Today's program was brought to you by Eating Tools, unique handmade eating and cooking tools. For more information, visit eatingtools.com. This week's Meet and Three is all about food branding and identity in 2020. The good, the bad, and the ugly. Everybody has some Boya product in their pantry.
So obviously the biggest kind of laws from all of this is the students really working with a brand that they're very comfortable with, that they're very familiar with. I'll be honest, I was completely floored. I was very surprised that a company, especially in the current climate, would backtrack out of a commitment to address issues of racism. Tune in to Meet and 3, HRN's weekly food news roundup wherever you listen to podcasts. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live from the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
We got uh John in uh Alpine, New Jersey. How you doing there in Alpine? I'm doing great, thank you. Good memory, by the way. Yeah, yeah.
We have uh we have Matt, of course, is uh back in Rhode Island now. Rhode Island Booth. Permanently in Rhode Island? You know. Are you co- I I forget?
Are you coastal Rhode Island or interior Rhode Island? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, 15 minutes from the beach walking. Ah, nice. And uh my son Booker has been waiting here because every week he waits in horror.
Part of the problem of of uh doing this from home is that my son has to tolerate the intro, and while some of our listeners enjoy the intro, my son does not. Anyways, about Matt, you mean the one who was who took help helped take care of me during my seizure control? Uh no, Matt, you never took care of it. No, I mean like who took me home from school. No, no, no.
Matt, yeah, I don't think you've met Matt in person. Oh. Oh, you're thinking of Matt Ekey, the former uh director of uh of customer service for Booker and Dax. Oh. Yes, yes.
No. I'm thinking. Yes, no, different Matt. Common name. Uh and we uh have Nastasia the Hammer Lopez calling in from a moving vehicle.
Now, correct me if I'm wrong. I have done this show from hotel rooms. I have done this show. Yeah, street literal street corner. I was sitting on like a street corner in uh former East Berlin in Germany.
Never before have we had a song of that. Yeah. It was the late 80s, yeah. Yeah, late 80s, early, early, mid mid cooking issues, early 80s. And it was uh it sucked.
First of all, what I found out is that I hate doing it from hotel rooms. Although I'd probably be enjoy it more now that I'm used to being alone and talking to you guys over things anyway. Oh, it's the difference anyway. Hotel room. Well, because you feel uh what's the word?
You feel uh, it's like you know how when you go into a uh okay, I I don't know whether you guys feel this or not, but it's like let's say there's pe let's say it's a normal time and you go over to your parents' house or whatever, and they have two bathrooms, right? And so the one bathroom is right where everyone is, and they have that one bathroom that's like way downstairs and like behind two shut doors, and you're like, I'm gonna go use that bathroom so that no one can hear me do my bathroom business, right? And then someone else invariably, when you're in there trying to get your only 30 seconds of private time when you're with the whole family, rattled at the doors. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you all know what I'm talking about, right?
Yes. Yeah, yeah. So somehow doing this, doing the scream talk in a hotel room is like, and like having this conversation in a hotel room by yourself. Somehow you feel a little bit like, you know, if you feel a little, I don't know, constrained. You know what I mean?
I mean, doing the intro alone makes it like a 50% chance that the people are gonna come talk to you in about five minutes into the show. Well, the hammer once forced me to do it on a street corner on someone else's request uh in the United States, which was kind of a nightmare. Remember that, Nastasia. She must have cut out. She's gonna cut in and out because she's going from cell tower to cell tower.
She can't help it. She's like, you know, she's a moving target. I think she actually pulled over for that. Oh, there we are. Yeah, I did.
Yeah, I'm here. So uh Nastasia. Where did I force you to do it? We were somewhere near uh we were somewhere near the uh what's the name of that uh that place that uh Ricker used to run, the wine place. Well, we did it at Bass Pro, which was like a weird, it's a I'll tell you something.
A mixture of the standard Bass Pro clientele and like plus your like standard like East Coast Connecticut, like, plus your like plus your like the the crew from Bridgeport was like an interesting mix of people at that rate at that uh radio program. Remember that, Nastasia? I love you. Bye. Oh, yes, yes, I love you too, Booker.
Bye. He doesn't, I don't think he like he can't hear that you guys are talking, so he doesn't know anyone else is here. But anyway, so uh so Nastasia, you weren't privy to this, so like you know, you you don't know anything about it. I don't know anything about it. When I I have a morning call with John to talk about the state of Booker and Dax's customer service every morning, we can talk about that later.
And uh he mentioned to me, I have to go. I need to make my energy balls. Yeah. True. Yep.
So uh please explain to us what an energy ball is. So we lovingly refer to them as jokoballs. Um the better. But it's uh cashew nuts that have been boiled and dehydrated. And so I told you and Nastasia Dave, um, you know why that is, but Matt and the rest of the radio world I have.
And so he also likes all the food to be served at room temperature, and the reason for that and the boiling and dehydrating of the nuts is to make everything as easy on the digestive system as possible. Um sorry, like same kind of principle where if you're really dehydrated, you don't want to be drinking straight cold water because all the blood rushes to your stomach, and it takes a while for the water to like acclimate to body temperature, I guess, and then like be better processed. So that's the idea behind this is so that his blood doesn't like rush to his stomach to deal with all the digestive stuff that his blood can then instead be used to like go repair the muscles or you know, whatever other kind of stuff. So that's that reasoning. Um but the Jokoballs are the cashews, uh some dried figs, persimmons, uh keto, cacao powder, uh coconut oil.
What makes one cacao powder keto and another one not keto? I have no idea. I think the fat content maybe. Um I don't know. I I should pay a little more attention to that, I guess.
I don't know. I need to not that I'm not taking this seriously, but I don't know, like similar to you, Dave, in a sense, if it gets to be like super healthy and focused like that, I get to be a little dubious about things. Um I guess that's what I've been thinking about the cacao powder. But uh yeah, it's basically that, and then roll them up into little like bite-sized balls and roll them in shredded coconut. They're actually pretty good, and I don't know, it's like his energy bars that he eats throughout the day, essentially.
Yeah, all right. And but you so you had one and you in fact enjoyed it. Yeah, I would actually make this again for myself in the future. It's tasty. Now, did you do you are you allowed to have any sort of the personal feel or flair, or do you have to rigidly kind of like adhere to the energy ball spec?
Um we can we can free flow a little bit. Last week when I was here, I did some savory ones. So I uh put some mushrooms in the food processor, chopped them down, cooked them down real hard, uh roasted some carrots, put in some brown rice and a couple other things that I can't remember right now, and then just made those into little balls and rolled them in sesame seeds. They're pretty tasty. Yeah.
Hey, did I did I tell you guys last week about uh uh Dax's dirtbag buddy, Nico and his parents, like they created this uh like amazing shiitake farm on their uh in their upstate area. Did I tell you guys about this? No. You told me about that, but not on the radio, yeah. Oh my god.
So here's like uh I have pictures, it's pretty cool. So like they I guess they had a tree that fell over, and I'm not sure what they used as the nurse log for it, but they cut all of these pieces of tree into uh I don't know, they're maybe like six inches across pieces, and like maybe like two and a half feet long, and then they or three feet long, and then they drilled a bunch of holes in them, and then they tapped in like the plugs with the with the shiitake, you know, stuff, you know, and then they just lay them up against uh they just lay them up against these other trees and this board, and man, I've never seen they sprout like mud, but they're so huge compared to what you like I mean like like coffee saucers, like big, you know what I mean? Uh but what's weird about them is they have the same kind of thin stems that the commercial shiitakis do. The stem was a lot tougher than I'm used to, so I took the stems off of it, but like shiitake's thinner, right? But like the size almost of those like crazy oversized portobellos, right?
So I'm like, I don't know how these are gonna taste. But they were fantastic. I mean the stems, yeah, chewy, but the portobellos great. And she also, this lucky uh, so it's basically it's uh, you know, although Nico and Dax did like some of the drilling and helped her out, this is the mom's project. And she also all over her property has wild chanterelles.
How crazy is that? Delicious. So good. You guys like chanterelles? Yeah, I love them.
Now listen, I'm gonna tell you guys something. Uh chanterelles are sometimes uh like eaten by by bugs, right? So if you look at the chanterelle, sometimes when you look at the chanterelle, so I don't know if you guys can all picture a chanterelle, it looks kind of like a like a like a drop of water splash, like a splash that's like frozen and in orange. So you know what I'm saying? Kind of like a cross between like a trumpet and a and a water splash.
Is my making sense here? Yes, yeah. So a lot of times when you see them, uh you know, not the ones you buy, but like when you see them, like the center, they'll be like a little hole. You're like, what is that? And bugs have eaten all throughout that thing, right?
And so well, but I was like, I'm gonna look at these things anyway. So I took them anyway, even though they had been eaten a little bit, the shiitakis had no eating in it. And then um, you know, so like the what I was doing was I was shredding them almost like I was pulling them almost like string cheese. I wasn't cutting them, right? So I was pulling them almost like string cheese and then rinsing them, and I looked under I you have a dissecting microscope, and I looked under them, literally, no hint of what had eaten them.
Like nothing was there. They were 100% clean once I got the dirt off of them. So whatever it was, or whatever you see, odds are, even if you see a little bit of damage in your chanterelle, might not want to give up on it because they were delicious, and I examined them thoroughly under, you know, a fairly high power dissecting microscope and was not able to find any living critters anywhere in it. So weird. So there you have it.
Um did John already talk about the the nuts. But well, he said he ground up his nuts into his energy balls. He said he was he said his nuts he his energy balls are filled with nuts. But he claimed to have a reason. I did, yes, that's not so to make it easier on digestion, yeah.
Yeah. I I definitely want We're not gonna get into this. I definitely want the nuts in my energy balls easily digested. You know? Yeah.
Uh well, it's not called a taste ball, it's called an energy ball. But yeah, I don't know if you could hear us, Doz, but John said that if someone handed them this and ate it, and then said, Would you like another one again at some point in your life? He would say yes. Okay. Yeah.
I mean, it's cashews and like dried fruit and cacao powder and coconut fat. Yeah. Speaking of, I know some of you out there have this problem, and I'm just here to talk to you about it beforehand. You buy some nuts, and they you said cashews just came to my mind. What?
Somebody on Instagram sent you a picture of a shop called D's nuts. Oh, yeah. Yeah, no, D's nuts. Yeah. Well, I wanted my uh my old manager from Booker and Dax, D.
Canonis. I wanted her to open a D's nuts thing, but you know, she had other plans. Anyway, um so like a lot of times you'll buy nuts, right? For whatever thing you're doing, energy balls, whatever. And then for whatever reason, maybe your cooking doesn't use that kind of nut that often, so they just sit around.
Has this happened to any of you? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So listen, before you use those nuts that have been sit sitting uh sitting in your kitchen for months and months and months, probably in an opened container that hasn't been oxygen flushed and hasn't been revacumed, right?
Taste them. Uh nuts can go not just stale, nuts can go rancid, right? So like I dumped, I like I was making, I forget what I was making. I was making something, and I was like, oh, cashews would be good in this. So I went and I tried to FIFO it.
I took the oldest package of open cashews I had in my house, I dumped it into the into the blender, and thank God, before I hit go, I reached in and grabbed one and ate it straight cardboard. Straight cardboard, rancid cashew. So then I had if you have if you have rancid peanuts, you can do the reasons peanut butter cups, right? Could you make the same type of peanut butter that they put inside there? That is an excellent point, Nastasia.
I don't know. I don't know. I don't know also what kind of added fats they add. Um, because you know they don't add peanut fat to uh jack the fat. You know they're too cheap for that.
But maybe maybe I shouldn't throw the stuff away. Who knows? Yeah. I'm uh it turns out I'm a wasteful weasel, as was known. John, John, you should make some some vegan.
I'm having a very hard time hearing you. What's amazing is I think she was speaking at a normal rate. And then the internet just like trailed her off like that. Here, start again. Making some vegan what?
Nope, it's still just filtering through the tubes. The tubes. One word at a time. That Alaskan senator's coming back from the dead with his series of tubes and it's not like a it's not like what'd he say? Have you ever played truck?
Yeah, but it's not like a dump truck, or it is really, it's a series of tubes. I don't know. Sometimes you'll send an email, it'll show up like a week later. At least that's what he said. Remember?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Are you back full time, Stas? You were like the internet was chopping you up like a mother. No, no.
She'll tell us when she's right. Uh so we know what uh John has been cooking. Uh Matter Nastasia, anything interesting? Any culinary highlights of the past uh week or week and a half. Uh I grilled some salmon last night, but the real highlight was using it for salmon hash this morning.
Ooh. So did you pre-cook the what size potatoes do you use in your hash? Very, very small, uh annoyingly small. So but you like you do like a dice to like a I don't know what that is, less than a centimeter square, probably. So, John, what would that size be called?
It wouldn't be called a dice, it would be called a Brunoise. There you go. And this is why we have a francophone, like you know, Chef Cook working with us. It's not diced, Matt. It is a Brunoise.
I don't know if I can bring myself to regularly say that. I'm gonna have to start dicing them, I guess. Brunoise is a good thing. Matt, how come the potatoes are so much bigger than they used to be? Oh, because I refuse to make a brunoise.
Is that pretty much what it how it's going? Yeah, absolutely. Because my French teacher, you know, in middle school never really got me there. So I have to dice these now. Yeah, yeah.
Now listen, do you take them like all the way crisp and then throw in the salmon? Or do you have like a non-crispy hash? It wasn't it wasn't crazy, crazy, crazy crispy. But yeah, I took it pretty much all the way I was gonna take it, and then I I didn't want to overdo it on the salmon because the salmon was really nicely cooked already. Yeah.
You ever cheat? Here's a good so like I like, by the way, uh for those of you that have never had hash before. What? Hash is delicious. Like hash is great, and everybody has a different style of hash, and I like them all, right?
So like I like canned Hormel corned beef hash. Love it. Like, in fact, that was my standard. What do you guys order when you go to diners? Hash bound.
Sometimes sometimes I'll get corned beef hash. Corn beef hash? I'm corned beef hash, two eggs, sunny side up, runny, rye toast, butter. Bang. Like that's like, if they don't have the rye, I'll do white.
But like that that's my standard, and I know that they don't make the hash. I know it comes out of a can, and I love it. I love it. Uh anyways, canned hash, the potatoes are soft because suckers in a can, obviously. But have you ever tried taking the potato pieces, doing them like um fried, like crunchy on the outside, like fried out, and then or if you want to do a simpler thing, just pre-roasting the potatoes, doing a little bit larger of a size potato, roasting them off so they're crispy on the outside, then tossing in the meat base?
Yes. That's the way you like it, right, Stas? That was yeah, yeah. Now I'll sometimes do some stuff to my hash that Nastasia would stab my eyes out for. I've been known sometimes to put rosemary into it.
And I know that Nastasia has some PTSD on rosemary and can't ever use it again in cooking, which is. Throw the salmon in at the end. Uh no, I put the salmon on basically as I was turning the heat off and just like let it come up to tap essentially. Alright. For a couple.
Yeah. Now, uh, did you uh do you eat your now you were eating your hash as a as a breakfast course or as a main course? I'm hash any time of day, by the way, so I'm not no judgment here. I'm just asking. Hash any time of day sounds very smart, but this was this was hash with a fried egg and a piece of toast and some like side salad.
Alright, what's what's what's your spring mix? What's your ideal fried egg? Uh well I I don't I don't know how to answer that question. No wrong answers here. How do you like your fried eggs?
Isn't there just one way? No, so many ways. Oh, I like I like hard yokes. You like yours hard cooked? Hard yoke.
I need the I need the yolk like oozing and saucing out my uh agreed. Saucing out my hash. That's what I need. But there's no wrong answer. There's just what you want.
Oh, I like full runny. Yeah, I just want the white to be set and then the rest running. Yeah, yeah. I, you know, I like a poached egg on my uh on my hash too. Although I I don't when I'm when I'm out I never ask for that because the odds that someone can do a poached egg properly, somewhere between zero and zero.
You know what I mean? Like at a diner? I mean, come on. Hey Dave. Yep.
It's our anniversary. How many years is it? It's end of August. Oh, geez, Louise. You can't pull this test on me a million infinity years?
Let me guess, hold a second. Twelve? I think it's 13. Ooh, lucky 13. Yeah.
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Many of these products can only be found at eating tools. Food, cooking, craftsmanship, and art are their ingredients. For more information, visit eatingtools.com. Wait, oh Dave, can we talk about Disney princesses? I mean, we could talk about it if you'd like.
But go on. Well, having no no, look. Okay, so I can say why you said Ariel was the answer. Yes, yes. Okay.
So Nastasia said that uh that uh Ariel was every man's Disney princess dream, and I was like, why? No private parts? And she's like, no, no, uh, no voice. And I was like, and I was like, I don't know. I mean, and it's like, you know, he did actually fall in love with Ursula the Sea Witch because of the uh and she's like, yeah, but she never said anything, she just was humming things.
So I was like, nah, maybe fair, maybe fair point, right, Stoss. Yeah, yeah. And so then she said, Who is your, you know, who if you weren't married and someone said you could try to go out with any of these Disney princesses, who would you pick? And so then that I think everyone, everyone who is, you know, would go out with a uh a woman should try to figure out who their Disney princess of choice uh would be. But like I didn't even I the problem is is that Nastasia was like you have to choose also based on their personality and all this other stuff, and I'm like, I haven't seen some of the more recent movies, you know what I mean?
Okay, Matt, so Matt, choose. And and we're talking classic. Uh well, well, classics up till what? Up till 90, up till 2000. Like Matt, you've seen most of them, right?
Um I pulled up a list to be like who are I mean, I would go Jazz. Huh? No, well, why? Uh I don't know. Because I I fondly remember Aladdin, basically.
He's choosing for himself, Stas. He's choosing for himself. Oh, sorry. I like how he's he's choosing, I would choose Jasmine. You're like, nah.
I okay. Sorry. Sorry. I meant for Dave. Who do you see, Dave?
Oh, oh. Um. Um. I don't even know. Who is this?
Who is the job? The thing about Jasmine, the thing about Jasmine is she does have that tiger. Uh Snow White? I don't know. Come on.
You know I hate that. It's very easy. It's very easy. I got it on my first try, Matt. Come on.
No offense if you guys like that look. No offense if you're a snow white person. I mean, uh, Bill has an army of singing tools. Is that it? Is that what seals the deal?
Bingo. Yeah, all right. And Matt, she's put up with a with a beast. Oh, yeah, that's actually man. Her dad is a crazy inventor.
Yeah, her dad's a dad's a crazy inventor. He's friends with a bunch of kitchen tools. Yeah. And can hang out with people that are otherwise unloved. It's incredibly obvious, and I feel bad.
I don't feel like I brought my A game here. That's okay. That's okay now. My question was: if you could be any Disney villain, who would you be? I know who I would be.
Say it, Dave. Captain Hook, straight up. Now, the the thing is, is that looking back, wow, what a horrible racist movie that was. But when I was a kid, holy crap, I loved Peter Penn. I love Captain Hook.
Like, and when we decided that's Wendy. Yeah. Sorry, sorry, John. You have to be Smee. If I'm Captain Hook, you have to be Smee.
Apologize about that. Great. Smee! I love Smee. Smee's awesome.
You know what I mean? Mm-hmm. Yeah. But Captain Hook, if I uh at one period in my life, I tried, I was younger, obviously. I mean, that's always true if you did it in the past.
Uh, I I really wanted Captain Hook's coat to the point where I was gonna try to convince my now dead grandma, who was pretty good at sewing, to uh to make me a legitimate, not some sort of BS costume version, but a legitimate Captain Hook coat. I mean, it's just such a serious coat the guy has, you know what I mean? Remember when you had the BS uh top hat in uh in LA for the Houdini Burk? Alright, so Nastasia Lopez hired or bought because we're not rich for this kind of stuff. We don't have excess money to spend on costumes, right?
So Nastasia buys like the the outfits that you would buy if you were going to a party strictly to hook up with someone and then instantly throw the costume in the uh dumpster as you were making out in the alley. That's the level of costume that Nastasia buys for our events. True or false. True, true. So she buys me a hat made, I'm pretty sure, out of used women's pantyhose.
A quote unquote top hat made out of like some sort of nylon discarded hosiery. And for whatever reason, because I was supposed to be the the circus leader of this uh of the party that we did at uh in Los Angeles last year. And uh for whatever reason, I don't know if you guys know this, if you've ever seen a picture of me, but I'm like super pale, like super pale. So like like I, you know, I burned very easily, and uh when I was uh when I was you know in grad school, I did an art project where uh burning kerosene sprayed all over my back and I I caught on fire. I've talked about this on air, but I had like second and third degree burns all over my back.
And so as a result, you can't see it, right? You know, if I were to ever take my shirt off, which no one has ever seen and no one ever will, but if I ever were to take my shirt off, my back looks normal, but I can't put it in the sun anymore. And so I just kind of turned into a person that where the sun never touches my skin except for the backs of my hands. So I wear big hats, I wear uh you know, long sleeve shirts, long pants, and uh because I don't like uh I don't like sunscreen. I don't like the I don't like oils and lotions and whatnot on on my skin.
And this is the reason why I have to take huge amounts of uh vitamin D. So anyway, I show up in LA, and of course Nastasia has rented a convertible because as one does, right, Nastasia? Yes. Yeah. And I don't have anyone, for some reason, I effed up and I left the apartment early, and I didn't bring any one of my multiple wide brim hats that I have, and we didn't have the time, and I wasn't gonna go spend money on a real wide-brimmed hat because they're expensive real ones, right?
So Nastasia's like, don't worry, I got you this. And so she hands me this piece of women's hosiery that I have to wear in a convertible in LA, driving around for like four days and at every light, people were like, mm-mm, douche. Or like, nice hat, dude. And then uh I had to wear it during the party. It was just a complete nightmare.
I had to wear it while we were moving, it was my moving hat. Oh my god. So like Nastasi and I didn't have the money to hire someone, so like we had a bunch of trash because it's a party, right? So like the person was like, and it was a huge hill that we had to roll the dumpster up. And the and the the tr the trash company was like, we're gonna leave the dumpster at the bottom of the hill.
If you want us to get the dumpster at the top of the hill, it's an extra two hundred dollars. Nastasia's like, that's like a case of cheap prosecco. And so she's like, we're gonna do it. So then I'm sitting here. Yeah, sitting here, oh my god.
Everyone was so hung over. Jeremiah Stone, the chef Jeremiah Stone. Nastasi was afraid he was almost dead in the pool the night before because he was doing the de the dead person float on purpose. He looked like something out of Sunset Boulevard, floating around. Everyone completely wrecked.
Nastasia and I, as our alarm goes off at six in the morning, we're like, get up, run in. I stick on my women's hosiery top hat, and we're pushing this dumpster up the hill nightmare. Loved it, right, Stas? Yeah, yeah. That's life.
Anyway, that this was supposed to be the year that we didn't have to do that stuff anymore. People have accused us of enjoying doing stupid things like this. We do not. We do not. Anyway.
Uh I don't know how the hell we got on that. I don't know. Oh, here's some uh facts for those of you out there that have access to this stuff. Uh went to the New York Botanical Garden uh again this weekend for the like third or fourth time since they've reopened. And uh so listen, I'm I'm gonna tell you this a little bit in secret because I'm not supposed to have done this, right?
I feel a little bit bad about it, but like an interesting place to go if you're interested in herbs and plants. One is the New York Botanical Garden, another one, specifically herbs now, is the cloisters. Either of you guys like the cloisters. Yeah. Or Matt, you like the cloisters?
I love I love the cloisters. I love the narwhal rooms. Yes. Yeah, so when anytime anyone says narwhal, now you have the B52s going through my head. Now all I can hear is that guy saying narwhal in my head.
Oh God. Hold on, give me a second to get it out. All right. Now, what I love about the cloisters is the aside from the the like weird medieval art and the fact that you know we stole all that crap from Europe for no apparent reason and aren't gonna give it back. Is that um they have amazing like herbs and flowers, and so if you're very discreet, you can like rub the the leaves a little bit and smell your fingers, and I do this and I'm not supposed to, right?
I'm not supposed to do this. I is that not okay? I think that's fine. I think as long as you're not like ripping the leaves off or anything like that. I think that's probably okay.
Every once in a while I will take a small thing. Yeah, I knew this was coming. I knew this was happening. I knew that was coming. Yeah.
Yeah. See, Dave, when I took that rock from the Acropolis, you like lost your mind. Well, yeah, that's not good. You cursed yourself and your family forever, I think. Right.
Yeah, yeah. You turned it from the Acropolis to the Acropolis. Good job. The uh Well, no, I mean, the thing is is it it's growing. I'm taking a little piece of a leaf that it's gonna grow up.
It's not even like a flower where it's gonna not like do it again for a year. It's like whatever. It's bad, you shouldn't do it, etc. If everybody did it, there would be no plenty of things. Exactly the tragedy of the commons.
Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. Uh so if you go to the New York Botanical Garden, which is in the Bronx, um, they have a section called, and I don't know the genesis of it, but whatever, whether they're gonna the ladies' border. You guys familiar with this section of the New York Botanical Gardens near the E Enit Haup Conservatorium?
Nope. Ah. The ladies' border is an area that is you like that place, right, Stas? Yeah. So it's it's laid out with a bunch of plants uh in a very dense fashion.
What? We're we're definitely working with a pretty solid delay here. Yeah. Um anyway, so there's a species of I mean, I was aware of the of the species, but I now I'm gonna have to wait for the delay because I gotta Nastasia, what are your thoughts on geraniums? I can you am I not delayed anymore?
I don't know. What are your thoughts on geraniums? Uh they're okay. I don't like them because they don't there's a lot of green and not a lot of flower. Usually.
Right, right. That's fair. And Nastasia, for those of you that don't know, is a flower person. But I'm not flowers. I'm not gonna tell you which flower she thinks are garbage and which one she doesn't, because in case you get her flowers, I would like her to judge you.
Thanks, Dave. I'm just kidding. Come on. Come on. Um the I did not know this because I'm not a flower person, but what we call geraniums a lot of the time aren't actually geraniums, right?
So like the things that are perennial that grow a lot in this area are actual geraniums, but the things that are planted in the ladies' border are pellargoniums, which for some reason we call geraniums. I who the who the heck knows why? Um, and here is the thing that I did not know is that all of these ones that are raised for flowers, which as you say, Nastasia, don't make enough flowers for your taste, right? Did you know that that there's a a huge subsection of them with scented leaves? Yes, I do.
I did. I know. How come you never brought this to my attention? Because I thought you only care about trees. No, I care about things you can eat.
You can eat them. Ah, I didn't know that. Yeah. So, like, I mean, crazy scents, like lemon rose, like rose, like lime. They had one there called filbert scented uranium uh geraniums.
I didn't really get the filbert. I mean, not that I could like a filbert is like John, do you know or anyone? Is there any real is a filbert just a uh like a jerky way to say uh to say hazelnut? Or are they actually different? I've never even heard what filbit?
Filbert's filbert. Yeah, it's not sure. Do you say Sherbert? Sherbet? What do you say?
I mean it's Sherbet. Okay. That's how it's spelled. There's no L back there. I know that's how it's spelled, but I have always my whole life since I used to order it in from the 70s on, have said Sher Bert, like Burton Ernie.
Okay, yeah. Yeah. But yeah, I guess when I was a kid I said it that way. Yeah. I mean, there's gotta be some reason that all of us grew up saying Sherbert, even if it is Sherbet.
I don't know. Anyway, point being that uh I want could anyone sell these? I've never seen these for sale as as an herb. Some of them had, and this is where I said I I ate a little bit of the leaf. Like not even a quarter of a leaf, Nastasi, just a little bit.
And a lot of them have a little bit of a uh the aromas are amazing. Amazing. Uh some of them have a little bit of a bitter aftertaste. I would love to try them in a nitromutdle cocktail to see whether or not that aroma comes through or to see whether it's possible to use them in cooking to good uh advantage. Yeah.
Can you hear me okay? Sometimes, and sometimes you this is what you sounded like. Can you hear me okay? Can you hear me now? Yeah.
There's an herb place in Connecticut that has a bunch of these geraniums. Really? Yes. Okay then. It's a date.
We will have to physically get close to each other. We'll go to this place and we'll get some some herbs. And we can go to Stanford too and hang out there for a little bit. Well, where is what town is this herb without blowing up your spot, what town is it in. And we'll never know.
We'll never know. We'll never ever know. Um, let's get to some uh I I'm anxious to hear in the chat room or if any of you tweet me at cooking issues, any good uses for scented geraniums in uh food or cocktail. I'd be interested. Because it's not it's not every day that a 49-year-old person in the food business who cares about this stuff, someone just hands them like a whole palette of stuff that they've never messed with before.
Yeah, that grows like like at their doorstep. You know what I mean? You probably can find them around too, because uh my mother-in-law, when I was down in DC for a few weeks in July, she had a few of them that she had planted in her garden, the aromatic ones. And was she using them? She was not using them for a culinary purpose.
No. Was she making a potpourri? She was just enjoying them as plants. By the way, does anyone still use potpourri? What was the no?
What is the use for potpourri, really? So in the 70s. I'm here. Oh, good, good. In in the did your mom still like the potpourri, Nastasia?
No. No. Oh. Hmm. Unclear.
I'm gonna say that you said no. Okay. So uh yeah. I'm gonna say she said no. What do you guys think?
It was no. It was definitely no. Keep going. So in the 70s, what you used to do was is you would get a bunch of theoretically aromatic and yet dried old stuff, like old rose petals, like cinnamon sticks, cloves, like all kind of leaves, right? And then it would be kind of brown, and then you would stick them all in a bowl.
But then because you realized that all of their natural scent had already been gone, because they had been picked sometime like a century earlier and been stored in a warehouse, you douse them in like actual like aroma that you bought in a bottle, and that my friends. Yeah, that my friends is potpourri. And it was huge in the 70s. People like had bowls of it out, and you would just go in and be like, oh, the potpourri. I feel like did wait, Nastaz, now you did do you did do the clove studded orange at Christmas time, right?
Yes, and we had a ton of potpourri during the early 90s. Oh, so you did have it. Yeah, but you asked if my mom still has it, and no. Okay, okay, okay, okay. But back in the day, you did you did the potpourri.
John and Matt, did you guys do the did you guys do the the clove studded citrus for the Christmas time? No, but my mom did have potpourri around the house until like the late 90s. Oh, you see? You guys making me feel like a jerk. But listen, I have to say, like, here's some things.
I know it's not, we're nowhere near Christmas time. I'm already kind of depressed about what it's going to be like this year. But, like, let me just say now, I am a fan, and I haven't done it in about 35, 36, 38 years. But the clove studded citrus, I think is cool. I still think it's cool.
Smells good. Anyway. Actually, potpourri, now that I'm translating it, that translates to rotten pot. Pourri means rotten? Yeah, puri.
Popori. Bo is pot, pooli is rotten. So the Frenchies were making fun of us even back then? I guess so. God.
You know? God. Uh all right. Let's take a look at the. Sure.
Take a question from the chat, sure. Uh Hunt Hunt, H U N D T said, Hi everyone. Beverage related question for the show. How do I clean a filthy old cold plate? The random person I got it from does not remember how many years ago he last used it, but does remember that the beer still inside is Bud Light.
Can I just run beer line cleaner and stamp sanitizer through it following normal instructions for cleaning lines? Or heat it in an oven as well, something else, or just trash it. This might be a good place to mention that John has visited the Budweiser factory and taken the factory tour. Yes, but I didn't w watch them clean anything. That's not part of the tour.
Yeah, but you but I'm saying is you saw where the Bud Light was born, right? Yes. Yes, yes, true. It is a really impressive factory. Those places, those places are insane.
I went to the Miller Gloers in LA, and they had vats, you know, uh watering vats that were like bigger than the annual production of the brewery I worked at. It's crazy. Yeah, it was what yeah, it's like a college campus all dedicated to beer was insane. Yeah. Uh here's what I would do.
Uh before you do any sanitizing and whatnot, which by the way, the sanitize, it depends on what you're gonna put back through it or not. I mean, the sanitizing is to prevent for for a lot a lot a lot of reasons, obviously, but I mean that to me the biggest thing is not whether or not it's sanitary in the in the short run, is how bad does it taste and is it throwing off flock? And throwing sanitizer in isn't going to take care of the fact that it's full of disgusting tasting filth. So uh what I would do is I would just get some flexible rubber hose and hook it up to a hot water tap and just flush it, flush it, just keep flushing it, just flush it, flush it, keep flushing it till it runs clean, let it sit with hot water in it for like two, three hours, flush it again, put detergent in, flush it, put detergent in, let it sit, flush it. Then if you want to sanitize it, go ahead.
But until that thing flushes clean, and until you can taste the water that comes out of it and not be like, hmm, gross, right? And by the way, not just water that is flowing through it at a high rate of speed. I'm talking about if you let it, if you flush water through it, you wait like two hours, you come back and you just turn on the tap a little bit so that a little bit trickles out, and you just get that stuff that was in the line, and you can knock that back and go, ah, clean. Then, then you're set. But I don't know.
Also, throw away uh you have to obviously throw away any of the plastic parts that have been touched it because the odds that you get those things completely clean are low. So, like stuff might be sitting in the um in the washers and the flare washers, because those are typically plastic, so you might want to pitch those and get new flare washers. Um, that's if there's gas. Oh, yeah. Well, the classic thing isn't necessarily beer.
The classic thing is root beer ruins any gasket, can't be fixed. So, like people who like store root beer in kegs always have uh like a root beer gasket set because it's well known that root beer just doesn't come out of come out of the gasket. Speaking of root beer, have you guys ever made root beer with actual sarsaparilla? No. No.
Yeah, me neither. Because it's been illegal since before I was born, but uh, because saffron is theoretically potentially uh carcinogenic. But um, you know, I saw, I was telling John also when I was at the botanical garden, I was telling him earlier uh today, I saw the biggest sassafrash tree I've ever seen in my life. Sassafrash tree where I you know come from is like a little tree. What?
Say it again. Did you take some? I think it's what she said. No, it was too big. This tree, Nastasia, you wouldn't believe it.
I was like, what's this giant tree? I sent John a picture, he couldn't believe it either. Huge sassafrash tree. Because like where I am, you know, am they always like little saplings when you throw them away. But for those of you that, and I know that anyone in the south already knows this, but for those of you up north who have sassafras growing as a weed tree, the um the roots, right, which is what you would you know get the saffron from to make root beer, isn't the only thing you can use that thing for.
The leaves, which are very easy to identify, the mitten-shaped leaves. Sassafras, also an interesting tree in that it has various leaf forms on the same plant. So, like some will look like a mitten, some won't. They won't have lobes. You know, mulberry is another plant that has that kind of interesting facet, although the leaves obviously look completely different.
But sassafras leaves, if you pick them and dry them and grind them, that's philae powder for making gumbo. So if you want to make uh a gumbo out of philae, uh you you actually have access to that up north, even if you don't want to buy philae powder. What are you saying, Stas? Lost her for a second. Uh all right, so I'll read this question from Carlos.
Uh Carlos Rodriguez writes in uh fan of the show, currently work on an organic veggie farm in Kelowna, BC, Columbia, uh, Canada. I'm looking to extract uh vegetables into oils and alcohol. Specifically, I'd like to start with fresh herbs and seeds. For seeds, uh cilantro, fennel, dill, and anise, and for herbs, lemon, verbena, lemon verbena can be tough. Uh gets detergent-y real quick and and goes brown real quick.
Anis hysop, sage, and thyme. As far as veggies go, peples, peppers. We grow 65 varieties of peppers right now, and we'll likely do more. Caratops, anything to do with tomatoes. I've done vinegar trials with the leaves, and it's okay, but not great.
I'd also like to look at flowers, lilac, and lavender. Anything I can get would be greatly appreciated. So, um, I mean, some flowers are very, very fragile. That's why they invented the technique kind of of enflourage, because they don't really withstand tincturing very well, and they don't withstand uh even steam distillation very well. So uh flowers that need to have their extraction done with enfourage, let's set those aside.
So enflourage is where you will get like a neutral fat. You'll press the flowers into the fat, then you will wash the smell off of the fat with pure alcohol. Uh that's a time honored, and that's actually the idea of enflourage is where the bartenders who started doing fat washing, I guess originally got their idea, which I don't know this for sure, but you guys remember the movie The Perfumer and the book? Nope. I think it was called The Perfumer.
It was a famous book about this guy who like had this amazing nose, and I think he ends up killing people and turning whatever smells. Anyway, they did a movie on it, and Enflourage is big in it, and it was pretty soon after that that enflourage became kind of a big thing in in the bar world. Well, fat washing, which was based on enfourage. Anyway, um as for the other things, uh oils are difficult to do with normal with normal bar stuff. If you have money and you're working on a farm with money, invest in a pilot scale um uh supercritical CO2 extraction unit.
I think you can get them for under 10 grand now. Just be careful that you get one that is uh fully rated for safety because you're dealing with a lot of high pressures. But I've never met someone who invested who is a professional. I mean, obviously not at home, but I've never met somebody who's invested in a super critical CO2 extraction setup and was like, the product sucks. Just never happens.
Everyone loves it. So that's what I would do. Uh was that a good answer? Uh guys, or no? Yeah, I think so.
And if he doesn't like the answer, you can always email me again and we can get more split. By the way, wag of the finger, somebody complained on Booker and Dax's Instagram account that uh John that we were bad at responding to call a call in on our uh customer service. And uh I don't know if you know this, but if you can hear my voice, we don't have a call in line for customer service. So of course we didn't respond on it. Just email.
What's wrong with that? I well what number were they calling that they said they were calling in and had a problem. Like, of course I don't know, yeah. I mean, if you you know, if you if you call, you know, if you call the local uh, you know, waffle house and ask them for customer service for Booker and DAX, they're not gonna return your call. We don't have a number you can call.
Very true. John Bends over backwards to give you good customer service. Uh oh, get this. So uh, oh by the way, we're back in stock now on uh with uh Searsols, correct? And the screens as of this morning, yep.
Now listen, again, sorry to be, you know, pushing the product, but um so for years, uh Booker and Dax has only recommended the TS8000 model Burns Matic torch. Uh and I just realized that although Home Depot still sells them for the same $50 something dollars and Lowe's for the same $50 something dollars that they always have. Uh, and by the way, if you do buy them from them with the kit, please do not use the math gas. Um it will burn out your screens, it will fall over and burn down your house. Please don't do it.
Um Amazon no longer sells the Burns and Matic for the cheap price. They have jacked the price of the Burns Matic up to 70 something dollars, and they now sell a knockoff Burns on Matic TS8000, which John, do you remember the name of it? I got it. The Blue Flame 9XTE. The Blue Flame 9 XTL multipurpose map and propane torch, and that's for $53.99.
Now uh it looks identical to a TS8000, uh, except for they changed the cap on the trigger from yellow to blue. So and they included some extra nozzles. But uh John has ordered one for himself, and he's gonna test it over the next week or so. And so by next week, we will tell you whether or not we officially say that you can use maybe two weeks. We need to make sure we're okay with it.
We can see whether we can officially recommend the blue flame 9 XTL as it as a torch for the Searsol, right? Yep, yeah. Um I hate this. I just on Amazon to look it up, and they say frequently brought together the Blue Flame 9 XTL, the Sears All, and two canisters of freaking map gas. Don't do it.
We can't change that. Yeah. I know people we and we've had people yell at us being like, Well, you recommended that you get it. We didn't. We didn't.
Also, on um on the new Searsols that we're we're working on. So I've been working with uh Nastasia, John, and our factory in China on uh on new Searsol products, and as part of that, I'm trying to figure out a way to measure it. So I'm looking and I don't have time now, but if any of you are interested, write in. I can go in great depth on how you can take an inexpensive uh infrared camera, like the FLIR for the um for the uh iPhone or the Android, which only goes up to 400 degrees Celsius, or the the older ones only I think only go up to like 200 degrees Celsius. Steve, you should ask our fans if they know anybody that has the type of camera you're looking to borrow.
Oh, well, I mean, the kind of cameras I'm looking like, like uh I forget which which the model number. I needed one that goes up to like 1200 degrees Celsius, which you can't get. And then I FLIR wants you to buy really expensive FLIR cameras or rent really expensive FLIAR cameras. Because we're what I'm trying to do is we're trying to look at the front of a Searsol in full, you know, in full Sears allness and try to see what the temperature distribution across it is, right? And it's hard because it's real hot.
Uh and so, and in fact, our factory, when they were doing a prototype for something for the large one that we're working on, they quoted us some numbers. I was like, yo, those numbers have no meaning, you have no way of measuring it. Uh because they're standing away, like like they're standing six feet away from it with an infrared thermometer. Oh, I got a new infrared thermometer. I'll talk about next week if I like it.
There's an infrared thermometer I just got that goes up to very high temperatures, can be used on grills, and has instead of you okay. Are you guys all familiar with the the infrared thermometer with the one laser? Yes. Yeah. So infrared thermometers have like a focusing element in them.
And if you ever look at the side of an infrared thermometer, you'll see a cone with some circles in it, and that's showing the size of the spot that they're looking at at different distances, right? And everybody always pays zero attention to this because the therm infrared thermometers typically have one laser, and that one laser, right? You point the laser at something, you're like, Well, that's what I'm measuring the temperature of, right? Wrong. So this laser, aside from the fact that it can go up to much higher temperatures, so it's not as accurate at lower temperatures, which I don't need, right?
For this thing, has two, sorry, infrared thermometers, has two lasers at an angle so that as you move in and out, it goes from being two dots to being a spot and back to two dots, so you can really see exactly the size spot that you're measuring, which I think is pretty nice. It's a pretty nice feature. Um so anyway. Well, it is one. Wait, wait.
So the I know you're anxious to get back on the road. So the uh so the filters, first of all, FLIR does not want you to modify their cheap camera to be able to look at high temperatures. They want you to really, really want you to get the $12,000 camera. And in fact, the their like $5,000 camera and their $12,000 camera are the same exact camera with different firmware in it, so that if you go online on eBay, you can buy the $5,000 camera and have them illegally upgrade the firmware so that you're getting the $12,000 camera. But that's for a separate story.
So we invested in this super expensive neutral density filter. So think about it this way: if you have X amount of uh infrared um electromagnetic radiation, infrared long wave coming off of something, right? It's measuring, it's integrating the values that are hitting the sensor and giving you that back as a temperature. If you put an infrared neutral density filter in so that it cuts all of the transmission in that um in that wavelength area equally, right, by a certain amount, effectively you're cutting all of the temperatures by that amount. Now it's not strictly one-to-one.
There's all these formulas, but that's how it works. So you can increase the temperatures you look at by throwing a neutral density filter in. So we're looking at like hundreds of dollars for like germanium, which is an element that is is used for infrared windows and things like heat-seeking missiles. We're you know looking at these things neutral density filters. Guess what people for the purposes that we're doing quart container lids make excellent neutral density filters.
So if any of you are interested we can maybe put up somewhere how to cut apart a quart container lid and turn your uh you know couple hundred dollar fleer camera that plugs onto your Android or your iPhone turn it into something that can fairly accurately measure the temperature of your barbecue grill. Alright so Jay Cole talked about uh sent us a a shout out um goat and cocktails but also about a foot pedal so I'm gonna deal with Jay's question maybe next week because I want to research he he recommends what's called the Tapmaster 1775 uh kind of foot pedal scenario so if any of you have experience before next week uh about putting about using that tap master I've never used it send it in because I'm gonna be researching it because I was thinking about how upset I am at most foot pedal scenarios uh that people do and I want to do something on making the world's best for a normal human being's kitchen foot pedal for uh sinks um and they also they have a 30 pound goat I'm trying to think of a how big is a 30 pound goat it's about the size of a suckling it's a little bigger than a suckling pig right John I think so yeah some wrecks for preparation four to five month old gut in skin but otherwise intact I was thinking Cambridge for half and curry for the other. That sounds good. I've never cooked a whole goat uh I have cooked rack of goat, which is great. I love goats.
Goat is now more as expensive as lamb. I'll think about that. If it hopefully it'll last till next week. I'll come up with some good. I'll come up with some good goat stuff.
And for those of you that have recommendations for J. Cole and his whole goat, please send them in. And cocktails to go with goat. Anything that would go with lamb will go with goat. Uh anything else?
I was going to do a classics in the field. For those of you that uh I was gonna do the French professional professional pastry series and charcuterie series with uh Roland Billie, but uh we'll do that maybe next week. John has a copy of the charcuterie, so maybe I'll have him chime in on that for next week. Anything else you guys want to talk about before we're on our way out? No, all right, have a good drive.
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