Hello and welcome to Cooking 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 Stand Studios. Joined as usual with uh John sitting behind me today. How are you doing? Doing great, thanks.
Yeah? Yep. You lying. No. No.
Start to the week. Okay, great. Soups. Got Joe Hazen rocking the panels. What's up?
Hey, how are you doing? Welcome to a Tuesday cooking issues. Yeah, yeah. Over there in Los Angeles, we got uh Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. How are you doing, Stas?
Good. Yeah. Great. Yeah, yeah. And uh, and uh, I think we got Jackie Molecules over there as well.
Yes, sir. How's it going? Um, doing well, and you know, I love to say we also in the upper left-hand corner, Quinn, we got Quinn's, we got uh a full of the full cooking issues crew. But even better than that, even better, we have today as our special guest, long, long, long time friend of uh the show and of ours personally, Dr. Ariel Johnson pushing her new book, which I am holding the first ever, I don't know, hold it up to the camera, the first ever hard copy of it ever off the presses.
And by the way, Ariel, you know, I still have my original, the original first liquid intelligence that came off the press, and that became our bar standard, and I it's all marked up and like so hopefully you'll do the same with your original copy. Flavorama! A guide to unlocking the art and science of flavor by Ariel Johnson forward by Rennie Redzepi with 99 recipes. Now you got two things going through my head with the 99 recipes, Ariel. You got 99 problems, exactly.
Which obviously you're referencing. Yeah. Yeah. And then last night I was at uh Amori Margot, the bar here in New York. Um, and Austin Hennelly, our friend uh from Kato was doing a pop-up there with uh with Max Green.
It was totally packed. But Cato just got named to like the I thought it was the this is how stupid I am about LA Stas, you'll appreciate this. I thought it was the hundred and one best restaurants in LA, and he's like, No, it's the 101. It's like 101 because of the freak of freeway. And I was like, Mocker.
Wow. Wow. Yeah. Anyway, welcome on the show. Thank you.
Thank you for having me. Yeah. Nowhere I'd rather be. You haven't been live at the new at the new place yet. How do you think?
Would you like our dicks? It's uh it's it's lots more uh marble and shiny gold stuff than uh than uh the trailer in Roberta's, definitely. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But plus you get more fish bowling from people, you know. Can go get a bottle of wine.
Yeah, hipsters don't look at you as much. We looked at them. Yeah, Nastasi. I kind of miss that. You don't get like the Well, this is a magnet for tourists who are here to look at things.
So yeah. Hey Nastasia, who was your favorite Roberta's person to look at, to watch? Wasn't it um Nazi Jesus? Uh yeah. Well, he was no, no, it was there was uh there was Jesus, it's Indy Jesus.
Indy Jesus, I thought. It was Indie Jesus and uh uh and Santa's Nazi Nazi Elf. Yeah, remember? Yeah, it was like that guy was such a character. Like it was the exact cross between an elf and like uh uh like a cartoon Nazi.
It was craziest thing. That's a I don't think I ever saw that guy. Oh, yeah, you would have noticed. Maybe, yeah, yeah. Like the tight tight shorts, though that look and that like elf at the same time.
Weird. Real weird. I mean, it's not that weird for Bushwick, but. Yeah. No, you know, I have not been back to Bushwick in years.
I have no idea what it's like over there now. For all I know, it's all people in suits. Not not that many suits, but like a bit more people who look like they are product managers at a tech company. Um five years ago. Definitely.
Okay, exactly. Yeah, I don't know about that. Oh, hey, uh, so nor so the way this works now is that we all kind of shoot the breeze over what happened in the past week, but I do have a small announcement first, right? Right now, In from Booker and Dax just landed in the United States, are a small batch of Sears all pros. That's right.
Sears all pros. Get them while they last. There's 50% more Siri area now with map gasket a Sears All Pro. Get a Sears O Pro. Hey, everybody, get a Sears All Pro.
Yeah. Okay. Uh that was my little announcement. And by the way, if anyone wants to become a sponsor on the show, I can do things like this for your company as well. We might have to take you up on that for the book tour.
Okay, everyone gets the same jingle. It's gonna be like, hey, everybody, whatever it is. Always the same basic jangle. Uh call in your questions too, uh uh Ariel at 917-410-1507. That's 917-410-1507.
Uh so now we shoot the breeze about uh the last week. Anything other than the fact that you have the first ever copy of your new book? Yeah, well, I have the first ever copy of my new book. Um by the way, fantastic. I I didn't get to finish it because I just started reading it.
Uh, you know, yeah, I just received a copy recently. Uh, but I like it's like uh all the hand drawings, very like nice punchy color. Also thank you. Like for a con I was like worried because like for a complicated subject, right? It's like it looks kind of small.
Well, no, well, it's like a three. Well, it's like 320 pages, which is uh that's a good that's a good length. But I mean it's not like uh a it's like it's there to help you. It's not there to be like must learn science, must learn science. You know what I mean?
It's like very helpful. I mean, there there was a version of it a couple years ago that was like 175,000 words. That's a lot where I hadn't like yet let go of the academic tendency of like I have to show that I know everything about this so that people take it seriously. Uh well there's a couple that's not fun to read. There's a couple of science, like so like you, you know, tell me if I'm wrong, but like you know how like there's a whole group of scientists who get real bent when you like anthropomorphize things at all or make things at all kind of easy for people to understand because they're worried about people's intuition slipping into whatever.
Oh yeah, no, they're they're very vocal about my work, yes. Yeah, but I think it's very helpful to get people to understand what's going on, and the stuff that you say that's like that doesn't lead people's intuition in the wrong direction because you're careful about that. Well, and you have to you have to understand you're like not speaking to you know someone with a background in any of this. You're talking to someone who's like maybe curious, but like doesn't have you know the reference points are analogies, they're not like theory. Uh so you have to make a decision about like, well, do I want this to be like academically accurate to like the current data, or do I want people to leave with something true and useful that they just learned?
I mean, my bet is useful. Yes, yeah, yes, yeah. So like I have this problem whenever like even just like I'm like I'm doing the update on uh liquid intelligence and and Jen, you know, who edit you know looks at my stuff, it's like what the hell? He's like, I was like, but I have to, or I'm gonna get crap from this other butt head. Oh yeah, oh yeah.
You know what I mean? Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Oh, also, in case, John, in case you weren't already gonna run out and buy this, it's not available until March. So we're gonna have you on again.
You can pre-order it now. Yeah, it's available to pre-order. Can you pre-order it at Kitchen Arts and Letters? It's where I want you to pre-order it. I I don't know.
You'd have to ask them, but uh uh most of the online uh spots bookshop.org if you want to support your local uh independent bookseller. Yeah, okay. I mean uh we'll talk to qu like either John or Matt. Why don't you hit up uh uh John or Quinn, hit up Matt and uh at Kitchen Arts and Letters, see if we can get them on the pre-order because then because we will do the you know our Patreon discount. Uh I don't know if they can apply it to a pre-order.
I don't know how it works. Uh I don't know how to know. Yeah, but if I if I were a smarter business person, I'd sort that out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Uh the other thing is that if you weren't already gonna uh buy this book, I'm pretty sure it's the only book on this subject I've ever read that quotes Mike Tyson. You know? Pretty great. Pretty sure. Yeah, yeah.
Well, I mean, you know, it's uh if uh if it's if it's true, it's true. Yeah, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everybody's got a plan until they get punched in the mouth. That's true.
Yeah. Uh and you know the thing is like early on, he never used to get punched, so he kept his plan. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. It it is uh the wisdom of experience, I think.
Remember how fast he used to be? He was so fast. Vaguely. Like he's he used to they used to just like show like videos of him like dot like they'd have these things swinging at his head and he'd be dodging them and like you know, beating everyone else up at the same time. He was just like uh a f a phenom.
You know what? Um anyway, so back to shooting the shooting the breeze. Anything other than this uh fantabulous thing arriving at your uh doorstep that happened? I mean that that's a pretty momentous one. Um yeah, uh I guess professionally, not much else super exciting going on now.
No. Any terrible meals or good meals? Terrible meals. Um I had like um well, I mean, maybe I should have known what I was getting into. I had like terrible takeout pizza from Italy.
Uh, but I was with like it was one of those situations where you were like with family and someone decided to make a takeout order, and it's like, you know what? Just let's do it. It's because it's easy, but uh very good. So, like, you know, I yeah, I just like whenever like I have to eat something that I know I don't want, I just turn off. It's fine.
Yeah, I mean, it's like I'm hungry, I know that cranky if I don't eat. So you know, you know who can't do that? Nastasia. She she still gets mad at me over bad lunches that she's had like 10 years ago. Like we uh we'll have a bad lunch like 10 years ago.
And she's like, you know why you're a bad person. No, no, no, no, no. She's just like, why did you sit around? Tell them, Stas. Tell them the lunch.
I think I told you, Ariel, when we, me and Dave and Harold, uh-huh, like we had to go to the fruit tasting, and they were all gonna the people that were hosting us were having lunch after it. No one told us to bring our own sack lunch, so we just sat there watching them eat their sack lunches. I mean, that's that's like uh such a bad meal that there is no food involved. That there was like crackers or some crap. It was it's just like who cares though?
That's the thing, but still ten years later, I gotta hear about it. Bad meal with good hospitality versus poor hospitality is like uh this was no meal, no meal, no hospitality. We were there to do business. Right. Like I wasn't there to like become friends with these people.
I was there with friends, at least I thought, like Nastasia and Harold, like Harold was cool with it, right? We were there to eat an ungodly amount of citrus. And you know what we did? We ate an ungodly amount of citrus. Uh-huh.
Yeah. And so, like, you know, the fact that everyone else was a huge weirdo, and I didn't have, you know, we didn't have like, you know, prepare lunch. So what? Like. So what?
It's it's funny. It's funny that uh uh the the the framing that Nastasia is still angry about it years later when uh you're a little worked up about it. Well, I'm just worried to me it's just like indicative of like our whole relationship that I don't understand. Anyway, uh what about you, Stas? Do you have any uh good or bad uh indifferent uh food or otherwise moments?
I had to go to Vegas last week, and I had a really good meal at a Jewish deli, not near the strip. Huh. Nice. Is it like is it the same same as like in New York style, like the big things of pastrami or what it was um yeah, it was pastrami sandwiches and chicken noodles, like it was super, it's called Weiss's deli, and it's in like a strip mall and it's packed, and it's really good. I have never been to Vegas.
I've had some really good Hawaiian food in Vegas. Really? Yeah, Vegas has like the largest population of people from Hawaii outside of Hawaii, so there's a lot of like strip mall places with like really good plate lunches and really stuff like that. Yeah, yeah. Macaroni salad, mahi mahi.
These are two places I've never been Hawaii and Vegas. Well, I've never been to Hawaii either, but uh my wife was born there and she's never been back. Interesting. They moved out when she was three. Yeah.
Anyway, military. Uh well, military kid. Yeah. Yeah. But she's got the Hawaiian uh middle name and her sister has the Hawaiian first name.
Oh, okay. Yeah. All right. Nice. Uh, what about about you, uh molecules or Quinn?
What do you guys got? I uh I actually went to this place called with with Nastasia, actually, and my girlfriend, we went to a place called Genghis Cohen, which is they call it New York style Sichuan Chinese. The ridiculous name of a restaurant. Like I keep seeing that place on Google Maps when I'm in LA and I'm like, I've gotta I've gotta check this out sometimes. I gotta I gotta say, like, even though like uh like you like clearly, like this gotta be a place that's been around a while, right?
Because you couldn't come up with that name nowadays, but I kinda love it. I kind of love it. It's great. Yeah, how was the food? It was it was great.
Like they didn't try to do anything too new to it. It just tasted like a regular New York City Chinese place, you know. Genga's going. It's very comforting. All right.
But it's one of those menus that's just impossibly long, you know, where there's like eight different sections and like twelve different fried rices, and you're like, I don't know. I I always wish those places just had like a let us choose, you know. I wish every place on earth had that. Yeah, truly. I know.
I never want to make any decisions ever. Hate choice so much. Well, it's like you guys will know better than me. Like you know you know your food. I want other people to have choices, right?
Like, you know, from a you know, but I I don't want to choose. You know what I mean? I I feel like I make so many choices like in my professional life that in my personal life it's just nice to sometimes not make decisions. You know, uh okay, okay. Sorry, Stas.
Good beat on you again with this, but that's another thing Stas hates about me is that like when we order, I always want to order last. And it's it's it's it's ti I don't know why, actually, as I'm saying it, I don't even understand it, but it's like it's tied into the not liking to choose kind of a stitch, but it pisses her off so much that even though she doesn't you don't even care, you just don't want me to do that, right? Right, right. So I tried to be the last one with how I'm around you up there. For no reason.
For no reason. Yeah. For no reason. Yeah. I'll know what I want, you know.
Yeah. 20 minutes before you. Yeah. Yeah. Whereas, like literally, I don't know until my mouth opens and words come out of it.
And then she'll get mad at me for asking the the server. I don't know. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah.
No balls. No balls. I have balls. I just don't care. I I don't care.
I don't like the one to choose. Yeah, I I find sometimes it's like if I if I don't have something that's like a basis for making an opinion, like I can't make an opinion. Um, although I have been working. Sometimes, I mean, having just said that, like, that is also a great way to make yourself crazy. And sometimes just making a decision feels a lot better.
Yeah. Even if it's not like the perfect decision. Look, if I go to a place and it's a crap hole, I'm just gonna order what I want because it's all gonna suck, right? If I go into like a garbage can diner, I'm gonna get corned beef hash and eggs because I know it's gonna come out of a can and I don't care how overcooked it. Yeah, you know it's gonna be consistent.
You know what you're gonna get. It's not gonna be a surprise. Or if I'm not in the mood for that, I'm gonna get a patty melt because pretty much as long as it comes with the requisite crap, I'm gonna love it. Right. You know what I mean?
You know, I go to a diner, order pancakes because they're just going to be pancakes. Yeah, they're gonna be like you're gonna be diner pancakes. They're gonna be bisquick level, friggin', whatever. And the person who makes them makes like hundreds a day, so they're gonna be. Oh my gosh.
Speaking of uh restaurants, like this. Did you hear about the California Chipotle lady? No. Oh yeah. Oh my God.
Best ever. So this lady, uh, she shows up at a restaurant. They're short staffed, right? And I think it was even the shift manager was working doing I think I think she was a manager, maybe she wasn't. And so she so she makes this lady's order, and the lady's like, it's wrong.
So she's like, fine, she'll make it again. She makes it again, gives it back to the lady. It was still wrong. So then the lady starts a burrito, starts yelling at her, throws the freaking burrito in her face. So she's got sour cream and hot burrito and and you know what Chipotle burrito is like so much rice and garbage in that thing.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's not like the yeah. Anyway, so like that stuff's all dripping all down her face.
She has to go in the back room and compose herself because she's at a workplace in front of a bunch of people and she's just had a freaking been assaulted. Fair. Anyway, so luckily a bunch of people recording lady gets arrested, right? So she goes to trial, she gets sentenced to 90 days in jail. But but the judge says that they'll knock 60 days off if she works in a fast food restaurant for 60 days.
Amazing. Yeah. Amazing. Yeah. I can think of a lot of people that should be sentenced to working in a fast food restaurant or other service job for 60 days before they're allowed to be out in public again.
What kind of just what? Yeah. Like you know what I mean? Like what? Yeah.
Like it's one, it's just a burrito, and two, like. Yeah. Yeah. Like, I don't know. Like it's not.
Those are also people, you know? Like, yeah, I know the woman who was assaulted. She ended up quitting her job. She'd been there for four years, and like has pe understandably PTSD from it. And I think it's trying to figure out something else to do, but yeah.
I mean, I've never had that happen to me. I still remember bad customers. I mean, I've been screamed at, but no, I've never had anything thrown in my face. Yeah. How about how about these people?
Have you ever been hit with a large candy cane? Hello, fake candy cane people. These people, it's not a candy cane. It's like a it's like a peppermint stick. A peppermint stick barber barber pole scepter.
This is Rockefeller Center uh at Christmas time. It's just I don't know, it doesn't make any sense. Like why are they walking around? Yeah, I guess that's a thing. You know.
That's not a thing though. No, I know, I know. But like it's like like uh I mean like elf on a shelf was oh listen. Invented wholesale like that. Yeah, well, I mean it's all invented wholesale.
Sure, sure, sure. But like sorry, and invented wholesale uh uh within the time period that I have been an adult, and so therefore, you know, like in the immortal words of Douglas Adams, uh uh newfangled and wrong. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. If it was wholesale invented 25 years ago, then it's as the world should be.
I'm sure Hallmark was behind that. Probably someone making a uh uh um a truckload of money on this. But uh so earmuffs, any small children's earmuffs. But uh yeah, my my n my niece, man, she's all about that elf. Oh, okay.
She's all about it. You cannot you okay, get this. So for those of you that don't know what we're talking about. How old is she? Uh like about that high.
Oh, okay. Yeah. Uh so like uh so uh the deal is is that this elf, right, moves it's a stuffed elf, but it comes alive at night, which by the way, that should scare the hell out of you right there. Right there, if you have a stuffed animal that comes alive at night, hide your knives. You know what I'm saying?
Yeah. Anyway, so like the elf like moves from place to place in your house, quote unquote moves when it comes alive at night. If you touch it, get this. This is how demented this is. If the kid touches the elf, the magic is gone, it's dead.
Yeah. That's horrifying. Yeah. I had no idea that there was this uh like disturbing lore behind it. I thought I just watched you.
So that's also like surveillance state uh allegory. He's not even allegory. Exactly. And that's how. Yeah.
I mean, wouldn't you then want to touch the elf to, you know, remove this panopticon situation from your uh living space? I mean, that's what I do. I was like, you know, like touch wood, touch elf. Exactly. Kill that thing.
You know what I mean? Like, but like, uh, yeah. So like, yeah, they're petrified that they are gonna like murder. I don't think maybe it doesn't die, it's just it just doesn't come back into that stuffed creature anymore. I don't know.
All around creepy. Yeah, I mean, I think I feel like, you know, f folklore is full of scary stories like that, but at least they like have some kind of important lesson that they teach. Like, don't go out into the woods at night when we are in a pre-technological society and wolves will definitely eat you. Yeah. This just seems like cruel.
This is important information. Don't touch crap your parents don't want you to. You know? Like, I wish you know what I mean. Let's design something that children want to touch and then tell them that they can't touch it arbitrarily.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it'll be amazing if they did it like my the way my old apartment worked. If I said don't touch it, it would probably really hurt you if you touched it.
Right, right, exactly. You know what I mean? Like, yeah, yeah. Yeah. You're not allowed to do that anymore either.
Oh, hurt hurt have it hurt people when they touch it? So, one of the reasons we moved out of the garment district where I had my loft was it just wasn't a great place for kids, right? We had Booker and our radiators when they came on, which was, you know, not that often. But when they came on, they were like super super duper super hot, and you couldn't like, they weren't in clothes at all. Because it's garment district.
Right, right, right. And so Booker's first word was hot. You know, in the like 17th and 18th century, they used to put kids in like, you know, babies toddlers in uh super long nightgowns that were you know, that was like their day day-to-day wear, were like nightgowns that were way too long, so that like they were they had a lot of trouble crawling because it would get like tangled around their legs, specifically so they could not accidentally like launch themselves into the fireplace. Oh, I like that. So there is so there is an intervention for this situation, but it is uh But if the gown does catch it.
Oh man. Uh you know what? That's the thing. People are like, oh, uh, you know, kids were fine back in the day. No, they weren't.
They died all the time. 50% infant mortality rate until like the mid-19th century. Nope. Yeah. Just because we used to do it, doesn't make it a good idea.
Um that's actually why the life expectancy, you see, like, oh, life expectancy in the Middle Ages was 35. It's like, yeah, because lots of people died before they were five. If you made it to 35, you probably live a while. Uh Quinn, you got I know you said you were doing some uh oh, Quinn made his uh his uh persimmon, he's gonna call this his sorbet, but it was very highly pectined, so it had a lot of texture, right? Is that those high pectan sorbet's well no?
I I well I did both a gelato with a little bit of dairy and a cervet, straight like 90% persimmon. Was it chewy? Was it chewing? No, it was but it had a good texture. Again, I still stabilize it a little bit, but it was really good.
And did you taste the one that had too much succinic acid in it? And what was the story with that? Oh, it was actually it was good. Didn't taste like persimmon. Tasted more like oysters and blood.
No, it was like persimmon apricot. It actually really wasn't bad. Okay. I made a banana ice cream over the weekend, actually. That was also chewy and pectiny in a pleasant way.
Yeah. But like uh using which uh technology? Uh like for freezing it? Yeah. Oh, just like uh countertop compressor ice cream machine I've had.
Oh, which one do you have? Let the Lello? The Lello, yeah. I got it in like two thousand eight, I think. So I it's definitely not a current model, but it it it's also made to two thousand eight standards, so it does actually run quite well.
All right, so on the Lelo, uh on the Lello, the okay, correct me if I'm wrong, batch time is somewhere like 18 minutes, right? 19 minutes? Mine was more like 25. 25. But it wasn't like ice, I mean it was like fridge cold, not like ice cold.
Right. So on those things, when you harden them off, does the texture really suffer from the long batch time, in your opinion? Well, like I mean, I was talking I was talking to my husband about this because we were like testing a recipe, and I was like Shout out to Tom. Shout shout out to shout out to Tom. Um hi sweetie.
Uh where like, yes, this is not at the quality necessarily that you would get from an ice cream store, but it's still uh ice cream at your house that you made. So like it's a little, yeah, it's a little grainier than I'd want if I was buying someone else's ice cream, but like if it's ice cream for me that I made, I still get, you know, there's that. It's exciting to have that. Um so you know, if it's still like pretty good, it's still great. So I just read a bunch of patents on um, I just read a bunch of patents.
So a problem that people want is for you to buy an alcoholic beverage, or not even alcoholic necessarily, but pretty much always alcoholic. And you put it in your freezer, and instead of getting the plate-like crystals that I like from quiescent freezing, they want it to come out of your freezer like a slurpee. So they uh I forget what the what the mix of it is, but they add um they add a bunch of stuff, like uh they add stuff to you know, stabilizers basically to prevent um prevent large crystals from forming, right? And then they add nucleating agents to it. I was about to ask if there's like a lot of yeah, yeah.
So they add insoluble nucleating agents to it. Uh they're tiny, right? Uh I forget which ones they used, but you ever experimented with this kind of stuff? Um, I mean, not on purpose. Right.
But uh or not in terms of like uh uh changing the composition of uh stuff to control ice crystal texture. But yes, I have uh, you know, accidentally and partially on purpose made plenty of uh iced iced slushy alcohol. Yeah. Yeah. You know who's done a video about freezes.
Oh, who's that? Next week, yeah. Yeah. Chris Young, yeah, coming on. Finally get finally coming on after all this time.
Do you have these uh combustion engineering thermometer? Oh, what now? Is his have you seen his thermometer? I don't I don't know that I have. All right, I'll give you the spiel.
Okay. Tune in next week. Tune in next week. But first, hey, Stas. Monday, Monday, Monday, Monday.
Monday at two. Monday. Uh so uh Stas, can they order the those freaking uh Sears all yet, by the way? The ones I was talking about earlier. I don't know.
I have to talk to Flexport. I I yeah. They are here. They are here. But we're selling them on on our website, right?
We're selling them just through our website. We're selling them on Amazon. But can we also sell them through our website because I hate Amazon? That is a question for Flexport, yeah. I will figure it out.
You should be able to say Amazon. If they were all there in two weeks, Glenn. Somebody from Canada is gonna order one. And then they're gonna be like, You didn't tell me I had your paid event. And then they're gonna ask for a refund.
And then we're gonna get completely hosed, and then Amazon's gonna take it back and chum it up. And then that's one less of the only a couple that we have. You know what I mean? So it's like Amazon can anyway. So Chris's thermometer is uh it's a multi, it's a multi point thermometer, right?
So it's like multiple probes? Correct. Okay. And uh and it, you know, it's got a little, you know, multiple multiple sensors in one probe. Uh-huh.
Okay. And so it's got uh and it's you know, you charge it uh vi you know via USB, you know, non contact via USB. Okay. And then magnetic or something? Yeah, and then you shove the probe into whatever.
You don't have to hit the center. I mean, you're supposed to go through the center, right? Oh, past the center. Yeah. And then you there's a and then you just wait, and then it you can either do it on your phone or you can do it with uh the little readout thing, Bluetooth to it.
And you it it predicts when you you tell it what temperature you want, and then after it checks the curves uh of the you know the the thermal yeah ramp that it's at, it predicts when it's gonna be done. Oh, very cool. Yeah yeah and it works. Uh and also for other fun crap um it'll also act as a logger. You can get the data out if you want.
Nice on and it can trans it it has some kind of electronics that uh hold up to oven heat yeah inside of it to transmit. I mean that's the thing. So they the the trick the way to destroy one is is that uh all of the the brain is actually not in the head where you would think the brain is the brain is in the actual probe. And so you're not allowed to have the probe ah because so like the meat itself is insulating the probe from the ding ding ding ding ding ding ding wow yeah nice yeah yeah that's smart yeah that is smart smart but we're also gonna talk about Kareemis because so he had a you know which is the worst name for a product ever the ninja creamy I don't oh I was thinking creamy's like uh what they call soft serve in Vermont really maple creamies yeah weird yeah Vermont you know they don't have very many people they can do stuff like that uh so the creamy is like you know the Faco jet oh yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah patent ran out so yeah the Faco jet nice so it's like 300 Paco jet so Quinn's had one now for like a year and a half that's how long it's taken to get Chris on the show or a year or whatever it is. And then and but I wanted to have a year and a half.
Okay. I wanted to have Quinn and Chris talk about it because Chris has obviously a lot of experience with like the Paco jet and like Quinn's has you know his perspective from like writing his ice cream book but I feel like both perspectives are useful for people who want to know how does this thing hold up versus a Paco because you know I mean yeah and from everything I've heard from pros like you know you don't necessarily want to rely on the creamy in a restaurant in a service situation yeah of course not surprising but it's not like you wanted to rely on the Paco Jet either but oh my God who who who has had a Paco Jet has not had it break like literally nobody yeah yeah that's why like this why are friends with each other yeah exactly climb yeah no one can afford to get five creamy yeah I mean that's uh I asked that so like you know Leo Robochek opened up uh uh what's it called Pennyworth in Brooklyn right and he was waiting for his Paco to come in and I was like what about creamy and he was like yeah I was like but they are like you know six times less expensive but yeah I don't know I'm I'm reminded of uh the time when I was working at Noma and we when we added a bunch of like grilled stuff to the menu and bought a bunch of like big green eggs and uh ran them so hard they kept cracking. Yeah. So it was like yeah it's cheaper to buy a big green egg or five big green eggs than install the proper oven until you have to like keep replacing them. And then eventually we got I think a Jasper Osper grill grill oven thing and that never broke.
So yeah. Yeah you know what I I have to say I'm just not uh the green egg doesn't work the way I want it to work. Well I I I have limited experience grilling because I've always lived in apartments. I mean I can grill but I've seen you do it but yeah exactly we've we've grilled together but I I do not have one in my uh uh immediate surroundings yeah I wish I did but but like uh you know the the the the big green egg, all those Kamado style grills are built for people with patience. Right?
Because they're they you know they build up thermal mass and like you know you're like that you can hold them I was like no no you know what I mean? Like I want right exactly what I mean? Yeah well you've seen me grill over a fire like on the ground. Yeah, yeah. Hell yeah.
Yeah. At Nastasia's uh uh seaside resort. Yeah. Yeah. Well, not see uh what's that called?
Soundside. Yeah. Oh, speaking of which, that reminds me, I can I can plug my book because um there is a recipe for people in circumstances like mine where you're in a living situation where you cannot have an open fire and you want smoky taste. There's a uh smoke oil, so lap song suchong infused oil that you can then use to uh apply delicious smoky flavors to things by oil poaching them. I do I I do uh I do all of my uh quote unquote cold smoking with hickory smoke powder.
Nice or whatever, yeah, whatever smoke you choose. Choose your smoke. You can get whatever. They're pretty good. You know what the issue with them is?
I'm gonna shout out real quick. Um Will and Dave and the Patreon have both purchased flavorama. Um I'm watching it happen in real time. Nice. Um the thing about the uh powder is if you add a little bit too much, it just goes ah, great.
It's like oversmoking something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, why like talk about let's get to some flavor crap. Talk to me about why something case. I mean, obviously things are dose dependent, but like you you mentioned that you that uh in the salty section, you mentioned that there's uh both a sense of saltiness and oh yeah, well, so uh so that's more of a t a tape.
So flavor is taste and smell. That's uh chapter one, I believe, part one. Um so uh in the case of smokiness, we're mostly talking about smell and aroma. In the case of salt, we're talking about taste. But the aqua stuff is actually a is that a flavor or it's mostly it's a flavor in the sense that it's mostly smell based.
You can't you can get some, yeah, the acronym is. It's not bitter. It's not bitter. But you can eventually, yeah. So if it eventually becomes bitter, then the bitterness and probably some like trigeminal like astringency.
Trigeminal being like the sense of touch that we use for flavor, um, including spiciness. Uh but uh yeah, I mean, so if you've ever like tasted something that was properly salted and then way over salted and it almost felt like burny. Um yeah, we have a uh, you know, a regular, a regular salty receptor that's activated in a certain range, but then like over a certain amount, there are uh I think I think we used to believe it was one dedicated receptor, but it probably is something else. We're not totally sure. Um a second signal of too much salt.
Uh so you know, I mean we have we can taste salt to begin with because we need to like take in a certain amount of sodium in our diets so that we don't, you know, uh uh lose our osmotic balance and die. Um but then too much salt is also bad. So it's kind of this uh yeah, like uh belt and suspenders thing of like, yes, make sure you eat salt, but no, not that much. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. But then with um, yeah, I mean, especially with smell molecules, so things like you know, going from nice smoky to too smoky. Um, yeah, th so like the the obviously like if you have more of a smell molecule, it smells stronger. Um, but you'll also get a situation where the quality of the flavor or smell can change. Um I mean, I either because like your brain gets like the much higher signal and it's like, wow, this is not so great, or at a much higher concentration, your smell, the smell molecule is like activating other receptors that usually don't respond to it unless it activates it a lot.
And so like there's um I don't know, there's like uh certain aldehydes, uh two methyl butanol, three methyl butanol, that in like lower concentrations smell kind of like chocolatey, multi, a little bit like a funyon, and um and high concentrations smell like intensely of cheese. Uh I like both of those things. Which I know because I have spilled it on myself and uh uh smelled like cheese for about two weeks. What kind of cheese though? Uh there's so many cheese, like which one of the cheesy kind of like cheddar cheese powder that kind of like not the not the like butyric acid cheesy cheesy note, but like a the kind of like almost like I don't know, h higher and sharper uh cheese note.
But not like a not like a moldy, not like a blue cheesy note. No, no, no, not so much. No. Yeah. Like if you get parmesan juice on your hands, that doesn't come up very often.
I don't juice wheels of Parmesan very often. You leave a piece of parmesan out and it starts sweating and you get the sweat on your hands and you're like, oh god, yeah, like that smell. I mean, I juice a lot. Right, right. Parmesan cultured cream and turned into butter.
Yeah, I bet. Uh by the way, Ariel was the person who, when I made the dirt martini, came back with the math and said that I had uh I would say it's what is six orders of magnitude over threshold? Yeah, I believe so, yeah. Yeah, a million times more higher than the odor threshold for Josmine. Yeah, Osmond, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So I mean, so like you you did do cereal dilution in the sense that you made a 1% solution and took a tiny amount of that, but I think you'd have to do it a couple more steps. About it. About it at one. Uh-huh. Yeah.
Yeah. Uh it's just nasty. You know what though? I don't ever want that flavor. I know everyone likes it, so a lot of people like it.
I don't want it. The the and and to be for for those who didn't see this episode or uh hear about this situation. Josmin is the like characteristic smell of dirt. Uh it's also the the the dirt flavor of beets. So um yeah, intense intense dirt.
Uh like when catfish are not good. Yes. Yeah. So it's often like produced as like a bacterial metabolite. So if like fish are eating a lot of like fresh water mud that has, yeah, like bacteria in it.
As those freshwater trash fish do. Exactly. Yeah. They can taste clean. Yeah.
Yeah. It depends on a lot of things. Does anyone want my I keep on trying to give away my bottle of Jasmine because like I'll take it. Really? And I wish I'd known beforehand.
Because Dax is gonna come home from college soon and he will break any flavor molecule bottle, and then the whole house will but we'll never get it out. Yeah, no, you won't. So yeah, you should uh you know I mean you can you can get like break resistant bottles that maybe you could decant it into, but I yeah, I don't think I have any Josmin right now. So if you if you haven't at all uh take it. Hell yeah.
Yeah. Hey, do you know what uh uh see, ever told you that I have all these lye problems, so many lie problems? I I've seen photos of your tongue after you uh was like, what's this white powder? Oh, it's a kitchen, so I'll check by sticking it on my tongue. And you burned your tongue.
Yeah. Even even I have to give her props on this. It was bad enough that Nastasia actually felt bad for me. You know what I mean? That's how bad it was.
What's that say it again? I had to call your white. That was horrible. That does sound kind of scary. Yeah.
Anyway, uh so uh other lie problems. So my current my current lie problems that as you know, lie is like super like hygroscopic, right? So like and so I and it was doing all these titrations for the book. Oh, and you didn't make up your sodium hydroxide solution fresh every time. Well, so I looked at the stuff.
It was a you know, it had agglomerated into like a giant kind of ball of lye. And I was like, this is trash. You know what I mean? So like I threw it out. I diluted the hell out of it and threw it out.
Sure. And then uh I ordered a fresh pound. Yeah, uh, you know, kilo or whatever. So then I'm trying to make because like I had like the lie before and like everyone got mad at me, so uh I tried to make a solution that I thought would be safe to store, but still not such that I had like five gallon buckets of lye sitting around, right? So Well what actually happened well, sorry.
No, so I made a bunch of lye like accurately. Yeah, like accurately made it as soon as I got it, right? And sealed it so that like they wouldn't they wouldn't change. Turns out, you know what? Lie will eventually make it through low density polyethylene.
Like did it eat through the Yes. Oh so I had all I bought all of these juice jars, you know, juice like plastic juice suckers with the with the LDPE tops and the and the clear ones that you get, like, you know, like you buy Whole Foods. And I had these concentrated, you know, relatively concentrated solutions. I had my actual, you know, the base that I was using, which is I think is like 0.27 molau. You know what I mean?
Because I'm giving I'm doing uh density based crap, not volumetric nitration. Anywho, so boom one leaks out and destroys my you know 80 year old can of lard. So I lost my lye and my lard and I got in trouble. So then I did you make soap out of it at least. No that's the thing.
And so then I had like another one I had a I put into a milk jug. Uh-huh an actual milk jug, gallon milk jug. I stuck it inside a cambro and just yesterday or not yesterday, two days ago, I looked at it and it had blasted out and my entire camber is then filled with the lye stuff. So did you know that like these LD LDPE crafts were not okay for lying. I've always stored it in glass so who's gonna have all this glass around and then Dax is gonna break it.
Right. But like I mean technically if if we're if we're like adhering to lab safety uh it should be stored like in glass or I mean there might be some kind of plastic that I'd have to look up that is like rated as non-reactive but like probably glass and then like in its own kind of special metal cabinet. I bet you if I gotten like actual Nal gene which is I think polypropylene right it probably would I don't know but like I don't know. I mean like like I I should know this because I am a chemist but uh the there's lots of stuff where it's just like oh yeah we just do it this way and that's storing it in glass. Well people don't store your lye in bunk.
Well and the other reason that we make up sodium hydroxide solutions fresh for titration is uh they can actually like absorb trace amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere that then like you know dissolve in the water, form carbonic acid, and like neutralize parts of the lye. Yeah, but I can't do it because I have no way to store lye the solid without it picking up. I don't have desiccators and all this other stuff. Do you have like a like packets of desiccant you can throw in the I was told, I don't know, you're you're the expert, but I was told that the lye it the lye will suck the water out of a desiccant pack. That you have to use some hardcore desiccants.
That I'm not sure about. Anyway, it sucks. The whole thing sucks. What I'm gonna recommend anyone who's gotta do titrations is just buy the solution you need made at a very accurate thing by a lab supply thing, even though it costs more. If you're doing it at home.
That's probably wise. Yeah for those of you doing titrations at home. Yeah. Don't build oh, did I tell you? I got like a really good pH meter.
They I think they got the price off by like a factor of five. Amazing. Yeah, I got you know, the a bench top one with the with the thing for like a hundred and twenty dollars. Oh god, can you send me? Do you still have the link?
I bought the instantly after I bought it, they took it offline and put it back up. For like $800. Yeah. I have I have a terrible habit of like letting pH probes dry out. Yeah, it's bad habit.
And then having to buy a new one. It is bad habit. Yeah. Yeah. Shame on me.
Yeah. Hey, question for you. Yes. Infusion question. Uh huh.
Ready for it? Yes. Okay. So uh I'm redoing the infusion chapter, obviously, because I'm doing all the chapters. And so I was like, you know what?
I'm gonna include, I'm gonna include uh not how to do it, but just like socks slit. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And so then I've been thinking, like, but like, why would you so for those of you that don't know, the way sox lit works, so or maybe you want to say what a success.
Yeah, so a soxlet extraction is a is a solvent extraction. So you're, you know, taking something like hexane, uh, although probably at home you're not doing hexane, you're using alcohol. Um in the lab would use hexane. And uh uh taking taking the a sample of something that you want to extract, mixing it with the with the solvents, uh letting um letting it kind of like filter off of the solids into like a little container that catches it, then you like distill the solvent out of that and like funnel it back through the uh the original sample material. So the idea is that you do this multiple times so that each time you're pulling out, you know, more and more of the uh the remaining stuff in the sample.
Right, because the solvent's always fresh. Yes. And the kinetics of the of uh uh is that the the bigger the gradient thermo dynamics. Yeah, yeah, the bigger the bigger the gradient you have, concentration gradient between what's in the solvent and what's in the product, the faster your Yeah. Well, there's also there's also like partition coefficients, so like the the the amount to which like an or an organic molecule will partition between alcohol or well, not alcohol and water because they mix, but like octanol and water is usually what we compare, um is dependent on uh so like g at a given concentration, there's like a maximum concentration you can have in like the solvent and in the sample.
So then if you take the solvent off and add fresh solvent. You're at you're at the zero point. So you can, yeah, yeah. So that's take advantage of that partitioning. That's the principle.
So that the only reason to do it is because you want to extract more. There's two reasons, I guess. You it's somewhat faster than just letting it sit around because it's with heat, but it if you want to extract more stuff or different stuff, then you could doing a normal infusion. So one thing when you do alcohol, right, is that you're you're infusing with something that's a lot closer to like 70, 80%. If you're starting with 40, right?
You're infusing with uh a distillate of that. It's not illegal because you're not actually separating them because it goes all back into the same thing. But you're infusing at a much higher alcohol point, and it is a uh and it's and it's warm at at the same time. So I was trying to think of what is actually a good application where it's gonna give a different example. The only one I've done so far is really allow where I've done coffee, which is interesting because the temperature of it is not at the burning coffee temperature, and it's with alcohol and not with water, so it's different.
And so I ran a soxlet for like two, three hours, like you know, 10-15 cycles on on uh coffee. And I got an interesting coffee bitters. Okay. Well, um, you said you're using like 80-proof alcohol or using like EverClear? 80.
Okay, because it'll work better with EverClear. Yeah, but the well, the thing is remember the stuff that's coming off the distillation is like I guess so I say that because like the more water you have in any kind of flavorful thing that you're boiling, the more volatiles are gonna get like driven off when you boil it. So so like dis distillation, like the reason you get like flavors when you're distilling alcohol is less that you're like at the boiling point of basically any flavor molecules, because you're like usually well below that. Um, but because f like smell molecules repel water, um they uh like go up into the the head space of the still with the alcohol. So it's like the same kind of the same feature as when you add spring water to your scotch and release some of the aromas.
So like you'll have less, fewer like flavor molecules traveling with the alcohol as you distill it if you use a higher higher proof alcohol. Yeah, I wasn't getting a lot of loss, thankfully. Okay. Because I couldn't smell it. Kind of.
I mean, I mean, you know. The wattage on the heater is so low that, you know, the tap water is aggressively more powerful as a chiller. You know what I mean? So I couldn't smell coffee until I broke the thing open. Interesting.
Um, wait, so like what else would be good to test though? Well, I mean I was gonna do pure alcohol and mint, because that's interesting. Yeah. I mean what about tea? I could try tea.
So like the thing with with a soxalate, what you get that's different than if you were like distilling it, like distilling usually leaves the taste molecules behind. But since like soxlets fundamentally a, you know, solvent contact extraction, you're gonna get all of those too. Right. So anything like tannic or bitter is gonna end up. But the well, the question is right, what is there that you want the you want to extract more than you could with a normal steep.
Right. Interesting. I could try tea. The issue with high alcohol and tea actually is that uh a lot of those polyphenols don't come out of tea as well and super high alcohol, right? Yeah, yeah.
A lot of them are like uh reasonably polar. Yeah. You know what's weird? I got bum quasia. This is a separate subject.
Okay. So like, you know, okay, so quasia, qua quasin, right, which is the quasinoids, whatever they're called, which is their, you know, the the bitter crap in in quasia. Uh is, you know, everyone points to it as being like the the purest bitters. Okay. You know what I mean?
Like, like as opposed to like, you know, uh wormwood, let's say, or gention. Okay. Right. And so I did like all of these water-based as a test, water and then ethanol, right? And wormwood is crazy bitter, even with a water extraction.
Crazy bitter. Genshin, crazy bitter with a water extraction. Quinine, crazy bitter with a water extra extraction. Quasia is not the quasin, not very water soluble. I looked it up, like almost insoluble.
But I wasn't able to get anything out of these things, even in a pure ethanol. Nothing. It's like and then I started chewing on the wood. Nothing. Have you ever had a bum quasia?
I I mean I have not, but you probably bought more batches of quasia than than I have. Or did I blast myself and I can't taste it anymore? I I that's not really how bitterness works. I blasted myself on, I've blasted myself on aromamolecules. I couldn't sm I couldn't smell or taste um methylanthranylate for like six months once.
Oh, you like threw off your baseline threshold? Well I put it in my mouth. Uh-huh. I blew through it. I blew through a uh a flavor tube that was pure methylanthranolate and it blasted me.
I I was like, I couldn't crazy. Yeah. Crazy. My brain was like, no, thank you. Yeah.
And you know interesting. It's one of my favorite fake flavors. Yeah. It's uh well, I mean, it's also a delicious real flavor in uh conquered grapes and yeah, but I even like the one note Nancy. Yeah, yeah.
You know what I mean? Yeah, no, I feel you. All right, let's get some questions. Let's get some questions. Did you which wait?
So you wait, this is the one you're interested in? Uh I mean, I can weigh in on any of the ones that I oh yeah, the the mousey one. I can talk about that. From Alexander, uh I got a bit of a general question that might fit when Andre Mack is on, but might also be better for someone like Harold McGain. Look, we got someone who is like both in the spirits world and in the science world.
So Alexander, you won. You know, you're not having a no good, horrible, very bad day. Uh I'm trying to understand the fault known as mousey in wine, mostly related to natural wines, where after opening, sometimes before they quickly develop some truly awful flavors, often described as puke. For me, it comes out as very bready in a rye bread type of way. Uh as in where does it come from and why does it happen?
And how do some winemakers avoid it uh completely without uh using sulfites? As far as I understand, it's not well understood other than being related to acid conversion. I read somewhere about wines with up to 80 parts per million of sulfites developing the mouse. Uh uh okay. And to add to this, I work at a bar or restaurant where he's made some strange uh discoveries, etc.
So what do you got? Well, so I uh in terms of it not being well understood, I can I can fill that in. Um so the fault that we know is mousiness in wine. So sometimes when you taste a wine, I guess it tastes like a wet mouse. Um that comes from uh like wild lactic acid bacteria uh fermenting along with uh you know the the yeast and other things that you intend to ferment.
And uh it creates a molecule called two acetylpyruline. Um so that is the that is the smell of mouse in wine. Interestingly, um, and kind of hearkening back to our uh our our earlier conversation about um different different smell molecules changing in quality depending on concentration. Um they'll also change in quality depending on like what you smell them with. So two acetylpyruline is also in basmati rice tortillas and pandan leaves.
And uh it's it's not the it's not the tortilla dog foot. It is the tortilla dog foot. Yeah. So uh the tortilla, well, the tortilla tortilla smell. If your dog's feet ever smell like tortillas, it's because of two acetylpuruline it's probably some kind of skin lactic acid bacteria I don't know I'm just extrapolating um but yeah it's also the smell of basmati rice and uh the the flavor of pandan so in a in a non-wine context it's it smells nice and toasty I like all those things I like dog feed I like tortillas I like basmati rice but but in wine um with that uh you know that context it is unpleasant um so it's uh two acetylpuruline it it's a nitrogen containing volatile so um you know one we are we tend to be more sensitive to like a lot of nitrogen and sulfur smell molecules comparatively to other things so we can smell them at like very low concentrations um but nitrogen in particular is sensitive to acidity so like uh uh a a nitrogen atom in a in a smell molecule is uh very happy to become positively charged um so it takes on a hydrogen ion uh so in an acidic situation like w where a normal smell molecule like won't interact with the acid that much like a weak acid um a nitrogen containing molecule will will react will become ionized and therefore not volatile well this is interesting because uh so you won't be able to smell it anymore wait when you add acid you won't be able to smell anymore because they had a situation where they had two ferments and every time they add hibiscus to the ferment they get the milestone well when you add acid you'll be able to smell it less so I think it develops it right after the acid discus yeah well, I mean, what is what uh you know, sort of wild bacteria could be on the hibiscus I don't know yeah.
I don't know. Um it's kind of like uh the like a a lot of well, for example, serving lemon with fish um uh doesn't just cover up, you know, uh various various fish-like flavors uh with lemoniness, it actually like acidifies some of them, like the trimethyl amine that smells like the fishy smell and makes them unsmellable. Unsmellable acid, acid and nitrogen molecules that changes the flavor. That was not my nickname. Uh Balloon Knott uh said, question for the show.
I noticed uh Uba forming on the surface of hot soy milk in a sealed mason jar at 80 degrees Celsius in a s with a small airspace, 100% humidity. I thought Ubaformation was from evaporation at the surface. How does Yuba tofu skin form? I would, if I were you, uh uh balloon, go to um, and I can't get my phone to stop turning. I would go to the mechanism for ubiformation by uh Yeming Chen 2010.
And also uh productivity properties of protein lipid films uh prepared dot dot dot dot by Kun Chen in 2009, where they go into it. And while dehydration is important, uh you just need, I think, an air, an air liquid interface because it's about fats which are gonna migrate towards the surface interacting with the proteins. So I think long heat over long time can also polymerize them, but I think it's accelerated by evaporation. Does that seem like it makes sense? Yes.
All right. Well, yeah, evaporation, but you also want like protein denaturation, which is fundamentally unfolding. And since most of protein folding is driven by interactions with water. If you're adding stuff that's not water, for example, fat to the situation or air, um, then uh then the proteins are gonna fold differently. Yeah, so it always forms at the interface, and I like I say, I think dehydration's gonna help it, but that interface still exists whether or not you have evaporation, air air, air liquid interface at where the fat's gonna wanna because the fat would rather touch the air than the freaking water.
Exactly. Well, the the the fat wanting to touch the air rather than the water is how whipped cream whips. That's how the foam is stabilized. The the fat molecules stick out into the air. Um I think you mean delicious whipped cream.
Yeah, exactly. And uh uh Yeah, similarly with egg whites, when you when you whip egg whites, the the kind of greasy parts of the proteins would rather stick out into the air than uh into the water to make a foam. Let's get this. Bruce bring you maybe you have an answer for this, because I don't. Bruce, Bruce Blingstein.
I don't know why that's a tongue twister for me. I should be able to say it. Bruce Blingstein. Bruce Bruce Blingstein. It's a lot of it's a lot of like moving parts of your mouth in different directions very fast.
Yeah. I have I have a Sean Brock recipe for columf potatoes. Uh the first step is to brine the potatoes in sugar salt solution for six hours. Can't find anything that points to what exactly that does to the potato. Anything other than the fact that you're gonna dehydrate it?
Oh, you're gonna like it and flavor it. Yeah. Um just gonna dehydrate it and flavor it. I think so. I mean, I know like potato starches often have like phosphorus mol or like phosphates attached to them, but I don't think sugar or salt is gonna do much with that.
No, yeah, I mean like they're pretty porous. So I'm assuming you will pull some of the liquid out of the potato because it's hypertonic. And I would assume that it's also gonna get those flavors into the potato. Yeah. Both of those things are.
So you'll have like a less watery. Although, you know, or whatever. Listen, don't waste six hours. Get a vacuum machine. Just do it now.
Just do it now. You know what I mean? Not later. Now. Um.
Oh, by the way, I did the uh my but do you ever hear me go on and on and on and on about Guardian service wear? I don't think so. So it's this LA man they're not anymore, but like starting in the 30s, LA manufacturer of uh of uh aluminum, heavy-duty aluminum cookware, okay? One of the early waterless cookers. And so you just put potatoes into it and put the lid on and put it on your stove and cook it with no water.
Oh. And you know what? It doesn't burn, but it gets kind of brown. It doesn't it gets kind of brown. So when you make mashed potatoes, it's kind of like toasted mashed potatoes.
Is it good? Yeah. Uh huh. Yeah. Uh do you have any uh tricks for cooking goose?
Lord Nabu wants to know. I think you would know better than me. You know what my trick for cooking goose is is to get a duck instead. But I've only done goose once. Yeah, I'm gonna think about it and I'm gonna try to get a good goose.
I think most goose is terrible, but maybe it's better now. John, do you have anything? Frenchophile? No. I'm gonna work on this.
I'm gonna work on this. Um Christian wrote in, hey, I'm looking for an alcoholic holiday beverage that is both delicious and highly drinkable, as uh in one person would be happy to consume multiple. Would love some of your favorite recommendations. Anyone? Anyone?
Favorite holiday? I like Danish style glug. Ooh, I like Swedish style glue, so we can have a fight about that later. Yeah, I've never had a lot of things. What's the difference?
It's probably the same. I don't know. Does the Swedish style have the like almonds and like mincemeat in it? I don't know. Nils never used to put that sweet.
But like sliced almonds and uh big basically like yeah, like candied glassed fruits in the bottom of it. Well, the trick with any of those things, right, is you you make it taste all good, then when you heat it up, you always have to have a little alcohol left to go chag it a chagada because you're gonna evaporate over the time that you keep it hot. It's all about the chagged a chagging it. Do they use Aka Vietnam in uh Dameland? No, no, no.
Just one. Oh, you don't spike it? Uh Nils used to spike the hell out of it. You might use like rum, but I don't think you mix aqua beat and red wine, at least in Denmark. Okay.
And they love rules about food. So then uh on the way out, we have two seconds. But here, Sam Erickson wants to know uh, do you have any tips for extracting caraway, dill, star anise, or other aqua flavors without alcohol to create a non-alcoholic awkvite in the vein of linny, just for family and friends. Both acetic acid, so vinegar and sugar will help uh increase the extractability of aroma molecules. But then you're gonna have a lot of vinegar in your own.
Well, so you find like a amount that you can uh I don't I don't actually like I guess I mean if sugar does then glycerin must also because they have like you know basically the same polygolic. Yeah. Um I mean, but then I guess a a less sweet, a less sweet sugar, like a uh uh like trihalos or something like that. Three three uh trisaccharide. Yeah, I did a uh I also for the quasio that I told you I couldn't get to make.
I did a uh I did a uh glycerin extraction. Oh my god, so sweet. Oh my god, so sweet. I was like, oh yeah! Crazy because glycerin is so dang sweet.
Yeah, true, I guess. And like a 6040 glycerin water is like pretty visc, like pretty loose, so it's not like glycerin. Anyway, uh Ariel, thanks for coming on and sharing. Flavorama! Pre-order it now.
Cooking issues.
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