Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you alive on Newstand Studios in Rockefeller Center in the heart of Manhattan. Joined as usual with Nastasia the Hammer Lopez in her undisclosed Heidi Hole in Stanford. How you doing, Stas? I'm good.
How are you? Doing alright, doing all right. We got uh got Joe Hazen in the booth. How you doing? I'm doing great.
How are you doing? Uh doing all right. Here's a question. There was a question uh from our special guest who I'll introduce in a minute about whether we're actually on the radio or not, which of course we aren't. Not, you know, because we're podcast, right?
But this let me Joe, when you were growing up, were you a uh were you a pirate radio guy? Were you like, did you do radio stuff or just music y like engineering stuff, or is that not your bag at all? Uh my bag was first in the studio, and then I became the head engineer of an East Village Radio, which was a radio studio in the East Village. A real radio. Real internet radio.
We started out on FM, and then we quickly got in trouble by the FCC. Yeah. My uncle was a country, he's an Italian crazy crazy Uncle Larry. Just as he's no, it's crazy Uncle Larry from Medford, okay? If that sets the picture.
Like old school Italian guy, uh, country DJ, and he almost got arrested, got his house padlocked when he was a kid because he built a big pirate station and didn't realize that the FCC was gonna come around with a triangulation antenna and like totally they have no sense of humor about this stuff. You notice that, Joe? None. None. But guess what?
Guess what rules we don't have to follow, Joe. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. FCC. Yeah.
Crap on them. Crap on them. Crap on the FCC. Uh, joined also with uh customer service uh extraordinaire agent, uh Jean Nahoul. How are you doing?
Doing great, thanks. Yeah? Yep. Yeah, he's right here in the studio with me. Yep.
So we're swapping it up. It looks like someone from Booker and Dax has to be in Connecticut at all times or the earth ends, I think is what happens. I think that's how it ends. And of course they got Jackie Molecules. Which booth are you in now?
You in some sort of DC thing? You still doing that DC thing? No, no, I'm in LA. I'm home in LA. And my first job was on AM radio.
Oh, wow. Like AM talk, or when they still tried to play music. They're like, it's stereo now. Do you have the stereo AM machine? Do was it like that?
It was no student radio 1440. We played music and we do stuff like I don't know, giveaway bowling tickets, you know. I'd be like, first caller to call in gets bowling tickets or something like that. You know what? It was cool though.
It was real radio. I think bowling is really fun for a game and a half. What about you? I two full games. Two full games.
What do you do with a half a game? I don't know, man. I used to go bowling more when I wasn't of drinking age. I'm sure if if the cocktails kept coming to the alley, I'm sure I could go for more games. But I have really fat fingers, and so they get stuck in the thumb holes.
And so like e either like the thumb hole is so big that it's like slip sliding away down the down the lane, or I get that every time it leaves my thumb and then my thumb inflates bigger and bigger, and I have to move to a bigger and bigger ball the further I go down. You know what I'm saying? Uh that's rough. I think that's where my two game max comes from. I'll watch you play forever as long as there's like, you know, I mean, I don't really like chicken tenders, but I'll eat the chicken tenders and and and you know, and some cocktails in a in a plastic glass.
You know what I'm saying? Sounds good. Yeah. Uh so before we talk about uh further inanities, let me uh introduce. We've been trying to have this guy on for, I don't know, stats.
How long? A year? He was supposed to do his birthday in December. All right, so like not a full year, but a different year. So, like, you know, in the way that they age soy sauce, it's been a year.
Yeah. Yeah. Uh yeah, we have with us uh Nicholas Coleman from Grove and Vine. He is, and this is the grossest title ever, an oleologist. All right, is that what he said?
Oleologist? It stems from the Italian word oleologo, which is like the enologo of wine becomes an enologist, so an oleologo becomes an oleologist. Right. And that term was coined by Luigi Caricato, this famous Italian olive oil expert. Yeah, well, a lot of things sound good in other languages.
But like, for instance, like one of my favorite kind of gross words, uh food description words, oleaginous. Oh, mine is mucilaginous. Oh. I think that's one grosser. Yeah, you know, we had an okra discussion a couple of weeks ago when Dr.
Jessica Harris was on. Very mucilaginous. And by the way, John, Mofad, you want to tell him uh it's opening up to the public when? Tomorrow. Ooh, African slash American.
Yeah, making the nation's table. Is giving an NPR interview right now in WNYC about the exit. I know, I know, I know. But go listen to the WN, go listen, listen, if you're listening live on Patreon, call in all of your olive oil questions to 917-410-1507. That's 917-410-1507.
And then listen to the listen to Dr. Harris afterwards, man. Afterwards. What? No, they can't, because if they they could look, they can only listen to one of us live.
They can't. And first of all, first of all, I have I have Nicholas here. I have Nick here all this whole time. We're gonna be talking about olive oil and various other unrelated things. For instance, it is my estimation, I could be totally wrong, that Nest now, I I met you through Nastasia.
Yes. Yeah. And you two bonded over your mutual hatred of story songs. Um no, we I think we bonded over our distaste of corporate middle management. When do you guys have to deal with corporate middle management?
It's a thing. Yeah, it's a thing. Like literally, both Nastasia and I are the middle management, the bottom management, and the top management of our company. We've worked our way past corporate middle management into our own thing. And and but anyway, I think that's how we bond it.
But we've known each other for many, many years. Yeah, and you also but you do hate story songs. No, you you uh let me be a people out there in podcast land, Dave Arnold in no way represents my ideas or thoughts. Okay, well, uh correct me if I'm wrong. The thing that I say about you all the time that you hate the most but is most true is that you think Dylan's way overrated.
No, Dylan is a genius and he's a living legend and he's an American hero and he's a pioneer. Well, he's also a jerk. I mean, sometimes after listening to him for a period of time, I'm like, I gotta turn this off because this guy's voice is starting to become a really obnoxious. Uh-huh. Yeah.
And that's a fair assessment of that man's voice. And mine. Uh so the um the other thing is uh that and and listen, listen, so the reason you should keep listening to get past this intro thing where we're gonna be talking about random things, is because what Nick does is like for you, basically, whoever you are, right? Travels the world and finds amazing producers of olive oil, right? Convinces them to bottle it under a under their own or his own label, but like keeps it so it's not getting bucketized into huge tankers, right?
Keeps the production like within a region he can control, and then brings them to you in their finest state. And then, but it's not just like remember, do you guys remember? First of all, way back in the day, it was like it's only it's Italian oil, it's it gotta get Italian oil. I love Italian oil. Don't get don't get bent at me, Joe.
But I love Italian oil, right? But then someone's like, oh, it's Spanish. It's the it's the it's the Nunas de Prado with the with the with the one where the the olives they squeeze themselves, and that's the one, all right. And then that got all blown out of proportion. Look, Nick's McGillah, if I'm correct, is that you're like, listen, uh, I'm gonna just search for what's delicious and interesting, and I'm gonna bottle that as fresh as humanly possible and and bring it to you regardless of what you grew up thinking was the best, right?
No one country has a monopoly on quality. It really comes down to individual producer, and if they're pruning if they've planted the right cultivar and the correct microclimate, if they're pruning the trees properly so all branches receive equal parts, sunlight and oxygen, if they're harvesting the olive at the correct moment to get the desired flavor profile, if they're getting it from tree to mill in mint condition as quickly as possible, and then if the olives are milled by an expert in a clean, modern sanitary mill and then filtered and stored correctly, and gotten in your hands fresh, then you can get great oil from around the world. But most countries, most of the oil they produce is not good and falls below the extra virgin threshold, despite the fact that so many oils are labeled extra virgin, because we live in a world of lies. We do live in a world of lies, this is true. We uh that is a very good fact.
Now, you also we'll do one more thing before we get to the stupid crap that we have to get to because that's just who we are, right? When I uh I met you at the French Fry movie. Yes. We met at Tribeca. At Tribeca, the French Fry movie A Premiere, right?
Yeah. Where uh, you know, I was in a French fry movie. You can go look it up. Uh I was their one of their science experts, along with Harold McGee. Yes.
Who you were olive oil tasting, you say with Harold McGee just uh two weeks ago. I was in uh I was selected as a judge for the Los Angeles International Olive Oil Competition, and I get flown out there, and we taste, you know, upwards of 500 oils with a panel of about 12 olive oil experts. And Harold McGee was one of the judges. And it was the first time we had tasted oils together, and uh he's the one who told me if I'm on this that it's actually gonna be videoed, despite the pack fact that people think it's audio. Right there.
So yeah, there we go. Uh he has been a trained olive oil taster for probably 11, 12 years now. He's been like uh, he took all the original training with the with the Italian folks, and then he's been on like all of those panels for years. Yeah. Now let me ask you this since you've never tasted olive oils with him.
Is there anything better than Harold McGee's thinking tasting face? I love watching the man tasting because he's like, he looks up and he's got his thinking and tasting. There's a lot of pondering. Yeah. You know, you you smell and then you think.
First, you smell the oil before you taste it. Then you analyze the smell, then you taste it, analyze the taste, and then you analyze the taste and smell in combination, because that's really important to evaluate in oil. Now, how fast do you get fatigued tasting oils? Like hams, I get fatigued very quickly. Like because of the salt content, fatigues you wicked quick.
We'll taste we'll taste about 40 to 50 oils in a day, and that'll be between 9 a.m. and about 2 p.m. And what's the standard palate cleanser? Is um sparkling water which scrubs the tongue. Uh huh.
A small thin slice of green apple. And what's been more modern in the olive oil world is um yogurt, plain Greek yogurt that helps kind of clean the palate. But you don't necessarily do it after every oil. You do it every day. Um is it a chill bani or a faye?
It's a faya. It's a fire, all right. They use it. I don't select they. Yeah.
All right. Yeah. Uh so. So where where do we start? I mean, this is a massive topic that olive oil isn't even about olive oil.
Olive oil connects all sorts of things in cultures and history and science and technology and agriculture and politics. All right. Well, this is the one. Let's keep on tasting for it. Let's keep on tasting for a minute.
So, like, one thing I notice with olive oil, especially olive oil, like that has like uh a lot of either the grass, not the buttery one so much, but the the the peppery ones and the and the ones with the kind of high grassy notes, they can taste different from sip to sip depending on how you aerate, where where it hits you. I always find that the second sip tastes way different from the first sip. So, how do you work around that when you're tasting? I don't find that. You don't like I don't find the second sip tastes way different than the size of the side.
Oh, I do all the time. Maybe it's because things like maybe it's because I need to prime my palate. Like whenever I go taste olive oils, I just disregard whatever the first sip is. So disregard it. Why?
I don't know. I think that's I think you should listen to your initial instincts and not completely disregard what's happening inside of you on a first taste. I almost always like the second sip. I I I think a second, I kind of believe in the mandatory second sip as a way to honor the producer that they've like sent it in. They've worked all year to make this oil, and to taste it only once seems a little silly.
So you can kind of like analyze it and taste it once and then taste it again as almost a verification. But if an oil tastes radically different on two sips, that's not good. Well, I think like a like for me, like a lot of times, I don't know whether maybe I'm blocked up in the first thing. I don't get a lot of like the like the the like any pepper grass thing comes through a lot more on the second sip for me than it does on the first. I don't know whether I'm just like choking it down too fast or like not doing the not doing the the the whole McGill, but I feel for me, a two-sip sitch is the only way.
I respect the two-sip sitch. Yeah. All right. Uh I think today I'm gonna try to get you on the first sip to taste the grass, the bitter, the pepper, the nuance, and and we'll we'll get there. Now, what do you think about the old school uh Italian convention that the more bitter the better because that's what they consider the like they basically feel that way?
You're miss you're mischaracterizing an entire country. It's regional. No, no, but Italian the people who used to run the the tasting thing for quality, right? Weren't they like phenolic hogs and they wanted like high phenolic, high, you know, however you pronounce that, or being awesome. It's about balance.
And some oils are too bitter relative to the grassiness or the pepperiness, and that would be an unbalanced oil. And that should get scored lower than something where the aroma and the bitterness and the pepperiness and other secondary aromas are all balanced with each other. Additionally, Italian oil, there's no such thing as Italian oil. It's hyper-regional. There's over 500 different olive cultivars.
The olives they grow in Liguria, which due to the microclimate, they harvest later are delicate and sweet and mellow. Whereas a Tuscan oil, they have to get the olives off the tree really early in the season because of frost can roll in. And those tend to be on the grassier, bitter, peppery side. So it's to judge a Ligurian oil based on that it should somehow be bitter and pepper would be like a false it would be a false relationship. So those oils are beautiful because they're sweet and mellow and like ethereal.
And when paired with a regional cuisine like pesto, allows the pine nuts, basil, and garlic to take center stage, and the oil just supports that. So you believe that uh you you are a believer, which I am not. You are a believer that that whatever is from locally probably tastes better with the local stuff. Why are you telling why are you using your words to say what I believe? No, no, I'm saying you just said the regional supporting.
You're saying the regional support thing. That's one. So you don't believe that? No, I think you can use all different oils for all different foods. Right.
And I don't think it has to be regional, but I do think the regionality is a really interesting way to learn about it because of that phrase, like kind of what grows together goes together. Especially you don't believe that you're saying. I believe that the world in today's world, you can mischaracterizing it. And both are not mutually exclusive. Remember how we just said that like facts are facts at the beginning of the show?
Anyway. It's it's it's there are many forces at play here. Okay. Okay. Which is true.
Okay. I think we want to simplify things, but it's actually more a little more nuanced than that. And that's what I think we should get into here: of how there is no one way to taste this stuff or pair this stuff, but it's uh whatever kind of piques your interest. All right. So how am I mischaracterizing you on this next statement?
Okay, go for it. Uh you do not believe in stocking your words. Okay, paraphrase back to you from when we were hanging out. You know you you should not stock different levels of oil for different different things in your house. Like, for instance, like I have an oil that I use for sauteing, and I have an oil that I use for finishing, and I'll be damned if I'm gonna pour my expensive oil into a fry pan to saute.
And you told me I was wrong. I think that's an excellent way to approach cooking olive oil, uh, using olive oil for multi-purposes in your home. Use the clean extra virgin olive oil that's more affordable for cooking, and then use the more single estate monocultivar finishing oils just raw. So you're okay with you're okay with it. Highly recommended.
All right, so economically advantageous and uh culinarily perfect. All right, so you were just double you were devil's advocating me before. I was saying that in my situation, I use the same oil to cook with that I finish with. Yeah, because you're like Mr. Olive Oil.
And that's why there are many forces at play with all these things, and it's very personal. Are you selling the uh are you selling the scrapers? Do you have a body-based olive oil? No, but I want I I have thought about um designing a sickle. Like a little one, a body scrap.
Yeah, that you could like so you could cover your body in fine olive oil. And because traditionally, olive oil was not used for food. Historically, the original use of olive oil was for skin, and people will cover their bodies in the oil, and they fatten the olive oil, lifts the impurities off the skin, and then they would skim it off and they would be clean and they would smell like whatever they infuse the oil with. So it was involved in the earliest form forms of perfumery and aromatics and and cleanliness. So you'd be a millionaire selling it to people for their because they think all the stuff they douse their bodies with it and then scrape it off.
You know what I'm saying? What does that say? Can't see. Now, you also uh are aware of my hatred of the recorder. And so you tried to bring me a cousin instrument to show me that uh it's but it's not because you blow on a recorder, and this is a real, like a real woodwind stuff, not woodwind, uh, what do you call a flute?
Uh the beauty of the flute is it's just wind. It's wind. So what have you what do you have here? So I brought, I figured I was on like a podcast slash radio show. I figured I'd bring something for interludes.
Um so I brought uh Indian bansuri flute that was made by this guy, Subhash, who's a famous concert bansuri maker in India. Describe a bansuri. A bansuri is a bamboo flute that is carved out in different keys. Um there are bass flutes, alto flutes, etc. This thing's giant though.
I mean, like in other words, like compared to uh a Western metal like orchestral flute. This so this is similar size, but it's like thicker. It's thicker, yeah. They're not the same. This is this is like Indian classical music uses this with a tabla, and you're you're flying.
I love tabla music. Give me some of this. Sounds better with Reverb. Nastasia, thoughts. I just judged it down.
What the F is going on. Now this is not that, this is not that classification, but Nastasia, what is Booker and Dax as a corporation? What's our least favorite category of music? Uh world. Correct.
No, yeah, no, no. Generically world. Like I we like music from all over the world. We hate generic world music. And you know as soon as it comes on.
Right? Yeah. I'm not saying you're doing that. I'm not saying you're playing that. Yeah, like playing a flute doesn't equal world.
No one's saying that. No one's saying that. Not one person has said that. All right. Hold on.
Uh but yes, this instrument can be found in the world in India. It looks it's very nice. It looks like it looks nicely made. It looks a lot better. You know what it looks like?
It looks like a really, you know that really when when you go, okay, for those of you that never like been to the United States when you were a small child, one of the things that happens to you is you're drug around to like all these, like at least back in the 70s. You're drug around to all these kind of like patriot slash revolutionary war sites, and they would everyone would sell you like yellow, brown, burnt up copies of the Declaration of Independence in a plastic tube and the Constitution in a tube, and uh a really crappy three-corner hat that was like made by the same people that make the Mickey Mouse hats, and an unworkable fife. And the unworkable it looks like a much nicer version of the unworkable fife. So it kind of triggers me a little bit because not one kid has ever made a decent note out of the unworkable fife. This thing has triggered you deeply.
Did you struggle with a recorder when you were a young child in class publicly? I I I wouldn't say I struggled. I instantly overblew that thing and was like, nah, no. Yeah. It requires it's about uh delicate control.
That is not me. Yeah, I am not known for my delicate control. So something that A sounds bad even in the best hands, B is so easy to overblow, and C drips spit everywhere. These are all losses. These are all losses.
What's your instrument of choice? Uh well, I I play bass. Oh, cool. Or played bass. What a sultry instrument.
Uh, you know what it was? Uh I can understand four strings. Every single one is the same interval apart. It's not like a guitar where you're like, that B string. Yeah, he's what the hell's that?
It's uh it really screws things up. Yeah, who the hell wants that? I don't play chords, I play bass. Yeah. Right.
And I also dislike guitarists who pick up basses and are like, I'm gonna play it like it's a guitar solo. Wrong. It's a bass. It's a bass. Though I'm a big fan of Jacopastorius, and he would.
Um he would uh transcribe Bach pieces, and so he would learn the different voicings of Bach. And I do think it's important as a basis to understand how to play the other melodic passages in a song to see how your bass line can fit within that in terms of counterpoint. All right. What about James Jameson playing with one finger, passed out drunk on his back in the Motown basement, some of the best songs ever? The best of the best.
Yeah. The the what do what'd they call his fingers? Something like the claw or something. They called his one his one fancy, his one. Because those guys with one finger.
You know, this like three-finger thing that Les Claypool and Flea are doing. They were not doing that. Les Claypool is a great bassist, if only he would remember what a melody is. Like he was amazing during Fizzle Fry. Like, like Primus in Fizzle Fry.
Oh my God. Yeah. Oh my God. And live, they were so they were so awesome. But I, you know, and I love Les Claypool, and I'm don't want to insult any Primus current prime like Primus people.
Those guys crawled into their own buttholes a little bit. Oh yeah. Once once uh what was it? Um Tales from the Punch Bowl came out, it was downhill from there. I don't know.
But like amazing. Just amazing. I would agree. Amazing, amazing bass. Amazing bass.
Uh so one other thing. I don't know when we're going to do it, Joe, but uh, you're here on a very auspicious day, uh, Nick. You know why? I have no idea. Because today is the first day of the cooking issues sponsorship.
We have a we have our first actual sponsor now that we've moved radio uh stations, we've moved networks from the other station Who Shall Remain Nameless. Okay, uh, to uh newsstand uh studios, and we have our first sponsor, and we're gonna play an ad. So how's this gonna work, Joe? How are we gonna do this? When do you want to do it?
But like when do you want to do it? Set it up. How do other people do it? They do it. What time during the show do they do it?
They set it up, usually like, hey, we Here's a word from our sponsor. Oh. It's mid-roll. It's mid-roll, so it should happen maybe now. Okay.
And now, a word from our sponsor, right back with Cooking Issues. This episode of Cooking Issues brought to you by Aura King Salmon, our favorite fish. Today we have Michael Fabro from Aura King to tell us more about it. Thanks, Dave. Great to be here.
And really excited to talk about Aura King salmon, uh, which we raised down in New Zealand. It's a super premium salmon that's available to professional chefs and home chefs alike. So coming from a zero waste perspective, Michael, I see that you're now using the fins for dog treats. That's right. Yeah, this is part of a a real goal we established a couple years ago about full utilization of the animal.
You know, in New Zealand, we cut uh fillets, we cut portions, we we do smoking, so you have a lot of trim. So we wanted to find a good home for that trim. So we developed the a line of pet treats. We also do uh oil as well. And we sell these under our uh brand called Omega Plus.
Uh Aura King Salmon, follow them on Instagram at Oracing Salmon. Everybody's favorite fish. And we're back. Uh by the way, uh your dog actually tried those trees, Joe. How were they?
Did the dog enjoy them? She loved them. Um she she had them a little bit this morning. And you gotta cut 'em up, you know, for a small pup. So um she didn't know what to do with the actual scales or the the the actual the actual fins itself, but she did eat the meat.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And for all you who are not Patreon subscribers yet, we have a really exciting discount coming up with Aura King Salmon that we'll talk about next week and give a discount code, but only to our Patreon members. So there's another reason to sign up.
Another reason to join. Aura King Salmon, legitimately delicious. And if you're in uh if you're in New York City, you can get they are the uh New Zealand King salmon that is at uh Russ and Daughters So if you've been to Russ and Daughters and have the New Zealand King, that's Oura King. Just a just a little FYI. All right, back to oil.
And back to oil. So uh are we still talking about fifes and music? We're back on oil, right? Yeah, we should get back on oil because music is pointless to talk about because it speaks for itself. Wow.
It does its own talking. No. But you hate talking in music. I'm just caving. That's why we gotta talk about olive oil because that's a little more mysterious, and I don't think it has the voice that it deserves.
Olive oil is fundamental and primordial to Western civilization, and yet we ignore it like we often ignore salt and we often ignore honey. And those three things, if you have those in your kitchen, you can do so much. And so if you also have flour. I'm just kidding. I'm just I'm just effing about.
All right, so before we start talking about it, let's talk about some terms so people get an idea in their head what's going on. Sure. So uh do you want to talk defects or do you want to talk about like No, first I want to talk about what olive oil is. Because it's incorrectly positioned in the supermarket where it's next to all the seed oils, like canola oil and vegetable oil and corn oil, etc. But the olive is a stone fruit related to the peach and the cherry and the plum.
And in a way, olive oil is a fresh fruit juice and really belongs in the produce section of grocery stores. Uh-huh. So you want it next to the avocado oil. Just messing with you again. It could be.
That would be more accurate than next to like seed oils where they have to add heat and chemical solvents to extract the oil. But they also do that to bad olive oil. They do. Um but good, high quality extra virgin olive oil, it must be from raw a raw fruit. And then you get into this whole defect world.
Um couple things about the olive I want to say before we start. The olive is inedible off the tree. You can't eat it. All the olives you eat have been cured to leech out this bitter acrid substance called glycosides. I've tried it.
It sucks. It's disgusting, and you will spit it out. And so there's a lot of people out there who don't like olives because they're cured, but they love olive oil. And that makes perfect sense because they're really fundamentally different products. The olive oil you take directly from the tree and immediately mill it into olive oil, ideally.
So it really is a raw fruit juice in that sense. Secondly, the olive tree never dies. From the pollen that grow from the roots, they can regenerate themselves. And that's why olive trees are many thousands of years old in certain parts of the world, and they can still produce fruit and you can still make oil from them. That said, the age of tree has nothing to do with the quality of the oil.
People who say, oh, our trees are 800 years old, so the oil's better than a 50-year-old tree is a very important thing to do. Well, I'm sure you need a certain amount of age, right? You need a certain amount of age for it to bear well, right? Olive trees get to full bearing capacity between 15 and 30 years. All right.
So the that that's the magic number, 15 to 30 years after that. What about the architectural structure of the tree and the health of the tree? So you can have old trees that are not pruned well, that aren't receiving benefits of oxygen and sunlight and get really bad oil. So never let someone tell you that the age of the tree is the key indicator of the quality of the fruit. Because unlike the vine, which grows deep and gets nutrients from different layers of bedrock, the olive tree, the roots are only a few feet underground.
So it doesn't matter how old it is. It's not getting different nutrients. So uh talk to me. What does the what does the the farming practices pre harvest in terms of how it's pruned? How does that affect the flavor of the oil?
The key determining factor of the flavor of the oil will be the olive cultivar used and the timing of the harvest. So all olives start their life green and they ripe into a deep purplish black, and the color of reflects the stage of maturation. The earlier you harvest the olives, when they're primarily that yellowish green, the less oil is gonna be in the fruit, but it's gonna be more grassy, bitter, peppery, and pungent. The later you harvest the fruit, when they're more that dark purple color, the more delicate, sweet, and ethereal the oil's going to be. And there's one is not inherently better than the other, but it depends on what flavor profile you like and what you want to pair it with.
Is one more likely to have problems, like I would guess the later it's harvested, the more likely you are to have problems. More problems with it on the tree, more problems with it in terms of it the because you're getting the oil later in its life in the fruit, the shelf life of that oil will be shorter than if you harvested that same olive a few weeks earlier. So it's not the protective, like uh the polyphenols and all that that's in the oil that's keeping it last longer. It's the fact that there's also less garbage in, or both? Both.
Now, how do they harvest these things? So they just put tarps around it, do they shake them? What do they do? There's different ways. Some can literally hand harvest, and that's one of the reasons why you prune the trees, is to keep them at a at a height that you can manage the harvest.
And they'll just use it with their fingers and put it into baskets. Other people put nets down and they use combs to comb the olives off the tree. And then other people use um shakers that grab the trunk of the tree and shake it and that falls off. And there's another method called uh super high density production, where you can take uh a certain a few olive cultivars like the Arbequina, the Koroneki, and the Arbosana, which are dwarfable, and you can plant them in hedgerows and prune them very close to the central trunk so a machine can go over the hedgerow and harvest them at an ideal moment of ripeness. But can you get good oil that way?
You can, because you can get it at the right, you can harvest it at the right time, but you don't have the diversity of flavor profiles because there's only like three cultivars that are dwarfable like that. And so people are working on dwarf stocks for a bunch of things now, or they're not? No. And it's debate, I mean, it's economically advantageous to harvest that way because one of the reasons an oil will be really expensive is the way it's harvested or the landscape is harvested at. So like in Tuscany, for example, where they have all these terraced landscapes, they can't even modernize and and use these machines to do it because they don't fit on these ledges.
So there's all these different price points you get, and it's depending on the cultivation and the and the cultivar you use and how it's harvested typically. And so uh and I just don't know that much about uh like olives as opposed to like apples. They they people are growing olives on their own rootstocks, or they're growing them on it, are they grafted like an apple? They typically there are nurseries that grow them up to about four years, and then you'll buy from a nursery and plant a four-year-old tree in your grove, and that that's gonna take better to it. Because if you plant it by seed, if there's weather issues, it could hurt the tree.
But the roots are the same variety as the tree itself. You can graft so this is interesting, you can create Frankenstein trees where you can graft a different cultivar onto a tree, and from that point forward it will be the new cultivar. Right, right. Because almost nobody grows apples on the on their own roots. Okay.
Yeah, you know what I mean? But in in olives, you can do it either way. Either way. Okay. It's very flexible.
And then some cultivars are self-pollinating and other cultivars require a pollinator. You mean like a like a like a partner olive? Exactly. So like there'll be a producer who has like every 20 rows of frantoyo he plants, he'll plant one row of pendolino. And so it's like that blend is technically a monocultivar frontoil oil, but really five percent of that is pendulino, and that's the pollinator that at a certain time of the year when there's wind and stuff, it it pollinates all the flowers, so you get a lot of fruit.
All right. And so how many pounds of olives does it take to make a bottle of the kind of oil? It depends on the cultivar. So some olives can have upwards of 20% oil in them. Some cultivars have 6% oil in them.
In that sense, some olives are used for the table. Well olives that have very low oil are typically used for the table because the yield would be so little. But some people produce oil out of those to have like hyper-rare cultivars, like the Giarafa olive in Sicily is like typically a table olive, but this one producer, Mandranova in Agrigento, will turn that into oil and have like a really rare boutique oil from that. So olives like calamata are the exception rather than the norm that are used for both table and oil? Calamata is not typically used for oil.
It's mainly the Koreneckian grease that's used for oil. Oh, a friend of mine used to make Alamada oil. Anyway, uh, do you like that or is it too pedestrian for you, the calamod? Do you like eating olives or do you only like olive oil? I like eating olives, but I don't eat olives three times a day, and I do use olive oil for three meals a day.
All right, all right. But I think the olive oil is a little more malleable than the olive. Would most oil olives make a nice high-fat table olive if they were cured or not? I don't know. I have not tasted table olives of so many cultivars because they're really reserved for oil.
Alright. I just don't know. All right. So you uh you want to start, you want to taste some oil, you want to talk like actually pull some oils out and taste some oils and talk about how to taste these oils and what we should be looking at? Yeah.
So first of all, I want to say my company, um, what I do is I chase the harvest northern and southern hemisphere. Freshness is a key component to quality, and any good, legitimate bottle of olive oil should have a harvest date on it. If there's no harvest date on a bottle and only a best before date or an expiration date, that sends a bunch of red flags to me. Secondly, you want to know the olive cultivars that are in the oil. If it just says extra virgin olive oil, product of Italy, you don't know what olives are in it.
It'd be like buying a wine that just says red wine. I do that constantly. No, you don't. And so you want to look at the olive cultivars. And then you want to know the producer.
You don't want it just from a general country, because so long as the oil's bottled and shipped out of Italy, it can say it's packed in Italy. But a lot of times those olives come from Spain, Tunisia, still doing that? They're still doing that. So a lot of olives that a lot of oils that have Italian sounding names, if you actually look on the back, the olives are from all different countries. They buy them, ship them to Italy, bottle it and ship it to North America, because we're the third largest consumer of olive oil in the world, but we don't have them in olive culture.
And we're like the dumping ground for a lot of unwanted oils from throughout the Mediterranean. We're the island of Misfit Oils. If you want to call it that, you can call it that. All right. Um by the way, can anyone who can grow olive trees make a good olive if they pay attention to what wants to grow there?
Or is it really that some places can produce better olive oils than others? The weather is such a huge factor. And so you want to be in a place that has the right exposure. For example, like hillsides are really good because you want the water to rush rapidly into the valley because the olive tree, if it gets too wet, um, it's really bad for the fruit. You want it to have to reach for nutrients and reach for water, and they thrive in these dry, arid environments.
So one of the common things people do who are trying to grow olive for the first time is they overwater them. And if you overwater it, it'll look like it's dehydrated because it's clogged up and it's not getting to the leaves and the leaves look dry, but it's actually because you're overwatering. So there's all these problems people have. But it's really is, it really comes down to it's like uh a keto, not boxing. You want to work with nature because if you've planted something incorrectly and you're fighting nature, there's nothing you can do.
You're hitting on boxers now? All right. No, I'm I'm trying to work with things. I think working working with other things is like a it's like a hack. P.S.
working with the weather. You now now with uh with the global warming, it's warm enough again to grow wine in England in Kent. And for Queen Elizabeth's uh 70th or Jubilee, they've released an English sparkling wine, which you can get on like the Queen's website. They're out of stock right now and they don't ship to the U.S., but it's an actual English sparkling wine. No one's given it a taste review.
The world is changing rapidly. Yeah, yeah. You know, she's also releasing a ketchup. I don't believe that. It is a true fact.
And she's also put a uh she wants her 70th anniversary uh prize-winning pudding. There's a contest for making the best pudding that's going to be labeled under her moniker. Yeah, she's gone into the food business. Everyone's getting in the food business. She's 95, she gets in the food business.
She's a billionaire and she's 95. Why does she have to make ketchup? Because food is maybe the only thing that really matters. All right. All right, what are we tasting?
So we're you totally eat the Queen's ketchup. I'm not a ketchup guy. What? Me neither. What?
Yeah. And in that genre of condiments, I'm more a mayo guy. I like a really well made mayo is a really special, luxurious thing. Mayo is the universal solvent. Like mayo, you need mayo.
Mayo is a way to solidify oil. Mayo's nice. You have any tricks for not having uh olive oil go bitter when you make a mayonnaise out of it? No. Okay.
You you can use a more delicate mellow oil that has uh hints of almond and sweetness to it that's not so grassy, bitter, and peppery. All right. But I am not a mayo specialist by any accounts. I love mayo. I love a mayo sear.
I love mayo. Yeah, mayo's great. Love mayo on a fry. But I also like ketchup. Yeah.
You know why? Because ketchup's good. Yeah. Good on onion rings. I love it.
I like a great onion rings. On uh bacon, egg, and cheese salt pepper ketchup is really a fundamental. Bacon, egg, and cheese, Shepard boy. Listen, speaking of uh onion rings, went to super duper weenie, John. Oh, finally.
Yeah, uh it was really, really good. Dax had no, it was really good. It was good. Yeah. I only had one.
I wasn't expecting, I wanted the kind of the whole I had the New Englander, which is split with the bacon, so that reminds me of the way we used to have them in New Haven at the Yankee Doodle back when the Yankee Doodle was a thing. But uh, and it was it was really good. But like uh Dax had the some sort of chili dog variant. He had two of them. Uh huh.
Yeah, but we had the onion rings. I thought it was quite good. It's not a regular weenie, uh, Nicholas. It's a super duper weenie. Super duper weenie.
I respect that. Yeah. All right, what do we what do we have here? What's this John's? We're gonna taste two oils.
Oh no, no, I didn't know there was all these people. Okay, well, okay. We're tasting two at once? No, we're tasting one at a time. All right, well, can we give we can we get Dave?
This is not complicated. Don't taste it yet. Oh, Jesus! You just said it was not complicated. I think you have mania.
That's not okay. So the first thing we want to do, Dave, you're gonna need that back in your hand. Yeah. Okay, jee bits. Is so first of all, these are in dark blue glasses.
You can see this on the screen. Color has no bearing on quality. A lot of people think the greener oil the better, or the grassier or the more vibrant. Well, it wouldn't we but it does have to do with when it's harvesting, it might add some characteristics to the grasses, right? Didn't you say earlier that the color I'm telling you now, finally, and f and definitively the color of the oil is not an indicator of the flavor profile or the quality.
Okay. Some really bad oils will add chlorophyll to the oil so it looks greener. Never judge an oil by the color. And that's why we taste out of these dark blue glasses because you don't want that color to have any psychological impact of the smell and taste of that oil. So at your events, you do them out of the cobalt.
Yeah, like in professional uh Los Angeles, like in the New York competition, the Los Angeles competition, it's always out of dark glasses. You're never seeing the color. Sweet. All right. Good to know.
Because I would have not thought that based on the ripening and what we were talking about earlier, so it's good that we That's the color of fruit. That does not correlate to color of oil. Ah. Because all olives start out green and ripen to a dark purplish black, but different cultivars will have different hues to them for a variety of reasons. So you could have a late harvest oil that's green as a day as long, even without chlorophyll.
You could have a later harvest coratina oil from southern Italy that will be more grassy, bitter, and peppery than an early harvest tajasca oil from Ligurio. So it's cultivated, it's it's like I was saying before, like there are many forces at play with anything that's interesting. And to say any one definitive thing can be a little silly. That said, I will definitively say that the color of the oil has no bearing on the quality. All right.
So whenever you taste, you want to put it in the palm of your hand and cup it with the other hand and swirl the oil. And the bottom palm warms the oil while the top palm traps the aromas. And after about 20 to 30 seconds, you the oil should be warm enough where the volatile aromas begin to lift off of it. And then the first thing we're gonna do is just smell it. Have you done this with Nastasia?
Yes. Really? Yeah. She could tolerate what I'm doing right now. You gotta warm it, man.
Okay. Nastasi, what do you think of this process? I respect what Nick does. This is That's not what I asked. And this is this is this is supposed to be leisurely and relaxing.
And when you taste oils, it's a time to slow down and focus on yourself because the action's happening inside of you. These are all things that I can't do. Okay, so let's smell it. Let's smell, let's smell some oil. I get freshly cut grass and herbs.
Do you get that at all? Yeah, it's kind of like a like a hexanol hit, like a like a grassy. Go for the hex. Yeah, go for always go for the hex. I love the smell of grass being cut.
Yeah, it's a childhood love of all of us. You know what I like? When you don't pick up the grass from before, and it also hits a little bit of the hay, and you get hay plus grass. Green plus brown. So it's clean.
You notice it's not waxy, it's not cr it doesn't smell like crayons, which a lot of supermarket oils will smell like. Ooh, crayons. It's not winy or vinegary, which is another thing that's called a defect. And also it doesn't smell like cured table olives. That's fussy.
That's your boy, right? Oils that smell like cured ale uh cured table olives have a defect in it called fustian. It means the olives underwent anaerobic fermentation before they were pressed. Um, none of that is in this, and that means there's all signs of quality and cleanliness of the fruit. Where's this from?
You don't want to tell me? No, of course. We uh we telegraph everything about every producer on every bottle we release. But like you want to tell me before we go? What what are we what are we tasting?
This is from Tusha Italy, which is a small pocket nestled in between the southeastern part of Tuscany, the southwestern part of Umbria, and the northeastern part of Lazio. And it's this little area called Tusha, and this is by a producer called Oleotamia, who's owned by this man named Pietro Ray in this small grove. And this is a blend of his Frantoyo and Lechino olives. Those are typical olives of Central Italy. Now, when you taste, you want to do this method called stripagio, where you take a sip of the oil and then you aerate it multiple times to create to open up the oil so you receive all aspects of the flavor profile before swallowing.
Oh trigger alert, trigger alert, mouth noises to come. And this is probably why your first sip tastes the same as your second sip. I feel like we're watching Blue Planet with David Attenborough or something. You're making like it's then I stop and then I swallow. It's grassy, herbaceous with balanced bitterness, supremely clean, hint of arugula, and rocket with a delayed elongated peppery finish.
And what causes that peppery finish, which many people think there's something wrong with oil when they taste it, is oleocanthol, which is a natural antioxidant and polyphenol found in the oil. And the more that peppery burn you feel that lingers, the higher levels of oleocanthol is in the oil. You differentiate between arugula and rocket? They're similar, they're just bitter greens. Sure.
Walk me through it. You want to put it in your a little bit in your mouth, almost like it's scaldingly hot soup, you know, when you sip it. And then I use my teeth to create um remember Banaka? Yes. It's this like aeration, an aerosol, and you want to aerate it in the mouth multiple times to unlock and open up the oil so you get all the nuances.
But is it like but you're the the sucking in, is it Hannibal Lecter? Is it or is it like everyone has their own style? Okay. What's your style, Dave? Uh someone's liver with some fava beans.
I don't know. I gotta I can only think about lector now. I was like, I'm gonna try this, people. Trigger noise. That's not me making that one.
He's trained. Trained. I just nailed it. Um good oils should linger and have secondary aromas, and you should be able to taste an oil for um a good oil you should be able to taste for like 20 minutes after you taste it. You don't know this about me, but as soon as you say the word linger now, I can only think about the cranberries.
I just have the cranberries going through my head and nothing else. You're a music freak. Well, the cranberries, they were great. Um clean, herbaceous, bitter, balanced bitterness, and a delayed elongated peppery sensation. John, you're gonna do it or not?
I just did it. Uh I didn't hear you. I did away from the mic okay. Oh, make me trigger people, but not what a guy. And this is like this flavor profile, this kind of grassy bitter peppery, is very typical of oils from central Italy and in Tuscany and Umbria and Northeast Lazio, where they mainly go grow the frantoio, Moriolo, and Lecino olives.
And they have to harvest the olives early because of frost can roll in and damage the fruit. So you have to get them off the tree and into oil. Um, usually they harvest in that area around like October 20th or so, but it depends on the weather. Whereas in Sicily, they can harvest in uh late September. Whereas in Liguria, they start harvest in November.
Yeah, I used to buy, I still do buy a lot of Sicilian oil like uh like uh Nochelara and am I am I a chump for liking that stuff? I love great clean, fresh Sicilian oil. There's Nocholara oil, you can find coratina, you can find Biancolila, Cherasuola, Giarafa, Moresca, and the very rare cultivar, the Tond Iblaya from the southeast region of Sicily, tondo coming from the word rotunda meaning round, and Iblea from the Iblea Mountains where it's grown. Sweet. Uh by the way, I you said this before, but I'm gonna highlight it, because this is the reason I was super excited to have you on.
You were the first person I know to kind of, as you say, chase the freshness. So it's not just a once a year thing when the fresh oils come in for you. It's at least twice a year and more because the season, it's like you were telling me the harvest is depending on where you are, in the northern or southern hemisphere, several months off difference, right? And so you have probably four or five different harvest months a year, right, that you can deal with. Yeah, but typically it's there's two harvests a year.
There's the northern hemisphere harvest, which happens in really October, November, and then there's the Southern Hemisphere harvest, which happens in you know, New Zealand, Australia, Chile, Argentina, South Africa, etc. Um, and that happens in like late April, May, and maybe the beginning of June. So you have almost four months. So you can chase the harvest northern and southern hemisphere and get fresh oil every six months, which is the for me, that was the only way to build a business around olive oil to have really the freshest oil at any given moment. But you're the only person I know who does that because you're not locked into a region.
You're just locked into finding the oil you like. I have the greatest breath of freedom to go where the weather is good and the harvest is good, and that has been like such a blessing for me because due to climate change, you'll have a good year somewhere, and the next year there can be no all literally no olives. So do you like make friends with someone and then you show up the next year and you're like, oh dude, you're all suck this year. Sorry, bye. No, they I have a lot of relationships with a lot of producers that I've built over a decade, and they're very transparent with me because they every producer in the world wants their oil sold in North America, specifically New York City.
And they know that we only select oils of a certain caliber. And we've had producers say, like, this year, we're not going to be able to even offer you an option. Um, because they want their oil to be outstanding for that North American market. And we airship the oil in. So, like this oil that we just tasted was bottled stateside on November 18th and sold to the public on December 1st.
That's like highly rare. So, how much has it changed in the in the intervening uh two and a half, three months? It's mellowed out. A lot? Not a lot, but you'll see in like one year's time, this thing will be a very different product.
But but so like uh part of the change is interesting and fun, like an like an old-fashioned cocktail, and then and then it gets to a point where it's not fun anymore, right? So, how long is the window of fun in change of a good olive oil? Depends on the cultivar and when it was harvested. So if you harvested Coratina olive really early, which has high levels of of antioxidants and polyphenols in it, that oil, I've had oils two years out that still tastes super fresh. But uh Arbequina oil harvested in middle season, nine months out, it's already lost its legs and is kind of flabby.
So it depends on the cultivar. It depends if it's filtered or not. A lot of people think unfiltered oil is better. Not true. You want to filter out the micro and macroscopic olive particles and sediment in the oil because what they do is they settle on the bottom and there's water in that, and that escapes and it goes, it gives an off taste in the oil called muddy sediment.
So the best producers in the world filter their olive oil. They also don't cold press their olives. They cold extract them. The cold press method where the olives um are crushed by stones and stacked on fiscally into what looks like a 100-layer lasagna and pressed is an outdated method. And the problem is the olive paste oxidizes during that time and those mats aren't always clean and you can get unwanted residue on them.
Whereas the cold extraction method, the olives run through a series of vacuums and centrifuges where they're separated by the density of the oil, the water, and the solids. And you can harvest the olives faster, it's more sanitary, it's c it's and you can get sharper oil from more ripe fruit. So a lot of the best producers cold extract the oil and they filter it before releasing it to the public. So I'm gonna ask you a question while you're pouring the second one because I don't want to run out of time. Uh, and because I had to also do some question questions, uh, which you're obviously supposed to chime in on as well.
Uh what are your thoughts on uh enzymes to liberate more olive uh oil from the from the paste? Um any of your folks use them? Ideally, you don't have to do that. If you plant the right cultivar and harvest at the right time, you don't have to do that. Some people will add water to the paste to help the during the mallexation process to help break it apart.
Uh, and they'll use like cold water to do that. So I've seen that done with great results, but uh the enzymes, it's not like yeah, one of the main uses of the enzyme that I use constantly, Pectanex Ultra SPL uh and Ultra XXL is probably in the secondary extraction after they get the first oil that you're using out, they hit hit it with a bunch of enzymes to just completely wipe out the the fruit so that everything's liberated out from it and they just you know jack the yields. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that would be like a totally different product than extraversion olive oil. Cool.
All right, so uh what am I what am I saying? Oh, sorry. Exactly. Sorry, geez, man. For those of you that can't see, I'm doing the swirly dirty.
Oh, well, now you are. You were about to just chug it. I was about to chug it because again, okay. So check this out. Now we're in Spain.
We're in the Toledo, the area of Toledo outside of Madrid. And this is a producer named Garcia de la Cruz, and this is an early harvest monocultivar piqual oil. And the piqual, it's interesting. Traditionally, this Spanish cultivar historically was harvested very late because they wanted the quantity. It's amazing how like olive oil is one of the foods that's getting much higher quality in the last couple decades, whereas so many other foods are becoming like more and more tasteless.
Typically, historically, they would harvest this really late and it would get this smell called pipi di gato, which is this like cat piss aroma that this was known for. And then they started harvesting it really early, and they started noticing that early harvest piquo olives have a distinct aroma of green tomato leaf. Ooh, I love green tomato leaves. You don't like cat pee though? Not a cat pee man?
Not in my food. Yeah, I get that. Yeah. And I love I I've distilled tomato leaves because I love them so much. Not poisonous, by the way.
That's a it's a myth, at least not in small quantities. That is a really special aroma. Smell that before before I'm so clean. Peep de gato. Now, you know, I've never been to either Toledo, Spain, or Toledo, Ohio.
Have you been to both? No. But I've been to Toledo, Spain. All right, so now let's sip this. I nailed it again.
Uh hold on. It's real burning in my throat. It might very peppery, not so bitter. It's in my throat. That's the last one.
I don't know how to do this job. Do you point your head down when you do that so it doesn't go down your windpipe? How do you do that without sucking it into your windpipe? I love I love how I love how non-plus Nick is. He just keeps on going.
So good. They're you aerate it multiple times and then you stop and then you swallow. I think you're like, Dave, I think you have mania. You're inhaling and swallowing simultaneously, which is just, of course, you're gonna choke yourself. You're choking yourself.
I like that oil a lot. I wish it wasn't in my lungs, but a lot. So much different kind of mouth noise on Mike right there. So there's just two oils, both harvested in October 2021. One of them is an action bronson collaboration we do, which is this really interesting thing that we keep developing, and we're getting the oil into a market that would otherwise never have never really known, I think about fresh high-quality olive oil.
So he's on tour right now on his NABA leather tour, and it's a U.S. tour, and they're selling the oil at the shows. Oh, nice. And it's just amazing to see at a rap concert at the merch table with the vinyl and the hoodies to see like world-class olive oil being sold and people loving it. Is he doing Italian or Spanish?
Which one's the Bronson? The Italian at the moment. Now, how hardcore was that Spanish olive oil like three months ago? It was that much more alive and dynamic. It's pretty alive and dynamic now, so says my lungs.
I think that's delicious. I would eat the hell out of that. It's great. And it's super versatile in cuisine. Yeah, but I would just pour the heck out of it on some bread.
Um is that bad? No, it's great. Highly recommended. Uh all right. Do we have any uh cust like questions?
Like I wanna I want to help anyone under I want to help you mystify this. John, what do we got? What do we got in the Discord? We got anything in the Discord? Nothing right now.
But what's the best? So, you know, if I buy one of these bottles and you know, pick you know, pay pay the price that these are worth. How do what's the best way to store these to ensure that the flavors stay as great as possible? You want to open it soon. Olive oil should be thought of like a fresh beer.
It's a race to the bottom of the bottle. So you want to open it soon after you get it and you want to use it quickly. Okay. When I open a bottle, ideally I want to use it within three months. That would really be as long as I like to go.
But for me in my home, I open a bottle and it's gone in a week. I've never had an aged beer I've loved. I've never had like a really, really old like a barley wine beer. Is a key component to the enjoyment of it. And it's a real waste of money to buy a nice bottle of olive oil and then keep it in your cabinet for a year and a half and only use it sparingly.
It's meant to be like you're meant to dose your food in oil and drag your food through puddles of oil before it goes into your mouth. What about light and heat? Light and heat both damage it. The the enemies of olive oil are light, heat, oxygen, and time. Um I think sunlight will burn through your oil super fast and destroy it probably the quickest.
And so you I that's why all our bottles are in dark glass. Do you do wine bladders for restaurants? We do uh five liter uh containers for restaurants. We supply about 40 restaurants in New York City. Including right next door, Lodi.
Yeah. Like right next door to the studio, we we supply that with olive oil. Not named after the apple, strangely. Huh. No.
Uh maybe the New Jersey town. Oh, wow. Which is not where the apple's from. Uh Misplace Enthusiasm says you might enjoy this, Nick. Hey, what are those collar things on poultry legs called?
And why? Well, in French, John, they are a a manchette, which was that a little little glove? Malchettes, yeah. Or like a little sleeve even. Malsh is a sleeve, yeah.
Yeah. And it's just there so your hands don't get uh in filth and because back in the day, you know, uh, it's not like today where it's like you grab a hold of something and you just like fist it while you carve it. It's like, you know, you had to show up at the table, you had to touch it, you had to boo-boo, and it's it's a way to not be touching the food with your hands while you're while you're doing your it's a presentation thing. It's just for show. You know, well, not just for shows, to keep your hands clean.
Do you like the little frilly things? They're old though, they've been around for hundreds of years. The little frilly things? Okay. So have you ever watched a cartoon of a turkey coming out of an oven and then when it comes to table, it's got little like chef hats that are cut up?
Yes. Yeah, those. We have a caller. Caller, you're on the air. Hey, how's it going, y'all?
Uh this is Josh from Norfolk here. Um I've got a non-olve oil related question. This discussion on oil has all been really interesting. So thanks for that. Um I want to do quails, but prepared sort of in the style of wings.
I'm considering like batch cocking them and then frying them whole and tossing them. I wonder if you got some advice on best practice to do that. Okay. Here's what you want to do. First of all, I need to know when you say in the manner of wings, do you mean from a size standpoint or from a crispy standpoint?
How boneless do you want them? Because like, well, you know, you can totally inside out bone a quail. It is a biznagge to do it. But you can inside out bone a quail so that all that's left are the little leg bones and you can hold on to it, and then the whole quail becomes boneless. Uh so it it all depends on what you want to do, but you can spatchcock it and then rip out the big bones.
If you do do that, please roast off those bones and use them to reinforce another poultry stock so that you have that uh quail stock, which you're gonna thank me for later. Uh what I would do is I would low temp the quails uh uh, you know, at um get the sticky bones out so they don't go through the bag. You can even ziplock it if you don't have that. And then uh I would do it somewhere in the area between 55 and 57 just to get it up for like I would do it like 45 minutes or something like this. Um because you know, quail's pretty tender as is, except for the legs, you're not gonna do it long enough to comfy the legs out because nobody does that.
And then I would cool it all the way down and then fry it. We use I used to do that where where I would inside out bone it, leave it whole, low temp cook it, then get this. I would put uh a 30 uh 62 degree soft poached egg inside the quail, then batter the whole quail and deep fry it, and then you'd hold it by the legs and go plow, and the the egg would just go all over the fried outside of the, and that's a joyous thing. I like saucing the bird with the egg yolk. Yeah, yeah.
Saucing the bird with the egg yolk is a thing, yeah. But the hard part is shimmying the egg into the into the quail's butt before you uh I just want to mention the frying component, because you mentioned you wanted to fry it. Um you can fry an extra virgin olive oil. The smoke point of extra extra virgin olive oil is 400 degrees Fahrenheit, and you can fry a lot of things around 350, 365 degrees Fahrenheit. Also, also, yeah, no one actually brings that this is a good point.
Everyone talks about the smoke oil. Stop paying attention to the smoke oil. I mean the smoke point. Stop paying attention to it. If you're heating an oil high enough to hit those kind of smoke points, you have another problem.
And also, like a lot of oils, the the like smoke point is listed, but it it's it's not usually the relevant phenomenon. Most of the off-tastes in frying don't come because of smoke point. It comes because uh of the particular, like for instance, canola oil has uh um uh linolinolinic, not linoleic, linolinic acid in it, which is a trash can garbage, rancid fish smell, and it breaks down and causes that aroma while you're cooking. So it's like please, like anytime someone tells you what the first thing you need to worry about is a smoke point in a frying recipe, just it's not true. It's just not the case.
Uh I mean, it's if you're gonna abuse the hell out of your oil, then you need something with a high smoke point because you're gonna abuse the hell out of it. But it unless you're gonna abuse the t to death, smoke point's not the primary, in my opinion. I and I love like I'm when I make eggplant parm, like for me, that eggplant must be fried in extravagant olive oil. I I don't see what the alternative is to give you an authentic eggplant palm. Ah, all right.
So, so Patreon people, I'm gonna give you your time next week. I'm gonna get to the questions I didn't get to. So good to have uh Nicholas Coleman from Grove and Vine. Give him what's your website? www.grove and vine.com.
Chase that oil! Cooking issues.
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