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To apply and review the terms and conditions, go to Heritage Radio Network.org slash B I Z. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your coastal cooking issues coming to you live from the Lower East Side of Manhattan. We got Nastasia Lopez waiting for her exterminator to show up in Stanford, Connecticut on the Long Island Sound. We got uh Matt in his Brooklyn booth, booth, booth, booth, and we got uh John chilling in in Murray Hill.
He still has not figured out where Murray comes from. Am I correct? I did. It was a uh shipping merchant. That's weak.
What do you want to know? Yeah, what else would you expect? It makes sense. I don't know. A shipping merchant?
I mean this is like yeah, Robert Murray. Mercantile family that settled in the area in the 18th century. Yeah, Nastasi wants to know what they ship. Yeah. And can we protest them?
Let's get it changed. Uh uh. Alright. So uh yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know.
It's just boring. Shipping merchant is boring. I'm sure I'm looking more up. I'll I'll let you guys know. Shipping Merchant does feel like it's a Wikipedia entry that's been edited to obscure reality.
Yeah. Yeah. Shipping merchant is like the modern day. What do you do? Imports and exports.
Yeah. Hmm. Okay. Um, the other name thing that John is supposed to look up is why in English, Dutch is slang for crappy. That I did not look up.
I didn't know that was an assignment for for those. Yeah, well, well, now you know. Next week. Yeah. Because I don't understand it.
Like Americans traditionally don't have anything against the Dutch, right? So it has to be something about it has to be something about Germans. It has to be like a bastardization of the word Deutsch, right? I would think so. Uh so strange news.
Uh I know John knows about this. I don't know if Nastasia is yet aware, because she uh does not follow the food news. Am I correct? I I do. But you do?
Whenever I ask you a question about food or person, you're like, I don't know, I don't care about that. I mean, I know about restaurants. But what are you talking about? Yeah. Well, the French Culinary Institute, now the International Culinary Center, this is the strangest one.
I was not expecting this, is merging with ice. Yeah, you told what do you say? You had told me that. That's not possible because I learned this morning and I haven't spoken to you today. Oh, so maybe I learned from somebody else.
Yeah. So for those of you that don't know, here in New York City for the longest time, there have been two major, I mean, there's lots of cooking schools, but there's been two major like cooking schools. Now, if you're not from New York, you might think that um that the CIA, which is not the spy corporation, the spy thing, but the set's um, what's it? The CIA stands for the Culinary Institute of America. They are in New York State, but they are not anywhere near New York City.
When I say not near, I mean nowhere's close. Like how far away, how far away is uh Hyde Park uh guys? Do you guys even know? An hour. What?
Two hours? Something like that. Two hours. And uh and so and the CIA is a a college. So it is a like it's a regular college that is culinary, but it's a college.
Whereas here in New York City, we had two what are called vocation, they were technically vocational schools, right? So you had the French Culinary Institute, uh founded by Dorothy Can Hamilton. That's where I was the director of culinary technology, where Anastasia was heir apparent and cooking issues uh blogmeister and um what's it called? Uh internship uh program leader, right? Well, what what do you have an actual title there?
I'm just making all this up, just giving your job description. No, you said nobody needs titles. So I was true, it's true. Uh but then you made up your own title, it was air apparent, but that's after you left the FCI? You made that up, and yes, it was actually You made that up.
Okay. Anyway. So uh we were there, and sometime while we were there, they took on uh Italian. So the French Culinary Institute was founded, I don't know, sometime in the 80s by Dorothy Can Hamilton. And it was, you know, she got this amazing group of chefs, and I'm sure most of you already have heard the story from me.
So she got uh Alan Sayak. Alan Sayak became the dean, and he was like old school, old school Frenchy French guy. Hilarious. I love I love that guy. Like I worked for him.
He always kind of like would give me side eye because I wasn't you know classically French trained, but he also was very generous to me with his time. He was at um Le Syric for a while, Lecine was his uh the which say Swan. It's say say that with a nice French accent there, John. Yeah, the Swan. Yeah.
Uh and you know, uh a couple other places. He's actually also the chef, I think, at the uh at the 51 club for a while, which is weird, right? Like way back in the day. Um, that's what it's called, right? 51 Club.
Anyway, um, so he was this kind of the guy he would walk around and like just kind of say crazy things. Like I remember one time I met with him early on, and I just washed my hands, and he made me kind of shake his hand. He's like, shake my hand, and then my hand was still a little wet because I hadn't dried it off. He's like, a hit of that, a hit of that. And I was like, yo, man.
And so that's from then on. I've never shaken someone's hands in a professional situation. It's always elbow or fist bumps, always 100% of the time. So is that a is it a dog? I thought it was a dog before.
Yeah, Major has decided that he's gonna wine the whole time. Could we is there like a treat we can give him or something? I'm glad he can't hear you say that. I believe there is not. Would you like me to check?
I mean, maybe. He started doing it literally 100% of the time. I mean, this is like, you know, Nastasia thinks it's you know cute when other people have their real-life corona stuff happen. Hold on a second, I'll see. Give me one second.
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Learn more about the wonderfully US grown Montmorency tart cherry at ChooseCherries.com. And we're back. So now he also told me this story like Alain Sayak, old school, old school French guy. And uh he would always, he's the guy that I think I said on the air, got real mad at me because I wanted some uh I wanted some mustard with my uh country style pate. And and he literally looked at me almost fat in my face and was like, Americans.
I was like, hey, ho, I like mustard with my country style pate. Um can you hear Major? Um I Dax tried to take him into his room, but I can still kind of hear him. Yes. It's a lot better, though.
Here's what happened, people. I'm trying to tell you about the French Culinary Institute, which is merging, and it's gonna not gonna be its own thing anymore. And instead, I'm talking about so last night that my kids walked the dogs at night, and I walked them in the morning, right? After you walked them in the morning, then you feed them. Now, last night they gave the dogs the last of the food.
Did anybody tell me that we were out of dog food? No. No, no, no one told me we're out of dog food. So I didn't realize until it was too late to go back out and get some this morning that they are out. So Major is just pissed that he has not been fed.
And they, I guess, this morning, because I heard Booker give the dog some treats, gave the dogs the last of the treats, and so there's nothing to even temporarily bribe them during the radio program. So if you hear some squealing and scratching, I'm not abusing the dog. The dog's just mad at me and letting me know. All right? Alright?
Yeah. I'm gonna stop talking about that now. So uh he also told me a story once where so he was growing up in the so I was asking uh Chef Sayak about game, right? Specifically uh things like uh woodcock and grouse. And everyone hopefully remembers the story where I was spitting uh buckshot and rancid uh woodcock guts all in Nastasia's face, not on purpose, but they were just all stuck to the outside of my mouth because I was I was fisting and muzzle eating these like uh birds at Hicks restaurant in London.
Remember that, Stas? Yeah, yeah. So anyway, so so Chef Alan hated, hated kind of like bloody rare things and hated game, and I asked him one day why. And he said, When I was a small child, my dad would bring home these game birds and hang them in the basement, and he would let them go until they were like stinky, and then we'd have to cook them like rare, and then I would watch them eat and just the stuff coming out of his teeth, and he's like, and I've never been able to eat it since. And so basically, you are Alan Sayak, Nastasia.
You and Alan Sayak share something in this kind of experience of people eating game birds and having it be like a revolting experience. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So anyway, so uh Chef Alan was the dean, you know, and he was the dean for decades until Nils came on, Nils Norrin, our buddy Nils Norn came on and took over and you know, kind of did the Nils Norrin thing there. Uh and they had Jacques Papin, which who we called uh Jackie Peeps, the Peep Show, what else we used to call him?
I think that's it. Yeah. Uh anyway, so uh him Jacques Therese, who's now famous uh, you know, in non-food circles for his uh nailed it stuff with Nicole Bayer. Uh huh, I'm missing someone. I'm missing one of the deans.
Anyway, so they were oh, Andre Soltner, who was like, you know, for many, many decades owned and ran Lutes with his wife, and which was the best restaurant in all of New York in the 70s, 60s, 70s, 80s. Anyways, so like they created this like core of culinary French culinary techniques. It's called the French Culinary Institute. And then sometime when we were there, you know, in the early 2000s, they brought Cesare Cassella on to become the the to do his Italian program, and they teamed up. This is the key thing where things started to change a little bit.
They teamed up with this Italian school in uh where where was that anyway? Where is that? Alma, something like that, Anastasia, something like that. Anyway, yeah, yeah, this Italian school, and the Italians were like, ain't no way, ain't no way I'm partnering with a bunch of French bastards. And so they literally, that's what happened.
And so they had to change the name of the school from the French Culinary Institute to the uh International Culinary Center. All right, now, simultaneously, and and the FCI's main thing was you came in for a career program, and on the on the cooking side, not on the pastry side was a little bit different, but on the cooking side, you came in and you did either the daytime or the nighttime, and you you worked your way through four levels of classroom work, and then your last two levels, you actually worked in a kitchen that served a restaurant, and the restaurant's name was Lake Hall. And Lake Cole was a fantastic deal. It was it's down was down on um Grand and Broadway, and you would go, and it was kind of like it's kind of like supercuts. Like sometimes you would get a fantastic meal, but you like you had to kind of time it like the very first day that the students were on, the chefs had to do a lot of the work because stuff was getting effed up real bad, and then like there two or three, like you know, the students were doing almost everything, but then you might get some problem.
But then after that, in the level, like they were pretty solid and running, and all of the all of the the food was created by the you know, these like kind of old school, like awesome French chefs, and then you would get this great meal for pretty cheap because you know they weren't trying to make a lot of money with it, they were just trying to get the students to practice. They had a decent wine list with great prices, and I loved going to Lake Hall. Even before I was involved with the FCI, I would go to Lake Cole kind of regularly because it was, you know, I didn't have any money and it was a good deal. Anyways, um, so that was the French Culinary Institute, and then it was called Peter Cump was the what ICE used to be called, and while we were more kind of focused on professional stuff, like Cump was more focused on kind of hobby and small courses, and but Cump grew into ICE, got this huge space downtown, and they were our arch rivals. So the French Culinary Institute where we were was when Dorothy Hamilton founded, here's something I don't know why I've talked about.
Her dad founded Apex Technical Schools. Now, for any of you that grew up anywhere near the New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, major metropolitan area, you who are a little older, Apex Technical Commercials had a very famous spokesperson who would get on and he would say several things that's gonna be like instant for anyone that was around here. Free set of tools when you graduate. So you got your free set of tools whenever you graduated from what whether it was like air conditioning repair or anything like this. And the other thing was uh I can't make the first call, I can't call you.
You have to make the first step and call us. And those two hooks were what caused Apex Technical Schools to become kind of like the biggest, best, most famous technical school in the entire kind of New York area. And the guy who founded that, or his daughter was Dorothy Hamilton, and she's like, I'm gonna found my own technical school and founded the SCI. So the SDI was technically a technical school, and all of us teachers had to go and take these courses because technical schools a lot of time rip people off, and so they're very heavily, very heavily um regulated by the state. So it's much harder to get a job cooking uh teaching at a technical school and keep it for your certifications than it is a major university, because a major university can just decide to hire you.
I mean, it's not harder because obviously, whatever. I don't mean it that way, but I mean from a regulation standpoint. Anyways, so Cump, aka ICE was the biggest, biggest, biggest, biggest, biggest, biggest, biggest competitor. In fact, when I got a job at the French Culinary Institute, and when I actually when I was leaving and I was gonna be a consultant there only, they wanted me to be exclusive to the French Culinary Institute. I'm like, I'm not gonna be exclusive because I already do like guest gigs at Harvard and all this other crap.
They're like, all right, you can do whatever you want, but don't teach at ICE. Whatever you do, you can't teach at ICE. They were arch enemies. So to hear that they are uh, and of course, Dorothy died a couple of years ago, Lake Hull closed down, everything changes, but I'm just a little shocked that they're merging. It's the strangest thing.
I mean, what what you guys have anything about this? No. Man. I just feel it's the end of an era. Particularly wrapped up in the in the I mean, like where you never pranked each other, you never like went to the other campus.
Come on. It's a good rivalry, nothing. I mean, it wasn't like it wasn't like a Harvard Yale thing, like, you know, because we were a little more adult than that. You know, no one was peeing on anyone else's statue, as far as I know. You know what I mean?
As far as I can tell, there was no statue urination, or you know, I never went to ice and uh stole a fire extinguisher and then discharged it all in a hallway in the middle of the night. I never did that at ice. Well, with some creative editing on my part, you just admitted to doing both those things. But I don't know. Anyway, to me, it's just uh and like when you read the the stuff on the in in the New York Times, Florence Fabricant just wrote a uh a piece on it.
Um, you know, it's like painted as this kind of like, oh, it's great, these two cooking schools are merging, but like for those inside, it's just throwing me for a loop. It's hard for me to think about uh anything else. Speaking of New York Times, Nastasia, Nastasi hates it when I talk about shows, so close your ears. Uh I I just watched the uh last episode of uh Ray Donovan, the series, Leaf Schreiber, who I like, but Nastasia does not. Nastasia, you do not like Lev Schreiber, right?
He's fine. I thought you said you saw him on the street and you're like, meh. Yeah, I mean, he's not as attractive as I thought he'd be. Okay. That's what I meant.
Okay? So they spent a good, like, it was a major thing. They were going against Pete Wells about his Luger review. Like, they took like all of this time during a very major plot point thing to talk about the Peter Luger's review and how Pete Wells was somehow like, you know, who the hell was he to say that Peter Luger's wasn't worth any stars? Crazy, right?
Are you in the show? In the show. In the show. How can that possibly be part of a good television show? I don't know.
It was weird. Now can you hear all the weird uh gaming going on in my background? Should I fix that too? Hold on a second. Uh Booker has this game called Bop It.
And he's 18, but he still loves the Bopet. I don't know why he loves the Bopet. There's like 8,000 Boppets. These games, if you're not Are you familiar with Bopet the game? No.
So there these it's basically a piece of plastic with a bunch of switches in it. And it's got like one that you hit, one that you twist, one that you pull, and there's all different. There's Bopit, there's Bopit Extreme, there's Bopit blah blah blah. So Booker has collected all the Boppets. He has a Bopit in Spanish, he has a Bopin in English, he has a miniature boppets, large-size boppets, like uh he's getting a German Bop it, all these Bopets, and they're real irritating because it's just it goes boost bopping, and you have to hit the thing, and then you know, spin it, twist it, ps, and then like if you don't do the right thing, then it like it like you know yells at you and says something horrible, right?
So and these games are well known, irritating, and like they they they penetrate my brain and my dreams. So I don't know what he was searching Bopets on the internets the other day, and he realized that people have hacked the Bopets. They cut a resistor, which it's so old school, the technology that they actually use a resistor to uh run the oscillator for the microprocessor. So you can change the resistor and change the clock speed of the microprocessor and thereby change the speed of the game. So he installed this thing that allows him to be like he made me do it.
He installed it. He made me do it yesterday. Bop it. And you can go bop it, pinch it, put it, bot it. And so like now, like all day I've been hearing like super slow and super fast versions of Bopit.
I'm about to lose my freaking mind. Yeah, you're so brave for helping him do that in this time where you can't leave your house that much. I know. And considering that like I spent the early part of his life re-engineering everything in the house to not make noise. Like I remember I had to, I told us on the air, like I have the Zoji Rushi uh rice cooker, and I'm the only one that I know of that I don't have the I'm done noise.
Like you used to sing a song, I don't even remember what it is, but I would have to open up all of my gear and cut all of the signal stuff because otherwise he would lose his mind when I was cooking rice. Anyways, all right, let's answer some questions. Let's answer some questions. Uh from Monty via email. Oh, by the way, I was gonna do a classics in the field.
Nastasia, you'll be you'll be glad to know. I was gonna do a classics in the field that had to do with flour milling today, but I knew that you would kill me. Yeah. Well, didn't we have when was well? How many months until we can have another bread/slash flower related uh thing on the gig?
That's up to you, Dave. Oh, it's not to me. I have to come on, it's up to it's up to all of us. Give me a break. All right, John.
When do you want to do it? Two week from now. Oh, Nastasi was hoping you would say months, but okay. All right. Uh speaking of which I did bake another pie from uh pie marches on, which, you know, as everyone knows is my you know current favorite classics in the field.
Angela Garbats, who was on the show, we should have her back on, see how her uh thing is doing. She also just purchased a copy. So I realized that there's not even a lot of copies left available. Someone needs to reprint that. But John thought maybe I should read this one quote.
Should I read the quote, John? I think so. I think it was pretty great. Yeah. And uh we brought this up because uh we're not posting this kind of stuff on social media right now, but I did make a 4th of July pie.
So the cherries that I told you guys I picked last week, which were Monoarensi sour cherries, I pitted them, and then instead of making a traditional cherry pie, which it doesn't seem to me that a lot of people actually like, just the pieces of cherry with the goop, uh, I did a version of kind of a whipped cherry pie. So I took uh the fresh cherries, I blended them, uh, sugar, heated them up, stirred cornstarch into that, and then just as the cornstarch came up and functionalized, added to a boil, I folded it into uh egg white, you know, whipped egg white with with sugar, like stiff peaks, and then put that into my now I've told you a million times, but please, the the real crust with the graham cracker on both sides. So I put that pie filling in, and these were very strongly flavored cherries, so really tart. So it was like a very still very strongly flavored kind of whipped pie. Then I put uh you know, as it was setting, I put over the top fresh blueberries and then little stars made of uh pie crust.
So it was good, but you can't see it because we're not posting stuff on social right now. This from Monroe Boston Strauss. Good pie is an asset to every menu. Poor pie is a detriment regardless of who makes it. You may be outstanding for your pies, but so long as an operator in your community serves pore, you will never reach the peak of success in sales.
Your interest in good pies should extend to your neighbor. In helping him to help himself to make good pies, you help yourself. Let's overcome once and for all the soggy underbaked crust condition. How's that for a quote? Pretty good, yeah.
Very good quote. It's a good quote. Yeah, good quote. Um, anyway, all right. Um deer cooking issues crew.
This was from Monty. I splurge in order to control freak because of the chef steps discount. It is not arrived yet. I'm sure it's arrived by now. All right.
My question is about omelets. How do you control the temperature to keep the eggs from sticking, but not so high that they get too overcooked and tough on the bottom but are cooked all the way through? Uh, how would you dial that into a control freak? Would you be able to use the same principles for let's say crepes? Uh, thanks.
Monty from Jacksonville, Oregon. I didn't know they had a Jacksonville in Oregon. Nastasius, is uh you ever you ever heard of Jacksonville, Oregon? No. No.
Alright. Do you think it's uh similar to I'm trying the only Jacksonville, obviously, I can think of is Florida. It's the only Jacksonville I've ever been to. I had a rather negative experience in Jacksonville, Florida. Someone tried to uh run my wife and Mai's car off the road.
Not good. It was bad. Uh yeah, that that doesn't sound great. Yeah, it was the middle of the night. It was the kind of early 90s.
And it was, I don't know, like three in the morning or something like this, and we're flying down the road because I was trying to get to my grandparents' house, and I decided to take a nap, and my wife was driving, so I had the seat lean back. Which, yeah, yeah, I get it, Nastasia. Poor etiquette for me to lean back while my wife's driving. But on the other hand, we were driving 24 hours straight, no brakes, and I needed a little bit of time to kind of shut my eyes. And they thought that she was driving alone in the car, and so they pulled up like a side of us, and someone else pulled in front, and they started slowing down to stop the car and like push her off the side of the highway, and then I popped up and they sped off.
How crazy is that? Crazy. That's insane. Yeah, well, you know, the 90s, different time. Um don't blame it on the 90s when you can just as easily blame Florida.
Alright. Alright. I was I'll leave that at there. I'm not gonna insult Florida the way I know Nastasia will. What was the name of that person who came on who hated Florida so much?
She was awesome. Remember her? Anyway. Um so uh okay, so crepes and omelets, two different problems, right? The heat on a crepe, most of the the issues.
First of all, I'm gonna let John talk a little bit about crepes because I happen to like overcooked American style omelets. John, do you like overcooked American style omelets? I no, not really. Yeah. No, not really.
I'm definitely much more about the Nastasia. What about you? Omelets. Yeah. I like overcooked omelets.
Yeah, I think you like an American overcooked omelet? Because you grew up in Covina, land of American overcooked omelets. You probably like watery, chopped up like uh peppers in them, the same way I do. I like that stuff. You know what I mean?
Uh what about you, Matt? Are you an omelet guy? Of course. Of course. And I probably never even had like a legit good one.
Oh, they're good. They're real good. Like they're creamy in the center. First of all, I gotta ask this question. How many of you show of voices?
How many of you enjoy scrambled eggs? I mean, yeah. Yep. Yes. Now, do you like the tiny creamy curd that you get from that kind of constant stirring?
Or like the big, fluffy, like not overcooked, but like some dry parts and some not the American style. American style. American. John? I prefer the wet, the smaller curds, constant stirring.
Yeah. Yeah. So that's speaking of French Culinary Institute. Like, at the French Culinary Institute, like, when you got to the restaurant thing, they would make you sit there and make omelets constantly because they want you to be able to make that French style omelet. And if you can't make that small curd-style scrambled egg at the French culinary, you were dead, dead in the water.
Wiley Dufrain, to this day, is a you know my brother-in-law, also a lover of both American cheese and eggs, like uh will only make the tiny curd, uh uh tiny curd stirred French style of uh scrambled egg. But crepes and omelets are different problems. With omelet, you're mainly worried about uh the sticking, so a lot of it's about the non stickness and also getting that thin film to wipe out and then letting it sit free itself, knocking it free at just the right moment and flipping it over. The reason American omelets are not the same isn't necessarily because of the pan, in my opinion. It's because of the stuff that it's added to it to change the kind of texture of the egg.
And the other issue is there's just too much egg in the pan. So like um you know like the way that I'll do it if I want like not that kind of American style texture is you can pull if you have a very non-stick like cast iron you can pull the skin back and then rerun fresh egg over it without kind of getting it fluffy or big and then fold it over and you can still keep the inside kind of wet. But anyway I see it as a fundamentally different kind of an issue. A crepe the real problem is just getting enough heat it being non stick but it getting enough heat onto it because that thin it's basically pouring like a thin bunch of water onto the bottom and you need like a heat heat back up pretty quickly. So I see them as fundamentally different problems.
But the control freak is gonna be great it it's I use it constantly in situations where I want a relatively high heat but I don't want to worry about scorching right so um like what's one thing that I do a lot you you know um you know how you take artichokes artichoke uh hearts and you you you quarter them and then you stick them in a pan with oil and then you uh you know I put a little salt sugar pepper whatnot but then you bring it up and the idea is to crisp up the bottom of the artichoke and steam it at the same time and then pull the lid off of the off of the uh pan so that it can really crisp up on the bottom after they just steam themselves and if you do it just right you get a brown crusty not burnt side on the on the artichoke heart and then the rest of it is kind of steamed perfectly. You know what I'm talking about, Stas? Yeah. You like that, right? No.
No? Yes, I said. Uh oh. Uh that is intensely easy to do on uh a control freak because you can set the pan to almost the exact temperature you want, and you can keep it kind of steaming and you can get it brown, but you're never going to kind of scorch it or overcook it, right? So it's like really good at stuff like that.
Uh I gotta be honest, I don't cook eggs on it because I just use my super, I just like crank the heat up on my gas thing and go. Cause I don't really worry about like hyper temperature control on um on my omelets and my scrambled eggs. But I don't know. But they the once you have the control freak, I think you'll find that there's lots of situations where uh here's another one. Like you you want to you're it's great for reheating, that's obvious, but like a lot of uh meats and whatnot, you want to bring them just up to like kind of uh a searing uh temperature, and then you want the lid on, you would pull off anytime you want to create that bottom crust without kind of burning it, it's great.
Uh therefore also like saute veg without burning, like like do you guys everyone likes brown. Well no, do you like Brussels sprouts? Do you guys like Brussels sprouts? Yeah, right, but you don't like it, I'm sure assuming you like it when they're brown but not burnt, right? And a lot of times it can be hard to kind of draw that line between brown and burnt, or especially if you're like me and you add a little bit of sugar to a lot of your veg, you tend to get scorching earlier than you otherwise would, and the control freak is kind of great for that.
So I think you're gonna find a lot of uh good uses for it. I mean, maybe it's gonna be good for crepes. It's hard for me to know because you know, I have a giant gas-fired cramped crepe maker that I use for crepes, and it's you know, why would I use anything else? Am I right? Anyway, I don't know.
Do you have anything? Do you have anything else to add about crepes or uh or omelets, guys? Nope. No. No.
Speaking of expensive big things, John, what is the name of that grill that we were looking at? Also from Ray Donovan, where I saw it the first time. God, I don't remember. I need to find that. It's did we talk about this on air already?
That the $20,000 grill. Yeah, yeah. How are we gonna get how are we gonna get our our tentacles into those people? And speaking of, Nastasia stopped eating uh cephalopods. Did you hear about this, people?
No. Yeah. She stopped eating cephalopods. All of a sudden, she decided they're too smart to eat, right? Yeah.
That's the breaking food news you should have led with. I mean, this is what the people need to know. I was like, octopus? She's like, no, it's sad, they're smart. I'm like, squid, no, sad, they're smart.
I was like, cuttlefish? She's like, don't care, don't eat them. I was like, I was like, okay, all right. But I yeah, I've I led with my argument, which is a that they're more like aliens, their intelligence is more like aliens than like mammal-style intelligence. And so maybe we should kill them so they don't take over and turn us into their butlers.
Because I swear to God, as soon as an octopus has the mutations whereby one, they uh can survive past mating, right? Because remember, after an octopus like does the deed and has kids, they die. That's so it's a one, it's a one-shot thing. So, like, after the male does the mating, it wanders off onto the bottom of the ocean to get eaten by other things. And after the female does the female eats a bunch of stuff, lays its, lays its eggs, and then just sits there blowing uh blowing water over the eggs to keep them from having uh you know things attack them or parasites, just sits there, doesn't eat the whole time after the you know after the eggs hatch, it you know, she wanders off and dies.
If they got rid of that habit, and if they didn't just die so damn young, they would definitely take over the world and kill us all. I don't think they would like us. What do you think, Staz? Yeah, I mean that would be exciting. Yeah, I think they would kill us.
Anyway, uh, and if they lived a little bit longer, but before they killed us, I would definitely make an aquarium with a motor on it and have a robot butler. For sure, I would have a robot butler. I mean uh an octopus butler with a like with a robot like movement thing. Wouldn't you? How awesome would that be?
Could you imagine, Stas, anything cooler than having a like a robotic aquarium driven by an octopus butler? Yeah, it'd be cool. Yeah, it'd be sick. Eight arms? I mean, I would just I mean, imagine.
Imagine. Oh my god. They're gonna present this audio in the in the like trial where they they put humanity on trial for crimes against octopi. This is gonna be uh oh, listen, when the cephalopods rule the world, if I should be so lucky to still be around, I will be the first person to get strung up because like you know, I know they're smart, they're just delicious, and I just want that butler because the coffee service would be amazing. Like, imagine an octopus butler doing like the Turkish coffee routine, all the cups simultaneously, stirring the e-brick, having it come up, and then like pouring it and just doing the whole thing at the same time.
You imagine how sweet that would be. Speaking of Turkish coffee, or as the Greeks call it, Greek coffee. John, is there any good place in the city that to get that? Not that I know of. Not in Manhattan, at least.
I bet you there's something good out in Queens. I want real with the with with the sand. Yeah. I want like good. I want to go back there someday.
Well, when we can travel again, maybe. Stars, remember that trip? Mm-hmm. That was fun. Uh, remember how we we almost broke our butts, rather, and you had to like like go down, you were walking barefoot all over Athens because it was just so damn slippery.
Yeah. Yeah. Because we had our work shoes on. I've said this before on the air, but I'll say it again. If you ever go to Athens, don't wear work shoes.
Wear the grippiest shoes you can possibly find, or you will trip and smash your head into a thousand pieces. True or false does. Yep. True. Yeah.
Alright. It's like walking over a uh a damned marble statue. It's crazy. It's dangerous. You know, I don't know.
I don't know how they I don't know how for thousands of years they had civilization. All right. From Antoine. Antoine wants to know if you're doing the Toki, the lowball. Uh I in fact I have sent that uh recipe to me, so I can do it.
Would you like me to? I mean, I'm just telling you. Jack sent me uh the recipe. So here is the syrup. Ready for it, people?
So the Toki Lowball is a joke. Uh I mean, the name is a joke because everyone was Toki is a Japanese whiskey made for the American market. So, as far as I know, Toki is not available in Japan. But Toki was designed specifically for highballs for whiskey highball. And the standard Toki highball is very low alcohol, very high, very high water content.
And so to kind of you know deal with that fact, you know, it it has it's a heavily bodied whiskey, not a strong flavor necessarily, not like overwhelming body from a flavor standpoint, but the actual body of it because they expect you to drink it at a very low alcohol percentage. I'm gonna tell you that when you're doing a highball, you should add some glycerin to it to body it up more, especially if you're doing it at the ratios that those guys are doing. Anyway, so uh Bobby Murphy from existing conditions made a syrup, and much like Bobby does, he uses unlike anything I do, everything Bobby does has like you know a bunch of different ingredients that like work with each other. So here's the recipe. 40 gram grams of uh lap sang suchong.
Now, we use a very nice uh lap song. So most, like a lot of Lopsong Suchong teas, which is a smoked tea, are so heavily smoked that uh it can almost be overwhelming. But the lap song that we're using here, and you should try to get a hold of one, is a very lightly the lightly smoked lop song, all right? Then 60 grams of wood dragon oolong, which is oolong tea, and then a hundred grams of the hoji cha chi with tea, which is like almost like sticks. They're like little sticks, it's not like it really a tea at all.
It's hojicha, h-o uh j-i-c-h-a. Then to that, do two and a half uh liters of water. The recipe in our specs I'll have to change because it actually says 25,000 liters of water, which would be quite a lot. Quite a lot. And then uh then sugar.
And so what you do is you you brew the tea, strain the tea, and then turn that into a 50-50, uh, add enough sugar to make a 50-50 simple syrup. So that's the Toki low ball syrup. That's the sweetener. And then the other part of the joke about uh what we're doing is instead of doing a high ball, the reason it's a low ball is it's relatively, especially for a carbonated product, relatively high in alcohol, uh served kind of short and on a rock. So because it's higher in alcohol, it's not as carbonated.
And here's the recipe for a large batch. So you'll have to do the math yourself. I don't have time. 5,625 milliliters of water, 4,500 milliliters of Toki whiskey, 563 milliliters of hojicha syrup, and 150 drops, which I have to do the math, but 150 drops. You can look at my book for the conversion.
I believe it's 20 drops to the milliliter uh of uh saline solution, and that's it, chill it and carbonate it. So uh that's the recipe, and you guys will have to do the math on how to how to undo it. Do you want to tell people about your bar opening? Isn't that the sweet? Well, we're shooting for it.
We're shooting for on Friday, opening up for outdoor service. We're gonna have a meeting. We just need to get all of our kind of ducks in a row to uh open it up, but it should be exciting, you know. We're gonna be out there um, you know, serving, serving drinks, doing the doing the stuff. Gotta see, gotta see how it works.
I know that the city uh got mad about what's been happening the last couple of weeks, and so we're just kind of looking to see other mistakes uh people have made in terms of not necessarily um taking care of the social distancing. You know, I just started having social distancing and anxiety dreams. I hadn't had them before, just the past couple of days. I've been having them where I like I'm all of a sudden I'm in this giant crowd and no one has masks and everyone's screaming at each other. Is this a dream that everyone's having now?
Whoa. No, huh? Stas, you having these kinds of dreams. All right, she's gone. She's she she's she's gone to the internet somewhere.
Yeah. Another thing is how long until the new TV programs have people wearing masks. I feel like all the TV programs I'm watching now are some alternate universe that no longer exists. It's so weird, you know what I mean? I I do find that very I don't know, frustrating right now.
And I well, because I like I'll watch something and I just get distracted by how happy these people look traipsing around New York, like you know, it's free. Yeah, I'm gonna go out and get something to eat. I'm gonna buy a cup of coffee. You know what I mean? And they're like talking to the person that they're getting coffee from, and like at which point I'm completely disengaged from whatever the story was supposed to be because I'm just like, oh, that'd be nice.
Yeah, yeah. But it's not like it's like you know, if they were shooting it now, we'd be like, No, get away, they're poison. You know what I mean? Like, whereas like they're just having an interaction. It's crazy anyway.
I guess that's because nobody's shooting stuff anymore, right? Because all of that stuff was put on hold. Uh whatever. No, yeah, nobody's shooting anything. I mean, I I uh some production companies are supposed to be like isolating entire shoots in random locations, but yeah, not in New York, that's for damn sure.
Yeah, yeah. Uh Fruit of Mora Cocktail wrote in. Uh hey Dave, uh reading your book, wanted to ask something. Can I replace Ticoloid 210S with another product for the preparation of Orjah? It's not very easy to find in Italy.
Thank you. Yes, you can substitute a mixture of uh gum Arabic and Xanthan. Uh I forget what the ratio is. I'll try to get it for next week. Uh I have it penciled into the copy of Liquid Intelligence that I keep at the bar, which is the very first uh copy, a hard copy of Liquid Intelligence that was printed.
I have it at the bar and I have it penciled in. But if my memory serves me correctly, it is um one, it is four parts gum Arabic to one part Xanthan or thereabouts, and you can use that. Um Anonymous wrote in more uh uh control free question. Would you recommend a control freak for sauces with high sugar content? I'm finding trying to find a way to keep and maintain a sauce with a high sugar content.
What would the best way be? Well, I'm not sure what the problem with the high sugar content sauce is, uh, like what the problem is. If the problem is that you're boiling over, the sucker's gonna boil over whether it's in a control freak or not, because sugary sauces tend to boil over, but it is very good for not going over temperature. Um, I mean, I I I do stuff like sugars and those kinds of boils in in the control freak just because I can get a relatively high uh heat input without going over temperature, so it's kind of good for that kind of stuff. Um, I don't know, John.
Do you have any feeling about what they were asking like more in depth in that or no? Like, what do you think about it? Not really, but I'm sure we can get him to elaborate a little bit more for next time. Yeah, uh Ann Titus wrote in by email. I wanted to uh briefly follow up by the question I sent a while back.
I asked about Dave's thoughts slash advice regarding ventilation in the kitchen because my at the time range hood didn't seem to do anything other than make noise. After thinking through Dave's con uh Dave's comments, we finally invested in a quality hood that vents outside. It has been a fantastic investment. I'm glad to hear this. Uh both smoke and grease residue are greatly diminished, which my family appreciates, since I have a tendency of creating a lot of smoke, as does anyone that cooks.
I like I can't tell you. I okay, well, I'm gonna finish what they wrote, which my family appreciates is have a tendency of creating a lot of smoke, searing, stir-frying, making uh a temporary oil for Indian food is all much better now. So uh thanks for your advice. You have fixed my cooking issue, kind regards and end. That is great.
And I have to say that I know a lot of people whose cooking lives are completely affected by the fear of smoke, you know. Um there's there's one the fear of smoke, and so like I've been having, you know, I I have been dealing with that. I've been torturing my wife for the past 25 years with smokiness in the in the kitchen. Um, and for the past I would say 10 or 11 years, I've been worried about smokiness as kind of a health issue, and I think that there's a lot more people now, and you're in and I said this years ago, but it really is true. Like in the upcoming years, indoor air quality, I think is gonna become a much bigger focus, especially now that all of us are inside all the time, right?
Is it gonna become a much bigger focus for uh health, and almost all apartments and houses are built with absolutely atrocious indoor air quality, especially uh when it comes to um the kitchen. But and for those of you that cook heavily, I mean, you hey Nastasi, when you go visit apartments, are you gonna like remember when you go visit an apartment and you could tell someone cooked? You visit the reason I'm asking you is you visited apartments more recently than I have, like to look for them, right? You can look up high on the ceiling and you can tell how much they cooked by how big of like a filth like residue grease garbage they have around the ceiling, right? Mm-hmm.
Yeah. And it's because there's no good there's no good ventilation. I really think that there's something to be done there. And I personally need to strike the balance because I know people come into my house and they're like, oh, it's smoky in here, and I'm like, and what? And I should care because why?
You know what I mean? And I really think I kind of should care more. So like I do get mad when people ruin dinner because they're worried about a little bit of smoke that's just uh transient. But on the other hand, I think it probably is bad for you, and there's more and more research coming out to say it. So anyway, try to get your uh ventilation in uh good order.
How how is a how does your kitchen vent uh at uh Stanford just open a window or do you have like like a hood? No, there's no vent, a window. And is the window at least close to the stove? Yeah. Yeah.
That's another problem. People don't own their apartments in New York most of the time, and so like they can't even really make an investment to try to make it make it nice. I think it's a real problem. What about you? How's your ventilation uh, John?
No machinery or anything like that, but my stove is right next to a door that goes out to uh this rooftop patio. So I just open that and have a fan point it out that way, and it helps. It doesn't make all the difference, but I always unplug the smoke detector when I'm cooking. Oh smoke, smoke detectors. Don't get me started on smoke detectors.
Do you um do you cook outside a lot, John? No, I would like to, but no. Why why don't you? Is it they would they would you get caught by somebody? Would you get like arrested?
I don't know. With the old super, he wasn't really cool with us rolling outside, but this new one from the last like two years seems pretty cool. So I'm gonna I don't know, I'm gonna try and get a grill or something this summer once the asbestos abatement is done. I told I I told you about the time I got the fire department called on me, right? No.
Yeah. So I lived in an illegal loft on the twentieth floor of a building in the garment district. And this building, I moved in in ninety seven, and this building was complete filth. When I say filth, I don't just mean like the fact that prostitutes would break in at night to turn tricks in the lobby, because that's also true. I don't mean that it was just I spent the first uh couple of weeks uh in this place with with my wife scraping gum off of the floor inside of our unit, because that's also true.
By the way, when you walk into New York City and you look down on the subway and you see all those black dots, people that's gum. That is gum. Uh and so like what I mean is that the working conditions in this garment building were so atrocious they wouldn't supply um bathrooms for the workers, and they would go into the fire stairwell and use it as the restroom for both number one and number two. It was crazy. This is like b like pre you know, pre-current, like the way New York is now.
You would the you couldn't you couldn't even afford to rent a commercial loft in this space now. Anyway, so we're there, and uh I had I didn't have any act outdoor space, but I did have access to this fire stairwell, and no one was pooping in my section of the fire stairwell because I was on the top floor. So you had to go down at least one or two floors to get into kind of the heavy latrine section of the fire stairwell. So anyway, so like uh after I realized that you know, after business hours, no one was coming up there, I was like, to hell with it, and I bought a giant grill. You know, one of those not expensive, but you know, they're based on a 55-gallon drum, like the giant round ones.
You know the ones I'm talking about? Yeah. Cheap but big, cast iron grates, and you know, I snuck it up the elevator and I put it into this fire stairwell, and I would cook like these immense meals off of this grill, uh, using like live flame charcoal on the top of a uh in, you know, basically inside of this building in in New York. And one day, they finally, after four and a half years, installed smoke detectors in the hallway, and I didn't know about it. And there was a there was a temperature inversion.
And so what happened is is the wind, instead of going like kind of through the hallway out the fire uh uh, you know, stairwell and up, went the other way and sucked the smoke into the building. And I had I was cooking, you know, I I would go to my butcher, Michael at the time, and he would get me all kinds of crazy stuff, like rack of goat, like giant stakes, like anything where he illegally got me lungs when I asked for them because I wanted to do some lung-based dishes, which were illegal in the US. So like I had like all this meat going, and I didn't realize that there was gonna be a problem until that smoke detector went off. I immediately, of course, beat it with a bat until the stopped making noise, but I didn't know it was connected to the fire department. So the fire department, a whole group of firefighters, comes running up in full turnout gear, 20 flights of stairs to make it to me, right?
To see what's going on. And then they see me grilling, and I'm grilling with all this live fire in the you know, in this fire stairwell. And the the firefighter, she looks at me and she's like, what the hell are you doing? And I was just like, uh I'm I'm grilling. She's like, what the hell are you doing with live fire in a fire stairwell on the 20th floor in New York?
And I uh look at her, you know, and you all you hear is from the meat, and I'm like, tastes better. And she's turned around and walked away. That was it. Wait, what? Yeah, turned around and walked away.
I was like, wow. I mean, did you offer them some? Yeah. No, I mean, like, it wasn't done yet. I was like, I think and then I think then her like underling, I was like, was like, yeah, you you you have to stop.
You know, you know, I was like, eh, okay. You're you're like, in my defense, I've been doing this for four years. Yeah, my defense, I've been doing this a long time, does taste much better. But like, yeah, like somehow, like I get in these situations where, like, you know, and Nastasia knows I have this habit, like I sometimes I can just get this look on my face where people like don't know kind of how to deal with it, and then they just walk away, right, Stas? Yeah.
I don't know. It happens all the time. Anyways, tastes better. Five minutes. Alright, so uh in honor of the French Culinary Institute, uh, for the classics in the field.
Classics in the field, yeah. I I won't do the milling one. I will do uh the fundamental techniques of classic cuisine from the French Culinary Institute. And the reason I'm choosing this is that you know, since the FCI slash the ICC is not going to be um its own standalone uh thing anymore. When I first started teaching there, all of their there wasn't a lot of like good cooking information on the internets, and when you went to school there, like and you wouldn't get a book, a textbook.
Instead, you got all of these loose leaf binders, like old school loose leaf binders that were full of like all of the recipes, and you know, they would make changes and they were all written, like I said before at the beginning of the show by the deans. And the very first book they compiled that was kind of the distillation of their program was the fundamental techniques of classic cuisine, and this is kind of like um a glossier, newer version of kind of uh what they would teach you on how to do this very specific style of restaurant cooking. So if you want to learn like you know how to do the classic vegetable like a l'anglaise where you make the parchment disc and you cut the hole in the center, and you you know, you put the you put the the water and like the pad of butter and the um and the little parchment over it. You're familiar with this one, John? No, yeah, but using a cartouche?
Well, there's a ling glaze and there's Etou Vay, right? So there's two, is that what you call it a cartoon? It's just like a piece of parchment that you cut into a circle and put over your pan. Yeah, okay, yeah, cartouche. Yeah.
So like they had those two different ways of cooking. If you want to, if you want to learn how to do to turn vegetables, which are the little footballs, which nobody does anymore. Does anyone still make the footballs, John? Not that I know of. Why would you?
Well, because it's like it's a dumb fun skill. So one of the one of the things about learning to cook in in large scale versus small scale is you have to learn to do a lot of prep, right? And so, like I was gonna say, like, you know, you haven't busted down a chicken until you've busted down like 50 chickens in a row, right? Because then you really get chicken into the bloodstream. You know what I'm saying?
You get the feel of the chicken in your hands. And so chickens are expensive, so one of the things they would have you bust through is they'd have you turn 8 billion potatoes or 8 billion carrots, and then they'd have you go home and turn it. What that is is you're making, like I say, these little footballs, which are very old school French. But if you want to learn like turning and cooking vegetables, uh, you can you know get it out of get it out of this book. They show you, you know, if you want to learn like the the height of like French, like French American style French restaurant cooking in like the 90s and early 2000s, you gotta pick up the book.
And I gotta say, I have a soft spot for this kind of cooking, which is kind of weird. You wouldn't think I would, but I do. Uh so anyway, in honor of them merging with uh ice, uh that I'm I'm I'll look through it now, and oh, here's their here's their omelets. Anyway, uh so pick that book up if you want to know kind of the theory and technique of what all of those people who went to that school, uh, even those who talk crap about it, like uh Dave Chang and uh, you know, part my our partner Dave Chang, Wiley Dufrein, Bobby Flay. Do you know Bobby Flay was the in the very first class of uh the French Culinary Institute?
So they, you know, they started with it with uh with a hit. They uh they got a famous uh chef right out of the gate. Um uh Alex Guarnichelle, Christina Toze. I think Alex Guarnicelli was there. Maybe she wasn't.
Anyways, uh, so pick that up if you if you want that kind of thing. You guys got anything else? I'm gonna make it on time today. Yeah, no. All right, so listen.
Let's do it. John says in two weeks, I think Nastasi's gonna want a little later for the bread. Write in some questions. Let us know if there's anything you want to know, how to cook any issues you're having. We'll see you next week.
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