Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live from Rockefeller Center on Newsstand Studios. How are you doing? Joined as usual with Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. How you doing, Stas?
Good. Yeah, we got uh John hanging out in Lyme, Connecticut on a separate uh feed. How you doing, John? I'm doing great, thanks. Sad not that you have past two weeks, you've been recording with us here in the in the studio.
Yeah, miss having you over here. I know. I'm hoping to be back next week. We'll see. Yeah, yeah.
And joined uh also as usual now for the past three times. Joe Hazen, how you doing? Hey, I'm doing great. How are you? Doing great.
Now, so listen, this is the first time that we're putting this uh up on Patreon for our Patreon subscribers first. Follow us on Patreon. How do they get to us, Nastasia? Patreon.com slash cooking issues. All right.
And then uh if you do that, you'll get access to the live feed. Next week, we're gonna actually go live. Uh plus you'll get it the same day instead of waiting until Friday. And we are for the very first time recording uh video footage. So you can we're gonna put that up as well, and you can.
I don't know why you want this, but you can see us here. You can look at Nastas, maybe you get an actual look at Nastasia's vegan face. They want you, Dave. Uh uh, listen. And John's really hardcore gulps.
Wow. This is like a barrel full of just like jerkiness this morning, Nastasia. Seriously. I don't know where you, you know. Oh, you're gonna like this.
So before and also maybe starting next week. Starting next week, Joe, we're gonna be able to do live uh calls. Yes. All right, so next week the live calls. Next week, the video.
Actually, this week we're recording video. Next week, live show. We're doing video every week. Yeah, that's part of the thing that they get. If they sign up for the certain level of Patreon, they get the video feed.
No. Not special. Not so special. We can also do videos that are special with cursing and whatnot, because everyone who signed up wants to know when we're gonna have the non-family when they get the full. No one wants the full, right?
I mean, no one wants the full. I mean, no one wants our actual full normal life. What do you think, John? Uh yeah, I can get pretty intense at times. Yeah.
Uh okay, so you're gonna enjoy this. So, for for whatever reason, I have no idea why. Like, construction is booming here in in New York. There's like a load of construction. I don't know.
Everyone's banking that New York's gonna come back and we need to build a bunch of stuff, so there's construction everywhere. Add to that, of course, like all the sidewalk cafes, which are gonna be a hundred percent good. Like, as the city comes back, like that extra outdoor scene is gonna we're gonna be like the Paris of New York, anyway. Um, but I saw what I was hoping was gonna be how I I thought I saw how I was gonna die, and it was gonna be amazing. Stas, get this.
I'm biking down like uh 48th Street, right? And there is a a bunch of construction. Oh, I know. I know, I know. Yeah, yeah, there's a whole bunch of construction.
I mean there's there's a giant plywood like what they do here in the city when they don't feel like anything is they put giant walls of green plywood in the street and then divert two normally crappy lanes of traffic into two like unsafe lanes of traffic. Anyway, so they did that, but then a fuel truck pulls up and parks in the thing, right? Now, another little piece of information that you guys don't know is that the sidewalks of New York, by and large, are hollow because people put basements underneath them. The sidewalks aren't solid. You're not supposed to.
So then a giant truck, huge, is like, I'm not waiting for this fuel truck and pulls off onto the side uh the hollow sidewalk, and I was like, please, please, please let this truck fall through the hollow sidewalk and then ignite the fuel truck. It would have been like that. If you gotta go, that's the way to do it. Right? No?
No. No? No, I guess not. I mean, it sounds like you're taking a lot of other people with you. Yeah, that's it.
It's not me. I'm not doing anything. I'm an I'm a bystander in this scenario. I'm just biking by. But I have to say, I paused a little bit.
I paused a little bit in case I waited for the guy to go around to see whether he would in fact collapse. But I have seen uh big trucks collapse the sidewalk. I haven't ever seen them go through the sidewalk, but I've seen them punch holes in the sidewalk. You ever seen that, Styles? No.
Yeah, yeah. It's sweet. Uh that's why you're not supposed to drive big heavy trucks onto the sidewalk. Uh also, this is an actual food note. I had last night like world-ending pork.
Joe, you like pork? Love pork. Yeah, yeah. Uh I know John likes pork. So I go to DiPalo's, which is my favorite cheese shop.
They've been in in Lower East, Lower Little Italy for like, you know, I think it's a hundred years or something silly now. I've been shopping there since the 90s, since when they were across the street when they moved. Anyway, recently they they reopened, and little known fact, DiPalos, for whatever reason, gets fresh meat. They get some fresh meat. So I go in there yesterday to get stuff or two days ago, and uh, and I'm like, uh Louie Louie, who's Louis DePolo, the guy who's, you know, one, you know, one of the owners, he's like, uh, I'm about to leave.
He's like, uh, Dave, you want any meat? I'm like, I don't really need any meat. What didn't he's like, I got uh pork. I was like, okay. He's like, Dave, this is the best pork.
I couldn't believe how good this pork was, this pork shop. I was like, how good could why are you wearing sunglasses? I decided I want to be like Howard Stern. You you want to be like Howard Stern? What does that even mean?
Well, hey Joe, why do people wear sunglasses when they record things? I don't know. Uh they're high? Like Phil Specter, or kind of like you know, like he's a murderer? Yeah.
I guess that's a cool vibe. No. I thought it was because of the light. Could be the light. What are you talking about?
Anyway, this is it. So go on. That's a good question, though. You're a big weirdo. Go on.
All right. So, anyways, so he pulls out this pork chop. And I and I have not, I'm gonna put it, I I didn't put it on the Instagram when I cooked it yesterday because you know, we had other things to worry about, the Patreon and whatnot. But uh, this is the best looking pork chop I think I've ever seen in my life. It was an insane pork chop.
I sent a picture to John. And uh, so then I did uh I did a low and slow on it. I did 60, I did I salt, tiny bit of sugar, tiny bit, a little bit, tiny bit, uh, and pepper in a bag. I did 60 degrees Celsius, which is 140 for all you Fahrenheit knuckleheads out there, uh, for about an hour, dropped it to 55 Celsius for another two hour hour, hour and a half, then dropped it to 52, seared the hell off of it. Stas got some beautiful slow-mo footage of searing it with the Sears all, like little blebs of of like fat and exploding fire, like all slow-mo, like real, like real like sizzlers, apple bees kind of footage.
You know what I mean? For us, because we're gonna start uh pushing that stuff out. Remember, you can buy Sears all's on the Booker Dacks website now. And nowhere else, because uh no one else will have us, pretty much, right? I mean, no one else will have it.
That's that's what it is. Anywho, uh, so I I make this pork chop. I made a mushroom gravy. You like mushroom gravy, John? Yeah.
Stasia, are you a mushroom gravy fan? Yeah, yeah. Like German style, like Jaeger Schnitzel style gravy. Uh Spetzel. I like Spenzel.
You guys are you guys down with the Spenzel? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yep, Spenzel. Made some Spenzel.
And Dax was like, this is the best pork I've ever had. He's like, you can only you have to buy this all the time now. So you can get it only at DiPalo's, I think, from Sam uh Weichsel uh Meats. Uh they do it, and get this. They secretly inject these pork chocks.
You ready for this show? With duck fat. Sounds rich. It was stupid. It was so it was nuts.
It was nuts. And I cooked it to like regular, like, you know, American style. So, like, not too pink. I cooked it to just so 60 for there to just get it to where like, you know, normal Mo people would drink it, uh, eat it. Like, not like you don't need to be like a low temperature maven to eat it this way.
You know what I mean? Just on that line. You go anything below that, and some people are like, I don't think it's cooked. You know what I mean? You hate that, right, John.
People when people say that. Yeah, it was super annoying. Yeah, but you can't help it. That's what people do. No, yeah, exactly.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't think it's cooked. You know what I mean? Anyway, so uh that pork was uh that was some world-ending pork. All right.
You guys have any uh other good uh any good food stories before we get to some questions? Anything? I had a good Connecticut style lobster roll from uh the lobster Landing the other day. Oh, how was it? It was really good as far as Connecticut style lobster rolls gone.
That place is really good. It's in Clinton's. Clinton, huh? You know who you know what's really good in Clinton? Their goodwill.
Oh really? A lot of people move over there or whatever. Or when they when they unload all of their stuff, uh, they they send it to the uh Clinton Goodwill. And I uh I like any like let's say you have, let's say you just are in the area and you're gonna have like 30 people over for Thanksgiving. This happened to me.
And uh I was like, I don't have that many dishes. You go to the Clinton Goodwill, you can get I mean they don't match, but you can get some nice stuff. I bought a piano there. Ready for this? I bought a piano, 25 bucks.
And then Nastasi and I had to spend five hours trying to get rid of it when I moved out of that house. It was a freaking nightmare. Uh but yeah, it's a good, it's a good uh it's a good goodwill. Yeah. Uh check it out.
Uh so what it makes a a lobster roll Connecticut style in your in your mind. First of all, why don't you give us, John, the different styles of lobster roll and uh how you see them? I mean, I really just see them as two styles of lobster roll. You've got well, three, I guess. I don't know, you got the main, which is dressed in mayo, and sort of colds.
Yeah, that's kind of weak, right? It's weak. Yeah, it's weak. Stas weak. Yeah.
I mean, I'll still eat it. Um stash, you put those glasses. Um the uh then you got the Connecticut style lobster roll, which is warm uh with just drawn butter on a roll. That's strong. That's the way to do it.
Yes, exactly. Yeah, it's the way to do it. And then the third way, I guess, is like some weird uh hybridization, bastardization of the two. How would you what? I've seen that.
Actually, I even went to a place in Maine in Kenebunkport that did a mayo and drawn butter lobster roll. Seems a little over the top to me. Yeah, I don't understand that. And uh did in Maine, do they put any sort of like like uh do they seafood salad it? Do they put like uh celery and garbage into it?
At a couple of the places I went to they did, but most of them it was pretty just straightforward, like either dressed simply in mayo on a roll or on uh on a hot dog button. Onions, no onions, no onions. So in a seafood salad, you like seafood salad, guys? Mm-hmm. Love seafood salad.
Yeah, I do too. I I'll make it like real, like with real stuff, or I'll just hack up sure me because I think that stuff tastes good. I like sere me. I think it's a I like a sure me. Yeah.
But for that, I always put a little bit of the celery in. You guys celery on that? Yeah. Love celery. I can't, I can't put raw onions in because Jen, my wife Jen doesn't like raw onions, so I usually make myself a little raw onion.
She can tolerate scallions, but not like raw onion onion. And I know Nastasia doesn't like raw onion because they give you nightmares. Yeah. We don't know why, but whatever. That's just true.
Here's the thing. Here's the thing about a nightmare. If you think you're gonna get a nightmare, guess what? You are. You know?
You are. I mean, there's no way around. I mean, like, it's in your head anyway, so if you think you're gonna get a nightmare, you most certainly are, probably. What kind of night do you don't want to talk about your nightmares? Yeah.
I had a we I had some weird nightmares. I can't, like, thankfully, I forget them pretty quickly. But when I wake up and I tell my n nightmares to people, like to Jen or to the kids, they're like, that's weird. You know what I mean? Do you feel like your nightmares are weird or scary?
Scary. Scary? How about you, John? Weird or scary nightmares. I don't really dream that I mean, I'm sure I do, but I don't really remember them if I am dreaming.
So yeah, I don't know. I can't remember any dream I've had in the last like five years. Wow. Yeah. Yeah.
Wow. Nastasi and I whenever whenever we figure in each other's dreams, they're nightmares, and we hold them against each other, which I think is good. Which is good. What about you, Joe? You more of a scary nightmare or more of a weird nightmare?
Weird. Yeah. Yeah. A lot more weird nightmares. Yeah, yeah, weird.
And so if they're weird, right, what makes them a nightmare? Because they're creepy. They're like a David Lynch film or something like this, and like it's bad, it's bad, but it's not like like asphyxiation terror. Like, that's like the the that that's the terrorist. But like I've never so like you you know when I how I think of we when I'm dreaming, right?
F first of all, like I have terrible circulation. Do you guys know this? So I have terrible circulation. So when I get up, when I get up quickly, like when I'm working on something on the ground, which happens a hundred percent of the time, and I get up, I basically I fall over. I like I timber because like I black out because like the blood doesn't get to my head fast enough and all this, and I'm always having to lean down to get the blood back to my head, right?
So also my my legs and my arms and stuff fall asleep really easily. So like by the time I get up from the stool at the end of this thing, my leg will be asleep, right? My whole life I've been like this. So what happens when I'm asleep, my limbs are always like under my body and they're asleep, so that they're like, you know, pins and needlies. And so in every dream, I think my body recognizes this, and so like it's always like I need to walk or run, but I'm really slow and my legs are like rubber.
Does that happen to you all the time? No. That's a hundred percent of the time in every dream I have, whether it's good or bad, I just assume I'm never gonna get anywhere fast because all of my limbs are gonna be rubberized. Anyway, that's too much information. That's too much information.
How about some food questions? How do we get on? Oh, the but we were on the lobster, we're on the lobster roll. By the way, we talked about the uh super old clams last time, right? I don't know.
We've never talked about old clams on this radio. I don't think so. Later, not this time. I'll save it. Uh I'll save it.
But again, of the three styles of clam chowder, there is only one you will eat, correct? New England. New England. Right. New England is the one that all you normal people think of as clam chowder.
Manhattan, it's the only thing that we have here that is bad compared to other people's version of it. Right? Yeah. Joe, you're not a Manhattan clam chowder person, are you? No, New England.
New England, right? Or Rhode Island, that weird Rhode Island thing. No one even eats that. Even in Royal Island, they don't have to. I was in Rhode Island.
They didn't even serve Rhode Island version of clam chowder. What do they call it? Rhode Island clam cheddar? I mean, maybe they just call it clam chowder, but I think most of those people eat clam chowder because they're not part of New England? They are.
That's the thing. But they have their own theoretical clam chowder, but I think it was made up by a marketing person. And it's like Brexit forder. I don't know. I don't know what it is.
Nobody eats it. You know what I mean? If you want tomato with your clam, why don't you just lions go to the West Coast and go all in and get like a Chapino or a bully base? And by the way, while we're talking about it, John, I'm gonna put you on the spot here. You could eat a bouilla base.
You don't get to be in Marseille, but you're eating a bouillo base, or you're having like a Chapino, which one do you take? Probably a Chopino. Yeah. Hell yeah. Hells yeah.
Stas, do you have a feeling on this? Yeah. Which one? Chapino. Yeah.
Joe. I don't know. They're both tomato-y fish stews, but one, you serve it with like the garlic bread and this and the half of a grilled sausage and it's spicy. The other one, you have to be eight million years old and be drinking little things of pastise while you're eating it. And if it doesn't have uh uh guna, is that my am I pronouncing that right, uh John?
That fish, yeah. If you don't, if you don't have this like weasley, by the way, not good tasting little fish, not bad tasting, but not great tasting little fish, then it's not a true bouillon base. So, A, you have to put up with some southern French person telling you that what you're eating isn't right. One, no one likes that. And then two, you have to uh not have it be spicy, not get the garlic bread and not have the sausage.
Chapinos a clear win, unless you don't eat meat. Unless you don't eat meat. Uh all right, here we go. Martin Lindstrom wrote in on the Twitter, uh, hey, thanks for the podcast. Many recipes containing citrus peel, i.e., candied citrus peel, lemon confie, et cetera, call for blanching it three times, changing bet uh the water between each time.
Why? Why uh would you not just boil it one time but longer? It would seem to break it down better. This is a good question, and one that I actually have the answer to. Uh, do you like uh candied citrus peel?
Yeah. Yeah. Love it. I love it too. And I like fruit cake.
So uh Miley Carpenter, my sister-in-law, who runs the food network magazine, started and everything. She wants uh the the fruitcake company in the United States is called Claxton. I don't know if you're familiar with the Clax Claxton, I believe. Claxton fruit cake. It's the fruitcake everyone buys and it's brick-shaped.
And this is like maybe 20 years ago. She called in back when you could do that, back when you could like, as a reporter, call in, be like, we need one of your fruitcakes. We're shooting it for a piece. And they sent her the fruitcake, and they're like, oh, someone's doing a fruitcake article, nice. And she was like, this is a gag gift that nobody actually eats, that everyone buys and gives it to people, and nobody likes it.
And the Claxton people were like, whoa, whoa, whoa, Miley Carpenter, people like the fruit cake. And she's like, no, they don't. And I was like, well, Miley, I mean, uh, I like fruitcake. I like fruitcake. Thin slice.
I think the problem is that if you eat it like it's cake, it's not cool. If you're having a thin slice of it, then it's good. You know what I mean? You don't eat it like you would eat like a birthday cake. Anyways, I digress.
So, like, uh, but it's useful for things like that or for Italian baked goods. I actually enjoy uh chocolate dipped candied peels and love chocolate dipped candied peels. And uh, there are some peels, if they're done really nicely, that I like thinly sliced next to a cheese plate sometimes, as long as you have some really salty cheeses. If the cheeses aren't salty, they're a little sweet. Anyway, back to your question.
It's bitterness. So what you're doing with the multiple blanching is that a lot of the bitter compounds that are in the white that are gonna stay in the candied peel. The w that the actual flesh is gonna stay in the candied peel. Uh, a lot of that white, you're trying to boil the bitter components out of it and you throw away the water so that when you add fresh water, you can reboil the bitter components back out. But the oils, which aren't as soluble in water and have a lot of the flavor, are gonna stay in the peel more.
So you're what you're trying to do is remove the water-soluble bitter stuff and leave the not water-soluble oil-based stuff in your peel. Then you do your syrup down, and then you you have your is that a good answer? Was that is that off the list there, John? Did I answer that adequately? That works, yep.
All right. Um, but it is a pain in the butt. You know what's even more of a pain in the butt? The traditional way of making uh like candied and glaciered fruits, because if you put a fresh fruit into a uh very sugary uh solution, the water will just boom go out of the fruit and it'll shrivel down because of osmotic pressure, right? So the old way of doing it is to slowly increase the amount of sugar over the course of like days sometimes to get the sugar level up to where you uh need it.
So you'll strain your fruit, add more sugar to the syrup, put it back in, you know, let it equilibrate. There's gotta be. Has anyone have you ever heard of uh someone figuring out a foolproof fast way of doing that, John? No. Yeah.
We'll be good though. Do you you ever you ever make the candy fruits? I don't, because it's a pain in the butt. Yeah, exactly. I made it once and that was sufficient.
Do you know what my kids don't like that's its own candied fruit? Kumquats. Can you believe that? I mean, just am I just that bad of a parent, Snaz? Yeah.
You know this. But like, why what's not to like about a kumquat? Like, why is it I mean, I know it's a terrible name, but like, how do you if how do you, if you like things that are tart, they're not that bitter, right? The skin is not that bitter on a kumquat. How do you not like them?
I think they can get pretty bitter, at least the ones I've had. I'm also willing to say that I feel like I'm pretty sensitive to bitterness, but are you a uh do you have you tried the prop strip? Are you a super taster? I have not, no. I'm not.
I'm not. I'm thankful, I'm thankful for it because uh I I like things that are uh bitter. Otherwise, how would I work with Nastasia for all these years? All right. Uh so we have a question in from uh Alexander uh Tailguard.
And uh we didn't answer this one. I thought, or did we answer part of it? Part of it. Oh, part of it. All right.
Uh I got a question, I hope you can answer. ASAP, because it's for the 17th of May celebration. What's the date today? Missed it. Missed it.
Oh, yeah. So we did did we oh, I said I was gonna answer it separately, and I didn't. Oh. Well, so it's a double whammy. A, I missed the celebration, so there's that.
And B, it's a carbonation question, so Nastasia's gonna love it. Uh, I'm gonna make a ginger cordial for a pre-made corny keg carbonated Moscow Mule, and was wondering about the best way to get it clear. My first idea is just blend the ginger with SPL and maybe a bit of hot water to thin it out. That will not work. Ginger has uh starches in it, and the starches will never clarify.
Ginger juice does not clarify with uh SPL. And then agar clarification is this would take uh uh forever. Also, I can't sometimes agar clarification also doesn't necessarily hold on to starch because it you like uh starch is a real pain in the in in in the behind. Um my first worry is uh would be uh my first thing is would it be best to squeeze out the juice with a nut milk bag or similar, just go directly to agar agar with the puree? Uh and is there better ways to make the cordial?
Uh listen, I want that proper ginger cake. What I do is uh the interesting thing about ginger, and everyone should do this, I don't know, or or not, you know, whatever. Do whatever you want. But slice, make some ginger juice, don't worry about clarifying it. Make some ginger juice and then taste it, heat it a little bit, taste it, heat it a little bit more, and taste it.
The taste of ginger changes drastically as it's heated to to different temperatures. So there's that, right? And I actually like the flavor of ginger that's been heated a bit, and it's still kind rather spicy, and and and people cheat, by the way, professionals cheat and add hot pepper into the ginger to make it uh more actual, like picante in the back in the back of the throat. Um, but the other thing that I typically do is I slice it paper thin, uh, and then steep it, and then you can steep it with or without heat. And that does not, if your knife is sharp and you're not bludgeoning your ginger, uh, that will make a very clear syrup, and you can do it that way, and you don't have to bother clarifying at all.
Did that properly answer that question there, John? Might work. Yep. Oh. Is that a sound effect or is that a real bell?
Sound effect. It's got a good ring to it. I appreciate Joe put some reverbs. We don't have our original uh Oh, yeah, should we talk about royalty-free what? Talk about what?
The move. The move to Maxon. Maxon's got the ticket to ride and it's hot. Yeah, okay, done. Next question.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Which move? The move to here? Yeah. We have did a little bit.
You want to talk more? Okay. Talk more. I mean, I'm uh we'll talk about it all day. We need people to sign up for the Patreon.
The whole point is is that we now have the Patreon where we can interact with you more. Like, literally, if you guys want something from us and you know, we can make it work, it's a good way for us to do that for you, right? Mm-hmm. So you go to the Patreon, you sign up. For now, for whatever reason, I don't know why.
I really don't. We have two RSS feeds, right? We have our, you know, native, you know, uh, Rockefeller Center, uh, Newstand Studio uh RSS feed that is goes with the Patreon, and then we're also putting the show up, the standard you know cooking issue show up on the Friday on uh Heritage Radio. But we're recording here at, you know, you know, you can't see around because the camera doesn't, but we'll take some pictures and put it out uh on the thing of what's going on. And and on the Twitter, you saw you saw my man uh Joe on that because I put him up.
But anyway, was that what you meant? Or is there more to say? Yeah. That's fine. That's good.
Okay, okay. Uh from certified uh, you think it's 10,000 and six or one thousand six? Is it two numbers or one number? I don't know. He DMs all the time, so we can ask him.
Yeah, all right. On Instagram, hey, uh just listening to your bagel toppings issue. Uh the issue, by the way, was that the onion and the garlic scorches, and Reinhardt's suggestion of pre-uh like rehydrating the onion and garlic was a freaking nightmare. A freaking nightmare. Uh gloopy mess.
Although, if I was gonna use it in something else, like if I was gonna fold it into a batter, it would be good. All right, I'll I'll say that. Um one wants the onion inside the dough, though. They want it only on the top of the bagel, right? Mm-hmm.
Yeah, yeah. Um, what about applying dry and then misting with a spray bottle before the bake? That way they're evenly coated and hydrated before going in the oven. I mean, I could try it. I mean, the other thing I could do is bake them halfway and then coat them with the onion, but I'm pretty sure that the people who do this for a living coat it like right out of the boil.
Boil, coat. You can't, you have to coat when when a bagel comes out of the boil, you have to coat it pretty quickly because uh they flash off fairly quickly, and then they don't hold as much stuff. So if you're if you go to a bagel shop, I'm sure you've all I mean, obviously we live in New York, you've all gone to bagel shops. You know how some bagel shops, like the the coating is sparse on the bagels, and some have the hyperdense coating on the bagels? Those hyperdense coating people are applying, I'm sure, right after the boil, almost like throwing them into the in into the spices right after the boil and then putting them out.
That's the only way that I know to get that hyper dense. If you wait at all, you get that sparse coat. Uh and I like the dense coat. What about you guys? Dense coat.
Dense coat? I don't like everything bagels. I didn't say everything, but you don't you don't like you like plain only. You don't even like sesame or poppy. So uh you're, you know, you can uh what's it abstain, abstain from this one.
Uh the one exception is I and this is just the way I grew up. I know that people a lot of people don't like them. I love a salt bagel. I freaking love a salt bagel. They don't hold that well, and the color on them's not usually as good as the other bagels, but I love a salt bagel.
Uh they have too much salt. The places that do the hypercoat, put too much salt on a salt bagel. It's like it's like I'm a deer and I'm chewing up a salt lick. You know what I mean? It's like so I I'll sit there and I'll scrape the I'll scrape the salt off.
And you do wait. And you don't like locks on your bagel, too, right? Is that what you're doing? No, I do. You like locks?
Tomato or no tomato? Tomato, yeah. Onion? Yeah. You, John?
Tomato, onion, lock? Joe? Yep. Okay, you said capers too? Yeah.
I love capers. And I like having capers next to my bagel. Okay. I feel they overpower the salmon. Maybe if you put too much on, I think a couple well-placed capers can do the trick.
I never order them with capers. I'll usually put it on with what I have in my fridge. You have all that stuff in your fridge at all times? Just capers, it's not. I have capers in my fridge, yeah.
All right, all right. Do you like capers and pasta sauce? Yeah, I do. I really like fried capers. Things are really good.
I never fry capers. Really good. Yeah. How much do you have to dry them off before you fry them? I would just roll them between a paper towel and from the day prior.
All right, let me ask you all a question on fr. I like fried garnishes, right? I'm not very good at as for as much as I fry. I mean, the issue is that like you like fried parsley and all those kind of garnishes? The oil, so oil for frot deep frying, which is what I like to do.
Oil for deep frying needs to not be fresh, super fresh. Like if the oil is too fresh, you have very bad heat transfer and it doesn't really taste fried. But the problem with like I think fried herb garnishes and probably also with capers is that you really don't want to taste the oil, right? Is there anything worse on a fried parsley where you taste the oil and it tastes like a fryer? So it's like almost like you need to have some sort of hyper fresh, like little thing of oil just to do those kinds of things.
You know what I mean? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Because like fried greens with like fried in the same oil that you're frying French fries in, oh, nasty. Now, see, this is maybe an application for air fryers.
As much as I hate air fryers, this might be an application for an air fryer where you can put just a fresh coat of very fresh oil on, throw it into the quote unquote air fryer in the impingement oven and get it to go. This might merit some testing. Because you know I'm not a fan of air frying in general. Yeah. Because why wouldn't you just fry?
Yeah. Baby, baby Jesus wants you to fry anyway. Holden trout uh via email. Hey Dave, I'm curious about how you go uh and calculate the acid used to adjust a cordial. So the problem we're talking about, for those of you that don't know, cordials, which I think everyone should start using because I think they're really good, not necessarily the one you buy in the supermarket, are where you take uh lime, lime or lemon or whatever, uh fruit juice, you boil it with the peel, so you get some of that peel note, uh, and sugar.
And so the sugar and the boiling both changes the flavor of and preserves for you know, for a long time, the flavor of that citrus. And it's really good. Let's say you, let's say you're gonna get scurvy. You ever look at the symptoms of scurvy stars? No.
They are up, they are messed up. They are real bad. Like your teeth fall out. Get this. You're gonna love this.
Old wounds reopen. Whoa, that's cool. Yeah, because yeah, I mean, unless you have it, because like it's a disease of the connect, your connective tissue starts falling apart. So the first thing that falls apart, like your scar tissue, old wounds open up. So can you imagine like a cut you got like 10 years ago, all of a sudden opening up on your hand or on your side and all your teeth fall out?
It's just like that's like that's messed up. So you don't want scurvy. And anti-scurvy things have one of my favorite English words. Ready for it? Anti-scorbootic.
Anti-scorbootic. It's a good word, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean, like, anyway.
So uh use that. You want to uh you next week I want all of you at some point during dinner to fit anti-scorbootic into your conversation. So um, anyways, so cordial was a way that you could bring things like lime juice on long voyages and they wouldn't go bad. And although you are destroying some of the vitamin C by doing it, presumably there's enough left to stop your teeth from falling out and your old wounds from reopening. So, cordial is good stuff.
Uh the problem with cordial from a cocktail balance standpoint is most of the drinks, most things that we like are balanced uh where the equivalent of simple syrup one to one and uh acid in the form of lime juice are pretty close to one to one. And when you make a cordial, you want the cordial to be at least 50% sugar. If it's not, it won't be preserved that well. The problem then is that there's not enough acidity, and so all the drinks end up being too sweet. So what we do is we add acid back to the cordials to make them the same uh acidity as the original juice was lemon, lime or whatever.
Uh and one way you can do this without adding acid is to just boil over boil your cordil down and add the sugar such that the weight of it is the volume of it is like let's say you start with a liter of lime juice, it's a liter again. But that's not the way we do it at the bar, we add acid. So the way you calculate it is really boring. And so I'm gonna try to do it very quickly for you. So uh oh God.
So if you take a kilo of lime juice, which we let's say it's a liter, and a kilo of uh sugar, and you add those two things together, now you have something that uh oh sorry, let's go, let's go back. Let's okay, let's do it that way. Now you have two kilos, right? But you have to divide that by 1.23, because that is the density of simple syrup, right? So now you have some number, which I can't do in my head, and that is the current volume that you have, right?
So that volume now is greater than the uh one liter of lime juice you started with. So you subtract one liter from whatever that number is, and you have some other number, I don't know what it is, like 600 and something, 700 milliliters, whatever it is. Now you need to add enough acid such that that extra volume is at six percent acidity. So you multiply that extra volume that you have by 0.06, and you add the acid. And if you're making lime, that acid is two parts citric, one part malic.
If it's lemon, it's all citric. Does that make sense? Was that fast enough? John, am I good on this? Am I done?
You're good, you're done. Was that semi-intelligible? Yep. All right. Aaron Chenault, oh, I love the ding.
I'm liking the ding. I do like the ding. Uh Aaron Chennault uh wrote in on Instagram. Hey Dave, uh loving liquid intelligence and plan on making some of the bottled Manhattans for a small shindig this summer. Uh I like the word shindig.
What do you what about you? Yeah. Uh I like my favorite thing, and if it's one word, maybe it's family friendly. You tell me. If not, we'll buzz it.
I don't have a family. You somebody else answer. I don't I've never been pregnant yet. I know what a pregnant lady looks like. No, but like, I'm also around a family.
And like the kids that I'm around, everyone curses. So you How old are they though? Two through six. It'll change. As soon as that kid starts cursing at their parents, everything changes.
Anyway, uh, I like shit toss. As a positive thing. Gonna have a shit toss. I like that. Like a like a party.
You don't use shit toss? No. Is that family-friendly? Joe? Family friendly or not family friendly?
Uh, shit toss. I never heard it either. Shit toss? Shit toss. Shit show.
Yes. Bad. Shit show this. Shit show. New York.
My life. Our life. Our life. Uh okay. Any thoughts on using argon for oxygen displacement versus liquid nitrogen?
We had a question on this. Uh, I know I use it a ton for uh finishes and such to prevent oxidation and can get small can called bloxogen. That's a good word. Bloxygen, because it blocks the oxygen. Bloxygen.
Uh cheers. Yeah, that'll work. I mean, the nice thing about liquid nitrogen, if you have it, is it gives you a vi visual indication that you are being uh you are successful. Whereas the argon has no visible indication that you are successful. Hey, speaking of visual indication, do you think this is a good idea in the book?
How many times for the frying section? Okay, you've deep fried, right? Mm-hmm. Okay. You've all deep fried.
I've I've done this to myself at least 10 times in my life. Uh, but I want to stop people from burning the hell out of themselves with tongs when they're deep frying. Everybody uses most people use tongs in the kitchen, and they're useful when you're deep frying because you want to go into the basket or to the fryer with the tongs and move stuff around. But what I think people don't realize or they're not thinking is that tongs are like chutes. They're like chutes and ladders for the oil.
So there's always, and the and the lips of the tongs are curved in a little bit to be able to grab on to whatever you're tonging, right? Is that the tongue? Is that the verb? Anyway, so what happens is you lift in and you pull up the stuff out of the thing, and then the grease, the hot grease runs down the tongue and onto your hands, and you can get really, really badly burnt that way. You ever gotten burnt that way, John?
I have, yep. Yeah. Like in the early days, yeah, yeah. So what I want to do for the for the book, maybe is is like get some tongs, put it into some fake blood and like lift it up and just show the flip fake blood going down my arm and like the with the anti-burner. You think that's good?
Mm-hmm. Yeah. And you don't need to wait for my book. That's a free tip from me to you. You're gonna do it, just be careful with your tongs if you're using your tongs in the deep royal.
October. Oh wow. And when it's done, it'll be Rocktober. You like Rocktober because you listen to all sorts of uh oh, those kind of radio stations. You know what I heard the best?
You know, there's always uh getting the lead out, right? At six or whatever. This is the best, the best uh channel in Connecticut. Stairway to seven. Oh wait, so wait, so they're seven o'clock.
Do they play this stuff before seven? Yeah. They play like 15 minutes, 645. It's 645, they play the whole thing as a stairway to seven. Stairway to seven.
Every night or just one night. I didn't, I don't know. I have no idea. They heard it once. I mean, that's strong.
Now I have that song going through my head. I coming in, I had Motorhead in my head. I've had Motorhead in my head for the past couple of days, but now I have that in my head with the seven. Hmm. Yeah.
Uh strong. You've had Lemmy on your on your brain since last week. Yeah, that was a good idea. Well, it's because uh I ride my bike here. And so like when I ride my bike, my my mental soundtrack is either like motorhead, rage against the machine, ministry.
Like I bike angry. I'm not a happy biker. I'm an angry biker. And so it's like that kind of not that motorhead's angry. It's not angry, it's just charging.
You know what I mean? So like that's the kind of stuff. I'm not like listening to like my mind isn't playing like, you know, uh Heartbeat City or you know, from the cars or something like that. Although I, you know, I do like that. I am a cars fan.
Uh I went through a period where I only listened to the cars. And then I went to a period where I only listened to Bob Marley. I was one of those kids that like would buy everything that someone had ever done and listen to only that for like a month or two or three or four or five or six. You don't know people like that? Oh, yeah, I was one of those people.
Yeah? Yeah. I mean, yeah. Yeah, well, good to know. So we have uh some similarities there.
It says a lot. Those kind, those kind of kids are are a certain kind of kid. Oh, for sure. Yeah, I wasn't kind of an addict. Of of different musicians.
Just musicians and record labels and finding like obscurities of tracks of, you know, oh, only released in Japan. Well, I know I know the track. Yeah. There's the only like trophy I got from it. Well, the the thing is this is that like back in the day, it took real work to know that stuff.
You know what I mean? Like, like real work. Like you had to haul your butt down to like, you know, uh, I know, um, what's it called? Um, St. Mark's or you know, A Street, go to one of those weird like bootleg record shops.
Sure. Go up, deal with that butt head who was working at the store, sift through all of the like Xerox copies on like blue and orange and green paper and like the back in the day, they had bootleg record presses, like vinyl. You would buy bootleg, not just cassettes, you'd buy bootleg vinyl. I don't even know how you do that. How did they make bootleg vinyl?
Someone's got a press. I mean, this like some regular, like some regular like jerk on the street just had like a vinyl press. I mean, those are those are not cheap. So, I mean, a lot of times they sound like shit. Excuse my language.
Yeah, yeah. They did, but uh I was happy to have them. Live, live recordings on vinyl. Oh, yeah. They were that anyway.
So now, you know, and also like as a kid growing up in the 80s, you know, I didn't have money, and like buying an album was expensive. So, like, you know, you had to know you like that album. You were taking a huge risk. I remember buying albums and being like, that sucked. I spent all my money on that.
Sucked. You know what I mean? Did I ever do you remember that size? Or were you just at the wrong age where you just could get all the stuff for free? Or because you got a job at MTV, you didn't pay for anything, it didn't matter.
I only listened to the albums my parents had. I didn't really buy records. What did they listen to? Classic rock. But like Beach Boys?
No. No. Classic rock. Well, like what is nowadays, classic rock. Steve Miller.
Okay. But like Abracadabra style, Steve Miller or a real Steve Miller? Steve. I had a copy of that album. That's a bad album.
It's a bad song. Steve Steve Miller, uh, that is a terrible song. Would you say that to him if you met him? I don't think he cares. I think for all I've heard that like he that they're not bad folks.
Like the person who wrote uh big old Jet Airliner, like he paid them, paid that guy, he's dead now, like a lot, like a lot of money, like more than he needed to. Like I hear he's a I hear they're not terrible people. Um whatever. Never met them. You wouldn't say that to his face, be like, yo, Steve, what about abracadabra?
I would say that. I'm gonna reach up and stab you. You know what I mean? Like, isn't that how the verse goes? I don't think so.
Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's not a joker, right? Uh well, that no, that's different. So Abracadabra was their 80s comeback.
It came out, was it 80s or 70s? See, Billy Joel's, Billy Joel's uh Glass Houses, 77. I think I think Abracadabra was like 82 or something like that. We'll have to look it up. Not not their best work, not their best work.
But I listened to it on loop when I lived in Englewood, New Jersey. Uh Dear Cooking Issues Crew, this is coming in from Adam via email. Oh my goodness. This is a spins all question about clarifying citrus juices. We're gonna we're gonna go through this, John.
You want me to go through this on the air? You put it on the thing. That means you want me to go through it on the air. Yeah, I mean, look, you and I want to go through it later and then I can type it up for him, but like in what you're cooking or something. I mean, it's like it's a good one.
It's a lot of very specific things about water temperatures and enzymes. I mean, Joe, what do you think? You want to hear a lot about clarifying juice or you want to uh you wanna I think maybe we should do this in the customer service kind of a of a light. What do you doing? Maybe a DM, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's too specific. Here's the thing. I like answering specific questions, but if it's a very long, technically involved specific question that only one person is gonna ever like, like if Nastasia is gonna look at me after I answer the question and be like Why? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Then you can put it on the Patreon, John. Oh, that's not a bad idea to answer like that kind of a question directly on pain for Patreon in written form. For the highest level. I don't know what if this person is. The most, the highest level.
Subscribe. I used to have a uh uh a friend of mine when I went to art school and he was from Bulgaria, and he used to say that everything from Bulgaria was like the best. I was like, who makes the best feta cheese? Bulgaria. Bulgaria is the highest level, Bulgarian feta, the highest level.
You would ask anything about Marie Aloy. Oh, yeah, she likes the Greek products. Whatever it is, you know, I'm sure, you know, she likes it's so funny. Like all the countries in that area are so like hyped up on their on their produce, and I love that, on their products rather, not the produce. Although probably also their produce.
Gosh, remember when we were in Greece, how hard it was to buy herbs in a store because everyone just picks herbs off of like, you know, wherever they live. We were like, we needed to go buy herbs to do liquid nitrogen drinks, and they're like, we don't buy herbs here. Yeah. We have them, we grow them, but like we just don't buy them. Yeah.
Remember when uh we had to take our shoes off because we were slipping and breaking our heads open on the Acropolis? We were climbing up the side of the Acropolis where we weren't really, I guess, supposed to go. And it's one big smooth marble mountain, and uh that's been polished by you know thousands of years of knuckleheads visiting it as a tourist destination. And Nastasi and I, I don't know why I had flats, because I'm I don't buy more than one pair of shoes at a time, and so they had worn down until they were slicks, like drag racing slicks. And it put a skim coat of rain on that thing, and I swear to God, it was the most dangerous hike I've ever been on was on a regular tourist hike because if you fall, you're falling down a mountain made of solid marble with like, you know, you know, 3,000, 2,000 year old steps carved into it.
It's good though. I mean, right? Mm-hmm. Uh oh, well, and uh I we answered all we answered all of the questions. Amazing.
What do you want to talk about? I don't know. What do you want to talk about? We have any more uh cooking related cli Oh my god, I have so many good cooking things, but I don't know what I'm supposed to say for the book and what I'm supposed to talk about live. Because if I if I let people know what I'm working on for the book, will will I get in trouble on the book?
Or if I'm late and then somebody else does it, what do you think? What are your thoughts? You don't care, right? Uh no, I care about what your publisher thinks. Yeah.
So it's the lateness, I guess that would suck. If I'm late and it could be, yeah. I have some good recipes coming up for this book, though. Also, we want to know what you want to hear us talk about, right? Now that we have control of it.
But we have control over what we said before. But now that we have more facets. Yeah. So on the Patreon specifically, like, we a lot of people requested that we do, like, like I said before, a non-family version of the show, right? And that's fine, but what would that mean?
Like, in other words, like, is it the kind of thing where like I'm the bear in the cage and someone just pokes me until I start cursing? I mean, yeah, I don't know what that means. I mean, like, I mean I mean, well, that we had that wine, rock star wine tasting, which people would some a lot of people did not like that though. But we could have one that involves that kind of stuff where it's just like there's actual kind of drinking taking place. How about this?
I was thinking that we would approach some of our favorite vendors in and and people and get discounts for our Patreon people. Do you think that's it? People would like that? Of course they'd like that, but like, you know, get people to come on. I don't know.
I don't know. I don't know. Uh I'm just shocked that we answered all the questions. I guess we don't have a lot of questions coming in because we people haven't had a radio show for the past three weeks, right? All right.
Yeah. So maybe we call this one at at 45 minutes, but we're gonna do the full hour. We're gonna have the video for the people who sign up for the video going forward uh and more fun stuff, right? Mm-hmm. All right, cooking issues.
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