This episode is brought to you by WisTale. Ever wonder how winning brands like Shake Shack, Chopped, and Torchies Tacos scale their business and train employees, all while delivering an exceptional customer experience? They do it with WisTale. Learn more at Wisetale.com. This week on Meet and Three, we have stories about food in large quantities.
From bulk buying groups and reasons for stocking up to creative solutions for handling excess waste. We have someone picking up our corks from the wine bottles, and they repurpose them to make buoys for boats and and and like shoes and all these different things. Yeah, because of the COVID, uh, everybody like uh isolated home. Bad to see the people. Face to face is too exciting.
So we kind of would treat it like a chance to say hello to the people and to the friend. Listen to Meet and Three, HRN's weekly food news roundup wherever you get your podcast. This is Dave Arnold, your host of cooking issues coming to you live from New Lab and brrrrrrr. Just saying that because you know I'm doing it from Brooklyn, so I get to say Brooklyn again. Uh excellent.
Yeah, yeah. Nastasia the hammer lopez uh with us today, the last time for a long time in uh Stanford. Yep. Yeah. Yeah, how you doing?
Uh you're gonna you uh you're going over to the other coast there for uh you're gonna do the quarantining family potting thing over there, huh? Yeah, it seemed like the right thing to do. It's exciting though, right? Yeah, I'll get to it. Get to see a different place.
Show still, but it'll be a nice to people. Get to see people, can't wait. Yeah. Well, you want to switch to later? No.
Yeah? No. No. I you know. So doesn't matter what time she goes to bed.
Yeah. With different reasons though. Like, doesn't matter what time you go to bed, right? You're just like, boom, you're up. Yes.
We have uh Matt and his Rhode Island Heidi Hole. How you doing? Indeed. I'm doing great. Yeah.
And uh John is also at New Lab, but uh our membership isn't cool enough to let us get two different rooms. So he is uh in like a main space, and I didn't go hyper loud on my uh on my intro, and I didn't do the full thing because I don't know how much people can hear me outside of this little box, and the box I'm in is like heavy on reverb, so I feel like a 50s musician. Like I feel like um boy, I feel I'm not gonna do any like 50s style like crooning stuff, but I definitely feel like I don't know, like I'm in Sun Records, like without the heat and without me being cool, that's how I feel in terms of the reverb levels. You know what I mean? It's like definitely Elvis levels of reverb in here.
Anyway. Um I mean, you might as well it's gonna make the rest of the show sound bad. So you might as well do like some nice singing or something at the top to make use of it. Well, that's the thing. I don't know, like people can still hear me out here.
It's just like mega reverb. It's like uh why does reverb make everyone sound better, Matt? In terms of singing. I don't I don't know, but I thought this is don't they isn't this like audio engineer 101 stuff, like what the reverbs for? Well, like I but I but I don't know why we perceive it.
I mean, I think uh it just softens things, I guess. So like you I don't know. I don't know why everybody prefers it that way. I don't know. Is it when you mess up the tone it just kind of averages it or that was kind of what that was my instinct was that yeah it like helps protect the listeners' ears from your bad technique is my guess yeah I mean I there's only so much of that stuff I can listen to the that like 50s like heavy heavy reverb stuff it's like there's only so much of the stereo tricks from the 70s and 60s that I can tolerate you know what I mean when I'm listening in earphones Stas you do that doesn't bother you right the stereo crap doesn't bother you no it doesn't not at all even on headphones yeah yeah like when they're doing that dumb thing where they sit there and they pan back and forth between the your two ears you're not like oh quit it yeah yeah I'm like quit it quit it you know what I mean you found a way to yell do extra yelling you gotta get your mind to work on that room you know that's the same way with uh like you know you listen to Mozart and you get all the like too many of those like little trilli things you're like stop no I'm the only guy it's only me all right uh I saw someone today my favorite thing for those of you that don't know me uh I I don't like umbrellas I'm fine with people using umbrellas but in New York the umbrella the big umbrella out when it's not raining is like a a severe hazard to my eyeballs Stas you're you're with me on this right yes especially if it's just like sprinkling oh yeah yeah and also like for those of you that don't know, like we have laws in New York that they have to do facade repairs so that people don't die from bricks falling and whatnot.
And so, like at any one time, there's so much scaffolding up at New York in New York because the old buildings, you have to put scaffolding up to protect the people on the ground while they're doing all of this work on the facades that they need to do that's mandated by law. And the the end result is there's just a lot of scaffolding around New York. And people walking under the scaffolding with umbrellas, man, man. So that pits me off. What about you, Stas?
Yes, bad. Yeah, really bad. So it was raining today in New York, and I'm assuming also in Stanford. Um, but it what like it kind of stopped raining, and you're in that point where it's not really raining, and all those idiots still have their umbrellas up, right? I don't know whether this Nastasi probably knows where I'm going.
So I'm sitting here and I had to drive here because I had to bring a bunch of stuff to New Lab for the new Sears all project that we're working on, which Stas will tell me exactly what I'm allowed to say and what I'm not. And I walked in, I was driving in, I was in traffic, and I saw a big gust of wind and three people at the same time, umbrellas inside out. And I was like, yeah, yeah. I love seeing someone's umbrella get turned inside out, don't you? I don't think I experience it the same way you do.
You don't the same way, not the same way. I wish I did, it sounds great. Well, it's like, uh look, listen, I don't want people to think that I'm happy that other people are unhappy. It's just like, you know, when you see somebody, I don't know, and they're doing something that you know that if you were walking next to them, you would get poked in the eye, or they would drip some crap on your head, even though you just have a hood on, so you're not taking up any more physical space on these New York City sidewalks, then you absolutely have to take and excuse me, oh sorry, and they're sitting there with this giant umbrella, and when a big gust of wind comes, it goes POW and knocks it inside out, you're like, all right. No, yeah, no, it makes sense.
In the context of New York City where umbrellas like should just be illegal uh because they're too dangerous. It makes sense. It's the thing, it's like the look, I'll say this also about New York City. So, like um biking in New York City during the corona time has been relatively joyous. Now, I don't have you know my real bike, so I am riding city bikes, which are you know kind of a nightmare, but like the people who are in New York have been by and large like New Yorkers or people who are used to driving in New York, and the bike traffic has actually been lower than it is normally.
So biking has been relatively stress-free. And now it is true, and I've mentioned this, uh, you know, part of biking in New York is to get some of your frustration out because you have to kind of be on point all the time because people are trying to kill you, and you have to worry about pedestrians stepping out in front of you, and blah blah blah. But I like I'm getting a little remember last week I couldn't figure out anything good to do in New York? Yes. Yeah, well, I still haven't, don't worry about that.
But but my point is that uh my point is that I feel that more people are coming back into New York because we have a lot more amateurs on the street than we used to, because the like uh on like a couple of days ago, I was out on the bike, and I haven't been almost killed by a car for like months, right? And two times in one ride, I had people like zooming around, taking the left and trying to kill me. You know what I'm talking about? Yeah. And uh part of it is because the um part of it is because now that we have all of the street dining, it's still kind of ad hoc, and so people are double parking in the place where the left turn lanes are supposed to be.
And so then people just zipping around the left turn and driving through a bike lane and trying to kill you. But uh anyway, so that's my sign that New York is uh New York is coming back, that I almost got I'm I am much more likely to get killed on my bicycle now. So that's uh it's good news, right? Things are looking up. Yeah, things are looking up, you know.
Uh all right, so uh let me get to uh the questions. Um we're working on a lot of new stuff for you guys. When I say a lot of student new stuff, like two two and a half new things in terms of Booker Index. And so uh John and I were sitting here, we had to take our machine shop course. So we're a little bit, you know, right, John?
We're a little bit behind in terms of getting ready for the show because we were uh learning how to program the local CNC machine, uh, which was fun. John, did you have a good time doing that? Yeah, definitely need about excited to be able to use the machine. Yeah, so I will say this, and we can talk about this. So uh, as you all know, the spinzall, the culinary centrifuge is uh out of stock uh because the factory won't uh hasn't you know agreed to make them yet.
So we're trying to do it. But John and Nastasia and I are working on uh a new way that we don't have to have that uh solenoid interlock system because that's one of the things that people kept on breaking. So one of the exciting things is we're gonna try to get rid of that on the on the next go around. For those of you that don't know what I'm talking about, ignore. And also uh if you've had a problem with a spinzall where the lights flash because it goes into imbalance mode, uh, we're fixing that too.
So if this doesn't mean anything to you, ignore it, right John yeah and if your bearing breaks in your lid hopefully it will make it replaceable yeah yeah yeah we're gonna try to we're trying to fix all of the stuff that like could have gone wrong in a generation one unit now that we've had this big pause where the factory basically forgot how to make them and they're learning from scratch we're trying to use that to our advantage to try to change some of the things that we didn't uh we didn't enjoy now one of the vagaries of building things is that uh you know there's things that they won't change like the t the way that this works is that when you say you're gonna make something at a factory they do a what's called make a tool for injection molding and it's a big hunk of I believe aluminum for us big hunk of it and that's all machined out so like to change something in the tooling if you need to do something minor it's not a problem but if you need to actually throw away that that big tool and make a new one that's a complete nightmare right stuzz huge nightmare yes huge nightmare huge you would not believe what kind of a nightmare that is uh we're not allowed to talk about the other stuff right says no soon though yep we might have something to talk about as it gets closer to the Thanksgiving time we'll know in like a week or two right yeah all right uh and we're and by the way John you don't know this we haven't mentioned this but uh we're gonna make your life a living hell oh swell right right stuff not like it is now you know which is all peachy right well it no but we're adding another layer. We add another layer. It's another layer of hell. It's like, remember, there's seven circles. And we're nowhere near Judas getting his leg chewed off in in the pit.
You know what I mean? Like we're nowhere near there. Like, I would say that right now, we're not like at that. You guys read Dante's Inferno ever? A while ago.
Well, you know how like the first level of hell is not really hell. It's just kind of like where all the Greeks hang out because they, you know, they didn't have baptize uh baptism, so Christ couldn't have saved them, but they're not really in hell, they're just kind of chilling in the Elysian Fields era uh area. You familiar with this? Uh-huh. I would say that John, in terms of Booker and Dax, John isn't quite that high up.
He's not like at that kind of like, you know, like he's not chilling with Plato and Socrates up there in the Legion fields, but he's definitely nowhere near Judas getting his leg chewed off all the time. Nowhere near. So, yeah. You got a good number of pits to descend to, John. That's that's so good.
I'm so excited. Yeah. Okay. Uh all right. So uh I'm a little disappointed in the cooking issues crew because Serena wrote in uh last week on on email and said, Do I have any recommendations for the Dallas Fort Worth era uh uh area?
Because she's moving there and we have not heard anything from you guys. And I'm sure that there is someone who is hearing us who has been to Dallas Fort Worth and gone out to a good uh bar and or restaurant in Dallas. Does does uh do Chad and Christy still have a bar open in in uh in in Dallas? They they did. I haven't spoken to them in a while.
If their place is still open, anything Chad uh Chad and Christie do is uh great. So check that out. But uh we'll figure it out. Uh all right. Also, uh Matt Collins wrote in last week uh asking about uses for dried camel milk.
And uh I am I apologize, Matt. I have not come up with any good uses for camel milk, but I did go to a website that was pushing uh camel milk. They didn't have any compelling reasons why you should want camel milk. They're like, it's milk and it's from a camel. What more do you want to know?
And I'm like, well, they're like, it tastes like milk, but like from a camel. I'm like, well, that's not really helpful. I've had camo milk cheese. It was uh fine, right? Have any of you guys had any camel milk products?
Camel's milk cheese once, but I think that's about it. And then what was your memory of it? I was okay. I mean, I'm glad I tried it, but I don't know if I'd get it again, yeah. But I don't know, yeah.
I had the same uh thing with it. I would try it again. I mean, I would eat it. Like pretty much most cheeses, if someone puts them out. You know what the one cheese that I've never gotten my, it's not even really cheese, the one cheese I've never learned to really, really enjoy.
Yay toast. Don't love it. You guys familiar with the yay toast? No. No.
It's that, so like I had a I had a uh a trauma with it when I was a child. So it's you know, a Scandinavian uh uh whey-based, hue, hui-based cheese, where um you make the whey-based block, believe it's whey-based, and then you cook the whole thing until it goes brown all the way through. It becomes sweet and it's brown all the way through, and you slice it off in like these, like you're supposed to, I think, chip it off and then like heat it on things like in these kind of thin slices. So when I was a kid in the 70s, like any cheese that was that color was a smoked cheese. So like you know, like when I was a kid, it's like you had real cheeses, and then you just had that whole section of the quote unquote cheese area at wherever you were buying them, where it was all of those the equivalent of smoked gouda.
You guys know what I'm talking about? That like that color, that smoked, you know what I'm talking about, or no? No. Yeah. All right, so like for maybe for you, Nastasia, like a a smoked skamorza, like that color, you know what I'm saying?
Where it's like it's got it's got like a pellicle on the outside, it's smoked colored. This is what yay toast looks like. So I buy it, or I have my mom buy it because whatever, I'm seven or eight, and and we bring it home. I'm all excited because I think I'm having some sort of like weird Scandinavian smoked thing. And then when we slice in to get a big piece, I realize that's not a skin, it's that color all the way through.
And then I take a bite of it and it's like real dense and like kind of real dense and fudgy. And I was just like, this is not cheese, I hate this, this is the worst, I hate this, I hate this, I hate this. And then I have not been able to. I should now, as an almost 50-year-old man, like just go on a yay toast, which I think how you pronounce it, G J, whatever, however you pronounce that. I need to go on like a thing where I'm like, I I need to like learn to love it.
I've tried that with the only other thing, melons, obviously, I don't like except for watermelon, but that you know is just me. I haven't been able to get myself to like natto. Have any of you been able to get yourself to like natto? No. And you had already left Japan on that.
Were you you were you there for the breakfast when they made me the Nato, which I actually enjoyed because basically you couldn't taste the natto as all the other stuff was so delicious, or had you already left Japan? I had already left. Yeah. Anyways. Yeah, I don't know.
So camel's milk cheese was not like that. If it was in front of me, I would eat it. Is there any cheese that you guys wouldn't eat? I don't like blue cheeses. Any blue cheese?
No. Hmm. Okay. John. I can't think of anything.
I mean, again, like not a huge fan of the camel's milk cheese, but I, you know, like I'm not gonna seek it out again before it was put in front of me, I'd probably either. Yeah. Matt. Uh, I also don't really do the blue, the moldy cheese, the blue cheese. But you know.
Yeah. And that's any of those blue cheeses. Uh, I mean, I'll try them, but I just I don't actually like go for it. Also, Chef Joanna, what is she saying in the chat? Something about live maggot cheese.
Where'd that window go? Uh, I've never had that. I've never had that, but uh my my the only person I know who has actually had it is dead. It's my stepfather's, you know, father, you know. Umnected.
And like, no, no, no, no, no. They're not connected, but I'll never forget, like, you know, when he so, you know, when he went back to uh he went to tour Italy uh sometime in the 80s, um, because he had actually never been there, which is strange. He went back to the town where his family was from and all this other stuff, you know, where his dad was born. And uh, and someone there broke open uh the big cheese and there was the maggots, and he was like, Yeah, and they just took the bread and they were like pop up and they they picked it all up and they and they ate it. And he would tell he would say that like constantly.
And so like it always stuck in my head, even as a kid, that there was this thing that existed, but I've never I've never had it. I mean, I would find it difficult to enjoy it. I mean, I would have to try it, but I would find it difficult to enjoy it. Um about you guys. I think I could do it.
I don't know. I got a bunch of other if I could do it. Some might be a good one. On the line do this. I don't know.
Like the other one that's weird is there is a there's a cheese that comes from right near the um Austrian uh Italian border, uh, where they take that's uh uh something similar to Quark, which is a soft cheese, and then they just incubate it with cheese mites, and then it isn't like a mimelet where there's like a hefty mite layer, it's mites all the way through. It's just mites. Cheese mites only, only cheese mites. Uh I forget the name of it, uh, but uh I would eat that before I would. I I would take a big old bite of cheese mite cheese because I eat cheese mites constantly.
You know what I mean? Like I like cheese mite doesn't bother me, but it's like uh I would probably like in in order, I would do the cheese mite cheese way before I would, you know, with gusto pound a you know a whole bunch of the Maggati cheese, you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. Also, I missed I missed what this was in response to, but 91 Alex is in the chat saying Norwegian here, you are definitely not supposed to heat Brunost.
Or that's how you pronounce it? I have no idea how to do it. What are you supposed to do with it? Ask him what the hell you're supposed to do with it. How do I learn how to like this stuff?
Help me out. What are we supposed to do with this? Alright, so we'll wait for him to get back. And so then I will uh the reason I was going, the reason this was a good segue from uh Chef Joanna with the Mike with the uh maggot cheese is on the blue cheese. I know Nastasia hates conceptually, I won't even say the S word, mold mold in general, right?
Is is it part of that or is it the taste or both? It's the taste. It's more the taste, yeah. Same. Alright, right.
Yeah, all right. Yeah, because you don't mind, you don't mind like a uh uh a moldy layer on the outside of your salumi, right? So that's right. Yeah, yeah. All right, all right.
Uh all right, cool. And I can't ask Matt that because uh he doesn't eat salumi. Uh do not. Yeah. Although, when did it become that we as a group of people here would use the word salumi instead of what I grew up with was cold cuts.
You gonna get a cold cup platter? Yeah, I'm gonna get a cold cup platter. You know what I'm saying? Anyway. Uh okay, wait, we got two.
We got two uh people from Scandinavian countries weighing in here. All right, let's give it to me. In Sweden, we use Brnost slash Messost as a spread on sandwiches, and then 91 Alex comes back with uh I'm I'm so sorry about all this pronunciation. Uh guy ghetos, guytast just means goat cheese, brunost brown cheese is what it's called. I don't like it myself, but people he just put it on their bread with butter and often some sort of jelly like strawberry or raspberry.
Yeah, it's just not for me. That's also like are are you guys cream cheese and jelly people? No. Yeah, it's okay. Yeah.
I mean, I can eat it. I can eat it, but I'm never like, you know what I really want to do? I want to get a bagel and cream cheese and some jelly. It's like I also don't eat cinnamon raisin bagels. I mean, I will eat a cinnamon raisin bagel.
I'm not saying that I find it repellent, but uh, but you know, like a I I have not had a cinnamon raisin bagel in probably 20 years. You guys are you sweet baking? My wife gets like egg and cheese sandwiches on cinnamon raisin bagel, and I just think that's scandalous. That's perverse. Yeah.
That's perverse. If I had known it before we got married, I mean. It would have been a that's a that's over. Yeah. No.
Egg and cheese on cinnamon raisin, huh? Hey, look, to each their own. The one thing I'm learning is that, you know, there's a in in life, there's a lot of different opinions out there. What do you think about uh cinnamon raisin, egg and cheese, Stas? I could do it.
Yeah? Would you enjoy it or would you just be able to do it? I'd enjoy it. Alright. And do you like a cinnamon raisin bagel in in general?
Yeah, yeah. Now, a cinnamon raisin bagel, here's the thing. So, like, is there a difference with a cinnamon raisin bagel over what kind of style you like? Stas, you're more of a puffy bagel person, right? Not a not a hard, yeah.
So I think like if you're a puffy bagel person, I think you're more likely to like a cinnamon raisin bagel because I think a cinnamon raisin bagel probably shows better in a puffy bagel style. Yeah. It's a guess. Uh all right. So, by the way, I haven't heard anything that's gonna make me run out and get this brown cheese and like, because like none of that stuff is stuff that I would normally do.
I guess you also have to slice it real thin. Someone's gotta get get back to me on the brown cheese thing of some reason why we should uh we should be doing it. Alright. Uh now, uh Brian Cottie wrote in. Uh Cotty?
Isn't it Brian Crady? I don't remember. Did you get that off the email right? Anyway. Uh hey David, the crew, love the show.
Looking to make chewing gum with juniper flavor. My goal is to eventually make a gin and tonic gum inspired by the three-course dinner gum from Willie Wonka. Well, if it's inspired by the three-course dinner, you gotta have three different cocktails in it. Three different cocktails. Can't do one, right?
And the I don't know whether anyone has yet figured out uh they haven't. Like a because otherwise someone would have done this already, right? Like a clean flavor release whereby like the first ten chews you you cleared one flavor through, and then only then the rest became soluble. No one no one's figured that out. But that would be kind of cool.
You would you would do that. I mean, if we could make that, we already would have made that, right, Nastasia? Right, yes. Yeah. So anyway, so we're we're on the gin and tonic uh thing, not three courses, but I get it, inspired by, because it's a great movie.
Who do I know that doesn't like that movie? There's someone I know, it's not one of us, right? I don't have to cut any of you guys off, right? No, it's not me. I didn't do it.
I'm just saying, like, if you don't like the original Willy Wonka, like you don't like Gene Wilder? You don't like, I don't what I don't understand how not to like it. There is someone I know, maybe someone in my family who doesn't like it, and I just don't understand it. Someone give me a plausible reason why you would not like that movie. Okay.
Okay. I mean, I'm sure there is a plausible reason because someone who's close to me, I can't remember who it is, doesn't like it, but whatever. Uh I'll figure it out eventually. Okay. The ingredients for five gum.
Is five gum a brand of gum that you guys are familiar with? Oh no. Oh, I don't think so. No, all right, me neither. Uh the ingredients for five gum are sorbital, gum base, glycerol.
What? No, I recognize the brand. I recognize the packaging. From like a lot of gas stations. Yeah, it's pretty popular.
Gas station gum? Is that is that is that uh is that uh John's uh subtle put down? Gas station gum. No, no, we'll buy gum. I mean, I don't know the bodega.
Yeah. Oh, speaking of bodegas, uh, we'll get back to it. Uh bodegas of Manitoba stations of the city. Is it gas stations? Oh, dude.
I don't agree because you have a personal relationship with your bodega. You don't have a personal relationship, I don't think, with your gas station, unless you're unless it's freaking Gomer Pyle and it's like freaking Andy Griffiths, but who lives like that? I mean, when I when I used to live in a gas station, it's like I mean, sorry. When I used to live in a in the suburbs, it's been so many years since I've lived in the suburbs that I can't even remember what how how to speak about it. But it's like you go to the gas station.
I self-serve anyway, because I'm cheap and I don't live in New Jersey, and uh because also I don't want to deal with humans. Do you want to deal with a human being nostasi when you're getting your gas? Uh pumping it, no. Nah. Nah.
Why? Because you do do you not trust like a little bit of me doesn't want them to like sit there and go shoop, shoop, shoop, shoop at the end. You know what I'm saying? The only time I've ever felt in danger while having gas put in my car was at one of those uh New Jersey pumps because I like taking me out of the equation, I forgot to turn the engine off, and this guy just starts filling my car up. It's like they don't care.
I mean, I would never do that to myself. It was way less. And they they claim safety is part of the reason for doing this. It's insane. Okay, listen, I want someone to call me out on this and tell me, like, you know, Zoolander aside, which has the best gasoline fight like uh ever in it.
And like, you know, one of the classics of movies is the gasoline fight from Zoolander. But I mean, here's the real in the real life, right? You pull up to your to the gas pump, right? And there's a gas pump right on the other side of you, and there's a gas pump right behind you, right? And you're sitting in there pumping gas, and person drives up right behind you and sticks their motor right in your butt while you're pumping gas and you don't blow up.
Am I right? I mean, there's other people with running motors everywhere. So it's like, you know, and not only that, but like they let you, which is crazy, like pump gas into a bucket. You're like, you could take your the thing, stick it into a bucket and pump gas into it, right? So it's like I get like not smoking when you're doing that because have you ever you ever lit a gas fire, Matt?
No. Okay. When you're lighting a gas fire, like, and they all the time in the movies, I think they get this wrong. Like they dump gas all over somebody or something, and then they sit there talking about how they're gonna light that person on fire or thing on fire for a long time. There's conversations, and like, you know, and then you know, you see the person throw the match, and it's like, no, and then they try to put out the match right before it hits the person.
Yeah, yeah, no. Here's what gas does gas vaporizes and makes a giant explosive cloud around whatever it's poured on. So if you dump gas on the ground or on your enemy or whatever, and sit around like shooting the breeze for a while before you decide to light a match, you're gonna get a big old fireball like of uh fire in you know in your face, right? So it's like open containers of gas or like big spills of gas on the ground are like soup dupe dangerous. You know what I'm saying?
But at a gas station, like have you ever seen that happen? No. On movies, well, in Zoolander, and again, it was amazing. It was amazing. Um you should not smoke near uh obviously near a gas station.
But uh, how do we get on the gas station? Oh, we're talking about knowing your gas station uh person. Anyway, I feel like you don't know them like you know your bodega. That's all. Anyway, and the only person I know, uh, so like I I know that there are whole cultures in the United States and elsewhere where it's like your gas station also has like the good barbecue or the good whatever, but it's like up here where you know, in the northeast, if you come from one of those places where a gas station maybe is known for having good food, not here, okay?
Like up here in the Northeast, the gas station doesn't have good food. So, like one of the things that we used to like to make fun of uh, you know, Peter Kim about, you know, uh, you know, director emeritus uh of the uh Museum of Food and Drink and you know, friend of ours, friend of the show, was that he would go in to a gas station and buy a moldy egg salad sandwich. Who buys an egg salad sandwich at a gr at a at a at a gas station? Notices it's moldy and eats it anyway. Remember that, Stas?
That's not true. He took the mold off and then put it in the tray that it came in, and then he ate the sandwich, and then he looked down, saw there's still peace. He ate that and he was like, Oh crap, I ate the mold. That's how happening. Yeah.
Yeah. It's not like he was like, mmm. Well, I mean, like, I think it's a pretty aggressive move to buy the egg salad sandwich at a gas station. Yeah, first of all. Like, it, you know, you know, he claims it was his uh years in the Peace Corps that makes him immune to any sort of stuff.
Although uh I don't care how much Peace Corps you did, Aflatoxin is aflatoxin all day long. And you're like, you know, yeah, he's powered through that sandwich and was and the thing is is it remember he tried to make us feel bad for thinking it was kind of crazy, right? Yeah. That was a great trip for you, Nastasia. Great.
That was the best trip ever because that was the egg salad, that was the bathroom incident. Yep. Which we which we won't go through again. And it was also when Peter insulted that whole uh town and was incredibly mean to that uh to that poor student, anyway. Yep.
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That's Wisetale.com slash H-R-N. W-I-S-E-T-A-I-L.com slash H-R-N. Terms and conditions apply. Visit their website for more details. Alright, we're back on the gum.
So sorbitol, gum base, glycerol, manitol, natural and artificial flavors, and then less than 2% of hydrogenated starch hydrolysate, which I didn't get a chance to look up, sorry. Aspartane, you know what that is. Those are both artificial sweeteners, which you won't have to deal with if you don't want to use artificial sweeteners. Soy lecithin and uh BHT to maintain freshness, colors, blue number one, uh lake blue and red 40. All right.
I see some sugar alcohols, but I don't know what gum base is or how uh how to source it. All right, uh, I'm gonna answer this first. Go to modernistpantry.com and just buy the gum base. Uh they used to sell it, I'm sure they still do. If not, I think Chef Rubber sells it.
In the old days, um, you it used to be natural, so it's from Chicle. So the the plant, Chikle, which is also makes a fruit, which is I think one of the sapadillas, but I'm not sure. Or Sapote, it's one of those things. Is a chicle tree. You score it, the resin comes out, uh, and they make original chicle was from that.
And from the word chicle comes chiclet. And so uh, you know, you know, chiclets, which do you guys use chiclets as a gum, or or is that just a childhood thing? For me, yeah. What'd you say? Childhood.
Childhood. All right. Uh it's kind of an unfortunate shape, right? I mean, it's like it's never enough. Like, you can't just eat one, like one chiclet isn't enough to like freshen you or do anything.
It's like you kind of like I I'm a bigger fan of the strip shape of gum. You guys? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Uh so, anyways, so the original person who I believe was from around here somewhere, is like some sort of I'm getting a kind of a Brooklyn mental vibe out of this person, but I can't say for certain because I didn't look up the history before I came on the show. So it was one of those situations where literally dude had a huge vat of this uh this chicle, like latex resin that he, not latex gut, but you know, resin stuff, chicle that he had, and he's like, What the hell am I gonna do with this? One of those kind of a situations. And he added flavor to it and sugar, and was like, Oh, now people could chew on this. And there's a long, long history of people chewing on tree exudates, for instance, uh the sweet gum, liquid embar styracophula, makes a something you can chew on.
You can chew on uh kios mastica, which is the you know, the resin uh gum mastic uh resin, you can chew on that, and because that stuff, because the resin is not water soluble, whatever flavors in it that is water soluble, will get slowly released into your mouth, and then the resin you just keep chewing on it until you get sick of it or until you get a headache. Is there anything worse than not being able to spit out gum because of where you are, and then you get that headache from over chewing? You guys know what I'm talking about? No. No.
Never got it. As soon as the flavor is as soon as the flavor is gone in the gum, and Harold McGee has a lot to say. When he comes on Harold McGee's coming on in November when his book comes out, by the way. He he agreed to that, I guess. Oh, is he?
Yeah. I mean, I'm happy to have him on whenever. I thought I thought he was gonna wait until the book came out, but whatever. I mean, I'm happy to have him on anyway, but we could talk to him. So one of his favorite stories is that there was a guy who uh was a kid during World War II and noticed that and gum was constantly running out.
So what he noticed was, you know, you because that it was this they didn't have it, is that if you took the gum and you chewed it until the flavor was gone, and then you added a little bit of sugar to the gum, the flavor, the mint flavor would come back. And it's all about the way your mind integrates flavors that are already there. So like once the sweetness is gone and you've already had the mint flavor in your mouth for a while, assuming it's mint gum, you're you can no longer perceive the mint even though it's there. And if you hit it with a little bit of sugar, your mind reintegrates the mint and the mint pops up, which is one of you know, it's it's one of the stories that um you know Harold always liked to use to tell it at the classes when he would teach him. Anyway, anyhow, huh?
So uh so now the gum base that you buy now is not typically from Chiklay, it's synthetic. And I don't know what they make it out of, but everyone buys the same one. And then you just get your flavorings, and you don't have to use uh, you know, aspartame and all that, you can use you know sugar, and then you uh you basically heat it in a microwave and it and it melts. And then you stir in all of your stuff, and if it gets too uh uh cold you just nuke it oh for a second again and then you roll it out uh like a dough and so you know then you can dust in in between with like cornstarch powdered sugar or something like this uh and then you roll it out and then when it gets cold you cut it into gum strip shapes and then there you go it's it's easy peasy and like I say last time I checked Monitors Pantry sold the gum base and if not Chef Rubber probably sells it. And the rest of the stuff you don't need to worry about.
You know if you want to add coloring add coloring to it. You know do you do you that answer the question guys or no? Yep. Yeah all right um my earphones are strangely running up okay you guys still hear me or no? Yep.
Yep. All right. And we have someone oh from Pittsburgh because I know because they uh they went in with the yins. I've never met an actual I know some people from Pittsburgh but I've never met someone who is an actual Yin's person. Have you guys actually met a Yin's person?
So like you know how like in like some parts of New York New Jersey Staten whatever you use you use guys? Oh okay yeah. Pittsburgh yins. It's like a thing. And so like if you're from there you know but if you don't you know if you don't you do know what uh anyway whatever I'm not gonna get into it.
Uh how you're doing it's been a while what's the deal with chamber stoves uh my wife and sister-in-law both claim they're wonderful things uh and that they should get them and it is worth the many thousands of dollars and will cook things so well. I feel like if they were so great, I would have heard of them sometime in the last 41 years. I would have seen them in one of the thousands of houses I've been in over the years. I figure they must be terrible. Tell me who's right.
Thanks, Zach from Pittsburgh. Well, Zach, I uh I have to say I enjoy the way you posed that question. Um yeah. Uh I all I I like uh I love, I do this all the time, and I think it always, you know, if if you want a particular answer, it always helps to shade it in the direction you want to go, right? This is like another thing I've always said, like when you're doing um, like the big difference between doing food demonstrations and actually serving people food like in a restaurant situation, is that in a food demonstration, I get to tell them that they're gonna like it beforehand, and so it makes it a lot easier to kind of go outside of people's comfort zones.
Uh anyway, uh, and also like uh Riedell, you know, is it Riedel or Redel? It's Riedel, right? The glassware people, it's Riedel, actually, because it's R, it's uh I E. Anyway, so um I was at uh a seminar once given by I think he's dead now, but like the the elder was the elder in the Riedel family, and he gave this amazing demo about because I don't know if they do they still push Riedel glasses based on the individual shape, makes the individual wines taste better. I don't know.
Hmm. Anyway, that that was the shtick. And and you know, and for a long time, and maybe still for all I know, I haven't been glass shopping in a long time. People still kind of like they still sell them this way. Was that you needed to have like an like a huge number of different glasses in your house because each individual glass was tailored to each kind of wine.
And Riedel came out also with a bunch of spirits-based glasses where they did the same thing. And I went to a presentation that Riedel did, and by the way, I like Riedel Glassware, it's it's good. I I have it in my house, I use it, right? I don't have a billion different. Well, well, because my name's Nastalcia, and I have my monocle.
You need to get us the monocles. We're gonna do the monocles, and you never did. It was a gift. Yeah. It was a gift, it was a gift.
It was a gift. Oh, nice. Are you taking those to California with you? Are you gonna use like uh uh jelly jars when you go out there? Yeah, all right, yeah.
I use Zoltos. I would not, I would not be near by the way, Riedel has a more expensive line of hand blown stuff. And I think I said this on the air. The guy uh I once interviewed the son. This is like 20 years ago.
I interviewed the son, who's probably now running the company, and he took two of their more expensive hand-blown glasses and he clinked them together, and he goes, That is the sound of money. And then he just stepped away, and I was like, I'm gonna use that someday. I don't know for what, because everything we have is like the sound of the sound of despair, right? Everything we clink together, Stas is like that's the sound of nothing much happening, right? The spins all breaking.
That's the sound of the spinzel breaking. It's fine. Um anyways, so where was I on this? Oh, so yeah, so the the elder Riedel, like had the elder Riedel had this had this thing where he would walk you through the different glasses. So there was all these glasses there that you know he had, and he would walk you through tasting it, and like at the end, you literally believed you could only drink bourbon out of the bourbon glass, and you could only drink Scotch whiskey out of the Scotch whiskey glass, and that if you did anything else, you would be insulting the spirit.
You know what I mean? He was a genius at getting you to go where so I have no idea whether or not anything he's saying was actually true, just because he was so good at getting people to know what was gonna happen. Now back to the chambers show uh stove. I have never used a chambers stove. I have never seen a chamber stove, and I had to Google what it was, as did John, right?
Yep. Yeah. So I for those of you that don't know, Chambers was a stove. They had a patent a long time ago in I think the teens or twenties of the last century. And the main shtick, and they were manufactured almost continuously up until the 1980s.
They then went out of business. Someone tried to resurrect them again in the early 2000s, and then I believe they were resurrected again in 2015. This is all according to the Wikipedia. But the shtick, the shtick of the chambers was that it was extremely well insulated. So I'll say this.
One is you build, you get a huge, huge thermal mass, and then you just take a lot of energy and you heat it up, and then that leaks energy out constantly, and you keep adding energy, and that's how you make everything stay at a nice constant rock solid temperature, right? So uh most big like kitchen stoves, like a Multaney or a Bonet or you know, anyone like that. What's the other like Heston, right? It's just huge chunks of metal. They throw a whole bunch of gas into it, and it's just hot as hell, right?
That's how like French tops work, which you might call a flat top or whatever. What do you like, John? You like French top, flat top? What do you call it? Flat top?
I thought we've always called it French top, but yeah. All right, whatever. You guys know what I'm talking about, right? Anyway, so the chambers was a little bit different. The chambers had extra insulation in it.
And their idea was is that the fire was uh also the fire, I think was not exposed, which was kind of new for that time. So I don't know how many people still have a gas stove with gas where you can see the gas running. I used to have one. I found an old uh for maybe like five, six years. I used uh an oven that I had found on the street on 38th Street that someone had kind of thrown out and it was from the like 30s and it was all enameled, it was kind of beautiful.
They had knocked the legs off, so I had it on bricks. Talk about unsafe, right? It had no thermostat, so you would just sit there and adjust the gas level inside, like you would for a range for the oven. It was kind of hardcore. So the chambers oven goes back to when that's how people were operating their ovens.
So it had a thermostat in it. Ooh, right? And then they would turn the gas on in it, I believe in a separate box, heat the oven up, and then when the gas turned off, they would close the damper so it wouldn't lose heat. So it was all about keeping the heat inside the uh oven. Uh so presumably I guess it would use less gas and it would also uh insulate better so it wouldn't get your kitchen as hot.
They then had a bunch of other uh things they added, like wells that you could cook soup in without having a lot of uh energy escape. They also all of them had griddle tops or flat tops uh that you could use, which I actually I love a I love a griddle top. I know a lot of people don't like necessarily having a griddle top, but if you do a lot of that kind of cooking, griddle top is nice, nice. Um, anyway, and they had a lot of kind of cool features that made them kind of cool. And I think they became cool again recently because I think Rachel Ray had said on the Wikipedia, like uses one and loves it.
So I don't really know why you would want one now as opposed to a thoroughly modern unit. But um people seem to like them, they they look nice. I've never used one. Is that a decent answer? Is that okay?
Digital audio tapes in the chat and said I used a chamber stove for a bit, the extra insulation helped with making pizza. Oh, because you could get it hotter? I that I believe that was the implication. So what I used to do there is just bypass the thermostat. And if you like, don't do this, please don't do this.
But uh you bypass your thermostat and turn it back into a straight pipe oven machine again. And the problem with this is is that it's easy to go overboard. So like I got in big trouble because I scorched one of my cabinets because uh I mean, nothing's gonna happen to the oven. The oven's gonna get up to you know eight hundred degrees, no problem. But um again, I don't know how high one of these chambers can go, but that's a it's a good point.
That I don't know though. Like if you're gonna do just that though, maybe maybe like I would I would get a normal oven and then spend the extra several thousands of dollars on getting like you know, a pizza oven that you could have in addition, you know what I mean? Just saying. The other thing is is that I the chambers, like most newer ovens, what's if you are gonna get a new oven anytime in the next like 10, 15 years, like it's better have like, you know, um like a super convection. Look, I hate the term air fry.
I know I've said this before, I hate air fry, but the actual function where they have a much faster convection is great, right? And if also like a steam injection, if you like anything that's gonna allow you to do steam injection or to have anything that approaches like an impingement oven or a fast air convection, like that's the future for sure. You know what I mean? Whether quartz is the future, I don't know, but like that's definitely the future of for sure. And also, I think more and more people are gonna kind of have their big oven that they use for standard stuff, and then they're gonna get the whatever the current equivalent of like you know, a brevel smart is because it just they're not that big, they don't heat up your kitchen that much, and because they're small, it's kind of easier for them to get up to those like temperatures quickly and kind of stay there.
So they take a lot less energy and a lot more efficient. I have to be honest, I do I do 80 to 90 uh well in the summer a hundred percent, but like even the rest of the time, most of the time I don't crank up the big oven unless I'm doing sheets of cookies or something big like a like a turkey. I mean, I I'm mainly using a small, uh a smaller thing like a uh like the Breville Smart Air, but it's big it's big for a toaster oven, but it's relatively small. Um when you had both, what would those of you that have both? What do you what do you use more often?
Uh toaster oven. Toaster oven? Yeah. Yeah. I remember a time when the toaster oven was like kind of like a novelty.
People didn't really care about the the toaster oven. It wasn't seen as like a legitimate like cooking implement, it was just there for reheating and for toasting. And I think over the past 10 years it's really kind of come in into into its own. You know what I mean? Um remember that guy who wanted to uh turn his regular toaster sideways and and put the pizza in it?
Yeah, I wonder what happened with that. I need to hear back from them on whether their pizza was any good. You know what I mean? Uh Stas, do you like a regular toaster or do you like a toaster oven when you have them? Uh I've never owned a toaster oven.
I like toasters. You like toasters? Yeah. What what style of toaster do you like? Are you like do you like a fancy toaster, like a dual it or like any old toaster, like a Hamilton Beach?
What's your toaster feeling? No, we just had like an old one at home, like a like an old, old one. So I don't really know. I haven't had one since home. How much do you hate when like someone puts something in the toaster and it sticks into the thing and then you can't get it out and it touches the element, and then you get you see that one wisp of smoke and you know your host.
You know you're ruined at that point because you know you're not gonna get it out in time, and then you're trying to gouge the thing out while it's a little bit more. My mom would use a fork, and I was so scared. You should have been scared. We had this conversation, I believe, when we were talking about the person reheating the pizza. Yeah.
That thing's electrically live. Why you ask a question if you're not gonna try it? Because they want to have their name bread on the pair. They want to have their name red on the air. By next week, I want you to put a piece why am I saying this?
Don't put the pizza in the toaster, Dave. Shut up. Shut up. I feel like you're trying pretty hard to have him not do this. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. I know, I know. The reason he didn't do it is because he listened to the show. Oh no. I'm such a moron.
I'm such a moron. I can't help it. I'm sorry. Uh Peter Ross writes in, John, you're gonna have to answer this question. Uh hi there.
I've read that using low ABV-that's alcohol by volume. Low ABV spirits in a spinzall is bad news. Is that true? Um, I never heard that. You heard that, uh John?
I have not heard that either. What would be the reason? I don't know. Maybe high ABV spirits. You do?
Okay. So super high ABV spirits, the problem is going back to the gas fire portion of the show, is that um it becomes a it becomes an issue if you're doing very high alcohol spirits that you're creating an alcohol vapor cloud, which can be dangerous, especially if you're a smoker. So, i.e. if you're using it in Europe. Just kidding, Europe.
Um, but it's like uh so I know I don't recommend high ABV spirits for that reason. And also, if you're using alcohol, you really want to make sure that it's cold, again, so that you're not volatilizing, and also the warmer the alcohol is, the more um alcohol will evaporate off. So you know, one of the main things that you're looking for when you're spinning alcohol in the spinzall or in any centrifuge, not just our centrifuge, but any centrifuge, is that um you want to prevent the alcohol from vaporizing because it lowers the ABV. Now, one of the problems you might have for certain techniques in the spinzall is that um when you're let's say you're doing something like a banana houstino where you you're blending a liquor and a banana or anything really, and you're spinning out the solids, because there's liquid in the banana, you're lowering the proof of the alcohol, right? And so what you're doing is you're lowering the stability.
So maybe what people are saying about centrifuging low alcohol products is that um the alcohol level becomes even lower when you add whatever you're adding to it, and therefore it's no longer stable. And that's a hundred percent valid, but you gotta remember we s we centrifuge zero percent alcohol stuff constantly, and it works great. So it's not gonna affect the outcome, but it maybe affect the stability. You think maybe that's what they're talking about? Uh yeah, hopefully.
If not, Peter email us back or you know, DMS on Instagram again, and we can clarify. Yeah, yeah. All right. Now, uh young Cognac wrote in, and I have to say from here on out, I have not actually read the whole question. So I'm just gonna go blind.
This is whatever knowledge I have. Remember when uh we had Matt from Kitchen Arts and Letters on, and I just threw random questions at him and he knew the answer. That was pretty impressive, I thought. I thought it was impressive. So we'll see whether I can do that to uh this question or whether or not I get it.
Also, you got used to two-minute rule here because we gotta we gotta go pretty soon. It's already one something, right? Yeah, but we started late then. All right. Uh I'm trying hard to milkwash with banana ice cream.
Uh it won't adhere. What do you mean? I'm trying hard to milkwash with a banana ice cream. It won't adhere. What to do?
I switch, do I switch to banana milk? I'm trying to wash this horribly hot rum. I get so close it curdles beautifully, and then when I go to strain it, I'm still left with a milky, cloudy result, even with coffee filters, cheesecloth, and a nut milk bag. That's my favorite word. Uh 50% loss and still far from clear result, and I'm unhappy with it, and it's uh, you know, you know my Wesley Willis.
I'm unhappy with it, and it pissed me off. Um, all right. I would guess, I don't know. If it curdles beautifully, um, one thing you can do is uh, and you got your timer going, Stas. I thought that worked well.
We didn't do it this week. Yeah, that's true. Well, because we also didn't get the questions until deep, deep into the show. So it's fine. Yeah.
All right, so like uh a couple of things. One, ice cream is stabilized, right? So one of the problems you might be having is uh because of the stabilization of it from the locust bean, the guard, carrageen and gel-in, whatever system they're using in the ice cream, uh, that might be causing you problems. So banana milk might be better. Um, the other thing is obviously if the banana has any starch, it's you know, it's gonna stay hazy no matter what.
But what you're saying is you're getting a very low yield. Not just that it's not clear, but you're getting a very low yield. Um and so your curds probably uh aren't uh hard enough. I would maybe add a little more uh acidity. And the other thing is is that in it I would I know that the the problem with milk washing in general is that um what after you do it, if you're gonna use it in a shaken drink, you need to use it within a week, right?
So your shelf life is somewhat limited, not in terms of safety, but in terms of how long it's gonna foam. If you're not gonna use it to foam though, you have a long, long time. Then time is your friend. Then I would break it and I would just put it into a tall round thing, not square, because if you use square, as soon as you pick it up and turn it, it'll kick up stuff. And I would just let it sediment for like two days and then just pour the stuff up off the top.
This should drastically increase your yield. And if it's not dropping a lot, then I would add wine finding agents to get it to adhere harder and drop more. That's what I would that's what I would do. Is that a good uh two-minute answer, guys? Great.
Yes, you still have 30 seconds. Well, I I don't have anything else to say now because I already I tried to wrap my head. What? I was letting you know. He bank he banks that time for a future question to be named.
This is like the this is like the hearings for the uh for the Supreme Court. Uh geez, Louise. Um, by the way, I appreciate this from Alexander. Uh Alexander uh Tailguard wrote in, and it's it I would not have pronounced uh his name right because it's T E I L. I would have said Tile Guard.
So thank thankfully wrote in this is Alexander uh tailguard, like the English uh word tail and then guard, hope that makes sense. Uh thanks for your answers last week. I'm sorry I assumed your hesitation on saying how to make the poly card was due to American safety concerns. Uh I do have a follow-up, I hope you can answer. I did receive my cartridge heater.
So a cartridge heater. So the things that I use to make red hot pokers are a thing called a cartridge heater. They're like kind of round sticks of burning hell. And what they're for in the real life is you uh let's say you're making um a piece of equipment and you have you have to have a block of metal be real hot. You bore a hole into the block of metal, and then you tap in one of these cartridge heaters, and this like cartridge heater then heats the whole block of metal.
That's what they're for. Um and you get the McMaster car supply or other places. Um okay. Uh I have my uh where's it uh I have my cartridge heater and it is stainless steel 321. I'm not concerned about it melting into my drink.
Yeah, but what you should be concerned about is that the temperatures you're gonna be running it, it's gonna oxidize like a mother. Like stainless, the ones I use have uh, I believe Inconel uh sheaths on them, and they don't oxidize nearly as much as the stainless will at that at that high temperature because stainless steel, for any of you that have a Searsol, right? Um the one of the reasons the front thing is Conthal, which is a the rear one's palladium-coated, like uh like uh 693 supermetal, which is amazing, but uh it's an amazing metal. I've been running so many tests recently, so this is like right in what I'm thinking about. The front one's conthol.
The reason you can't use stainless there is because at high temperature, stainless um will oxidize, and once it oxidizes, it basically just vaporizes like a vampire when you stick a when you when you stick a steak through its heart. By the way, you guys seen uh Vampires versus the Bronx? No. So Vampires versus the Bronx is uh centers around this uh vampires invading the Bronx. And my son Dax was like, it's like attack the block in America, but it's not.
I mean, obviously the people who made this have seen attack the block, but it's not like attack the block. Kid Miro from Jesus and Miro is in there and he's in a he runs a bodega. This is back to the bodega section of the show, right? And uh, and this goes back to my son Dax, even though we're from the Lower East Side and we're not from like Harlem or anywhere else like this, right? He's become obsessed with the chopped cheese sandwich, which I know we've talked about on the air, which did not exist when I was a kid, right?
And even when in the 90s, when I lived like close to West Harlem, right, when I lived in Morningside Heights, right, it wasn't a thing over there. It was still at that point confined to kind of East Harlem, where it was originated at Haji's uh Delhi, which is where is that, John? Do you remember? Like 109th and second, I think. Somewhere around there, yeah.
And I never used to go that far over because we were over like 125th over on the on way on the west side, near the 24-hour McDonald's. Anyway, so uh chopped cheese, for those of you don't know, you you take your your hamburger meat, you put it on your flat top uh you griddle and uh you know raw onions and you know whatever spices you're you know, salt, pepper, whatever spices you're gonna add, then you also I think raw onion and sometimes like chopped up pepper, whatever. And then you when you flip it, you put the cheese, it melts it, and then you hash it all, you hack it all together, like cross-hatch it all together, and you put it on like you know, kind of a bodega like roll, hero roll, you know what I mean? And you eat it. Anyway, my son Dax is now obsessed with these, even though again he's from the lower east side.
And uh in the and this is why you have to become friends with your bodega person, because you have to know you have to become a conducente of this sort of thing to understand whether your chopped cheese is good or not. And again, I'm not part of the culture, so I don't know what I'm talking about. However, uh one of the fun the this is almost a comment on gentrification is like vampires coming into your neighborhood, is what uh vampires versus uh the Bronx is. But one of the ways you know that the neighborhood is quote unquote going to hell that the vampires are showing up is that Kid Miro of Jesus and Miro Fame has as a menu item instead of chopped cheese, chopped cheese on a croissant. So there's that chopped cheese on a croissant.
And that's when you know that it's end times, baby. That's when you know the vampires have shown up. All right, so uh I'm not concerned about it melting into my drink. It's a 500 watt 20 millimeter by 100, 20 by 100 millimeter. I can't speak millimeter.
What is that, John? Give me that an inches. That's a little that's three-quarters of an inch by, which is about right, by what's a hundred millimeters? It is like four inches? 3.93 inches.
It's a little short, so I'm worried that it's going to blow itself up. So about the size you said in your book, it oh, it works great, and my cocktails ignite. Alright, however, I'm not getting much of those caramel notes you described, having tried your red hot ale and the grony uh with a very sweet homemade beer mouth. Uh is my unin on hot enough, or is my taste buds that are failing me? Also, a question for Nastasia.
How did you go from vegan face to becoming vegetarian? She's told you why, but Nastasia, I'll let you go for it. Um, because the only contact I had with uh anything that was alive was dead uh animal protein. And I thought that was really sad in the middle of um isolation and quarantine. On my protein's dead.
Um I have that song going through my head, but with with your lyrics and it uh um well look, I think what you need to do, uh Alexander, is do this for me. Just run the test where you make one just by boiling water, right? And then do the one with the red-hot poker, and that is the difference I'm talking about. Maybe I just described it poorly in my book. But do that, do the one where you just make it like newfangled way by heating up water like a chump on the stove, and then burn one, and hopefully you'll get the difference.
And also, like certain spirits like change radically when they burn. So um, like a lot of uh bitters um and things change radically. Jaegermeister burnt is delicious, delicious, which I only learned because Nastasi and I had to do the Jimmy Fallon show back when he was doing the late, late, whatever that that show was called. And um, and he liked Jaegermeister, so it happened to be the winter time, so we tried burning and it turns out it was delicious. By the way, Nastasia, huge fan of, as we know, uh what's it called?
What's that show? A Saturday nive. So I don't watch a lot of regular TV, but I've started trying to watch Saturday Night Live now, maybe so like you know, I can share this information with Nastasia, right? So that we have something that we're doing, right? That we can talk about later, because it's nice.
We don't have a water cooler anymore. I can talk to her about it. Have you noticed, Nastasia? Oh, so the only kind of local commercials I get are when I watch the Saturday Night Live. Have you seen there's a so New York, for those of you that live elsewhere, you're probably inundated with political ads right now, right?
Because it's election season. But in New York, because all of the elections are pretty much baked in, everybody knows in New York City the Democrat is gonna win whatever it is. There's no real elections here, right? I mean, it's like it's like that so no one bothers spending advertising money on New York City. Ever.
So we don't get political ads. It just doesn't happen, right? Uh sometimes we'll get ads that like we get a lot of ads telling us to donate money to other people's races that are closer, that we where we can't vote, but they want us to donate money, but we get very few ads actually targeted at us in politics. So it's rare. So but it turns out there's one race in Staten Island, which is a little island, it's the it's the borough that's like off the coast of Manhattan, Staten Island, and it's kind of the Republican enclave of New York City.
And so the ads for Congress there are the funniest ads I've ever seen in my life. And the Republican there, because it's in New York City, doesn't have any money. So I've only ever seen the ads from the Democrat. Did you see those ads on Saturday Night Live, Sas? Uh I get Connecticut ones here.
But it's got to be that guy, right? Yeah, it's Max Rose. And so when I first heard him, I couldn't believe he was the Democrat. So there's this guy who's actually in Congress right now. I don't know anything about his policies, anything.
He's a he's a uh uh a vet, I think Iraq, not Afghanistan. I think he's an Iraq war vet. And I I just have to say, like, Nastasio, you gotta look up, you would love this guy's commercials because he's like her is his opponent Wendy Malinakis or some, I'm gonna call her Wendy Malonakis. Nicole Maliatakis. That's it.
Nicole Malat, he's like, Nicole Maliatakis is a freaking piece of yeah, she's like, he's like she's like a piece of shit though. I can't say it. He's like, she's a freaking liar, she's a freak of scumbag. Don't believe anything when uh Nicole Maliatakis says he just goes off. He's like, he's like, he's like, when I was getting my ass kicked in Afghanistan, or where is it?
When I was getting my ass kicked in Iraq, you what was she doing? She was trying to shaft you here in New York. He just goes crazy. I was like, oh my god, this is a real congressperson. I was like, this is the best guy ever.
And then he gets all these other people like, what's her name? Maliatakis? Yeah. Yeah, he's like, Maliatakis is a liar, Maliatakis is a liar, Maliatakis is a liar. And we go on, I was like, oh my god, this is the best political ad I've ever seen.
And it was like so aggro and amazing, and I was like, oh man, I kind of miss local TV. So I know Nastasia loves local radio because she gets to hear, like, you know, come to the church basement, get your sausage and pep, right? Like, that's why you listen to that's one of the reasons you listen to that stuff, right? Okay, yeah. And so, like, to be able to see that on TV, to see the local political ad with uh Max Rose trying to beat the crap out of uh out of the I was like, uh, that's great.
Anyway, um We're gonna go. All right. So next week, Nastasia will be uh well, you're not are you in LA or are you gonna be near closer to Covina? No, no, no, no. I will be in uh I will be in LA.
You're not renting, you're not renting the house, are you? I no, I rented a different house. Are you in the hills though? I'm not telling you exactly where you're gonna say, but I'm trying to get a feeling. I am I am not in the I am not in the Hollywood Hills, but I am in a canyon, yes.
Oh, oh, are you doing the Laurel Canyon thing? I'm not anybody. No, I'm not in Laurel Canyon. Well, the thing is like, like, you know, whatever, we'll talk about it later. Next week.
Next week. Next week we'll talk about how Nastasi is doing. Nastassi is gonna have a different set of plants, a different set of people, different set of everything to be dealing with. Cooking issues. Cooking issues is powered by Simplecast.
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