Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live from New Stan Studios at Rockefeller Center in the heart of Manhattan, New York City, East Coast, New York State. Remember, we are a whole state and not just a city, although we tend to forget that down here. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, true.
Trying to forget that. Uh very happy to have back in the booth, Joe Hazen. How you doing, Joe? I'm doing great. How are you guys?
Uh doing well, doing well. Uh I'm sure you did not miss us at all. No, I missed you guys dearly. Uh, nice, nice. Uh, and we have our West Coast, uh, we have our West Coast musical and engineering crew, Jackie Molecules.
How you doing? Surprise, I'm in Mexico City again. Ah, what is it with you in Mexico City? Why do you why why, dude? He can be anywhere.
This is the the time of working anywhere. This is the world Wait, what's what's that song? This is the world we live in. Uh, this is the hands we're given. What's that song?
I don't know. This is the world we live in. Uh what song is that? Who sings that? I have no idea.
Uh no idea. Uh Phil Collins. Oh, yeah, yeah. So little known fact. There's a very famous musician whose violin costs how many millions?
I'm not gonna call him out by name, not that anyone cares, but Stas, how much is his violin cost? Oh, like uh a million? I don't know. No, no, no, many millions. Oh, okay.
It's a stratavarius, many millions. And uh uh can't listen to rock musicians, can't listen to rock music because it's too sloppy for him. Except for what group, Nastasia? Genesis. Genesis.
And we're not sure, we're not sure whether he enjoys a Peter Gabriel Genesis or more of a Phil Collins Genesis. Phil Collins, I think. I would say so because I mean Peter Gabriel, no offense, but you're a little sloppy compared to my man Phil. I don't think you could be pulling off that uh Nastasia's favorite, all-time favorite thing, maybe, is when Phil Collins has to make it to that dang drum set. Oh god, yeah.
Have you seen it in the air tonight? He's walking around the stage singing the beginning of the song, and he has to make it to the drums for that part, you know, for the part, the part. And he makes it. Yeah. Spoiler.
Yeah. For for those of you who like so for so I'm 50 and I'm kind of old for I'm sorry, sorry, kind of young for Prime Phil Collins, right? So the Phil Collins I grew up with was the Sis Studio Phil Collins. Which is, you know, I mean, he made a lot of money, but that's not like the best Phil Collins, is it? No.
Uh oh my God, remember when he remade that Supreme song? Can't hear any love. Oh my God. Why? Why did that need to get remade?
One last thing about music before we get into what we're doing. Oh, by the way, Nastasi the Hammer Lopez, how you doing? Okay. Always, always selling yourself, Stas. Okay.
Still breathing. Not underground yet. You know what? You gotta start doing like my uh crazy uh racist grandpa used to do all the time. Is that when you say, How are you doing?
He only had two answers. Vertical, meaning not dead, or soberly, meaning meaning he hadn't started drinking. Or I think he meant sober in the old school sense of angry. Yeah, yeah. Like severely syllably vertical.
Those are his only two answers ever. Yeah. Uh so last music thing before I talk about our our guest. First of all, Patreon people, call in your questions to uh 917-410-1507. That's 917-410-1507.
And uh we're gonna what we're gonna do is gonna split this show, and we're gonna just gonna like go crazy at the end on a bunch of Patreon questions and other questions. So don't worry. The show, the beginning part of the show, it's like two shows in one, people. Two shows in one. So I'm walking past the ice rink.
You like this ice rink stars? It used to. Okay. This do you want to describe the thing that you've taken over now? It's now not even my family's thing anymore, it's your thing.
I don't know. Sign of the cross. Oh, yeah. Oh yeah. No, no, I know.
And you want it, you want to t tell people. So originally this started as something in my family. I don't know how many other families have this. But now Nastasia, and Nastasia has her own culture of sign of the cross. Yeah.
Right. So you might be thinking, you Catholic out there or people who watch movies, might be thinking that what sign of the cross means is, oh, you like you cross yourself, like something bad happens, you cross yourself, right? That's what you're thinking, John? Yeah. All right.
No. What a sign of the cross means is someone, usually someone, you don't sign to the cross someone who's who you're not like. It's like a family member. It's like when your sister does something to you, or your cousin, or your brother does something to you that is so bad that what you do is you it's almost always at the dinner table. Kind of has to be at the dinner table.
It has to be in front of people. You can't sign to the cross someone on your own. It doesn't work that way. Okay. All right.
Ready for it? You go, that's it, sign of the cross. And you pull out a piece of paper, you make a cross on it, you fold that paper up, you put it in your wallet, and they're dead to you. That's it. It's over.
They're dead. Sign of the cross. Right? So that's in my family, that's what they do. And you have to say it that way.
That's it, sign of the cross. And then that's it. It's never mentioned again. They're never brought up again. You don't bring that person up to that person.
They're not just dead, they are like expunged in a Stalinist sense. Got it. Right. Now I have no such pieces of paper in my wallet, right? And by the way, neither does my stepfather.
It was more of the older generation that did the sign of the cross. I mean, I don't know. I mean, Gerard does have some people that he's kind of signed with the cross, but it's not actually physically in his wallet, like it was in his dad's wallet. Anyway, so Stas, what your your your culture of it's slightly different. Well, yeah.
I mean, you you taught me, and then I put in two, like a couple years ago. And to me, they're like they're dead, right? But I also hope like the worst for them. Not death, but like the the worst thing. And it usually happens.
So that happened. I took those two out. Then I have one in there right now that's been in there for like two years, three years, maybe. And then I'm I need to put the new one in soon. So yeah.
Yeah. And Dave is like, Dave has said to me, like, no, don't do that. No, come on, no, don't do that. Like, so Dave actually believes that this is uh Well, it's supposed to no, no, I don't believe it's gonna have a negative impact on them, but it's supposed to be a permanent personal statement. Yeah, but I also add a little to it.
But what I'm saying is, yeah, your y your culture of the cross can be different from mine. Yeah, you know what I mean? It doesn't have to be the same thing. But like you know, in my family, it's just not that it's not serious for you, but it means something slightly different for you, I think. You know what I'm saying?
It may it means taking down, remembering to hop wish them ill every time I see it and take them down in a very specific way. Yes, so like, yeah, so like in my family's sign of the cross, they're just gone. Right. You don't do anything against them. Right.
You know what I mean? It's just that's it. Yeah. They have to have the piece of paper. It's all about the piece of paper.
Yeah. Uh molecules, were you gonna say something? I thought I heard you say something. Nope. Now listen.
No. We have some upcoming uh he's worried he's gonna get the sign of the cross put on him. So I'm going past I'm going past the rink. And they're playing that Sam Cook song. Don't know much about history, don't know much biology, don't know much about the French I took, all the all this other stuff.
Let me tell you something. I was thinking about that. I was thinking about myself. Imagine if I use that strategy to woo somebody. Listen, if you are not Sam Cook, don't use the strategy, I am a complete dummy, dumb butt to try to woo a date.
And the reason I thought about this is because the only reason I can think that molecules is going to Mexico City so often is you have some sort of hot date down there, someone who brings something other than yellowtail to the table. Everybody thinks this. I didn't think that's a good thing. Because it's the only reason to travel to the same place. I don't think so, Jack.
Thank you, stars. Yeah. Why? I I believe that you're there because you can work anywhere. And yeah, anyone who thinks that is envious.
It's cheap, it's delicious. There's an incredible music scene. I mean the weather is perfect. Come on. So for those of you down there, he doesn't have a hot date, you can call him up.
Okay. Now uh that's right. Still single. The next the next two episodes are focused on, and we haven't uh we haven't had anyone from the museum on a long time on the museum of uh food and drink. And we have an upcoming exhibition.
So next week we're gonna have on uh Dr. Jessica Harris, who is the curator of the upcoming show African slash American Making America's table, correct? Making the nation's table. Making the nation's table. Uh and uh we're gonna have her on, but she's also gonna talk about uh High on the Hog, her Netflix documentary, and like all the books she writes, and also people might not know this personal friend to Jackie Molecules.
I mean, I've known her a long time, but you know, Jackie Molecules and Dr. Harris are tight. Also, you should ask a lot you should ask a lot of specific questions for Dr. Harris because it's very rare that we get to uh have her on because even though she does live in New York most of the time, like a lot of the time she's either in New Orleans or you know, in other places, so you know, get your questions in for her. Uh but this week we're having uh actually the new well, not new anymore.
It's been like almost like half a year or more or something like that. I lose track of time. The older you get, the more you lose track of time. But the the president of the museum of uh food and drink, Nasley Parvisi, how are you doing? Hi, Dave.
How's everything going? I love that you just did it's good. I just love that you did my annual review and don't know that I've been there for a year now. That's true. I was on the annual review.
Listen, I'm telling you, uh the older you get people, like a year is like a year is like a week and a half. I know. It's like well, especially this year. Yeah, also anyone I mean like I feel like you can do a yearly review after like three days or like after like five years. You know what I mean?
I feel like it's just not working for us. It's been four days, you're fired. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I get that. You know, people should do that more often.
I honestly like it would save a lot of problems. Yeah. For those of you out there, I feel like you kind of have lots of things taken out. Yeah, well, look, how often has it happened? Look, so Nasley, before she came to the Museum of Food and Drink, uh, was uh like okay, so she's in California now, moving back to New York, but she, you know, was uh working in the Bloomberg administration.
What was your what were you what were you running? What were you heading up at Bloomberg? Not Bloomberg, the company. Yeah. Yeah, Bloomberg, the mayor.
Um I was the commissioner for community affairs for New York City. All right. So in other words, you had to deal with a lot of people. A lot of people. Like a lot, lot of people.
So True or false. Yes. When was the last time when was the last time that when you hired someone or brought someone on, right? That you were like, this person is a hundred percent right, and then you like, oh my god, I hate this person. That doesn't happen that often, right?
Not that often. Here's the thing. I would say my talent in life is hiring. Like everyone's got a way to manage or a talent or whatever, and mine is hiring. So I don't think I have done that.
I definitely towards the last days, hired somebody who I knew I wasn't gonna like. Um, but I gotta say, I also think that's a sign of growing up is hiring people that you don't necessarily like, but who are right for the job. Um, I actually thought that was okay. Right. I don't think I've ever hired somebody who's like really failed me in the end.
Well, you've never had to hire someone and you had that little twinge because you needed someone right then. That's never happened. It's not worth it. My management style is to not manage people. And so I have sort of taken a hit both on like I'll have to do the extra work or other people will have to cover to make sure the right person's there.
There's no payoff to quickly hiring somebody. There's just not. I don't even know how we got on this. Nasley, this is not a hiring seminar. We've got to talk about the exhibit.
So why don't we talk about I'm happy to tell you? I know, I know. It's it's my fault. As usual. As usual.
Oh, do you are you hiring people right now? Mm-hmm. Yeah. All right, people. Yeah.
We are hiring folks, yeah, on the floor. We need folks on the museum floor during uh while the exhibition's going. And I think we still need uh an educator, so we're hiring for that. What about dos and educator to work with the kids? What about docenty kind of people?
Yeah. Docentie kind of people are both on a volunteer basis, and the folks who work on the museum floor are essentially going to be trained as docents as well. While making sure you don't touch the ebony kitchen. So, okay, so let's get let's get to the let's get to the exhibit. And so I'm yeah, we'll probably go kind of hard in on content next week, uh when uh Jessica's here.
Yeah, yeah. So let's go into like the mechanics of like how and John, by the way, full di full disclosure, uh when the exhibit was being made, John was one uh on the curatorial team. That's true. At Frank, you know, uh and like on the exhibitions, and I'm on the exhibitions committee. So like, you know, we're pretending that we're siloed here and we all have different jobs, but really we don't.
So um come on. So Nazi, you and John, I guess can talk about uh a little bit about the um the advisory structure. I'll just say this at the beginning. So, like for those of you that don't know, like uh I'm the founder of the museum food and drink, and that it's my was my idea, but I don't do the work to to make it happen, right? I mean, I do some work, but not the work to make it happen.
And um we've done several uh exhibits. Uh, you know, the smallest exhibit was the very first one that I did. I literally built in my wife's architecture office on American country ham. Back when no one was talking about American country ham. No one was talking about it.
Anyway, so like I was like, you know, you have to like s eat it like a prosciutto. Slice it, don't cook it, eat it like, you know, love your American country ham. I was on that train. I gotta say, I gotta say, Joe, before anyone, before anyone, Joe, people might say that I'm I was like lit, I was early to that game. I was before the game.
I wrote, I made the game. I created the game. Anyway, uh, not to toot whoop whoop my own horn. Anyways, so that was the first exhibit. Uh tiny, did it a trade show?
That's how I actually got into the food business uh for real. That's how Michael Batterberry found me and I got hired on food arts. Anyway, of course, I don't know how to start a museum, so I didn't. So the mu idea floundered, festered until Nastasi and I were like, hey, let's throw this fundraiser. Stas, best fundraiser you've ever been to in your life?
Best. Yes. Best. We know how to party. We know how to build a few.
Keep hearing about that fundraiser. And sub party. Nazi, when was the last time you were at uh when was the last time you were at a event where a whole roast ostrich was wheeled in? Ridden by the house. Uh uh.
When was the last time you were written by a cook? That's all I'll say about it. I think we know the answer to this. I mean, it's like Joust. Have you ever played the game?
I was ridden at one point by a cook. Yeah. Joust, great game. So also let me ask you another question, Stas, and this is actually what I'm most proud of. Not that we had like an amazing like all-star cast of cooks, not that, you know, people who were huge at the time, people who became huge afterwards, like, so like good choices all around.
Uh also, what was that event, Stas? Was that event late? No. No. It was during the day.
No, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, like, did it last the amount of time that it was supposed to last? Oh, yeah. Did the dishes go out on time? Yeah, yeah.
Did was anyone waiting around to eat? Was there a lot of speeches? No. No, no. People.
People. People. I don't understand what it is. Maybe rich people. Maybe rich people like to hear people talk when they're trying to have a conversation at the table.
I know that we don't like that. I know that no one I know likes speeches. If you ever need someone to speak, I know you listen. If you listen to this show, you're like, oh, Dave, he talks forever. Not at events.
At events, Stas, how fast are my speeches? So fast. So I think you were the auctioneer too, right? Oh my God. Sas, how fast was that auction?
So fast. You'd be good at that. He's very good. Uh first of all, I turn on my loudest, fastest jet wine. And I I I'm not aggressive.
No, but like, remember that time I did an auction uh at the Thanksgiving farm and uh what's her name? Lorraine Bracho was there, and I shamed her for not upping her bid once. Oh God. Yeah. While she was like at the height of Sopranos kind of thing.
I was like, come on. I was like giving her stuff anyway. I'm just gonna say, for those of you that have to give speeches at these events, snappy, fast, hit it, quit it. Snappy, fast. Yeah, hit it, quit it.
Right? Boom. Yeah. Yep. Because because listen.
Words to remember as we plan our fall events. Listen, people. No one wants to hear it. No, but not only that, you're angling to sit next to that one person that you paid all that money to sit next to, right? So you just want to have a conversation with that one person or meet someone new.
That's the only reason to pay other than to look whatever. Give money to the institution, sure. So you pay, you're the one speaking, you want to talk to that person, you don't want to get interrupted every 25 seconds. You know what I mean? And lots of alcohol.
We did that. I had to give speeches on behalf of the mayor, and I was like, I'm gonna just cut four of these paragraphs because no one cares, especially when you're not the mayor. Like the last thing they want is some like city employee giving his speech, and they're just start chatting. You're like, This is dumb. Why am I here?
I mean, I don't know, Nasley. I mean, not for nothing, but I'd rather have almost anyone other than Bloomberg give a speech. I mean, the guy is like the guy's like a desiccated sponge in terms of his uh speaking manner. I mean, he's smart, but he's hear him in Spanish. Brilliant.
I mean, oh my god, his Spanish is hilarious. I mean, like, I mean, like the whole thing, he's I'm I'm not saying anything negative about the guy. What I'm saying is is that he's a boring speaker. That's all I'm saying about him. You know what I mean?
I think he'd agree. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, on the other hand, he's a billionaire.
Oh, yeah. Why is can you tell me this is not a massive this is not a museum question, but and if you don't feel comfortable answering, why does he not have any love for Medford? I mean, I know why I for Medford? Yeah. I mean, I can see many reasons why you wouldn't have love for Medford.
This is where he's from, people. Bloomberg is not in New Yorker. Bloomford Bloomberg's from Medford Mass, where they used to have the rum, where they where Paul Revere has stopped and drank the rum and they have that event every year, blah, blah, blah. Medford. Why he why hating on it?
Um, I kind of feel the same way he does, which is, and by the way, he has certainly like given a lot to Medford, but sort of uh it's not obviously anything he makes a big deal about. But I think for all of us who grow up in Massachusetts, it's an amazing place to grow up. But uh, I'll say from my perspective, someone who grew up outside of Worcester, like I grew up knowing I could not wait to get out of there and I couldn't wait to move to New York City. And as soon as I turned 18, I moved to New York City. Um, and Mike got out of Massachusetts as soon as he turned 18 as well.
Um I think that when your success is built in New York City, you're not sort of trying to be like, let me figure out how to make Medford the world's best city. I mean, it's just it's a small town. He didn't have a choice in growing up in it. And New York is where he made a name for himself. And PS New York's got bigger problems, and that's where he decided to spend most of his money to try to sort of move the needle on some of those problems rather than Medford.
Um, but yeah, I don't I I always say this like I I love my Boston sports teams, blah, blah, blah. I love Massachusetts. I don't know that Massachusetts loves me. And I would say as a brown kid growing up in central Mass and maybe as a Jewish kid growing up in Medford. Um, I I'm not I don't want to speak for him, but I'll say when you're different, you really feel different in New England.
Yeah, I mean that probably goes anywhere, but when you're different, it's like really stark in your face. Like my town was Irish Catholic. Uh signs of the cross everywhere. Yeah. Um I mean, as as a white as a white man who used to go to Medford as a kid a lot 'cause, you know, I have family there.
Like I I've never I've never been to a place where someone assumed they could say such crazy overt racist to me about other people. That's Massachusetts. Yeah. Oh, I didn't mean to. But I I a friend of mine who's Haitian sort of said this kind of perfectly because we talked about how weird it was for both of us to grow up there and kind of also love it and kind of also hate it.
And he's they moved up there because his mom was getting a PhD at Harvard. And he goes, you know, the bus never stopped for my mom. And she would always say, At least in the South, I could get on the bus. This is obviously years ago. She goes, I have to sit on the back of the bus, but I could get on the bus.
And in Boston, the bus didn't even stop to pick me up. And that to me is kind of like a nutshell of like old Massachusetts racism. Um it's changing. I don't mean to sort of like paint a bad light, but I think anybody from New England like knows that you can be like have super liberal values and be extremely racist. Like the two are not mutually exclusive in a place like Massachusetts.
Right. But I mean I think there's like it's so different there now. First of all, the T's in this is now the Medford show. The T is there now, right? Or it's about to be.
And then the uh like the the other thing biotech has completely changed these tones. Yeah, no, I mean it's like it's like everyone's getting you know, all those uh old school like blue racists are getting priced out of their out of their out of the area, right? I mean it's all yeah. Totally. Yep.
Yeah, same with Worcester, like all of it. The T's goes from Worcester to Boston. Like I grew up next to Worcester, no one ever went into Worcester for anything. No one even worked in Worcester. Can I tell you a story about that?
Can I tell you a story about that? That's really Nastasia's story to tell. She's gonna get mad at me. I'm gonna get hit for this afterwards. Because she's not gonna tell it.
I don't know what you're gonna say. Nastasia, Nastasia has a friend of a friend who's a local reporter in Worcester. Okay, a local reporter in Worcester. Not gonna sell this person out who they are. They live in California.
But they are a local reporter in Worcester. So they would rather just like scan Twitter feeds from Worcester people than get anywhere within a thousand miles of Worcester to write about local Worcester stuff. That that's crazy. I love that. I love that.
No, that tracks to me. That makes total sense. Have you been to Worcester? I'm not trash Massachusetts. Well, I I don't think I'll ever go back.
They they closed the uh the uh armory museum, so I don't know that I'll ever go back, but you know, I mean, that was a great museum. Burned down. Well, that's one way to close it. It was metal, it all burned to the ground. Yep.
Great museum if you like armor and armory stuff. Amazing museum. Yeah. Even if you don't like it, it was an impressive thing. Yeah, I don't care about armor.
That museum was awesome. I have to say, again, last, like the like Massachusetts has like a lot of cool, weird little museums in it. You know what I'm saying? Totally. The Whaling Museum.
Yeah. Go to the Whaling Museum, people. Elizabeth Gardner. Oh, I know I've never. Marketing Museums, lots of colleges.
I've never been back. I've never been to the Gardener. Uh I've never been to the Gardener. I need to go. I tried to go last time I was in uh in Boston, but they they're time now and I could I couldn't get in.
But uh the Whaling Museum, like the best thing to do is to be my age and have gone in the m early to mid seventies when they were still like whaling, yay, and then go like when you have kids and they're like whaling boo and just see how the museum changes over time. It's kinda fun. Uh all right, so let's talk about a big thing for us. Yeah. Let's talk about like uh so we start the museum and we develop this apparatus for like talking about food as a lens through which to view culture, uh, technology, history, economics, the whole the whole gamut.
Basically, we try to view all of the aspects of you know, what it means to be a human through the lens of food and at at the same time trying to promote um learning about each other, each other writ large by, you know, breaking bread with each other, which is you know, pretty much everyone involved with the museum believes that the best way to um kind of build bridges between people is to break bread with them and talk about, you know, what we're eating, why we're eating, etcetera. This is why Nastasia hates Italian people because that's all they talk about. Eating and what else? Don't hate Italian people. Okay, all right.
But you hate that they only talk about food and food and and digestion, right? Yes. Okay. That's fair. I haven't said an unfair thing.
And not working. Yeah. They love to talk about not working. They're for it or against it. Or the northerners talk about the southerners, or both.
That too, but generally deeply against it. I'm not gonna I'm not gonna go there. I'm not gonna go there. But the uh so we developed this apparatus, and then this is the first exhibit, I guess chow to some extent, right, as well. But this is the first exhibit where we're like, okay, we're gonna hand over the apparatus of the museum to an outside um curator, uh Jessica Harris.
So I don't know whether you whether you want to talk about the process of like the advisors working with the museum or what what we want to talk about here. I'll leave it up to John and John should take that question. Oh. Yeah, John, I think you should take that question. Okay, yeah.
If you want. Um Yeah, I mean, obviously, you know, we wanted to talk about this subject that's you know, hadn't really been given much attention. It also timing-wise kind of worked out. It was the you know, 1619 project was coming out, it was 400 years of uh, you know, since uh slaves enslaved people first arrived to the Americas. So it's just a really kind of timely uh exhibition that we wanted to put together, and we realized that no one on the staff was really capable or had the expertise to be able to talk to this.
So we've uh Peter Kim and I think Dave and Catherine were able to talk uh Jessica Harris into helping us out with it. And she was really just a tremendous force to work with. She is the authority on the subject. And then with her help, we also got together a sort of advisory council of just really terrific figures in uh the field of African American culinary history, current culinary chefs, things like that. Um you want to read some of them off?
Yeah, uh Alexander Smalls, um Michael Twiddy, Adrian Cheatham, uh Pierre Cham. Who we've had on the show. Who we've had on the show, uh Eric Adjapong, I think. Carla Hall. Carla Hall, yeah.
Tanya Holland. Thank you. Yes, yeah, Tanya Holland. I mean, really just this tremendous really amazing roster of chefs and historians and just people who were involved in this world. Um, and they helped us put this story together and really realize what was important, what we needed to hit on, how to talk about all this properly, and you know, really helped put together a great exhibition.
Yeah, I mean, uh, it was funny. So I was there in the first meeting um years and years ago. So this is something we'd wanted to do fundamentally forever, uh, ever since I I knew Dr. Harris's work for obviously for a long time, but when Pierre took me on to Senegal, she was also on that trip. And I was like, uh, hey, you know, like would you ever wanna do, you know, do something with the with the museum, you know, because we had already had the idea, but we weren't going anywhere with it yet.
And she's like, Yeah, sure, you know, and so then um, you know, and then she became friends with Peter and it all kind of snowballed from there. But we were at this first meeting. So for she's gonna be on next week. But you know, for those of you that don't know Dr. Harris, she is the kind of person that pretty much everyone defers to, right?
So I couldn't imagine anyone better to have as the kind of person leading up the team that r running this uh exhibition so we we had this giant meeting uh you know near the Andas Hotel right near here in midtown and uh we get like the a lot of the advisors you're talking about people calling in but people around the table this is pre-COVID like way pre-COVID and uh just this huge table and I think because she is such a force in the you know in the community food community the black community uh and writing about in writing in teaching that she was able to kind of cement what would otherwise be an incredibly disparate group of people into a m kind of message and idea that a lot of that at least most of them could get behind. I thought it was an interesting process. Yeah. What do you think? I wasn't at that meeting but I heard good things about it was all the at all the other subsequent meetings but yeah didn't make that first one.
Yeah. Oh man I know man gotta be in the room where it happens I know I was a lowly intern at that point. Lowly in Oh how oh how you have risen. Yeah yeah Jesus art history professor. Yep.
Letting Dave know with the empty city bike crack. Uh hey people life's not linear okay so uh actually something we also haven't said on this yet uh Nasley when is the exhibition formally opening up to the public and when can everyone get tickets and where can they get tickets? Thanks, Sean. Um ticket sales start tomorrow, which is super exciting. Unless you're a MoFAD member, you're able to buy tickets starting yesterday.
Uh but ticket sales uh start tomorrow and we delayed um like so many other folks did, but this time thankfully it was only by three weeks. Uh so the public opening is February 23rd, which we are so excited about. Um it was supposed to open actually uh this week, but I think we made the right choice. We just uh it's funny, we didn't Omicron obviously hit New York City pretty hard. Um my problem was that we just don't have a lot of staff redundancy, and you know, if the person who's supposed to deliver all of our like new panels and new furniture got sick, or the carpenter who's supposed to make it, like all the work that we have to do right now is basically physical and on location.
So it made sense just just to try to build a little bit of a time buffer um to make sure that we could actually get the exhibition up in time. So uh some yeah. Let's talk about COVID. So this exhibition was supposed to open in uh March of 2020. Uh uh it was slated and we were only a couple of weeks out when the when the kind of COVID hit.
Um it was you came on I don't know, maybe I guess a year uh or like nine months after a year ago. So but yeah, but I'm trying I don't know how like nine months after the lockdown or something like this. Um but so what like obviously a lot of our listeners know about how hard it is to run a hospitality establishment during these times of COVID. Yeah uh cultural institutions have been hit obviously extremely hard. But do you want to talk about what it's like to be a small cultural institution when this kind of thing hits?
Sure. Sure. And I think, you know, I'll go on the soapbox. I think the difference between running the cultural institution and a small one versus a restaurant. I think we have a lot of the same challenges, but restaurants did not get nearly the same amount of help, nor was the aid offered to restaurants useful for how restaurants operate versus how other types of businesses or cultural institutions operate.
Because we were really saved by the PPP, not the first round. That was also geared terribly towards cultural institutions, but certainly the second round and subsequent aids. And know that you can sort of turn on the lights and there's money for sort of decades, not to kind of make light of what every institution was going through. And I think space is this really interesting thing because a lot of organizations have to deal with tens of thousands of uh square feet of space that they have to kind of still maintain even if the doors remain shut. But I I think for small institutions, um, you know, we gave up our the MoFAD lab space.
So by the time I got the uh I got the position, um, we were out of the lab space. There was no way we could afford to kind of keep paying rent on a space that was going to be closed. Um, the majority of the staff were laid off. Uh, some of them were unhelpfully rehired for six weeks, and then that money ran out that first round of PPP, and they were laid off once again or eight weeks, twelve weeks, whatever. Um, and it's just incredibly hard.
And I think part of it too is, you know, the sort of psychological impact, it's just really heartbreaking. Um, you know, we don't sort of talk about that because I think we're all sort of heartbroken in our own ways uh during these last couple of years, if you have to deal with any one of the ramifications as a business owner, as a parent, as a as an employee, what have you. Um, but I think it was really hard, you know, to some extent, uh, given everything that happened in the last two years, especially with the movement with black lives, like I'm happier that we're opening now versus then. Um, I think that the show, there's just a lot more interest in this um around any number of topics around the history and acknowledging the history of African Americans in America. Um, I think there's a lot more interest on food ways given all the amazing food programming that's sort of come up through sort of Netflix and other venues.
But um, I will say it's been unbelievably hard. I think that everyone has felt a sort of personal responsibility to keep their favorite local restaurant alive to sort of make sure that people are being fed in their communities and culturals fall to the bottom, and I get that of people sort of giving structure. Uh cultural institutions aren't necessarily deemed as necessary when push comes to shove. And when you're dealing with an emergency situation when you see lives getting really broken and more and more people unhoused and more and more people sort of with food insecurity. So yeah, it's been kind of zero fun.
And I would say if you're gonna take a nonprofit job, don't do it in the middle of a pandemic. Um, but that said, there's enough people and the staff, like I can't say enough about how amazing the staff is. Any one of them could be paid twice as much and be working somewhere else. And their dedication and their devotion to MoFad, um, to the show, to getting the show open, is is really something to behold. I feel really lucky um to have inherited the staff that I inherited.
Uh I feel really lucky. Um, they're an amazing, amazing group of people. Uh and yeah, I think for us the pivot um we made a pivot to virtual and that's actually been really was really successful and still continues to be um fairly successful but we were really quick. I think by June we started our first virtual event and I would say a lot of culturals like if we're gonna look for some silver linings have sort of said this. It didn't do a whole lot in terms of funding but you know it's not kind of how we can like stay alive um but it sort of kept us going uh and it did the other thing as an educational institution that we always think about which is access like for the first time we had we have audiences from California to Omaha to Singapore to China like joining in and I say Asia because somehow the timing of our programs worked really well in the Asian market.
Not necessarily in like the European market or anywhere else but weren't they at like at seven people at 7 a.m. Yeah. That's yeah the before work uh it's like their before work happy hour program. As uh as someone you know Nastasi and I are quite well versed in doing business in Asia and we really enjoy all of the calls right during dinner, don't we Nastasia? Oh yeah.
Or like you know if you happen to be out don't you love having to like you love when I'm at a club and I'm like I'll take it from here. Yeah first of all it's more like a it's more like a clerb and she calls up and it's like I'm like Stas, I can hear it. I can hear it. I can hear it. We're on a business meeting.
Uh so okay, so in the in the in a couple of minutes we have left before I have to start going uh speeding through Patreon questions. Why don't you run us through the exhibit? So talk about like like the structure of the exhibit and what you're gonna see, and of course, what I consider to be the gem, the the test kitchen. So obviously going back to what Jean was talking about with um with Dr. Harris and the advisors, I think there was a choice between breath or depth.
And I think Dr. Harris really felt like, don't forget again, two years ago, I would say a lot fewer people sort of cared about the subject. Dr. Harris is like a rock star these days, right? Like she was one of Time's 100 notable people, like this subject and Dr.
Harris um and all the work she's been doing for decades. Like, I think it's amazing for her to kind of like reach her moment um kind of fully 50 years into her career, right? Like that's pretty incredible to to watch. But I think that for Dr. Harris, uh, the thought was to really contextualize all this within sort of the history, like the 400 years of um the beginnings of the when enslaved people were brought over to the Americas and sort of into the now.
And this means that it's like you'll get kind of a wide understanding of the context world of the show, um, and not a ton of opportunities to sort of go super in depth, except for my favorite object. Dave and I uh each have our own, the sort of my sort of favorite sacred object is you walk in at first to our legacy quilt, which is just 406 squares, beautifully, beautifully hand stitched by the Harlem Needle Guild, um that we commissioned and designed um and had them sort of sew it. And the each square represents uh mostly people, uh, but also sometimes ingredients or organizations that really impacted um sort of black food history. And that could be anywhere from inventions to the Black Panthers uh school lunch program uh to Dr. Harris, who's obviously featured on the quilts, but folks who've had a significant contribution over the last four four centuries in African American food culinary history.
And the nice thing about that is like you can sort of, it's cool, you can have a there's a tool, uh you can use your phone to kind of scan it, because we also have a built-in uh mobile app. And you know, you sort of click on something you're interested in, and you'll see like a two-tweet, uh sort of 268-character description of what you're looking at. Um and it's a really nice chance for people to kind of get an understanding of who's on the quilt, but also an understanding, uh, an opportunity to explore that further and dive deeper. Then you go into sort of the body of the exhibition, which we sort of split up thematically. So it's agriculture, commerce, um, culinary arts, distilling, uh, brewing and distilling, uh, and again cover sort of like we focus on Golagichi agriculture, um, rice culture down in the low country.
Uh, and then what we do with exhibition is kind of start with a piece of um like Golagichi culture, which is from the 1600s, and then bring that into sort of what does that look like and what's the legacy of that farming culture today, along with other stories around agriculture, um, including like sort of gardening and sort of modern day African American farmers and gardeners and their contributions. Um, culinary arts, we go into the 18th century, um, talk about James Hemming and how he brought French food and kind of really introduced French food and other uh foods into American and kind of the American vernacular. Um, and then again, go into sort of modern day African American chefs and their contributions. Brewing and distilling, we talk about uh Uncle Narist, uh, the enslaved uh man who's taught Jack Daniels how to brew, um, how to make whiskey not how to brew, how to distill whiskey. Um easy people.
Uh and again, going to uh the modern story of Uncle Nearest, this wonderful, wonderful whiskey brand. Um I have not tasted it to make some of the best whiskey in the country. I have not tasted it. Really good. I know.
I have not tasted it. It's taste it. It's a delight. Is it like uh exactly is it taste like Jack Daniels? No, it's much better.
It's a much smoother product. You know, uh when I was young, were you and I like Jack? Were you ever taught the the ghost of Gentleman Jack? You take the Jack Daniels bottle. You take well, you take the Jack Daniels bottle and then you you you take it and you run it under hot water in the bathroom, you turn the lights off, and then you you put a a match to the thing that goes whoosh, and that's the ghost of Gentleman Jack.
Yeah, that's what we used to do. What? Yeah. Okay, that's amazing. My art professor.
No, I'm around vodka in our house, and that was it. Cool artifact in the exhibition is the original or like the first line of uh square Jack Daniels bottles. They used to be rounded and we found one that was first one that was square. Yeah. Yeah.
From like the 1890s. Yes. We also have an ideal bartender there. We do, yes. Original that was loaned to us by Greg Bone.
Yep. We uh the only climate controlled thing that we have in the exhibition, the only climate controlled display case. Yeah. All right, but we're we're running out of talk about the ebony test kitchen because I want people to know that they this like amazing thing that we have. It really is amazing.
So um the whole sort of ebony complex, business complex in Chicago was about to get knocked over by the battering ram to make way for luxury condos. And a great preservation organization, Landmarks, Illinois, put out an RFP. They pulled the kitchen out before the sort of battering ball came in and put out an RFP to any organization that wanted to essentially buy it for a dollar and refurbish it. And MoFed did it. We jumped on it.
And I think Dave or Jean cannot correct me if I'm wrong. This was done while we were kind of almost done planning for the exhibition. And it was kind of this last minute edition, but well worth it. I think everyone jumped on the opportunity to get their hands on the exhibition to get their hands on the kitchen, lovingly restored the entire kitchen, which was no easy feat. And now it's kind of the last thing that you walk through.
And you know, this is to me like a lot of people have seen the Julia Child's kitchen in the Smithsonian, like this is so cool and so sort of funky. We say it's everyone says the word psychedelic. You know, the design of it is so 60s and 70s. It's orange, it's purple, it's green. Um, it's swirly patterns all over the cabinets.
Uh it's small, uh, which is actually, I mean, for anybody who's worked in kitchens, like it's kind of an ideal-sized test kitchen. Uh, and so much, you know, in some ways the exhibition ends with this kitchen because so much of the exhibition goes through from enslavement onwards. Um, uh, so much of the story is about sort of black people sort of farming for white people, um, cooking for white people, serving white people, and you kind of end on this note of sort of post World War II, uh, where you have kind of a black publication company dedicated to providing black content for black people, and really kind of for the first time, right? Uh, and the kitchen kind of embodies that you had African American chefs in there and the food editors who were really kind of rethinking and modernizing what is black food. Um, you know, you had GIs returning back from wars, kind of having traveled to different places, you had a sort of versioning middle class um black communities who again were traveling places, bringing back ingredients, going back um to the African continent to kind of and bringing in uh ingredients and kind of playing with them anew.
And Ebony really captured a lot of that. And Ebony actually magazine captured a lot of just the histories and the stories that we tell that probably would have been lost if they hadn't so beautifully and painstakingly preserved them. So it's a really fitting end to the to the exhibition. It's an amazing space. Dr.
Harris actually was there when it was working. She, you know, would visited it on occasion, and we interviewed all of the living uh ebony editors who use the kitchen and we talked to them about it. And we had to make uh couple minor changes for just for um uh accessibility. Uh and you know, we ran it by the editors to make sure that we weren't kind of hurting what they thought was the um essence of the kitchen. We widen the entrance ways to wheelchair people.
Yeah, and it's uh it's a uh it's an amazing thing, and I don't think it's I think in the way that Julia Child's kitchen is a proxy for what she meant to kind of the explosion of kind of interest in cooking post-war uh for a certain group of people. I think the ebony test kitchen is just as important, you know, if not more than her kitchen in the in the Smithsonian and honestly just as cool. I mean, Julia Child's pegboards are cool. I'm not gonna say that Julia Child's pegboards in her kitchen aren't cool, because they are, but this kitchen is super cool. Super cool.
Something else. And it blows the no offense, James Beard House, but James Beard's Kitchen sucks. Now, one thing about James Beard's kitchen is you actually cook in it. I mean, they've changed it somewhat, but it sucks. Hooks.
Famously. Terrible. No, this is an artifact. Yeah, but this is an amazing kitchen. Uh so and it's got some cool food processors.
I don't know whether we're gonna have them out, but like all these cool like fold away. It's gonna be on display. It's not gonna be folded down. Yeah. It's got like a uh an in the wall toaster.
The in the wall toaster is pretty sweet. Uh well, I mean, I'm old enough to remember when we used to have can openers. I know. Can openers. Yeah, yeah.
Uh we got a caller? Caller, you're on the air. I think. Hello. Hello?
Hey, hello. Hey, sorry about that, guys. I never called in before. Um my question was I know I know Dave's doing a book on some moisture stuff. But just reading that inner listening to that intersection of laziness and quality episode.
Really good episode. Um an RD for a Pennsylvania-based convenience store chain. I'll let you flip a coin as to which one it is. Um we do a lot with speed ovens, like Turbochef, Mary Chef ovens. Right.
I was curious if there'd be any application to include steam into that forced air portion of it. Or if the microwave would just kind of cancel that out, or if they wouldn't interact very well. Huh. So they're so you're dealing with combination impingement microwaves. So it's like a combination of yeah.
Uh yeah, I don't have seen one with steam. I mean, look, steam, I don't know, to be honest. I mean, I'm sure that I one one of the problems would be um, I don't really, I've never really studied in depth how the recirculation works on the impingement. Uh I think they're they're just cycling it through and blasting it down. I mean, I could imagine a lot of positive effects just because keeping the humidity level at the right place, but the the a lot of what the benefit you get out of the combis are for kind of longer cooked things where you're really worried about the um keeping the moisture level of the food uh exactly where you want or keeping the wet bulb where you want so that the inside doesn't overcook while you get the outside cooked.
Uh and so because most of those impingement things are all about no, no, no. I don't know how much of a benefit you would get. Although I could imagine like very fast reheating. So, like, you know, uh reheating of like baked goods where you want to keep them moist. I could imagine a high humidity, like uh on the equivalent of a combi oven setting of like 300 Fahrenheit, like 50% to 65% steam for something like a quick bread that you want to take from frozen or refresh fast.
I could imagine like hitting it with the impingements, maybe in combination with microwave being somewhat beneficial, but I don't think it must not be enough of an application for them to to because the c the extra cost of steam is high. You know what I mean? Sure. But it's interesting because maybe it's a violent way to cook to cook food. Just thought maybe there's something interesting there.
Also, one more thing real quick. Sorry, I know we're in a gedge here. Um you said you had a family member that went to Penn State. Listen, if you're ever in the area, if you ever want to come down and check out some ice cream, I still got friends in the program. It's really an amazing thing.
So if everything levels off. Let me know. I think that'll be a lot of fun. I would love to. I mean, uh, yeah, my my grandpa was uh in the very first uh like uh radio engineers uh grad uh class out of uh Penn State in the 30s.
And so like uh yeah, I've always wanted to go to their ice cream. I want to have an ice cream off. I wanna I want to somehow like get a very rich person with a helicopter and we'll go to Cornell's ice cream and then Yukon's ice cream and then Penn State's ice cream, like bing bing bing, all in one day, and just have the have the different ice cream. Yukon, I mean, look, Penn State Ice Cream, world renowned, their ice cream program world renowned. But I mean, Yukon, the cow is right there, like literally the cow is right there.
You know what I mean? Yeah, no, I gotcha. I mean it's great, great talking to you. Thank you. Thanks a ton.
I love the show. Oh, good. Thanks, thanks for thanks for calling in. Uh Nazi, you have any opinions on ice cream. Um, you know, I'm from New England.
We eat more ice cream than per capita, I think, than anywhere else in the country. That's true. And it's fully a winter dessert. Um, yeah, I'm a fan. Although my brother and I like to split life up in half, and because we're the same age and way too competitive.
Uh he's the ice cream guy. Uh man do I love. Man do I love ice cream. I'm glad that New York has caught up on the ice cream scene. Oh, you think you think we were behind on the ice cream scene in the way that we were behind on coffee for years and years and years and years and years?
Vastly. Oh, yeah, there was nowhere to get good ice cream in New York in the 90s and even early 2000s. Like, yeah, I feel like in the last 10 years, they've caught up on ice cream. All right. Okay.
I have some full statement. But nothing like Tuscaninis, like all right. I have some friends who will argue with you. Well, that's for his okay. Okay, so listen, on the uh on your way out, because I got a blast through these Patreon questions.
I can't look I can't without asking you a food question. Tell me about a food that you want to talk about like briefly. What's like give me give me a food stuff? I'm not gonna place one on you that we've talked about before. Give me a food stuff.
Place one on me. You're asking the president of MoFat to just talk about any food. Yeah. That is what's a food. What's a food that I should be thinking about more?
Either a food that you feel is trending up right now that people are talking about or food that people should be talking about more that they're not talking about. And by the way, people, I'm putting her on the spot. I didn't tell her this beforehand. Yeah. No, I cannot believe that Pandan is not bigger than like I get it's obviously super huge in like Indonesian and Malaysian cultures and flavoring, but like I don't understand why we're still using vanilla.
Like it's great. But anything that use vanilla for to me is like, yeah. Vanilla's delicious. It's delicious. I love it.
But like Pandan to me is like equal and and so amazing. Like it's vanilla, but it's also coconut, but it's also herby and toasty and so my god. I like can never get enough of pandan. There was a time or any kind of good there was there was a time in the mid 2000s when like a lot of you know, back when uh pastry chefs were pastry chefs in restaurants were kind of more famous than they are now than current yeah, I mean you know, there was a moment where pastry chefs were becoming extremely famous. Yeah.
And Pandan was having like I it felt like it was gonna get really big, and I don't know why it didn't take off more. Um, I think one of the reasons is that most of the suppliers uh in New York, anyway, uh you're buying frozen pandan leaves, and the frozen pandan leaves are of like widely varying quality. So, so like one like a bad pandan leaf when you thaw it out has a very characteristic fishy aroma, right? Um and I I don't really know. I mean, also, like, I don't know, maybe people would enjoy it more if it was called screw pine.
Screw pine is such a good word. You know what I mean? Everyone likes greenish things, right? I don't understand, like if you're gonna hand me a green confection, I would rather have it be pandan than uh than matcha. Although I like a matcha, like a cookie, I like a matcha ice cream.
But I'd rather have a No, I know, I like matcha too, but I'm it every time I see something green, I'm like, oh, maybe pandan, and they're like, yes, matcha. I was like, I don't want a matcha croissant. I think that's like not a good flavor profile. I don't know if I want a pandemic croissant either, but why not? Yeah, I love matcha, but it's definitely not you know why not?
Too brown, too brown. You know what's really good, pandonized, pondinated. Uh make a pandon butter and then pandon shortbread. Oh, we used to do that at the SCI all the time, do pandan shortbread. But the the problem is Oh, that's amazing.
You have to pull it before it gets brown. And the reason it's good in this application is that shortbread and people pay attention. Shortbread is supposed to be blonde. It's not supposed to be really. Although everybody overcooks their shortbread because why?
Because brown butter is delicious, right? So they overcook their shortbread, but shortbread is supposed to be blonde. And pandan shortbread, especially don't brown it. You lose the effect and you kill some of the flavor. But make yourself a pandon butter and go for it.
Uh well, Nasley, thanks so much uh for coming on. I gotta rip through some Patreon questions. You can stick around if you want to. Stick around if you want. I'm just gonna have to, I'm just gonna be talking about stuff that you may or may not care about.
Uh I'll I'll go on mute. I'm in I'm always in the middle. No, nothing. All right, we could chime in anytime, you know. Uh from Biff Dit.
Oh, that's that's the second part of the show. I like that joke. Can I have that one more time? I'm gonna have one more time. Do you know that that sound is basically going in my head 24 7?
Me, by the way. Really? Anyway. Uh mute button? No, no, no, no, no.
Joe, Joe's got a uh like a uh like a rewind, a fast rewind uh sound effect, which is my other favorite sound effect is the ripping the needle off the record sound effect. Yeah. That's a good one. That's also like my life, ripping the needle off the there you go. Sound of my life.
You know who likes uh vinyl? Nastasia. That's kind of quite all right. Uh from Biff Dit. If I occasionally want to make French fries uh and store the used fatslash oil, is my move to get a solid fat like tallow or lard to fry with, solid fats are more resistant to rancidity and oxidation than any oil, right?
Technically, yes. Uh in reality, um stable fry oils are pretty stable. So my question to you is like, how much are you using and uh you know how long are you using it for? Most of the time when you're if you just don't overheat the oil, and if you after it's sufficiently cool, you strain it through uh through like a fine strainer and then uh store it in absence of light with and you store it in um so it doesn't have a lot of oxygen on the top, so like you know, back in the bottle from which it came and keep it like fairly topped up. Uh it's gonna uh last a long time.
Like I get like, I can get like if you're careful with it, I can get like four or five fries out of uh even corn oil, which is not, you know, particularly a fancy oil, right? Uh so if you like a solid fat, it is true that solid fats uh have different properties. Some people believe that they can uh make a crispier product. I don't really know whether that's true or not. I worry mainly about fats and their texture when they're cool.
French fries, since they're eaten hot, I don't really think it's a problem unless you're gonna eat cold fries for them getting that kind of waxy feeling from when they cool off. So I think you could pretty much use whatever you like the uh flavor of and not worry about it. Do not use canola or soy. As long as you do not use canola or soy, you will probably be in uh okay shape unless you have access to very expensive uh like industrial fry like modified soy oil for frying, right? Uh it's because the specific um fatty acids in canola and soy are terrible and give you that awful fishy, disgusting, rancid uh aroma.
Things like corn aren't gonna give you a bad flavor, but yeah, I mean I've I've filled my deep fat fryer with lard, I filled my deep fat fryer with butter, I filled my deep. You know how much, you know how expensive it is to fill a 40-pound deep fryer with butter? It's expensive. And it didn't last that long, to be honest. Uh lard doesn't typically last that long uh compared to I've never had tallow.
I've never filled my fryer with tallow. Crisco works like a dream tube, though. I mean, you know, uh, but I would say I wouldn't worry about it um that much. Also, you need a little bit of oil breakdown in order for the oil to work properly anyway. So you want to keep it in that optimum zone of uh fryability.
The other thing I'll say about this is that uh most of the stuff that's in oil breakdown isn't actually the free uh fatty acids or the ran, because that stuff actually evaporates, it's volatile. You smell it, it close off. Most of that stuff polymerizes, and that's kind of why your your oil kind of gets dark and kind of starts foaming. It's like all polymerized oil and surface active things. A little bit of it good, a lot of it bad.
Is that a good answer or not? Did I answer this? Good answer. All right. Uh boom.
Zach from Pittsburgh wants to know about a particular chef, whether I have any opinions on it. Zach, I do not feel comfortable giving opinions about people that I don't know personally on the on the air unless it's like wide widely known. So I'm just gonna I'm not gonna gossip about somebody else's thing. Is that a smart move, John? Smart move.
Okay. Uh Maxwell writes in hey, cooking issues team. I have a question about carbonating with a CO2 cap, uh CO2 tank and a carbicap. I can make perfect seltzer with this setup in a two-liter soda bottle, but I have basically no luck making high balls. What are your thoughts on highballs, John?
Whiskey highball? You're not a whiskey highballer. No, not really. What about you, Joe? You whiskey highball?
Okay. Yes. Yeah. Really? Yeah.
It's not my, I I can drink them, but it's not my thing. I don't think Stas's thing. I don't know about uh Jack. Yeah, no. I like them.
You like them? You know what? You know what Nastasia's favorite mixed mixed drink is? Nastasia's favorite mixed drink is champagne. You know what she likes to mix it with?
More champagne. Yeah, yeah. Listen, people, when Nastasia comes to the question. When Stasi comes over to your house, just get the nice rose bubbles. Don't get her crap though.
I think she deserves to have something that she likes, enjoys drinking. Don't you think so, Sas? That's nice, yes. Um, similar taste and stuff, yeah. Yes.
What makes something a highball, Dave? Uh I think it's like the glass, and it's just a whiskey high ball. It's like a long drink. So that's an interesting question. So, like I think most Americans make a whiskey highball, it's so basically club soda.
So it's like soda with like some salts in it, typically and whiskey, and supposedly with nothing else added. So Americans tend to use more whiskey, but like a traditional Japanese uh highball has a lot more soda water in it than an American highball does. So where most people go wrong when they're making high balls in America is because you're not adding sugar to it, if you take the high ball down to a level where the carbonation is going to be nice and bright and refreshing, the whiskey ends up losing its backbone once you get down to like four to one. So most Americans I think are closer to like two to one, three to one, whereas like some Japanese highballs can get like three to one, four to one in terms of like water to, and at that point it loses its backbone. Uh so things like Toki, which isn't like which is huge over here, the Toki highball, uh not tokey highball is huge over here.
That whiskey, I don't even think they sell it in Japan. It it's it's here for high balls. And what's interesting about it is if you rub that in your palms, it's kind of a very heavy whiskey. It's kind of not saying that they dope it with glycerin, but I'm saying it's got that heavy feeling. So it keeps its body better at higher dilutions.
So the first thing problem you're getting with carbonation is you're probably not diluting it enough. Highballs need to be fairly diluted for you to get good uh bubbles. The lower the alcohol uh content, the better your bubbles are gonna stay. Uh the other thing is, I mean, I'd have to hear your actual steps of what you're doing to to carbonate it, but super cold has to be colder than seltzer water. Uh add some glycerin.
So if you're going higher on water, but you want to maintain the structure of the drink, you need to add a little bit of glycerin to it. I know people hate that idea because they're dumb. They should just add a little glycerin to it like a little bit and that'll keep the structure as you go to a more diluted highball uh and then carbonate it three times make sure you vent in between carbonations look a single carbonation is good for water so the fact that you can make good water doesn't mean you can necessarily make a good cocktail you want to squeeze all the air out get it colder than freezing not colder than it freezes but colder than zero uh then squeeze all the air out carbonate it once twice three times a high ball right so like carbonate it three times let it rest so the first two let it blast off you can uncap them real quick the third one wait for it to completely settle and go completely clear before you unscrew it and serve it and that should give you a good highball how's that all right all right from panda pendato pendato daka what do you think am I getting that right I think so it's it's a it's a hard number of syllables for me to make it yeah uh not exactly a question would love it if we could talk a little bit about uh awamori which I hope I'm pronounced right it's the Okinawan uh distilled beverage uh I've had for the first time the past summer and loved it very challenging to get on the East Coast but would love to know more about the spirit. We need to have I need to have uh like one of my uh many experts on uh distilled beverages and we should have asked uh we should have asked this last week with uh Wandridge yeah yeah uh so I mean like so basically it is a distilled beverage from Okinawa that you know until recently was seen as kind of second fiddle like that means lower quality than uh shochu uh, you know, from you know the other islands, but now is respected and loved in its own right, which is of course different from soju. Uh, I think it goes through a single fermentation, and it's typically made with a different kind of rice.
It's made, I think most of the rice that they use in Okinawa for actually come from Thailand. But that said, I don't know a lot about it, so I hesitate to say anything. But next time I speak to an expert in this kind of thing, we'll have them we'll get you some information. Does that sound good, John? Sounds good.
All right. Uh Tim writes in, I did not drink alcohol, and shortly before the pandemic, when I moved to New York City, I fell in love with the non-alcoholic drink options at existing conditions. Well, thank you. We worked hard on them. Uh specifically the spruce mousse with champagne acid.
I've been to a range of bars and I've never been to one that made such unique drinks that truly tasted exciting like the ones uh at XCON. Well, thanks. Uh I think the one thing that we kind of did that was different at the time. I'm sure a lot of people are working on this now, is we were focusing on what makes specific styles of alcoholic drinks taste the way they do and drink the way they do. So it's not just flavor, it's mouthfeel, it's the speed at which you want to drink them, right?
What makes them them other than the alcohol? And then trying to mimic those kind of um, those kind of properties in so like so, and obviously carbonated ones, which spruce are easier because you just you you you you need to, there are fewer things to emulate. It's har much harder to emulate a shaken drink or a stirred drink. So the two ones that we can kind of emulate the feeling of are uh built drinks on rocks, where it's all about like designing a drink that has a lot of body and richness and then changes over time as it dilutes the way that an old fashioned would, or carbonated drinks, where it's easier to kind of get those flavors on because they're relatively dilute anyway, so it's easier to subtract out the effects of alcohol and reconstruct it. Use a lot of glycerin so that we can lower the sugar.
That's really the secret. Lower the sugar, put a little glycerin in, and all of a sudden it tastes more like a real adult drink than a freaking sugary soda. That's the that's the trick on that one. Uh add a little something with add a little something that has like a tea kind of flavor to give some sort of sort of like a back of the throat phenolics, some some sort of astringency, uh, and then like whatever your upfront flavor is. And so it's those combinations of thinking about what alcoholic drinks do.
That's kind of what we did. But I think a lot of people are thinking along those lines now. I don't know. Uh I don't know. I'm not in the business right now.
From Douglas L. Uh, looking at making black garlic, uh, the Noma Ferments book makes it sound like a simple problem of sustained temperature management. That I'm not writing that book, moisture management. Sorry, can't help you, Douglas. No, I'm kidding.
Uh I had I lack a rice or a slow cooker for this. You should get one of the I don't have a slow cooker, but rice cookers, if you do get a rice cooker, I would spend the extra money on the one with the induction. Why? Because the rice cooker bowl can go on your induction hob and you can saute things like onions and stuff in the thing and then put it back into your rice cooker and go. Secret trick for you.
For you, Douglas. I have the Zoji Rushi because that's just the best one that was available in the United States at the time. But I don't know. The if I had the money, I would buy one of the new super fancy rice cookers. I freaking love my rice cooker.
I love my rice cooker. I'm gonna go ahead and tell you this. I love my rice cooker. Uh okay, I use it all the time for many things. I used it last night to reheat a chili.
You know what I'm saying? Rice cooker. Um, but wondered if bagging and low-temping uh the black garlic would suffice, or would the trapped moisture cause a bacterial playground? No, you're fine. You you heat it at a high enough temperature uh that it's not gonna be a bacterial playground.
Uh when you vac it down, keep the stuff in in one layer so it heats relatively quickly in the bag. Your main problems are gonna be you're gonna be spending a lot of electricity. You've got to keep a giant bucket of water running for you know 10, 12 days, and you have to keep the stuff submerged. That's the other pain in the butt. So you're gonna have to keep it submerged, and boy is that sucker gonna want to float on you.
Uh so little trick is um you can uh either put like a bag uh I wouldn't put a bag in a bag, but you don't want that this touching the garlic necessarily. In fact, you don't, but like put weights in the bag, and then the bag will sink. And then what people who bag it do is they after they open it, they air dry it a little bit because it will be more moist because it won't have uh evaporated at all. Is that good answer? All right.
Umastasia, Nicholas Petty. The only reason he has joined the Patreon is to hear you tell the story on our new airwaves of the Ristorateur and the rat. Oh God. Uh yes. There's a restaurateur who had a restaurant on Sixth Avenue, and rats would run in outdoor seating and rats would run toward the the diners.
And he would come out running out of the front door and and kick them. Okay. Kick them across the street. But you're not Yeah, I'm not gonna say who it is. But you're also not selling it.
What like when you first told this story? Yeah, first of all, what kind of shoes was he wearing? Nice Italian wingtips. Like, I know the I know the guy. Yeah.
He's a fancy man. Mm-hmm. He's a fancy man. He wears fancy clothes. Yeah.
And uh he has fancy shoes. Mm-hmm. Right. Now, so he runs out of the restaurant. Uh proposal of nothing, right?
You guys are having a drink, standing around having a drink. He's like, excuse me, runs over, kicks the rat, like kicks the rat into a tree, correct? Yeah. Rat doesn't die right away, right? No, no.
Stunned. Rat. Stunned. Rat's like, what? Rat is used to being the one that makes other people move, not the one that like gets gets kicked, right?
Yeah. Okay. So the rat, the rat does it does a thing, like kind of like stands up like one of like a like a miniature version of the inflatable rats from the the Union Busters, right? And then and then what is this unnamed gentleman do? Uh I think he sat down and ate with us.
Didn't he kick it again? Didn't he didn't he finish it? Yeah, he tried to kick it. But the thing is, like, passerbys on the street walked past me and Mark, and they were like, Do you know that guy? And I was like, No him, he owns this place.
And the other thing is that so I want before you answer this question, I want you all to imagine what the look on his face was as he's running after the rat, right? So the question is, and I'll have Nastasi answer it in a minute. No him, he owns it. Uh the look on his face could be horror that the customers see a rat. Could be blank face, right?
Just I'm a machine, he's the terminator, right? Could be pure joy. So, of those three choices, Stas, let people think about it for a second. Which one of those three looks was on his face? Or it could like could be anger.
Anger's a fourth one. Just Terminator. Terminator mode. Oh, so dead face. I thought it was joy.
Oh. That he got to kick that out. Afterward, he was joyous. Yeah, yeah. He loved it, he loved it.
He loved it. And he will be very angry that we're telling the story again. So but we're not telling a story about a person. It's just, you know. Okay.
It's gonna be like a fairy tale that people tell the restaurateur and the rat. Yeah. By the way, as I've said many times on the on these airwaves, uh, they can change the laws, but as far as I know, when I was growing up, literally there's no illegal way. There should be, but there's no illegal way to kill a rat. You can't not kill the rat.
You can't kick a rat and not kill it. That would be animal cruelty. First of all, it is animal cruelty anyway. I don't want to hear about it. But I'm saying legally, legal technically.
Lego technically. Good to know. Yeah. Uh, because they're straight up vermin. Yep.
Yeah. Uh okay. Um, from Spirit and Matter, hey, Dave. Uh thanks for the content and the info you've shared along the way. I have a question you may know the answer to.
If I infuse fruit with liquor and then dehydrated at 145 degrees Fahrenheit, uh for 12 hours, how much alcohol loss would you experience? All I mean, like, not I mean, look, you never get rid of a hundred percent of the alcohol. I don't want to hear about it from people being like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, but like once you get rid of the moisture from everything, the alcohol goes before the moisture. So if most of the water is gone, almost all of the alcohol is gone.
It's below, it's below what you would find measurable. It is not true that boiling a soup that you add alcohol to gets rid of all the alcohol. Measurable amounts of alcohol remain. But when you're physically dehydrating something, that alcohol is pretty much gone. I mean, that's how distillation works, right?
Um Daniel Cook, I have a question on shaking. You've mentioned uh shaking technique doesn't matter so much as time shaking. Does the same hold true for cocktails made with egg whites? I imagine the whites make for a different structure that might make shaking technique matter more. My bar manager says it's good to get the inside of the shaker spinning as opposed to back and forth when you're working with eggs.
Thanks. Listen, I'm not gonna yuck on your bar manager's yum at all, but I would say, yeah. I would say that what that is is that they have developed a shaking style that suits their mode of looking cool, and that that we'll just leave it at that. What you should do is get Wasta's cocktail cocktail cube. Sell.
Those things. You know, and she would those things. Remember, Booker and Dax, the company where that's nice to have the stuff, but you know, really, whatever. The world will be just as fine without us. Uh send me an email at John at Booker and Dax.com to get your cocktail cubes.
Really, John? The important test, the important test, we make we literally make no money. We just want you to have one. Listen, uh, the important test to do is to figure out whether you want to do your dry shake beforehand or your whip shake after you've shaken. I before I ran my test before the whip shake, which is when you do a dry shake after you do your first shake with ice.
I ran my test before that was a thing. Uh most younger people like the whip shake better than the dry shake. Um, also obviously shake vigorously and use big ice and a cocktail cube, but do a test at your bar. It's a really fun test to run, to be honest. And to test two different people against each other is very fun.
Yeah, it's really fun. Uh, Nicholas, I had a question about uh um reduced uh cassava, like brown cassava, like sauces and liquids. I don't have enough information to answer that, Nicholas, so I'm gonna try to get to that uh later. Uh Chris Crandell wanted to know what I think about lofty water, which is, I guess, a water that look, it's some sort of new ant non-carbonated, carbonated bubbly stuff. So I'm gonna guess it's nitrous, but they don't tell you a lot.
I hate when people I freaking hate when people are like, we're changing the world. Then tell me how. Tell me how, right? Tell me how. Either you have a patent-pended process, in which case, tell me how, or what like they don't mention the gas they use, they don't mention anything.
They put a bunch of I'm not, again, yucking yum or trying to hurt somebody else's business. I would like to hear more about what it is they're actually doing. My guess is that they're just putting nitrous in water. And what is straight nitrous and water taste like, Stas? Uh good?
No, no, poison. It tastes like poison. Straight nitrous. Our mix tasted good, but when it's just nitrous, it has that, remember that fake, that fake sweet flavor? Oh, kind of, yeah.
Yeah. Poison. So they add flavor to it so that you don't taste that poison, and it is lightly sweet without having sugar in it, but it's a weird sweetness, like a saccharine sweetness. Yeah, I I I've served you that, John. Straight nitrous water?
No. What? Before his time. We gotta go, Dave. Listen, listen.
For those of you that want to taste what straight nitrous water tastes like, get your uh EC whipped cream maker, right? And just uh in inject it, inject, put ice, ice, and water, make sure it's real cold. And then just put whipped cream chargers in and shake real hard. Two of them. Put one in, vent it, put another one in, shake it real hard.
That's nitrous water. You can taste it, swirl it in your mouth, and it it's very sweet and weird. I find it maybe with flavor in it, it's okay. It's kind of fun to do um unsweetened lemonades with it, but it's on its own tastes somewhat poisonous. Is great with uh with uh what's it called?
Uh as a mix with CO2. So we got a couple more questions. We're not gonna get to them, but whenever we have a backlog of questions, people, we're gonna do this uh where we cut off at the end and go kind of jet wine through the stuff, right, John? Right. What are you gonna say?
I just want to get to a couple announcements real quick. Um some exciting things. So just to remind our upcoming guests, next week we have Dr. Jessica Harris, followed by Adam Di Martino, Francesco Magoya, Nick uh from Grove and Vine, Kenji Kenji, and uh James Hoffman. And then obviously join the Patreon membership.
There are great perks like the new one where uh just this morning we posted the all the classics in the field list that both Dave has mentioned and uh Matt Sarwell from Kitchen Arts and Letters. And we have an exciting uh sort of cross-promotional thing happening with Kitchen Arts and Letters where we will start tr uh offering on most books uh 20% off discount for the authors that are coming in for the show. So there will be a coupon code up on Patreon soon for High on the Hog by uh Dr. Harris. So keep an eye out for that.
Nice. Yep. I enjoy that. Yeah, all good things. Yeah.
So uh on the way out, John, what is the name of the Connecticut relish that you brought me? Blackies. Blackies. Poorly named, yeah. Poorly named.
I mean, but uh so it looks like a it's not like green, right? It's kind of like brownish, reddish green. Yeah. Look, but it looks like a standard relish in the jar, not a standard relish. No.
Not a sweet relish. No. It looks like a sweet relish. It does. Like a sweet pickle relish.
Yeah. What are your feelings on relish? I like it. I love relish. Yeah.
I think relish is good. It is. It's delicious. Yeah, yeah. Good stuff.
Yeah. Uh, I was not expecting this to be completely dead not sweet. And I have to say, enjoyable, uh, what's the what's the word I'm looking for? Enjoyable um alternative relish. Yeah.
Connecticut's got a really good style relish. Yeah. Connecticut. Go Connecticut. Go Connecticut.
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