This episode brought to you by Appeal, helping you to enjoy your fruits and vegetables at peak freshness and reduce food waste. Learn more at appeal.com, A-P-E-E-L dot com. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live from the lower east side of Manhattan, New York City. We got uh Nastasia, the hammerlow pins from her undisclosed location in Southern California with the newly uh, you know, the newly whatever re-in ordered uh stay at homes.
How are you doing there, Nastasia? Good. Yeah. Although she's not staying at home because she's moving, so she has no home. She's homeless for like an hour.
People don't need to know that. Now they do. Now they do. Uh we got uh John coming from uh Lyme, Connecticut. Uh home of Lyme disease.
It actually is named after Lyme, Connecticut. So that's not just an unfortunate kind of thing. And uh John, tell me if you know this story. Are you familiar with the uh company Deep River uh Snacks? They make potato chips.
Oh yeah, great potato chips. Yeah, they are good actually. I enjoy them. I do. Uh so the owner of Deep River, they actually they're made in Lyme, right?
So Deep River, Deep River is a town like across the river from uh Lyme, across the river and like right across the Connecticut River from Lyme. And Lyme is a little bit hoity toity, and Deep River, like is not. You know what I mean? Like Deep River is like like that's where Gretchen Ma comes from, I think. It's old school, like, you know, kind of like nice little place.
And the people just up north, Chester, which is where the artist Saul Lewitt lives and stuff like, they like to look down on deep river people. Anyway, I digress. So the reason it's called Deep River Snacks is because the guy who lives in Lyme that started the company is like, who wants to buy Lyme disease potato chips? You know what I mean? Yeah.
Yeah. No, no, no, no, but that makes sense, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Uh we got uh Matt in his Heidi Hole uh booth uh in uh Rhode Island. How's it going?
Going all right. We have an ad campaign here that I just saw the other day. I walked past this poster and I was like, have you tested negative for Lyme disease? You might still have Lyme disease. I was like, that's stop.
That's great. That's great. Remember uh back in the day, uh, I mean, like, you know, now obviously it's different, but back in the day, I my one of my favorite ads was um there was for some sort of disinfectant like soap or spray. And it it, you know, God knows in you know, going forward, uh, what our collective immunities for other things are gonna be like now that we've like lived in almost completely aseptic environments for the past nine months, right? Because I didn't your parents ever used to tell you guys that you needed to like consume a certain amount of dirt and filth in order to build up your immunity.
Do you remember this? Anyway. Yeah. And until recently, right, because of for obvious reasons, I've always been kind of against you know, sterilizing every surface in my life because I'm like, I'd rather build up an immunity to like the small level of stuff that's around me. Anyway, so like there was a I I forget which cleaner it was, but they were like, it was like a husband-wife, and they were like, uh, honey, you remember that time like uh like two months ago when you were sick and you thought you had the flu?
He's like, yeah. And she's like, well, you know, maybe it was just a mild case of salmonella. We need to sterilize the whole freaking house. And then she like sprays this like like cleaner because they're trying to get you petrified of your kitchen at all times. So I feel like the Lyme disease is the same thing.
It's like, hey, you had a bunch of tests that you don't have Lyme disease, you may still have it. I still have it. Yeah. Although I have to say, undiagnosed Lyme disease is really terrible. Like it's not something to mess around with.
Like having spent a lot of time in Lyme Disease Central and gotten it before, like undiagnosed Lyme disease is no joke. But uh but how are you supposed to diagnose it if you're negative? What do they want you to do with this information? I I stopped reading the poster at that point, so I didn't go down to the next small, like the font size smaller, so I don't actually know what I was supposed to do about it. Right.
The what the what do I do with this information kind of I was just like, God, and then I ran away. So not only did the ad take you off, but also it did not have its desired effect of you uh of you like doing anything. Yeah, there's another there's another ad that uh uh Nastasi, it went up after you left, so you haven't seen it, but John and I have seen it. Uh it's like a so the Manhattan Bridge goes from Brooklyn to uh Williamsburg and we sorry from Brooklyn to um Lower Manhattan. And when you go across it, there's this big ad and it says, if like if you hate racism, no, if if you like racism, delete Uber.
It's all this stuff, but it in giant letters it has the word racism and Uber, and the phrasing of it is too complicated to immediately understand. It wasn't like Uber hates racism, right? Or something like so blunt that like when you're driving in a car, you can understand what the heck they were saying, right? Instead, it's this complicated construction like if then, if then racism Uber. So I was like, Uber's racist?
And then I was like, and then like only like the next three times when I saw it was it like, oh, Uber's trying to say something against racism. Bad ad. If I have to sit there and wonder whether your company is racist or not, what idiot sat by in a room was like, you know what? Let's in an equal size font. Let's just put the words racism and uber right next to each other on a big billboard that people can only see as they're driving.
What do you think, guys? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's do that. It seems like a good idea, right? Anyway.
Um John, you remember you you've seen that billboard, yeah? Yeah. Yeah, we went to car together. It was terrible. It was super confusing.
Yeah, yeah, super confused. Uh, all right. So uh are any of you guys, uh are any of you guys familiar with the um Korean uh American food uh person uh uh monk. Anyone? She's got like eight billion like YouTube followers, she has several cookbooks.
Um and actually, Nastasia, you're you're gonna like this. Guess what Mongqi, and I'm probably butchering the pronunciation. Guess what Mongchi translates to? Uh I don't know. Uh the hammer.
Nice. Yeah, yeah, means hammer in Korean. Anyway, step off territory is taken. Well, you know, I feel like in a different language you can do it. You know what I mean?
I feel like it's anyway. Uh so she's enormously popular. And uh she had this recipe. So I like I'm still on turkey leftovers because there's just not that many of us, and Trader Joe's turkey was like 20 pounds, so like you know, I still have turkey leftover. And uh, so I was like, okay, I'm gonna make like I was gonna do like a turkey pot pie.
You guys like pot pie, right? Oh what's up, yeah. I love pot pie. But here's my this is this is a pot pie question. This is not what I'm here to talk about, but do you require that there be two crusts, even though the bottom crust is gonna get soggy and make the leftovers not as good?
Or are you okay with a one crust where the top crust is there and then you can just dig into it and serve it like out of a casserole dish? Thoughts. I'm okay with just a top crust. Nastasia. Okay.
Uh-huh. Did you ever eat chicken, Matt? Or no? Is this just totally lost on you? Uh this is pretty lost on me because I even when I ate meat things, I just didn't really like chicken that much.
What about pot pies though? All right. Well, for those of you that I don't know, have never been a child in America before, a pot pie is like vegetables. You need to have your your peas, carrot, celery, right? And like a cream-based, like like a light cream-based gravy kind of a situation.
And which, you know, if you're gonna be a joker about it, you could use some sort of cream soup, right? And then typically hacked up chicken, but turkey delicious in in pie format. Uh, and it's it's one of the great things. It's one of the uh it's one of the great like comfort foods, I think, like ever. It's delicious anyway.
So I was like, I'm gonna make a turkey pot pie. And Jen was like, my wife was like, yeah, awesome. I love pot pie. And then I remembered neither of my kids will eat the vegetable combination that's in a pot pie. I was like, I'm toast.
They won't eat it. And then I just have to sit there getting more and more angry as only Jen and I are eating the pot pie, and I just I was like, I can't do it, I can't do it. I was like, fine. I will make a turkey soup completely devoid of vegetables, and then just have the vegetables separately. So that's what I did.
I made like a light cream turkey soup, but then I was like, I still want some sort of dumpling y thing, so I was gonna do dumplings, but Dax had just made a second batch after Thanksgiving because he got it really into it of these Parker house rolls that were, you know, uh my wife's mom's recipe. Anyway, long story. So I was like, eh, I have a lot of leftover potatoes because of course I bought too many potatoes. So I have all these leftover potatoes. I was I'm gonna make potato dumplings.
But I'm like, well, I'm not gonna make gnocchi because my gnocchi are terrible. My gnocchi are terrible. Like I used to make really good gnocchi, I made it like once a week, and then somehow I lost the knack. And then when I read people's instructions on the internet about how to get the knack back, I just never make ones that I like. Do either do any of you guys make gnocchi that you like?
No. John, do you do you make you never tried? Matt, you never tried vegetarian who's never tried making gnocchi before? Uh yeah, I don't know. No excuse.
Yeah, no excuse. Um, John, how's your gnocchi game? He's muted. He may be on a call or something. Uh we'll find out when it's dog is hard.
Dogs. Dogs, right. Uh no, I have never made gnocchi. What the heck? I know, I shouldn't I need to change that.
Well, you know, if you would inspire us by telling us how to do it right, we would try it. But since you're just telling us you don't even know, that's something I don't know. Is that I I feel like I feel like it's one of those things where like when you do it a lot and you have it, and you have it, you have it, and then somehow you lose it and it doesn't come back for a while. Like I need to get it back somehow. Anyway, so I was like, I'm not gonna do the gnocchi because no, to hell with it.
So I came upon this concept, and the reason I made it, this is going back to uh to uh Mangqi. She makes this potato dumpling that does not seem plausible. I'm gonna tell you what she does. Then you can look her, look, just look up potato dumpling. The actual name for it, which I'm gonna butcher beyond belief, is dumb uh damja ungsmi, right?
Is the these potato dumplings. But here's what she does. It contains, get this, only potato, which she starts fresh, she doesn't buy anything, right? Potatoes, regular Russet Burbanks, uh, which, you know, for any of you listening outside of the United States is the standard US mealy variety, Idaho style potato that you buy. It's a standard baked potato potato.
And what she does is she peels it, she takes one of those uh, you know those kind of like uh daikon style graters with like the hexagonal holes with the like the little points that go up. You guys familiar with what I'm talking about? Is this making sense to you? Yeah. Yeah.
So she's taking one of those kind of graters, she peels it, and she just grates the potato like into like a cheesecloth situation, right, in water, and then grates the whole thing. And I looked at the grating under my microscope. They're like little fine threads, is what the kind of gratitude because you'll it looks like a paste, but what comes out is little fine threads if you look at it under a microscope. I have pictures. And then you you rinse that potato stuff into a big bowl and you save the water, and then you squeeze the hell out of it.
So now you have like super dry, like potato like strands. You set that aside and you let the water settle, and the water turns disgusting, kind of purplish brown because of the enzymes. You decant all the water off, and the starch is like a cake at the bottom of your bowl, just a potato starch. Now you take the the shaved potato, you put it back on top of the starch with a little bit of salt, and you knead it back into a dough, and miraculously it turns into a dough. And then you roll it in balls between your hands, and it holds it holds together like a ball.
It doesn't fall apart. And then you boil it in in stock. She used an anchovy stock. I used you know turkey stock. You boil it, and they stay whole and they turn chewy almost like a rice cake, but the outside looks frilly almost like a miniature version of a snowball, the coconut confection that you know you used to buy.
And I was like, this is a miracle. But then no one in my family loved them. I was like, would you ever seek these out? And they're like, no, I would not seek these out. I was like, would you seek these out over a rice cake?
And they're like, no, I would not seek them out over a rice cake. But still, look it up because it's one of those things that, you know, it's kind of miraculous that it works at all. Just a little bit of salt and a potato makes a texture unlike any potato texture I've ever had out of a standard russet burbank. And it's not that complicated. But you know, maybe someone who's made this recipe can tell me like the game changer of why, like, you know, how I'm gonna get my family to love this.
But I just thought it was kind of a miracle anyway. Um Jim says this sounds like poutine rapae, which is an Acadian dish from the Maritimes, but generally gets stuffed with pork. Huh, I don't know. I will look that up. Do you have a do you have the like text me after this or email me the spelling of it and I will look it up?
I mean, you know, I think almost anything is better when stuffed with pork, but especially bitter melon. You guys like bittermelons? I mean, not you, Matt, but you guys like bittermelon stuff with pork? Yeah, yeah, bittermelon stuff with pork is delicious. Um, all right.
So speaking of pork, uh, Alex Goody wrote in uh to Nastasia a long time ago, and I haven't haven't answered it yet. Hoping you can help me out with a plan I have on making better uh chicharones, uh chicharunas. Uh, I'm sure that Alex has already tried this, but uh we'll go for it anyway. I haven't tried this yet because I'm concerned it'll explode in the fryer. Oh my god, get this.
The worst fryer experience I've ever had. I've had many fryer experiences, mostly good, but some bad over the many years of deal with a fryer was I I improperly made a falafel recipe and it wasn't bound at all. You guys like falafel? Yeah. Yeah.
So I I improperly made a falafel recipe, and it didn't have uh an adequate binder in it. And because I had a commercial fryer, 40 pound, 40 pounds of oil commercial fryer, like I never used to worry about overloading it. So I put the almost the entire batch in, like enough to cover the entire top layer of the oil, which is substantial. And the entire batch of falafel instantly disintegrated into uh like a layer, like a blanket of falafel on the top of the thing, absorbed oil and sank to the bottom of my fryer. It was the worst frying nightmare, I think, of all time.
The second was the that wasn't a nightmare, but would have been the worst nightmare of all time, is uh when Nastasia and I were with, I believe uh Fabulous, Fabian von Haskin, I forget Piper probably, right? Was it Piper who was there with us? And we were testing lowering a turkey into a deep fryer, and we dropped it. And had the fryer been on, we all would have died. Remember that?
Yep. Yeah. Wait, die why would you have died? Just because it would have sprayed oil everywhere or yeah, it would have sprayed oil everywhere. We all would have, we all would have been toast.
And then our response was because it was cold, because we were running a dry, you know, a dry run. It was still oil, so it was still messy, but it was a dry run in the sense that it wasn't on. Um, we all just started laughing because we're all like, hey, we would be dead now. It was awesome, right, Stas? Yes.
Yep. Yeah, yeah. Uh okay, back to uh Alex Goody's question here. I want to find a way to make relatively flat uh, you know, uh pork skins of consistent size. I plan to pressure cook and then grind the pork andor chicken skin and use transglutaminase to recombine it and form into sheets and then fry.
Which transglutaminase do I use? Uh I have your guide. Transglutaminase is the enzyme that uh glues proteins together. But it doesn't really go into something like this. I just assume GB.
Uh so GB is a greatest bond. The different transglutin, well, I'll finish the question. Since I'm deep frying, but I imagine there are other considerations in the choice that I'm unaware of. I know that I'll have to mess with ratios of uh different skins, thicknesses, etc. etc.
But any advice uh would be appreciated. Uh also just check uh knowing it won't be horrible failure uh is always appreciated. I don't think it'll be horrible failure. It might not work, but I don't think it'll be a horrible failure. Um I have some model recipes that make this make sense from modernist cuisine.
Um they have uh traditional chicharron where you pressure cook the skin and then dehydrate it and fry it. Uh by the way, I don't know that pressure cooking the pork skins in the traditional recipe is necessary. Nastasi and I used to make them constantly, unfortunately. And they you smell terrible when you're making when you're when you're cooking off pork skins and then scraping them because you have to scrape the fat off the back to get good kind of expansion. How bad do your hands smell, Nastasia?
We mostly did beaver, which was gross. Yeah, we did. Well, we did a bunch of beaver flapper, that is true. But I just remember we used to we couldn't do beaver flapper for big events because we never had that much of it. But do you remember when we got that whole, we would get whole cases of pork skin in, and then we would be there with the interns like scraping all of the stuff at all of the stations in the Italian kitchen?
Like because we only had like an hour and a half. So I was like, get them in the get them in the water. We'd have to boil them. When you boil them, when you're done boiling, what you're doing is you're converting all of the collagen to gelatin. Then when the collagen is turned into gelatin, there's a little bit of other proteins and connective tissue in there that don't uh solubilize, and but that's the only strength of the pork skin, right?
So you have to let it cool completely before you even touch it because a pork skin that's th thoroughly cooked through won't even hold its own weight when you lift it. It'll just tear, right? But when you let it cool off and the gelatin sets, it's strong enough to mess with. That's when you scrape off the back, and that's when your hands start smelling like pork skin, which is just nasty. In the same way that like pork stock, John, give me some give me some dropping you some knowledge on the pork stock.
Uh yeah, really unpleasant. Stinky, not fun. Had to make it one back when I worked at the breath one. We added pork shanks for the chicken stock. Um but yeah, stinky.
But why did you do do you think it made the stock better? I don't think so. She thought it added I mean, I guess it does add more gelatin and body to the stock, but I don't know. I I couldn't see necessarily a purpose on it. I'd rather just throw in more chicken feed or something like that.
Or how about this people? I don't know if you guys have thought of this before. You know what you can add to stock to give it more gelatin if you already like the flavor? Gelatin, powder gelatin. Gelatin.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I if you like the flavor of what you're working with and want to add gelatin, how's about gelatin instead of stinky, stinky pork uh bones? Because here's the other thing, like other people are like, oh, well, what you do is you take the pork bones and then you put them in cold water, and then you bring the water up just to the simmer, and then you scrape all of the stink off, throw that water away, and then make a real stock where you're just getting the gelatin out of the bones and not all that stinky pork stock flavor, or just use gelatin.
I'm just saying. Um, all right. Uh and then uh Chef Steph's makes chicken noodles where they grind chicken and then glue it to form it into a sheet using Activa RM and then cut it into noodles and steam them. Uh this that okay, so look, the the transglutaminase noodle thing goes back to Wiley Dufresne, my brother-in-law, who one of his most famous WD recipes, WE50 recipes, was um shrimp noodles, where he just mixed shrimp and transglutaminase and salt, and then extruded it out of like one of those Japanese noodle press presses into water, and the noodles would instantly set into noodles that could be uh eaten like pasta. It was a great dish, it was a great idea.
He was very mad that uh uh Ajinamoto, the company that makes um Activa, R, which is the um transglutaminase, that they had uh basically stopped him from patenting any process because they had the way that they had organized their patents, they were very good at it. So he couldn't get any intellectual property protection out of that kind of discovery, even though he really did do that. Um one of his second great things, this is more uh apropos of what you're asking here, Alex, is he also invented the vegetable sheet noodle, where you use uh you actually take, like I said before, gelatin. So it's not gonna matter much which activa he uses. He was, I believe, using Activa Ti, which for the gelatin ones, which is strong.
So the Activa RM, which is the old school standard one, is uh is gelatin, sorry, is milk protein casein plus enzyme plus filler. Um greatest bond and the casein is the glue molecule that it's using to glue with the the helper glue. GB, the one that you mentioned, greatest bond, is uh a mixture of gelatin and uh enzyme and filler. Uh Wiley used TI, which is just enzyme and filler, and then gelatin, because he's like, I'll add the amount of gelatin I want, thanks, which I think is a good idea. And the what happens when you um crosslink gelatin with um uh activa is it becomes non-thermoreversible.
So in other words, the gelatin won't melt anymore, assuming that you cross-link it enough and use a gelatin of high enough uh polymerization. So what he did is he would take any sort of vegetable you want, mix it with uh gelatin, add transglutaminase, sheet it into noodles, let it sit for over a day so it can fully uh fully react, and then those noodles would be non-thermal reversible. You could make vegetable noodles that you could then boil in in in water and they wouldn't break apart. Now, um you can do this and uh you're gonna have to test because the way that uh pork rinds work is that the uh hold on one second. Sorry, uh the dogs were locked in a room, and then whenever they get unlocked from the room, they run around with happiness.
Oh, yeah, I totally just muted John thinking that that's what those dogs are. Anyways, so uh where was I? So it like the pork rinds um work because gelatin that is dried becomes plastic again as it heats up. So do some tests. I think it'll probably work.
Uh Wiley said he thinks it'll probably work. I texted him. Uh give it a shot. It's not probably it's you know, duh, do one or two strips before you uh uh put the whole thing in your fryer and falafel up the bottom of it like I did, uh, which is a nightmare. Uh uh long time that we've had this on the on the thing for a long time and we haven't mentioned it, so I think we should bring it up.
You also have Dax Arnold on the code. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Give me one second. Mark from Cam Loops, Mark from Cam Loops says, and Dax can weigh in on this. Dax, are you there?
Yep. Muted him at you muted my own son? Yeah, I'm here, I'm here. Uh all right, Dax, see what you think about this. Uh Dax only cares about hip hops.
I think this is more of a rock band name, but Mark from Cam Loops says uh persistent pinking is a great name for a rock band. What do you guys think? Call it college rock band. Yeah. College rock band persistent pinking.
I guess. Persistent pinking, of course, is the problem that uh poultry and other meats have where they just won't turn gray as you cook them, no matter how high a heat you subject uh them to, which is a nightmare for people that won't eat that meat. All right now, Dax has a request for the cooking issues listeners. You know, go for it, Dax. Yeah, okay.
So my friends and I we've been trying to find like regular spray cranberry for the longest time. Not the winter spice, but like the regular stuff. If anyone out there like knows how to get it, please drag towards my dad. Uh I've been looking for it everywhere. And the only thing.
Why do you care about this, Dex? I mean, I care about it because I remember in 2018, I was able to just get it so easily I could just go to Target. My friends and I, we loved it. And then after that, it just went scarce. Like you just couldn't find it anymore.
I just want to have it again. Now, what's wrong with the winter spice cranberry sprite? I mean, nothing's wrong with it. It still tastes good, but like I just I still want the original. It's endorsed by Dram, right?
Yeah, and LeBron James. So these are two people you can do. It's endorsed by LeBron James, but Dram just helped to make the song. Yeah. Yeah, but it's not, it's it's it's to you, it just doesn't bring back your your childhood as as much as how do you know?
How do you know that it even exists? Now, just so you think that Dax is lazy. Dax has done his Googling, right? It's not available here, right? I mean it is, but I have to I'd have to pick it up in Alabama, and I have no means of getting there.
That's not here. Alabama is not here, Dax. And how do you know that it's actually available in Alabama? Did you call the store in Alabama and say, are you sure you have this or have you not updated your stock list from 2018? Yeah, no, I've been calling stores, checking stocks.
You called a store in Alabama. Yeah, because I thought they would deliver, but they don't. How are they gonna deliver? Dax, I might be making a rundown close to Alabama, meeting up with a brother-in-law from Alabama for the right price. I will get you some of this, but it's gonna be less.
If they're gonna make it at all, why would they only sell it in in Alabama? I don't know. That was just one of the stores that I saw. And what spice do you add to cranberry to make it into winter? What's a winter spice?
I I I don't know. Every store between here in Alabama. I mean, like, I've checked a bunch of stores within like 10 mile radius. Bike bike radius. So here's another thing.
Dax, by the way, I've to mention mentioned this on the show. Dax is a soda smuggler. Do you guys know this? Soda sm okay. Yeah.
So Dax, there's a there's a vape shop that, aside from vaping, which you know, I do not endorse, uh, they also deal in international sodas. And so uh Dax has purchased some limited edition sodas from them for exorbitant amounts of money. But then when we were in Belgium right before the pandemic, he noticed a rare soda. Which one was it, Dax? It's like Fanta exotic.
That's what it's like. Fanta exotic. Yeah. And so he bought like 30 pounds, like, you know, like however many two-liter bottles, like 30 pounds of Fanta exotic and stuffed his suitcase with it and brought it, you know, whatever the weight limit was, that's how much you know, Fanta exotic he brought back into the country. And what'd you do, Dax?
I sold it to him. Yeah, sold it. He's a like like Dax is a legitimate rare soda dealer. Wow. Yeah.
I mean, all right. All right. So uh you guys have heard his request. If anyone has the hookup and knows how Dax can get, but don't don't come in here with your winter spice sprites, cranberry sprites. That is that is what a joker would do.
I'm telling you right now, Dax has already had the winter sp uh spice sprites. I still have some in my possession. And he's fine with it. He's not hating. If anyone hears this who is involved with winter's winter spice cranberry Sprite, he's not against you.
He just wants some OG. Am I right about this, Dax? That is exactly correct. Yeah. Do you have anything else before you sign off?
Are you good? By the way, Dax told his teachers, because he's theoretically in quote unquote. Well, I'm not in class right now. I'm not in classroom. I got up.
You didn't have to lie. You mean you got up by saying you needed to go to the restroom? No, I didn't have to. Hey, for those of you that don't like have access to kids, what percentage of the kids in quote unquote online school now actually just turn off their cameras and their microphones and do whatever they want during their class sessions. I would assume all of them, but I don't know.
I'm not around. But seriously, Dax, give me a number. What percentage? I mean, I I don't know. Like the I don't know who's doing what behind the camera.
So they're not there. Oh, so you think that some of them have turned their camera off, muted themselves, and are diligently studying what the teacher is saying. I can tell you what percentage are doing that. Uh yeah, anyway. That's a little little insight, little insight into the state of our schools, people.
Well, thanks, Dax, for that uh that plea for Sprite. Thank you. All right. Bye guys. Uh and uh oh, Nastasia doing the booker goodbye.
I love it. Only Nastasia and I know give me the booker goodbye again, Staz. I can't, because it's not I can't not do it. Because you can't hang up. Oh, you okay.
Let me so Nastasia said that she has to leave hard at one because she has to go do stuff, right? So when you when it comes time for you to leave. Just gonna do it to do the book or goodbye so everyone can get the book or goodbye. All right. Yes.
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Learn more at appeal.com. That was uh a while ago. Listen, Joe, we understand this. We have we have given this question to Adam, right? So when Adam gets back to us, I will tell you the answer to your to what he says about your rye bread.
Did you text him, babe? I texted him, but I did the lazy person's text, which is I literally took a picture of my email that uh had uh Joe's question about rye bread in it and texted him the picture. So when you look at it, it looks like a dot matrix printer. You know how pictures of of monitors look like weird little squares in Yum Hama? Because of the aliasing effect?
Yeah. Uh all right. Did you text him, like do you passive aggressively text him a picture of you having already forwarded him or like the email that you sent him? I I would appreciate I didn't send him an email. I think Nastasia sent him an email.
Okay. Yeah, but you didn't ask any question under the photo. You just sent the photo with no context? No. I okay, okay.
Here's just so you guys can judge or not judge, this is what I said. This is how I write texts. Howdy, Dave Arnold here. I hope you are well. That's my standard.
Then I said, I had a question from a listener on your rye recipe. Thought I'd go to the source, sorry so last minute. I sent it today and I texted him a picture of the question. Is that an acceptable way to do this? I'd say he's not gonna get back to you.
Like ever? Yeah. Okay. Alright. Alright.
Uh, so I did a little more research uh on a question um that came in a while ago. So let's uh and I think I have an answer for you. Lisa Somerville uh wrote in, uh, and remember we said this before, but she is 43 female, married, and buys any gadget she wants. Uh, and both for uh the home and for the bakery that she owns with her husband. Um anyway, so um what she said was is that she had a student uh who used to tell her about a German bakery where she used to work that made their own quote unquote vanilla flavor by combining prune juice and vodka.
I'd never heard of this, so I tried it. Equal parts prune juice and vodka. At first it was terrible, but after letting the mixture sit at room temperature for a week or two, it tasted surprisingly like vanilla. My question is, why does this work? I'm also curious about the history of this, but I'm guessing it comes from a time when vanilla beans couldn't be transported because of wartime.
Any insight on this would be appreciated. Thanks. Love the show, Lisa. Alright, I did a little more digging, and there is nothing, nothing that I was able to find on there being actual vanillin in prune juice. Now, what I did find was W.
Dennis wrote an article in the Journal of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry in April 1911, saying the detection of prune juice and caramel in vanilla flavoring extracts. And then it said the for that this is from 19, actually 1910, October 12, 1910. I guess it was published in April 11 then. The foreign coloring materials mostly most frequently used in the preparation of factitious vanilla flavoring extracts are caramel, prune juice, comma, and coal tar dyes. And so, and they are it was more difficult to uh do detection tests for prune juice than uh caramel coloring.
Uh so anyway, uh I think that this practice started um as a way to make fake vanilla look more uh by the way, fake vanilla is all based on vanillin. And vanillin was one of the very first isolated uh organic flavor molecules, and also one of the first ones to be synthesized uh in the laboratory, and it played a huge role in the development of the flavor industry. In fact, it was one of the main pillars of the flavor exhibit that the Museum of Food and Drink did way back way back in the day. Uh and it was actually a German, going back to Germany in the um in the 1870s, that had the first factory that was producing artificial vanilla, make uh vanillin, producing vanillin to make artificial uh vanilla. It at the beginning it was quite expensive, but by the time this century rolled rolled around by the mid-20s, well, last century, sorry, my my century, then the 1900s.
Um, when uh in the 20s and 30s, they figured out how to make it out of uh lignin, which is basically pulp, uh, and it became fantastically cheaper. But early, I think people were using prune juice and other things with a little bit of vanillin to make a closer fake vanilla than just a clear um a clear vanilin would be. Uh so I don't I think it's probably maybe reminiscent of it from a color thing, but I couldn't find any actual chemical uh overlap. Um interesting, uh, did you know? And I did not know this, that prune juice is a common additive in tobacco for smoking because it adds sweetness and it has a couple of other things, but it harshes the it harshes it, and some cigarettes are up to a half of a percent.
The tobacco is up to half a percent of uh of prune juice. Did you be aware of this? I was not. Yeah. And also uh on uh prune juice as being the uh laxative extraordinaire for uh for the old geezer community, uh which I'm rapidly approaching, uh the Sun Sweet Corporation uh says that it is not just the high fiber in prune juice that that gets your motor running, uh it but it contains more sorbitol, which is uh a laxative in large ingredients than most other fruit juices.
So there is the uh poopfactive uh element of the uh prune juice for you. So that's a little bonus you're getting in your prune juice research today. You like that? A little bonus? Yeah.
Yeah. Uh okay, now listen, Michael Vahabi wrote in about uh panettone. Now we'll have a discussion now. Nastasia. You don't like panettone, right?
Is that one of the things you don't like? I do, I like it. Oh. Who do I know that doesn't like it then? I know someone in my family or like close friend doesn't like it.
Now I gotta figure out who it is. I just assumed it was my biscuit hating friend Nastasia, but huh? Alright then. Well, so John was proposing who are you proposing trying to get on, John? Um the guy Roy from Panatone by Roy, who apparently makes excellent pentatones.
Alright. So should we should we save this? So the question was on um for the Panatone, they make a very stiff starter called a pasta madre, and there's lots of things about do you have to wrap it in this and boopoo and boop bee? So maybe we should just hold this off and and you know, in case we get him on, we can we can ask him, no. Yeah.
Alright. If that's what we want to do. Umastas, what is your was it Matt that doesn't like it? No. No.
Matt doesn't care. What are your guys' thoughts on uh using it in a French toast uh style situation? Good. That sounds great. Yeah?
Yeah. It it's so if you don't find it to be gilding the lily. No. Yeah, not at all. What about Brioche French toast?
Highly in favor. Huh. What about actual old school French toast like Pamper Du style, where it's like started out as like a stiffer, more rustic bread. You let it actually freaking stale, and then it's you have to soak it up with like a a lot of liquid because it that bread is actually kind of gone into its zone. Any of you guys like that style of French toast?
It's a much firmer French toast. I just did that last week. Would you prefer the softer, more kind of uh, you know, uh like the brioche slash where where there's already like a bullet. No, I mean that would be that would be nice, but no, I like having the option to to make use of the stale bread via the the old school way of doing that. I wonder what percentage of French toast that is made uses stale bread, roughly zero, like not zero, but like very small amount, right?
I think most people make French toast with bread that you could actually eat right now and be happy with. I think so. Especially because what percentage of French toast is eaten in restaurants, probably a very high percentage. Like diner style restaurants. Yeah, yeah.
Do you know what I tried to emulate once? And I I think I've mentioned it on the show, and all of you guys, I think would have just missed this. Uh well, Nastasia would have just missed it, you guys would have missed it by a lot. But there used to be a restaurant called the Royal Canadian Pancake House, where Sylvester Stallone went, I've mentioned this to bulk up for Copland. And their whole shtick uh was you know, giant size things, and they used to take, I think it was like a whole hala or some sort of like egg-heavy, could have been like could have been a brioche, but it was a whole loaf of bread, and they somehow sliced it so that it opened up almost like a blooming onion, and then they soaked it, and then they developed a deep fry basket where they just put the entire loaf into the deep fryer at once and deep-fried it to make this like ridiculous, like absurd, really, when you think about it.
French toast. I have to say, was not bad. And then I tried recreating it once, I was unable. So if any of you have the recipe for the Royal Canadian Pancake house whole deep fried French toast, because it was never important enough for me to run through all the tests it would take to actually recreate it. But that sounds like kind of a fun party trick once more than three people are allowed to get in the same room again together, right?
Yeah. Yeah. Alright. Stephen Bass wrote in via email, could you please share the spec for the cornstar from the old Booker Index? Cornstar with a C, corn, uh was uh a recipe by Austin Hennley, who is now he's still at Major Domo, right?
Major Domo Reopener, everything's closed now again in LA, but um uh anyway, from Austin Hennley, and the recipe was first you had to make uh corn infused rye. And for that recipe, he used knob creek rye, and it was a 750 of knob creek, and then 150 grams of freeze-dried corn powder. Uh we got it from Milk Bar because I think they used to use that in their corn cookies, right? Uh, but I think you could probably just crush up uh freeze-dried corn. Uh, then he ISI'd it for two minutes, uh, you know, with you know, my rapid infusion technique, probably with two chargers and a liter bottle, and then strained it and uh pressed it and then put it in a centerfuge to get rid of the solid.
So that was a pain in the butt to make. And then once you made that, it was that, then a half ounce of lemon juice, and a quarter ounce of JM cane, which is an expensive cane syrup, but jam cane is a lot thinner than Steen's, which is the corn syrup I've been using uh at the house, which is delicious, so you'd have to adjust the recipe a little bit because uh steens won't jigger, but uh jam Cain probably will. 11 dashes of black pepper bitters. I think they used a simplified liquid intelligence recipe. So my recipe for black pepper bitters uses cubebs, grains of paradise, and several different kinds of black pepper.
Cubebs, underused, love cubebs. Uh also love the word. Stas, what do you think of the word cubebs? Cube. Yeah, right?
It's got two B's in it with it. How often do you get words like that? Cubebs. Um I think they simplified it, they just use black peppers because no one wanted to go buy all the stuff. And uh, four drops of saline solution, that's a 20% saline solution.
Shake it on a shake it on uh on a big old rock, pour it over a fresh big old rock, and serve it with a snack. No, no, it was served in a coop and uh put snack mix on the side. I'll have to say uh that drink made it on the menu because Austin decided, everyone always decided whenever we would have these kind of meetings. This is both at existing conditions, even at the French culinary with the interns. Anytime I would say I hate something, someone would be like, That's the thing I'm gonna make for you and make you like it.
Stas, true or false. Everyone always does this with me. No, because if everyone did that to you, you'd have a lot more things. Everyone's scared of you. So the people that actually do it that make it through are lower than you think.
You mean the number of them? Yep. Anyway, so I say, like, I don't like corn drinks. I've tried making corn drinks. Nastasi and I have made several disgusting corn drinks, true or false.
Yeah. Yeah. And because we had to, because we were forced to, right? And um, and so at one of these meetings, I was like, listen, because everyone's always like, what about corn and a drink? And I'm like, I was like, you could try every single one that I've had, I've hated, and I've tried it.
You know, I've tried corn juice, I've tried corn blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And um, and so, like, you know, through dogged persistence, like he got this one that made it on the menu, but it was still something I would never order. But apparently, uh, Steven, you ordered it, had it, liked it, and want the recipe. So there it is. There you have it.
Um, and by the way, when you're working on a menu, I think it's a good idea to let multiple, you need to discern whether something is just something you don't like or whether it's bad, and it's hard, which is why you should always take input from everyone around you and have multiple people tasting. Because there's plenty of stuff that I don't like that is uh is good, right? Anyway. Uh okay. Uh Brandon wrote in a sorry, Styze, you're gonna have to earmuff because it's a a bread baking question.
Question for you on bread baking. In my research on the science of bread baking, I found detailed breakdowns of the impact of almost every variable on the final loaf except for one, the temperature of the dough when it goes into the oven. Assuming you were following traditional preheated oven and preheated Dutch oven technique as opposed to cold oven and uh cold Dutch oven. Um, which by the way, okay, I'm not gonna get into that. It would I would have to spend all time just talking about that, so I won't even talk about that.
Uh, how does the temperature of the dough impact oven spring? Milk Street's pizza recipe started uh my hunt for this information is they call for putting the dough in a bowl and floating the bowl in hot water until it reaches 75 degrees. Uh the warming step causes uh a lot more rise and air bubbles versus uh um dough straight from the fridge or sitting sitting at room temp. I guess it depends on your room temp, right? Uh I make a focacci like flatbread regularly and find the dough temp makes a big difference on the rise and crumb texture.
Shaping the dough in a sheet pan and floating it uh on hot water for 30 minutes um results in a fantastic rise in crumb, regardless of proof level. Um, I'm wondering whether or not you're getting a I'm wondering whether or not you're getting a differential, right? Because you're lowering the bottom surface of it. So you're reactivating the yeast that's at the bottom, but not at the top, and so you're starting to expand the air bubbles in the bottom faster than you are on the top, which is maybe creating kind of the structure that you want. I mean, clearly, like all the research points to the to the fact that um the bubbles that are in the any bread that you make are actually there from the kneading and folding, and they've been expanded by the gas that's coming off of the yeast, but that the yeast, it's not possible for the yeast to actually initiate its own kind of um its own kind of air pocket, which is why even in your no-need, uh right, you're making that shaggy dough that's getting some air in it.
And there's always one or two folds and flop doodles of it to try to get some air into it. And then even so, because of the high hydration, but also because of that kind of lack of kneading, you're getting these big old uh air bubbles. So my guess is that if there is a differential effect and have someone chime in or tell me I'm wrong or send us some information so I can talk about it more uh next week. Um, but my guess is that if there is an effect, you're getting an effect by differentially heating the bottom versus the top and just uh stratifying where the yeast is reactivating first. Is that a good enough answer?
Was that within your we we we went off the uh ding, Stas. We want to go back on the ding someday. I mean, yeah, but sure. It worked. We only tried it once, right?
Yeah. You liked it, didn't you? I liked it, but it's it's uh a lot of work. But yeah, we can do it. I mean, if you look, if you don't think it's worth it, don't do it.
If you like it, do it. It's up to you. Uh Patrick wrote in spin's all question. Have you ever had the clear did I did I talk about this already? Have you ever had the clear dirty martini at the new Hemingway bar at the Paris Ritz?
No. I've not been to the new Paris Ritz. Anyway, uh it's a clear liquid, and they put a I mean, I wish. I love Paris. You guys, I mean, I know John likes freaking Paris.
What about you, Stuzz? Are you a Paris fan or not a fan? Yes. Why do you say it like that? You're not a fan of a lot of things that people really like.
I I could see you not liking Parrots just because everybody loves Paris so much, out of all proportion to what they should love it. That's all. I'm just asking. God. Um it is a clear liquid, and they put a clear ice cube at the bottom with an olive inside of the clear ice cube, but it tastes dirty, the martini now.
Tastes dirty despite being clear. Even when the ice cube melts, do you think they are using clarified olive juice for that ice cube? I doubt it because the dirtiness, aside from any flavors, is uh salt uh and other things, and you can't freeze that stuff into uh into the you know into it. It would make it not clear and it would get frozen out. So you can you can have an inclusion like a whole olive, right, and then freeze clear ice around it, but you can't have a you can't have something clear that has like a lot of flavor in the actual clear part of the ice.
Now, that's my guess. Uh someone could tell me that I'm wrong and they've done it, in which case I will update my answer, but that's my guess. My guess is that it is tasting less dirty as it melts until you get to the olive, which might be surrounded by a portion of brine, where it will then re-dirty it. Just a guess. Um hold and Trout uh gave a good technique via email.
Um, a few things to pass along on one of the last episodes, uh Dave mentioned his experiments with the silicone stasher bags. Uh, which are, by the way, they're those uh those silicone kind of Ziploc bags uh that that I think the thing that I think is interesting about them is that um they can be retorted in even ovens, so you don't have to worry about throwing them into boiling water. In fact, in my freezer right now, I have leftover stuffing in two stasher bags that I use this uh technique on. Uh because don't you hate when you take a Ziploc bag out of the freezer and you throw it into hot water and the hot water gets a little too hot and the bag loses its integrity or it touches the bottom of the pan or the side and melts out and then liquid gets in when you're reheating. Does this happen to anyone but me?
Just me. Uh okay. Uh and so Holden wrote in and said, you know, how I said I wasn't able to get uh all the air out the way that I do with uh Ziploc bags and a bag of water. And uh he has this technique uh when he points us to a YouTube where they do it, where uh you put the stasher bag inside of a like a manual vacuum bag, and then you suck a vacuum on that, and you can then suck it in, and it does work quite well. Be careful when you do it though, don't seal the stasher bag before you put it in, or the air inside the stasher bag will inflate, reopen the seal of the stasher bag, possibly with consequential amounts of spilling out of the one stasher bag into your vacuum bag.
I'm not gonna tell you how I know that. Uh also recently heard, it's just uh Holden Trout again. Recently heard the episode uh where I was talking about the River Cottage Cookbook as a classic in the field, and wanted to let us know that when they published the American edition of the book, they took out the my favorite part of the book, which is the cute farm animals with the butchery diagrams drawn over them. Shame on you, American publisher, shame on you. Um Lackland Bissett wrote in uh from Australia and saw on Kickstarter something called IXON, which is a preservative-free meat you can store at room temperature, and wondered what my opinion of it was.
So they have this thing that they call advanced sous-vide aseptic packaging, and you know, it's a product that is commercially sterile, i.e., it doesn't require refrigeration, meats in vacuum bags. Um I'm interested in it, um, Lackland, but the problem is that nowhere on the site do they tell you how they do it. Nowhere do they tell you kind of like something like a food preservation technology. Like I want to see, I want to see what they're doing. So I think the problem is that they probably don't have enough protection on the process to be able to tell you exactly why they how they do it.
And in the absence of that, I can't say whether I think it's great, right? So it could be like it's probably based on some sort of multiple hurdle technology, so some level of salt, some level of heat pasteurization, perhaps with um irradiation, perhaps with UV, perhaps with high pressure, who knows? Uh right, so like one thing that's possible is that they could have super high pressure, like pressure that's enough to uh sterilize something in without using any heat, typically is high enough to also degrade meat texture, which is why you don't see it very often on things other than like oysters and whatnot. But um, but maybe like through multiple hurdle technology, they can do a lower pressure with it and like a cook, but they don't tell you what they're doing. So irritating.
Uh Jared is gold wrote in via Instagram. Quick question: uh, what do you think is a good temp to a good temperature to low temp half a chicken with the backbone uh with with cut in half with the backbone in? I beware the backbone, your low temp, just like I say, like uh talking about persistent pinking, stuff coming out of the backbone can cause some persistent pinking. Trying to have a nicely cooked leg and thigh without a fibrosis breast, a fibroy breast. Uh, thanks, love the show.
Um, all right, so the breast is gonna be taste cooked, but look trans. Some people can tolerate translucent-looking breasts and thigh meat. Most of us can't. So if you can tolerate it, just be aware that other people can't, and so cook it a little higher. Uh, 63 is the minimum temperature on breasts, however, 64.5 or so is the lowest temperature on thigh, but in reality, I would say probably 65 is safe to get it up within a reasonable uh amount of time.
I would still at 65 salt the breast beforehand to try to um you know increase its water holding capacity at that um temperature. But I I typically do it at like 65. If I'm doing something big, I'll even do 66. Anything much over that, and you're gonna start having uh problems. But hit these are all in Celsius, by the way.
Um Colin Hughes wrote in via Instagram. Hey, I have a question. What do you think of ceramic slash pottery mixing glasses? I'd guess that they have a super high thermal mass and would make drinks uh inconsistent. Can you add any ins uh insights into that?
Thanks. Uh yeah, that's exactly correct. Uh, however, you can use it if you want, but you have to pre-chill it all the time. And so the way to do that is to always store your mixing glass full of uh ice and water. Uh and so when everyone at the bar decided that they didn't like stirring in tins anymore and they want to stir in fancy Uri-looking glasses, I said that's fine, but if I ever see you uh not having a pre-chilled Uri glass, you mix in, then I'll yell at you and take your head off, and I'll point to this very moment where we've had this conversation where you said that you would be religious about doing that, and I will tell you what a liar you are.
And I didn't actually do that to them during service, but I will say that during service occasionally uh I would see it happening. Um, but just be aware that it will affect it, and so uh in certain drinks, actually, if you're if you're working in a bar, right? Then you have to make it consistent. So I would make sure that they're always pre-chilled, always just keep ice and water in them all the time. Uh at home, uh, there are certain drinks that actually want more dilution.
So drinks where you know you have to stir longer, well, might as well instead of stirring it longer, uh, I mean, if you stirring it longer will make it colder as well. But if that's not a benefit in a particular drink, because it's not always a benefit, then um just use one that's not pre-chilled. I mean, it's it's gonna be a drink-by-drink basis, but from a consistency standpoint, uh, you are correct. Um, Thomas wrote in, uh, I'm having exhaust fan issues in my rental kitchen. The exhaust fan is clearly not powerful enough for any real cooking.
Are there any solutions to this problem? Are anyone are any home kitchen fans good? No, because uh with my experience, they all seem to be crap. Your experience has also been my experience, Thomas. Uh, thanks for your time.
Warm regards, Thomas. Um, I mean, look, the the the best thing you're gonna get out of most situations is the box fan in uh your window. If you're a little bit handy, um, what I would do for the kitchen window, it's ugly, so you know be aware. Is uh if you really can't afford to do good work, get a piece of wood, buy uh fans, the the circular fans that are meant to be mounted into holes that you cut, cut the hole, try to do a nice job, route it out if you can, right? And then bolt two fans in, right?
Side by side that basic that take up basically the whole width of your window. And you'll see this a lot in kind of illegal uh illegal venting down near where I live, down here in lower Manhattan. And then uh lower the top window, not the bottom one, the top window. Because remember, all this hot stuff that you want to evacuate accumulates high and then rolls down. So put it up high, right, across the entire window, and then screw it into the window uh so they can't pop out, and that's gonna be, and you can put a speed control on the board that you have there and then run a wire to it.
And that's gonna be the best bet for a rental because it doesn't actually do any modification, doesn't require you to modify the wall. No landlord is gonna see one little scroll hole in the side of your window jam, and that's what that's that's what I would do. But it can look really ugly. Most of the people that do it use real crappy uh CDX plywood, and so it looks very provisional. You guys have all seen this uh walking around Manhattan, right?
This style of vent. Yeah. Looks garbage, but you can make it look better. I mean, I don't know how much the looks is important. I don't know whether you can see the kitchen from all over the rest of the apartment or not.
Uh all right. Uh, and remember, never call it uh a hood or a vent. Because the reason those once you put once you put cooking exhaust into a pipe, you then have to worry about fire, right? Because the stuff that builds up in the pipe can catch fire and cause a real bad kind of uh fire effect, the fire shooting out. Um so be aware.
Uh Zachary Stewart wrote in uh by email. In college, I learned the trick for bad coffee or bad beer was to put a shake of salt in it. There hey in college, there was no such thing. I love how, like, you know, I'm glad that people are much uh fancier now in college. There was no such thing as bad beer in college.
There was only beer we couldn't afford. The best beer in college was free beer. You guys familiar with this? Yes. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. My favorite beer in college was whatever was free. Um, right? I mean, and and even like liquor, the best liquor for a while was free because we had no money.
Uh, but anyway, uh, I'm glad that people are beyond that now. Because as soon as you can afford to not drink complete swill, you should. I'm not saying you should spend scads of money. Anyway, uh, I learned that the trick for bad coffee or bad beer was to put a shake of salt in it. Despite the hundreds of hours of coffee talk from Dave, I've never heard of him talk about putting salt in.
So salt and coffee, sometimes, always or never, Zach from Pittsburgh P.S. In real life, I'm not a inser. Alright, listen, there's a good point. I'm surprised I've never mentioned it. Uh I do not put salt in my espresso.
Maybe I should try it, but I do add a pinch of salt when I'm adding the sugar to my wife's lattes. So when I'm doing milk in coffee, I will add uh a small. Oh, that's the booker goodbye, people. That's the booker goodbye. Strong.
I mean, I'll talk to her about it later when she's done. That's that's strong. That's how it works. You could be in the middle of a sentence, and Booker will give you the book of goodbye. Just like that.
Very polite, happy. Yeah. He's glad he's glad he's spoken to you. Uh-huh. He's not at all upset.
And he's hanging up now. And he's gone. Goodbye. Um, so yeah, so I put it basically in coffee with milk. But John, have you ever put coff uh salt into coffee that doesn't have milk?
No, I guess not. No. I've tried putting the salt in the coffee with milk and I never didn't really notice a difference, but I guess the father. Did you try it before and after? No.
That's the trick. I haven't tried it because I don't like coffee with milk, so I'm a bad judge. Uh I just do it because it's just kind of instinct for me to do it. But for someone who has tested it, let us know. I've never tried it with beer.
You ever tried it with beer? No, I've never heard about that with beer. Actually, I've never heard anyone say that with beer, yeah. I mean, the problem with adding salt to beer is that it foams like a weasel, right? Because you're throwing nucleation sites into your beer.
So back but but back at the at the bar at the end of the night when we were having our shift to cate's, um, I would uh invariably pour in cr Clary Lime and uh saline solution, though. And that's great. Clarified lime and saline topping off a tacate is good. I would prefer it to have been a negromadello, but we didn't stock that. We had to do it.
What's your what are your favorite cheap Mexican beers? Uh I always go. I was always served chicate, but we also my favorite kid post ship drink was uh Miller High Life, one of the restaurants. I don't always had that for us. The champagne of beers, huh?
Yep. Yeah. So I think if they were all lined up, I'd go Negro Modelo. Although, because of college experiences, I have like a very fond soft spot for my memory of Dose Eckeys. Really?
I haven't had one in years, so that tells you something right there. For those of you for those of you that have like never seen Matt, he kind of looks like a young, like longer haired version of the Dos X guy. Like if you had his facial hair, you could be the Dose X guy when you're older, dude. I'll look into that. I don't know about that one.
Yeah. Yeah. Um yeah, at towards the end of existing conditions, we we used to have, you know, the Miller Pony was what we always garnish. The Corsair was one of my favorite drink that I would get there. Uh and uh which is the preserved lemon drink, preserved lemon, tequila, uh lime, and a little bit of sugar and some spice.
And uh towards the end we couldn't get the Miller ponies anymore. Uh and so they had the modello ponies, which were amazing, but they were the uh especialito ones. Uh and I prefer negro modello to the the to this special one. You uh yeah, I would just do Negro Modello. Yeah, Negro Modello, yeah, yeah.
Uh wait, what was the Corsair recipe? Because I preserved lemons in the fridge and I love tequila. Do you have a centrifuge? Oh god. All right, next.
Uh that's a good John. Did you you uh Corsair wasn't your drink, we but like it's a good drink. Yeah, very good drink, yeah. Yeah, because it's like super salty and not it, like I don't know, I like it. Um Jason Thomas wrote in via Instagram.
I was hoping for a recommendation for a book on Gard Manger work. I'm a home cook and uh know that I'm not being resourceful enough at maximizing scraps and leftovers. Uh love the show. So I mean, most of the garde manger books that I have uh or that I have had aren't really about kind of what you would do with for garmenter in like a normal restaurant kitchen. It's more about kind of like fancy hotel buffet style garmenter stuff.
Do you ever John, what do you think about that? Have you ever seen one of a book that deals with kind of like the actual aspects of so Garmanger for those of you that aren't hip is uh like the cold the cold kitchen, right? So, you know, it's basically station where um you know any cold prep would get done. What'd you say? Salads, yeah.
Stuff you do you say salads? Anyway, cold apps, yeah, salads. Yeah, cold apps, salads. Uh and in a major hotel, it would also be where like the buffets are done. But I don't know of any books that deal with the aspect that that you're interested in.
I mean, like the the do you, John? No, not really. I mean, just with that, I would think more maybe it's better to like think about fermenting or you know, marinating scraps of whatever in vinegar, you know, to make like an apple scrap vinegar or something like that. I don't know. That seems more like what I would be looking into.
Right. I mean, the old school I mean, like, you know, honestly, like in a big kitchen, like unless you have a lot of a particular scrap, which happens all the time, like a lot of like kind of scraps just get bulked for stock and stuff like that, right? In terms of veg. Yeah. Um, but like classically, the you know, old school in the 80s, the book to beat was uh The Art of Garmanger uh by uh Sonnen Schmidt and uh John Nicholas.
That was kind of the book but it's more of uh like I'm looking at my edition which is from the 80s I have the fourth edition from the 80s and yeah it's all very precious buffet looking kind of stuff kind of not what you're looking for like roulades and whatnot the CIA then came out with uh you know the cooking school not the not the spy agency came out with uh a book that's gone through a bunch of editions but I've never owned it um I think called uh the art of a garmanger kitchen or something like this but if you are interested in buffets which I've never I've never owned it but I'm sure it's it's good um like the the it's already been a classic in the field but buffets and receptions is a sick book put out by Virtue Press V-I-R-T-U-E Virtue Press in the early 80s I think late 70s sick sick crazy uh again I would never recommend it you cook a whale but there is a recipe for cooking whale in there and specifically what kind of whale uh the other one you might want to look at is uh Professional Caterer series uh by Denis Rafel. Uh the first four volumes are more first three of the four volumes are more in the last one's more hot side stuff but again ooh all these books now are on my desk and they're about to fall give me a second yeah just to give you an idea of the weight of this uh stack of books that I'm telling you about it's this yeah I was wondering how you had all of these books at hand but they're just yeah piled around you. Well, I mean, the one good thing about recording this thing at home is that I can just go back to my to my bookshelf uh and get stuff. The problem is is that it's also hard to find stuff on on my on my bookshelf. Um Nate wrote in uh about uh the combi ANOVA countertop combi oven.
I have no experience with it. I think I mentioned that last week, but I'd like to put out there, uh I'd like to put out there uh anyone in the chat or who wants to write us who does have experience with this, let us know what they think. Uh and and obviously we're happy to uh test it out should someone want to ship us one to test. Um we're we're running running low on time. I'm missing a couple of questions.
Um, so we'll get to we'll get we have a carbonation question. Should we do the carbonation question just so Nastasia doesn't have to hear it? Yes, that seems go out on that one. All right, because Sergio Toom wrote in from Melbourne. He's a he is an Argentinian uh person in Australia, but Nastasia is mentioned so much in this that I can't read it after she's already done the book or goodbye on me.
Uh right. And then um the other one is a question about safety, so from Mark. So I don't want to go into that one uh half-assed, right? So because I don't want to give someone incorrect safety information that causes someone to God forbid get sick. So, uh from behind this wall on Instagram, hey, uh hey Dave, sorry uh for this uh out of the blue message.
Uh big fans of liquid intelligence have a question about applying your method for carbonation for my carbonation rig to corny kegs, as uh we're just we're getting the same results as we do in bottles. Any help much appreciated as we're looking to bulk up our operation into bottles. Uh cheers, Alex. Okay, I'm not exactly sure what the question is, but I'm gonna assume the question is this. I'm currently kegging cocktails and then dispensing them out of a keg into a glass and not getting as many bubbles as I want because that system is stealing the bubbles from my cocktail.
And I want to put it into bottles, but those bottles are also stealing the bubbles, and I'm not it's not any better than the kegs. This John, do you think that's that the question? I think so. If it's not, he can write back in and I will get them up to you next week for the radio show. The problem with um, look, certain drinks want to be highly carbonated, and certain drinks can be have a small amount of carbonation and still be delicious.
For instance, the Negroni can go anywhere from zero carbonation to full carbonation and be delicious at any point along the way. Uh things like you know, my gin and juice recipe, when they lose their carbonation, they lose their verve. So um, you know, so like I I have never been a fan of you know, uh of myself having a carbonation rig for cocktails because it's I've never gotten one that does exactly what I uh need to do. Uh someone rung my doorbell, so we'll see whether I hear from my dogs. Um that said, um, when you are carbonating in when we put stuff in bottles, the way we got the best result was to carbonate in two-liter bottles.
Um, like do force carbonation, make sure that it's ice cold, triple carb it, at least, at least triple carb it. Chill your bottles, but don't over-chill them. If your bottles are in the freezer, you're gonna lose all your bubbles because the minute you pour a carbonated drink into frozen glass, you'll get uh ice crystals forming on the inside of the frozen glass, nightmare nucleation sites. It's gonna be a nightmare for you. So, you what you want to do is fill them with ice water and then dump them out right before you fill them.
Uh that'll make sure there are no nucleation sites, pour in all the way almost to the top, leave a very small ulage, which is that little space at the top of a wine bottle, leave a very small space. That space is critical for a carbonation, and then uh and then cap it. Um, and that's kind of the best way that you're going to be able to. Now uh people have said they've had luck with counterpressure fillers. I have not had luck with a counterpressure filler, but if you do, God bless you, but still, you're gonna wanna keep your eulage as small as possible, and you're gonna want to make sure your bottles are cold as long as they're not below freezing.
All right, and then cap them immediately. I can't tell you how many times I've seen people and they're pouring the stuff out and they're sitting there and they're just letting it sit around, they're talking, they're chatting, they want to do 50 bottles at once and then go cap 50 bottles. No, pour like five bottles, cap, pour five bottles, cap, pour five bottles, cap, pour them all high, and you should get uh a decent result. If what you're saying is is that you can't get bottle carbonation with a carbonation cap to be any better than a um than a corny keg, that's a different problem. And there I would say it's probably a uh clarification problem, it's not cold enough, or you're not multiply carbonating uh like carbonating three times.
I even once saw where someone was injecting CO2 onto the top of the bottle and then removing the pressure and then shaking it. No, it needs to be connected to pressure while you are shaking it. So uh I answered either one of those two questions, but if those weren't the questions you wanted answered, then write on in again and I'll talk about it again after Nastasia does the book or goodbye because otherwise I'll hear about it later. Because we all know Nastasia. Hey, it's carbonation questions, true or false.
Truth. And Chef Joanna is in the chat and points out that the CIA book, the Garmanget, The Art and Craft of the Cold Kitchen, is cheap at Thrift Books. It is like seven or eight bucks. So cool. I think she had recommended it in the chat before you mentioned it, maybe.
Unclear on timing. All right. Well, there you go. All right, maybe uh I should not pick up a copy. Don't pick up a copy.
Don't pick up a copy. My house is littered with books. Anyway, uh, John, uh, people should look out for uh a new copy of the newsletter soon, correct? Correct. All right.
See you guys next week. Uh guest Melissa Weller on next week. Oh, we have Guest Melissa Weller. Uh, and uh what I just read her book. What's the title of the book again, John?
I can't remember. It's like sticky, what is it? Isn't it? Googling. A good bake, the art and science of making perfect pastries, cakes, cookies, pies, and breads at home.
A cookbook. Yeah, a good bake. And the cover of it, the reason I say sticky is the cover, she has like a like a baked good, like a babkey thing with like like a like the gooey, like that gooey kind of stuff poured over the top. And so anytime I think of it, I'm like sticky, shaky, right? Makes sense.
Yep. Anyway, so she's on the show next week. So uh if you have her book and you have a question, make sure to write it in early enough for John to get it to me. Uh, and we can talk about it. Because unfortunately, again, with the COVID, we can't have call-ins, so get your questions in on that.
Uh, and uh we'll uh talk to you next week. Cooking Issues. Cooking Issues is powered by Simplecast. Thanks for listening to Heritage Radio Network. Food radio supported by you.
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