This episode is brought to you by Vertera Dinnerware. Learn more at Vertera.com. That's V-E-R-T-E-R-R-A.com. Time for Lunch is a new podcast from HRN for curious young eaters, where we focus on the serious questions. Aren't chickens tiny dinosaurs?
We get to know our favorite foods in unexpected ways. We just like cheered like you would cheer for your classmate when they're round in second base in softball. And we just like peach, peach, peach, peach. Yay, thank you, bitches. Learn some new recipes and jokes.
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Subscribe, time for lunch on your favorite podcast app so that you and your favorite young eater can catch up on the whole first season. New episodes of season two out each week. Corona time on the Heritage Radio Network. Joined as usual with Nastasia the Hammer Lopez in Stanford, Connecticut by the sound. How you doing, Stas?
Yeah? Yeah. I didn't think I was gonna have you on, so I'm I'm glad. I feel like this is a bonus to have you on because we, you know, I thought you weren't gonna be on today, but that's great. We have uh as usual, John from uh the Booker and Dax Customer Service Representative Extraordinaire.
Uh how you doing? Doing well, thank you. Uh and uh special guest, uh Ed Cornell from uh Milk Cult. Where does the word milk cult? Like in what sense cult?
Like cult like Kool-Aid, like cult like Jonestown? I mean, I would there I think there's a bunch of like much better things you could reference than both Kool-Aid and Jonestown, but you know, you can go with that if you want. I mean, are you familiar with the fact that at Jonestown, the vast majority of the people actually were drinking Flavor Aid because he was so cheap that he didn't want to buy the on-brand Kool-Aid? Well, of course. I mean, like in your final days, you do have to pinch pennies.
But that's the exact opposite time from when you pinch pennies. Like if you know you're going out, just buy the Kool-Aid. You don't buy the flavor aid. That's why the the Haley's uh comic guys got new kicks before they went out. Oh, yeah, they got the outfits, they got new outfits, they got nice matching everything.
They, you know. They found them with like matching Nikes on. Oh, yeah, I remember that. Yeah. Yeah.
That was sad. They were all sad. So not that they were all sad. So not that kind of cult. Yeah, no, but you know, like, you know, ice cream cult, you know, obsession and more like cult, like cult film.
Yeah, I mean both. You know. Yeah. It's like how long have you been doing the milk cult in DC? Uh I've been doing it about between seven and eight years.
Um, yeah, so doing about seven, eight years. And uh I actually started doing it about a year after I started listening to cooking issues. I was I was living in um Indonesia and kind of like listening to cooking issues every week. I think it was like right of the first or second year you guys started, and then moved back to DC, and I was working in construction and food and restaurants, and then started doing this as like a side thing, and then started doing it full time. Well, what kind of construction did you do?
I did home renovations for a bunch of years. Um, but then and like I well, I was a general handyman for a bunch of years when I was in college, and then home renovations and then doing restaurant build-outs. So in in everyone has their least favorite things when it comes to doing renovations. What's yours? Um my least favorite thing is probably electrical, because I can do enough of it to actually say yes to it, but then it just takes me so long that it um it ends up not being worth it.
You know, like plumbing, like I'll either say yes and do a good job or just completely outsource it. But I think over the years, you know, taking electrical work was just like, yeah, cool. Uh you know, it's like you you want to say yes, but then you just get yourself into a job that you just sort of should have subcontracted out. Yeah, I hate doing sheetrock. Oh, I mean, once you do enough of it, you can just rock it out.
I mean, yeah. I mean, I hate doing it like I don't get good at it. I don't like lifting those panels up. I don't like cutting the holes in the sheetrock. I don't like I don't like taping it, I don't like spackling it.
I hate sanding it. I hate through I hate taping tarps up to catch all the dust from the sheet rock. I hate doing sheetrock. I'm like, wait, hold on, but wait, I'm like, why are you sanding sheetrock? Not only is that gonna give you lung cancer, but you're just not supposed to sand sheetrock.
No, no, no, where you put the plaster up. Like you like, I'm not gonna doing that. I'm gonna think of Durac. Sorry, I'm thinking of Durok. Oh, yeah, yeah.
No, so like I put up the sheetrock, I tape it, I put that little line of the thing, and I always put in too much uh compound there, and so I have to sand it, and there's dust everywhere. I hate it. I hate it. I really do. Putting up ceiling, putting up sealing sheet rock is the worst.
I also hate any renovation of old paint crap where you can't take everything off and you have to paint that that pink stuff on that like that like plaster weld stuff. Oh my god. Anyway, uh enough of this. Uh we'll come back to all of these great things in a minute. Uh we wanted to get a couple of things out of the way.
So Nastasia, like uh often says, she doesn't have any like new uh food news to report. However, I consider what you did a couple of weeks ago food news. You uh you did you were living the you were living the coastal dream there. Yeah, I had Alexa and my friends Alexis and Reed over, and Reed is an avid fisherman, and he um used your poles, Dave, the ones that you have here. It's actually Dax's poles, but yeah, yeah.
Um and he caught a couple um porgies, I guess, and then we were eating those and the and the fishing line was in the water while we were having dinner outside, and then all of a sudden it started really pulling, and so he jumped up and star and reeled it in, and it was a huge it was a 28-inch um bass. What's the key what's the keeper zone right now? Do you even know? I don't really I don't know. 27 and 32, I think.
Because every year it's different, you know what I mean, depending on what the stocks are like, what the keeper length is, yeah. But strong, strong move, right in the sound, big striper. And you you say you just filleted that sucker and ate it, right? Yeah, right off my porch, too, which is like so crazy. It was so crazy.
I've never seen a fish caught or eaten one like that before. My stepfather, the reason that rods at your place is because Dax had expressed some interest in fishing. And my stepfather, the only things he likes, like wine, cigars, fishing, and being alone during the time of COVID. Because he he only ever fishes alone. He gets up at like zero in the morning, and he only he does exclusively surf casting, doesn't like going out on boats.
So you were living kind of like the best life Gerard could my stepfather could hope to live outside of the Cape. So nice. Yeah. Yeah. How'd it taste?
Good, great. Wonderful. Um it's cool to be able to cast from your porch. Were you up high or were you on the ground level? Up high, like not that high, but like three feet above the water, maybe.
But like you weren't on your second level. Oh, because you couldn't know. Because you couldn't get back to cast. You would be hitting the back of your of your like fake light. It's not a fake lighthouse.
That's not right. It's it's not a lighthouse building, but you would imagine it would be like you'd have to like go inside to reel it in. That'd be weird. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It'd be no good.
Yeah, it wouldn't work. Anyway, very cool. Uh, very cool, very cool. All right, now bar thing. You're gonna talk about the bar thing real quick.
Oh my god. Oh my god. So Ed and John feel free to weigh in. And in fact, John knows more about this story than I do because he had the heart to read my email about it, and I didn't. But so Ed, do you have any outdoor seating right now with the milk coat?
No, so we don't do any retail, we do ice cream for a bunch of restaurants here. So a bunch of our restaurants have closed and some have reopened, but there is limited outdoor seating in DC right now. Are you but are you selling like are you in other words? Are you you're not doing any sort of home delivery to make up for the lack of restaurant business or we've done some like like there was a few weeks where we did some we did like a bunch for charity there was this bakers against racism thing they participated in and do delivery but like we've I mean we've tried to shut down as much interaction stuff as possible like we're just it was bad here about a month ago so we've just erred on the side of limiting stuff. Well so where are you now with that?
Oh I mean we're just still like you know most of our restaurant customers are shut down so we're just doing our grocery wholesale business with like a few restaurant customers left and almost no deliveries right now. But has the gr have the groceries made up for the lack of restaurants? Yeah we I mean we had a significant jump this year anyways but like our typical April sales were like three times what they were last year in grocery channels. And so the fact that the restaurants went to almost zero was like it like it didn't affect because the groceries were so far up? Yeah but like we're I mean there's very few other businesses that are like ours in that so it's like I mean it was it happened to be beneficial for us but like we're very we're the one of the very few people who are in that situation.
Right because I know some people who I don't know them personally but like I use them like people who are wholesale only and who like they don't really distribute to in other words they're they're restaurant distributors only and they're hosed. You know what I mean? So they've got there's a couple couple people down here in DC who are that, and they have essentially shut the doors of their business until further notice. Well I know some of them, like I know some of our suppliers up here now do deliver to home. So you like, and what's funny is is that they only chefs know to buy from them.
So because you know, like they're the only so like I know like uh Baldo ships. Yeah, Balador opened up for home delivery down here as well. Um but I mean I don't know, like I don't know how whether that's actually doing anything for them. Um whatever the Japanese supplier, what is it, MTC, whatever that we're I forget the name of it, but like where we get the ishiri, they're doing home stuff. At the very least, they're at least moving product that would have spoiled at the very least.
Yeah. Yeah. So but for someone who has an actual grocery store distribution, you're saying it's it's it's workable. Yeah, because we are we're in like about a hundred Whole Foods between Ohio and Connecticut and DC, and like that's probably the bulk of our single channel sales. What kind of a pain in the butt is that to deal with the Whole Foods?
You don't have to say, I tell you what, I tell you what, because we go through a distributor, I just I almost never talk to them except in unless they ask us for something. And I just take a really, really big hit, but do volume, so I don't ask myself a lot of questions. So presumably though, you have to have like the the hyper clean labels. Like you there's probably stuff you can't use that you would like to use, but you can't because of their dumb label rules. I'm not saying they're dumb, but they're stupid.
It's it they're arbitrary, is what I'll say. Some of them are arbitrary, some of them make a lot of sense, but some of them are very arbitrary, and I've been working within that framework for the past four or five years, anyways. So you know what? Like, I just it's just a cost of doing business. Yeah, yeah.
Nastasi and I haven't dealt with them since they got bought, right? Stas, all the stuff we did was pre-Amazon. Yeah. Can you imagine having to deal with a combination of Whole Foods and Amazon? Oh, yeah.
We would just become, we should just become an Amazon employees at that point, you know. Oh man. Yeah, Nastasi and I almost for a minute, we almost had a soda business and we almost had a snack food business. And then we just I forget we were just like sitting in that in that kind of like Eldritch Street hellhole, and we just kind of looked at each other and we're just like, nah. Right?
Yeah. Yeah. We like like we looked out how many years we would have to like do stuff that we weren't interested in at all. And then be like, at the end of that, we had like a 30% chance of doing well. And we're like, nah, right?
Isn't that how it happened? Yeah. Yeah. It was not gonna make us any money for like yeah, a long time. Yeah, years and years and years.
Like you have to like, because in the snack food business, it's not like one or two widgets you need to sell. It's like a jillion widgets. And like good good luck co-packing on snacks. So for those of you that don't know, you come up with an idea, and unless you're big, you have to then convince somebody else to make it for you because you don't have a million dollars to buy all of the extruders and all of that. You don't have the the trucking, the warehousing, you don't have the uh the um the fill pack, you know, the the weigh and fill packaging with the with the plastic sleeves that can you know purge with getting you don't own any of that stuff, and neither can you.
And so you have to find someone else who's willing to package your stuff to your specifications. Then you have to jump through the hoops of getting your labels right for someone like a Whole Foods if that's the route you're gonna go. And Nastas and I were just like, the hell with this, right? I mean, yeah. Anyway, yeah, I work with a bunch of people who are in that position.
And like my friend Katie, she used to be, she used to work at Roberta's and Blanca, and she's started co-packing in New Jersey, like uh like a plant-based and plant-based food stuff. I'll shout her out here, Keats Co. And um, she just transferred to a cobacker in New Jersey, and like, yeah, she has to do an insane amount of numbers before anything comes around. Yeah, and it's just a it's a daily slog with that stuff, you know what I mean? And then, yeah, it's an insane number of numbers.
I remember once we uh we found a co-packer, I don't know if you remember this, Nastasia. We found a co-packer who would kind of do what we want. And the other thing is that like for us, like we were doing stuff that wasn't exactly like what everyone else was doing, obviously, because that's the kind of idiots that we always are. Uh I'll try to find it before the episode is up, but uh Jack Schram, uh, existing conditions, Jack Shram, said that my memoir should be uh titled, like uh the the best thing no one asked for. Right?
Because like we make these things that are things that no one has asked for, and we try to do as good a job as we can at it, but if you make something that no one's asked for before, it's a pain in the butt. So anyway, we found this person to make the stuff, but then remember this? He's like, I can't even turn the equipment off and on for less than two tractor trailers full of stuff. And again, that would have like like quadrupled the amount of physical space that we had rented in New York. It was a nightmare.
Nightmare. You know what I mean? Where do you guys make your stuff? We manufacture out of uh like a like a shared kitchen space. Like we have our own pod of freezers and equipment, and we use off-site um storage for freezer storage.
So we have like somebody, a contractor come and pick up pallets of our product and take it to a distributor warehouse, which is in like there's one in New Jersey and there's one in Frederick that we use. But we manufacture everything from end-to-end ourselves, which is both really dumb and really awesome. And your but your batch or your continuous? Batch. We don't have the size to we might be at continuous in like two years, but like right now, like we just don't have that volume to justify continuous because it just like mixins and stuff working.
500 gallons at a time. Right. In other words, like how much would you have to change your flavors and your styles if you went to continuous? A lot or not a lot? I don't think so.
I don't think a lot because you know, continuous technology is gotten a lot better, you know. Like continuous technology is probably just about as good as batch freezer technology right now, and you know, it's expensive, but like um even with variegants and everything, like you're pretty much gonna get the same product from continuous and batch freezers at this point, maybe not 20, 25 years ago, but um they're good now, you know. And what's your batch size? Batch size? We so right now, like our wholesale, we me and my business partner, we will produce, pack, and wrap like 2,000 ice cream sandwiches by hand over the course of two days.
Well, that sucks. Yes, it does. Yeah. Yeah, I'm sure I'm sure your your your next nickel is gonna go towards making that thing being wrapped not by hand. Oh, yeah, we've looked at a flow wrapper.
Like like today after this. I'm just gonna we're just gonna go downstairs and package ice cream sandwiches for five hours straight. So are you in a parka inside of like a 20 degree Fahrenheit room? Like what are you what are you in? How are you wrapping these things?
We actually, so we we do we have like a really good system of going in and out of hardening cabinets and blast freezers where we get no product melt, but it took us years to figure that out. So we're going like we basically have like a really good routine where we hold stuff overnight in a hardening cabinet, and then so once it's cut and taken out, it's like at negative 20 degrees, so it can sit out for two minutes while we pack and then throw the finished product package back into a hardening cabinet. So it's been a while since Nastasia and I have had any of your ice cream sandwiches. But what what so refresh me on what kind of technology? Thin thin cook thin cookie, like bendable, like one is uh really basic vanilla ice cream on a chocolate chip cookie, like basically our version of a little bit better chip witch, but like a saltier, saltier square chip witch, but like not too big, but it's like you know, it's reasonably priced, like $3.50.
And then we do an avocado um ice cream base with a chocolate wafer cookie, which is kind of I mean, it's based on an Indonesian um uh apple cut chocolate drink, but I mean it's an ice cream sandwich, and then we're rolling out two new products this year, which are essentially like small, which are essentially our small versions of Klondike bars. What would you do for a Klondike bar? Exactly. Yeah. Avery, back to your story about the bar.
Well, I was like, let's finish this. Do you like Klondike bars, Nastasia? Is that your favorite ice cream? I like ice cream sandwiches. Do you like Klondike's better or ice cream sandwiches better?
Ice cream sandwiches. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, when you make these ice cream sandwiches, are you are you doing Carvel style? Are you softing it onto the thing and then squishing it? Or are you like say cutting blanks and then layering hardened blanks together?
Carvel style. So we go out of a batch freezer into half sheets of cookies and then let them sit overnight and harden in a hardening cabinet and then cut them up. We used to do the other way, and it just um it just it doesn't get the moisture, you know, moisture management right, like essentially because our goal is to have a cookie that breaks with your bite, and you know, if you harden and then pack together, um, then the moisture transfer won't get a nice soft cookie. And I had one more thing, but Nastasi. All right, we'll tell the story and then maybe I'll think of it.
Oh, yeah, what's size? What's the way what size is your batch freezer though? How many how many gallons or what do you what do you measure in? Are you measuring in liters, quartz? What do you measure in?
Uh quartz, we use in Carpajani LB502, and we do like an anywhere from like four to sixteen quart batch. And so for a production running. How long is that in like 60 to 120 quarts over the course of a day? But like a 16-quart batch is a 16-quart batch is how many minutes on the freeze time? Oh, it's pretty short.
I want to say it's like if it I mean, depending on air temperature, it's like anywhere from like eight to fourteen minutes, you know. Dang. That's a lot of power. Yeah. Ours is a water-cooled model, so it uh runs a little bit faster than the air-cooled.
Yeah. They only I owned a water-cooled uh soft serve machine once. I had to hook it up to my bathtub. It was a nightmare. That was a complete nightmare.
Anyway, uh, all right. So here's the story. So, you know, see what you think. And John, fill me in when I'm wrong, okay? All right.
So Nastasi and I occasionally, when we're on the West 4th Street, New York City subway stop, which runs along Sixth Avenue. So for those of you that have never been to New York, you can't picture this, but it's kind of a it's like tourists are there, students are there, it's kind of garbage, right? Sus? Yeah. I mean, it's where my bar is.
I love it. It's great. Like, you know, I've been going there like my whole life, but it's not like, it's not like what people think of when they think of like great New York. Am I right? Yes.
Yeah. It does have a great dollar slice, which I've spoken about at length uh before. So, you know, I won't get into it again. But um, there is like every city, every place, every area within a city has like scammers who have their own like scams, right? So, like, you know, uh when I used to live uptown, there was the I don't have the money for gas for home scam guy, right?
Uh but here there's a scam that Nastasia, you said you had seen before, right? I was with you. No, no, before, like before that. Like you knew. But similar.
So like the first time we saw it, Nastasia saw it happen. It was just like scam. So like we're walking down the street, and it's crazy looking dude and crazy looking woman, right? Which is like like a technical, in other words, like they look like something's up, right? Is that a fair thing to say, Nastasia?
Yeah. They look like kind of like junkies, actually. Yeah. So yes. I don't know anything about their lives other than what we're about to tell you.
So what they do is is I think it's the guy, right? Has with them some sort of terrible, like, like, uh, like, you know that aluminum pan that a that like a Greek salad used to come in, or like when you got like a a takeout lasagna in an aluminum foil like Megillah with the with the plastic thing with the crimp edges. You guys know what I'm talking about? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So walking down the street with one of these, clearly half eaten, clearly like found somewhere, right? And then dude will bump into someone who looks young or student-y or touristy, or otherwise with money, and will very visibly make sure that the that the food falls to the ground. Classic. Yeah, yeah. And then, like, they start yelling at the mark about I paid eight dollars for my lunch and blah.
You know what I mean? And so, like trying to get money out of this person, and Nastasia wanted to like go over there and and give them a piece of her mind. Did you not? I think I told the guy that they were scamming it's a scam as we walked past it. Oh my god, that's right.
I now remember. Nastasi walks by and like, and this is one of the things I love most about you, Nastasia, right? Is like at the box when you were screaming how much you were like hating what they were doing at the box. Nastasia will just she's not, you don't let leave it inside, right? You're just like, it's a scam!
It's a scam! Remember? Yeah, yeah. Don't pay them, it's a scam! Yeah, and I was like, love you, Stas, love you.
You know what I mean? And so then we went went to the bar. But get this, Daz. That dude did it to our bar, to our outdoor seating. He walked up to existing conditions, and by the way, you can go to existing conditions now, and today we're installing a tent, so you're not even gonna get rained on or sun done when you're outside, unless you want to be.
We have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven outdoor tables, all socially distanced. And hey Cuomo, that's our governor here. We actually enforce social distancing even though we're a bar. If you want to regulate social distancing, regulate social distancing, don't regulate what how much food I need to serve you when you're coming to the bar. Anyway, side point.
Sorry. Not a political show, sorry. Love Cuomo. Love the sausage and pep. You might disagree with me on this, but I I respect a good scam.
If I see a good scam going on, I would not interrupt, and I would just tip my hat. And if somebody has a good scam going, I tip my hat to them because they're just, you know, they're out there, you know, people are gonna get taken advantage of, you know, as long as it's not too aggressive. Here's why I'm gonna gut this dude if I ever see him again. He walked. This is egregious.
He walked up to our place, to the place where people are trying to freaking socially distance, trying to have some sense of freaking normalcy during COVID time, right? They don't have their masks on because they're drinking and they're sitting at a table with a cocoon around them. Like we've literally built like a planter around them to shield them from this. Walks in, does the salad trick to someone in our space because we have to have a sidewalk cut through, like you're legally, you have to have an eight-foot sidewalk cut through through it, right? Goes through the whole drop my salad spiel, gets rebuffed by Jack Shram, is like, get out of here, you scam oddist scumbag.
Jack doesn't talk like that. He's been on the show, so you can go to hear what he actually sounds like. The guy then flips out, de social distances everyone by approaching everyone, and then rips all of our plants out of our planters and throws them on the ground. Well, that's a little much. That's egregious.
That definitely falls in the egregious category. Any messing of somebody else's business is egregious. Going to any one of my guests and messing with them at all makes me really, really, really, really want bad things. What were they doing when he was ripping the plants out? What are you gonna do?
Like, first of all, like, you know, my bar is very anti calling the police on people, right? And, you know, we're also you know, what are you gonna do? Like, you also don't want to approach an unmasked, crazy, as you put it, Nastasia, person who looks like they have other issues other than the salad they've just thrown on the ground, right? I mean, like, what's the right answer? Were the plants edible?
He might have just been trying to pick a new salad. Yeah, no. Um, yeah. They were not, I think, like actively poisonous, but they were some sort, some sort of tropical or semi-tropical, monocot, leafy plant, uh inedible variety. And uh, I just want to like, what the hell, man?
Like, like, it's not hard enough already that I gotta deal with your with, you know, do your do your scam like to them after they leave. You know what I mean? On the street. I don't know. I don't even know how that scam plausibly works when your marks are seated.
How do they bump into them when they're seated? I think it was they were getting their drink and coming back to their table because the way it's set up is that we're not doing table service. Like you go up and it's like, or it's like it's like an old bank teller, so we have like the giant Spit guard, and the drink comes underneath the Spit Guard, or like the way that like those weird post offices from the 80s work. You know what I mean? Yeah, it's like one of those things.
And so I think that they were coming back with their drink and it happened. And I'm sure that that person probably, I'm sure that the dude probably spilled the person's drink as well. John, was that listed in there or not? That was not listed in there. I didn't see that.
But am I getting this pretty accurately? Yeah, yeah, so far spot on. Oh my god. I just hate it so much. Although here's a scam, Ed, that you might enjoy.
Uh, in the early 80s, a friend of mine who lived in the uh East Village uh would, whenever he would do outdoor dining, there was a guy on his block, early 80s, who used to uh poop his pants, and he would make sure to poop his pants and like keep them real poopy so that he was a uh a malodorous like miasma of stench at any given time of B-O and poop and general filth. And what he would do is come right up next to people who were trying to sit outdoors and eat and stay there until everyone would go into their pockets and give him the cash to leave. So, what do you think of that scam? I mean, it's effective. Again, I think it's just not it's like what's the difference between doesn't make it okay.
What's the difference between that? I mean, like, I'd almost have more respect if they did it mafia style and they just approached the the owner of the restaurant before service and were like, listen, I am going to make it a living hell for your guests such that they will never come back to your business again, and you're never gonna be able to have any locals, and everyone's gonna say that it's a nightmare going to your place, or you could just give me uh like 25 bucks right now for the day. Protection against my smell, right? At least that would be some sort of like kind of like have some sort of thing. There's negotiation happening.
It's not there's not a hostage taken, it's negotiation. Right. Right. I mean, it's still wrong. I don't like any form of extortion, but it's like, I don't know.
What do you think, Stas? Yeah, I think it's awful. Awful. Yeah, yeah. I have scammed.
I would have a good scam story. All right. I would love to be with Nastasi when that happened, though. A friend of mine used to represent um the subway corporation and all their slip and fall cases, and they had like a nice routine of people who would always come into these subway locations and slip and fall and sue subway because they knew at the very bottom rate they were gonna get 5K for their first slip and fall, and then like $2,000 for every slip and fall after that until they hit like a number because uh the franchisees were all protected by Subway Corporate. They were they would knew that if they went into a subway, a sandwich shop that they slipped and fell.
Doesn't matter how it happened, they knew they were gonna get a certain amount of money. So like what's the number? Do you know what the number was? Oh, I think they were getting 5k on their first slip and fall, and then like two 2500 for the next two after that, and then after I get three, I think you get like three, and then judges after that wouldn't they wouldn't even hear the cases afterwards. So Stas worth it.
No, that is terrible. That's no, no, I'm saying, like, but like in this, would you do a slip and fall for let's say you really needed the money? No. No. How much?
Uh I just I wouldn't do it. It's it's embarrassing. That's embarrassing. Okay. So, like, it's not like the classic Nastasia million dollars on this one.
No, I you know, we like doing like more insane stuff. Yeah. And and as I always said, I'll do it for free. Um I mean, how much will you pay me to fall? Anyway, uh, all right, let's answer some questions.
Actually, Ed, we have a question coming up that uh that you might uh have some uh good good info on, and I will say things and you will tell me I am wrong or not. Uh not this one though. This episode is brought to you by Vertera. Impressively versatile, stylishly sustainable, environmentally disposable dinnerware from Fallen Leaves. Vertera is a mission-driven company focused on making environmentally responsible single-use products, founded in 2006 on the belief that every culinary creation deserves a beautiful, sustainably crafted foundation.
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Trevor, I don't know. I thought we mentioned this last week, but I don't know. Trevor wrote in and said in 2015, uh I said that tilapia is best cooked in a garbage can. Does this method still hold up? If you were going to cook tilapia at all, yes, garbage can is as good a method as any.
And by that by that I mean throw it in the garbage and eat something else. However, I'm sure you could make some sort of like uh Nastasia. Do you remember when uh we did the Anthony Bourdain show and we made a tandoor out of a garbage can and a flower pot? Yeah, yeah. So that would be another good way.
Tilapia is fine if you don't actually want to taste a fish. If like, if you're gonna like, let's say you you were gonna, okay. Do you like uh Nastasia or anyone? Do you like that taco, that pre-made taco seasoning stuff? Yes.
Yeah, I do as well. I like it as well. I'm gonna go ahead and say, I like it as well. We have it in our house because Dax enjoys that flavor. I have compounded my own, and Dax is like, just use the taco seasoning.
Sorry, it's on like fine. You know what I made with taco seasoning the other day? This is off topic. Uh when corona hit, we went out and bought a bunch of frozen veg, and that frozen veg has been sitting on our freezer, like kind of not used. Uh and so I was like, you know what?
What the hell? So, like we had a bunch of cut okra. I think it was the only thing they had left, right? Cut okra, frozen. Toss that sucker, salt, pepper, little bit of taco seasoning, oil, onion, and a couple of tomatoes, and uh throw that in at like 450 for like 35, 40 minutes.
Good. Not so much that it tastes like taco, just a little bit. What do you think of that? Sounds great. No one cares.
No one cares. It's good. Uh and it's not too uh, it's not too uh slimy. Stas, what are your feelings on okra? Uh I don't really like it that much.
Because of the snot or just other reasons? Nah. What about fried okra, like like crispy fried where it's fine? Well that's fine. Yeah.
Anyway, so back to the tilapia. So if you're gonna take and drench something in taco seasoning, which is how we got onto this, and then you're gonna shred it up into tiny pieces, and you're gonna use like you're gonna put it into a taco with like lettuce and all this other stuff. You're gonna make fish tacos. At that point, do you really care what the fish taste like? You're not tasting the fish anyway.
You know what I mean? Then it's fine. In which case you should cook it in your garbage can tandoor. Not that tan I love tandoors. I don't mean that tandoors are garbage cans.
What I'm saying is is that Nastasi and I made one out of a garbage can and some flower pots, and it worked quite well. I'm ashamed to say there was one restaurant I worked at um where I was working the line, and we had uh fish tacos, and on the menu we put them as red snapper tacos, but we really just gave them tilapia. Oh my sleazy. Yeah. That's bad, dude.
Yeah, and charged them red snapper prices, obviously. Oh my god. Terrible! Yeah, it was really messed up. John, that's beyond.
That's that's freaking dishonorable. Yeah. I would, yeah, I'd agree. Like, I will take being a bad person before I'll take being dishonorable. Yeah.
Right? Stas, you know me, I'd rather be bad than dishonorable. No one was like, wow, this is not good. They were just like, yes, chef. I mean, we all, you know, told the chef that we thought it wasn't the right thing, or you know, me and the two other guys working there told him that we thought it was kind of a trash thing to do.
Um, but he didn't really care. He wanted to keep his food cost down. Wow. And this was the kind of chef who, like, the whole time while we're all prepping and like getting ready for service, he was out on his computer, like in the dining room doing who knows what, but definitely not anything helpful to the kitchen. It was a little frustrating.
Listen, I'm gonna go ahead and say people never do that. That is the worst. Even at home, don't do that. Like, that's why, like, I have a couple of lines. Uh, just a couple, right?
One is like I don't tell somebody something's vegetarian when it's not. You know what I mean? I don't I don't lie to people about what they put into their bodies and what you cook. It's crazy. And unless Nastasia's playing a practical joke on a close friend, I don't think you do either, right?
No, yeah, I mean that then they're not paying for it. They're paying for it in farts and funny, but they're not paying money. This guy, the same chef had also told me at one of the whole other places he worked. He did like a lobster ravioli, but he really just put shrimp in there. Oh, sorry.
Wow, uh, Matt. I mean, while you are correct. Wow. And that is as I have said, as I have said, one of the great words in the English language, and I hope I never have to stop using it because of the two Ks, right, Stas? Doesn't it sound great?
Yes. Remember when I called a cop that? Oh, yeah, I do. I do. Yeah, yeah.
Well, no, you called him the real one, and then you switched it to COP, right? Like on the fly. You came up with it on the fly. Yeah. You're a sucker, cop, cop.
That's what you say. Like, you you literally, didn't he literally say what did you say? And you pulled that out. And I said, cop sucker. Yeah.
That's Stas for you. Uh, anyways, that is incredible. I'm still, I am still taken aback. Yeah. Anyway, but just goes to show.
Snapper, red snapper, delicious fish, uh, tilapia, not, and when you taco fy them, who can tell? Right? Yep. I mean, you're dumping enough acid and whatnot on that you're not gonna get if there is any um, you know, kind of dirty flavor on the tilapi, it's gonna get covered up and like you know, chemically leveled out by the lime juice, anyways. So, yeah, yeah, terrible, terrible people.
You know what you should do. tilapia and something else that tastes like dirt, like beets. Like, what if we did a tilapia beat thing, stuff? Bad, really bad. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
All right. Uh all right, we we did Devin Patel's uh thing last week at the end of it, right? Didn't we? Yeah, we did. Yes, we did.
Yeah, okay. Uh all right. So, Timothy Helmuth wrote in via email, and Ed, uh, I would like you to weigh in on this because I don't think we discussed this. I have some very uh you know clear thoughts on it. Let's see if you think.
Hey, cooking issues crew. Do you have any suggestions for improving the texture of popsicles made in a home freezer? Now, Ed, home, home freezer. I've been mostly uh been blending various fruits with a bit of dextrose and sucrose syrup. Um flavors are by the way, when you say dextrose syrup, what do you really mean?
No one actually has dextrose syrup. They have this stuff that is like has a dextrose equivalent, but it's uh we uh we'll get into it later. Uh flavors are why doesn't people who sell that stuff, why don't they just write the DE equivalent on it? You know what I mean? Like it, don't you find this frustrating when you're buying this kind of stuff?
Like, like like these syrups that are all different, they perform differently. So, unless you know the brand, the DE equivalent, everything about it. Like I stopped, I stopped. I we make our own syrups, so like I stopped buying, besides buying straight powders, like I just stopped buying everybody else's syrups because they won't like they like they're they won't show you how to use it. Like they just don't label it properly.
Yeah. Irritant, irritant, uh, and sucrose syrup. The flip back to popsicles. The flavors are great, but everything turns pretty turns out pretty crunchy with big ice crystals. If I bump the sweetness way up, they freeze smoother but not solid enough.
Uh, I know a better freezer would help, but that's not an option for me. Unfortunately, uh, not an option for me, unfortunately. I've considered uh ordering some isomalt, which I think would help the texture while keeping the sweetness down. Yeah, but it's not gonna help you because it's still still not gonna get solid. If you isomalt the hell out of it, it won't be sweet, but it also, if you should whatever.
Your thoughts uh on that idea and any other suggestions would be much appreciated. Thanks for continuing making the show. Uh Timothy, so do you wanna hit at this? You want me to hit at this new comment? What do you want?
I mean, the easiest thing to do is to just pack your freezer beforehand with as much product of as possible the night before, so that your freezer's carrying capacity is like super super high. And then just do a salt. If you can put your pops, if they're in a metal container, that's best, but put them in a salt ice bath in the freezer, so the melting, the melting ice will just super rapidly freeze the pops. That's the cheapest and easiest way to do it. That's correct.
And because think about, I want you to think about it this way, Timothy. As you freeze slowly, right? Let's say, let's say you started slowly, you get one ice crystal grows, and then it starts to grow. That thing's gonna grow as pure ice. And what's gonna happen is that imagine like freezing orange juice the way that you did when you were a kid, is you have one section that's almost all ice with very little flavor inclusions, and then it's more and more concentrated as you go in towards the center of the of the ice cube.
And that's exactly what's gonna happen. If you don't freeze rapidly, you're gonna get large water crystals, and they're going to segregate a relatively syrupy section, and that syrupy section won't even be homogenous throughout the whole thing. So it's gonna be bad. Would you agree with this, Ed? Yeah.
Yeah. So rapid freezing is going to be one of your first answers. Now, you can also uh so sugar, right, is uh actually no, sugar will lower the one other thing you can do is you can do the jello brand pudding pop technique of pre uh light gelling your stuff. It won't melt down. If if melting down is important to you, it won't melt down as much.
But um, if you physically segregate the flavors and liquids into a light gel, then as it freezes, it will tend to stay relatively homogenous and freeze in place, and the crystals will tend to be smaller as well. Um, what do you think? What do you think about that suggestion? Hate it, like it. I like it.
They could also add more dissolved solids to their recipe. I mean, if they want to incorporate, like if they're vegan, if they want to incorporate pea protein or something like I know that a lot of popsicle makers right now are using pea protein, and it's you know, it's fairly neutral and like not gonna bug a lot of people. Um or if they want to just stabilize it in the blender, I mean, there's plenty of things that they can, you know, whatever stabilizer they prefer, whether I don't really like Xanthan, but like I don't know, Gore will work pretty well for what they're doing, and it's pretty neutral. Um, or just or just more dissolved solids. Well, and also they're not doing it commercially, they're doing it at home.
Yeah, so like the cost doesn't matter, right? I mean, like they could make a light fluid gel if they wanted. They could do it like a light agar fluid gel or better yet, a light uh what's it called? Uh Gelan fluid gel, right? And then, you know, and if you're only doing it like once in a while and you're doing it at home, you know, it seems like it's not that wouldn't be that difficult to do it or that expensive to, you know, to do as one-offs, uh one-offs at home.
Um so anyway, that's what I mean. The problem with adding so many solids is is it's never gonna get as hard as he as he wants it. You know what I mean? If you increase the sugar level or the dissolved solids, like he wanted to with isomalt or one of these other things, you you know, it's it's if you actually depreze decrease the uh the freezing point of it enough, then you're gonna get it's not gonna freeze as hard, wouldn't you think? Yeah, but I don't I don't think it's gonna be a that extreme of a um they're adding they're gonna be adding that much though.
I mean, just like start off with a little bit and see if it helps. Kind of that situation. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Um all right. Tom Coate wrote in uh has been listening to our milling and stuff. By the way, we're gonna do another milling show soon. But Tom wanted to do a shout out to uh New American Stone Mills and uh Elmore Mountain uh bread because they make their own. I'm not gonna be here for that show.
On purpose, really? You can't tolerate it? Can't tolerate it. I won't can't tolerate bread? You actually like bread.
I do like bread. You still you mean like, all right, whatever. Uh we're gonna have like the the world's faux foremost scientific authority on uh whole wheat uh bread and milling, but Nastasi does not want to participate. All right, her choice. Um anyway.
Uh Ronaldo wrote in, Ronaldo Fori wrote in. Uh hello, I'm a stiller at a small distillery in South Africa, and I came across your oh wait, am I even supposed to talk about this? Alright, we'll talk about it. Um and I came across your projects while uh looking at the Harvard Food Science course. Uh I have a vacuum distillation setup at home, a roadov app that I built from scratch.
Uh well, kudos to you. It works quite well, but is wondering if you can provide more info about the peristaltic pump you use on the distillant side. Any guidance or information would be a great help. Thanks in advance. Ronaldo.
So, Nastasia, how should I deal with this? Since you know that everybody hates it when I go down a rabbit hole on peristaltic pumps. How should we handle this in general? Should we eventually do something like we did uh for uh the carbonation thing? Yes.
Yo, John, are people liking that carbonation video or what? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the people who want it are liking it. Yes.
And then the people who don't want to hear 45 minutes about the intricacies of carbonation rigs don't have to hear it. They're lost. So it's a I mean, I don't know. You should watch the video, Matt and then say that again. Oh, then come back.
I just no, no, no, I loop it during the day. It's like my wife's. Oh my god. Okay, just the the rant on tubes. I think if you if you could just condense that video to the the 15-second rant on tubes where I I lose my mind about PVC tubing with uh seltzer water, like that's pretty much the the whole thing, or the actual legitimate, no acting pure joy of that first glass of seltzer at the end.
You could edit that thing down to like five seconds. Dax. So if you say anything bad about it, you're saying something bad about my son, and we'll fight. I just wanted to know who had a sit through it. No, not sitting, standing.
Oh my god, it was also Stas, it was such a nightmare. Uh the two videos he shot, we hadn't set anything up, but like I just needed to get it done in his COVID time. So, like the poor kid, like whenever he had to shoot down, I was making him stand on a chair and hold the camera over things, and he's like, Dad, my arm, and I'm like, shut up! Hold it up there! You know what I mean?
Like, stop shaking, and like poor guy. But he did it with uh, you know, uh what would amount to a 15-year-old for zero complaints. I mean, for you and I, it would be complaining, but for a 15-year-old, pretty much zero complaints. You know what I mean? Yeah.
And now he's ready to do the pump video. So this is great. Yeah, yeah. Um uh Brooke Hobtu wrote in and said, Hey, I found a suspiciously cheap vacuum chamber sealer and wondering if you've ever heard of the unit before. And the uh gives a website to it, it's less than half of what I've seen other units for, so it feels like it's too good to be true.
And I looked at it and it looks too good to be true. Um let me tell you, when you're looking at something, when you're looking at equipment, you never win. There's no winning in life. There is like various degrees of breaking even or losing. So if a piece of equipment costs $2,000, let's say, and you find one that is $200, that doesn't jibe.
So you can't, it's not gonna be the same. They have done something somewhere that it's not gonna be the same. So on this one, most likely it's the pump that's garbage. Uh I have to go take a look at it because I looked at it a couple weeks ago or when it when it first came in. But like there's you can go online now.
Are you are you guys familiar with the site? Bang Good? No. Yes. Yeah.
Yeah. So you go on Banggood and you can buy re on Banggood, you can buy retail for from like Alibaba style stuff. But keep in mind what you're buying is non-guaranteed stuff direct from the factory that is ripping off somebody else. So like, you know, Nastasia and John and I work on a product for a bunch of years, like we get it manufactured, we try to do RQC on it, we bring it in, and then someone on Banggood will then knock it off without the QC, right? But also without the markup of having to pay for the years that we you know spent trying to bring it to market, and they'll sell things considerably cheaper from Banggood.
Now you're I have ordered some stuff there that you know where I don't know the you know the origin you know originators of it or who I'm ripping off. Like I've I've gotten some RGB very high powered uh RGB diode lasers off of them and other things, and you know, sometimes they work, eh? Sometimes they don't. Uh so like you can go on Banggood and you can buy a piece of equipment there, and it is like half the price that you would expect to pay for uh the equivalent uh thing, and yeah, it's not gonna work as well, it won't have instructions, and there will be QC issues, but you can get something that will work. Uh and this is the classic way now that people are buying things like uh sugarcane juicers, where there's no good supplier of sugarcane juicers in the US, right?
All right. Uh, but you can't do a tenth of the price because what that means is they're just not using anything even close to the correct components. Now, will it work for you? Maybe. You know what I mean?
Like, maybe you don't need a good enough vacuum, maybe you don't need the cycle time. Um, maybe it'll work, maybe it won't catch on fire. I know that uh Philip Preston bought an extremely cheap vacuum sealer once on um online as a distributor because he was thinking of distributing them, and then uh he put uh a bunch of liquid into the thing as a test, and it started smoking and caught fire. So it's like, you know, there's that. So again, it all it all depends.
Uh was that a good answer? Did I answer enough? No, yeah. Yeah, that seems pretty thorough. You have five minutes.
Yes. I I answered Matt Hall's questions about non-venting pressure cookers, right? Last week? Yes. All right.
Uh I will say though, Dave, why would you advocate for people to buy things off that Banggood website if they're crap, like if it's I don't know, like think about everything that we went through with a knockoff Searzals, you know, and you're just doing that to other companies. I'm not. I don't advocate ripping, I don't advocate ripping off people's intellectual property. There's a lot of stuff on Banggood where, where like I say, like it's not that there's intellectual property, they're doing like components like diode lasers, right? And so like you're like, I'm I've I I've only bought things like that off of them.
There is no real US source. You know what I mean? And it's not US, by the way. There's no there's no sort of like QC company backed source for it. So I'm not like I'm not taking away like one of the things that you'll notice on Banggood, and I don't buy those things, is anytime there's a successful Kickstarter, the people who do the Kickstarter, you know, um has to find a factory, and then that factory will often sell the stuff on Banggood before the Kickstarter stuff is even fulfilled.
What? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Seen it happen all the time. And no, I won't support that stuff. That is that's not a it's not cool, right?
Um because in the at the end of the day, that also um destroys innovation, right? You're destroying innovation by doing that. There, you know, um, and if any of you are going to manufacture stuff, you have to be real hardcore about your factories, making sure that they you have um documents in place to make sure that they don't steal your stuff, and that's kind of like a lot of what we do, right? Yes, is like making sure that they can't do that. Um that's why when we get knockoffs, like either someone's broken an agreement, which has happened to us, or they're just making it wrong.
You know what I mean? Like, well, the thing we're talking about specifically is I think, and Nastasia, you also believe that we know who did one of the knockoff that did an actual knockoff with our name on it. And it throws off this black dandruff because they don't know how to make it right. And yeah, no, well, I don't support that at all. But um, and in general, I think, you know, you should buy good quality stuff and um, you know, and use it for a long time.
But there's also, you know, the I need it once, I'm never gonna need it again, uh, diode laser problems. So I mean there's there's a place for both. Does that answer your question, John? Yes, that's fair. Thank you.
Yeah. Um this is from Seth in Fairfax, Fairfax, Virginia. Hmm. I don't know. Uh I have begun to take my backpacking meals more seriously and have begun to develop my own uh dehydrated recipes, which are far more economical, customizable, and delicious.
I generally do vegetable-based meals on the trail, but work in meat every few meals. My question is it universally recommended uh to first pressure cook chicken or buy canned chicken before dehydrating? Otherwise, it is notoriously hard to rehydrate. Since uh you were working on your miracle of moisture management book, I was wondering if you could share any insights into the safety or quality reasons this might be important. To achieve the highest quality dried chicken, I would have cooked sous vide.
Can you recommend preparation of other proteins for the dehydrator that are either bland to add into anything or a great flavorful addition? I'm thinking of tofu shrimp. Oh, dried shrimp is delicious because it's already been uh lean sausage, that would be awesome. Uh thanks, Seth. Uh I mean, uh any of you guys have any experience with this with the trail stuff?
What about you? Add anything? Uh no, mostly just mean dehydrating fruits, but like I don't know. I'm wearing to give people dehydrating proteins advice because you know, just I wouldn't know how to not make someone sick with that. Yeah, well, but think about it.
If you're dehydrating, you salt it, right? This is a time, time honored, a time-honored way to do things. The pressure cooking. Yeah. I yeah.
Well, the pressure cooking, though, on something like chicken, I think is going to accomplish two things. One, it's gonna kill everything, right? It's gonna kill everything. Um, and secondly, um, because it is going to break apart the fibers and it's going to uh let the um water get out better, I think you ha stand a better shot of it dehydrating relatively quickly and perhaps making it easier to rehydrate because of the damage that you've done to the tissue in the in the process of pressure cooking it. So a lot's gonna depend on how you want to dehydrate something.
So, like if you just kind of stir some protein in, you could like even get floss. That'll rehydrate relatively quickly as opposed to something like jerky. But the ultimate that you should do, and if you but if you have the money, I don't know what what you know, I don't know your life, right? But if you have the money, investing in and they have them now for a lot cheaper than they used to be and a lot easier to use. I forget the name of it, but freeze drying is amazing because when you freeze dry, you can cook however you want, right?
And then you freeze it, and then as it dehydrates, it maintains its um it's its physical shape. And because it maintains its physical shape, it has all that porosity, it's going to rehydrate that much better, right? Uh and so having done rehydrated uh meats and sausages and whatnot out of a freeze dryer, I can say it works really, really well. And most of the people who are doing high quality proteins um are using uh freeze drying. And so it's relatively uh labor-intensive, but I mean, I think if you are gonna do this, like as you say, seriously, and you have the money, it might be a worthwhile investment.
What do you guys think about that? No, no, freeze dried. I like freeze dried. You ever put freeze-dried stuff into uh into ice cream? No.
Have you ever have you ever done the Sam Mason trick of liquid nitrogen freezing things and stirring them in after the batch comes out? Yeah, like I have I have tried that. I don't know if it's worth the depending on what it is, I don't know if it's worth the effort to go and have just keeping liquid nitrogen on hand to do it. Can like just it's it's cool. It's certainly cool.
I don't know how much better something's gonna be. Well, I just like the chunks of of uh jelly, like those weird chunks of jelly he can get that way. You know what I mean? As opposed to a swirl, you know. Yeah, I mean, if you can get the same effect by like just like stabilizing something really heavily and then freezing it, I feel like, but uh maybe not.
I don't know. All right, so wait. So uh Jake Odlam wrote in and wants to know uh if I'm adding lime juice after carbonating a drink, why clarify the juice? Because otherwise you're gonna lose bubbles faster. Uh do a side-by-side test, and you will see that.
Now now for the rest of the time until they rip us off, we're not gonna do a classics in the air. What do you give us some ice cream stuff? You uh because before we went on the show, I said, I said, give us the pitch on milk cut cult and what you're working on. He's like, do you want the 30-second pitch or the 20-minute pitch? Well, now we're we're in between.
Do you have any other projects or anything you're working on? Anything you want to say about ice cream while we're while we're on the back end of our show? Oh, yeah, two things. So we're launching two new mini Klondike bar products in the mid-Atlantic and Northeast region. And they're called Dippy Boys.
They're like little snack-sized Klondike bars. And yeah, they've been working on them for like a year. Finally got all of our packaging and everything in. They'll roll out like end of August, beginning of fall. And that's our, you know, that's my dumb product placement.
Um, and the other thing for you go on. We pour we pour ice cream base the same way we would with our ice cream sandwiches, but we don't, we just pour it into regular molds and then cut it up on an air-powered cutting machine and then enrobe them in. One is enrobed in like a hibiscus, like it's a Macrut Lime ice cream enrobed in hibiscus with a hibiscus shell and uh an orange blossom candied rice bottom, and the other one is vanilla ice cream with a candied potato chip and chocolate shell. Now let me ask you this are you using like uh a chocolate and robing like a modified chocolate and robing machine? So we are just enrobing them like in a big batch right now, and we're probably gonna have to purchase an enrober sometime this fall because we're the volume we're gonna do is we'll just kill ourselves if we don't get an inrover like an like an in rover with a um with a moving uh trimor enrobing conveyor belt, yeah.
Those you ever used one? They're amazing. Yeah, they're awesome. They're really cool. They are amazing, but they're like 10 grand.
Watch that. They're like 10 grand. You never need to watch the intro to Willy Wonka again because you just watch it, you just watch the stuff flowing over the product. It's amazing. I love them.
So that. And the only other thing I want to plug is I found out this past year, somebody I was doing work for somebody else, and uh Cuisine Tech sells a sorbet stabilizer. Um, but they don't print that it's not vegan. I think it's creamidan, it's like 32 or 64, and I they've been selling it to a lot of restaurants, and they don't always print that it contains gelatin and some other animal-based stabilizers. And so for I guess that's for general people's knowledge, is there's nothing wrong with it, but they sell it as a sorbet stabilizer.
We've I've never used it, but I was helping somebody else who used it, and I was like, hey, you know, this has gelatin in it, animal gelatin, and they're kind of like, oh, and they just kind of so that's just for public information for people. A lot of people use creamadin. This the uh FCI used to use creamadan. Yeah, but it's not I mean it's great. I mean it works, but you know, like there's nothing wrong with it, but it does contain animal gelatin.
So for just for people to know. And they don't print it. Before we're done, so you're dipping with dipping forks, like with those little like like swirly looking things, or with the tines, like you're actually like old school doing it. Yeah, we're old school. It's there's so many things about our business that's horrible.
I mean, in terms of, but like, you know, when we have the money, we upgrade. So, like probably next two months we'll be getting a full and robing machine. I would not wish hand dipping on my worst enemy. Oh, yeah, it's bad. Do you do you do you have to put a wafer underneath it, or are you counting on the on the drip and then you get just you get a certain level of float when you put it down on whatever you're drying it on that size?
We have a we have a we have an okay enough, we have an okay enough way of doing it right now that like it just kind of works until we get a full enrober. Oh my god hand dipping oh Jesus now are are you using some sort of like homemade magic shell variant or is it actually like a straighter coating or like can you talk about the technology of the coating? It's pretty basic. We do a one-to-one we use Tho chocolate which I really love um and uh cocoa butter solids uh for the chocolate dip and then for the hibiscus um my partner worked on that recipe so it I think it's um I can't remember what we're doing for that but it's um it's a cocoa butter solids and um I can't it's vegan but I can't remember what we're doing for that because he's been working on that recipe but for a regular chocolate shell it's really simple it's just one to one um high quality dark chocolate and cocoa butter solids now whenever you're dipping something I mean like it seems like a lot could go wrong right because if your centers are too cold it will you'll have an issue with dipping but if you melt into your chocolate at all that'll cause lots of other problems. So is that a hard line to get right?
It's just like a workflow it's just like getting a good workflow going like having a large water bath large warm water bath going and and as long as we're working at a good pace it just continues to go okay um but like it took a lot of uh just like really really super frustrating sessions to you know, get things going well. So you messed up a lot of centers and messed up a lot of uh shell? Yes. Gigantic mess losing product. It's just nightmare.
Yeah, this is a a lot of things are actually like that. Like uh, do any of you guys remember Wiley uh Wiley Dufreyn's old uh like um fake egg? It was like a carrot something uh yolk and then like a coconut milk like white, and it was all it looked exactly like an egg. And he used to publish the recipe, people were like, it doesn't work, but it's like nah, really like the first hundred you make suck, and then the next like fifteen thousand you make are fine. You know what I mean?
Because you got to get into the zone of the production. There's like some there's some physical getting your hands used to it. So you're saying dipping the ice cream is not only is it not only a technical issue getting all the variables right and doing it continuously, but also just getting your hands used to the process so you know what you're doing? Yeah, I think it's actually more of a workflow because like the recipe doesn't change too much. It's just it's just movement and temperature control with your product, and then it's it's like what you said, it becomes easier when you're doing a thousand of them than when you're trying to figure everything out and just do um, you know, fifty.
Yeah, yeah. We gotta bounce. All right, so on the way out, I will say this. Uh shout out to the French Culinary International Culinary Center. Uh any anyone who is uh an alum or a former teacher, um, we said on air uh a couple of weeks ago that unfortunately they're uh you know, closing the you know, the curriculum and whatnot got bought by uh the Institute for Culinary Education, ICE.
Um, but they very graciously uh donated uh Eric Murning and they're very graciously donated uh their library to the Museum of Food and Drink. So what John and I will be doing tomorrow is driving a big old uh C and CNC. Uh for those of you that don't know, anyone who needs to kind of rent cheaply and brutally here in New York a truck. We where do we go, Stas? C and C.
Wait, you guys should stop by my place. We should talk to John about it. John, do it. No? Yeah, yeah.
And they can we turn it. No, I gotta talk to my fan. No, no, no, I'm not coming. We're packing up. Yeah, that's fine.
Yeah. Oh, that'd be the best. Stas can go look at the anyway. So we were we're taking the library up, and we just saw it was very it was it was sad seeing seeing like all that stuff getting broken down. Uh you know, Stas, you would have it would have been good for you to see it too.
Like it's a I mean it's still there. It's there on the it used to be like four or five floors, and they're keeping the the upper floor, but like where the library was and stuff is closed down, the amphitheater. Remember that bar, Stas that was from Lutes, that zinc bar that we used to serve all those drinks behind at events. So that's being donated to the museum. We're taking that.
Um so anyway, so it's good that we can preserve some of this stuff uh for the museum. But anyway, that's what John and I will be doing tomorrow, and may or may not be stopping by Stanford. Maybe we'll throw the rod in the water, see if we can catch some stripers. I'll tell you when high tide is, yeah. All right.
And uh Ed, thanks so much. Please check out where where can you buy these uh what are they called? Uh dipping boys. What are they called? Boy dipping books.
Tiffy Boys. Uh they'll uh they'll probably be at the um parks in New York. They'll be at the Parks Love Food Co-op, I'm guessing. They're a pretty good customer of ours. But you know, it's like um independent grocers between DC and Connecticut.
All right, so look out for Dippy Boys starting when? Uh September. They'll roll out. And and and you have it for the you have the vegan ones and then you have the milky-based ones, right? That is correct.
Thanks, man. So even though it's called Milk Cult, he's got all your vegan needs covered as well. Hey, you know, get to look after people, you know. Yeah, so milk milk written large. Milk in the sense of good mouthfeel, not necessarily comes out of cow.
Yes, correct. All right. Well, thanks for coming on. We'll see you soon. Cooking issues.
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