This episode is brought to you by Hearst Ranch. Grass-fed beef raised on California's Central Coast. Now available online through larger meat company. Learn more at Hearstranch.com. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues.
This is Dave Arlder Hotel Cooking issues coming to you live on the Herodon Radio Network every Tuesday. Whenever. And also, Happy New Year, everyone. Happy New Year. Uh joined uh actually one of the last times Nastasi's gonna be joining us because uh from California, because she's headed back to our coast pretty soon, right, Nastasia?
No. I thought you were coming back in January. Yeah, change your mind be extended because my well, we can talk about it later. Yeah, nice. Well I mean, why would I go back and I'm glad to know that my business partner like doesn't even tell me like you know, on air I hear, you know, no.
All right, whatever. It happened like last night. Happy New Year. We got uh John in his uh Connecticut uh booth, right? That's right.
Yeah, and Matt in his Rhode Island Heidi Hall. How are you doing? Hello, hello, doing well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh all all undisclosed locations.
Uh I'm the only one who'll say exactly where I am. Lower east side. Come down to Grand Street, we'll fight. I'm kidding, we won't. Actually, I'm sure I'm sure Joel will say where he is too.
He just joins. Oh, hey. Uh long time uh long time friend of the show, Joel Gargano in here from uh Chester, Connecticut. How you doing? I'm doing great.
I'm actually home in Clinton right now. Oh, wait, I thought you were in Deep River, your house. You moved to Clinton. We moved. We uh we bought a house in Clinton because you know, kid and all.
Is it because when you were in Deep River and you went to Chester, all the Chester people were making fun of Deep River constantly, and so you're like, I can't live here, I can't do it. A lot of a lot of my staff grew up in Deep River, so they're they're pretty they have some strong feelings about that argument. Yeah, so for those of you that don't know and don't care, like on the left side of the Connecticut River, which is it's not actually the I don't you know I don't know. I always thought it was the most important river in Connecticut, but Connecticut's got like three or four main rivers. Anyway, Connecticut's one of them.
Uh and uh on the left side of it, there's these little towns, like really nice little towns, one of which was Chester, where I used to have a place in where Joel's restaurant is, Grano Arso Restaurant. And then just south of that is Deep River, and this town had these two towns have kind of a rivalry, and the Chester people, even though Chester is like also like a nice kind of it's not like Ritzy, it's just nice. You know what I mean? Like like it's like it's kind of ideal for someone like me. It's not like uh it's not like the upper east side.
It's like if you divided New York into zones, where where do you think Chester would be? New York City. Where where would Chester be? Well, I mean Yeah Murray Hill. I'll say I I would say probably maybe maybe West Village.
West Village. Yeah, ooh. And then and then that would make Deep Deep River then would be like the Bowery or something. Alphabet City, maybe. Yeah, all right.
Back when Alphabet City, back when you could still get murdered in Alphabet City. So anyway, uh also uh congratulations on the uh relatively new one in your family there, Joel. Thank you. Her name is Swan, and she's uh she's she's an absolute gem. Oh, beautiful.
Awesome. Great. Yeah, well, it's uh all joy. Now, uh before I get a couple of questions, uh that uh we had, we had, by the way, so uh Joel's an expert in uh um making both his own pasta and also in grinding flour, fresh grinding. We had a couple of questions in.
So rather than me speculating and kind of like, you know, uh weasling my way through these two questions that we had, we figured we'll just have uh Joel on, we'll ask him. And then you you get you get the answer from someone with some experience. Uh and secondly, uh, we wanted to check in and uh see how um what the what the kind of current COVID environment of business is up there in uh Connecticut. Well, I'll I'll start with the business stuff. Um so way back when, way back when, last March, um everyone was kind of in you know freak out mode.
So um it took a little while for us to figure out what what we were gonna be. Um so once we figured out that we can do some family style takeout stuff, um, you know, that that eventually worked out pretty good until we were able to reopen and do a parking lot restaurant, which actually was was pretty great. Um in Connecticut, at least where we are in Connecticut, um, people are pretty respectful. So that was that was kind of nice to see that people did the masks and didn't didn't complain that much. Uh we had once in a while you get a few one offs who just want to uh bark a little bit at the host, but um, but other than that, it's it's been pretty good.
That's the crew from Newington, Berlin and Newington came in. Yeah, yeah, they just they they roll right on, roll right on in with um particular hats on their heads and uh say certain things to our staff. So j just so you guys know, like coastal Connecticut is an extension of the line between no offense to coastal Connecticut, but it's an extension of the line between New York and Boston. All right. So like like that's who when people are like complaining about us East Coast elite people, like like they're part of that.
No, whether they're blue-collar or whatever, they're part of the thing that the rest of the country hates, right? That's us. But then, like, literally, literally 35 minutes to 45 minutes north, just above what's the middle town line, if you're going up the Connecticut River from the from the Long Island Sound, right? It completely changes. Coastal Coastal Connecticut's gone.
You know what I mean? It's like am I right about this, Joel? What do you think? You are exactly right. Um, and I'll I kind of leave I'll leave no comment on that, but yeah, there's it definitely goes into a different zone, uh, just a few miles north of Chester.
That is that is absolutely correct. So by the way, the bet my favorite place in Connecticut is right where the line, it's a place called Portland, Connecticut, which is a real rundown, like well, I shouldn't say that, but it's a community that has seen better economic days. It's across the river from Middletown, right? And in it is the my favorite water park ever, Brownstone. Have you gone to Brownstone, Joel?
There's a water park up there. I had no idea. Oh my god. Once this COVID is over, you gotta go to Brownstone. It it is a brownstone quarry where they quarried, you could guess, brownstone.
And uh at some point, I think in the 20s or 30s of the last century, the it flooded and couldn't be unflooded because they build quarries next to rivers a lot, so it's right on the other side of the Connecticut River from where Middletown, where that old bridge is. And uh it flooded and no one knew what to do with it. So at one point someone was like, Hey, let's open a water park. And it is it is amazing water park. It's got like, I don't know how, but there's like an amazing group of people, everyone's fun.
It's like, you know, like all different kinds of people, all different kinds of ages. You and the only and it's not like Action Park, if you've seen if you ever heard of Action Park in Vernon, New Jersey, or seen the recent documentary on it, the most dangerous water park of all time, where I actually went when I was a child. Uh, you know, everyone wears a vest, everyone's fairly respectful, but it's still kind of crazy. Like you could still jump off of a off of a cliff in a in a quarry into water. Amazing.
Go go when when the world reopens. But anyway. Hey John, we should grab our speedos and go next weekend. Yeah. I don't know whether I don't know when they're gonna open.
I I was gonna go this summer, but obviously not. You know what I mean? If any of you are from the area and want to go, the the power move once people are allowed, once people would ever be seen near water that someone else had been in, the power move is to get a group together and rent one of the gazebos. There's gazebos that like the entire place is decks, and you walk out on these floating decks, and then you can kind of just do whatever you want. You make a day of it, right?
And you can bring your own food. Don't bring liquor, I don't think. But you could I don't think you could bring your own food and you rent this gazebo, and your crew then owns this gazebo for the day. You could just camp out, you spend a whole day there. Well, like the most bad suggestion I think I've ever heard you say.
Hey, it's fantastic. Look, I believe it. Yeah, yeah, no, no. It's just it's funny. For those of you that don't know, you're never gonna see me.
I wore a bathing suit to this place. I did still wear a shirt because you know, I don't I don't show skin in public, but like they got me to wear a bathing suit, and I was happy to be there. So for me to be happy to be at a place like this, I mean, that says a lot. And unlike Sesame Place, no offense, Philadelphia. This place does not smell like a poorly attended uh male gym locker, right?
You know, or like you know when you leave a towel and you wash the towel and then you don't dry the towel, and then a week later, you open the dryer and you're like, oh, that right? Sesame Place, I'm not saying it smells like that, but it smells like that. You know what I'm saying? Sesame Place is a water park near Philadelphia. Anyway, I love Sesame Place, no offense, but you know.
That's not, yeah, that's not really coming across in that description. What the lack of offense? The one negative thing I'll say about Brownstone is this. Uh that when you are approaching Brownstone, you're like, whoa, I don't think I'm gonna like this because right next to it on the other side of the of the street, right on the where the river is, are like a bunch of like uh oil storage tanks. Because for those of you that have never been to Connecticut, much like New Jersey on the waterfront, at some point in the 20th century, someone decided, hey, what if we took everything we had that was pure and beautiful and surrounded it with petroleum?
Right? And so, like anywhere you go in Connecticut where there should be beautiful wall, except for where Nastasia's house is, not that she's ever gonna go back, apparently, although I didn't know, but everywhere you go where they're supposed to be. But I'm going back, I want to clarify to everyone, I'm going back. It's just the idea of sitting in my house on the water by myself in the winter and then being out in the sun near my family is like, you know, yeah, the choice seems pretty clear. Hey, Nastasia, Nastasia, not now, but tell me when we can tell the story of the of the windows.
Anyway, you can tell it. Yeah, and that's the other part of it. You can tell. All right, well, let's finish this. Every single beautiful place in Connecticut, at some point, someone has tried to ruin it with it with either a raised highway where they take 95 and like cut through all this beautiful stuff, or they put some sort of giant uh gasoline storage there.
So you can kind of when the wind changes direction at the at Brownstone, but once you're in the quarry, you don't smell it, but like when you're up top, you're like, eh, meh, you know what I mean? Anyway. Uh, so business. Uh, you're saying they're being respectful, but like what what's happening now that it's turning winter tent. So, okay, so obviously, we had to close out our big parking lot uh restaurant.
Um, so we put a few tables out front, and most people don't want to sit outside. We get a few people that don't mind, and we have our little propane heater. You ever see these ones? You can get them at Home Depot. They look like uh like Johnny Five from Short Circuit, and they had basically it's like two big eyes, and they this is a propane and just lights up.
We just wheel them over to the table, right? Um, and they can get their personal heater, and they're like 50 bucks a piece. But they're not the overhead, they're not the overhead umbrella infrareds that are that kind of money, man. Yeah. Plus, those things are like twice the cost of what they used to be.
You know what they're doing in New York City now. I don't even know how these are legal because they they've they've New York City has converted outdoor dining back to indoor dining. So the the coolest setup I saw is someone bought a bunch of those uh portable greenhouses and just stacked them one next to each other. So keep yeah, to keep the heat in. And so here's the thing like all of those people are indoor, and then the poor server has to show up and deal with a bunch of hopefully for the you know bank accounts of everyone involved, extremely liquored up, you know what I mean?
Like people like spewing crap into the server's face. I still feel bad for the for the servers, but that's how we're dealing with it. This is definitely something that um has shown a lot uh of our industry and a couple ways, what we're capable of doing. Obviously, we you're we're made to think on our feet, but but the other side of things financially, that um you you you get a little more thrifty than than you think you could be. You know, um, I didn't think that we'd be offering um the the food that we're doing out in a parking lot on picnic tables, and people would be throwing down upwards of uh you know a hundred dollars a person before you know service charge gratuity or whatever, and they're happy to do it sitting on a picnic table, which is amazing to me so that that's the kind of community that that we do have and we have the plus side and I know there's a lot of other restaurants in the state and you know group here in the country that are doing a lot worse than we are so which um such great people to come support us through in all this stupid mess.
But now that it's cold out we have people inside it's not the most popular thing to be honest. You know but our staff is really good and they take you know the utmost precautions and um if anyone gives any sass we give it right back andor kick them out. Funny story we had a guy show up the other day right before service started and wearing a body camera attached to a lanyard and started uh picking a fight with the hostess and she's 16 years old by the way it's like so you're a grand ass man picking a fight with a 16 year old hostess about uh putting a mask on so we're like okay this so and the and the body camera is just so he can prove to all of his friends what a douchebag he is I'm pretty sure on it this was like he was trying to collect content for his Facebook page or something. Um so uh it was uh our manager Haley came over and uh squashed you pretty quick um and I had just turned the corner as this was happening and uh the funniest part about this was we had someone picking up a takeout order um while this was happening and the bottom of the bag was wet there was two quarts of marinara sauce in that bag that just hit the floor exploded all over the host area while this guy is harassing our young hostess. So if you can imagine this moment of like, what the f what is going on with you?
It was, but those those opportun those things that happen are so few and far between that, you know, when they do, we're just kind of like, you're you're crazy. Just get out. So when we when that does happen, we just we kick them out. So it's only good. A lot of fun cleaning up uh marinara sauce and uh well yeah hopefully it was in a quart and not in glass uh yeah yeah yeah wait what let me ask you quick why can't like you you ever notice with core containers and for those of you that that have you noticed this they're getting worse yeah they are more brittle than they used to be it used to be so core containers like where we come from over here everyone uses core containers and they're not environmentally unfriendly because you use them eight million times and by the way for any of you that order soup from people or whatever and someone hands you a quart container don't throw that away at home you can use that thing forever right the one caveat is is that if you freeze in them they are extremely brittle but recently the core container batches I've been getting have all been brittle even at room temperature.
You can't you know when you got some kind of solid and you gotta look you got to squeeze got to get a little squeeze to get it out. Yeah you can't do the squeeze anymore you get you give a little squeeze the whole thing shatters game over yeah and they and and they they separate in it like there's a disc line separation around the bottom that I've been cracking all the core containers on. I don't get it. They're polypropylene they nothing should happen to them right like the like polypropylene is a great plastic for this uh uh for this because a it's la lack of you know plasticizers the fact that it doesn't leach the fact that it can handle high temperature relatively high temperatures like like way past boiling um without degrading like all of that, but they they and but suddenly they've they these have just been so disappointed. We found we found one brand um from from our one of our vendors, TriMark, that you have to like talk, you have to like call call our sales drive and say, give me this specific one, or else they'll just pick whatever and send it, right?
Because they got a bunch of different brands. Right. But this one seems to be of the old style. So I can give it a solid squeeze and it doesn't shatter. Yeah.
I'll give I like that. I'll give you an example of this just happened to me last week. So Dax, who's 15, like, of course, I mean, kind of like me actually, fidgets constantly, right? He fidgly. So we're at the dinner table, and he's taking, I had a uh, you know, we uh so you don't just buy quartz, you buy quartz, you buy pints, and you buy uh some eight ounces, right?
So that you can efficiently uh store things with different quantities. So I think I had an eight or a sixteen, you know, uh, and I had this Greek yogurt in it, and Dax kept on spinning the the yogurt around on the table. I'm like, Dax, nothing good can happen from spinning this. The only things that can happen are bad things, right? Spillage, whatever.
So he kept on doing it, and so finally I went whack, and I hit the container down onto the table to stop it from spinning and shattered it, yogurt everywhere. Yogurt everywhere. Definitely imagine it opened. Yeah, classic, classic me story. I was like, I told you nothing good could happen.
You're and it ends up what happened is you pissed your dad off, he hit the yogurt container down under the table. Now there's yogurt everywhere. See, see? So I was I was also. Yeah, yeah.
Well, you know. Uh okay. So these are the cooking questions. Uh, although hey, core containers was relatively quick cooking related, cooking tangential, cooking adjacent. So I feel like we've gotten some cooking stuff in.
And Nastasia, remind us, we'll talk Windows at the end. Uh Trevor, I have two questions for you. Trevor Driscoll wrote in, and uh, I was wondering about the virtues of fresh milling flowers for pastas. Have you experimented with milling your own grains for pasta doughs? And does it generally have a similar impact uh as it does when you're baking bread?
Cheers, Trevor and P. S. We gave them some advice that the rice cooker was in fact not a uh uh what's it called, just a superfluous luxury, and that they would use it more and more. And he says, P.S. the rice cooker has become a crowd favorite, and that purchase is no longer contentious.
Well, I'm glad you're never gonna really I I've never met anyone who's like, I wish I didn't have this rice cook. I never use it. Crazy. Anyway, uh, so you got you got an answer for me, Joel? Sure.
So um, hi Trevor. Well, we've we've done a bunch of different stuff at the restaurant, uh, Granar Arso with uh freshly milling grain. Um when it was part of how we open, it's part of the concept of the restaurant. So we went through a few different iterations. Um I think the the two camps that you're gonna fall into, and I'm I'm assuming he's uh he's a home cook, he's probably gonna be making sheeted or rolled pasta, not extruded, machine extruded pasta.
So um I'll I'll go into the extruded stuff first, just so he has a point of reference. But the the problem you get into, and it's not impossible. Uh, the problem you get into if you did 100% a freshly milled flour through an extruded pasta machine is that if it's not milled finely enough, it'll get caught in the dyes, um, and then you're having a big, big problem. So, what we do is we actually sift out uh the brand and germ after the mill. And we just have a tabletop mill, it's a Kumo, um, tabletop mill.
Um, and we set it to as fine as possible and pass it through, and then sift out the the chunkies. Um, and then we use that flour um to make our pasta dough. The hydrations do change, typically you need just a touch more water, even if you're sifting. Um, so you have to play with your ratios a little bit. But anyway, it is possible.
The only problem you run into with uh using freshly milk flour is that your product uh if it sits, as we call in the restaurant on meason plast, if it sits for too long, uh it'll start to oxidize. Um the changes. Um, in fact, we've noticed it gets gummy. So I would suggest if you are extruding. Um you think that's due to enzymatic action?
I I don't really know. Um it could be I'm I'm thinking it's like partially fermenting, even maybe. I don't I don't really know. Um, because we're not at the restaurant, we're not freezing extruded pasta. So it just sits in the cooler until we use it.
So you imagine, you know, with your prep schedules, let's say you have enough pasta for two days or three days sometimes, and you or you want it to carry the weekend and see how it is on Tuesday. Um, it has completely changed color. Uh it gets dark brown, um, and it's it's really not that appetizing. So yeah, uh what we've done at the restaurant um is actually much lower the amount of whole grain, um, freshly mill flour we put into and use mostly semolina. And we've adjusted this since we opened uh just because of that, because the product was degrading so quickly.
But did like when you did cook it though right away, did you like so like fresh milled wheat in bread just tastes different? I'm not saying it's better. I like it a lot. That's what I use now, but it's just tastes different from AP flour and makes whole wheat flour that you buy seem like like some sort of like terrible bad joke that people are playing on you, right? Like, do you get any taste effects like that in the floor?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it definitely it definitely tastes uh again, you know, like it I guess it depends, you know, like what kind of flavor profile you're looking for. Pure semolina, uh just regular general mill semolina has uh has a almost nostalgic flavor to most people. It's it's delicious on its own right. And it's and it's kind of neutral to whatever preparation you're doing.
Versus if you're going to uh freshly mill grain, you know, you're gonna want that to be a predominant flavor and not just kill it with you know your your your marinara sauce uh or or a like a like a basil pesto or something that you would make at home normal. So I would I would probably do different preparations if you are gonna do that to highlight uh the flavor of the grain. Now that that's just extruded stuff, but with freshly roll uh sorry, sheet sheeted pasta um or rolled pasta, um typically you're making uh a dough with eggs in it. Um that you can get away with with whole grain without sifting the flour. Um, but you are gonna have just a little bit less pliability, I think, with the dough.
Um it definitely you have to up the hydration or the amount of uh egg you're putting in at the restaurant. You don't re grind yeah, you don't regrind the brand, even at a fine setting, the brand's pretty big. If you're going fine on your rollers, it's gonna cause tear out sometimes, right? Correct, yeah. And we've done that.
We just think because we actually at the restaurant we have other purpose for the brand of the germ. So we we find other things to do with it. We actually reload it back into our bread. So let's say we're making a pasta dough and we sift out the brand of the germ. We'll take, we call it the uh the the what I forgot what my my baker calls if you'll scrap or something.
Um the trim of it, and he he takes it and and throws it back into the bread. So it's it's had a purpose. Um, but for for the roll pasta, uh that's a better bet for the freshly milked flour. Um, I would I would suggest it, but if you're not gonna use it right away, put it in the freezer. So um we actually do this as practice at the restaurant.
Um it does not degrade the quality, in my opinion, of uh of raviolis, all that kind of stuff because we're going through it in a day or two anyway. Um all it does is set the dough so it doesn't, you know, the moisture doesn't leak out of the filling and yada yada. So actually uh using fresh amount of flour helps the structure of the ravioli. So it actually for the dishes that we do, it actually helps. And we do this with rye.
So we add up the 10% of freshly milled rye that's been. Oh, that's crazy. Rye is so sticky, you don't have problems with it? Not at all. It actually firms up the dough.
So, but again, we're only using 10%, and the rest of it is double zero. So uh that that amount actually firms the dough up enough. You have to up the hydration again, just a tad. Um, and we get a fantastic product out of that. You make great garganelli, uh, um, you know, tagletelli, fettuccine, yada yada, all that stuff.
Now, Nastasia, you're not against fresh egg pastas and fresh ravioli, right? Right. I'm not yeah, you're okay. But you know, you know, I'm sure Joel knows by now that you're in general you are a commercially produced dry pasta lover and have taken a stance against most fresh pastas, true? Right.
Really? Yeah. Why? I just really don't like them. And it feels like if you're gonna have a shape other than uh like fettuccine with uh bolinese sauce or something, uh it should be dry.
Because when I eat shapes, it's just like a big mound of dough in your stomach. And I spend a lot of time in Italy and going back and forth. And it's like I love dried pasta. I prefer it. What about tortillini and broto?
You know, you got new, you got you know a stuffed pasta. They're really tiny and I said stuffed pasta is fine. Yeah, Nastancia's not against things that she thinks are intended to be fresh, right? Yeah. That is intended to be fresh.
You can't do it any other way. I see what you're saying. I see what you're saying. Also, Nastasia, I am uh the way that I have received what you have said, not just about this argument, but all arguments are like sometimes big companies do a great job, let them do it. Yeah.
That's a good point. That's a really good point. And actually, Dave, I'm gonna make a plug. We're opening up a dry pasta company this year. So that's that's a big that's a big thing.
We've we've purchased the equipment. We have this gigantic pasta extruder um from pastabiz that we uh got in a drying cabinet. So that's that's the real deal way to do it. Um the guys at Pasta Biz are great. So help us kind of source all this stuff out.
I I I anxiously anticipate uh uh trying some of your uh where and if you can, I would love to hear because you you I mean Nastasia w won't give any proprietary information out, obviously, but like you know, if you talk to some of these old school uh Italians, they're like the drying rate, the drying rate, but then they won't tell you what exactly the effect is or what they do because everyone has their secrets and they won't tell you. So I'm hoping that you know, maybe if you do some experiments on drying rate on these pastas that you can, you know, maybe tell us what's actually going on with this stuff. Might be free. Yeah, it's I've never dried pasta commercially before. We've done you know, sit by the windowsill kind of thing, um, and that usually does not yield great results.
So, especially with extruded pasta and the low hydration, it's actually really difficult um to do it. So the drying cabinets are pretty dialed in. There's cycles it goes through, and it's like super hot, uh, you know, it goes up to like 130 degrees or something. I'll I'll know once once I get the damn thing plugged in. Um, but it's sitting in a crate right now.
Anyway, so that's kind of where we're going. And it's a good opportunity for us to try to transfer um the style of pasta we do at the restaurant and really see if it works with drying, you know, and particularly using rye, because we love using rye in our pasta, it's in our bread, it's all the stuff. Um, it's one of our favorite grains to do because when we when we uh do our toast on it, um, the grana arso kind of flour, instead of burning, you know, quote unquote burning the flour, we toast the whole grain in a cast iron pan until it's smells like uh you put Cheerios in the toaster oven. You know, I mean they get kind of this burnt oaty kind of smell. We chill it and then pass it through the mill.
Um, and we get a really fantastic flavorful product. Um, so we're gonna try to see how that translates into drying. It might not work. We don't know. We'll find out.
Well, I again I anxiously anticipate. Now, you get there's one more question for you, and uh before that, I'm gonna like insert here a little because there's a lot of confusion, I think, even people who know a lot about exactly what semolina is and dorum and why you would use it. So Nastasia, expert on this from the you know, all the pasta business. Joel, you are I'm gonna just insert something and then you can argue about what I say. So uh Semolina, right, is a it's a grind, right?
So it's it's a grind. And what it is is it's got very few fines in it. In other words, like it's it's not supposed to have any dust or very little dust as possible because you don't want to have um a lot of uh dusty damaged starch because that stuff absorbs water like a mother, right? And so it's going to like make you have to have a higher hydration dough to make it machinable, right? Uh and so then the other thing about durum is that uh durum wheat, which is a wheat now, not a grind.
So you can have Durham flour, right? You don't have to just only get semolina out of it. You can make Durham flour, right? But typically people are buying the semolina from Durham. Durum is an extremely hard wheat, right?
But the gluten in it, right, is not such that uh it's going to stretch back as much as a because you could also whip mill semolina from a regular like spring or winter hard wheat. But if you do that, you're gonna get so much like shrink back on your stuff that you're not gonna be able to kind of extrude properly. You need you need it to hold together, have enough protein to have good bite, but you don't want it to be snapping back. You don't want the the the you know the snap back that you would get in something where the where the gluten system was extremely uh stretchy, right? So this so that's why you want an extremely hard wheat, and by the way, the hardness of wheat uh people associate it with high protein, not true.
It is a different protein, it's not the gluten protein that makes the grains hard. Uh and they've done the research over the past 15 years, it's a different set of proteins that cause the uh the wheat to be hard. But you want it to be very hard so that it shatters into these kind of large chunks, and then uh the or the you know, not large, but these little these semolina chunks, which can then be formed into a relatively low hydration and also not, you know, you can stretch it out, but it doesn't snap back dough, and that is why Dorum Semolina is the sinequan non of pasta flowers. Would you both of you say that's relatively accurate? Accurate.
Yeah. Um the second question, uh uh pasta related question, and before I get to this, I had another question. Someone wants to start grinding more meat. Uh I have the question here somewhere while you have it. Do you have any any recommendations for you know relatively inexpensive, like you know, next level up from uh the KitchenAid meat grinder?
That you know, maybe I don't know, like the hobart is what everyone gets the five the the you know the the you know the the hobart that's about the size of uh of a small ice cream machine. But is there one that's uh cheaper that works that you've tested or no? We we go we go traditional hobart. In fact, I think the cast iron thing that attaches to my 20 core mixer is probably 30 years old. But the um and it and it works great.
Although I will, and I I don't have a recommendation, but I will put in a formal complaint to KitchenAid that the food grinder attachment, the blade on that thing is like basically a paper clip uh that they've melted down and to make it look like uh some sort of uh uh like knife that you're supposed to put in this thing is completely garbage. But you know what's really good for is that if you're gonna make an emulsified style sausage, it actually does a good job at mashing the meat and the fat together. Because it's such a smear machine, it does the opposite of what it's supposed to do, but if you're making emulsified sausage, it actually does it'll actually do okay. Nice. All right.
Zach C uh put this chat room question in before. Uh mid pandemic, I was somehow able to convince my partner that an arcaboleno AEX5. Now that people is like if you live in a house or want a small pasta machine in a line on uh in a in a restaurant, right? It doesn't have a lot of output, but I've been jonesing for one of these things for years. It it mixes and then extrudes, and you can get all kinds of cool dyes.
It is, uh, as the British would say, an awesome piece of kit. Anyway, uh I was able to uh get the A uh AEX5 uh as a critical tool to survive sheltering in place. It's been amazing. One thing I find challenging is that the only real recipes for extruded pasta are aimed at commercial/slash industrial scale, where the main goal is to end up with dried pasta. So this is going back to our dried pasta question.
Do you know, and this since you have not yet been a dryer, Joel, you will know this. Do you know of any resources that have uh recipe guidance for extruded fresh pastas? I want to better understand how things like different flowers, eggs, moisture, etc. impact the final product. And then a bonus question, uh I'll probably handle this one, uh, unless you're one of you guys are welders.
I have a tank of welding argon at my apartment because uh sometimes a man's got a tig. My roommate and I hypothesize that we could displace the air in an open bottle of wine with the argon uh to prevent oxidation. It didn't work. Should this theoretically work? Yes, it should.
You're just not delivering it right. All right, now back to the pasta question. Oh wow, sometimes a man's got a tig. I like that. Um, like when you run a TIG, there's a certain amount of air in the line.
So if you have the Argon thing, if you're actually using the torch, the TIG tip, right? You gotta run it for a little while. Don't you know you want to make sure that you're not gonna build up pressure in the bottle. Some of those early argon things will cause the bottle to shatter. So you're gonna wanna run it for a while before you even do the injection, and then you're gonna want an in and an out, and you want the out to be outside of the bottle and the in to be in the bottle so that it's trans transferring all the stuff out.
Anyway, go ahead. So uh yeah, so uh this is that this has been a sort of um I wouldn't call it an argument, but something inside my head that knocks around a lot. Why extrude pasta that's supposed to be dried um and but then just go around and turn it fresh? Does the texture change? Absolutely.
I think it's just a completely different product. So when people come into our restaurant, they're like, hey, this guy makes all of his own pasta, how cool. Um, you know, they they probably don't connect the two dots that if I if I purchase dried pasta of made with American semolina flour, it probably went through the exact same machine um that I use, probably just a bigger scale, but the process is exactly the same. So really all it comes down to is the type of flyer using and the texture that you desire. Uh but the pressure on the big machines is a lot higher though, right?
Like the screw pressure is a lot higher than that. Yeah, but that will also changes the temperature of the dough for which it extrudes, and that changes the product. So for for um uh what's this gentleman's name again? Uh Zach C. Zach, all right, Zach.
Uh so here's your master hydration to start with 31%. So start with 31% water by weight uh of of your coarse or whatever of your sorry of your semolino flour. Don't don't go down the the Durham road. So general journal Mills, okay, classic standard uh for uh for for semolina in America, it does a great job, it's very consistent. Um start with 31%.
If you want to start to add in some uh some adjunct grains or some spelt or whatever, start with five percent, climb up to 10%. Um, you've got this little machine so you can have fun. So you can dry it. It does make a different texture. If you don't dry it, just cook cook it right away.
So even if it's sat in the fridge for you know, two days, it'll generally keep around the same hydration. The cook time won't change that much. Um, if you leave it out with with no cover, obviously it'll dry out and then it'll change the cook time. But um, if you do decide to dry it, you can do the by the window sill method. You can put a small box fan on it.
Um, just you have to rotate the shapes around because if it's sitting or put on a rack, um, but you still have to shake them around because whatever contact point it has, um, it's gonna, it's it's not gonna, it's gonna stay wetter in that area. So the drying won't be even. But um, I would I would encourage them to experiment with both and see which one you like better. Because you might like your dried, you know, spaghetti or bucottini product that's your extruding, but you might hate your rigatoni because the the wall thickness is different or something like that. And that's something we run into at the restaurant all the time is uh, you know, how fast can we cook this?
You know, because we're a restaurant, it's gotta we gotta get the food out. Um so sometimes I choose shapes that have thinner wall thicknesses and pair them with with more popular dishes. And if I don't like the texture of the completed dish, great, start, throw it out, start over. Um, but some pasta shapes do take a lot longer, like Sarde is sometimes an eight-minute cook, even if you just extruded it fresh and didn't dry it. So I guess it really depends where where Mr.
Zach wants to land uh with with what he likes. Um, but I would encourage him to try both. What do you think about what do you think about Nastasia's comment on the doughiness of a lot of people's attempt at fresh pasta, it should be otherwise? Do you think it's just because they don't have a machine that can achieve a low enough hydration on extrusion? Because they use the wrong flour.
Oh, yeah, definitely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, and back to what you're saying about the sort of elasticity, plasticity of of like semolina doughs. Um, you know, it it just creates a different bite. And that's why I encourage people if you're going to extrude pasta, you can add non-semolina flowers to it, but it will inherently make the dough more gummy, maybe, uh, sometimes softer.
And some people like that, they don't mind it. I think really it's like shape dependent. I mean, I mean, there's so many shapes you or dyes you can buy for your extruder. Um, but if you don't like the doughiness of it, perhaps maybe dry it a little bit. Um, I don't like adding eggs at all to my extruded doughs.
I know there's people that do that, they'll kind of dose their semolina doughs with egg yolk. Um, I feel like they just do it just for for color. But um I I don't I don't prefer the texture that it that it that it kind of contributes to to that. So I just I'm a simulating. Real real pasta heads though hate soft pasta, right?
What do what do you mean? So what do you mean? Well, anastasia, you hate a soft pasta, right? But it's an egg though. Like it is.
And I'm going off of like Mark Ladner's training, you know, and he's pretty good at pasta. Well, but what I'm saying is is that you hate a pasta that doesn't have a texture when you bite into it. That's what I mean by kind of soft, right? You mean like the al dente type. Yeah, you're just not gonna have to accept that you're not gonna get that.
That's all. Yeah, well, in the end, but the the problem is, right? That when you go harder, when you when you try to go lower hydration with with and your technique is that doesn't match up to it, it's you can I guess you can make it harder, but then the outside gets like almost boiled dumpling looking, right? Yeah, yeah. I well, like again, I think if you're using, let's say, for example, you want to make a sheet of dough, it's got eggs in it, and you do that.
Uh, you know, you you pull it the measuring cup and you get you know, crappy all-purpose flour, throw in three eggs and mix it around, and then you you pass it. I think that makes terrible pasta dough. It just it's not the right flour. Um, the if there's too much egg white in it, I think, and it makes the it makes it too uh like a wrong type of firmness, it almost like souffles a little bit when you cook it. I don't know what it's like.
Yeah, it puffs up. Well, this this like the damage, like the damaged starch and the fines and all that are gonna inflate and you're gonna get like that, you know. Yeah, so that's why they're heavier on the egg yolk. I I think that's the better way to do it. And you don't want your pasta looking like a spetzel, right?
Although I love spzzel. So what so what we do, we actually sheet our um our pastas, even if we make garganelli or any of that um that are non-stuffed, we sheet them as thin as possible. Uh, we go is is before it it breaks, they're extremely fragile. That's why we make them and throw them in the freezer immediately, so that way we can portion them, but the cook on them is like like under 90 seconds, and we can put in like whatever filling you want, and it basically thaws out in that 90 seconds, never curdles like you do uh um the cheese or any of that, it never curdles in there, and the texture on the pasta is like amazing. It's super super silky and soft and doesn't have that um any like bit of like odd firmness to it that that you get sometimes with those whole egg style doughs.
What the one that I I don't like and I still can't really comprehend is freshly sheeted guitar, which is you use that, it looks like a guitar, right? It's a bunch of strings across a board. You have to make a really thick kind of dough, or sorry, sorry, like thickness um before you pass it through to get this like square cut shape. By the time you cook that thing, it is like a brick in your stomach. So I haven't really wrapped my head around what why you would do that.
Why not just sheet it thinner and make you know a spaghetti style guitar that's a little bit thinner? It just might be a regional or a buttons cooking technique. People used to have the they'd string across the board and they'd do it. Did anyone ever do that industrially? I mean, they do I I guess, but I mean, do you know what I'm saying?
I mean, you did what you did, right? Yeah. I mean, I think if you think about it, why not just pass it through a die? I mean, you are gonna get a different texture because you're you're literally forcing it through an auger and it's gonna heat up a little bit. Um, but I don't know.
I I I would prefer if that dough was a firmer semolina style dough, not an egg dough, because again, it's like you're biting into like a like a really hard souffleed flower lump. You know what I mean? You're really selling it there, the hard hard souffleed flower lump. What do you got, Matt? Uh Courtney BST asks in the chat, can you dry fresh pasta in a dehydrator?
I have one at home and would love to give handmade dried pasta away as gifts. Yeah, you you can. Um, I've done it, it does not work great. The problem is, I think of that uh unless you say your dehydrator is super low, I still think the fan is like too much. So maybe if you like vented a corner of the dehydrator and kind of let a little more air out, it might work.
Um I've I've done probably eight to ten tests doing this. I've had zero great results. I think you're better off doing an ambient temperature, it just takes longer. So just leave it out on the counter. Uh make sure it's not, you know, you're you're not in like, I don't know, like like a human part of the country, or if you are, make sure the air conditioner is on and it's not, you know, just a bunch of moisture in your in your kitchen, or else it'll take longer.
And I would flip the pasta off to move it around. Yeah, but you need a certain look, you need a low enough humidity to do it though. Like you need a low humidity. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I again I have a lot more to learn about about drying pasta.
But it's almost like if you dry it too fast, it just cracks and it's it's useless. It'll look fine. It'll actually look kind of cool. You're like, oh, look at this thing. If I put it in a box and slap the label on it, it will look professional.
But by the time you go to cook it, your noodles just they crack, they fall apart. Uh people always tell me my noodle cracks. Um also like I uh I said earlier that uh you know I've somehow lost my touch on uh gnocchi, and you you wrote in you want to give some quick uh gnocchi tips wh while I have you on here. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, I did.
Have you tested it yet? No, no, no. I've been working on a bunch of other last night. I was working on my favorite burglarloid, the patty melt. I have some my new thoughts on patty melting.
Dave, I'm gonna before I get to my gnocchi, I'm I'm gonna let you add something. So every single year, my wife and I, as a Christmas decorate tree decorating tradition, we make your patty melt. Oh man, the high tech one? No, no, the the one you made on that you did like an eater video like 10 years ago. Yeah.
Nice. I I make it, I make it every year. She loves it. Patty melt's delicious, right? Delicious.
What was the one you put like a ketchup puck in it or something? That was really well. So I the original patty melt I did was just the way that I would do it if I was gonna do the best job I could do. And then uh I made it and eater was like, no, no, no, we came to you because we wanted something kind of like as wacky, something stupid. I was like, alright.
And so I was like, what if I what because by the way, like I'm in general on my burgers, I'm a mayonnaise and other kind of, but on patty melt, the answer is ketchup. Like there isn't really a different answer. So if you don't like ketchup, maybe patty melts aren't for you because the answer to what goes on a patty melt is ketchup. Someone's like, Can I put tomatoes on it? No.
No, no, no. What you do is you eat so patty melt, for those of you that don't know, is rye bread, right? You can go seedless or you can go not seedless, but like like New York, like Jewish deli style rye bread. Then uh you could change the cheese up a little bit, but Swiss, some Swiss, some Emmenthal style thing. I like Gruyere, whatever.
Uh that, right? Then uh like like really well sauteed onions and a burger, and it should end up like like a grilled like a grilled cheese. So like the taste of this with some ketchup is great. Anyway, so I did one where I low temped it and all this other stuff, you know, it was it's delicious, but uh but the one I was working on yesterday was like I was trying to go even kind of lower, so I was I was uh I was doing something closer to a smash burger on the burger so that the burger was like small but still all the way across the the rye. It ended up good.
I also though switched my technology from butter on the grilled cheese part of it to uh mayonnaise, and I think I over mayonnaise it last night, so it got a little bit a little bit too greasy. Anyway, I digress. So either was like, it's not crazy enough. So then I I did a reverse alginate, which typically I don't use these techniques, uh, but I did a reverse alginate um ketchup puck, which I then molded inside of a um, which I then molded inside of a of a burger, and then low temped the burger, then like flash seared. I can't remember whether I fried it or flash seared the burger off, put it inside of the pre-grilled, which is still a good idea, by the way, doing a pre-grilled cheese thing to your patty mouth, separating it and put the burger in between the bread that's already been pressed flat with the grilled cheese and the and the and the onions is still a smart move.
Anyway, do that, and then when you cut it at the table and open it, the ketchup self-sauses itself out. So it's a nice trick. But I don't think anyone's ever going to do that in the real life. That's just because. And then eater, for as mad as they got at me for not going crazy enough on the first one, they posted both.
You know, anyway. Uh good times. But the patty melt is I'm not gonna say it's a hamburger, but it's my favorite burgaloid. Do you for your toast, because I don't remember, do you uh do you pre-butter the bread and then put on the griddle, or do you butter the griddle? So the the issue with uh if you're a butter grilled cheese, and I'm I'm saying uh in all honesty, I'm becoming a convert to the mayonnaise uh the like side of the the dark side of this because you know, my whole life I've been a butter guy.
Uh and there is room for a for a little bit of change, but I butter I butter the surface on the first piece of bread and then put it down. The problem is when you flip it, it's hard to get the butter all the way under the second piece. And you know, the the when I was a kid making them, you would just cut little pieces of butter and put them all around and they would kind of capillary wick in, but you'd always have little dry spots, you know, over your bread, which is not what you want, right? So, I mean, I'm kind of thinking maybe butter on one side and mayonnaise on the other might be the the the answer answer. But I mean, obviously, nothing simpler than just spreading some mayonnaise on and putting it down.
I've never have I done maybe I can't remember for the video because if the French culinary butter was free and I I could just keep a bunch of melted stuff around, I might have done the brush on of melted butter, but I wouldn't recommend that for home just because it's kind of too wasteful for home people, you know. Yeah, that's an extra step you don't need to do. I just say if you're if you're the type of person that leaves your butter out soften to like 24-7, which you should, um, then it's it's an easy schmear. I don't know. Can I tell you something?
So, like, so Booker goes through an unconscionable amount of butter. Just to give you an idea, like the the Liege style waffles that I make, I I did some calculations. I think they're roughly a third of a stick of butter. I don't know. There's something ridiculous in the Liege waffles.
It's like uh it's a pound of butter for 13. Anyway, it's crazy amount of butter in it. Booker then adds like a half stick of butter to the Liege waffle in all the cranes. So he's he so I lied when I said he only eats sushi and candy. He also, you know, Elvis style consumes, you know, uh like sticks of butter at a time and still has an unhealthily low uh BMI uh you know body weight.
Anyway, um he's a growing young man, he deserves butter. Yeah, yeah. I mean, like I'm not against obviously I'm not against the butter. Um, but here's another little thing he has about it is that he doesn't like soft butter. So like I had one of those butter cloches where it doesn't go rancid where you store it and it it puts the butter under the surface of water when it's being stored without getting it wet so that it you don't get oxygen in, so it doesn't go rancid on you.
And he's like, uh, butter should be hard, Dad. I'm like, no, you're wrong. He's like, yeah, I don't care what you think, that's the way I want it. So now no butter can be tempered in this house or Booker won't use it. Dude, you just hide some like in another room.
You can't do that. I guess. I don't know, but like again, like I mean, I have more butter in my fridge at any one moment than most people who aren't cooking professionally at this point. Like, you know, I it once I go below three pounds in butter reserves and strategic butter reserves, I start getting nervous. You know what I mean?
Same with eggs. Like if I don't have at least two dozen fresh eggs in my fridge at any one time, I start like, you know, feeling like something bad is gonna happen to me. And that's not a pandemic thing. That's just the way I cook. Um but yeah I guess I could spare a stick.
Just keep keep it like underneath your bed. Yeah but sometime sometime around five or six maybe even more maybe maybe like even longer now I switched from being a butter on my bread guy to an olive oil on my bread guy. That's also good. I like what when when you've been in our restaurant did you find it strange that we serve butter with in in our with our bread in our Italian restaurant. No I didn't remember that.
I don't know I I didn't register it. Do you do both? No we just served our the cultured butter because we did the cultured butter is delicious. Yeah. Yeah I mean it it makes total sense.
I just I've always had this like internal fear that one day some uh super uh Italian guy is gonna walk into my uh to my kitchen and and shoot me in the face for serving butter with bread in an Italian restaurant but most of that most of that generation is dead so you don't need to worry about it. Good point good point. He died like a year ago so you're good. So the uh the the the the Nokia was was a bit of a bit of an interesting thing we wanted to do at the restaurant. So um I prefer the potato Nokia not the densey lumpy uh flour bomb Nokia.
So we go the I'll call the the Marco Kenora method which is it's rusted potato and double zero flour and salt and that's it. So we we did this method. I've I've made it a thousand and one times. Sometimes you get inconsistent uh potatoes, uh blah blah blah, or you're not you're not doing it right. So you just you turn into a chef on the situation, you start weighing everything, and that's the only way to do it.
So you weigh the milled potato, so bake off X amount of potatoes. Uh, we have a ratio we follow, and we uh make sure just we cook the hell out of the potato. Like you're gonna make baked potatoes for dinner at home, cook them an extra half an hour, like just leave them in the oven. Um, and then scoop out uh the guts out of it. Uh the most important part is that you have to be ready.
So you have to have all of your everything kind of like your flour out, all this kind of stuff, the salt out. You have to have your water boiling ready to go, or else you're gonna be in trouble. Um, as soon as the dough cools down, it gets gummy. And if you work the Nokia dough while it's gummy, it gets more gummy after you cook it. So what we do is we pass the potato through a food mill.
Um, you can obviously do this with a potato ricer at home, it's not an issue. Um handheld potato ricers, the potato ricer attachments for for uh stick blenders sound stupid, are great. R great. Go ahead. What is it attaches to a stick blender?
Yeah, there's a stick blender ricing attachment. It well, it goes in the opposite direction. So it's got like a little food mill like uh wings underneath. You push it down and it forces it up through the ricer, but it's real quick, and you know, you get those like uh those like like Montblanc chestnut like like streams of things coming out of the top of them. You do a couple of hits into it so you're not over processing it, and it's fast, and don't have to clean it out because I hate food mills.
It's a it's a tool that only Europeans, I think, have. No one in the United States makes enough potatoes for this to be an issue, and so they're very hard to find. But I I have a couple, but uh yeah. So we found at the restaurant because that's what we do. We want everything to work on the pickup.
Um so uh we made a little discovery. If we add just a very small amount of cornstarch to to the dough, um, when we add the flour portion, because we sift it over, so there's no lumps. The very small amount of cornstarch makes all of the difference um in holding the stability of the Nokia so it doesn't fall apart. Because the idea is you want as little flour as possible to hold it together, but you also don't want it to, you know, become a total mess in the boil. So um after you you get your rolled out your make your nokey shapes, you can probably watch 28 videos on the internet of how to roll the Nokia.
Um, and then we boil them in salted water for about two to three minutes, depending on the size of it, and then we shock them, which sets the starch. So you boil them and shock them, which sounds counterintuitive because you're like, hey, I want to eat these Nokia now, but you have to shock them because it sets the starch. And then we portion them, do whatever. And at the restaurant, when order comes in, we heat up our sauce of choice, whatever that is, could be a butter glaze, could be a cheesy sauce, could be uh, you know, tomato-based marinero, whatever. Um, cachouri pepe style is very popular for Nokia in the restaurant.
So we do this, and the you just heat them up in the sauce, don't reboil them. You don't need to do that. Step saver, just put it right into the sauce, heat it up together with the sauce. Uh liaison, fat in there, cheese, whatever, and serve it and need it, and they're great. They also were good as like uh after you blanch shock them to make a sort of a Nokia casserole that works really good.
We do that for holiday stuff. We did this this past year. We made like a truffled uh sort of uh mornay bechamella sauce, fonduta, and then um put the blanched gnocchi in there. So give them instructions, bake it in the oven for X amount of time, and it's like this cheesy like potato Nokie pie worked really good. All right, now how hot are the potatoes when you're scooping them?
Super hot. You gotta burn your hands, dude. Yeah, so what poor sap does that job? Nothing is crappier than pulling an oven out of uh pulling a potato out of the oven and then having to get the flesh out of it right now. I hate it.
Yeah. You just gotta be ready. Put like double triple glove up. You've got to spend the couple cents on gloves, right? Hold the kitchen towel, you know.
I did some tests on peeling, uh peeling, wrapping, and baking potatoes, but I don't have anything conclusive yet. Wouldn't it wouldn't it just dry out on the after you on the exterior anyway? Not well, not if you wrap it, right? I'm working on it, I'm working on it. Now let me ask you this.
Since you clearly have a lot of potato skins lying around, do you have a good uh potato skin recipe? Because most are garbage. They come out either leathery, they're not crispy. I haven't gotten the the true, like, you know, uh simplot style, you know, pre, you know, TGI Fridays potato uh potato appeal recipe down yet. You got something for me?
No, we we either throw them out or snack on them with a little bit of salt, maybe a little olive oil in the morning. It's a good Nokia's done in the morning, right? So it's one of the first things we do when we come in. So it's it's a good breakfast. So we just eat them or throw them out.
So no, I don't, I don't have a potato skin thing, but most of the time they're like it's like an like an oil mop in your in your deep fryer. It's kind of I know, I know, and they're never as crunchy as I want. How the heck do the pros do it? Someone out there let me know how they're done. Who who's a pro at potato skins?
You're saying like TGI? TGI Fridays, yeah. But they don't make them. It's like Simplot, or like someone, you know, someone in Conagra makes those things for them, right? So, because that's what they're doing.
So I I mean, I I just don't know how they do it. I've never had good. This is also, I know a lot of people out there like to make their French fries with the skins on. I don't really understand that because I've never had the skin of a potato that I have worked with get as crunchy as the non-skin side. But it's the flavor.
So you know what? I think um what's his name? Heston Blumenval did this. You if you're gonna do uh a blanch, a water blanch on your fries, put the skins inside of a sachet and put them into the water and almost make like a potato skin stock and then pull them out, then blanch your blanch your French fries. I mean, I have infused flavors into things when I'm boiling with the French fries.
I don't know. I don't know. Right now I'm working on I'm working on the potato chip. I have some Nastasia sent me her favorite uh West Coast potato chips. Uh you want to call out the brand, Nastasia?
Uh I don't have them here. You have them when you want to call it out. I can't because they're they're up in a thing. I'd have to go leave the radio show. I don't know.
No, we'll talk about it next time. But I like Nastasia doesn't mind a dark chip. She likes a hard and not hard in a bad way, because sometimes hard means bad in fried goods, but like crunchy. She likes a crunchy AF, like and doesn't mind it dark, so like kettle style, crunchy, thick, thick chip. She likes it thick and crunchy.
You can tell when they're kind of kind of burnt. I mean, I don't know. This is an argument. Yeah, listen. The Cape Cod chip, that's like the gold standard.
Cape Cods are relatively blonde. I think they must be putting a vacuum on that on that thing to getting them uh blonde. We know, we used to when we didn't want things to color up, we would just hit them with acid beforehand, right? But um, in the current test that I've been running, like I would put like six different potato chips out, and Dax jen, my wife Jen always went for the ones that she she doesn't like a greasy potato chip. She's not afraid of consuming infinite amounts of fat, right?
She'll guzzle the oil. Does that's not the problem. She doesn't like greasy chips, right? And I'm making I'm emphasizing the Z to emphasize, you know, why she doesn't like it. Greasy.
Dax, interestingly, because I wouldn't have pegged him for this, is interested in maximum potato flavor. So the like OG kettle style, which are fundamentally just chipped directly into the fryer. He always prefers those, even though they're darker in general, because he says they have the most potato flavor, which is something I haven't thought about before, versus all of my blanch ones, you know. Yeah, yeah. I think the average person's not gonna make a potato stock to do their their blanching with, but you know, maybe.
I don't know. Does anyone does anyone on this call? Did you guys wipe your hand while you took potato chips on your shirt or pants? Or do you grab a napkin like like a polite person? Uh okay, so the shirt is always a bad call because people can see your shirt.
Yeah. But it be do you do it like instinctively? Like it's just the closest thing to wipe your hands on. No, I just leave my hand. What I actually do, like when I'm testing the in the real life, what I get is I'll eat my hand will be filthy, I'll hold it in the air, and then I'll walk over to the sink, use the foot pedals and wash it off.
Oh, okay. Well, foot pedals are nice. I'm gonna do a thing eventually on foot pedals. I have to do something on foot pedals, uh because they're awesome. Well, and then the company that you use for all the parts will change on you and they won't sell the parts anymore.
I know, I know. Well, John, speaking of it, do you have the uh do you have the information on the new company that you're recommending to replace Mark Power? I haven't had the the heart to call any different company and actually run through all the part numbers to see what the changeovers are, but well, so when I spoke to uh Mark Tarzan's or the company yesterday, they recommended a master marketing fun low, S-U-N-L-O-W, but I'm not quite sure it fits the bill. We need to look into it a little more. So depressing.
Look, if TNS Brass goes out, and by the way, here's something I'm gonna say about buying equipment. Once once we, you know, people are starting restaurants again and you're buying equipment, or even at home, maybe. You know, commercial frit faucets are different from something else from from home ones in in some ways. Um every contractor, I don't understand this. I don't understand whether contractors get paid off by crappy faucet manufacturers or what.
But you're paying so much money, right? And they're always gonna recommend that you get a cheaper faucet. Always. Cheaper angle stops, cheaper faucets, right? And the truth is is that TNS Brass, who's, you know, far from ever giving me anything, if they, you know, as a company, like they've always been kind of a little bit of jerkweeds because they won't deal with humans directly.
TNS brass is phenomenally expensive if you pay retail. There is no reason to pay retail for TNS brass. And you you often don't, as a especially as a uh a cook when you're, you know, because you have a lot of other things to worry about. But if you just go online on eBay or anywhere else, you can get TNS brass, not like at half off, but you can usually get it at a third of retail, right? And then just hand it to your contractor and be like, install this, because the I'm not gonna say anything bad about Fisher or any of the other crappy faucets, crown the ones that they other people try to sell you, but they will work fine for six months, and you'll be like, see, there's no problem.
And then they will start to break. Other people's foot pedals will start to break, the faucets won't shut off right, because the people that you hire to work in your restaurant are going to be brutal on that faucet. So, like a high quality faucet that you can depend on and whose parts are easily changed is a blessing. I don't know. What do you think, Joel?
What do you think about uh high quality faucets? I mean, definitely. Uh the the problem that I see, especially within restaurants, because I'm gonna bring it up all the time, is that if if you buy it, there's someone there to break it. Literally, literally within within probably 14 seconds of the item arriving, so someone's gonna break it, no matter what. Like a real TNS brass, if you can afford to l wait and look on eBay and get one, they're so robo.
If you've ever used like real, like the the really nice chrome, really thick TS brass faucet stuff, and they're the real spray arms, they're so robo. Yes, they'll still get broken, but it's gonna take instead of 30 seconds, it'll take like a minute and a half, and you can like you can replace the the parts, they're serviceable. Yeah, and for God's sakes, get your contractor to screw the dang faucet down firmly. Because once once things start spinning and they're not firm anymore, then people brutalize it as it hits the beginning and the end. Another thing, go quarter turn.
I know I've said this on angle stops a million times, a million times, but if you if you have like uh if you if you have valves on your faucets that are multi-turn, people will gorilla them at both both ends, which is gonna very quickly ruin your valve, and those those ones strip out a lot faster, right? Yeah. So if you get the totally agree, yeah, it's it's terrible. I did quarter turn all the way. Quarter turn, quarter turn.
And you know, I'm gonna say something that's a little counterintuitive. I like the wrist handle ones because they're just less filthy, but it is true that you know, but they're easy to gorilla. You could put a lot of force on a quarter on a quarter turn with a wrist handle, but it I find it's superior from a sanitary uh uh maybe I'll do a video on it at some point. Yeah, everyone. This episode is brought to you by Hearst Ranch.
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He said yes for Joel. When you said pasta dryer is 130 degrees, do you mean Fahrenheit or Celsius? What? Oh, uh, I was I was referring to what someone told me because I haven't tested my gigantic pasta dryer yet. Um, but it goes up to 130 Fahrenheit.
That's around, I think, where where it caps out for the initial, and then it like it cools down for the rest of the drying. But it has to go through like I don't know if it's like trying to like flash off a bunch of moisture that's on the pasta. Um, and it just has to evacuate really fast. I'm not really sure behind the science behind that because I'm just diving into it now. But um, if you're gonna use a dehydrator at home, I would certainly go as low as possible.
Yeah, the other thing. But it kind of mimic, like, you know, it's uh it's a nice uh tempered day, you know, it's mild out. Uh try to mimic that sort of climate in the dehydrator. Look, there's another there's another issue, right? That like that needs to be addressed on a on a dehydrator.
Temperature is not a air temperature is not a valid way to measure this stuff. You need to know the relative humidity. So that's gonna be the difference between the wet bulb and the dry bulb temperature. And no small home dehydrator, X caliber style has a way to measure the relative humidity. So if you're at 130 degrees Fahrenheit and you're, you know, and 100% humidity, right?
So let's say Louisiana, right? Like that is gonna be a much different experience for the pasta than being at 122, let's say 122, something that could happen in Louisiana, although it doesn't, that's not that hot, but versus 122 uh in Phoenix as you know, at like 8% humidity, it your pasta is gonna experience something very, very different from a drying standpoint. So the temperature, when you're talking about especially low temperature drying, specifying temperature as separate from your humidity isn't gonna give you anything reproducible. Does that make sense? You know what I'm saying?
It's like you and I don't know why people don't, I don't know why no one's cracked the thing where they they deal with both, especially because at the low temperatures at which you're dehydrating, it's relatively trivial to at least tell you what the number is. It might not be relatively trivial to control it, but it's relatively trivial to for for you to know what what the number is. And since Devin did write in, I'm assuming this is Devin Patel, uh, Nastasia, it's late, but Devin wanted Phil Bravo to sing Dreaming of a White Christmas. Do you think we can get that next year? No.
Why not? You don't think he'll do it? No, I already asked him when I saw that question come in. Oh, and he said no. Well, we have a year to work on them.
And also, Devin would like uh Jackie Molecules to know, right? When he's going uh uh about spending the on on wine on a date, the amount or price of wine purchased is an investment. So a cheap bottle is like one night and 50 bottles is like a marriage proposal status. But I don't really know what that means. And if you're investing, Devin, in a nice wine so that you can get someone thinking that you are good, that could be an investment that lasts a lifetime.
Right? Right? I don't know. And they also wanted to uh say, and maybe any of you have experience here, Devin is making a lactofermented or was making a lactofermented um mustard and uh was wondering about the other spices like uh uh onion, paprika, celery seed, put it in before the ferment or after the ferment or both. Uh, I would if you had if you're gonna do this on an ongoing basis, I would definitely do an A-B test.
I would do a little before and a little after and see whether or not there's a fundamental difference. Most pickling recipes have you put this stuff in before. And I think a lot of that might be that a lot of the old school pickling recipes are based on some of the antimicrobial or anti-bad microbial effects that a lot of these spices have. Um but you know, if you're not worried about that, I don't really know whether anyone has done the you know, the the kind of overarching study of what it tastes like when you add it before versus what you add um after. And uh you also said that you noted that when you were cooking soup and you added vinegar to it, that the acidity from the vinegar uh went away, but the acidity and other things doesn't just make perfect sense to me because vinegar is, as we know, one of the very few volatile uh organic cooking acids.
That makes sense. Anyone? Anyone sense? I I prefer cooking on acid more than cooking with acid. Oh my god, have you done that?
No. But I but in my in my dreams I feel like it would it would it would be a lot more fun these days. I've never taken any sort of hallucinogen, but I just don't think I would react well. I don't know. So maybe we can actually can we all just trip together and see what happens?
I mean, it might be a fun experiment. I I don't know. I've never tried it. Nastasia is not interested in hallucinogens, right? Or you are, I can't remember.
No. No. We're supposed to add a lot of that. I don't know. I just don't know that I would I would I don't know that I would come back from it.
Uh but are we are are we mentioning so one of the reasons Nastasia doesn't want to come back right now to this side of the country is that in one of these major storms we had, because her house is right on the sound, and the sound, the Long Island Sound, is a relatively protected body of water. So having your house on the sound is a is a lot different from having it on the Atlantic Ocean where you can get like where you get pummeled on the regular, right? No one expects that their house is right on the sound is gonna get obliterated, and yet somehow some wind kicked up in one of these like you know, cyclone situations over here that we had. And it was the blizzard two weeks ago. And soaked all of your stuff, right?
Yeah, broke the windows, and now all the windows or the windows facing the sound are boarded up. So my friend went there yesterday, and she was like, yeah, it's pretty depressing in here with the windows boarded, and they can't fix them until it gets hot there. So I don't know when that is. Why are they grounded in with cement? Yeah.
And so um I was like, well, maybe I should spend a couple more weeks here. Because I don't know, looking at boarded up windows inside alone would be super sad. Why do you we know why do you think that we deserve anything more than that? No, I considered that, Dave. I knew that you would you would want me there, but everyone's telling me there's no point.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Uh and are you allowed to tell about uh the dream in which I was unreasonable? Yeah, last two nights ago, I dreamt that Dave made made me make a football-sized uh field of fudge. And he walked away to take uh something, take care of his family, some family.
You said my dog was uh was causing problems. I had to go to the body. No, it was something family really. So it was definitely something like your kids or your dogs, and the fudge seized up before I can make it all the way around the football field to stir it, so all the nuts had just stayed on one side of the thing, and then Dave came back and was like, the hell, like you're supposed to stir the entire thing and all this. And I woke up like frantically, like, oh my god, I really effed up.
And then I called Dave and told him, and literally his response was, Well, why didn't you think of another solution to like make sure that the nuts were spread more? Like, as if it were a real thing. I played right into it. I was like, I I felt like I would have disappointed her if I didn't play. I was like, this here's what I said exactly.
I was like, Nastasia, listen. If you didn't think it was gonna work, you knew we were making a football field of fudge. You knew we were doing this. You saw me show up, you saw the ingredients go into the football field. If you didn't think it was gonna work, why didn't you say something then?
Why do you wait? Yeah, but then I was like, why did you run off to go take care of that? You should have we got in a whole five minutes. You couldn't just stir the fudge for five minutes, five minutes. You ruined the whole football field.
Five minutes. So that's what it's like, even in dreams. Normally I recommend against sharing dreams with other people because they tend to be like boring and way more nonsensical than you think. But for you guys, I recommend not sharing because it leads to actual uh arguments. That's amazing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. So on the way out, since we have some chefs and other people, uh Chef Joanna, uh, you know, uh listener way I uh uh says, and sometimes into the chat room, which we always appreciate. Can uh Dave please comment on ceramic knives, yay or nay. They make me nervous.
I have like some petties, some pairings that uh there they but they make me nervous because I always feel like I can't resharpen them like when stuff happens to them. And I've broken the tip off of one. But Wiley uh loves them. Wiley he has a slicer, he uses sometimes. He loves the the ceramics uh for the price to slice ratio.
Uh what do you think, Joel? Um, I don't I don't keep things that are too precious or crap. Joel, in fact, I probably 10 years ago I stopped spending money on fancy knives because I just uh I don't I don't take good care of them. I have I have a good amount of utility knives and some Corinth style uh stuff that I've held on to over the years, and uh I buy the the ones that are a little bit less expensive, and then when I'm done with them, I just buy another one because they're like 70, 80 bucks. After two or three years, I get another one.
But the ceramic knives, um, I had one bad experience when I was a young cook and I lobbed off my knuckle with it. So I pretty much decided at that point that I don't ever want to be near one ever again. Oh yeah. Yeah. Interesting.
Hey, here's something else interesting. You know how I don't know whether any if anyone's heard this show, like a lot of them, uh, when I do talk about knife sharpening, I always mention my dislike for um the asymmetrical sharping sharpening that some uh Japanese Western knives have, where they'll have a different angle on one side of the blade than the other. I either prefer completely symmetrical old school European or completely traditional chisel chisel grind uh on um that they have, you know, in Japanese knives. And Wiley was like, well, you know, if you just um take some time the first time you use it and then just keep going on one side of a Japanese Western, you can turn a Japanese western into a chisel grind because they're so thin, it's actually not that hard to do it. And so he's been all of his Japanese western uh thin ones are um are sharpened chisel grind, which is pushed them for a 90 10 from a 7030.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and so and I think he's even worse like the only issue with a Japanese western is is that like uh if you want to go a true zero on the flat side, you need to it needs to be concave uh on the bottom so that the so that the spine edge and then the blade edge can rest to really take it off. So most people do do a very slight relief on the back side just because their knives aren't like concave enough to sharpen like a true chisel chisel. But I look I think anyone who I like know and deal with a lot, whose kind of opinions who who don't take opinions from other people without like actually thinking about it themselves, none of them really love the asymmetrical grinds they're just because I'll tell you this there there's kind of like people who buy very sharp knives but then don't want to take the time to sharpen them anything that gets in your way of sharpening is bad. So if you have a sharpening system that that is too complicated for you to use on a regular basis then I would rather you use something that makes your knife slightly less sharp right but that you could do on the regular because the overall the integral of sharpness over time will be a much larger number if you can like on a regular keep it relatively sharp than if you take it up to some high level of sharpness once a year.
And so like you know I do I would say you know on knives that I use a lot I almost you know weekly I'll touch them up. I'm not talking professionally I'm talking home use. You know what I mean? I'll I'll I'll weekly hit them up or so. Some knives the carbon ones that sharpen really well but are pain in the butt because they rust I'll sharpen them every time I use them right so I'll I'll just sharpen them every time I use them because it's not that hard.
So getting a knife that's easy to sharpen and getting a sharpening regime that you can actually tolerate that you can live with that's fast and livable is more important I think than getting the ultimate sharpness out of a knife. I don't know it's my twice that almost sounds like health advice that was good. Yeah but but don't you agree with me though like like I have some of these super fancy sharpeners but it's like a half hour thing. I gotta set up the base I gotta do the soaking I could set the angles. I got the different with the guides and all this other stuff.
And you know what the world? I don't like knives that are that are too sharp because if it puts you fine of an edge on it, it does that thing where it sticks into the cutting board. Oh yeah. Yeah. Also, I think a lot of people when they when they they sharpen and they get too sharp.
Remember, there's absolute sharpness, and then there's like how good are you for the angles that you choose. I don't go hyper hyper uh narrow on my angles. I prefer a slightly stronger edge. So, you know, if you're going to if you're using one of these supermodern steels and you're going to a very, very, very small angle on the bottom of the blade. Yeah, I mean, A, that sharpness isn't going to get maintained that long, and B, you're gonna stick.
Although I do like it when my uh traditional carbon Japanese ones, I take them to that level of sharpness where it's just like stupid sharp, where like it'll cut you if you look at it wrong. I mean, I do like that. You know what I mean? Um anyways. My uh my feelings on uh on sharpening.
All right. Well, uh Joel, thanks for uh coming on and answering some pasta questions. And so I know we have a lot of questions for uh next week, but hopefully there are ones that uh I can answer without having to pull in uh experts. So maybe we'll we'll just rip through some next week. John John and Nastasi will try to keep me keep me on track, maybe.
Yep, we can do that. All right, thanks, Joel. Cooking issues. Cooking issues is powered by Simple Cast. Thanks for listening to Heritage Radio Network, food radio supported by you.
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