Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking is just coming to you alive from Rockefeller Center on News Stand Studios. Join not with Nastasia the Hammer Lopez because she is in a big fat airplane flying from here to Los Angeles. But we do have in the studios with John. How are you doing, John?
Doing great, thanks. Joe Hazen. Hey, how are you guys? Doing well and live from Mexico City, Jackie Molecules. What's up?
Hola. Hello. Now, I want to know. I gave, I gave Mr. Mob, by the way, calling your if you're listening live on Patreon, call in your questions to 917-410-1507.
That's 917-410-1507. And if you'd someday like to listen live, you can just join our Patreon. It's not that much money. And we're still gonna give you the stuff for free on Friday. But if you join it, like it helps us to be alive, right?
Right, John? Very true. Yeah. And uh where do they go for that? Where do they go for that Patreon?
Patreon.com and then look up cooking issues in the search bar at the top of the page. There you have it. There you have it. Can I just say, well, first of all, I'm gonna I'm gonna shame Jackie Molecules a little bit. He's in Mexico City right now, and he's not, I think, that far from the one of what I think is one of the finest markets in the world.
One of the finest ones that I've ever been to is uh the Merced in Mexico City. Now, if you like food, the Merced is a great, it's a great market. Am I lying about this? Anyone who's been to the Mercedes gonna call me a liar? It's amazing.
I have not. No, it's amazing. Yeah. You know what? Like everyone goes uh ape crap over what's that?
I forget the name just shot out of my head. The Barcelona market. Oh. Famous. Yes, blank on that as well.
Listen, I've been to a lot of markets. I think the Merced, I like it a lot because it's not just food. Like I said, they have cut-rate pinata dealers. At least they used to. And I don't, I don't know where I can go get some of the best fruits around, amazing freaking uh, you know, uh tortilla game and pinatas.
It's a good mix. So I told him about one of my all-time favorite people, which is the squash blossom lady in the Merced, who is like fresh pressure. She's got she's got like the big ball of masa, and this is the best thing about down there. You got the big ball of fresh masa, and I didn't ask her, I was like, Are you using masaka or do you actually have someone do the next molezi? Come on, man.
I'm not, I mean, I'm a bad person, but I'm not like a it well, it's not that I'm not a terrible person, it's just I don't like embarrassment like when I'm out. Like I save my embarrassment for my private life, or maybe for the radio here, you know what I mean? Anyway, but her fresh press uh masa game is on point. So, like most people who in the US were used to like the kind of roundish tortilla press. You know, you guys know what I'm talking about?
The roundish tortilla press. Which by the way, they're all garbage. Do you ever notice, guys, how the spacing in a tortilla press sucks, how it sucks. It's like it's not spaced right. You know what I mean?
So they always come out like too thick, and you can't adjust. I don't know how they in Mexico they're using, I think the same thing a lot of people, but somehow I think they're made in Colombia. I think the Victoria stuff's all cast in Colombia, which is what a lot of us use. Anyway, I digress. She has a bunch of people have these what look like long presses, right?
They're longer presses with a piece of freaking like inch pipe as the pull handle. And so she can make like longer things. Like they're still thin, like a like a regular tortilla. So it's not like a telecoyos press or something like this. You know what I mean?
It's like pretty thin. But she just goes, takes the ball, goes, and she's got like the big, like like the big disc that she's using for this for these uh squash blossom quesadillas, which are still corn, by the way. She's making it corn. We call them casey, I don't know what she called them. I just ordered them anyway.
And the big giant, as I've said many times, I'll continue to say it, contractor bag full of squash blossoms, which if I had to buy that here at the Union Square Green Market, I just don't have enough cash left in my bank account to do it. You know what I mean? I just don't have it. And then just imagine trash bags. And then I remember I had with me someone who's uh uh Venezuelans native Spanish speaker, and I was like, yo, uh, I need you to ask her if this is like, did we just happen to hit this at like prime squash blossom season?
Is this like the freaking like cicadas coming out? And that's why I can have so many freaking squash blossoms. And he talked to her and she goes, We have it like this all year round. And I was like, Oh my god. And I have to get back on an airplane to this stink pit.
Anyway, so saying all this, Jack has had a week to go find her. Not only has he not found her, he attempted yesterday because he knew I was gonna shame him not going to the squash blossom lady, and you got turned back by a rainstorm. I did. Yep. A rainstorm.
Yep. And you're absolutely right. It was Monday, and I was like, oh, uh, the show is tomorrow. I have to go, and I got rained on. Yeah, man, yeah.
I know I you know, I knew I knew what you would try to do. All right, there you go. I'm gonna go right after the show. Yeah, you're gonna I'm gonna take a video or a picture and I'll put it on the Patreon. Now I have to say, I only went to her.
You please do. That would be amazing. Uh I have to say, I I I'm gonna go look. At some point someone asked me to, uh I don't think it's in my phone anymore. Someone asked me to find her, and I geotagged her on an image once for somebody.
So I got maybe I I'll look for it if you can't find her. But uh I I don't remember how late she operates. You've never been to Mark of your set, it's like enormous. It's the size of a labyrinth. It's it's the size of the town I grew up in.
It's the size of Mount Cusco, basically. You know what I mean? Um and like I say, like it's it's like uh for for those of you like New York isn't what it used to be, but it's still a little bit like this. Growing up in New York City, Joe, you well, you know, but whoever, whoever, John, you people have been around here, right? New York used to be much more so than today, divided into specific neighborhoods.
You know what I mean? There wasn't just a flower district, there was the artificial flower district. There was the district where you could, you know, where all of the floral trimmings were, right? In our area in the garment district, there was the area where all of the fabric jobbers were, and then there was the area where like the trimmings and the buttons people were, right? There used to be an area where leather crap was.
It's like everything had an area because back in the day, without the internet and without shipping, what are you gonna do? What are you gonna do? You're gonna drive all over this freaking city trying to pick up if you know you know what you need to go, you go to that neighborhood. And it was kind of to say it was kind of cool. It was kind of cool.
That big marine, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Like uh, you know, over near where the nomad uh bar used to be, that was uh for a long time the uh illegal wholesale district. That's where like uh, you know, like a lot of the uh stuff was sold out. It's amazing.
And like also, like so it wasn't just uh ethnic enclave neighborhoods for things like restaurants and people like Lidl Lee, Chinatown and whatnot, which by the way, like I need I I'm so out of date on New York City's Chinatowns. They I'm so out of date. I need to learn more about my own city. And this one more gripe before I get into it. A lot of people say that Los Angeles has uh like more interesting or more diverse restaurants than New York does, right?
You've heard people say this, right, John? Yep. Yeah. You know why? It's because they're looking at they're looking at Manhattan.
You know, they're looking at Manhattan. There's this place called Queens. You know what I mean? Like, which is the most diverse place on earth, Queens. You know what I mean?
It really is. So I don't know. And I shamefully, shamefully shame. It's yeah, I haven't been eating out since the since the the COVID, since the pandemic. So shamefully, I know very little about my own city.
I've never been to the Sri Lankan neighborhood on Staten Island to have the food over there. I've never uh Yeah, I know. It's because I'm an idiot, and guess what? I love Sri Lankan food, right? But it's like it's just I don't know.
It's so weird. We're so weird here in the city, like we think we know so much, and we don't even know our own city, half of us. You know what I mean? Eater says there are nine Chinatowns in New York City, like throughout the boroughs. Right.
And so but the other interesting thing about that, because I drove I biked through a uh a Chinatown I'd never been to before. Uh not the one that's in Sunset Park, but the one right next to Sunset Park. And what's interesting about each one of them is that they're all different. They're all you know, they're all focused on a different thing, and I just know nothing about it. So I need to take, you know, after we get our business straight, John, I need to take some time and reacquaint myself with the food ways of my own city.
You know what I mean? Absolutely. Yeah. Um anyway, uh, oh, so I have another thing to food shame you about, uh, Jack. It's not a shame, but uh so Don Lee, you know, my partner at existing conditions, we were down years ago uh in Mexico City for uh Tales of the Cocktail Mexico City.
And by the way, is there still a chance to sign up for uh the Tales of the Cocktail thing I'm doing? Yes, there certainly is. Push that out there, uh so on Thursday, September 23rd at 1 p.m. Eastern Central Time, Dave, along with Derek Brown, Shannon Mustafer, and Ivy Mix will be speaking about creativity and cocktails, and it's gonna be great. So go to tales of the cocktail.org to get your tickets.
Yeah. So again, the pitch is different people, all you know, called creative by other people. What do they share in common? How do you find your own creative voice? Blah, blah, yakity shmackity, right?
Pretty much Exactly. Oh, speaking of blah, blah, yakity schmackity. Before I get into this thing, I need to tell Jackie Molecules about. Next week, I will not be here because I'll be doing uh teaching at Harvard, and it's live again this year. So I'll I'll be in Boston.
Um we gotta figure out for you, Patreon people, let us know what we can do to make it up for you missing the show. Uh let us know what we can do, and we'll try to do something fun for you. Right? Yep. Yeah.
Nastasia wanted to do a pop-up in uh in Boston, but it was just it's just too too too much too fast because like it's uh it's it's hard for me to just walk in and do something like that because it makes me real nervous. You know what I mean, John? You know me. Yeah. Yes, yes, I do.
Yeah. Speaking of real nervous, a little bit of a teaser. We're uh we were shooting some of this video for this this product launch. We're doing. It's not, by the way, it's not the big, it's not a it's a it's a it's a Sears all related product.
I'll just tell you that right now. It's not the V8. I don't want to hear about it. It's not the V8. Um So we're shooting the video for it, and I have to edit it because we don't have the we don't have the ability to hire someone else to edit it.
Is there anything worse than editing your own voice? Even just listening to the podcast and hearing my own voice. I had to do that the other week to get to a back question. It was brutal. Not fun.
Yeah, I mean, I'm no I'm no Adam Driver. I'm not gonna storm out hearing my own voice, but like that's a hilarious. What was that? Was that MPR he stormed out of? Yep.
Yep, fresh air, I think, with Terry Gross, yeah. So because no one storms out on Terry Gross, dude. Nope. I think that was it at least. I'm butt and then he just leaves?
Yep. It's amazing. He didn't even say anything, right? She during the clip, he just dropped the earphones and walked out. Yep.
Intense. Intense. You know what he needs? He needs uh uh that uh what's his name? Vince Vaughn with earmuffs from uh from Wedding Crashers.
Yeah, or no, no, uh old school. Whatever it was. All right, so here I am on the next thing to shame you on, Jack. So Don Lee and I were down there and uh we found this place that was within walking distance of our hotel uh Alameda and the uh and the Zocolo, so like it triangulate that way, right? And it was a place that Don called only Meat Bucket.
And I think it's now like listed on like, you know, the things to do in Mexico City when you're there. And I'll just describe Meat Bucket. So imagine uh for those of you that ever you know again, in New York, if you would in the old days, like carved out of the sides of buildings were like little like notches, right? Almost like a closet, but inside would be somebody selling something, like umbrellas or like shoe parts, or like you guys familiar with what I'm talking about, like those little notches carved out of the side of a building, hole in the wall, let's say, but you couldn't even go into it. So this was a hole in the wall.
Like could have been an entryway, but they blocked it off and someone was serving meat there. And they had a giant steel kettle, black steel kettle, filled with like bubbling. I'm gonna wanna say oil, maybe broth, maybe broth plus oil, would that be broil? Off oith. Anyway, some mixture.
It couldn't have been straight oil because it was bubbling, right? So it's some mixture of meat, juice, and and and fat. Big, and in that cauldron was every kind of meat. I'm not talking like one kind of meat, name a meat. Lamb.
Oh, uh, it's mainly beef and pork. Name a part of the animal. Oh, there you go, yeah. I mean, the whole thing, sure. Yes.
Probably the head was in there. Yeah, tripe. I think all of it. Everything. All of it.
And so what you would do is is they had like a board and they would write down all the the meat parts, and you would just be like pop. And then they would take the after they had the uh the tortilla, they would dip, they would dip the tortilla in the meat bucket, put it on the thing, and then get the meat of choice, pull it out of the cauldron, whack it a wag it whack it over with the cleavers, and then throw it into the tortilla and hand it to you. And then outside of the thing was just like the little thing of sauce and and the and the little bucket of like, you know, like little lime wedges. That's amazing. How do they keep track of where all the meat is in such a cauldron if it's all the you know?
I mean it was impressive. It was uh the size of the cauldron in my mind was uh maybe slightly bigger across in a 55 gallon bucket. Okay. You know what I mean? Yeah.
Like large walk size, you know what I mean? Like, you know, like you could kind of hug it. You know what I mean? You could kinda hug on to it, but like not really, you know what I mean? Yeah.
Oh, amazing. So you gotta go find yourself the meat bucket. How am I gonna find the meat bucket? That is impossible. Needle in the haystack.
It's a meat bucket in a haystack. But it will be uh it will be a reward. I mean, like, how could you refuse finding a place called meat bucket? So I just walk around. This is not in Merced.
You're saying this is somewhere not in Merced. So, like our hotel was like on that park, like Alameda, and like it's within a block and a half of that, and then like towards the Zocolo, or how are you pronounced that? The main square. Just ask the locals, you know, where can I find the meat bucket? Yeah.
They'll be good to go, Jack. Yeah, that'll work. Meat bucket. I don't know how to say bucket in Spanish. Does anyone know how to say bucket?
No. Give me meat bucket in French, John. So or de viande, so is bucket, yeah. Yeah. But wouldn't it cubeta?
Really? Do you prefer uh the viande or do you prefer like other words, like when you're when you're going, do you go to places when you're in France and specifically go to like uh I used to go to this place when I had to go to Paris uh a gibier only does like poultry and stuff like that, and like and like well, gibier is even more like game like rabbits, things like that. But like, yeah, they the GBA would have like the pheasant and the rabbit. We don't have that in the U.S. No, it's really unfortunate.
Yeah. My dad loves pheasant and rabbit and all that other stuff. Yeah. Wish there was I wish it was more of a thing here. Yeah, there's not even it's not a category that I know of, a Gibier.
No, I mean game, but like not no. Yeah. Like definitely New York doesn't have. We're going the way of Paris with our outdoor dining, although, you know, we need to up our now that we're gonna do it permanently, we should, you know, some of this stuff needs a little buffing. You know what I mean?
Absolutely. A little buff and a polish. Yeah, yeah. But you know, next next major tragedy we have here in this city, uh, maybe we'll get GBAs. I don't know how that would happen.
I don't either, but be amazing. Yeah. Um got this in from Jacob Pope on the Patreon. Hey Dave, I'm trying to make oat milk in quotes uh at home, and I was wondering if there are any methods to emulsify a liquid fat into it that does not involve an expensive homogenizer or sonicator or even blending it where it will eventually precipitate out. I find that using a blender also introduces a lot of air and drastically changes the texture.
Uh that is true. However, the texture will settle over time. By the way, this is in general, um okay, I'm gonna finish your question and then I'm gonna should I tangent first and then finish? What do you think? Sure.
Which tangent first? Yeah, because yeah, I don't circle you back to the question. So blending and texture is a big thing that people don't understand. When you're making uh syrups or you're making purees, right? Um the texture is a lot more air than you necessarily think gets whipped into your product.
Now, this can be a problem from a flavor standpoint in terms of oxidation, right? Uh, but for most things, it's actually a problem in terms of one color. Uh, two, uh, the viscosity changes a little bit. That's not really important. Uh, three, it makes measurement more difficult because uh if you're measuring especially something like for a cocktail, it uh it can become problematic.
Most things will settle out over time and go back. So if you if you only had to blend it at the beginning to emulsify it, but didn't have to blend it before use, you'd probably be okay, right? However, uh, here's an interesting experiment. If you use a blender on something uh and then put it into a vacuum machine, you can immediately suck all the air out of it. So we used to show this uh all the time.
We would take and blend uh tomatoes, canned tomatoes. And y'all know how when you blend canned tomatoes or tomatoes in general, they go pink, right? They go real pink because you're whipping all that air into it. You put it in a vacuum machine, cover it a little bit because it's gonna spatter, it's gonna be real ugly. Uh, but then when you suck all the air out of it and boom, it goes down, it goes back to dark red again.
So that that's one way to de-erate anything that can be boiled. This is one of the reasons why after things are blended, a lot of recipes will specify to bring stuff up to the boil. The boil will actually boil the air out and cause the color to drop back down to where it was and and the texture. Uh that wasn't what you were asking, but I'll just add that anyway. Uh, no one has ever made, I think, inexpensively, the the uh vacuum blending uh rigs, right, that the dentists use.
People keep threatening to make them available, and there's some people that have relatively inexpensive, relatively crappy vacuum mixers. But vacuum mixing, I once back in the day tried to hook a vacuum machine up to uh vacuum pump up to a vita prep. Now, I did it with a vitapep in this was 2004, right? And the Vitapep bearings at that time were not good enough. So I was for those of you that never used a Vitamix or a Vitapep, uh, if if you're in a real kitchen, there's oil and grease that have seeped down around the base of the Vitapep.
There just is, believe me. And so I sucked the vacuum and the bearings weren't vacuum tight back in the day, and I was sucking bearing grease up through my Vitapep container into the into what I was mixing. And I was like, nope, bad idea, not gonna do that again. But I've been told that the bearings are better now and that that that won't happen, and that they actually make also pictures that are designed for a vacuum. So vacuum blending is a very interesting technology.
I don't care about it for its theoretical health uh implications. But uh it would be interesting actually to do a light vacuum whip for something like nitro muddling, right? So instead of nitrile muddling, which you're doing blending, uh blender muddling, I would like to try vacuum uh on that, and it would be good for blending things that you don't want to whip air into. Okay, again I digress. Uh yeah, no, I would just use an emulsifier and blend it uh and then let it settle out.
Uh, what you can do is you can um if you're adding other flavors to it, like you you could just blend a portion of it and emulsify it in. If you use a I would use a stabilizer, so Xanthan gum is a stabilizer. Uh, it's gonna also make the stuff a little bit snotty, so you don't want to use very much of it. Uh uh good stabilizer for beverage systems that is not so good for commercial use because it's quite expensive, but good for uh us is uh gum arabic. And the the stuff that I recommend in liquid intelligence is uh a mixture of gum Arabic and Xanthan gum, and that does a great job and it's relatively stable and it's it's good enough that once it's in solution, you know, every day or so, you don't need to reblend it to get it back together.
You can just kind of toss it back and forth like you would a chocolate milk when you were a kid. You guys remember when you were a kid taking a chocolate milk and going like this, Wapa Wapa Whoppa, like that, without whipping a lot of air into it. So, yeah, right? Whoppa whoppa. And then you get that chocolate milk back.
Or were you guys the kids that drank it so that you would have all the light chocolate milk on the top and then suck all the chocolate down at the bottom? Nope. You know that kid though. Actually, no. Yeah, I do know that kid.
Yeah, I know that kid. Have any of you ever met someone who successfully done the gallon milk challenge? No. Okay. Yeah, it didn't end well.
It's doing the rounds, yeah. So uh my friend who did it in high school, he it he got it all down, jug hit the table, and then it all came back up. Like he got it all down, jug hit the table, all came back up. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of, I'm not gonna talk about this. I was told by Dax, I was like, I was I was at the TWA Hotel this uh weekend, which was kind of cool at JFK, TWAA airport hotel. And uh they allow you to bring dogs.
Oh. Yeah. They should not. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Uh so Erosaren, who the architect who died roughly my age, 51, uh operation uh from an operation to get rid of a brain tumor. Anyways, again I digress. So he designed it and he wanted the flow to work in a certain way. So there's not a lot of ways in and out of the of the hotel.
So if you're designing a hotel, if any of you are out there are hotel people, if you're designing a hotel and you're going to allow dogs, right, then you have to make there be an easy way for people to punch out of the building with their dogs. You with me? Yep. Yes. I want to punch out of that building.
Now, if you have a hotel that is part of a landmark structure and you're required to keep 200 feet of red, bright red carpet that you have to walk down to get from the main lobby to the area where the elevators are for your hotel, you have to make sure that there's not I'm just gonna put it this way. The way dogs work is dogs uh trained dogs, dogs that are trained, right? That aren't sick, right? A sick dog, people you can't blame a sick dog. If a dog is sick, you can't blame the dog, it's sick, right?
But dogs in general aren't gonna go inside unless they sense that it is a place where dogs are supposed to go to the bathroom. And how do they sense this? Other dogs pee. So if there's a bunch of other dogs that have already peed in an area and you haven't natured the miracles the hell out of it, right, then what your dog smells is a message that says, Hey, I was here. Would you like to add a message?
And then your dog adds a message, and so on and so on. So this 20-year-old landmarked carpet is about 99% dog pee at this point. That's unfortunate. Did you bring your dogs there? I did.
And so like I had to do the short leash and run. Short leash and run, short leash and run, right? Hopefully the butt can't settle down in the time it takes you to run across that carpet. Anyway. The perils of the perils of hotel design.
All right. Uh did I answer the question on emulsification with ticaloid? The mixture that I used, I forget what it is. Uh, John, see if you can look it up and put it out on our on our Patreon. Uh I suggested once a mix because Ticoloid 210 or 310s became harder and harder to find.
It's mostly gum arabic with a very little bit of xanthan. You're gonna want your final xanthan percentage to be I would say a quarter of a percent or less. Quarter of a percent or less. Okay. Uh and your uh your gum arabic, the nice thing about the ticaloid is that it it dissolves cold no problem.
You know what I mean? Uh we're gonna want to dissolve the the ticaloid into your water base first, or the the gum arabic and the xanthan into your water base first, and then um and then add your oil to it to emulsify it in. The reason gum arabic is good is because it dilutes well. I'm assuming you're not necessarily drinking the oat milk straight, you're pouring it into coffee. Gum arabic is a great emulsifier for those kind of a situations.
Uh gum acacia is the other word. If you find gum Arabic to be an offensive word, I'm told that gum acacia is what we should call it now. Um anyway, so I believe uh if you keep it it's something like four parts Arabic to one part or four parts acacia to one part uh xanthan or something in that range, but uh give it a shot. You really can't add too much of the acacia, it's not gonna cause a problem. But please don't buy like the big yellow chunks.
Buy a nice, you know, powderized good one. And it's not even really the hydrocolloid in the acacia that that helps you, it's the protein in it. They've uh done studies where they've removed the protein fraction from gum acacia and it no longer has its amazing emulsifying properties. What about uh 210S special blend of gum arabic and santhan? That works.
Okay, yeah, that's on Modernist Pantry. Oh, modernistpantry.com. By the way, I I have to apologize if you do end up watching the video where we're trying to sell the new product that I'm working on. Uh we're all working on. Uh I kind of went into pitch guy voice while I was doing it.
I couldn't. I couldn't. Not full pitch voice, not like not full mighty putty, not full built uh Billy Mays, you know? Yeah. But close.
And I was like, oh man, I was doing my pitch man voice this whole time. Oh well. Uh all right. Uh Anthony Chan wrote in. What is the recommended alcohol content if I have to make a b boozy ice cream?
I put three ba three ounces of Bailey's into my ice cream mix. When you were guys with kids, you ever you ever do the uh the the Bailey's milkshakes where you just like fill your blender with uh ice cream and then dunk the Bailey's? Not kids, but you know what I mean. Like no, never did that. You never did a Bailey shake?
No? Nope. I have to say I have to say I'm not a Bailey's guy, but that tastes real good. Okay, you know what I'm saying? Like, I mean, I mean, it's not gonna i i if you're if you're in business trying to get all crunked up, it ain't gonna crunk you up because you're not dumping that much baileys in and Bailey's not that much of a high alcohol product anyway, but it tastes real good.
Yeah, yeah. Uh you guys, uh when uh when you guys were coming of drinking age, were they still making those like disgusting Bailey shots where they would pour an acidic ingredient into Bailey's? They used to have different names like Bloody Brain, uh uh Cement Mixer. No? Did not see that, thankfully.
No, I didn't see that either. So they used to they used to be a thing that people thought was a fun thing to do, where it was a shot with Bailey's plus something that congeals Bailey's. Yeah, it's terrible. I'm glad that's no longer a thing. That's garbage.
It's garbage, trash can thing. All right. I put three ounces of Bailey's into my ice cream mix, uh, one pint total volume. Anthony, Anthony, you're screwing with me on with with pints. Pints a pound the world around.
I love it, right? 16 ounces. When was the last time you thought, John, what's the last time you had a recipe that you thought of in ounces and pints? Oh, you're French though. You're Belgian.
Yeah, ever. You know what's so weird, dude? Like you're Belgian, but you don't get all Hercule Poireau offended when someone calls you French. No, yeah. I mean, my friends have been doing that for a very, very long time.
So I'm just kind of made peace with it. Your boy Hercule hates that though. Yes. Belgique. Uh and he was, but he was French Belgian too, right?
He wasn't like Flemish. He wasn't getting all bent because he was like Flemish. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, French Belgian.
Yeah. Yeah. Uh all right. Uh I put three ounces of Bailey's into my one pint of uh one pint total volume of uh ice cream mix, and it seems like it can never get to the right consistency. It seems to be too watery.
Uh same mix without alcohol. I got the correct consistency without issue. Thanks so much and have a nice day. Well, uh, I mean, you're already Patreon supporters, so I appreciate it. So I don't want you to spend another five bucks, but you should go to uh Quinn Fusile's uh book, Gelato Obsession, and get a hold of his where he has a very simple explanation.
We had him on the show a couple weeks back of um the uh uh AFP, which is the uh the anti-freezing potential that uh a lot of other people in the industry use basically the same number, just divided by 100, called the PAC, which is uh some sort of Italian thing that means the same thing, like like uh how much it it it's frozen. So I uh using uh Quinn's math. So Quinn's math is that uh every gram of alcohol is uh the equivalent anti-freezing power of nine grams of sugar. All right? All right, you with me, people?
Okay. Now, uh Quinn is for for uh something that is in your range. So let's just let's just pretend that your mix was a thousand uh grams instead of a pint. Let's just mix, let's just say it was a kilo, right? So uh Quinn would want the equivalent of 340 to 380 anti-freezing units or sugar units of anti-freezing power in in in the ice cream to get the right texture.
Because remember, Quinn, a little bit crazy on this one, wants to have it be scooping temperature right out of the freezer. You remember that? Right out of an American, not well, he's Canadian, but you know what I'm saying, right out of like a standard freezer, not a dipping cabinet. Uh most people who are uh shooting for gelato at gelato dipping temperatures are shooting for about 240 to 280. Now, if you remember back from that show, what Quinn does is he doesn't want his stuff to be that sweet, so he's adding things like dextrose and other things that have lower sweetening for the amount of anti-freeze power they have.
All right, you with me? You with me so far? All right. So alcohol is a much more potent antifreeze. So as soon as you start adding alcohol, it's you're either gonna have to r drastically reduce the amount of sugar, right?
Or or do something else, like boil off the water. Now I looked at what you added. You added, you had a recipe which I'm just gonna assume was 454 uh grams, about a pint, right? And to that you added uh 85 roughly milliliters of Bailey's. Now, in that Bailey's, which is 17% alcohol, there is 14.5 uh grams or milliliters of pure ethanol.
But that is the equivalent of 130 grams of sugar. That is the equivalent of 130 grams of sugar in terms of how much it's going to reduce your uh freezing potential. Now, Bailey's is also very sugary. So Bailey's is probably somewhere in the area of 250 to 300 grams of sugar in a liter, right? Somewhere in that range.
So you're also adding somewhere between 50 and 52 grams of sugar sugar in the form of Bailey's. So you have added the sugar equivalent, right? You've added the sugar equivalent of I say 50? I didn't mean to say that. Uh 20, 21 to 25 grams of sugar, right?
So in your 85 grams of uh 85 milliliters of Bailey's is roughly 14 and a half uh milliliters of ethanol, which is the equivalent of 130 grams of sugar, plus an additional actual 21 to 26 grams of sugar, right? Right? Sorry for that correction. Sorry, loud numbers, loud numbers. Which means that your total sugar equivalent that you're adding to your 450 grams is 151 grams of sugar.
AKA a lot. That's a lot, right? You're adding uh say every milliliter of Bailey's that you add is the equivalent of adding 1.8 milliliters of or grams of straight sugar, right? So it's a lot. Uh so all I'm saying is is that even if you added no additional sugar to your recipe.
If the recipe had zero sugar and the only thing you had was 369 grams of base and 85 grams of Bailey's, right? Then you right then would be just at the correct level for uh Quinn stuff. So on the soft side for regular folk, right? Uh so you got no wiggle room in your recipe. So what's the answer?
Boil off the alcohol. That's the answer. Or use less. Every uh every ounce of Baileys that you add is the equivalent of adding 50 52 grams of sugar to your recipe. All right.
And Anthony, in case you were wondering where to get gelato obsession, go to cooking with q dot ca. Q the letter Q. And he didn't he also buy gelato obsession.com? Or did that not do that not working? It's five bucks, people.
Yep, that works. It's five dollars. Come on, man. Oh no, wait, I can't break it. Just go to cooking with Q.com and you can definitely get it there.
All right. From Prashant Ganesh. Hey David uh crew, this is Prashant from Florida. Uh I've been making yogurt at home for the past 18 months using a yogurt culture from my family. Now here's the key from his family.
So the issue is wants to preserve this culture. That's the issue. By the way, I'm gonna say this yoga culture. Uh we I don't know him personally. I would love to get Sandor Cats on this show.
He has a new book that just came out. We can probably make that happen. We know somebody who knows him. Jeremy and him are good, really good friends. Yeah?
Yeah. I mean, I was in my new book that I'm writing right now, like I had to write something about fermentation. And I was like, you know what? Crap on it. Just go buy anything by Sandor Cats.
You know what I mean? Yep. Why reinvent the wheel? Wheels are already round. The art of fermentation, his book on it is extensive, thorough, and really, really great.
I haven't read the new book yet. I haven't read the new one either. Yeah, that's from a couple years ago, the big fat orange one. Yeah, yeah, I have that one. Yeah.
Yeah. Great. Yeah. Yeah. Wheel rolls.
You know what I mean? Yep. Don't need a new wheel. Anyway. Uh yeah.
Anyway. So what we should do is if he does come on, we should revisit. Can you flag this question? I'm going to talk about it now, but can you flag this question and we can revisit it if we ever do get him on? Yep.
All right. Um Prashant's been making yogurt at home with a family culture. Uh I was unable to make yogurt for two months and would now like to know uh how to restart it. When I started making it again, the taste seems off in all four attempts. One, it's extremely sour, and two, it has a weird taste that I don't really know how to describe.
I'm wondering if you had any suggestions for how to revive the uh my yogurt and make it taste better. I was also wondering if you had suggestions on how to best preserve the culture when I'm not able to make it for an extended period of time. Thanks, Prashant. All right, now here's the thing about cultures, right? So they change.
Right. First of all, assuming you're storing so remember, yogurt is cultured at uh, you know, warm temperature. For any of you that were alive in the 70s, the Salt Incorporation used to make a little yogurt machine where you'd put little cups in and it would keep uh like like individual serving sizes of yogurt at exactly yogurt culturing temperature, and you would put it in the night before, and every day you would have yogurt and people would buy it and they would do it for about a day and a half and then they would throw it into their closet. You ever seen this thing? Little mini individual yogurt cup thing from the Salt Incorporation?
Yep. Yeah, yeah. They were also the purveyors of the first really crappy home American cappuccino machines that did not work at all at all. The the espresso from them was garbage. But what do we know?
The average American had ever been to Italy. Anyway, uh so I digress again. Uh so what what I I'm assuming you've stored it in the fridge. Now remember, the fridge is not the best place for the those yogurt cultures to survive. So I'm guessing what's happened in the long time that you've uh had it uh being stored is that other bacteria have uh colonized it, and it is now no longer primarily the same culture that you uh were using before.
And I can't remember, I couldn't remember and I couldn't do a quick search on it, which is why we should ask a fermentation expert. But I believe that long-term refrigerator storage will skew towards more of the acid-producing bacteria, which is why what happens is is that you have to spend several weeks like pitching and tossing, pitching and tossing, pissing, pitching and tossing, pitching and tossing to get the bacteria level back close to where where you were. So, you know, you you use a small amount of inoculum and you culture it at the correct yogurt temperatures, dump it, do it again, do it again, do it again, do it again, and you should get back into a yogurt zone. Now, is it gonna be the exact same stuff that you had before? Maybe not, because a lot of times, and there's a lot of uh science types who are who kind of poo-poo uh preserving cultures for a long time simply because they're not static.
You know, like different things fly in from around uh, you know, the place. So like you you get a company that whose job it is, like Hansen or something like this, to do cultures or like a yeast company like Y East or one of these things or White Labs, and you know, they're analyzing and specifically getting, you know, uh albeit mainly monocultures or what's a what's like a is there a word for several things, not a mono, but like you know, two or three strains, you know what I mean? Is there like an oleo culture? Not that I know of. Anyway, but you know what I'm saying, right?
It's like like a relatively narrow band of things. Yeah, you know, versus wild fermentations. But those wild fermentations that you keep going forever, they're just not static. They just really aren't. Um, they're living organisms.
They evolve. Yeah, well, they're not even environment that they're in. They're like cities of living organisms, right? And so, like somebody, you know, you you you take you take New York City, and then you know, you you lift it up and then you take it to uh, you know, I don't know, Keokook, Iowa, right? And then other people move into town.
You know what I mean? And so it's like it becomes a different place. You know what I mean? It's not static. Um so you know, you can probably get it back into good yogurt feather by, like I say, pitching and dumping a bunch to try to restabilize it.
I mean, I'm not an expert in yogurt, but I'm thinking that would work. Or get a new uh a new batch from your family, I think is ideal. Uh yogurt, so bacteria will be debilitated but not killed by freezing. I would guess that you could probably ice cube freeze culture for a good amount of time as long as you've excluded air from it. Uh, you know, so that it doesn't get all desiccated and freezer burned.
And then um I'll freeze it as rapidly as possible. And then uh alternatively, some people dry the culture, but you know, I don't really know how they survive that on account of the fact that they're not spore forming. Lactobactobacillus are not spore-forming bacteria, so I don't really know how they survive the drying or uh, but people say that that I mean, obviously they sell dried cultures, so that obviously works, but I don't I don't understand the mechanism of it, right? Girt, right? Isn't that what it's called?
Tried yogurt balls? Oh. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I got again, scientifically, I don't understand the mechanism of why they survived that. You know?
Yeah. That it works, I have no doubt. How it works, I do not know. You know? Yep.
Again, pick up any book by Sandor Katz. Um or Zilber or or you know, Ariel Johnson or you know, Ariel Johnson's fermentation book didn't get enough press because she wasn't uh as well known when that book came out as uh she is now. Go check out her fermentation book. She wrote that while she was, I think, still at the food lab. Oh wow.
Interesting. Has she submitted her new book yet? Not that I know of, but I haven't spoken to her in a couple months. So yeah, I don't know. And I get her back on these airways.
Everyone loves everyone loves an uh an Ariel Johnson uh episode where they get to ask their real hardcore, not their knucklehead science questions that you know we can answer, but like their real hardcore science questions. Speaking of, I'm gonna be with uh at the Harvard, I'm gonna be with Harold McGee again. So if you had if you guys on Patreon have anything you want me to ask him for the show, let me know. I'll ask him. You know, if you don't have the you can just ask me directly.
This is a secret. People don't know what a sweet guy he is. You know what I mean? That's it's that's also open to the public, right? The Harvard Lecture?
If you are in Boston, the Harvard lecture is open to the public. Yeah. You can come check it out. Next Tuesday at noon? No, that is a student lecture, and you have to pay a hundred thousand dollars a year to see that.
Gotcha. Okay. But uh the the public lecture is on the Monday. Yeah. And does not require a hundred thousand dollars.
However, I'm sure that's what it costs to like even rent a modest apartment in Boston now that it's gone all biotech crazy. You know what I mean? That town is like not the way it used to be. No, it's not. It's changed a lot.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, probably in some ways for the better, but I don't know. I gotta figure out where I'm gonna eat when I'm up there. Anyway, uh, I'm gonna be there with the family.
Going to the Museum of Science, great museum. Great, great, great museum. The electricity show at the Museum of Science. First of all, you've all heard of the Vandagraaff generator, right? Yeah.
Guess who built the generator that they have at the Museum of Science? A guy by the name of Vandagraf, the actual Vandagraph generator. But this son of a gun has a like, like, you know how like uh, you know how like uh in school you were like, that's like two salad bowls sat. You know what I mean? The little ball, the Vandagraph generator.
This one is like, this one, it it's like the size of the ball they drop at Times Square on on freaking New Year's Eve. It's big. And like it's so powerful that they they have uh the the belts that they use to run it because that's how Vanegraph generators work. They go like two stories up to the top of the thing and then down into the sub basement and they spin up and it shoots lightning bolts like like 15 feet. Thing is bananas.
And then the guys at uh MIT who figured out how to make musical Tesla coils. And if you guys don't know musical Tesla coils, ooh, ooh, look up a musical Tesla coil, but they have musical Tesla coils. So the Tesla coil, it shoots out uh like these these lightning bolts, right? But uh it's frequency driven. So they can change the sound of the lightning based on the frequency they pulse it with.
So they have several of them, so it's polyphonic, and then they play songs on the musical Tesla coils in polyphonic notes. They have like I think three notes or something or more, big and loud. So I swear to God, I was there, I don't know, five years ago, and they played, they played some classic stuff, you know, classic music, whatever, you know, whatever Bach or something, you know, you know, you know, Tacot and Fugue, Organy stuff, right? You know, that kind of stuff. And then I then after the show was over, I went to go talk to the guys like, okay, okay.
But they l-thunderstruck. Oh my God. They played Thunderstruck on with lightning. Pretty cool. Hearing Thunderstruck with lightning was like Yeah, pretty amazing.
Museum of Science. There's a lot of little uh if you're in Boston, you go to the Museum of Science. Uh there's a lot of like hidden gems, at least there used to be. I haven't been a number of years. In one of like the basements or the lower levels near the elevator, you go around the corner and it's just a wall of mechanisms.
Have you seen that? No. It's just like a wall of um, so I don't know if they still do this. My kids never did it, so I don't know whether anyone else's kids still do it, but there used to be these things called dioramas where you took a shoebox and you cut a hole in the shoebox, and then you built like a little world inside of the shoebox, and then you would look into the shoebox, right? I don't know that kids do that anymore.
Diorama. I love a diorama. But it's like that sort of scale, but just a whole wall of mechanisms where you stare in and they're like actually moving, like linkages, linkages. Speaking of linkages, I need to add uh Feltman's to our hot dog off. Yes, you're mentioning that the other day.
Yeah. So we're gonna have a Michigan, we're gonna have a uh uh Coneys, and we're gonna have uh we're gonna have your your hum, your uh what they call Hummel, yep. Hummel from from Connecticut. And then we'll maybe we'll try to get a Feltman's here from New York. Feltman's claims that the actual obviously the Frankfurter is from Frankfurt, that the name is built right in, right?
But that I didn't realize this until I was researching the Feltmans, is that the claim of Coney Island is that they were the first group. This guy, Feltman, was the first person, this is in the 1800s, to throw the Frankfurter, because he was from Frankfurt, you know, I'm Maine, and uh I'm mine, uh, and uh he was the first person to be like, you know what you should do? You should cook a long bun and put the Frankfurter on the bun so that you could eat it on the go. That apparently is what was invented, and that was in Coney Island. He did that in Coney Island, which would explain why the Detroit hot dogs are called Coneys.
Yeah, right? Not just that, not just that, you know, someone on their way to Detroit passed through Coney Island was like, hey, Coneys. It's like that that they had the idea of the bun. Whether or not that's true, I don't know, because I don't believe any food history stories. They're all 99% trash.
99% of them are garbage. For real. Histories, like, I don't know. I've seen so many of them rewritten. Do you what are you what are your feelings, John?
You're a uh art historian, art art, you know, professor. What do you think about food histories? I love them. I don't necessarily believe them, but I love knowing all the different stories about how something could have come come to be. Yeah?
Yeah. It's fun. I don't know. Yeah, I don't believe like more than half either. Yeah.
I don't believe any of them. They're all fun. I don't know. It's fun to know. It just adds like some more history and like mystique, and I don't know, demystifies and I don't know.
It's kind of fun. My look, there was a there's an interesting book, for instance, uh uh what was it called? The Language of Food Jurosky. Yeah, Jorovsky, yeah. Uh his editor was also Maria Guarnashelli, so I I met him.
Yeah. Um Standerovsky, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And so, like, you know, it's some interesting. I think like linguistic movement is interesting.
So like he had this thing, how like this, you know, dish that uh came from the Middle East, Seek Bodge, like turned it somehow into fishing chips, right? So, like as an exercise in like language change, but the idea that a particular dish was invented that is ubiquitous, a ubiquitous dish is invented by one particular person makes very little sense to me. Like ex Benedict and Delmonico's. Yeah, what was the story? That one's almost certainly false too, right?
Yeah. It's got yeah, well, I mean, especially because there are two or three other stories for it too. There's the Waldorf Delmonico's, and then I'm blanking on the third one. But yeah, basically somebody came in one day, hung over and like asked the chef to come up with this dish, and boom, ex Benedict concocted. Yeah, yeah.
This is just all garbage. Especially because, like, okay, listen, here's something that every restaurant does. You know what we do? We poach eggs. What's another thing that all restaurants of that era would have?
Mother sauces. Yeah, yeah. Holidays, right? Yeah. Comes up, dude.
People have eggs in the morning and stuff. It comes up. You know, it's like uh here's the way I I like to think of it. It's like uh here's another thing. I you know how like someone was like, it wasn't Sikorsky.
My great-grandpa actually invented the helicopter. Leonardo da Vinci invented the helicopter. No, he did not. No, he did not. Sikorsky invented the freaking helicopter, right?
Just because someone thinks that waving something over their head is gonna make them fly, doesn't mean they figured out how to move the propellers in such a way that the you know that the helicopter takes off of the ground, right? Right. Right. So like it's not like did somebody in, you know, 1312 make a cookie that was with black and white on it. They invented the black and white.
No. No. That's not important. It's not that someone ever did it. That somebody did something once in their basement a billion years ago doesn't make them the inventor of something.
It's who popularized a thing. Yep. Right? Yep. So, like, was Arnold Palmer the first person on the planet to mix iced tea and lemonade?
No. No. You know what people had a lot of around? Hey, how many times when you were kids, did you ever just be like, I'm gonna mix this with this? This is almost mixed.
Right. Every day. Every day. I used to open my fridge every day and just mix little bits of craft together and see what happened. We used to call it cootie juice and throw it on people.
Did you guys also use am I the only one who we always had the jar of the pepperoncini in the fridge in the fridge? You always had that little jar of pepperoncini? I did not. Yeah, yeah, we did too. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So it was like a lot of that juice and then like other spices and stuff, and that was like that, that was the cootie juice. And we would either drink it or throw it on each other. Yeah, yeah. I don't feel people have those jars of pepperoncini around anymore. Yeah.
You know what they make in Connecticut that's delicious? The Norpro Corporation? They're not high quality. I love, I mean, they are, but I love them, but uh everybody else I give them to, they they hate them. Is that is the um the Italian like stuffed cherry peppers, they're either stuffed with the Provloon or or or Provloon wrapped with prosciutto, or sometimes you can get them with like with tuna in them.
And I love those damn things. And they come in like jars with handles on them, and you can, I love those things. And and I've I'm told that they're not good, but I just love them. They're made in Connecticut, another Connecticut thing. Yeah, the Norpro Corporation.
All right, yeah. Um we said before, sadly, Ben De Table, who uh we worked with at the previous network. Uh they uh are going out of business and they still have some warehouse clearing boxes, which are basically just a hodgepodge of remnant inventory for insanely good price. Started at $65, now doing 25% off that with cowork clearance for well over $110 worth of stuff. Uh just go to this site and uh, you know, help help clear out his warehouse.
Uh they have high quality stuff. I got a box recently, a lot of good uh rancho gordo. Uh you like the rancho gordo beans? I love rancho gordo. Rancho gordo.
Get uh yeah, they're good beans. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Really, really great.
Yeah, got some good uh got some good spices. Uh actually some really good fragrant fennel. And I was like, Well, good's the fennel gonna be. I opened it up. That was good.
I I love fennel though. You don't like fennel? Not I know. I love fennel. Really?
I like fennel. Yeah, fennel's great. I love fennel too. I love fennel. I like that licoricey anisey flavor.
Like uh the um the uh like the the candy, the Indian candy coated fennel. I love that. I love fennel sausage. I love fennel sweet sausage. I also love the the the the cured fennel sausage.
The oh, speaking of cured sausage, you guys hear about the quote unquote Italian style meats. I sent you that, yeah. Yeah. But so get this, people. The CDC, I I don't even know how they get away with saying like this.
Stay away from Italian style meats. Ding. Yeah. I'm like, first of all, I'm gonna take a little bit of a fit. Stay away from Italian style meats.
You don't have to stay away from them. You can just cook them to really high temperatures, too. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. They're like, a bunch of people got sick eatery eating off of antipasto or charcuterie plates.
Hold up, let me read that. Italian style meats. They figured out what it was, though. So you don't have to stay away from Italian style meats anymore. Outbreak alert until specific Italian style meat products are identified.
Reheat all Italian style meats to 165 degrees Fahrenheit or until steaming hot before eating. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
They discovered what it was. It was pre-made. First of all, I I get it. Sometimes you're, you're, you're, sometimes you're lazy, but it was it was pre-made antipasto trays. So like in case you can't slice up the cheese and the meat and like lay it on a plate.
It comes in a pre-packed plastic thing. So what am I supposed to do? Like rip the plastic off the top, be like, here you go, fancy. Because that stuff's not cheap. You know what I mean?
Anyway, by uh uh Fritel Fratelli Baretta was that was the company. And I looked it up and they recalled it all. So they're they're good, right? They recalled it all. Um it's 200, I think it's 280.
Look it up. 280,000 pounds of meat they had you recall. Look up the number. It's something crazy like that. What was the name?
Fratelli? Fratelli, uh f Fritelli Bar uh Bretti, I think. Not Beretta Boretti. Not like the gun, like or yeah, yeah, Beretta. Or the or the 547,666 vacuum sealed 24 ounce trays have been recalled.
Oh my god, 24 ounces. So that's two pounds. That's uh not too, it's a pound and a half of each. Yeah, it's a pound and a half. Oh my God.
That's so 862,000 pounds according to the USDA. Yeah. That's so much meat. Yeah. That's so much meat.
Oh, interestingly, look this one up because I forget the name of it. But there's another one. I don't even know how this happened. There's a food, it's not a recall. Get this.
The FDA, this is this week, specifically said, don't buy cured fish from this company. Figure out what it is. But they didn't issue a recall. They're like, yo, this fish is not safe. Don't eat it.
But they didn't issue a like, they didn't force the company to do a recall, and the company is like, nah, I'm gonna sell it. What is it? Like Norwegian salmon? It is like salmon. Seafood Felix Northwest.
Felix Pepper smoked while mixed salmon jerky. What'd you call it? Canned salmons. Yeah, Listeria. Yeah.
But but the company refused to do a recall. I've never heard of this. Well, they're disputing the fact. Right. So the FDA said don't eat it.
But they're not mandating them to take it off the I've never heard of this. Have you heard of this? No, never. Here make a loud, yeah. Yeah.
Uh John, make another mental note. It's not mental because here I am talking about it. But uh pretty soon I'm gonna have to, like very soon, I'm gonna have to write the uh food safety section of uh the book. And so maybe we should have a food safety uh expert. There's a couple on uh Twitter that um people have said we should have them on the show anyway.
Let's have them on and I can ask them some questions, make sure I don't want to kill anybody. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah, get me a name of a food. Yeah, I don't want to kill anybody.
Uh you know, uh, you Patreon people, uh, let us know what you think. So, what do you guys think about this thing? This report about um eating hot dogs takes 36 minutes off of your life expectancy. How do you call it? I can eat a hot dog so much faster than 36 minutes.
You're saying I'm wasting 36 minutes of my life eating the hot dogs. Well, apparently Joey China is a scientific, it's they're saying literally taking it off your life. Taking it off your life. Like one hot dog you eat is minus 36 minutes off what you were expected. So Joey Chestnut apparently has like a year and a half taken off his life because of all the hot dogs he's eaten.
But if you eat other certain fruits or vegetables, you can add six minutes to your life by doing that. Yeah, but if that if that fruit or vegetable takes less than six minutes to eat, then you live forever. You just sit on the toilet pounding that fruit or vegetable and you just keep adding six minutes, it's like it doesn't work. First of all, none of this stuff works. I'm reminded of uh I had a health teacher in junior high, and he was like they say that smoking cigarettes takes five years off your life, but they don't tell you which five years you could die young.
I'm like, that doesn't that's not how that works, dude. Taking five years off means you take five years off. You don't get to like stop my life now, and then I resume the after it doesn't work that way. You know what I mean? Yeah, uh these studies are uh what's the word I'm looking for?
Without meaning. You know what I mean? It's like what they're doing is is that they're they're aggregating eight million people or whatever. They're aggregating some huge number of people. They're figuring out like how many hot dogs they eat, and then they're figuring out how, you know, over the course of their life, and then they're figuring out you know how what that difference in life potential is, and then they're just doing a straight division between number of hot dogs and number of minutes.
Relatively zero, relatively low meaning. That's like there's another thing where people are like uh there's a huge study that came out of uh uh China recently on substituting uh potassium-based uh potassium-based salt replacer, so potassium chloride instead of sodium chloride. And it being China, they can do this kind of thing where where we can't, right? They're like they gave an entire cohort only this potassium chloride to work with with their cooking, and another one the regular sodium chloride. And they traced the the difference, and there was excess mortality due to things like stroke, things that you would you know associate with hypertension in the salt cohort.
However, right, no one is arguing, no one is arguing. Are there some people who should limit their salt? Yes, there are some people who should limit their salt. Does that mean that you, Joe? I mean, I don't know your blood pressure, but does that mean that you should lower your salt?
That's a different question. Yeah, of course. Yeah. Yeah. There's one more Patreon question that we should get to.
Do it. I thought I got them all. No, Rob Pasco. Oh, what do you got? Hi, question for the show.
Is it worth taking the time to grind slash sandback a new lodge cast iron skillet until smooth? Uh sandback, loot of maker skull crack, what? Okay. Uh the uh is it worth the time. Here's the thing.
Uh I love my old cast iron pans that uh were sanded. I love them. I don't know how long, like if you have a four and a half inch angle grinder with a with and you get a flap, a flap disc on it, it shouldn't take you that long at all. What you want to make sure you don't do is gouge the pan at all. Don't gouge the pan.
Like that's important, right? So if you have the ability to do it without gouging it, I would say go for it, right? Um, I would say go for it. I don't know. Has anyone done it by hand, just hand sanding it?
I don't know how long that would take. I have no, I feel like that would take it. I would say go for it. I would say go for it and report back to us. Report back and then you can't.
Yeah. I mean, like, look, I have some lodge, the the you know, the unfinished lodge that are like 20 something years old now, and they're plenty non stick, but my old griswall that was polished on the bottom is so so sweet. Uh I had someone else actually write in, I don't know about their uh, I don't know where it is, uh somewhere down here about um their Elizabeth Wells, uh about pans. I'm used to almost everything uh on non stick, uh, don't judge. I have a question about blue steel pans.
I now have two high quality blue steel pans. I can get a decent initial seasoning on them using serious eats method, which I didn't get a chance to go look at. And basic soy uh vegetable oil. By the way, uh soy soy oil will smell especially bad when you are seasoning your pans. I'm not saying it's gonna make your food taste bad, but uh soy soy oil uh has a particularly disgusting fishy smell when it's uh overheated because of the not linolaic, linolenic acid, right?
Linolinic acid. Um, but they never get fully non stick. No way I could cook an egg in them without serious sticking. It seems every time I use and need to clean them using soap and soft side of a dish bun, the seasoning comes off. What am I doing wrong?
Cleaning them with kosher salt alone seems to help, but it's still a huge pain to have essentially reseason every time I use them. Am I using the wrong oil or the wrong seasoning method? Does it just take a while to fully break them in? And will someone with a soyology have a reaction if I use soy oil to season with? I don't think so.
Please help me uh with these gorgeous pants. Just use them. Just keep using them. Just keep using them. Like the seasoning is just gonna get better and better.
Uh, anything that comes off is not really fully seasoned anyway. Like the full season, like pro polymerized stuff that that bakes to the pan just takes a little while to build up. Uh so I have from JB Prince, they have a really cool what one that I have, a blue, uh, you know, a black steel pan. Uh and you know, I've had it for a couple of months. I haven't talked about it yet because I really like to break them in for a couple of months.
So just stick with it. It's just gonna get uh it's just gonna get better and better, right? Right. Oh, I'm being told that we're uh we're out of time. So the rest of the email and social media questions I have, uh, I will get to them.
Don't worry, we have not forgotten. None of them are uh none of them are time sensitive, right, John? No, but we'll try and do maybe do a power hour episode next week or in the coming weeks and bang them out. Power hour? Yeah.
Joe, what do you think about that? Power hour or like just straight questions like blah blah blah blah blah. Bingo. All right. Next time.
We're not here next week. Remember, I'm at the Harvard. We'll try to figure out something for Patreon people, and after that, power hour. Cooking issues.
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