This episode is brought to you by Roberta's, home of Heritage Radio Network for 10 years. Learn more about Robertas at RobertaSPizza.com. Hi there, I'm Yom, host of Item 13, an African food podcast. I am excited to be joining the Heritage Radio Network this year as we kick off our fourth season of the podcast. On item 13, we cover all aspects of the African food ecosystem.
You will hear West Africans squabble over who has the best jolof. Newsflash, it's Ghana. It's time to celebrate Agile. Like we're done with comparing who and who didn't want. And Jolof is not just about even the rice, it's about the protein that goes with it.
Guests share their expertise on African food ingredients and spices. This is a region where, you know, even if you look at 18th century maps, you know, you had something called the pepper coast. Fresh and aromatic peppers. That is what distinguishes West Africa. Tips on marketing food businesses.
A good way to engage your audience is to take them on that journey. You know, get them talking about this idea you have. That way you are engaging them, they are engaging with each other, and you're getting useful insights that you can then pull from and use to develop your recipe. This season, my goal is to focus on more stories outside of English speaking West Africa. So you will hear stories from Benny from Uganda, Liberia, and even Haiti.
You will also hear us discuss the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement and how COVID-19 has impacted some of the businesses featured on the show. You can catch up now on previous episodes of item 13 wherever you listen to podcasts. And join us this season as we debut on HRN. Thank you and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold Cooking Issues coming to you.
From Brooklyn, actually today. On the Heritage Radio Network. Got Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. How you doing? Fine.
You're back in Stanford? Yes, I am. Yeah, we got John also in Brooklyn. How you doing, John? Doing swell.
Yeah, so like I'm hoping I did a slightly abbreviated intro today. Hey Matt, you see you uh yeah, you're back in Rhode Island, right? Back in Rhode Island. All right. I did a slightly abbreviated intro because we are in a co-working space, and I didn't know how much crazy screaming cooking issues I could do before they would revoke our membership.
But uh John and I are here trying to go through the last of the spinzalls that we're turning into parts to help uh help you folks out uh who need parts for their spinzalls. And just as you know, John is going to be away next week, so there will be no customer service next week, right, John? Correct. So get on your emails between now and Friday, and I'll take care of what I can. Yeah, otherwise you will have to wait a week in order for us to answer your.
You're gonna get one of those uh auto pop ups out of office. Yeah. What if we just said something that was just like, uh, sorry, we're toast, we don't exist anymore. Goodbye. Something like that.
People people wouldn't have a sense of humor about it, I don't think. Anyway. Probably not. Uh, probably not. So, Nastasia, I'm intrigued.
I got a photograph from uh Nastasia. Well, she was in New York last night because we were in New York last night. She was in New York last night because we were doing a pop-up at at Wild Air. So that's Jeremiah Stone and Fabian Von Howski, who I call, of course, fabulous and have because I've known him since he was like 18. Uh it's, you know, one of their restaurants.
And so we did a Booker and Dax pop-up. Jack Shram came and we mixed a bunch of drinks. And I thought it was fun, right? People enjoyed it. Yeah.
I think people really liked it. There was a line down the block. Sold out of everything. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Full, fully socially distanced, all you know, according to rules and everything. I thought it was good. So they they made one of my favorites.
They made uh so when when Wild Air opened, they did this. I'm pretty sure it's gluten gluten-free, actually, but they did this uh squid, like this squid fried squid. It's not tempura, it looks like tempura, but it's not because it's actually crunchy, whereas we all know that tempura won't stay crunchy that long, where this stays crunchy a long time, like fried lemon slices and like a squid ink, um, what would you call that? Like a mayonnaise, like a naoli, what would you call that? It was an aioli, yeah.
Yeah. So then uh, but then I was like, oh, you gotta bring that back because that was one of my favorites. Not that I got to eat anything. Did you guys get to have the food? I had a little bit.
I had a piece of this. It was good. They sold, yeah, they sold out pretty fast. So then I had literally just been saying to someone that I think that the cuttlefish, even though it's camouflage is great, that it's definitely of the three, a third tier cephalopod, right? And then Jeremiah's like, surprise, we're doing a squid, but we're doing it with cuttlefish.
I'm like, cuttlefish for real? It was good. It was really good. I enjoyed it like it. But in general, my feeling is that you could be a squid person or you could be an octopus person, but like definitely those, like those are like the so like what do you guys think?
You agree with me or disagree with me? I know that Nastasia doesn't is not grooving on killing cephalopods at all now because they're friends, not food now in her mind, right? Yeah, yeah, yes. Yeah. But but you're more like uh that's by the way, that's a uh finding Nemo reference.
For those of you that have never seen Finding Nemo, that's a finding Nemo reference. There's a shark, a great white shark in Finding Nemo, who is trying to go vegetarian, and it's actually a group of sharks, and they keep on saying, friends not food, friends not food, trying to like not eat like you know, Dory and Nemo and all their friends. So um, but you're okay with killing cuttlefish, right? Because you don't care about them. No, you said that they're equally intelligent.
No, no, well, no, no, no. They're not equally intelligent. They're definitely dumber, but they're their camouflage is amazing. Like the cuttlefish have some of the most amazing camouflage abilities of uh of the cephalopods, but I think that they're definitely dumber. I mean, look, I think octopus is the smartest, right?
Or I should say the smartest octopus is by far the smartest invertebrate in the world. Like, like, there's no no comparison, right? Um, and then I would say like the smartest squid is underneath the you know the octopus, and then I would say cuttlefish, and then Nautilus is just a like a like a dumb bud. You know, a nautilus is just like a floating freaking shell thing. But no one eats nautiluses, do they?
Yeah, I have to look up nautilus. I don't know what that is. They have meat. No, that is just a shell. Well, I mean, I mean, there is a shell, but in order to produce a shell, there needs to be a meaty thing in it.
You know what I mean? Are you familiar with um Tyrion purple? No. No, no. Are you okay?
So uh I forget how I went down this rabbit hole, but like purple was a very expensive, uh, very expensive color back in the day. So purple was one of the very first synthesized aniline dyes. It was done in um England, and that's the color mauve was this synthesized dye in the 1800s that became very popular. Prior to that, purple was extremely expensive because a light fast purple that lasted a long time, like the the best dyes came from these snails, these murex snails that you know are in the Mediterranean. You crush these snails up, and it takes like a thousand snails to make like one gram of this dye, and that dye doesn't go very far.
That's why it's like royal purple, blah, blah, blah. So there's dye. Is it great purple, or is it like a blue that then gets changed into a purple? It's well, so it's not, it's not a an anthocyanin, it's a different thing. So it's not a in other words, it's pH stable, but like diff different species of this mirx style of snail um produce different colors, and those colors can range from red to purple to more bluish.
So for instance, like the the very specific blue thread that's supposed to be in um Jewish prayer shawls, uh, what's that dye called? Tech Techalet, I forget the name of it. That is also, even though it's blue and not purple, that is recently been theorized to be a murex uh snail dye as well, just treated in a slightly different way. But it all starts with, and apparently, if you really put your mind to it, you can milk these snails to get the dye out. But what in the real life, what happens is that you're not sitting around milking a snail, which is also how you get musk aromas, right?
They milk milk civic cats, which aren't cats, anyway, to get musk out. So, like, but no one milks the snails. What they do is they smash the snails up and they get they get the dye out. But it's fantastically expensive. So it's literally, I looked it up.
You can buy this dye now for you can get a quarter of a gram for like a hundred, a hundred and twenty bucks or something like that, or like more. It's like thousands of dollars a gram. It's freaking bananas. Anyways, and the thing is, is like I was kind of like, should I try to find something made with this like? No, no, no, no, why would wrong rabbit hole?
Anyway, but the point is that that guy was eating those snails. That's where we're going all of this, is that there's a guy in Lebanon right now making Tyrion purple, smashing up these snails, and then he has to sit around and think of recipes. He has to think of recipes where he can use all of these thousands of snails that he goes through to make this minute amount of dye that he has. And I'll give you one last little thing about these snails. Apparently, there is a passage in you know one of the volumes of the Talmud that says that uh if you marry a man and he all of a sudden decides to switch professions and he switches professions into a dye maker of Murek's dye, you're allowed to divorce him because he's gonna stank so bad.
Wait, what? So bad. Yeah. It's like grounds for divorce. He became he became a dime maker.
I mean, please, what am I supposed to smell like this forever? Come on. Come on. But you know, nowadays we live in a situation where, you know, like both both partners can, you know, work, you know, and do it. Like, I feel that's the kind of thing where you have to go in as a family business.
You can't be like, you know, the person coming home stanking of crushed up Murex snails all day. Yeah, if everyone smells that way, then you won't notice, it'll be fine. Yeah, it's like garlic at dinner. You know what I mean? Do you know what I'm noticing a lot?
Like, don't you hate how even if you don't eat the onion when you're slicing raw onions, the onion gets into your fingers, and then like you can taste it later on that evening, and when you brush your teeth, even if you haven't eaten it. So horrible. It's horrible, right? And I and I love that flavor and that smell in my food, but then when I like smell it on my fingers, it's so for like I hate that. And it's for it's forever.
It's it's like lasts forever. It's crazy. This is and and my problem with it is that I have to be careful because Jen, my wife, does not like raw onions, loves cooked onions, doesn't like raw onions. Like, so it's like, you know, I can't be, I can't be having raw onion fingers. I don't know, but what am I gonna sit there and like put gloves on at home to slice the raw onions?
I don't know, should I? I guess I should. I don't know. What are your thoughts on raw onions? Uh Stas?
I don't like I can't even. I told you they give me night. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, I forgot. Yeah.
They give you nightmares. Wait, you're okay with cooked ones. Nightmares? Yeah. Raw onions give me.
I love pickled onions and I loved cooked onions, but raw onions can't do it. Whoa. Yeah. Also, move move your mic maybe slightly further away. That was a few.
Yeah. Well, yeah. Oh, uh one more thing before we get. Oh, so so then, so we did our pop-up. Uh, there was cuttlefish.
It was delicious. So I maybe temporarily take back my statement about cuttlefish being a third tier, uh a third tier cephalopod. Um, but Nastasia stayed over at a hotel. I'm I guess I'm sure it was fine. After we got in a huge fight.
Huge. Uh we did get in a huge fight. Uh, and you know, like like we do. Uh but when you got home today, what'd you see on the on the coast? Well, no, that I had it was has been there for a while, but I wanted to show you today.
But I have a blue lobster. Well, I mean, it's a blue lobster in several pieces now. Yeah. Was it ever whole? No.
It was like it was under a rock hole, and I picked it up, but the tail separated, and then the other the head and the claw, I had to dig out of the hole, and then that's that's what it is. Huge but it wasn't it wasn't alive at all, right? No, no. The tail had been eaten, and I had Peter Kim over, and he was like, Oh my god, somebody's eating, somebody's coming here with lobsters and like grilling them and eating them. I was like, Peter, I live on the sound.
You know, they used they used to be a like a pretty decent commercial fishery on the sound for lobster. I didn't know lobsters were out here though. And that one looks cool, right? It's like blue and old. Yeah, blue blue lobsters, very, very fancy.
No, there used to be a serious commercial fishery for lobster in the Long Island Sound. Um I forget why it declined, but you know, look, like the further north you go, the colder the water and the and the rockier the ground underneath, like the like those people all look down on us. So like Cape Cod people look down on Long Island Sound lobster, and then Maine lobster people like look way down on uh Cape Cod lobsters. So I remember I was in Maine once and I was taking this mail boat out, but I'm on this mail boat, and the mail boat is also the lobster boat, right? Because you you don't have just one job in you know in this part of Maine.
It's like, you know, I don't know, he's he's probably also the town magistrate or whatever, but he's a lobster fisher person. And by the way, you can't just become a lobster fisher person in Maine because when you put when you're when you're putting a lobster boat out, you put all your buoys out, and those buoys mark your traps, right? And when you put the traps out, um if someone like takes your trap, like takes it, that's like a shooting in the face offense. That's like a stab and burn, and you're like, why'd you stab that guy and light his body on fire? Oh, well, they cut my lobster trap.
I mean, uh, sorry, they stole my lobster trap, and you're like, okay, okay, fine, fine. You know, you're good. You know, I mean you're gonna get let off. But uh what they do do is that if you are a newbie, if Nastasia shows up in Maine, buys a lobster boat, goes and puts all of her little pots out with the buoys, they just come by and cut the buoys. They won't take the traps because for some reason that is against the code, but they will just cut your buoys straight off.
And so you have to like do it for like a couple of years before they're like fine and they stop cutting your buoys. That's how you have to do it to get into it. Anyway, so lobster guy, but I'm like, oh, I always just bump my sandwich in Cape Cod. He's like, oh yeah. I was like, oh, we used to get lobster a lot.
And he goes, mud bugs. And that's all he said to me for the rest of the trip. Because the Cape Cod lobsters are mud bugs to him because he has the hard bottom. He was like, he wouldn't even deign to talk to someone who was eating Cape Cod lobsters, which is I'm sure how the Cape Cod people think about the sound. And then if you go up to Nova Scotia, where like the fourshoe lobsters are, they're like warm water mean lobsters are the worst.
Anyway, the snobbery among lobsters. And by the way, to me. Well, I mean, I don't know how angry like sound-based lobster people are. I don't know whether they're as hardcore as Maynard's, but yeah, you could probably find a place. I mean, like on the Cape, like they they put traps out, but um a lot of the big lobsters they get with diving.
So like if you go to Cape Cod, like out at the tip, there's places out near the tip near Provincetown, like Race Point, where it gets really deep really quickly. And so people go to those kind of places where there's a big drop off and they'll um dive down for lobsters. Um, but I don't know. Yeah, you could look it up. I mean, it's a thing.
I also don't know whether there's any regulations about putting traps in in public waters in the sound. But yeah, the short answer is yes. You could probably buy a trap, get a buoy, and if you figured out how to legally do it, you could kayak out, drop that sucker and get a lobster, which would be, I think, fun to do at least once, right? Yeah. Also pulling a lobster trap back up into a kayak with you is gonna be quite the experience, I think.
Are you are you saying that Nastasia doesn't have the freaking anger to get a lobster trap out of the water in a kayak? She's got the anger to power it, but then I don't know. You'd be gonna be up close and personal with this lobster. In a very tippy vehicle. I mean, but she can lean the other way.
I mean, I have faith in her. I'm gonna have to say, I have faith that Nastasia will get that lobster up. I have a faith that if there's a lobster in that trap, she will get it up. Like, come hell or high water. She will get that lobster.
Although, isn't it weird that the lobster photo I sent you? They the claw was still intact. So they didn't eat the meat and the whatever ate it, ate the tail, but not the claw. So are you a tail person or a claw person? I don't like lobster that much.
I only like lobster rolls. Wait, is it it? Okay, so you like lobster rolls. Uh cold, not hot. What's the difference?
Okay. So mayo is the mayo in Maine. Yeah. No. What?
And you live in Connecticut? It's Connecticut Roll all the way. Yeah. I like I like I like I like uh I like a warm lobster but uh with in butter, lobster, lobster butter. Like that's my that's my favorite.
And surprisingly, even though Chester, Connecticut is not anywhere near the sound, like I'm sure they didn't open this year because of COVID. They have a fantastic place that is just it's he's a teacher, and in the summer he runs the snack shack by Cedar Lake, which is um like the kind of local town recreational lake in Chester, Connecticut. Some of the best lobster roll of Connecticut style I've ever had. Amazing. My dream in life is to run a snack shack.
Like that is what I would want to do. This is attainable for you. Yeah, get buddy buddy with the guy from Chester. Maybe you can inherit. No, no, I need to be on I need to be on ocean.
But um, yeah. This is attainable. Nastasia, this is completely attainable. But yeah. Yeah.
You need a flat, you need a deep fryer and a flat top, and pretty much you're good to go. Right? And then Well, I think you're open whenever in the hell you want to be, because unlike a unlike a regular restaurant, it's not like if someone goes and the snack shack's closed today, they're like, Oh well. The snack shack's closed. Oh well, yeah.
And if they're if they're at the beach and the snack shack's open, they're like, I'm going to the snack shack. It's like ideal for you. Yeah. It's ideal. It's ideal.
I can see you kayaking up with your fresh lob fresh lobster catch. Yeah. Cooking up the one lobster roll you can make with your catch and then closing for the day. Yeah. And people are not upset by anything you serve them because it's it's just a bonus to the beach, you know.
It's just a freaking bonus. Right. So it's like it's like you can be as good as you want, but you don't have to feel pressure on it. Like, you know, you'll do a good job. I know you, you do a good job, but you don't have to be like that New York thing where it's like not only do you have to do a good job, but you have to have the appearance of doing a good job for everyone with their little with all their little mental gotsies that they have about like what a good job means in New York.
You know what I'm saying? And um, so like the yeah, I think maybe this is a I feel like we've you know gone to a breakthrough. This is what you should do. Snack shack. Like, let's make our next product.
Right. Let's make our next product. And I will make a snack shack. And you know, hopefully we make some money on the next product. We snack shack and you hang out.
And then you show up, and Nastasia will be sitting there, like pounding bubbly wine. She can't serve it to you because she doesn't have that license, but she'll be pounding bubbly wine. Wait, Dave, is it true that um you can't serve oh you can't serve alcoholic beverages on the beach, huh? I think it depends on the beach. You definitely can't have glass.
Most beaches don't, but it's like sometimes if you have restaurants, like there's demarcated areas where you can serve alcohol. But I'm just assuming that you don't have that license because that's a a gambocha to get that stuff. You just want to have a snack shack. Right. Yeah.
Right? I mean, you know what I mean? Uh oh, by the way, the blue lobster, I've never eaten one. It's also extremely fancy. Never had a blue.
I don't think they taste any different. It's just, I think a genetic thingamajig that makes them makes them blue, but they are more expensive. And lobster, as much as I love lobster and lobster rolls, lobster, second tier crustacean, I think. Crab. Oh, really?
Crab. I thought you were gonna say um the smaller things. Like what? Acrivise? Crayfish?
Yeah. No, that's like fifth tier. Like, look, I like I like the fl I like the flavor that of the water that crayfish are boiled in. But speaking of mud bugs, they're literal mud bugs. Like they live in fresh water, so they don't have like a lot of um like uh you know free peptides.
They don't need to. So like their flesh is like just not as flavorful, which is why they're and I love eating them. I love the action of just like ripping through all of those crayfish bodies, like I love it, just ripping through all those bodies. But like um, yeah, it tastes mainly about the the the boil, I think. This which is why when you cook a lobster, you cook it, you pull it, you eat it.
When you cook a crayfish, you cook it and you have to let it soak in that liquid forever, otherwise the thing is relatively tasteless. What do you think? I don't I don't have a lot of experience with crayfish. Shrimp as we eat them are good, but to me, like shrimp becomes a first-tier crustacean when you have the shell and the head, and you get that really crunchy head with the nice head goop, and you can suck that out. To me, that's top-tier crustacean action right there.
Whereas I don't like the head goop in a lobster. Anyway, so what do you mean gross? No, I'm sorry. Whatever's in the spinzall is gross. Oh, oh.
Oh, that's true. Yeah, so like, whatever, I'm not gonna get it. The spinzalls that that we have to wade through now, or I should say we, John is currently waiting through right now, are like what do you want to do to the people that that mail them back? Like really bad things. I can't believe people mail things back this way.
It's shameful. Uh I have no idea what uh how this is gonna work with our recording, but my internet connection just dropped for a second. Anyway, we have a uh fish question in the chat. All right, go for it. Corbin Fanning asks, how do you know which fish or any seafood for that matter you can eat raw?
The FDA guidelines make it seem like flash frozen frozen fish are the only safe thing, safe things to eat. How can this be true if sushi restaurants are varieties of fish and none of them look like they were frozen? Uh most fish in sushi restaurants has been prior prior, has been previously frozen. But like a lot of the freezing is done at kind of a really high level. There are different parasites that are associated with different um fish.
So, like, you know, um, some of which are merely gross. Like, I don't think you can get worms from cod in your own body, but they're just hard gross. That's why you don't see cod sushi, right, John? We were having this discussion the other day. I saw it once, yeah.
Yeah, well, you weren't you weren't happy about it. For those of you that have never handled raw cod, it's like it can be like wormaged. It's crazy, right? Um, so you know most fish are frozen that way. So we were talking, we had the Oracing salmon people on uh last year, and they just test theirs, don't and they don't uh freeze them, right?
But most of this stuff is frozen. It's certain fish are more susceptible to worms than others, especially uh fish that are um fish that are um carnivores, I think are more susceptible to a lot of these uh parasites, so most of them kind of are frozen. Um, as far as I know, but I could be wrong. Um so if you're catching your own fish, I mean, and you are gonna freeze them because you're worried about um parasites, uh, I would say the trick is is to get a is to freeze it as quickly as possible. So I would definitely do the salt ice slurry, zip it in a zippy, put it in and get it frozen very quickly.
This way you'll get less mushiness, you'll have a firmer fish, and you'll get less drip loss as it thaws. Do you think that answers the question, Matt, or no? Yeah, totally. My name is Brandon Hoy, co-owner of Roberta's. A super duper awesome place.
Robert's is a very, very, very, very proud sponsor of the Heritage Radio Network. We're also super awesome. Thank you, Heritage. All right. Luke Mezzar wrote in via email.
Uh, currently have an instant pot, uh, and I'm looking to potentially buy a Kuhn Recon pressure cooker to get that extra pressure. I actually have never measured because I don't own one, the pressure inside of an Instapot. But for some reason, all of the electric pots that I have measured are lower than 15 uh pounds per square inch. Why? I don't know.
I don't, I don't know what it is. I spoke to Nastasi and I actually once spoke to someone who is uh worked for a company that sold pressure cookers, electric pressure cookers, and he said to us, What do you need the extra pressure for? And we're like, because. Wasn't that what I said, Sas? I think it was something like that.
I was like, and if I want it, why not just give it to me? It cooks faster. Like things taste, so like when you're cooking at pressure, by the way, uh the blog uh Genuine Ideas, which I do actually love that blog, has a completely incorrect view of why pressure cooking, pressure cooking, one of the ways pressure pressure cooking is different from normal cooking. Um, the extra temperature you get will accelerate cooking quite a bit of things like collagen. So when you're trying to do a braise uh and you want to break down collagen quickly, like those extra psi are gonna make it happen faster.
For sure, right? Because it's going to cook at a higher temperature. But not only that, if you go on Cooking Issues blog, which still exists somewhere, and you look at the pressure cooking posts, you can see we made the same stock in pressure cookers at different pressures. And the higher pressure, which you know is equivalent to a higher temperature, you'll notice the stock is browner. And you're getting more of those brown cooked meaty notes.
So the as long as the meat, right, the meat in a pressure cooker at a higher pressure is going to taste richer than it otherwise would, more meaty, assuming it's non-venting. So I I would say that the Coon Recon is going to get to a higher temperature than the instant pot. Therefore, I would like it better. And also, they don't say this, you can overdrive a coon recon if you want. Um, because the Coon Recon goes to uh the there's a little spring do dad.
It goes up to first ring, which is theoretically five PSI. It goes up to the second ring, which is theoretically 15 psi, and then it keeps going up for almost another like half ring before it starts going whoosh. So you can get a little bit of extra out of it. And when I really need it to work, what I do is I just throw some towels on top of the knob to provide a little down pressure, and I can get a little even more PSI. So even though you're uh up there uh at you know a mile above sea level, I think it's worth an upgrade to go to something where you're actually manipulating the pressure with a valve rather than um manipulating it with a temperature sensor in the bottom of a pot.
What do you think? Answer? Was that answered or no? Yes. Yeah.
All right. Uh I thought I answered this, but I guess I didn't, Jerough Ann wrote in via Instagram. Love liquid intelligence. Thank you. Wondering if I could ask a question about one of the recipes.
I've tried the cognac and red wine egg wash. So this is what what I did was is that we're making a carbonated drink with red wine and cognac, and it was just too aggressive with the wood and the tannins in the wine. So you wash it with egg, and the egg protein binds to a lot of the polyphenols and the tannins and pulls them out. So it just lightens it up. So it makes it that once you make the drink and you carbonate it, it you know, it's not too aggressive.
Not too aggressive like Nastasi and I were with each other last night. Right? You like that? Um so it turned out amazing, but how long are you able to keep the booze mixture after you've egg washed it? Can you use it forever because the alcohol content, or will it go bad because of the egg?
Hope you're able to answer my questions. Kind regards, uh Joanne. So uh yeah, you can use it forever. And in fact, the longer you wait, uh more egg white protein will drop out. And when the egg white protein drops out and you decant, or if you buy a spinzole when they're back in stock and you spin it out, if you get more of that egg white out, uh it will be easier and easier to carbonate if you're carbonating.
So yes, it will never go bad. Uh in fact, look, most of these high alcohol things that have milk or eggs or whatnot in them, like um the longer they sit, the more stable they are, and so kind of like the quote unquote safer they are. Um but uh if you're using the the protein like the egg white or you're using like uh milk protein, if you're using that as a foaming agent, like in a shaken cocktail, that will dissipate because the proteins will aggregate usually over time and fall out of solution. Um Peter Flanagan writes in hello. Uh oh my God, so I can't go through this.
Peter Flanagan, write us any time. So a couple of uh episodes back, we were talking about uh scales. And I was saying that I bought a scale on the internets that is 30 kilogram scale by the 0.1 gram. And by the way, I love it. And I also have for Booker and Dax, because we're gonna be testing um Searsol soon, and I want to be very accurate about gas consumption.
I have a five kilogram that does by the 0.01 grams. And my question was why is it that I can get these scales? One is five kilos by the 0.1 gram, one is 10, one is 20, and one is 30 kilos by the 0.1 gram, all the same body, the same, like everything, same basically price, but like one costs a lot more. And uh and Peter went through all of the uh calculations about how many bits they would need in their um in their um analog uh to digital converter and says it's possible, and then gives me some reasons about why some might be cheaper, which someone else also wrote in a process called binning, where I have a bunch of equipment and I measure it, and I take the crappy stuff and I sell it to you as a derated item. So like the crappiest units get get made into the five kilogram scales and the best units get made into the 30 kilogram scales.
Uh and then I like the sign off, and he says, We have any more problems, refer it to the cooking issues metrology department or some other lab monkey. Hope this helps Peter. I wish we had some lab monkeys. How much do you think a lab monkey costs us? What do we pay John?
Oh, wow. No, I mean, like an actual. I want an actual monkey. I want an actual monkey. Did we talk about this before?
Like the very worst Christmas gift you can give someone is a rescue monkey. Is that a thing? I mean, like I was just trying to imagine what's the very worst thing you could get somebody as a Christmas gift. And it's like, surprise, it's a monkey that's so poorly behaved that a person who actually wanted a monkey gave it up, and now you have it and you didn't even ask for a monkey. It's gonna be flinging poop everywhere, it's gonna be screaming, it may be violent.
Rescue monkey, the worst gift. The worst. I can't regift it. What are you gonna do with a rescue monkey? Anyway, if you think of a worse gift, you let me know.
Uh Heather Chang wrote in what? You got one? Question from the chat about eggs. Sounds like cookie, kind of urgent. Uh quick quick question from Nathan Page.
What's the temp time for pasteurizing eggs with a circulator or some resources for reading up on it? I'm wanting to make cookie dough that is safe for my pregnant wife. Ah, I would do 57 degrees Celsius for uh an hour and 20 minutes. And you could do if you needed to do an hour and 40, you could do an hour and 40. Here's why the the 57, which is 135 degrees Fahrenheit, will kill salmonella.
Um you wanna, I forget, I don't have in my head right now the actual uh thermal death curve for salmonella, uh, thermal death curve in chicken, which is not the same as eggs, but eggs is actually gonna be easier to kill than in chicken because it's a 100% liquid phase. So whatever the curve for chicken is will work in um eggs as well. So I would uh and also push the old blog again. If you go to the Sous vide, low temperature primer in the cooking issues blog, I printed the at the time FSIS uh curves for thermal death curves for Salmonella, and you can trace them. Uh but I use 57 because while an egg uh will get slightly thicker at 57 if you cook it for a long time Celsius, it won't set, right?
And um, so I use 57. And it within 45 minutes, the center of the egg will be within a degree uh if you're using large eggs, within 45 minutes, the center of the egg will be within one to two degrees of 57, and then I will let it ride for however long the thermal death curve is. Uh but I would say that if you did an hour and a half, you're probably way more than safe, and then cool it down. And so that's the way that I would do it. It might be possible to do it at a lower temperature and get even less of a thickening on the egg, like you might be able to do a 55, uh, but I always do 57.
Um part of that is because I often used to have 57 degree baths around for other things, and so it was just easier for me to do 57 than anything else. And 57 is the kind of um the hottest uh temperature that you can just put your hand in and out of to get things without having to worry about it. Answer was a good answer. Did it work? It's a great answer.
Every time you say thermal death curve, I think I should start a noise rock project called thermal death curve. Uh I mean if that if that hasn't already been taken, you must do that. I would, even though that's not my style of music, I would totally, I would totally listen to that. I would. The best band when I was in college was this band, Kentucky Fried Doom.
They put uh what do you call those? Pareto or the they put the oh my god, the contact mics on a deep fryer, and during the show, they were like a doom metal band. During the show, they would mic the deep fryer and deep fry any item that you brought to the show, creating quite a smell in the place. It was what did people bring? I mean, they well, some people brought things that they actually wanted to eat, like you know, Oreos and whatever else.
Uh I mean, people definitely brought meat because meat is the thing that's gonna like stink up the room the most. No one like put their underwear into fryer. No, it had to be food. I I I think it was all food. Actually, don't I'm not clear on who owned this deep fryer.
And how did it sound? How did the mic sound? I mean, it was great. It was just like this crazy otherworldly burbling thing going through a bunch of processing. Yeah, yeah.
Oh I like that. Kentucky Fried Doom, huh? I'm I enjoy my Doom Kentucky Fried. Although if Popeyes came out with some Doom, I would definitely buy the Popeyes Doom over the Kentucky Fried Doom. Because Popeyes is the superior chicken, I think.
Yeah, well where are you Stas and John? Uh, do you have opinions on uh fast food fried chicken? You saw me eating it last night. Yeah, I did as well. Which one?
Popeyes? Yeah, nice. She she was eating the sandwich. She was on the sandwich train, which I have not had one of their sandwiches yet. I've heard it's a delicious sandwich.
I've heard nothing but good things about Popeye's sandwich. And I'll say, Wiley Dufresne, famous chef, my brother-in-law, at his wedding, he was like, You know what I'm gonna have at my wedding for my wedding food? Popeye's fried chicken. And that's what they had, Popeye's fried chicken. Popeyes catered Wiley's wedding.
That's amazing. Yeah, it was. And you know, you know what no one said? This food sucks. You know how like you're at a wedding and you're like, oh man, this food sucks.
Well, like, no one says that about Popeye's fried chicken. Just like a bunch of Popeye's fried chicken around, no one's like, oh man, these suck because Popeye's chicken is delicious. Anyway, that's my feeling. So Booker loves Popeye's chicken. And Dax also, of course, loves Popeye's chicken.
But because Dax and I, you know, whatever, like Dax and I always want the spicy, and Booker has got in his mind that he doesn't want the spicy. So then I forced him to taste some spicy the other the other day, and I was like, see, it's not gonna burn you. It's not like super spicy. And he was like, I think I might have converted Booker to being okay with the spicy. You guys are spicy, right?
You're not a you're not a mild Popeye, are you? Really? Have you had the spicy one, Sas? Yeah. Yeah.
Huh. Did I talk about 10 inch knives yesterday? Last time? Maybe. I don't think I did, but I think because you spoke to me about that, but yeah, not on the radio.
Yeah, I'll bring it up. So, like, uh, this is one of those things where I would have assumed and wrongly that like everyone had they had the spicy would choose spicy. But clearly, Nastasia, who knows what she likes, prefers the mild. And so, like, I have to re-uh re um, what's the word, re-uh calibrate my mind to see some people just like the mild one. Even it's not that Nastasia doesn't like spicy things, she just prefers the mild chicken, right, Stuz?
Right. So, so because I think like a lot of people have a a bad mental idea that just because somebody doesn't want something like this piece of chicken spicy, that they can't handle spicy things, which is not the case. I know that for a fact because I've seen Stas pound spicy food. Pepper flakes. Yeah.
But this what? Pepper flakes on our pizzas. Oh, hell yeah, man. Nastasi and I are like, we're like the, we're like the pepper people on pizza. Like when Nastasi and I show up to a pizza place and there's no pepper flakes, we're like, how am I supposed to eat this?
How am I supposed to eat this? And so like we instantly unscrew the thing because, and we have it's been a long time since we've talked about this. I want to find the idiot who made that pepper flake shaker and with the holes. Yeah, they don't. Yeah, it's it's insane.
It is insanity. It's done just to make you angry. It's like the person who designed that hates pepper flakes. That's what it is. They don't like pepper flakes.
And the roof one, there is a shape available that is fine for pepper flakes. So why does anyone have the one with the holes? I don't know. People, if you have the one with the holes, after you're done self-flagellating, get the one with the lines. It's the one with the lines that can do the pepper flakes.
That thing works fine. I uh we we don't have to unscrew the one with the lines, right, Stas? No. No. But they don't have them at Robertas, but we also don't go there anymore.
Well, yes, we're not we're no longer they yes, we no longer get our our pizza, but we used to just go unscrew that thing and just dump it. I I mean I use an inordinate amount of uh although you know what I've been doing now, uh I have a whole bunch of that uh Calabrian like uh Calabrian chili in oil. I've been like slathering that on pizza. That actually is spicy. You can put an infinite amount of pepper flakes on, and until they hydrate, they're not gonna kill you with spice.
But if you like go like completely ballistic with the Calabrian chili and oil, you will you will eventually feel it as spicy. You know what I mean? Anyways, you like those collabrian chili sauce? Mm-hmm. Yeah.
And they're good. You should get to some questions. All right. Heather uh Chang writes in this is Heather, bartender from Hong Kong. Uh recently I'm trying to create a corn flavored cocktail without infusing slash modifying the spirit itself.
I tried to, oh my God, we have such a long line of failed corn cocktails, right, Stas? Oof. Remember that corn spirit? Yeah, it was called like thunds or something like that. Was it called?
I don't remember. Oh, corn corn hole. Cornhole? It was called something. I don't know.
It was like anyway, uh, without modifying the spirit. I tried to blend the corn uh centerfuse, uh centrifuge it to get the juice, then clarify with agar agar. So pectanex doesn't work for corn clarification, but the outcome was still not very clear. Can I ask, do you have anything in mind that I can extract the flavor of corn and clarify it the best without infusing alcohol itself? Thanks.
Yeah, once you blend corn and you get that starch in it, you're not gonna get that starch out. Like you could let it sit forever and it will eventually like settle out, but it just takes forever. What what we used to do if we wanted things that were clear is we would get freeze dried corn and then just soak it for a long time and you get a kind of a soaked flavor, and then it doesn't throw off a lot of um starch. But as soon as you blend it, like pretty much your toast. But if the if you get the freeze-dried one, you can make like a corn tea with it.
Uh your yield won't be great, but it'll be clear. Does that make sense? Yeah. Uh Jason Dalio wrote in, Dave, love the podcast. Sorry to hear about your bar.
Me too. Would turning a toaster on its side work for reheating pizza slices? Jason, you are a lunatic. You're a lunatic, Jason. Like what kind of toaster?
So like the he included a picture with them. That's my fault for not including it in there. It's like the two-sided toaster with a spring, you know, you push it down, it pops up. Yeah. So the toaster was on its side.
Yeah, yes. Genius. Yeah. It works. So, well, here's the thing the crust on your pizza is rather high compared to a slice of bread.
So if you have one of these vertical toasters that's designed to do a bagel, so it has the it has the betel cr bagel cradle thing, then what's gonna happen is the bagel cradle will come down and hit the crust. God help you if that thing starts going into the cheese, right? The other the other problem you're gonna have is that a pizza slice, the average, now I'm going to the standard, like God pre-ordained large pie eight-slice pizza American style, right? That wedge kind of is not gonna fit all the way into a toaster. So you're gonna have to do halves anyway.
And as soon as that thing starts getting uh down there, especially on the reheat, I'm a little worried about the tip flop. So toaster grates aren't necessarily very, very closely spaced. And if you get tip flop down into your toaster thing, you're gonna get some serious scorching. You're also gonna have to worry about cheese drip. And so, I mean, if you had something black to it's because you're not supposed to have to clean the side of a toaster, right?
Like usually the the crumb tray is in the bottom. So you you're gonna have an opportunity to make quite a bit of smoke. And the at least in the old style toasters that I had, they use uh a resistance heating wire that is pretty much exposed. So it's a fragile and b electrically live. This is why you you know, when you go at a toaster with a fork, your parents would be like, what are you doing?
Get that fork out of the toaster. What are you raising? Like that. You know what I mean? Because like they can be electrically live.
So just be careful, but you know, if it fits, I mean you're gonna heat your pizza up for sure. I mean, what do you what do you think, John? I like to imagine that this person is sitting in a kitchen that has like a microwave, an oven, maybe even a toaster oven, but he's like, that toaster, that toaster is the thing. Yeah, well, I appreciate that. I mean, uh, Stas and I haven't seen the picture.
Stas, you haven't seen the picture, right? So we don't know what it looks like. I is that the one I forwarded to you, John? I think so. Yeah, I just got that this morning, right?
Yeah. And what do you think, Stas? You think it's a good idea or a bad idea? Um, I mean, Dave, it looks exactly like you'd imagine it to look like. With a bag with a bagel holder?
I think so, yeah. Yes, I did. Listen, listen, Jason, don't burn your house down. And if you do burn your house down, we told you not to burn your house down. All right.
Uh yeah, you heard it here. Thomas O'Connor wrote in uh hey, my name is Thomas, fan of your book. Uh I'm fascinated uh by uh so much. I'm slowly trying out the techniques starting with uh fast infusion with uh nitrous. Uh I've got an EC whipper and uh want to create sustainable drinks and food, hopefully taking the pulp from my Sous V strawberry and cream syrup uh into infused vodka, looking at your ratios.
I'd only need one charge for a 500 milliliter whipper, but what weight would you think would be suitable for pulp strawberries? Oh my God. Uh I can't, as then as with your jalapeno tequila, you suggest 45 grams of jalapeno. But jalapeno, look, in a jalapeno infusion, like you get a lot of flavor out of a little bit of a jalapeno. Think about how you're cooking with think about like when you're gonna sit down and eat strawberries, think of how many strawberries you're gonna eat.
When you're gonna sit down and eat jalapenos, think of how many jalapenos you're gonna eat. The bowl of strawberries is gonna be a lot bigger, right? So to get the same kind of flavor impact uh that you want out of strawberries is gonna take, I think, significantly more strawberries than it would take if you were gonna do uh hot pepper, right? Um it's hard for me to say with certainty, like every single so the technique we're talking about is rapid infusion, where you take a porous item. Uh so you gotta make sure the strawberry is still porous, right?
So if you've already made a syrup with it and it's you know a solid or collapsed or it's pulp or puree, then quick infusion is not really gonna help you anymore. Quick infusion's only gonna help if you have a whole fruit, veg, leaf, or spice that, or even if it is broken up, that is still porous because what's happening is is that the pressure is forcing the liquid into the food. And then when you release it, it's bubbling back out again. So, you know, anything else, you're you're really just trying to marry and clarify, which is more of you know something that you would either use agar clarification or a centrifuge for. But agar clarification with liquor, um, I don't like it as much because it tends to strip a lot of the flavor uh out of the booze.
I have done it, but it tends to water it down more. So I apologize that I can't give a ratio because all of those recipes were done just by testing and figuring out kind of what worked. Um, but to get flavor, it's usually more than you'd think. Uh the one of the exceptions is jalapeno's where you don't need that much to get the flavor you want. Um Jeremy Brainerd wrote in uh, hey, after burning through another standard non-stick pan, I decided to try carbon steel.
I tried seasoning the pan twice, but both times the seasoning seems to come off after just cooking some scrambled eggs with butter in the pan first. Do you have a good uh bulletproof/slash idiot proof method for applying uh a good seasoning uh that will last? Also, somewhat related side rant. When referring to heat uh on a cooktop, what is medium heat? Every burner is different.
You are correct. You're correct, Jeremy. Uh, medium heat is meaningless. Um I I like to think of it this way: low heat is I can walk away from it and ain't nothing bad gonna happen. Medium heat is bubba bubba bubba, and high heat is if I walk away from this pan, it's gonna start smoking.
I gotta watch out, which by the way, Dax did this morning, completely smoked out our whole house. He uses our not he uses our cast irons and he just cranks that sucker until it's like a freaking locomotive billowing smoke out of it. What does he make? Like, he like first he cooks like these bacon, egg, and cheese sandwiches for himself, which I applaud. But he cooks bacon.
I have so like you know how like uh at like uh a cheap steakhouse or like at a fajita place, you have those like oval cast iron skillets that you can just throw in the salamander, like you could put them on the on the stove, you could put them on a on a you know in an oven on on top of the range, or you could throw them in a salamander, you know what I'm talking about? Those oval ones with the handles, and then you put them on the wood, you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. So we have a bunch of those.
And Dax uses that to cook the bacon. I'm like, yo, dingus, like you're like grease is going everywhere, and then like lighting on fire. I don't know why. I've trained him, I've tried to tell him a million times, like the eggs don't want to be cooked that hot, you crazy guy. But still he anyway, whatever.
He persists. Uh so anyway, so you're correct. Medium heat uh has no meaning. Perhaps we should think of a better way to talk about it. That's a good uh project to think about.
Um, but back to your problem. Um when you're getting uh carbon steel, I think carbon steel is probably gonna take longer to fully season up than uh like a polished actual steel pan, old school, than cast iron simply because it's less porous than the cast iron, but it will eventually uh season. I would do the oil wipe, oven, oil wipe, oven, oil wipe, oven, oil wipe, oven until it is black enough for you to not worry about, and then it's still gonna stick for a while. Oil wipe, oil wipe, oil wipe, and eventually it'll start getting good. Um I don't have any like straight steel pans.
John, did you ever have to season those when you were doing your uh French e restaurant stuff or no? No, I did I did not do that. No. Yeah, but but there I I mean, like I did have to season a piece of uh regular black steel for a project I was doing, and yeah, it's just oil and heat for a long time. Uh, and it's gonna make some smoke.
Um, just keep doing it. It it'll work. Don't scrub it afterwards. I mean, that's the thing. Like, just use um uh like a Scotchbrite, like, and don't go too crazy uh at first, because you're really just polymerizing that oil and making a layer, and you gotta get and you don't want to go too thick on the oil because then it gets kind of gloppy, and that's no good.
No one no one likes a gloppy seasoning. Um Alexander Teilgard wrote in. I how is that pronounced? I wonder how you pronounce that. G-A with the aw sound over it.
Hmm, I don't know. Man, someone tell me. Uh hey gang, I'm a bartender from Norway. Never been to Norway, always wanted to go to Norway. Um, who any of you guys ever been to Norway?
No. No, not yet. I would like to go to Norway. Uh I'm a bartender from Norway who only discovered your great show a few weeks ago, and I love it. Have a few questions.
Uh both the book Liquid Intelligence and the Show has made me wanting a rota vap. However, they are far beyond my budget. Yeah, they are, they're expensive. Um, I came I came over some way cheaper options. Um this one's from AliExpress uh online.
They just say vacuum distillation. Um, can this be put together for a budget replacement for a rotovap? I'm mostly interested in doing reductions. If so, what kind of pump is recommended for creating negative pressure? How would a setup with a good pump uh an immersion circulator for heat compared to a real rotovet?
All right. So um you also asked about red hop okay, but let's look at the roto vap first. If you're mostly worried about reductions, then you don't really, really care about the distillate, then you can do almost anything you want. So you need a magnetic stir bar, you want to go pretty quickly uh with a hot plate, and then you need some form to suck a vacuum and you need uh a condenser just to condense the liquid out. But because you don't care about the flavor of the liquid because you're doing reductions, it you don't need to be that great.
You don't need a really, really good condenser, and you can frankly condense at a much higher temperature, right? So you could use tap water or ice water, and it won't be a problem. Uh for pumps, uh, because you are going to try to do kind of a hard reduction, you're gonna need a very good vacuum pump if you want your temperatures of your product to stay low, and you're gonna have to handle a lot of vapor, and uh you're also gonna be um letting liquids through your pump. All of that means that the little weenie diaphragm pumps that people sell and little piston pumps people sell are not gonna do it for you. What I would do is there's some very inexpensive refrigeration vacuum pumps.
Get a big one, you know, big, they're still only weigh like 15 pounds, but you can get them for like between 60 and 200 US, and um they're allowed, you want to buy a filter. So I don't know in Norway, in the US, we have something called McMaster Car, where you can get um like industrial things, and one of the things you're gonna want to do is get a muffler, and they're basically they're just they're literally like they screw onto the output of your vacuum pump, and they are A, they muffle the sound, make it a lot quieter. They're cheap, they're like 10 bucks. Uh, but also they're gonna stop the oil because these are oil pumps, the oil mist from going out into your kitchen, which is something you don't want to have happen. But if that's what you're looking to do, um that should work fine.
You know, really the super expensive roto vap becomes more important when you care about the distillate instead of the reduction. Does that make sense? Was that a good answer? Yeah. Uh also we gotta go pretty soon.
Uh all right, hold second. So uh also wondering about the red hot poker, I want to make one. I've ordered cartridge heaters. Oh man. Listen, um I I like the A people making a red hot poker.
The reason I didn't include instructions in the book on how to make a red hot poker, I just kind of showed what it was, is because if any of it goes wrong, I don't think it's gonna hurt. You can get hurt doing it. Like, so if you do something wrong and you get like a cartridge heater that's not made for what you're doing, or it's not can't handle what you're doing because none of them are made for what you're doing. You can get little molten metal blibs and you can get like uh electricity going into your drink. So you have to make sure you have GFIs and um, you know, you to be a little bit careful with what you're doing, but the longevity of a red-hot poker is also so short that you know, unless you're doing it for a living or you're really dedicated, it's a pain in the butt.
So I hesitate to give out what I did exactly or what I do exactly because I think it's just gonna be a heartache, and I don't want to be in the position of putting someone there. Um, so it's kind of like you need to do the experimentation to kind of figure out what works for you. Is this making sense what I'm saying, guys? I mean, I like it's in other words, I I I I hate giving out things and then having them either hurt people or having people be disappointed because they think they can follow a set of instructions I've given and it doesn't work. You know what I'm saying?
I mean, I thought the greatest risk of fire or injury was gonna be the toaster thing, but here we are at Red Hot Poker, so we're really doing it this episode. Yeah, yeah, right. Uh all right. So listen. Oh, oh um, there's, by the way, I have I missed three or four questions.
We'll get to you. We have a show next week, right, Sas? John's not here. It's just you and me. Oh, joy, joy, joyous.
Uh, all right. So I'll get to the rest of the questions I didn't get to. We had a backlog because we had an awesome classics in the field. Uh and I think uh those guys uh at uh Kitchen Arts and Letters, they did they make their goal, right? They definitely did, yes.
Yeah, all right. Remember, support Kitchen Arts and Letters, support your local uh bookstore, but even if they're not your local bookstores, support specifically Kitchen Arts and Letters. Uh Stas, John, Matt, you got anything else on the way out? What's up? Nah.
All right. Uh, John, have a good vacation. Remember, get your get your uh customer service questions because next week there will be no customer service. Cooking issues. Cooking issues is powered by Simplecast.
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