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This episode is brought to you by Dashable, an app that helps you find deals, save money, and earn rewards at local businesses in New York City. This week on Meet and Three, we head into the second part of our mini-series on global trade, where we talk about all things sweet, from chocolate and sugar cane to the cultural festival that accompanied the growth of the date industry in the U.S. They're using this romance and fantasy to say dates are exotic and you should consume them. I like to think of the food that we eat as archaeological artifacts, in part because the history of humanity is in the stands in your produce market. It's not like other foods.
We have very like personal feelings about chocolate. Tune in to Meet and Three, HRN's weekly food news roundup, wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live on the Heritage Radio Network every Tuesday from whenever to whenever. You know, whatever.
We're all over the all over the country here. I got I'm in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. We got uh Matt. Are you back in Robert's or are you back in Rhode Island now? I'm in Rhode Island, but I actually went to my parents' house for this recording because I was so worried about my internet functioning.
So a different booth. I see. I see. Nastasia the Hammer Lopez, still in California. How you doing?
Good. We have one more show from here next week, and Jack and Aaron want to join. Cool. Uh the the poll cat, Aaron the Pole Cat. Uh-huh.
But he says he wants you to talk about his live wire. Who what? What he wants to talk about live wire. Okay, but like I'm most interested. What I most want to hear is I most want to get Jack and Aaron in an argument about uh date wines.
Yeah. Yeah, we can probably set up the channel. You never talked about the thing that you wanted to do. What? You never talked about the thing you wanted to do with both of them.
Oh, me. Well, but they did. Should we just let people know since neither of them are listening? Can we just tell people what Yeah, we can't do it anyway because of COVID. Well, yeah, I mean, eventually, you know, this will pass.
But so the concept was is I'm gonna refresh for those of you that uh, you know, weren't weren't around when when this argument happened. But Jack Insley, Jackie Molecules, the original engineer for the cooking issues program, uh, you know, we're still friends with him, right? And he was saying he's out in California right now for the COVID, and he was saying that uh he had an issue with uh the wine that was at this date. Is that is that accurate? It was a Merlot and he hated it.
Is this correct? It was a cheap bottle of Merlot that his date brought over, yeah. Yeah. And he was like, the hell is this? But basically, right?
Mm-hmm. Yeah. And Aaron was like, you're an evil human being. Who cares what the what the wine was, et cetera, et cetera. Is that am I am I fairly accurate?
Like in this, in this time of COVID, the wine contains alcohol. I'm sure it's not so overtly flawed that uh it's completely, you know, undrinkable and will poison you, right? For instance, it t tastes better than some people's well water, and uh just suck it up and don't be a jerk. That was the the gist, right? Mm-hmm.
Keep your eyes on the prize. Yeah. Now listen, yeah. I think we can all agree that that in the world of extreme rock bottom low priced wines, perhaps California extreme low price Merlot might be the worst. Yeah.
You know, that's something that we maybe you don't, dear listener, but we as a cooking issues collective do agree. So anyway, so that what we wanted to do, what Nastasia and I really, really, really wanted to do was to go buy like an ocean of crappy uh Merlot. In fact, you called a company. Did they ever get back to you? Emailed.
No, they never got back. Who did we email? Do you remember? Yellowtail. Oh, yeah, yeah.
Nastasia. Well, Nastasia's uh punching bag of choice. Uh, if you go to her house. If you really want to piss Nastasia off, should you ever be invited to her house, which is eh, I'm gonna go ahead and say it. Unlikely.
If you bring uh yellowtail, that that is like that's super trigger for her, anyway. So she was gonna try to buy how many gallons? You did the math, Dave. I did the math, but I don't remember the numbers. I don't remember, no.
Yeah, it's like something like a hundred gallons or something, right? Or 55 gallons or something. Yeah. And we were going to do a Merlot Jell-O wrestling match for charity. Between Aaron Polk, Aaron Polski, the poll cat, you know, a former uh Harvard and Stone, now he now has his own uh canned cocktail company and Jackie Molecules, and we were since I couldn't be there, because you know, whatever, I was going to uh I was going to get a computer monitor and put it on the end of a stick, and we were gonna have someone with my head screaming at them as like the let's get ready, let's get ready to rumble that guy, but like you can't actually say it like he does, or you'll get sued.
Uh, but like my head on the end of a stick, and then I would officiate and like Nastasi would be there and it would be great. But they disagreed. They really didn't want to do it, and they each separately texted me telling me to shut you up, Dave. Shut me up? You're the one that just brought it up.
No, no, no, no. The day you you came up with this idea. Yeah. But like I mean, I don't know, like, I don't know, like, I understand what they're getting at. Like somehow they feel like their personal like life brand, not like money brand, but like their life brand, right?
Like their dating app, let's say, their their profile will be damaged by this. But do you really think so? I'm not a guy. I don't know. What do you guys think?
No, but you're their target, not you specifically, but you they you know, they're both interested in women. So I'm saying is that it would this is it would this be a negative in their if if you found out that they had done this, would you be like, no way? Yeah. Oh. So they're right.
What if we just had the words for charity? Were those words already included? Uh I included them, but that's okay. Nastasia is saying that it doesn't affect her uh decision. All right.
Well, it's hard to separate the person from the, you know. I don't want to date either of them. Well, okay. Let's say, you know. So let's say that there is someone that you don't know, and they're on the margins of and they're on the dating app and they have photos of them jello rest.
No, no, no, no, no one said that. What I'm saying is is that then, like, okay, I'll give you an example. In the course of conversation, it comes out, they're like, oh yeah, by the way, this is a thing that I have done. Yeah. I'll give you an example.
So in college, I think I said this on the air before, in college, so when I was young, I wanted to uh chop trees down. I didn't want to necessarily be a professional lumberjack, but I wanted to be able to go out into the woods and chop trees down. And you know, because when I was splitting wood for you know, spare you know, money, you know, when I was a kid, a piece of a so a piece of the mall, which is the thing that you split the wood with, like, came off and shot into my leg, and I had to go and get it surgically removed. It was a pain in the butt. Anyway, from there on out, like I wasn't allowed to talk about owning an axe.
I wasn't allowed to talk about chopping trees down. It was like I couldn't talk about it in the house, I wasn't allowed to do it. So, like, honestly, like within the first like month of going to college, I bought an axe. And I was like, you know, I'm on my own now. I can have what I want.
I've always wanted to own an axe, so now I have an axe. And uh it turns out that other people in your dorm think you're crazy for having an axe as it as it happens. And so I found out much later, like when I was a junior and I started going out with my now wife, Jen. She told me that people were going around telling women to not go out with me because I was a lunatic and I had an axe. I mean, I had other issues, but like, you know, that was, you know, one of them, right?
And so uh what I'm saying is is this like that? So if someone's like, that idiot was in a jello wrestling match. So like if your friend told you that, would that like ruin it for you, Stus? That's what I'm trying to find out. No.
But the rest of their lives would bum me out. It wasn't supposed to be a referendum on Jackie Molecules. No. The question is is this a relative net, a relative minus, a relative plus, a relative minus, or a relative neutral in their life? Neutral, neutral, neutral.
All right, this is a long way to go to find that simple answer. Oh my goodness. Uh oh, before we get going, we had a we had a question come back into the chat. So Ed Ed and Camera claims in the last episode, 438, Peter Flanagan wrote in for a toaster oven recommendation. But the tale of his sad slash scary microwave provided just enough tangential distraction that it ended up being a discussion of microwave detection, cooktop ventilation, and microwave recommendations.
As someone who was recently looking at toaster ovens, I too was curious to hear Dave's thoughts. Any chance of revisiting the toaster oven recommendations? Well, what were the what were the parameters? Everything is about parameters, right? So, like, you know, uh, you know, what do you are you literally interested in just a slice of toast?
You know that you can buy this the Japanese toaster maker that costs three uh toast maker that costs $300, I think, and makes only two slices of toast and cooks nothing else. I've never had the toast out of that machine, so I can't tell you whether it's uh any good. Um I know some people were trying to buy the Cuisinar Combi oven toaster to try to mimic that. Uh like I had bad luck with that unit because I thought the controls were bad and the grate was terrible. It was unbelievable.
It's like the the the lines between the grate on that were so farly spaced so far spaced apart that your bread would literally sag down. Nightmare. Um, I mean, I use the brevel, I like it, but I forget was this person did they want like a stand-up toaster? Did they want like a toaster oven? Like, is the size important?
I don't remember what the parameters were. Uh you see what I'm saying? Yes, I do see what you're saying. Because, like, what what I would tell someone to buy, for instance, is it is it important for you to look cool? If it's important for you to look cool, the dual it looks nice.
And it and the toast is fine. You know what I mean? You like, are you guys fans of the dual it? I don't know. It's the one that looks a little bit like an airstream, it's British.
Oh. You know what I mean? Real fancy. Anyway. For what it's worth, Jim in the chat weighs in and says if I were buying a new toaster oven today, I'd buy the ANOVA since you get what amounts to a residential combi oven experience.
Well, that's uh that isn't interesting because uh we are talking to them about trying to get one to test out and then have them come on and we'll talk about uh home combi ovens. That's in the works, is it not, John? It is, yes. And it's it doesn't sound like an if. It sounds like this is going to happen and you will be testing it out, so we'll have an update for everyone soon.
All right, but the point is is that I can't talk about it because I haven't tried it. Exactly. Yeah. You know what I mean? I mean, I can talk about it, but it'll be useless to you because I can't I I will not recommend something that I have not tried, uh, you know, unless it comes extremely highly recommended from a friend, and then I have to give all the caveats, etc.
etc. Okay. I've never even touched one in the real life. Um, go for it. No, no, I thought you were going to move to a different question.
I have a follow-up from uh Matt at Kitchen Arts and Letters. Oh, oh. Uh I'll move to a different question because we'll talk more about wet bulb, dry bulb, dew point, humidity, ovens, the difficulty measuring therein, and the fact that I just had to cancel a 250 dollar order on on the phone uh because nothing measures humidity the way I want. And we'll move on. We'll move back to this question that uh we we uh we got.
So John, go for it. Yeah, so last week we answered a question from Alex Edwards, who was wondering about uh the administrative books about the administrative side of being a chef. Uh, and we asked Matt Sartwell at Kitchen Arts and Letters, and here is his answer. There's a book called Work Clean by Dan Charnis, which applies chef lessons to the larger idea of managing your life. And Eric Repairs on the line was an inside look at how LaBernard Down was organized, though it is unfortunately out of print.
But when it comes to a hard look at staffing, cost control, purchasing, etc., the market fragments into very specific books, which are developed for use in large-scale restaurant and hotel schools and concerned with running very large operations. They're dry, nuts and bolts titles that are not about imagination. To be honest, we've not been going deep in these areas because the books have become expensive in the way of textbooks these days, often well over $125. And they frequently, bafflingly, start with incredibly rudimentary discussions, such as the difference between front and back of the house. And that's what he's got.
And let me just put this out there. Anytime you want to know, is there a good book on X, Y, and Z? And is it really good or not? A good thing to do is to call or email Kitchen Arts and Letters, and they will know. But I will say that I feel that you're a little bit then morally obligated to buy it from them.
Would you not agree? Probably, yeah. Yeah. The out of print one, the repair, go you can, you know, I think that's fair game. Just go on ABE.
I don't think that one cost too much. I think it was on a tour for that book when he told I went to some talk he gave, and he told me the magical LaBernard Dan tasting trick. You remember this one, guys? Yeah. Yeah.
The standard cheese. Standard cheese, life changer. I have not figured out what my standard cheese is, but at La Bernard Dan, for those of you that didn't hear me say it before, Eric Ripaire had a standard, crappy, uh, you know, available supermarket, completely uniform cheese. I believe it was Kraft Swiss. And they would eat a block of it, like everyone would eat a block of it every day before service before they went around and tasted all their mise en plus, so they could figure out, oh, my nose isn't working so well today, my palate's messed up today, etc.
etc. Um, anyways. Um, and I have a question out there if anyone can help me out. Uh so I had someone ask me on Twitter, uh, you know, they're cooking for someone who uh has you know had just had the COVID and had an osmia, you know, hopefully temporary anosmia, which is where you can't really smell and so it ruins your sense of taste, and was wondering what dishes are good for them. I asked my wife because she had um she had some anosmia after, you know, she had uh COVID, and uh and I was like, so is there anything that kind of makes it through that's good when you can't smell?
And she's like, No, it all sucks, it sucks, it's it's ruined everything, food's ruined. No. So like she didn't give me anything good. So if anyone out there has had any good experiences trying to make things for people that can't uh smell, uh, let me know. Uh all right.
Actually, real quick, I have a personal plug too. Uh if anybody, any listeners out there know anything about tapping maple trees. Please let me know. Yeah, for those of you that for those of you that are he's in Connecticut, right? So you're talking about maple trees in Connecticut.
I know we have a listener who wrote in a couple of times about vacuum dehydration on maple. So if you're still a listener, John wants to do it, and then he's gonna be you you're gonna be like our roving uh like correspondent on tapping maples. You're gonna give a like a week by week blow by blow, right? That is the plan, as long as the timing works up for when I can tap them, because it's a week where I can't be here. And you you're not interested necessarily in making eight boatloads of this stuff.
You just you just want like uh, you know, somewhere between a core to a half gallon of stuff, right? Yeah. I'm fairly certain the Harry Rosenbloom of Feast Your Ears uh has done that in Rhode Island, so I could definitely put you in touch with him. Who knows what's up? Yeah, actually no Harry, so I can I'll shoot him a message.
Yeah, thanks for that. Okay. Yeah. All right. Okay.
Um now listen, what's the question that Nastasi said I had to get to today about something about the sun, or should we answer a food question first? Should we answer a food question? Yeah, I do a food question. Let's do a food question. And then you you find it.
All right. Um Brian Garrick wrote in. Uh, hey there. I recently read about two different techniques to preserve the tomato harvest. One, preserving in ash, right?
So this is where uh someone I believe in um in Burundi, uh who has who grows tomatoes, uh says that if you pack the tomatoes in boxes full of ash, like the stuff left over from fires, ash, that they last, so says he, for uh months. Now, I wasn't able to f and by last, I mean not supposedly dehydrated like they last, like you can eat them. Uh now uh John and I looked at an excruciatingly long video this morning of someone in Canada who attempted to uh recreate this t preserving tomato in ash kind of a situation. And uh what happened was that they didn't spoil, probably because the ash is a desiccating, so it's you know, it's stopping it from getting too moist on the outside, and probably the uh pH of the ash prevents mold growth uh and whatnot on the outside of the tomatoes, so they don't um they don't spoil in the way that a standard uh tomato would spoil. Now he didn't show pictures of it when it was a couple of months in, but he said that they felt kind of like water balloons.
Now the the downside is that uh because he was in Canada and he stored it over the winter, it was like stupid cold and very low humidity. So they completely desiccated and turned into small little discs. My guess is is that in Burundi with a much higher uh humidity that you get much less evaporation, and the closer you are to uh saturated in the in your humidity, the less chance you are of it um uh of it desiccating. And so then you're in a situation where it's not quote unquote spoiling, right? Because it's not molding, but it's also uh not desiccating, right?
Now, is that gonna taste good? That I can't tell you. Uh, but I was gonna say that the the guy in Canada had uh no luck. The second one you said was hanging, and you're pointing out uh picture of some people hanging uh tomatoes in, I I think the one that you sent me was uh it was Italy or Spain or something. And uh I was wondering if you have any thoughts on doing this, i.e., hanging tomatoes or packing them in ash at home next season.
This way I can have winter tomatoes that are actually delicious. Why don't they rot? Is it a technique or a varietal? Will this work for other fruits and veggies? What about temperature?
Is that an issue? I recall you and a cooking issues guest, perhaps Daniel Gritzer did a refrigerated tomato test and thought that cold storage destroyed the flavor. Uh now listen, do you think that taste would be compromised with either of these techniques? I mean, for sure taste is gonna be compromised and texture. But Daniel and I had a big disagreement.
Let's go back. I have my whole life, because this is the way I was taught since I was a small person, that putting tomatoes in the fridge is an enemy, it makes you an enemy of quality because the texture turns mealy. Daniel Gritzer, because he's a contrarian, right? Right, Stasman, he's a contrarian fellow. He's a contrarian.
I like him, but he's a contrarian fella. He's one of those guys, he always has a smile on his face, but he'll always tell you that like whatever you thought was wrong, pretty much. Yeah. Yeah. Not in a mean way.
Um, so uh anyway, so he was like actually, I ran he and he ran a bunch of tests, right? And so he says that, you know, if you're some sort of monocle-wearing uh, you know, wine fridge owner, which I I am, I was given one, so I have a like a wine cooler, you can uh keep them in that and that's good. But keeping them on the shelf, um, they respire too quickly and they actually lose some of their um good flavor and aroma versus putting it in a fridge, which will eventually make the texture worse. But all in all, the ones he tested, uh he was better off keeping them in the fridge. Now, it's too long to go into here, but that's what the that's what we had Daniel Gritzer on.
Now, the one that you're talking about, the ash, I'm gonna go ahead and say that uh I haven't met or seen anyone that's tasted the actual one from this dude in Burundi after the six months. But the one the guy in Canada washed off the dehydrated one and said it tasted nasty, like it musty, like like super nasty. Now, could work in Burundi, don't know. I haven't wasn't able to find any uh scientific articles on it. The hanging tomatoes is in fact a variety.
So the famous uh Iberian peninsula, like you know, you I guess I think of it mainly as Catalonian, like uh tomato with bread. They've they've over the years developed special varieties of tomato that can be hung, right? And they maybe desiccate a little bit, but in they're designed in the atmosphere in which they grow to last for months and months, uh just hanging upside down, either tied onto a string, like tomato by tomato, uh, and and then they're meant to be cut in half and rubbed into toasted bread to make the uh you know bread with tomato, the famous bread with tomato dish that they have there. It will not work with standard ones. So if you go to the uh a good review of this is the an article uh that the EU put out called The Valorization of Hanging Tomatoes in Spain.
Uh and it talks, it's an interesting article about how there's uh congruent or I should say uh co-breeding. So it's not just one variety, people all in that in that area all selected four varieties that would last longer when hung and just ate the ones that go bad and then planted the ones that lasted long year after year. So there's a number of different varieties of these hanging tomatoes, but they're not standard uh tomato in the same way that apples that are meant to be kept for a long time aren't the standard apple. So you'd have to get a hold of this variety. You can buy this variety in uh in the United States, the seed in the United States.
I've never tried it. Uh it also requires that you uh do not irrigate. They need to be a relatively low moisture tomato for it to work. Was that a good enough answer, guys? Yeah.
All right. From Highbation via Instagram. Hey Dave, uh, you've been featuring a lot of articles talking about non-alcoholic cocktails that I've come across. I'm trying to create my own non-alcoholic spirit using distillation at home. Aiming for something similar to seed lip.
Can I can we just have we mentioned this? Why would you name your I we I know I've met them, but like seed lip sounds not pleasant, right? What's wrong with that guy? He's got a seed lip. Doesn't sound good, right?
Never had it. No, I'm saying the name. I mean, like, in other words, like the way that you hate the word spore, I think seed lip sounds like something's wrong. Yeah. I see that.
Yeah. Uh and ritual zero proof. Any advice on this process, where to look or who to talk to about creating something like this. Uh also just want to recognize how rough this past year has been on your industry. And it was unfortunate to read about the closed and existing conditions.
Yeah. It was even more unfortunate to live it. Uh, but thank you. Uh I hope things will be looking up again soon. Thanks, Donovan.
So here's my here's my question to you, Donovan. Is uh when you say a s a spirit, look, most people who are making non-alcoholic uh spirits, right? Or whatever you want to call them, zero-proof spirits, they're looking to sell you something that you can then mix into uh into cocktails one-to-one for a spirit or like a spirit. And that's not really kind of what I'm an that's not really what I'm an uh I would say an expert in or what I've been um working on, right? So for that you could, you know, distill a bunch of flavors.
The trick is is uh trying to, you know, you have to add um people sometimes try to add a little something cooling or something to provide some stuff for your trigeminal uh your trigeminal nerve, so you get some of that bit of cooling, but they also need to add body, so like if you're smart, you're gonna add some glycerin. Uh you need to add uh probably something that has a little bit of polyphenol, some tannins to give it a little bit of complexity, and usually some kind of an herb base, right? That's and that's typically what people are doing. Um, but uh but those things I I find it's much easier to make really good non-alcoholic drinks if instead of focusing on a non-alcoholic spirit, you focus on a um you focus on non-alcoholic cocktails and then constructing the whole flavor from the ground up because it gives you much more volume to work with. When you're making a non-alcoholic spirit, the entire volume of that non-alcoholic spirit, the water portion of it, right, is now accounted for and gives you less room to work with in your non-alcoholic cocktail.
Does that make sense? So in general, I I focus on cocktails rather than trying to you know make spirits, but if you're going to distill, you can distill things that have nice, uh a lot of things distill well. They don't necessarily distill well into water just because uh they'll be relatively fugitive. So when you're doing uh water based distillations like hydrosols, you're gonna want to use them very, very quickly. Um glycerin, vegetable glycerin is is gonna be your friend.
And in general, uh, like I say, try to include some plant-based materials that'll give some sort of either skin contact kind of a feeling or some sort of uh astringency or some sort of polyphenols like you might get from wood and add a little something that's gonna get some herbal complexities like non tea, like teas like tasans are typically good as are uh herbal things. Is this uh that make any sense, guys? Does that make sense? Yes, yeah. All right.
Uh all right. If you're gonna do it professionally, right, that's when they try to make ones that you can buy one unit and then mix them into various cocktails, right? Because it's a different problem. Uh and then they're trying to mimic certain flavors, like this mimic the flavor of rum, but I don't think that's what you're trying to do. Okay.
Uh from Josh Whitland via Instagram. I hope you and the uh B and D slash H R N crew are doing well. I can't find any concrete answers on this, so I thought uh probably uh pay to ask you. I want to make a classic burger bun, but no matter what I try, I cannot get the store-bought style squishiness where the bun has more of a paper thin skin instead of a crust and a soft pillowy crumb that bounces back post-squish. All online recipes result in a bun that doesn't squish.
What's the secret to achieving this? I don't own a steam function oven. So I've tried a Dutch oven technique, still with no joy. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. All the best, Josh from uh Somerset, UK.
Man, I wish I could go back to Somerset. The cider there is so good. Cider's so good. Um, listen. Uh the question is this.
So uh there's a continuum between uh like white like white bread, like you know, like crusty white bread, right, and brioche. And in between that continuum somewhere, right, in between like a crusty dinner roll and a brioche roll lies, I think the hamburger bun that you want. So if you think about brioche, right? Brioche is squishy and has a thin crust, right? Because the stuff they wash on the outside of the brioche makes a thin crust.
So you're gonna want to go somewhere in between those. Now, you might want to go all the way to brioche because I don't know if you know this, but hamburgers on brioche buns, what do they taste, guys? Guys. Say that again. Brioche.
Hamburger on a brioche bun. Tastes what? Not good. Tastes great. You don't like brioche bun, S?
Yes, I do. So why'd you say not great? I was thinking of something else, but no. Yeah, you're right. I can't.
I can't even we're so boring that we can't even keep the attention of the people on the show for five minutes while I'm asking a question. No, I was responding, I was responding to a listener about me being boring. So that was like a full circle event. Okay. Sweet.
I like a full circle event. Yeah. It's the circle of death. Why do they call it the circle of life? It really never ends with life.
It ends with you being dead. Circle starts with you being dead and ends with you being dead. Anyway. So uh most hamburger buns uh are not as rich as a brioche. So I'll just tell you what my hamburger bun recipe is that is not very crusty.
It's relatively thin. It's also relatively squishy. And close your ears, Nastasia, because I do use whole wheat uh flour. Um, but anyway, so uh but it's very light whole wheat because I I sift it. And anyway, and in fact, I think I have a recipe.
I have a recipe here. I have a recipe here that doesn't use whole wheat flour. All right. So I'll give you both the one that doesn't use one and the one that I actually use with whole wheat. So 239 grams of flour, 60 grams of butter, 56 grams of eggs, which is one large whole in the US, 125 grams of milk, 3.5 grams of SAF red yeast, SAF red, except no substitutes, uh, five grams of salt, and 11 grams of white sugar.
Mix the flour and yeast in a bowl with a paddle, melt the butter, whisk together salt, sugar, milk, egg, butter, add to flour, beat till it comes away from the bowl and is cohesive, turn and mess with every 30 minutes for two hours, let it rise by half, refrigerate for a couple of hours, punch down, form it, wait 10 minutes, and then form it again and bake it at uh let it double up and bake at 375 with the wash and seeds of your choice. But uh the one that I actually use for my burger buns are 197 grams of uh whole wheat flour. So I use uh typically redeemer wheat put through a 60 mesh uh uh sieve, 51 butter, 56 eggs, which is again is one, 98 of milk, uh three of SAF red yeast, 4.25 of salt, and 9.35 of sugar, and six grams of vital wheat gluten. Uh and then uh, you know, that makes four buns. And then uh that's it.
That's how it works. Right? Is that good? That is that an answer. Try that.
See if you like it. If you don't, get back to me. But just think about it as the brioche continuum. One day you'll find it the brioche connection, the lovers, the dreamers, and me. Are you familiar?
Uh do you like the uh that the rainbow connection? Are you Muppets fans, by the way? Yeah. This episode is brought to you by Dashable, an app created to help you find deals, save money, and earn rewards at local businesses in New York City. Dashable will help you find the deals worth dashing for in a variety of categories, from food and drink to art, health, and pets.
Support local businesses and save money when you download Dashable today. That's D A S H I B L E. Sydney Solof wrote in via Instagram, greetings. Need help on our non alcoholic beverage or another non-alcohol non alcoholic beverage project that includes preparing different fruits, herbs, citrus, and sugar, wanting to understand which direction to go for best shelf life preservation, eight months or longer till opened, then kept refrigerated. We use common acid preservatives and understanding my pH balance, how much is needed to add into a mixture.
Okay, listen, all that stuff is like very well regulated. Um, and you know, it's best. Um I would rather not give you the advice for it, like uh, but those numbers for shelf stable, you're gonna want to pasteurize the stuff. And so then the question is is that for a particular pH, you're gonna need to get up to a certain uh temperature of pasteurizing and just make sure that your um, for instance, when you're using citrus, I recommend using citrus that uh has been cooked, like cordial style citrus, so that the temperature is not gonna be a problem. So you're gonna need to pasteurize it to kill yeast, otherwise you're gonna have to preserve the ever-loving crap out of it.
The other thing is if you have the money and you want to go fresh, then uh UV pasteurization is also uh interesting, and it has uh combinations of UV pasteurizing with lower temperature of flash pasteurization can get pretty good results that uh last uh a long time. Is that a decent answer, guys or not? Yes, yeah, okay. Chad wrote in, uh I'm currently listening to all of your old episodes. I'm on 110, so that's what out of eight million, though, right?
We've had eight million episodes? 400 and something, right now. Cheers. 430. And and listening to your newer ones each week as well.
I would actually like to ask about the pizza oven you simulated in your home oven. Uh, what are these heated pizza stones? Did you rig something up? Yes. Uh, could you share the info on how you set up your oven?
I've been working on pizza for years, but haven't able to get higher than 550 to 600 in my oven. I want to build a wood fired oven outside, but haven't ever followed through. Any pointers would be appreciated. Next time I'll ask about something interesting like Penko. I promise Chad Linden from Georgetown, Kentucky.
So uh, I mean, like, look, what I did was the pizza was good, but it was a complete nightmare. First of all, I ripped out the thermostat in my oven and just put a solenoid control valve into it with a PID and monitor it, and so the oven was able, the oven internal temperature was able to get up to ridiculous numbers, like completely unsafe numbers. Like you shouldn't do it and then um I bought refractory cement and I bought uh you can buy on McMaster car bendable uh like uh heating elements so they look just they look similar to the heating element you'd have in a deep fryer or in the top of your oven but you bend it yourself and I bent those and then cast them into uh refractory and then put them in you know put you know baking stones on top of that and then drilled holes again not a good idea in the side of my oven and put the the the the super high temperature things out of it and those had their own temperature control and their own uh thermocouples and then I also put uh a heater in the in the top so that you could independently control well semi-independently because the the the oven was gas fired from the bottom so a lot of heat came from the bottom but I could crank that sucker and I easily got over 900 degrees but uh I can't tell you what a problem that brought to my domestic living situation and not only that but uh I I I I failed to put into it a uh a nor like a normal person button so whenever you're effing with your oven just realize that you're doing something unsafe so I'm leave that there leave it where it is uh and I'm gonna I'm learning a lot more about oven modification now actually while I'm writing the book so I'll probably have a lot better ways to do things safely in let's say six months but um what you want to do is you want to make it so that anyone who comes into your house can use your oven? Because I can't, you will get so sick of people being like, I can't turn on your oven. Why can't your oven be normal?
What's wrong with your oven? You know what I mean? Like, uh, uh irritating. So what you want, like ideally, is a switch. And I actually uh in I I did modify my current oven.
I unmodified it because we had a problem. There was a gas gas leak in my building. Some idiot literally shoved uh a drill bit or something through our main gas line, and all of the gas in our building was shut down for months. But as a result of that, they came up and inspected actually all of our equipment. And so I had to kind of de-hot rod my oven.
But the way I did it with the oven that I hot rotted here was I had the regular thermostat and the regular everything, and then I just had a knob on it. You know how like people, when they have cars, they'll have a knob that like bypasses their muffler and their catalytic converter so they can pretend to be hot rotters on the road? Uh yeah. So I basically did that where it's like once I flip this knob, the oven was a normal person oven. And then when I did it the other way, it was in crazy mode.
Um so I would I would recommend doing something like that so that people can use your oven and also make sure that they're that the electronics that you use to control this, uh, your oven aren't anywhere near the heat source because there's nothing more irritating than in the middle of a bunch of pizza cooking, like right when the people come over and you're about to put the pizzas in, your uh PID controller goes over temp, over temp, over temp, and shuts down. Real embarrassing, makes it feel real stupid because the other person who came beforehand had just insulted you for having an oven that no one can use and now you can't use it either, and the house is filling with smoke. It's a lot of it's a lot of losing to deal with all at once. Um did you have to insulate like around that to keep things safe, or is the oven like that well? The floor got real hot.
I mean, like the oven's not gonna freaking, like, nothing's gonna happen to the oven. Think about it. Like they go on self-clean, they go high. The issue is. I meant the cabinetry around it, et cetera.
You can't have cabinetry around it. Uh okay. Right. Yeah. Yeah.
Um look, I'm not saying it was a good idea. Well, you know? Come on. Yes. You know?
Um, and you know, and event eventually, you know, uh uh, especially once you've already done it, right? And you've had it for years, then the next time you're like, is it is it worth it, or is it okay that I was able to do it? And then you say to yourself, it's okay that I was able to do it, and you're fine living without it. Yeah. Right.
Right? Right. Uh from Steinberg via Instagram. I've had it with shoe recipes. Uh, shoe with a like cabbage, like, you know, shoe pastry, not shoe like the shoe on your no one has recipes for the shoes on your feet.
I mean, someone does, but I don't. I'm exhausted from having to guess when the pinade is done on the stove, then having to guess again how much egg the dough will take. I want to eliminate this guesswork. Besides taking the weight of the ingredients before and after on the stovetop and the temperature of the pinnot at the moment of removing it from the stovetop. Is there anything else I can measure and try to lock down?
In any case, please keep up the excellent work. Uh so listen, I used to make this stuff rather regular regularly, but that was like 10 years ago. I haven't made it in a long time. I mean, uh, so I I mean, other than I would start, if you want to do it yourself, just as you say, I would lock down the weights before and after. It's helpful for me when I do um recipe testing because I have a scale that'll do 30 kilograms by the tenth gram.
So I weigh things in the pots, even in big roasting pans, and it's it's not a problem. But uh John, do you have any recommendations for this? You're uh you're an old school francophile. Yeah, not really. I've only used to make it once, and that was at the very first restaurant I started working at back in 2008.
So yeah. Don't listen, anyone out there who has a in the chat or whatever, who's hearing this, write us in some suggestions and we'll send it to we'll send it to Steinberg uh to you know help them out, right? Uh Ben McCasey wrote in via Twitter. Um I don't know if my previous question was rejected, or if you just can't stop talking about silent film stars long enough to answer the questions. Ouch.
Ooh, sorry. But uh could you provide a primer on how to use MSG? Is it one-to-one to salt? No. Uh how much to start with uh stir-fry, roast, stew, uh chili.
And you know what? I didn't forgot to look it up. There are standard things, but it does not require very much MSG, and it's definitely not one-to-one. Uh I don't definitely don't use it one-to-one with salt. John, maybe you can uh Google around um and see kind of what standard uh max is.
But the thing about uh MSG is that um you you get MSG'd up real quick, and so it's it's a problem when you're cooking. The my my my issue, and again, I don't use MSG, I don't have an MSG, I don't have a bowl of MSG sitting next to my stove the way I have uh salt, right? I I probably should because I have nothing against MSG as anyone who listens to me knows. Um, but I tend to use other, you know, MSG laden things rather than the straight stuff. But I will say that if you add some MSG, right, and then you add a little more, it's very easy to add too much and then not notice you've added too much until you haven't had MSG for a couple of minutes and then go back and taste it again.
And I would say it's easier to do that with MSG than it is with uh salt. The same thing can happen with salt. You can you can oversalt something by tasting salting, tasting, salting, tasting, salting because your palate gets a little bit blunted to the salt as you're doing that, and then you oversalt, right? But that definitely happens with MSG. And so I would add a little bit and wait uh and then uh add a add a little bit more.
Um is that a decent answer or no? Yeah, and I'll just chime in with I know Andrew Zimmern posted about this a couple months ago, and I think he this isn't necessarily like answering your question, but he keeps like a salt well around with uh three to one salt to MSG like mix, and he sometimes uses that in his cooking. So that makes a lot more sense because you're uh again, you're not likely to because uh by the time you're probably wicked over MSGing it, you're also wicked over salting it. So if there's already some salt in it and then you're finishing out with that, that's that sounds like a smart idea. I like that idea.
That is a I don't know that whether that's the ratio I choose, but that sounds like a good idea. And since uh, you know, whatever, so it's probably a good starting point. Uh Fru Schmidt wrote in via email. Hello, uh Dave Hammer, John, Matt, the boondoggler, the punching bag. We haven't had the punching bag on in a while.
Uh and whoever else happens to be. What? Yeah, we should have him on. Yeah. Uh and whoever else happens to be around, been listening for something like six to seven years.
Jeez, Luis. Uh love the show. Hope you keep it going until you're fabulously rich. Yeah, good luck, right, Sus? Yeah.
Yeah. Mardi Gras coming up on February 16th. And while it'll be sad and lonely this year, I can still make uh and deliver uh gumbo and king cake. I like king cake and want to make my own with cream cheese and raspberry filling. I made it from a dry mix last year.
I think I could pretty easily go from scratch this year. Any tips? Any ideas on books or websites? I should check for recipes, huh? Well, your worst case if you pick the highest rated recipes on all recipes, read the comments, make it, take notes and tweak from there.
I'll do you one better. This question probably came in before I went through this. I think it was last week or the week before. But what I would do is I would look at the at the things like all recipes, look at a couple of sites, right? Choose the ones that are relatively highly rated, and then compare the recipes before you even make one.
I can't tell you guys when you compare a whole bunch of recipes and look at how they differ, right? If you have any baking experience at all or any cooking experience at all, a simple side-by-side comparison in conjunction with reading the comments about what people said about them, right, can help you get much closer to a final result in one or two iterations than almost anything, uh anything else. But I don't have a specific uh king cake uh um I made it once a couple of years ago, but I didn't write down the recipe because I wasn't doing recipe development at the time. I should have written down it was quite good, I have to say, it was delicious. Uh but I remember don't bake the baby into the king cake because, well, at least the babies I bought were plastic, right?
Uh you know, so like we you know, I I did the thing where I baked it, turned it upside down, and shoved the baby in. Now, if you could get a glass baby, that would be amazing. Uh, but I I couldn't. Some people don't use babies though, they use other stuff, right? Like little what else do people use?
I don't know. I'm only familiar with the baby. Oh, bean, I've heard bean. Yeah. What'd you say, John?
I'm only familiar with the baby. Yeah. You know what? Also, like everyone wants to have one. No one actually follows any of the rules.
So, like, if I I I made one one year I made like two or three, and I think I did one where I stuck a bunch of babies in it so that all the babies eating it could have a bunch of babies in every one. You know what I mean? That's a good one. Because everyone's more than one cake. Well, that's cheating.
Of course it's cheating. Yeah. Uh Mcrit wrote in via Instagram, Dave and Co. Two things. One, newer can openers that cut the lid from the side to leave no sharp uh edges, cannot be used to squeeze tuna.
I don't I do not have such a can opener. Do you do any of you guys have one of those can openers that like that like top hats the can? No. No, but I've seen it. Yeah, I definitely lived in a house where they had that, and it was it was fine, but I might not have been eating tuna at the time, so I didn't run up against this particular problem.
Well, it's an interesting use of phrase. You lived in a house that had one. What were you? Kato Kalen? You didn't have control over the can opener?
Where were you living that you had no control over the can? Uh it was only when I moved very recently. When I moved the last time in Brooklyn, I owned so little kitchen stuff because I've always lived with roommates. It was depressing to realize how much stuff we had to buy. So the reason M.
Chris bringing this up is that all three of all four of us, I guess, agreed that the tunican squisher was not something that needed to exist. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, all right.
So that's one. And uh two, what was the frying oil additive you mentioned? Uh I heard mere oil as in it's merely oil or mere oil, like mirror cat oil, but I can't find anything under those names. Much thanks. It's Mir Oil M-I-R-O-I-L.
Now, that company that makes that, they make two different products. They make a liquid that you add during frying, and the liquid is like rosemary extract, and I think one other extract that has antioxidants in it, along with citric acid and ascorbic acid. So uh what that's meant to do is stop the oxidation on a couple of fronts, and then at the end, the powder that you add is uh a powder that contains perlite and uh also some acids, so it basically adsorbs a lot of the bull crap, and then and then when you filter it, like the nasties stick to it. So that's how that's how it works. But the problem with it is is that you need to each packet ca uh is for like you know 50 gallons uh 50 pounds of oil, and then you know, you have to buy a bunch of packets.
So I'm trying to find some solution that is more home friendly, maybe a DIY hack because they don't sell, you know, I have three or four liters of oil that I want to use and and fix, you know, and I don't think anyone wants to spend, you know, $75 buying a powder to save $20 worth of oil, right? So I uh I'm uh I'm I'm working on it. Uh from Strange Birdie via Instagram. Uh I found myself impatiently waiting on bananas to ripen to blend into rum to clarify. Well, welcome to the club.
I wonder if more sugar actually develops uh slash starch converts with this trick. I'm gonna try it, but figured out if I figured I'd see if you've done it before. Uh ways to uh quickly ripen bananas. Now, John, do you did you read which which they were? I didn't get a chance to click the link and follow.
What were their ways? I've tried many ways to quickly uh ripen bananas, but I've never had any that actually uh work. Did you did you see what it was? What the what the I did not, but I you want to quickly go to Eric Strode's question and I'll read this over and then circle back to it. To read uh Eric Strode, sure, I'll do that.
Yeah. Uh hey David Nastasi from Eric Strode. Hey David Nastasi, I found an interesting Instagram post this weekend from a prominent San Francisco food journalist. Uh it's funny. Who is it?
If you said prominent San Francisco food journalists, just name them, right? I mean, like, why so secret? Uh he had a batch of oysters that had crabs inside of them. Instead of tossing them, as most of his followers encouraged them, he cooked them up and then did some research and found an old old New York Times article from 1907 on oyster crabs as a rare delicacy. I thought this would be a fun topic to bring up on the podcast.
I was curious if you've ever heard of these crabs. And then there's an Instagram post to it. Big fan of the show, burned through the backlog a couple years ago and look forward to each new episode. Best Eric. I have not heard of oyster crabs, but uh, I mean, it sounds like a horrible venereal disease.
Am I right, Sus? Wait, why me? Because I'm not saying that you have it. I'm saying that I'm saying that you're the person who like associates words with diseases. I'm not implying that Nastasia is a an experienced haver of venereal diseases, just that she doesn't like words that remind her of them.
That's all. Is that not fair? Yeah. Huh. Alright.
I mean, anyway, I I don't know about that, Eric, but I'm gonna I'm gonna look into it. I like any sort of rare uh I like any sort of rare crustacean. Like like I I've heard they're endangered now, so I'll probably never eat one, but the coconut crab, which is the world's largest land crab, looks like a giant, incredibly scary hermit crab. If you if you've never seen a coconut crab, Google Coconut Crab, but don't go to any idiot website where they don't provide scale. People, when you're taking pictures of a giant crab, make sure to include something for scale, right?
I mean, doesn't that stand a reason? Yeah, those things are huge. They're huge and scary. You never eaten one, right, John? No, I would love to, though.
I would yeah if they're not endangered, I would love to eat one of those things. Love it. Yeah. Um, so anyway, I'll I'll I'll uh I'll check it out. I'll check it out there, Eric, and we'll we'll uh we'll talk about it.
Actually, don't we have an oyster expert, uh, John at the museum? Weren't we dealing with someone uh for oysters when we were doing the uh oyster shucking stuff for the African slash American exhibit? Yeah, we're working with Ben Harney a lot of uh real mother suckers. And he's a legitimate New York, and he's bringing he's bringing the old New York uh oyster shucker experience back, right? Yes, with the oyster cart and everything.
You want to reach out to him and see if he knows any knows anything of the oyster crab? Yes, I can do that. Alright, alright. So uh stay stay tuned. Uh all right, Lukash wrote in.
I haven't heard from Lucas. Well, wait, no, no, no, hold up. Strange birdie. Okay. Yeah, yeah.
The banana's ripening. So what's the banana technique? Um basically it's baking them at 300 degrees uh for 30 to 40 minutes, and they get black and apparently look ripe. But it just seems I don't know. Like uh it doesn't seem like a lot of things.
You have access to a thing you can test this for me and see whether they actually get sweet, John? Uh I can try and go get some bananas later. I have to go to UPS. So yeah, yeah, I can yeah, can do. All right, we'll give it a shot.
I mean, the the issue is they can't just get soft and look black. You have to get rid of the starch or they won't clarify properly. For instance, some bananas, even when they are ripe, not Cavendish, but some banana varieties, even though they are in fact sweet and soft, still have enough starch to mess up with a clarification. So this is the one Nastasi wanted to make sure that we got to. This is uh from Lukash.
Haven't heard from Lukash in a while. Hope everything's all right. Hey Nastasia, I'm sorry to write you on this address. I'm not sure you're using it for work purposes. I listened to you and Dave's show on delay, and you are my main connection to NYC because he had to go back to uh Poland.
Recently I listened to the episodes about sunsets and length of day, and I think you are right. Now, by the way, Lukash is a uh he does finance stuff now, but he's a physicist. He did like low temperature physics uh for a while. So when the I Einstein boson condensate, whatever the hell it was, whenever that happened, he was like huge on that. Uh like he was like telling me about it, and I understood, you know, maybe the quarter, what he's saying.
Anyway, so he's he's not a scientifically challenged person. He's a scientist, right, Stas, that's what you wanted me to get across. Um no, I just wanted you to read the question. All right. Uh the sun r in New York City rises uh between uh 5 uh 24 on June in the morning on June 21st to 623 on September 1st.
Most people experience many more sunsets than sunrises. Therefore, if you're in part of time where you can experience sunset but sleep through sunrise, you will get more sun when you are awake. Dave is right in a purely astronomical sense, but it does not matter when you select a place to live. I'm not a scientist anymore. So yeah, but what my point was is that Nastasia believes there's an appreciable daylight difference between 10th Avenue and First Avenue.
Right. Right. There's just not. I mean, Lukas, I love that you're sticking up for uh uh uh Nastasia on this, but I mean, like, I don't know what kind of bet I could make. I don't I don't know.
And like I I'll do the math at some point on like literally how many minutes, how many seconds it takes for the Earth to spin the width of Manhattan. He's not arguing with your logic though. He's saying from a purely astronomical sense, you're right. No, but I'm saying from an experiential point, I'm also right, because Nastasia is only a she's talking about a 15-minute walk, right? So I would agree if if you were talking about like I'm on one side of the time zone versus on the other side of the uh of the time zone, or like blah, blah, blah, whatever.
What I'm saying is is that from the point of actually being able to tell, what is it gonna be? One second difference, like one second, less? You know what I mean? Like, we're talking about three miles. I don't know what the I don't know what the uh diameter of the earth is as a section through the axis of rotation at our latitude, right?
But like you take that and then you you you multiply by uh pi. That's the number of miles that circle is around, right? That's 24 hours. Do the division, it can't be more than a second or two. Yeah, right.
I mean, you're probably right. Yeah. Um. Oh, and get this, people. This is the last question.
If I get through this question in the next three minutes, we're caught up. Well, is that a public question, though? That was more just to include for your own edification. Oh, you never thought I'd get to it? I yeah, not really.
Let's not say what do you think? It's the it's the Alex Pressa email. I won't read it. I won't read it. We actually made it early.
We're good. Oh that's fine. Oh, yeah. So what do we want to also chat chat chimes in the pecans? People pecans and kincakes, and someone else recommends them very highly.
Instead of babies? Or on top? I like them on top. No, instead. Why?
So people don't crack their teeth on the baby? I can only assume so. It does seem like a prudent thing to do. Let me just say that, and we can have this discussion. I know Nastasia doesn't care much.
I think pecans, and I'm from the north, so I'm gonna say pecans. I think pecans are freaking delicious. I think they are such a good nut. I I don't like I think if you don't like, I think it might be, I mean, hickory nuts are like, I think God's nut, but you can't buy them, right? But like pecans, which are closely related to hickories, I can't think of a nut that I like the taste of better than a pecan.
I mean, pistachios are delicious. I know Nastasi likes pistachio. Pistachios are delicious, but I don't count them because they're such a pain. I never cook with them, you know? But uh what do you what do you guys think about the pecan?
I only eat pistachios. Only? That's the only nut you like? Yeah, I eat them every day here. Really?
Are they from California or are they imported? No, they're from California. Do you it are are the one is that wonderful brand from California? I don't know. I don't know.
But that's not the brand you eat, you just buy them from a farmer's market or whatnot? Yeah. When did when are they when it when is the season? Are they still fresh? Are they good?
I mean I'm sure they're good. Otherwise you wouldn't need them. Yeah. You like them salted though, right? Um, yeah.
Yeah. Yeah, of course. I don't understand why people eat unsalted nuts. Uh okay. I will say this on the way out then since I have a 30 seconds.
I made Scrapple last night. And the Scrapple, I put it on the uh on the Instagram. Scrapple, I had a bunch of people talk to me about Goeta. Uh maybe I'll make goeta again, but Scrapple, gotta bring Scrapple back. Scrapple is is it's super delicious.
I made it in the Pullman pan that I stole from the French Culinary Institute as they were closing it. It's steal it, they let me have it. And Nastasi would like you all to know that we are doing an unhappy hour when? Friday uh 7 p.m. Eastern time.
And and 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. Oh, I thought it was 7 p.m.
Eastern time. That's what it ends up. 7 p.m. Eastern time to 8 p.m. Eastern time.
Wait, what is it, John? We have 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. But we can we can change it for the same thing. But then it's gonna be too early in in uh in California, right?
Well, I'm it's not like I can drink at 4 p.m. So I'll be watching you drink, Dave. What? Why can't you drink at 4 p.m. if it's for work?
Didn't stop you when we were slamming slamming back uh Scotch at 6 a.m. when we had the radio show. That was real. That was we were getting paid for that, if you remember. Yeah, but all I was saying is is it like what's the difference between the city?
Because this is a driving, this is a driving city, and I'm not gonna drink at four. You're gonna drive that day? You drive. But you weren't gonna drive if the it it it it if the thing was at 5 p.m., you weren't gonna drive. But because it's at four, you are gonna drive.
It's date. Okay, I'm definitely not drinking at four, but I will pretend to. I don't know crap on it. I don't even want to do it anymore. What's the point of this?
I like seriously. Like, why can't you do it at eight? I get the whole thing. Can you do it at eight? Can you do it at eight?
That would be perfect. Eight to nine? I mean, like, you know, my kids need to get to bed at a certain point. They eat, like, they eat at a certain time. Like, it's like Well, I just want to make one point that we like a lot of the people that the majority of people that read our newsletter are from California.
So it would be nice. Yeah, my my point is is that like I have people like I need to. I know, but you know, one day out of one day out of the whole pandemic, you can't I need to get food. It's not one day. Every time you ever have something for me to do, it's one day of the pandemic.
I have to get food into my family's face. Okay, the place clean, and like everything so that people can go to bed at the right time, right? And so then, and what you're saying though is that because where it's at four instead of five, you can't have a glass of wine. I that doesn't seem to me to be, they're not like parallel statements. I mean, whatever, do what you want.
But like I was gonna have to do that. I have to have a walk with my family before dinner, so I don't want to be like completely shit-faced. Uh a glass of wine's gonna make you completely off your nut? That's fine, I'll drink. I will drink.
No, no, I'm not gonna force you to do it. I just saying maybe we should just not do it. If we can't, if we can't do a time when we can all get away. I I didn't think that a 5 p.m. 8 p.m.
was so bad, but now I realize that it is. Five to eight. I mean, five p.m. my time, eight p.m. your time.
I didn't know that it was a strict like eight p.m. dinner for you. That's all. Well, it's not it's not it's not just that. It's that remember, I make the dinner.
So, like, hey, guess what? Boondogger calling me actually in the middle of the show. Uh, like, I I actually make the dinner, so it's not like I can hang up the phone and then all of a sudden dinner's on the table. You know what I mean? Nastasia, could you drink maybe some proteo or drink or make a drink out of drink what you want, the subjective guide to making objectively delicious cocktails by John LeBerry.
Absolutely. That's a great idea. All right. Whatever. Now you see how the sausage is made.
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