Hello and welcome to Cookie Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live from the heart of Manhattan, Rockefeller Center, New York City. New Stan Studios. Joined as usual with John over here in front of me. How you doing?
Doing great things? Yeah? Yeah? Yeah? Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. Nahulin it up strong. Yeah, as always. Yeah. Trying to.
Yeah. Chefing it. Yeah. Doing it, you know. Yeah, yeah.
Grooving, moving. Yeah. Loving the busy summer. It's great. New York City this summer time.
Oh my God. And we'll talk about it later. Yeah. Uh got uh Joe Hazen rocking the panels. How you doing?
I'm doing well, man. Yeah. Looking good over here. Yeah, I'm um I'm soupy, real soupy today. Yeah.
Saw some guys moving a refrigerator down the street and I was like, I was biking past them. I was feeling like all soupy, and I'm like, that's real soup right there. Put that soup in the fridge when you're done. Oh. Nasty.
You know how like there's these hills in Manhattan? And they're like on that big hand truck and they're wheeling this giant rich person fridge up the street and it's like up a hill, but the sidewalk's all F so they can't be on the sidewalk, so they're in the street, so there's a truck behind them laying on the horn. Uh-huh. And they're just staring at the ground with sweat dripping off their faces. Yeah, baby.
It's very musical. Yeah, that's why we live here. Yeah. You know, I have to say, nothing's more convenient than New York City. Am I right?
Totally. New York City is a great place if you have a lot of money and don't have to do anything. Yeah. Yeah. Very good way of putting it.
Yeah. Very accurate. Yeah. Uh coming to us from, I believe, Stanford, Connecticut, on the coastline of the uh sound. We got Nastasia the Hammer Lopez.
How you doing? I'm good. How are you? Doing well. Doing well.
And it's not it's not very windy, so you must be okay, right? Jack and I are trading places when, Jack? Like next week? The week after. Uh yeah, like the 21st or twenty second.
We'll be trading places. So which one of you is Nick Nolte? And which one of you is Eddie Murphy? Oh god, I guess. Oh.
I don't do blackface. Wow. So wow. So you're saying that Jack does. That's what's messed up about that.
Wow. You're also not technically white. So that makes it fine, is what you're saying. Both of you are saying some really effed up stuff. So just gonna leave it at leave it at that.
And uh Jackie Molecules, uh how's uh how's Los Angeles doing? It's great. Yeah. It is very good. I uh very quickly I'll say I I very recently with my girlfriend went to go see our friend Austin Hennley at Cato Restaurant.
Um I interviewed him for a story I'm doing on NA drinks, and went and had the tasting menu at Cato with his NA pairing, which was really, really, really good. He's doing some super interesting things there. Now I know we discussed with him on the show, I think on the show, we discussed with Austin, wasn't he on the show? Didn't we discuss with him? Maybe yeah, yeah.
Yeah. And uh briefly. Yeah, yeah. And uh and I asked him why it was called Kato. Why is it called Kato again?
Oh, I couldn't tell you that. But it's not named after the racist character from the Pink Panther series. And as a follow-up, has Peter Sellers ever been in a movie that wasn't like completely crazy racist. I'm in Washington being there, wasn't it? I'm sure it was.
I'm sure if we went and we rewatched it, there'd be some crazy racism in it. I'm pretty sure. Yeah. It was the 70s. I also can't remember Strange Love, whether there was anything like out of the ordinary and strange love.
Anyway, and uh in the upper upper left left, Quinn, how you doing? Hey, I'm good. All right, so since we've last been uh all together, it's been Canada Day. Which which when's Canada Day, Quinn? It's uh July 1st.
They're like, when can we put a day that's like a little bit before the American one? Just a little bit, but kind of on the same day. Is that what happened? Is that how Canada Day started? I mean, I think there was like when we asked nicely, like, hey Britain, can we just like be regular?
And they're like, sure. They're like, yeah, that's fine. Yeah. They're like, please. All right.
Yeah. And you and you made it, you arranged it so it would be like three days before our thing, so you could be like, well, our our crap comes first. I guess. And do you have fireworks on Canada Day? Uh yeah, usually.
I don't think there were many this year because of wildfires. Hmm. Hmm. I see well in my area. But they have wildfires over on your side too.
Is all of Canada on fire right now? I think less so than a few weeks ago. Yeah. But yeah. Yeah.
The smoke made it all the way over to Europe. I swear. I was I just flew back from Copenhagen like two days ago. I flew back on Sunday. Uh more on that in a minute.
Uh, but uh I could swear I saw like a tinge in the sky when I was flying from your from your fire still. Yeah. Well, you know, uh, you gotta love a worldwide climate catastrophe. Uh all right. So now is the time, since it is a no tangent Tuesday, when we discuss anything that's happened over the past week or so that was interesting from a food perspective.
Anything? What do you guys got? Nothing. Man, nothing. Yeah.
Well, you know, I had the the NA drinks at Cato. And one thing that Austin was doing that was super, super interesting was steeping um NA wine in kombu to add body to it. How was it was really good. It was I'm I don't generally like NA drinks. I think they usually just taste like juice or kombucha.
But um using some really interesting things. Can I ask you uh shout out the bartender? Can I ask you a separate question? Do you like kombucha? Uh yeah, I do.
But like if I'm having a pairing with a meal, I don't really I'm not craving kombucha. You know? Yeah. Uh I generally and I think it's because of my uh honestly it's because of my age. But like uh in general, I like v like vinegary things on their own, but with food I generally don't want like a vinegary beverage and most kombucha shade like pretty hard on the acetic side.
And uh yeah, I just don't necessarily want that with my food very much. What do you mean? That's what I feel. What if you made kombucha with combu to get the same effect? I get your joke.
Combubucha, but uh I don't know, it's just not my thing. It's not not what I you know, when I want to add body to something, I just cheat and add glycerin, 'cause you know, that's me. Glycerin. Straight up. You know what I mean?
Like, or like you know, I mean, like, I mean, the thing is you'd have to choose a very particular you know how like some wines have like a seaweed hit to them, right? So you could choose a wine like that to hit up, but m most of the time I don't necessarily want a big old seaweed kelpie hit on my you didn't really taste that though, weirdly. Uh it didn't the t the flavor didn't come through as much as sort of just like the body, if that makes sense. You ever walk down the beach, Jack, and just pick up a piece of kelp and go all the time. Yeah.
I mean, I actually have, but uh you know. Anyway, uh I mean I like kelp's a good product, man. In fact, I have some kelp for us to taste in a minute. You know, those of us that are in the studio, we got some some kelp action. Uh I'm sorry, Dave.
I can't allow that. Wow. Yeah, we got the we got the 2001 Space Odyssey Hal. What was it? Hal, what, 9,000?
I don't remember. Yeah. Yeah. Oh my oh my god, oh my god. We gotta get Harold McGee, who goes by Hal to a lot of people.
Uh-huh. Right? I don't call him Hal. Stas, do you call him Hal? No, no.
No, me either. But like I think you need to, if you're over 60, you call him Hal. If you're over 60 and you're actually a friend of his, you call him Hal. If you're under 60 and you're and you're a friend of his, you think you call him Harold. You know what I mean?
You think that's how it works? Is that what you're gonna do when you're turning 60? No, no, no. The age keeps going. Okay.
The age just keeps shifting up. Gotcha. I think. You know what I mean? It's one of those things where, like, if you were born before this day, must be this high to ride this line, or you know, whatever, whatever it is.
Oh. Speaking of which, I was in Copenhagen for the past uh couple of days. A lot of food crap to report. You want to hear some have you ever been to Copenhagen? No, I have not.
Any of you other fools ever been to Copenhagen? No. All right. No, no. So first thing, Danish is a weird language.
So I texted Nils, Norrin, you know, and I was like, Nils, I said, what the hell's wrong with these people? They sound they sound kind of bananas. And he's like, yeah, growing up we used to make fun of them because they all sound like they're talking with porridge in their mouth. So you can't pronounce anything like either like it's Swedish or like it's German. It's something in between.
So I'm not even gonna bother trying to pronounce the Danish words. You know what I'm saying? So the Danish national dish is this thing with it's it's like S it's like it it looks like it's sm like s'more broad if you were if you were English, but it's like smrbirt or something like that. You know what I mean? Like anyway, and it's like this buttered, like dense rye bread with like stuff on, right?
And like their big thing is like lunch, right? So you get it at lunch at like with beer and like a little schnapps glass, right? So there's this place we went for that called like I'm not gonna get the I don't know whether they pronounce it schnapps like the German or like snaps. I don't know what the heck the Danish do, but the place is called Tolden Schnapps, like customs and schnapps. And you go in there and you order your your three things, right?
Then I got the I started with the herring, because of course I started with herring, right? And then I moved on to their the crispy pork, which I'm gonna talk about in a minute because they have a genius the Danes have a genius crispy pork situation, which I think I can't believe that A, I didn't already know about it, and B that not everyone in the world has taken this on. Like for any of you like uh Italian adjacent folks out there, this would be a genius way to do a Porchetta. Like this should be the way Porquetta is done. All right?
So Quinn, take note. Ready? Okay. Take are you taking note? In my mind.
Okay. So uh what they do is they t they take a uh pork chop, they do like a pork chop, loin chop, right? Not the tenderloin, please, right? And then uh they take the bone off. Then they instead of doing like pricking the skin or scoring it like with an X hatch pattern, they cut long strips into the skin down into the fat at the interval they're gonna slice it later.
Are you with me on the genius yet? Yeah. So they basically pre-cut it, not into the meat, but like all the way down three quarters through the fat. We're getting fish bowl. Hey guys.
Yeah. Yeah, you you cut you cut down through the fat, uh, all almost to the meat, and then you salt the bee Jesus out of it, right? And then sometimes people put like herbs in between the slices and stuff. Then you put it in a dish over liquid and you roast it like you're doing like a roast pork, and then at the end you crank it so that the skin gets all crackly and crispy and delicious, right? Mm-hmm.
And then when you take it out, you just slice right into the lines that you pre-cut in the skin. You're not going through anything crispy with your knife, so you get perfect slices with a perfect layer of crackling over the whole thing. Is that not the smartest thing of all time? Yeah. Clever.
Amazing. Yeah. So Quinn, when are you gonna make I know you know this is the kind of thing you like to do? When are you gonna make a porchetta and do the do the Danish porchetta? Do Danish cut porchetta.
Uh I'll put it on the list. Uh I'm sorry. That's gotta get bumped way up on the list. I mean I mean, first of all, is there any living person who eats pork who doesn't like porchetta? No, but no.
And is there anyone who doesn't kind of wish that every slice had the magic, the magic skin on it? I'm just saying. Yeah. Yeah. So Quinn, I mean, like, I don't know.
This seems to me to be this needs to get bumped up, you know. You know, I think above lactic acid gel uh la lactic uh lactose gelato. I think this needs to get bumped above lactose gelato. I mean the lactose gelato is is done. Okay.
How was the lactose gelato? No, I'm not pure lactose. I mean for those of you that don't know, Quinn's obsessed with using lactose as an actual sweetener. He's like, I'm not allergic to it, so I'm just gonna jack this with as much lactose as a human literally, literally as much lactose as is humanly possible, right? In into his so you think you could add more without it?
Because like people don't put lactose into people don't add, in fact, people like there's a maximum amount of milk powder, dry milk powder that people will put in to dope up the solids of an ice cream because they're worried that too much lactose is gonna cause uh sanding crystallization. Uh so they don't do it. But Quinn is like, I'm gonna push the lactose as far as I can go. And can you tell any difference? Are you like, man, I wish everything on earth was sweetened with lactose?
No, not everything, but I think it's a good flavor. I also again vehemently disagree with every reported sweetness number for lactose. But every sweetness number ever reported for anything is wrong. Didn't we go through this on the air a couple times ago? I know, but like every single thing is wrong.
Like they're all wrong. Unless somebody said we did a test of all of the sweeteners at the concentrations of interest in the vehicle of interest at the temperature of interest. That's the only time it makes sense. Right? So like, because the relative sweetness, first of all, the absolute sweetness of sucrose changes with temperature.
And the relative sweetness of sucrose to other things changes also as temperature and also their absolute sweetness changes as a function of temperature. So it's like, and concentration. So the the more concentration there is on a sugar, right, the closer it gets in sweetness to sucrose on a concentration percentage basis. So in minor amounts, I'm sure lact the lactose numbers are probably correct. And in huge amounts that are over way over and above any sort of number that any normal person puts into their ice cream, then I'm sure the numbers are completely wrong.
I think they're rolling in trace members well, though. You know. Report back, man. Report back. You gotta report back.
Everyone else has worked on other problems getting rid of the lactose, and Quinn's like, I'll buy your lactose. You get rid of your lactose, I'll take it. I'll take it by the truckload. Yeah. Yeah.
Lactose, man. Hey, speaking of lactose, I discovered something a little disconcerting before I get back to uh Danish McDaneland. Uh the lactic acid powder that you buy that I've been recommending to people to buy for years is garbage. Uh it is not pure. So, and here's what's uh fun.
You want to know the fun fact? Yeah. The fun fact is is that it's not pure, it's not impure by a known amount. So, like the lactic acid powder that Modernist Pantry sells, I think is a higher purity than the one that you get at Calustian's. The one at Calustian's, because I was doing acid percentage tests, like, you know, I was making like little like uh uh, you know, water, sugar acid mixes for Dax to test out, and I couldn't get any reasonable lactic acid percentage to be equi, equis sour, right, to uh, you know, tartaric, malic, citric on their own, right?
And I was like, what the heck's going on? And then it struck me. Lactic acid is not is not going to form crystals, right? But whenever you make champagne acid, which is a mixture of tartaric acid and lactic acid, it always forms crystals in the in the acid in the fridge over time and causes problems when you're carbonating, right? And what happens is they jack it with calcium lactate and they don't tell you how much.
So until people start writing, I'm gonna call modernist pantry, Lord Quinn, text them, tell them to write the per the actual percentage of what their product of lactic acid is. Because otherwise, I'm gonna have to recommend that everyone go buy the liquid lac lactic acid, which is what I now have to do. Lactic acid eighty, eighty-eight percent. But what pain in the butt, what a pain in the butt. You know what I'm saying?
Yeah. It's like, uh. Just sucks. Yeah. And why calcium lactate?
If you have to put some sort of filler in it, why not just like I don't know, maltodextrin or something? I don't know, ridiculous. Ridiculous. Absurd. Jerks.
It's a problem we can all relate to. Yeah. Yeah. Well, anyone that does acid adjusting. Yeah.
If anyone on earth can relate to it, it's our audience. You know what I'm saying? That's true. Uh, yeah. All right.
So also I tried their, get this. They call this a French hot dog in in Copenhagen. So they take this kind of I'm gonna throw some scare quotes around it, baguette, right? With a hole in it, right? It's the most suggestive thing in the world.
So like you ask for a French hot dog, and they're like, you know, and you and the their hot dogs are like super longs. They're like super long hot dogs. You know what I mean? Not like a regular ballpark franc, super longs. And they're like, I'm like, they're like, what what sauce do you want?
I'm like, I don't know. How am I supposed to take it? And they're like, locals get the mayo. And I'm like, okay. Yeah.
So they take this freaking baguette and they shove the the the sauce in and they go. And then they take the hot dog and they go sploo right into it, and the mayonnaise until the mayonnaise comes out of the freaking hole next to the hot dog. And I'm like, really? Really? Really?
That's my least favorite part about that style of hot dog is the condiment just like comes out of that whole constantly. There's nowhere for it to like overflow to it. Just becomes really messy. Yeah. I mean, I don't know why they don't have like two halves and they're like and you can go boom, like like like you're putting it in a sheath, like bang.
So it's just baguette, like just baguette, because somebody commented on Instagram, yo, what's up with uh that whole tip? No meat. I mean, no sauce. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Anyway. Uh what else? What else to have there? Oh, yeah, I went to NOMA.
Yeah. Fancy. Yeah, super fancy. So I went to NOMA 2.0. Uh we were first in, last out.
So we showed up a little before six and didn't roll out of that place until midnight. And uh I have to say, I went in kind of wanting to be a little bit of a hater. And it was a fantastic, fantastic, crazy fantastic meal. It was nuts. That was going to be my off-air question for you.
Was what's your thought? But it sounds like it was very, very good. Yeah. Well, so here's the thing. Now, Jen took pictures of every course.
I didn't, because I'm not pulling my camera out at a freaking at a restaurant, right? But she took pictures of every course. Is it okay for me to post a picture of all the courses, you think? Of course. Yeah?
Yeah, why not? I don't know. So maybe I'll do that. I'll post a picture of all of all the courses. But I mean, I've been to plenty of tasting menus in my life, and I've been to plenty of like kind of over-the-top places, but I haven't been to one of the places where the staff to guess ratio is basically one to one.
Oh wow. Yeah. They have like 80 something people that work there, you know, and they do 80 covers. Or 80-something covers. So when you go there, it's on the very, it's the very edge of like it's like on the water, kind of with like a big garden thing in in Copenhagen, northern part of Copenhagen.
And uh you come into a greenhouse and you sit and they give you a pear, apple, quince, cider to sit, and you're sitting in the greenhouse while you get ready. When you go to the bathroom, a person takes because I've been walking around all day. Like well, I've been walking all day. So I'm gross as hell. I'm like, I want to go freshen up.
So I go to the bathroom, and the person who takes me to the bathroom is waiting for me when I leave. And I was like, oh Jesus! Oh my god. So like uh like certain like of this high high level service stuff kind of gets to me, you know what I mean? And then when they took us into the dining room, the entire, and of course it's all beautiful because this was built for Noma.
No between them. When you go in, and of course the kitchen's crazy beautiful. Although I I'm I heard that the hoods don't work as well as they want. So they do frying in a different room because the hoods are non-visually invasive, so they're up on the ceiling. Oh, okay.
And the extraction, they don't like the extraction enough to do uh frying up there. Yeah, yeah. So you go in and then the entire staff is lined up when you go in welcoming you. And again, I'm like, oh my God. You know what I mean?
Yeah. But when you sit, man, and like we did the, of course, we did the wine pairing, and they, of course, they just have crazy bananas, crazy banana stuff. Like to give you some uh ideas, like um, they pick all these beach roses and then they put like a gelee into the beach rose that uh has raspberry that they get there. The actual combination, and and they take remove all of the thorns and everything in it so that you just pick up the rose and and eat the whole thing, like with the with the leaves, you grab it like it's a strawberry, like a strawberry, and you eat it. But it's not like a like a rose from the supermarket.
It's like if you ever picked up a beach rose, it'll like rip your fingers apart because of all the thorns. So they strip it all off. Kind of tasted like Ispahan, actually. You know, that flavor, Pierre May's like Ispahan, which is lychee, raspberry, and rose. It's like one of his famous flavors.
It's delicious, frankly, ispahan. So I was like super psyched. Stuff like that. They they cooked a pine cone for like eight billion years until you could eat the pine cone. You know what I mean?
Yeah. And they served that on the end of like perfect like tree foil, like um pine like thing. They had a lot of pine actually. They did a uh a an early pine needle butter to like di and they did uh locally grown bamboo, which is real thin, that they shaved off to make look like asparagus, but they put the outside of the bamboo as a handle, and you dip it into this like spring pine needle butter. I was like, it was real good.
It's a real real good. You know what I mean? Like when they they did a uh a course which was uh you know, earmuffs, but they like ramp leaves, pickled ramp leaves, which they've been doing for years, but on the inside they had some uh uh barley miso that they had made with barley, and they bring out the big, you know, uh koji, rather, not miso. Uh they bring out the big like barley koji mat that looks like a quilt and they have it in front of you while you're eating, and you know, and the thing that they skewer the pine cone on, they shave off the they shave off the bark on the one section so it's like a perfect toothpick, and then they angle the end perfectly so that it's like there's there's no friction or anything. Everything is all perfect.
His little flower soup. We had his flower soup, we had his meringue basket, all the stuff. And uh Kevin, who runs who you know, is the kind of new Ariel, I think he has the same position that Ariel and Zilber had. Okay. Uh with the fermentation lab, gave us a full tour afterwards.
Oh my god. That's probably really cool. Oh, yeah. You know what? I was like, like I said, I went in and wanted to be like, how good could it be?
And I was like, it's really, really, really good. You know, but I understand also the idea that it's not sustainable because you're like, is this end times? Is this what it was like to be like an emperor? Or is this what it was like to be one of those gilded age weasels or like somebody from succession that can just have whatever they want whenever they want it? It's like it's because it's not reasonable to have that many people working on the problem of your dinner.
You know what I mean? Yeah. I mean, in life. I mean, I was super happy to be there. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, blessed to be there. But it was like, you know, anyway. So I brought some of their their uh Noma Project stuff to uh exciting. Yeah. Let's do it.
Let's taste it up. All right. So this is uh, this is their and I'll I have uh I brought stuff I have copies of, so you can take these uh with you to the restaurant, John. Yeah. So this is uh Dashi uh RDX, and so this is a mixture of uh, what is it?
It's kambu, tell your boy Austin, our boy us. Uh kombu dashi, katsobushi, sake, uh, and like their mushroom garum that is then kind of reduced out. And I'm also just tasting it for the first time. So Joe, you want a little taste of this here? Sure.
Yeah. I don't know how much you want. We got more if you need. But I think they're starting to sell this. I think this is the kind of stuff they're gonna be working on when they shut down the restaurant proper.
Yeah. You know, so uh you guys taste first, tell me what you think. It's real syrupy, it's got like the consistency of like a mid-grade uh balsamic. It's good that one is already for sale, or it will be very soon. Yeah, but I mean, in other words, that's what they're gonna do for a living, because they're not gonna have a restaurant anymore.
Yeah. That's real good. Yep, that's really good. So this balance of sweet. Yeah, it to me it is a finishing product in that you'd want like a it's not like a super salt punch in the face, so you're not using it to season, you're using it more as like a flavoring.
What do you guys think? Yeah, it's it'll like round things out. Yeah. Like that sweetness back there, too. Right.
Right. Yeah, it's got like almost like a mirror level of sweetness. Yeah. Um the salt level is medium. Mushroom really hits hard.
Yeah, it does. Not in a bad way. No, no, no. Not a bad way at all. They did a lot of stuff with King Oyster mushrooms.
They did a thing where they hollowed out a you know, King Oyster mushrooms, what they look like, right? They you know that big stick thing. Yeah. So they did something where they cut a line down it and then they cut out the whole middle pith of it, and then they slashed it on the skin side a zillion times so that you could eat it so it wouldn't be fibery and stringy. They did another thing where they fried these flowers where they only fried the tips of the flowers, but it was real short, so someone had to sit there and hold each flour in the fryer on its own until it was done.
And then by the way, the Danes have a good fried parsley game. If you like to go to a place that has a good fried parsley game, the Danes in there makes it so good. I don't know, they do it a lot. It's the the oil is perfect, it's not great, you know, it's not uh doesn't taste like the oil must be only for fried parsley. I don't know what it is because it doesn't you know what I mean?
Yeah you know how like bad fried parsley is like taste like whatever they fried beforehand like nasty. Anyway, fried parsley game on point. Yeah, uh so anyway. So that was uh no much. What else we got?
What else did they give us here? Oh little uh sweet kelp salt. It's a very kelpie, it's a very kelpie day, folks. It's kelpie, kelpy kelp, kelp and the kelp kelps. I didn't bring the whiskey vinegar, which I heard is good.
That is salty. But also kelpie. It has the texture of maple sugar. Yeah. You know?
What do you guys think? Celping it up? Like a finishing thing. Yeah. I wonder how much actual kelpitude you'd get if it was if, like, depending on this is That's gonna be intense.
This is gonna be funky. So this is beef garum solids. So garum, you know, the Roman fish sauce. At Noma, they make garums with a bunch of different things. This is beef garum solids, and it looks like a cross between beef floss and haw flakes.
If you've ever eaten kind of haw flakes, you know, uh, that's what it looks like. And it's smells like uh let me see what's uh jerky. It's friable. Oh, it has a I know that flavor. What's that flavor?
I know that flavor. What's that flavor? What is it? I don't know. But you know it though.
Yeah, I want to say beef jerky, but it's also not that at all. No, there's something cereal. Oh, wow, cereal. Like there's some not cereal breakfast cereal, but like like not corn chips, but maybe something fresh. Maybe something free.
I don't know what they do. I mean, if if it's gonna be garum, then they don't need to add anything. They could just do salt and weight. But uh their term, their term for garum based on their book is a koji and protein mix. I don't know.
Anyway. This one's a little advanced for my palate. A little advanced for my palate. That's such a strong, strong way of saying something. Uh but like the um anyway, uh Kevin uh Kevin was a a dream.
Uh Ariel put us in touch. Ariel, I think got us the reservation through him. And if you guys, if any of you can like go get the res Oh, they I got to sign a brick and back. Oh, that's cool. And you know, Fabian, I saw Fabian's brick, Wiley's brick.
I signed a brick. Gotta sign a brick. Tastes a little bit like blood. That makes sense. Yeah.
Like the iron. Iron. Iron Man. Um when you think of Iron Man, do you think of Downey or do you think of um of um the song? Downey, probably.
I do the song. Yeah. I am Iron Man. That's all I think of. I guess throwing my edge again.
What do you what do you say? That song does rock. It really is good. Even Dax loves that song. Every once in a while, Dax will come by nobody wants him.
I'm like, yeah, man. I met Tom uh uh uh Tony Iomi in in South of France eating dinner once. Yeah? What happened? I sp I I I just had to come over and say hi and uh thank he was super cool.
Super cool. He was eating strawberries. Strawberries. Yep. Alright.
I like that. Oh, I'll tell you what's weird. The Pellegrino makes the beef garum pop. It does, yeah. I just noticed that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Alright, well anyway, uh big thanks out to the uh Noma crew and uh definitely want to go back. I missed there's one pork sandwich I didn't get to have in in Denmark, but you know, maybe I'll give you a reason to go back. Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, I tried pretty much most of the other things I wanted to try. There was a question actually later on uh about recommendations for Denmark, but and they have a reservation to Noma, so whatever. I think I've covered and smothered that. Yeah, I'd say so. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. All right. Bought some good licorice too. Yeah.
You don't like licorice at all? Oh, did you bring any to share? No, but next time I'll bring you one. Oh, please. Uh you know, you know, Lochrid's the little Lockery candies, you like those?
Yeah. They do one with uh like licorice plus blood orange. I'll bring you one. Oh, it sounds good. It's like high high ammonia.
Oh, this one's not an ammonia one. I didn't I'll next time I'm gonna get an ammonia licorice, I'll get you the one. I love it. Yeah, I love it. I love that.
I can pound that stuff all day. Not enough like the construction worker who killed himself. Oh, uh tell more. That guy used to eat like three boxes of uh red licorice. Wiley got mad.
He's like, why do they call it red licorice? Nicorice. I'm like, Wiley, gotta not worry about these things. But like uh he's like, uh, yeah, he he was like, I'm gonna switch from red to black licorice. I guess he thought it was more healthy, which I guess it would be if you ate a reasonable quantity, but he would eat like three or four boxes a day.
I forget what it was, whether it crashes your potassium, it does something to you, and you ended up uh on the dead end of the stick. So it was not uh is not the best move. So if you're gonna eat licorice, eat it in uh, you know, reasonable quantities. I'm sorry, Dave. I can't allow that.
Exactly. You guys gotta go watch uh do you know that I haven't seen that movie since I was too young to know what the hell is going on? Same. You know, all the chimps with the bones and the screaming and the monolith. Yeah, and the also sprock Zerathrustra and homie.
That's a great tune. You know what I mean? I mean, I I I think I think that inspired that uh that whole intro scene. Was you remember that Sesame Street up a little little vignettes with the moon? It was the capital letter M.
Bum. No, I don't remember the Sesame Street. What was it with the Yep, yep, yep. Oh, those are the best. We're already working.
I love those things. If I could make my mouth do that, if I could if I had those eyes and I could make my mouth just go, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. Those are the best. Good times. Uh all right.
Alexander uh wrote in, and I apologize. I had a huge long answer for you, Alexander, but it was on I wrote it out last time, because I looked it up for last time, and I don't have my old answer. I thought I saved it, but I didn't. But I'll read your question anyway, and I'll tell you what I remember from what I read. But I had gotten a bunch of stuff for you, just as you know.
Plum colonel orjah. How bad of an idea is it? Now, plum kernel, I'm assuming that what you mean here is that you're gonna take plums, you're gonna crack the hard, ridiculous thing and get just the actual seed out of the inside of the of the kernel, right? You understand what I'm saying, guys? So like imagine you have that much time in your life that you would take a bunch of plum seeds, crack them open, and get the seed out of the uh, you know, the very inner kernel out of the middle, right?
Now, all of these things, right? Plums, apricots, all of these things. They're all what's called uh cyanogenic, right? In other words, they make cyanide, right? Uh you know, H H C N is the uh chemical formula.
And uh yeah, so that's what we're talking about. How bad an idea is it? Uh I am aware of the high uh amygdalene content and the risks associated with this. So I am, of course, not talking about just making uh one from raw kernels, but rather how to reduce them and do this safely. Yes, I could just use almonds or an extract to achieve approximately the same flavor, but they don't grow here, so that kind of loses the point.
I read an article uh on Science Direct about uh reducing uh hydrogen cyanide, and also uh a blog thing from Darcy O'Neill, uh Art of Drink on cyanide and cherry, and got the idea of crushing the kernels, soaking them in 45 degrees Celsius water for 12 to 18 hours, and then do a drying step as more uh to roast it at 170, 150, 170 Celsius, as suggested by the uh uh Art of the Drink blog. Uh do you think this would be enough to make it safe? Will it completely ruin the flavor? Uh do you know how they do it with apricot kernels and amboretto? I read somewhere that alcohol neutralizes the HCN.
Is that true? I'll just say that right now. No. I'm just gonna I'm gonna leave that out there right in there. No.
No, it does not. Um if that's the case, I might go for some sort of uh liqueurs. I'm planning to make a spice rum liqueur out of Ray and Nephew overproof rum anyway, is 63 AB V enough. All right. First of all, uh like old school, old school, old school traditionally.
I think, although I'm not gonna bet your life on it, that if you make it and let it sit for a long time, the stuff that does convert to hydrogen cyanide, you can get to flash off after a while if it's been aged long enough. But I'm not gonna bet my life or yours on that. Uh the soaking it does reduce the content of that stuff because it is water soluble, but yes, it's also gonna soak out all of the flavor, right? All of the water soluble flavor. And also, I don't know how much it's gonna be reduced, right?
So a lot of this comes down, and if you read Darcy O'Neill's uh That's the Art of Drink that you reference, part one and part two. First of all, these were written a long time ago. So I would just maybe, maybe we'll have him on. We'll ask him. He's a a chemist and a and a uh what's it called?
A um a bar guy. Uh he nowhere says that he feels comfortable having people make uh uh orjah out of this stuff straight. And if you look online, there are published works. Uh the other issue is is that in plums in particular, I've seen data on the cyanogenic, right? So like uh they're all rated based on how what their potential for cyanide production is.
And it can be like a factor of 10 difference between different plum varieties. So some plum varieties are so low that I'd be like, yeah, sure, no problem. And some bump plum varieties are as high as bitter almonds or like the worst apricot kernels. So it's kind of hard to say. I would say don't do it.
Right? Or just use 10 as a flavoring with a bunch of other things like we do when we use apricot kernels that I go, you know, you go buy apricot kernels in Chinatown, which is the only place I know where to buy them. I guess Calustians also might have them. And, you know, you put a couple of them in as a flavoring with a zillion real regular almonds, and then, you know, because the stuff that they make commercially now, they just remove the stuff that's bad because the the benzaldehyde is what the flavor is, and that doesn't require cyanide. So I don't know.
Is this a good answer? Yeah. Good enough? Yeah. Good enough for government work as my dad used to say.
All right. Abuido writes in, hey, what's the make of the Belgian waffle iron you purchased that caused the pandemic and the financial ruin of ruins of tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of real individuals with family? Just me, you know, because uh my, you know, I I treated myself too much, therefore I ruined everything for everybody. Uh also, where did you buy it and is it available online? Well, it's available online if you have infinite money.
It is the HVD A 57 waffle iron. It is God's waffle iron. It is about a hundred pounds. I would get to 220 if you have 220. And anyone that kind of buys one of these should probably have enough money to get 220 put into their kitchen, right?
They're stupidly expensive. Uh I love it, right? And you could buy it online if you have infinite money. I went to a guy named Ray Waffles. And Ray Waffles lived in Staten Island.
And I heard that uh he got real sick. He got hospitalized during the pandemic, and I don't know if he made it. But Ray Waffles had some that let's just say fell off the back of a truck. So I paid nowhere near the small fortune incosts. Yeah.
I paid nowhere even close to the retail value of an H V D A 57. But now that anybody says they they're like, we make Belgian waffles. I walk in, I look at their iron, and I'm like, No. No, you don't. You know what I mean?
Like, I mean, like Crampos makes a an okay iron, uh, and there's another company that makes an okay iron. But like, there's a reason all the real shops in Belgium use the HVD, and PS, it's also expensive over there. It the reason it's expensive is because it's so robo that it like I said, it weighs about a hundred pounds, and it is CNC machined cast iron waffle plates. That's what we're talking about. But get to 220.
Just get to 220. Uh yeah. Oh my God, that's so good. The problem is now, like I was thinking of writing a a recipe for waffles, and I and I just I don't know how to make a waffle iron. Let me put it to you this way.
It can make a whole like like waffle the size of your head in two minutes flat, crispy. Like two minutes flat. I was at the uh this place in Denmark and they had a quote unquote waffle iron, Mr. Waffle, that makes these little weird like little wafflettes, and it's like it's like like stuff in a squeezy, and you you do it yourself at like hotels. Now it was better than a uh an American hotel do-it-yourself waffle, right?
Three minutes. Who takes three minutes to cook a waffle? Unacceptable. Unacceptable. It means they don't have enough juice.
No. You know, and it was not a w you know, a weenie waffle iron, the one at the Danish Hotel. Anyway. Uh Danish Hotel had a um a weird cheese cutter. Get this.
You know Giro? Like for like Tetem One? Yeah. You know, makes those uh makes those those Tetem One flowers. Delicious P.S.
Very good, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And you know wire cutters. Yeah. Right.
So I guess th they had this like Danish block cheese, which is like whatever the Danish equivalent of like, you know, block cheese. Yeah. I don't know. And it was a cross between a wire cutter and a G roll where you just put two blocks standing up, two square blocks standing up. You with me?
Like like twin towers standing up, right? And then instead of a G roll with a knife, it's a wire that's stretched, and you just you you turn the wire and the wire's on a screw, so it advances exactly one slice per revolution, and so you make two slices per revolution. But where they didn't get it right is that the wire has zero resistance when you're not in cheese. Duh. And then as soon as you go into the cheese, it gets a like a little bit of resistance, and that's right where it also has to ride up on the edge of the thing.
So you're not, so you're you're putting up some force there, so that's a point to break a wire. But then also, as it buries in the cheese, as it gets to almost 45 degrees through the block of cheese on the wire, you're at your maximum drag of the wire through the cheese. And so it requires a lot more force, and I think people just push it a little too far at that point and boing. And so, like at breakfast in the morning, if you got there early, you'd have the little weird cheese slicer, which I use despite the fact that the cheese was just meh. I just wanted to use the weird slicer.
But if you got there late, late in the day, nothing. Anyway, not a good idea. Interesting. Not a good idea. Um, all right.
Should I should I listen? If you really want to see whether Ray Waffles is still alive, send a uh message to Quinn and I'll have him give you uh Ray Waffles telephone number, and you can call him on the DL and see whether Ray Waffles is A still alive. I don't even know his last name. His last name is Waffles. Waffles, Mr.
Waffles. And then B, you know, uh it would cost a lot to ship. Right. So I knocked it down because I literally crossed the Verizon and Narrows Bridge, went and got it. So I really knocked it down.
But that's what I would do. Uh I get the impression that he used to work for one of the companies here that had a bunch of them, and maybe doesn't anymore, if you get my drift. Anyway. Uh Saison Slayer, very pedantic, but Dave talking about cavitation got me thinking about other technical terms that are often misused. I've uh noticed some folks on the internet using emulsified as a synonym for combined and mixed.
That does suck. That does suck. Hey, you know what? I haven't tested yet. Uh people say that it's easier to make emulsions in vacuum blenders.
I should test that in the vacuum blender. The reason being that like when you're whipping air in, that's another energy interface that you need to create. And if you don't need to create that like highly energetic interface between air and uh the liquids, then you can use it quicker. Right. But I don't know.
I don't know if it's true or not. Gotta run the test. Anyway. But that is I'm actually mean emulsion in that case, not a mixture or a combination. Yeah.
Um I've noticed some folks on the internet using emulsified as a synonym for combined, which I don't think is really quite right. Are there any other terms that aren't quite correctly used that come to mind? Well, I mean, you guys know I don't like dry brine. Like what else is there? AKA salting.
Reverse sear. Yeah, no reverse sear, yeah. Right. Sear before you sear after. Doesn't matter.
You know what I'm saying? Yeah. And by the way, that is the way cooking has been done since time immemorial. Right? You look at recipes from whenever.
And they've always say, Turn it up to 400 for the last 15 minutes of cooking. Some people do it at the beginning of the cook, some people do it after. It's only, first of all, uh forward reverse makes make whatever, because it's whatever, before and after, right? So it only makes sense if your only concept of searing is cooking a steak in a restaurant where what you have to do is sear it and then throw it in a finishing oven because that's your only way of cooking, right? But anyone that's done any sort of sous vide stuff knows you sear it at the end, and that the reverse in that case would be to sear it beforehand.
The real correct answer is of course sear it both times. You know, having tested hundreds of people on it, it's slightly better to do it both. Slightly, but better. I don't typically do it both anymore because I'm lazy. And the difference is slight.
You know what I mean? Uh what else is misuse? What uh what Quinn? I'm sure you uh get get in a in a hot and lathered about this. I feel like sometimes fermented is misused.
To mean what? I don't know, just like sit around. Like if you mix something and like let it mingle. I feel like sometimes it's labeled fermented. Mingle.
For some reason you got that cranberry song linger in my head. Do you have to let it mingle? Anyway, the um I've got I've got one for you, Dave. What do you got? Molecular.
Yeah, it sucks. Except for the only correct usage of that is when you're talking about Jackie molecules. That's right. It's the only correct usage. Yeah, uh I'm going back to Quinn's for a sec.
I mean, molecular is no reason to call it. Either it all is or none of it is. Uh and nobody's like, imagine if someone had like a uh like a a scanning tunneling microscope and they were actually placing individual atoms or like nano cooking. God help us. You know, God help us.
That's the next step up from individually frying flowers. It's nano by one, yeah, exactly. Nano positioned. Yeah. Uh I'm thinking about what Quinn said, there is one thing that everyone always calls fermented, but it's not.
Black garlic? Yeah, black garlic, that's what it is. That's it. That's it. Yeah.
That sucks. And by the way, uh sous vide is another one. Uh, when they don't mean vacuum, that's irritating. And the reason that I don't like it is because if you use a term that implies something that's incorrect, then it also distorts your intuition, and so it makes it hard for you to discover new things or think about what's actually going on because you bring with it, you bring with an incorrect term uh all of the baggage uh of the incorrect term. And so it's just uh a bad it's a bad idea.
Yeah, you know what I mean? Yeah. There are others. What other ones? Uh pH for acidity in terms of f acidity as a flavor, pH as a uh as an actual measure of the number of protons, totally different.
Um there's a lot. Yeah. You know what I mean? There's a lot. I can't think of any others right now.
Again, I did have a list and then it was printed on my last on my two weeks ago sheet. Uh Kevin McHugh, is there any way or has anyone managed to quantify how much carbon dioxide leaves a drink in the mouth versus in the stomach? Well, I mean, I guess it depends on how much you burp. Am I right? Right?
But no, I don't think so. Uh I mean, clearly, when you drink as fast as I do, a bunch of it does get down in there. But once you have taken carbon dioxide in, as opposed to nitrogen, which is interesting, the carbon dioxide will go into your bloodstream because you you actively transport carbon dioxide and oxygen in and out, right? Not actively, but it happens. Whereas uh if you burp in nitrogen, sorry, if you consume a lot of nitrogen, then that ends up coming out your butt as toots.
So uh there was a case of a man who had uh larger than normal volume of phlatus as defined by his doctors. Phaletus. And uh it was determined that it was because he swallowed so much dang air. Anyway. Uh but carbon dioxide doesn't do that.
But Kev, why are you interested in this? What is it that you wish to know? What do you think he wishes to know? Why is this a question of import to Kev? Maybe trying to poison someone, I don't know.
But like you can't poison them with the CO2 and levels. You can't put enough. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. Let us know why you want to know.
Maybe we could find some more information for you. JPM, can you show ear musk for Stas here? Can you share a bit about the forced carbonation stations from existing conditions? I know it's been talked about on the show, but haven't found any information about what it actually involved. Oh, this was for Garrett, but we did mention this, right, when Garrett was here.
Also, uh Garrett uh mentions forced carbonations in the bar, but ops for adding soda water. Didn't we talk about this when Garrett was here? I think briefly, but you said uh keep it in. I did? For more details.
That doesn't sound like the way the carbonation system worked at existing conditions was we took a standard coal plate, like you would have like a beverage cold plate, and instead of running beverage through it, we ran chilled glycol through it. We got we bought a big poly science like like uh lab laboratory propylene glycol chiller and ran super cold propylene glycol through the cold plate, and then we had 20 proof we bought the world's cheapest vodka, bellows, bellows vodka. It was like fifteen dollars for a 1.75 liter handle. And we would make a 50-50 mix of bellows and water and stick it into uh an ice bath with the cold plate in the bottom of it, and then we would just run an aquarium circulator pump and just always have that circulating, and we would keep it at about minus seven Celsius, and then all the bottles I I built like a rack so that the bottles would just float to the level of liquid in them. And so you just throw the bottles in, and even if they were empty, they wouldn't flop over because the rack was there, but if they were full, they would sink to their fullness level, and then that's how we would force carbonate and keep everything cold.
And at the end of the night, you just cover it up and let them let them go, and then once a week we would drain the alcohol and put new stuff in because it still got kind of gross. Even though it was, you know, nothing would grow in it because it was twenty percent alcohol, it was still get gross. Yeah. So we would, you know, pitch it after a while. That good enough answer?
Yeah. And then we know we used carbonator caps and you know. Those rings. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Which, you know, add infinitum we've discussed. Ian would like to uh hear uh wait, would like to hear my uh my thoughts on soup supression technique as well as freeze switching. So freeze switching is when you you do like an old uh it's you know uh how they used to make uh apple like one of the ways you used to make apple jack or like you know, freeze concentration, like ice wine, you like you freeze a liquid, and then um the first stuff to thaw is is uh is the stuff that's higher in flavor and alcohol and other things, and then you throw away the ice crystals, you know this technique? Not familiar, but okay.
Yeah, all right. Well, it's a technique. And you know, that's originally like when people uh how make ice wine, right? So they would freeze, they would, and then like they would take the crystals out of the ice wine, and then every time that it re crystallizes and then remove liquid, it's concentrating the alcohol and the sugar and the acid and all this. Right.
So you can do that on purpose. And I used to do it, I did it used to do it back at the FCI, and as a concentration technique. But now what people are doing is they're doing that and then adding back a different base liquid instead of water. Right? I think that's what they're doing.
So it's called uh what do they call it? Freeze switching, I think is what they uh it's a good technique. You know, it's a little bit of a pain in the behind. They the guys at Cuisine Solutions uh do a lot of that, and they built a little rig or a machine for it. But I don't know what suppression is.
Like sou like sou like under pression. Quinn, look that up there. Suppression. What's that? Look it up.
Uh good. All right. Uh and I'll get back to it. From NTFN, I've heard Dave mention on the show that dry ice can be used to keep pictures of carbonated drinks, chilled and carbonated. What's a safe way of doing this?
Is it worth the trouble? Did I really say that? Because I don't really like doing that. What do you say? Uh that you use dry ice to keep pictures of carbonated drinks, chilled and carbonated.
I don't really like it. I don't like doing that. I think you said that in very, very old episodes. I mean, I've done it, but the problem is that when you throw nuggets of dry ice, they form a pellicle of regular ice around them. And it just kind of it's kind of a nightmare.
Nowadays, when I'm keeping things cold, I use just salt and ice. Because I rarely want things colder than salt and ice. So I'll just I'll like I'll make my ice slurry that I'm sticking all my stuff into, and then I'll just put salt. You've got to make sure you wipe down the bottles because um if you don't wipe down the bottles, uh you can pour salt in someone's drink. But it ain't gonna kill them.
You know what I mean? It's not gonna be as bad as swallowing a chunk of dry ice. I don't like using dry ice. Dry ice will add some carbonation, but it's not like you can keep a pitcher of stuff carbonated fully just by having dry ice in it because it's just not enough pressure available. Does that make sense?
Yeah. Okay. Uh Quinn, tell me when you got that crap. Phaedrus's toe. What's Phaedrus?
Is Phaedrus like a some sort of myth that I don't remember? F-A-D-R-E-E. P H P H A E D R U S. Who is Phaedrus? Who's Phaedrus and what happened with their toe?
Curious now. I'm trying to refine my fry game. Plato. Oh, that's one of his dialogues. Okay, it just written by Plato's dialogue between Socrates and Phaedrus, an interlocutor in several dialogues.
Yeah, but what was the I forget Phaedrus's McGillicuddy. See how bad my Play-Doh is? I just remember in general that I'm interested to hear kind of I don't know, machine learning and Plato informs. Because there's nothing uh well, who is it? Uh was it Diogenes who famously like hated Plato?
I think so, yeah. And uh, you know, Plato is talking about his forms, you know, Plato's forms, platonic forms. And uh, you know, a man is a being uh that walks upright on two legs, and Diogenes was like, What about chicken? And goes, without feathers. So he just shows up with a with a like a live plucked chicken, throws it at him and goes, Behold your man, and then walks away.
Amazing. It's pretty good. Yeah. I.e. your forms are stupid.
Yeah. Anyway. But I'm kind of interested, like, you know, the whole kind of machine learning versus forms kind of a situation. I haven't read anything good on the internet. No one's no, I've not no internet hasn't served me up a uh uh, you know, modern take on platonic forms and how machine learning uh kind of theoretically fits into that.
Yeah. You know what I mean? How it decides whether something's a zebra. Have you heard about this uh I forgot the name of it, but there's ways to attack machine learning algorithms so that it still looks like to his uh a zebra to us, but the machine thinks it's uh like uh a bird. Because the machine's not seeing a zebra, it's just running a bunch of algorithms.
So if you know what if you know the machine, if you know the the learning set that the machine is looking at, you can just look at all the coefficients that it's crunching to figure out whether something is a bird or a zebra, and you can just change pixels that to our eyes make still looks like a zebra, but you can make it say bird. Yeah. Logically. It's weird. But I forget what it's called, that kind of attack on uh the thing.
Anyway, Phaedrus Phaedrus and uh their toe once uh wants to refine their fry game. I've read the cooking issues, uh, two French Fry Supremacy articles, Chef Steps, Thick Cut French fries and Kenji's thin and crispy recipe. Oh, I wanted to find out if Dave had additional suggestions that he had developed after his 2010 era articles. Oh, so many, dude. So many, man.
Uh but we'll have to do a whole French fry thing later. I mean, so many. There's no perfect fry. First thing is just go to Belgium. If you really like, if you want to spend any length of time, you should go to Belgium and just see what's possible with the setups that are being used in the best fry shops in the world, and then decide where you want to go from there, right?
Like what is important to you in terms of like your workflow? Like my French fry was built around having to finish in a fryer at a certain temperature in a particular place, a particular thickness, but you don't need to do any of the stuff that I was doing if you do it exactly the way the Belgians do it. So there's no one perfect fry or perfect way to the fry. You need to go to Belgium. Uh Alexi, how does donor kebab vertical spit cooking maintain food safety?
Wouldn't a kebab cooked uh from raw notionally have the middle uh in the danger zone for a long time to incubate bacteria? This is a good question. I don't know. And get this in Denmark, I saw someone with a uh a freaking donor, like swarma thing that was like three and a half feet across. I walked past them and I made the I made the giant bear hug look and I gave the guy the weird eye, and he was like, he just nodded his head.
He's like, Yeah, yeah, yeah. Big, big, big swarma house. Did you ever figure out what that stuff was, Quinn, before they rip us off the air? Uh yeah. What?
It seems like it's just like freezing fruit or other ingredients. Salad in a cocktail as a way to extract. Why is that Sue's pre underpression? What did that understand? Suppression?
I don't know. I don't understand. Let me know what it is. Maybe I'll look it up. It doesn't make sense.
Beefnog. What? Yeah. I don't have a link in my finger. I think I'll s I'll send it to you later.
All right. Beefnog wanted is going to uh Copenhagen in early August. And wants suggestions. It's going to Noma. I believe I gave you your suggestions, Beefnog.
And uh is that a is that a take on uh beeflog from uh Space Ghost the cartoon from Brack? Beeflog. So I knew you were beeflog guy and not a cheese log guy. But I will say this when you go to Noma and you're gonna be solo and you're gonna be at a common table, they have you meet beforehand for a drink, which I thought was nice. What is this?
Cooking issues, and I'm gonna go to the house.
Timestamps may be off due to dynamic ad insertion.