the decisions along the way are um, you know, they inhibit just general volume, then final shape won't contribute to it. So, really, the answer I guess would be for someone like him, what I think he's getting at is with all things considered that fermentation is excellent along the way, um, final shape uh to get your maximum volume, um, you're gonna need to make sure that the temperature is higher than what your bulk fermentations were.
So, after you've shaped, you can shape so many different ways, even just look on YouTube, um, but just in addition to what you've chosen for a shape, um, make sure your temperature is about 10 or 15% warmer than what your bulk fermentation was, and then you'll really get some volume. Cool. Josh writes in and says, Sifting. Has Adam experimented with the differences between only sifting with a coarse screen, like 24, that's real coarse, versus sifting with a 60 and adding back uh an equal extraction percentage. Curious if sifting only out the larger brand helps with bread structure while keeping some of the flavorful bits.
That's great. Yeah, tons tons of experience with uh sifting. Um, and I'm all about sifting because you can add it back in in any portion you want, and you can add it back in in clever ways, other than just putting it straight into the dough. Um, for example, I think sifting very fine, like on a 70, um, and getting a really nice powdery uh flour, and then making bread maybe in a way that someone could possibly be more used to, and then using the brand to line the basket and have it go all on the outside of the bread is a really cool look. You know, it gives it a darker color because the brand um caramelizes a different temperature.
Um, also I've taken the brand and used it in the Levan, which gives it a jump start, just natural yeast, it's living on the outside of the grain. Um, so sifting's great. Um, going super fine, you can you know you can pull off bigger flakes, uh more coarse. Um, really, the finer you go, the easier the dough will be to work with. Um, and then you can think of interesting ways to put brand back in if your goal is to get 100% inclusion, um, or you can use the brand for something else altogether, but it's uh it's a good thing.
I've been doing almost exclusively 60. How much more of standard kind of bread internal structure am I going to get out of a 70 versus a 60 mesh? Not a whole lot more. Um you'd notice it if you were trying to say make like pizza um or if you're gonna make puff pastry or something like that. Then it'll the the difference between 60 and 70 is pretty significant.
Um just because you'll uh you'll really see its ability to stretch really thin, which with bread you're not really going that by the way, people 60 is the number of lines per inch, 70s of lines per inch, which is different from the actual whole size. Meshes is a whole nother subject, which we don't unfortunately have time to get into, but they're they're really dumb. The way they're spec'd is dumb. Would you say it's dumb, Adam? Dumb.
Dumb. Uh Capri Sun writes in starch damage. Is it even worth worrying about as a home miller? Uh and why did you not mention micronizer mills in your book? Uh then this is a more technical question, but do it try to do it quick.
Does Ferrabon heat up flour a bunch? Is damaged starch actually beneficial for some Italian uses? How coarse are the rustic old world style grinds mentioned in your book? Thanks. Um hold on.
You have to repeat a little bit of that. All right, how coarse are the rustic old world style grinds? Um pretty coarse. Um definitely much more than uh how fine you can get with a home mill. Because you're talking about massive stones, usually moved by animals, um, by like donkeys and stuff like that, horses.
Um, so certainly more coarse. There's a lot more room between the stones for grain to slip by. Why not mention a micronizers? Um wasn't it necessary? Oh, well, you do actually mention them.
You're like, these are the mills, buy a stone one. You're like, these are the mills, but buy a stone one. That's what you said basically. Yeah. Right?
Well, it was basically based on my hope to get people to mill. So the um access to stone mills was easiest. Also, they produced the results of what I had worked with. So I figured if you were working with stone milling, and if I was working with stone milling, we could maybe be speaking the same language. So to give the user the best possible chance to have success with the recipes that I worked with.
By the way, when someone says they want to get on the same page with you, Nastasi and I like to say, but we're not even reading the same freaking book. Am I right, Sas? So uh, and lastly on that one, starch damage, worth worrying about as a home miller or not? Not okay. Paul Lee writes in, is it better?
Oh, you're gonna is it better to age your flour for a month or two after it's been milled? Years ago, I was taught, and you're gonna this I want you to go to ape like in a short but ape, short but ape. Years ago, I was taught that using green flour could give unpredictable or inconsistent results, such as faster fermentation rate or bucky dough because of the higher ends enzyme activity. Go to town. All right.
So um I grew up in a world of uh baking primarily that was uh I feel like the standard of everyone else in the last hundred years, you buy a bag of flour, follow a recipe, and you're always told that there's gonna be like differences, you know, and and there's this baker myth and lure that every day is a little different, you know, it's more humid out or it's uh colder today, and with the advancement of the products that I've grew up working with, I never saw the changes. And I really had to start to research what were these people talking about. It's like fresh compact yeast, 24 grams for a two kilo loaf or whatever is always the same. And whenever I got a flour that was a bread flour, it was always the same. Um, and what I realized is that people were talking about was fresh flour, and then that's where the baker as a profession certainly had um a lot more unpredictability um to it.
And then that that's where a lot of the skill level came in, where you weren't just dealing with an inert um predictable ingredient. So by not aging it by having it fresh, you certainly have something that will be different every single time. Um, and then that's really speaking to the skill level, um, not on whether you should or shouldn't do it. You should do it because it has more flavor, you should do it because it has more activity and it's more alive. You shouldn't do it if you're trying to have the exact same result and not um delve into training and delve into the craft.
Um, so it's really a craft question versus uh standardized question. So if you want to standardize something using flour that's fresh milled, if you're going to fresh mill it and then age it, you might as well just buy a product already and eliminate the milling because you've lost the benefit of it. You've lost the flavor and everything. So you know, eliminate that part of your process and make it easier. So if you're gonna go through the trouble of milling, then you might as well get the benefits of it, which are flavor, that activity, um, but then pay attention to the craft differently.
And I'm also gonna say for the kind of people that I think are the kind of people that listen to this show. Um look, I it I like bread made with commercial flour because I think it tastes good. However, it does not taste the same as this stuff. And if you haven't had like stuff made from fresh flour, you are going to love it. Does that mean you won't still love bread made with commercial flour?
No, but I will never use commercial whole wheat flour again. Like not ever. You know what I mean? Like I never will. Um, and and I think it's a hundred percent like learning about how the grains work and like learning about like how milling works and the actual parts of it and the flavors and the stuff you can get is a hundred percent worth any cook delving into.
Not that you're gonna do it for the rest of your life, but I mean, I think it's a hundred percent valuable. No? I do, I agree. Kevin writes in, we're almost done, we're almost done, we're gonna get all these goddamn questions. Kevin, what's the deal with sprouted grains?
Are they healthier or do they taste better different? They're uh really cool. Um there are different health effects, um, not significant enough where you should sprout every grain. You can over sprout, you can under sprout. Um that's how malt is made.
You sprout the grain and then toast it, um, and then you can extract it. So you can get sugar from it, you can make beer from it. Um, so many cool things about malting. Um, it's just like another layer and another um effect to a desired target. So when you're designing something, you make targets, and this is a a way to achieve certain goals.
So it's up to you and what you like to eat. But uh do do the is there too much amylase activity in that stuff? Do you have to kill it before you make the dough or is it fine? Yeah, no, you do. Um and you have to leave enough um basically available energy in the grain um that's not going towards plant production.
So that way you can use it to make bread. If everything goes to plant production, then you're gonna have a plant and no flour. So Matt, we're almost we're almost done, Matt. Joe Ankways writes in, I would like him to talk about feeding ratios for starters. This is an important one.
What effect is feeding twice the volume of starter versus other ratios? The whole process is new to me. So I'll really quickly can you hit both hydration level and percentage of starter to add when you're making the stuff. Yes, um, the higher the hydration of your starter, the faster and the easier that yeast can move on its highway. Um yeast travels through water uh in in your levan in your starter.
So the higher the hydration, the more open the lanes are for the yeast. Drier it is, the slower things will happen. Um so it comes down to schedule and uh also flavor is affected on how quickly yeast um is fed and is eating and digesting itself. So um it comes down to flavor, timing, um, and then what you're trying to make. So with something that's lower hydration in your starter, you're now adding less water into your dough.
So if you want to make, say, Panatone, that's that starter is usually 50% hydration because you're not looking to add a lot of water because there's gonna be a big addition of fat. Um, and then the emulsion um starts to get tricky. So you need uh maybe a little less water. Um, and then when you're going to make, say, just like a sourdough bread, you get the ability to add more water to your dough, and and that'll make it seem more moist. Um so fermentation time is increased by it being more wet.
Um, and then also you're adding more water when you're adding your starter to your dough. So it's uh increases hydration not just to the starter but to the dough. Um and I hope that answers it. Speaking of Panatone, last but not least, uh Jared Johnson wants to know where he can get a recipe for uh Bichola della Valkyolina. Um I think the alaimo brothers have answer for that.
If you look at Masimo I Limo and La Calandre, they have like a recipe bank online. They should have uh a recipe for that. I've never been to, I've never been that north in Italy. I've never been to Voltaire. Anyway, I hear it's really super pretty.
So uh I'm gonna leave you with this. Adam, I know one of your favorite grains to make breads with, and I want you to talk about it and tell you my experience in a sec, is the um Sonoran white wheat. And uh what's interesting about this particular wheat is it's from the Sonoran Desert, Hayden flour mills, they charge a lot, don't they, Adam? These people. They really do.
Yeah, they charge a lot. However, the interesting thing to me about this wheat is for years, uh years, I would trash talk uh flour tortillas. And a friend of mine's family is from New Mexico for like they've been like 300 years, like they, you know, like old school New Mexico, like s old school Spanish speaking New Mexico, their family's been there since before it was uh English speaking they're like been there forever anyway he was like you're being a jerk flour tortillas are kind of they're they're what we grew up on there so it's not just like like a white people thing showing up and making Tex Mex stuff out of it. Right. And what I read was that the this uh Sonoran white wheat is the wheat that caused the creation of the flour tortilla and what's interesting about it you were talking before about elasticity versus extensibility.
It doesn't form gluten but it has a high protein so I just made last night flour tortillas with it lard and uh Sonoran white and oh my god were those good flour tortillas. Pretty nuts. And then just the inherent flavor of the sonora is so good. It's got like um it's mellow but there's like this um for lack of a better term like creamy um creaminess to it that's really unique. It's really good.
Well when the water hits it especially when I had the lard it strangely almost took on a cereal milk smell to it like it had this kind of intoxicating smell to it the dough did. You know and it's not even that hard to it's the hardest one to mill so far has been Eincorn. That stuff's a pain to sift. Yeah. It's super oily is it super oily why is it such a pain?
It's a pain because it's a really hard grain just in general. So when you're when you're putting it through the mill it's you know unless you have like a 10,000 pound mill you're stressing that. And then also its ability to um absorb water, like its starch availability is lower. It's starch quality, I guess you could call it, is not as high as a lot of other things. So when you put it through the sifter, it's almost like um like pebbly, you know, it's like uh it's just yeah, and it clogged my it was a pain.
Yeah, you know what I mean? Like, but you know, and the dove also felt weird. Now I told you I cheated, I added gluten, but it had a weird play-do-y-yeah, it was weird, dude. It's a weird tell you later how uh how it tasted. By the way, Stas, true or false, you don't like Panatone, correct?
Uh I do. I do like it. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah.
What's the one that you hate then? What's the traditional Italian bread that you don't like? I don't know. I don't know. Maybe I'm thinking of someone else that doesn't like panadone.
John, is it you that doesn't like panadell? I haven't had good panettone. I don't want to say I don't like it. I haven't liked white paper. All right.
All right, Adam, how about this? Uh I know Matt's gonna kill me, but how about this? Panatone on the way out. The giant panotones, just a gimmick, right? Um, it's not better being giant, definitely a gimmick.
Nah. And but can you how do you bake something that big? Because like some of the big ones, they're like they're like the size of a table. They're crazy. How like like how does that even work?
Why did you do that? I know. It's it's like the same reason why they do the giant mortadellas in Bologna. They do like the thousand kilo ones and stuff that are just like huge. It's just for they're usually for a sagra for a food festival.
Um that's what they're how much would stash how much would you love to put me on the meat slicer that could do one of those giant mortadellas and just be like shunk, shunk, chunk, chunk. That would be the worst, right? Like sitting there, like which which way, which direction would you rather get fed into the giant mortadella meat slicer? Oh, head first. I don't even shoe with a head in this situation.
You go head first? No, I don't see you with a head in this situation. Oh, I'm already headless? Torso, yeah. Just the well, okay.
Oh, oh my god. So you're saying put me, put my back against the slicing thing and go that way. Oh, ouch. That's rough. That's rough.
All right, last, lad, real last. I know that you also do meat meat curing. Okay, so people, people. Vertical slicers are the original slice. The original machine slicer was developed by WA uh W.A.
Van Burkle, and it's a vertical slicing machine, and the carriage that holds the meat pushes the meat across, and you slice piece by piece. As opposed to what we in the United States typically use is called a gravity fed slicer, where it's on an angle. This is what you see at your local deli, and gravity plus a little pusher thing pushes the meat into the blade. The problem is is that as you push into the blade, the stuff near the bottom squeezes out and cause creates what's called a heel. The meat heels out, and every once in a while you need to rotate your meat or pull it out and trim that heel off because it doesn't trim evenly otherwise.
Now, vertical slicing, everyone says it's better, it doesn't smear the fat, blah blah, slower, bigger. But is there a way to feed the most of the ham in? I had a vertical slicer once I used it, I was like, what am I gonna do with the rest of this freaking ham? Because you need to have a whole bunch of stuff to hold on to to get a vertical slicer to work properly. Is there a workaround, Adam?
Um with the vertical slicer, well, there's a couple theories. Some some people think that the stuff that can't go through the slicer is then to be used for other applications and not be sliced, i.e., like uh a broth or something like that, or you're just used for a different thing. Um they do get tricky. Those Berkle slices are pretty dangerous. Um I I don't have any other hack other than just to use those bits that you can't get into the slicer just for a different application.
Yeah, yeah. Well, Nastasia is Nastasia is at least kind enough to decapitate me before she puts me on the giant buckle. Well, Adam, thanks so much for coming. Enjoy having you on. Maybe we'll do another uh bread session at some point in the future, you know, until you uh get and for people right in.
Adam wants to do bread car talk, bread talk. Uh this time we didn't have people reading the questions, though. That's what we forgot to do, Nastasia. That's my favorite. I know, I know.
Why did we forget? We're just done. We didn't forget. We we just talked about it too late. But yeah.
And also it's really hard to get a gaggle of people to like do what we did last time. Oh, yeah, because they're all complaining that as they're working from home that they can't just uh read like a 30-second question. Yeah. Well, thank you very much. Thanks for having me on.
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