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, News Dance Studios, joined as usual with John across from me. How you doing? Doing great, thanks. Yeah, and got uh Joe rocking the panels.
How you doing? I'm doing very well, man. Good to see you. Yeah. So we have uh we have a full house over there on the west coast.
Yeah. We got uh got the Jackie Molecules. How you doing, Mr. Molecules? I'm good, man.
How are you? Uh meh, yeah, meh, meh. Uh Nastasi the Hammer Lopez, how you doing? Good. And uh my man Quinn in the upper left in Vancouver Island, what's up?
Yep, I'm good. Yeah, all right. That sounds good. Uh if you're listening live on Patreon, why don't you call in your questions too? 917-410-1507.
That's 917-410-1507. So uh what do you guys have in the uh in the way of uh weekly uh garbage to uh talk to me about um so what I didn't mention last week was uh my girlfriend and I drove across the country from uh Boston to LA to bring her car here to LA. What kind of car? And uh Civic. All right.
What what year? 2019. Oh, okay. So not like uh an 80s civic, not like a new Civic. Ish.
Yeah. Yeah, okay. Ish. Um but we we took a very delicious route. Um and I would say the the highlight was hitting Sean Brock's new spot in Nashville, Audrey.
Oh, so you went down and over. Oh yeah, yeah. Like Atlanta, Nashville, Memphis, New Orleans. Never been to Nashville. I've never been to Nashville.
Yeah, it was Audrey was very, very good. I had been to uh Husk previously, but Audrey was incredible. Well give us some give us some highlights of uh what you had. Um I did this like Anson Mills blue cornbread, which was probably the best cornbread I've ever had with Lardo. I'm assuming no sugar, right?
A zero sugar situation. No, yeah, yeah, for sure. Zero zero sugar. Um chicken dumplings. Uh there was a there was a beef tongue skewer.
Um tell me about the chicken soup with a dumpling or like some sort of like thing, like what was it? Like what and what in what way dumpling? Like a totally wet dumpling or a dry on-the-top dumpling that had like uh been ovened? Like what was the situation? It was like a kind it was a wet dumpling.
Um not like in soup soup, though. It had I think there's black truffle on it. Was it fundamentally a biscuit style dough dumpling, or was it more of a bready bread dumpling? Yeah, yeah. Okay.
So like plenty of fat in plenty of fat and like a little bit of like uh internal texture to the dumpling. There's so many dumplings. I wish there was a everyone's like everyone's like, oh you guys don't have very, you know, many different kinds of like we have billions of things. We just call call them all dumplings. You know what I mean?
And they're all different. You know what I'm saying? Gets me angry. Yeah, you know what I mean? Uh my man John here's also had a uh pop up pawpaw pie with that.
Oh hold up, hold up, hold up. Was it made with frozen fresh pawpaws or was it made with dry pawpaws, pawpaw preserve? You gotta tell me what's going on because I can't say that I know what a pawpaw tastes like. I almost bought a tree, but then I lost the property that I was gonna put said tree on. So hook me up.
Give me some pawpawn. I mean I I I don't know. Uh I mean, did it taste like a what kind of pie did it taste like? What cut what like was it like dense? Was it like almost like you know, like a raisin pie or like a like a fig pie, or was it like soupy like an apple pie?
No, no, no, maybe like a key lime, you know. Um, so it was like whisked into like a condensed milk kind of a situation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Did you have the salt-risen bread? Uh did I have the salt-risen bread?
I don't think so. You would know. You would know. Because it's got like a cheesy, weird, cheesy, strange aroma to it. Oh, no, no, no.
No. You uh I'm not gonna say, but you um you chumped yourself. You chumped yourself. Now you have to make salt-risen bread, which is a huge pain in the behind. You know what I'm saying?
It's like not you know. I mean, they remember we had him on the show, and he said that they make it every day. And I was like, Oh my god, what a pain in the butt because it fails. Like, but he's like, No, we got it down. He's like, Thanks for asking.
It is a pain in the butt. Thank you for acknowledging. Anyway, uh, next time you're there, which I mean, have you have you have you been there before, or is this the one and only time in your life you're gonna go there? Probably the one and only time I'm gonna go. Someone's gonna need to mail my man uh molecule some salt-risen bread.
I highly recommend trying salt-risen bread. John, you've had salt-risen bread, right? No, I don't think so. Oh, you sons of guns. Weasels.
I don't even know where to get it. You have to make it. Yeah. Actually, I think there is uh a group, I wanna say West Virginia, or somewhere in that area that I think still has a bakery. I don't know if they ship.
If they ship, we should just get it shipped like to the west coast, to the upper west coast, and here we can all have some salt-risen bread. Yeah, I feel like when we do these tastings, we should get them shipped everywhere to all three locations and his and his salt risen bread experts back on the show. Just to talk about salt risen bread. Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, there's I feel like I've gone over the salt risen bread story and the gangrene so many times. I don't know. We'll think about it. Think about it. See if people want to hear the same story again.
Oh, uh speaking of growing my own uh pawpaw tree, before we go any further on your trip, which I want to hear more about. I saw a guy when I was uh coming up here after after I parked the bike. He had a cane, a walking stick, where clearly they had grown the tree, and when it was a sapling, they bent the sapling over and they grew the cane. They grew the tree in the shape of the cane. Because I could see the grain of it.
It hadn't been wet bent, it hadn't been turned. It was the raw stick bent in the shape of a cane, the way that they used to do for like uh ships, for like, you know, parts of ships. And I was like, oh my god. I gotta start now. You know, if I'm gonna if I'm gonna get a decent cane by the time I need one, because you gotta what plant like 10?
Do you get one that you like? You know what I mean? Anyway. All right. So uh after you went down there, what was your next uh oh uh did you get did you have you done that the Nashville Hot Chicken?
Because I've never had it in Nashville. John, you did it, right? Yeah. Did you have I've done it before. You enjoyed it or didn't enjoy it.
It's good. I mean, John, where did you go? I I did Princes and Hattie B's. Not on this trip, but yeah. It's like it's fine.
Yeah. All right. You just made a bunch of enemies. You just made a huge number of enemies. Uh I've never had it's good.
It's just, you know, I I feel like you can weirdly get good Nashville like style hot chicken outside of Nashville. It's not the kind of thing I feel like I have to have when I'm in Nashville, weirdly. That's true. And now you just doubled your enemies. Yeah.
Uh all right. What else? What else did you have? Uh then we hit Memphis quickly and then down to New Orleans, which of course is always delicious. Um my first parkways, though.
I that was my first parkway pool boy, which was very good, obviously. Yeah, you like that bread? I do. Okay. Yeah.
Sure. Um then uh through Houston, San Antonio, Houston, Albuquerque, Vegas, and LA. And I will say, anytime I'm in Vegas, I make sure to go to the Chengdu taste there, which is yeah, my jam. Yeah, again, never been to Vegas. Been to San Antonio recently.
You've never been to Vegas? No. Nope. Wow. No.
It's weird, right? Wiley loves Vegas. Wiley, I don't think I hadn't told Did I have him tell the story when he was on the when he was on the beer? Really? Yeah, yeah.
You and me both, man. You know? Uh I figure I get good food everywhere. I don't like to gamble. We have shows in New York, not the same kind of show, maybe.
I don't know. You know what I mean? Yeah. A lot of holds in desert. Different.
Yeah, I like the desert. I'm gonna go to Phoenix again in like a couple of weeks. If you want some serious desert, Phoenix is awesome. Like outside of Phoenix, you know what I mean? For desert.
But uh, yeah, no, never been to Vegas. Uh Wiley opened Jean Georges' restaurant at a hotel in Vegas. That's right. And lived there for six months. And was on the company tab, right?
But somehow it didn't get told right. So he had he had had a fridge, which is a daily charge at the hotel at like every day for six months, because the first thing he did was like, give me a fridge. And so he put the fridge in there, and then he said when he went down to check out when he went home, they hit print on his bill. And it was one of those old like dot matrix. And he said it was printing for like a half hour, 45 minutes, just printing his six months of hotel bill from when he opened that.
He loves a hotel though. He was psyched. I would not like that. I am I do not want to live in a hotel for six months, I don't think. You guys?
I think I could do it. Yeah? Really? For six months, I think so. I don't know.
I don't know. Uh it gets it gets expensive like to eat and just live. You really miss cooking. I've stayed in hotels for a long time with work and uh you think it's great. And then after about week two and a half, you're like, I want to go home and cook.
I noticed something in San Antonio about that. Get this, see whether you get this uh slight dig that there's there's I'm trying to see if this is uh an undercurrent or if it was just two people in a row, San Antonio said. I asked them what restaurants were good in San Antonio, and here's what they said. Both of them, not related to each other, separate drives. I don't eat fast food.
I was like, I did not say fast food. So, like, at least in San Antonio, there's some undercurrent that if you're going out to a restaurant, you're doing some sort of shortcut or eating fast food. I was like, who said fast food? You know what I'm saying? Um anyway, so interesting.
But I do, yeah, I don't I don't eat out uh enough. I know, John, I need to come to your restaurant more. Sure. Speaking of which, got any good good new menu items? Uh the cheese croquettes, I think, are finally done.
Which took annoyingly way longer than they should have. How many times you burn your mouth on those suckers? Not that much. It was more just like getting the consistency of the batter right. It has to be a lot stiffer than what feels natural.
Um it's it's a mornay basically, but it's a really, really stiff mornae. When someone hands me a croquette and I bite into it right away, and the entire inside of it sticks to the roof of my mouth. I'm like, why, dude? And they're like, Why'd you eat it so fast? I'm like, you serve it to me, Jurgis.
You know what I mean? Like, what the hell? No, that's on you, man. I'm not gonna win. I think it's an inherently bad.
I it's just I just it's not my no, you know what? No, crap. Yeah, it's fine. You know what I'm saying? Yeah.
I don't like doing that either, but you know, it comes with the territory if that's what you're ordering. I guess. Yeah, all right. Uh so I made something this week. So uh if you remember uh Chef uh JJ Johnson, what was this?
What was the rice book that uh I led you and it never came back? Yeah, yeah. Um uh the it's it's from the field, it's not all field choice stuff. It's yeah, anyway. So uh I don't know if you remember when he was on the show, we were talking about uh John John, DJ One.
Simple art of rice. Simple art of rice. Dj O N D J O N, which is a Haitian mushroom, like wild mushroom that in Haiti is used uh in cooking for kind of special events. And when I read it in the book, and when I talked to him about it, I was like, oh my god, I gotta get some John Jan mushrooms. And so like I I got some at Calusteans, and then they were burning a hole in my pantry for the longest time because I needed some sort of excuse to do it.
But I was like, you know what? I'm gonna make a bunch of rice. So I made it. And I highly recommend everyone loved the John John. I can't really put my finger on what the flavor of the John John is, but everyone likes it.
So I'll give you what I did. First of all, here's what don't do, right? So I I made it in a rice cooker, you know, because I've mentioned on the show many times that like I can't be bothered and I'm doing a bunch of other stuff. And so like I'm gonna I'm gonna use a rice cooker. That's all there is to it.
And I also believe, you know, if you remember I told Chef JJ, I was like, he's like, you just gotta do the thing with your finger with the I was like, nope, nope, no, nope. And he's like, why? It always works. Don't care. It doesn't matter whether it's right or wrong.
I'm not gonna do it. You know what I mean? So I uh so the the secret with the mushrooms is, and the secret with all mushrooms, and by the way, I don't know whether I talked about this on air, but I ran a whole bunch of tests uh a year or two ago, which I don't think I talked about. Soaking mushrooms, I the test was on shiitakis, right? But I was smoke uh um soaking shiitakis at different temperatures to see whether or not it actually tasted appreciably better if you did cold water soak uh before you heated it.
And unfortunately the answer is yes. So you really doesn't taste as good to rehydrate a mushroom in an in hot water or boiling water, um, anything really above 60 uh Celsius, but that's when mushrooms start undergoing their cooked transition from being uncooked to cooked, that's when that happens. So, yeah, so sorry folks, uh take your time and you know, soak your mushrooms right. I didn't bother vacuuming it, but I soaked the John John mushrooms for a long time. Uh I put them into a uh nut milk bag, an 80 micron nut milk bag, and then after I soak them, I brought it up to the boil and you know, put on um kitchen gloves, not like not kitchen gloves like uh how I described this, not like I don't want you to get poisoned gloves, but like scrubbing gloves.
Like rubber you know what I'm talking about? Yeah. Dishwashing gloves. Yeah. You should always keep a pair of uh not filthy dishwashing gloves around because it's just enough insulation so that if you're if you're already got cook's hands that can touch hot things, you still can't really grab boiling liquids.
Like you're not that good yet, probably. You shouldn't be. You should really hope you're not that good. But a good pair of like just like scrub gloves, you know what I mean? First of all, they're grippy, which is nice when it's wet.
But then you can take that sack, that nut milk sack, that hot nut sack, and you can squeeze it real hard for at least 10 seconds before your hand starts burning. And so I that's what I did. So I squeezed it out, got all of the John John juice out, uh, and then so you add that to the rice, and then I made a blend of uh parsley, fresh parsley, cilantro, uh clove, uh pepper, garlic, and I didn't use shallows because I don't do that. I've mentioned that a bunch of times. Onion, but blended all that up with a little bit of the John John stock back in the rice.
Uh, brought it up, cooked it. The mistake I made was is I held back on the salt, right? Oh, I didn't hydrate it in water, I hydrated it in veg stock. I was cooking for vegetarians by highlight, I did it in veg stock. If I was gonna do it for myself, I would do it in chicken stock.
But if I'm doing it for vegetarians, you can't do it in chicken stock. So uh anyways, so the mistake I made was as it was getting close to being done, there wasn't that much liquid left. I tasted it, I was like, oh, it's low on salt. And I wanted it to be eaten kind of on its own. So I I added some salt, but then the stirring of it at that point, I broke a bunch of the rice grains.
But it didn't get gummy and it didn't get sticky. Like they stayed, it was almost like the rice had been miniaturized. So all of the grains stayed separate, but they were kind of broken in half. And people were like, How do you do that? I'm like, I'm really good at what I do.
And I was like, I wasn't supposed to happen. It wasn't supposed to be that way. But uh anyway, it was good. Nice. Yeah.
Made some, you know, the bad. I made like a my standard uh dried cod gloop to go on top of it, which is good. My standard dried cod glue is just uh you put onions in a pan and you walk away for a billion years with butter, right? And then you you know, super low. Then you throw in uh red and green bell pepper and you let that go for a billion years until it cuts down.
Then you uh you you bring you you take the thin, the cheap, like the pollock salt, pollock, really cheap stuff, and then you put it in a big pot of cold water, you bring it up once, drain it, bring it up, fill it, bring it up again, then chop it fine, mix it in, and then smash smashed uh boiled yams. You know, not sweet potatoes, yams, white, not sweet, yam, name to be more accurate on top of the rest. Anyway, it was good. That was my cooking adventure for the uh for the the week. What about what about anyone else that got some cooking crap they want to talk about?
It being cooking issues. What do you got? Uh the day after last week's show, we were completely throwed in. So bring me a big old pot of ragu genovese, which turned out pretty good. And how do the Genevese folks take their ragu?
It's basically a little bit of carrot, a little bit of celery, pieces of beef, not brand, and then just a giant pile of like sliced onion. I like that. And then you cook it for as long as you can. This makes sense. So you get like a very subtle passive sort of caramelization, but like it's relatively blonde, I would say.
So how present is the carrot in that. Um it depends. Well, I mean, you made it just now. How present was the carrot? Again, you get you get the occasional bit.
I think we could have actually chopped it a little finer. Yeah. But um it was good. I mean, it's like it's a big blood of like sweet onions with like little morsels of like stewed fatty beef. So you're at two-thirds of a mirapoi, no celery, huh?
Oh no, there was a it's that's celery, didn't they? I don't know. I don't remember y'all. I would have clocked it, I thought maybe very little carrot, very little celery, and then just like again, like the French onion amount of onion. Yeah, I appreciate that.
I I I won't gonna say I overuse it because I don't think that's possible, but uh I go through a lot of onion. My standard like method to do anything is just chop a whole bunch of onions and get them going while you're doing the rest of the stuff. That's basically how I start everything, you know, especially if you're pressure cooking. I do like two or three times the the normal human amount of uh of onion, but um yeah. Do you know what's weird?
I was thinking about this the other day with mirapoi, is that like some people are very sensitive to too much carrot in a miracle, and some people are very sensitive to too much celery. A lot of people are sensitive to too much celery. Not that many people sensitive to too much onion, unless they're allergic to alliums, in which case they're incredibly sensitive. So if you're if you're sensitive to onions in general, you're highly, highly sensitive to onions in a miropoi. But I mean, just in terms of general taste uh aesthetics for most people, it's weird how it's always the carrot and the celery.
Hard to balance. I would say that I always add more carrot than celery. I think I just do it by eye never. But if we're doing a standard recipe, we're usually pretty even in terms of like it's like usually two part onion, one part the rest, you know. One of each, you mean?
Or half half. Two half half or two one one. Oh, I use way then. I use way more onion. Anyway.
Uh depends. I mean, I'm just it should depend. But for me, good and the leftover generation is like just took a like a glob of it because it turns into like kind of a group, and then I refried on one side, and it made like a melt with a velvea. It was quite good. I like Velveeta.
Someone was hating on Velveeta recently. What's the hate? Velveeta tastes good. Kind of a good does. Yeah, Velveeta's good.
Nastasia, what's do you do you don't hate Velveeta, right? Who was it that we were talking to doesn't like Velveeta? Some you know who it was? Yeah, I think it was Chef Josh said something on one of his internet things I was looking for for last week's thing, said doesn't like Velveeta. I'm like, I don't know, man.
It is a well-made he likes sodium citrate. I don't think it would be him. There's different between liking sodium citrate and liking Velveeta, my man. Velveeta is a like a pro like it's like you know what I'm saying? It's like he likes using sodium citrate to make his own cheese melting things.
And I've said to a bunch of people, I like I do that too. Okay, exactly. I think it's like, you know who makes really good meltable cheese brand blends? The Kraft Corporation. You know what I mean?
It's like it, you know. I think look, some things like if you're like, what I really want is the flavor of Gruyere in a sauce. You can make it ensure it's easy to do, like add which is delicious, right? Add like citrate to it. But a lot of times I just want Velveeta.
You know what I'm saying? That's just me though. That's just me. Um it's one of those things with the citrate that, like, sure, I know how to do it. I've taught people how to do it.
And then I just don't do it. It's like making the alginate balls. Like, I know how to do it. I've taught people how to do it. I don't do it.
I don't care about it. You know what I mean? It's like, it's not that I don't care about it. I don't care about it from my own personal practice. See what I mean?
Yeah. It's like when I'm read doing the re up for the for the book. I have to, I'm literally writing, I was like, I'm not writing how to do this. Plenty of people do it. I know how to do it, but I don't do it for myself, so I'm not gonna talk about it here.
And my wife's like, that's really long-winded. I'm like, yeah, I know. You know what I mean? So then she takes it out. So I don't know what it's gonna look like eventually.
Uh hey, hear this, Quinn. You know what that is? That's Warren Johnson sent me some Hawkins cheesies, or as he calls them, Canadian packing peanuts. So if you want to open up uh away from the microphone, John, and he also sent us uh some of uh his uh liquor from above average drinks. We have a uh corrienter, a coriander aguardiente.
This is bottle number 42 out of 82, and it's clocking in at 48% alcohol. And I figure we can uh, Joe, you want to try this or no? The agoridente? The coriander agrediente? I'm sure my man John's gonna have some.
Here to you. So this is clocking hot, folks. Uh it's clocking at 48. And I don't really know anything uh about this. So let's just uh try it.
Here's the Lauren, long time, long time listener. Yeah. Like the nose smells sweet. Yeah, got coriander. What do you think?
What do you think? I like it. Yeah. Wanna make some com it's got it almost smells like uh Christmas pastry. Yeah.
You get that? Almost like uh like a sweetish, like a like smells like someone cooked like a semla, like almost like there's cardamom in it, even though there's not. You know what I mean? You smell that? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah. I love that pastry smell. You want to smell it, Joe? I smell coriander is such a pain in the butt because it can be so many things. It can be high in citrus, it can be.
We're back at the French Culinary Institute, Nastasi, you remember this? At the French Culinary U Institute, we would run back in there whenever they left the storeroom so that they were unguarded, we would run back in there and open every single. So at the French culinary, we used to get these giant things of spices, like, you know, like the you know, the industrial, not industrial, but like, you know, big spices. So Nastasi and I would go back there and just open every single one, rip off the lids and be like, nope, nope, nope. And then we would put it in the maybe pile.
Remember this, Nas? And then we would like keep smelling the maybe pile, and then we would steal the best one and leave everyone else with the garbage. Do you remember that? I don't think that's with me. Yeah.
Remember, we used to distill, we would distill constantly. One of the things we would distill was the caraway, and the other was we would add c uh some coriander to it. I don't know. You don't remember this? You blocked it out.
So the the next thing uh we have from Warren is a coriander a liqueur. This is at 30 ABV. I'm assuming it's sweeter. It's got some brown to it, so I don't know what the brown's from. We'll see what's going on here.
Wanna try the liqueur? Yeah, he wants to try that. All right. Uh just pour me in the pour you in this way. So what do you think?
What do you think? And then you can read this stuff. All right. Yeah. Well, thanks one.
We always appreciate uh getting uh sal good, huh? Yeah. Yeah. It's not like highly um it's like light. Like it's not like highly herbalized, it's not bitter.
Yeah, no. It's really nice. Well spiced. Should I tell you guys what I've been doing uh at home? Sure.
For in terms of liqueurs, should I mention it? Okay, so uh how many times on air have I mentioned how much I love um I love glycerin? Like a lot? Like a lot? So a lot.
Well, so I've been I have a new thing I've been doing. Uh you ready for it? Glacid. Have I mentioned glaci yet? No?
All right. So I really like uh taking an Amaro and uh turning it into kind of like a spritz situation. But you wanna add, because they're often very bitter, you want to add a lot of kind of seltzer water to it. And then it gets like a really low, like a session drink. So like, you know, if you use channar, you're talking about like four percent alcohol.
If you're using like something like a little higher, like it can be like you know, six percent alcohol, but I'm talking like two, a two-ounce pourer of Amaro, adding like a hundred and fifty to a hundred and sixty mils of uh s of seltzer water, right? So like a lot. Very like so, in order to have that be okay, one, you need to add some acid, right? Because I I don't think it worked well without acid, but you also need to add something to body it back up. So glycerin's the answer.
So I've been making a champagne acid glycerin mix that is 60, 60% glycerin, right? And uh 30% uh sorry, 40% water at 6% uh acidity, doing the champagne acid base, which is I use liquid lactic lactic acid now and uh tartaric acid. So I can give the recipe. I don't, I I did it, I I calculated the density of uh glycerin and I did all the calculations, but maybe on the on the Patreon I can put out the recipe for it. And a half ounce of glassid with uh like two ounces of base uh like Amaro, top that with, you know, stir it, mix it up, top that with uh seltzer, like up, like you could top it pretty high, twist orange, a couple ice cubes, you're off to the races.
So that's my standard low alk that we have at the at the house now. And something like channel that has a lot of body and it's very low in alcohol, like 13 and a half percent low, right? Uh if you want to go even lower, I have this drink, I haven't come up with a new name for it yet, but like the two per it's two percent alcohol, right? But it it so what you do with that is it's an ounce and a quarter of channar, half ounce of glacid, and then I make uh a celery seed syrup, which is just as simple as it sounds. You just I also have the recipe, I can put it on the Patreon, but you dump a bunch of celery seed.
Celery seed, how if you grew up in New York, you know Dr. Brown's celray soda, right? Anyone knows Dr. Brown's celery soda. It's hard to get, but it's like to me, you know how everyone likes whatever their local soda is?
To me, that's God soda. And they used to make uh a diet version, but it's not celery, it's celery seed. So just celery seed and uh water and sugar, you strain that out. So half ounce of celery seed syrup, an ounce and a quarter of channar, half ounce gacid, fill that up with uh seltzer orange twist, two percent alcohol, you're good. You're good.
Pounder. It's a pounder. You know what I mean? Pound, pound that thing. Uh and one of them is like, you know, less than a quarter of a cocktail.
So it's like it's like a fifth of the crazy. It's like five of five or six of them is like a beer. It's nuts. You know what I mean? Yeah.
You know, by then you're full of liquid because they're also tall drinks. Yeah. You know what I mean? Anyway. Uh all right.
You guys tried the cheesies yet? Joe, you've had cheesies before, right? We were theorizing last night because I because I ate a package. Is it because it's so cold in Canada you guys need to jack the salt so much? Is it like almost the same as being in an airplane?
I think I think it's just because it's sharper than they dehydrate. You know what I mean? No, but they're adding salt to it, my man. It's not just I think, I think the content of the actual cheese powder is also higher. That's possible, but you know, if you're making something with a higher salt cheese powder, you know what you do to the rest of the salt?
You lower it. You know what I'm saying? You leave it alone. You leave it alone, you let it rise. All right, fine.
Uh I mean that's clearly what they do. But we were just saying it's like, you know, it's like maybe like everyone has their like Canada goose on up there, and like they can't hear anything because they got that helmet on, you know, that that big hood. And so they need something so crunchy that like they can feel it through like all of that crazy weather, and you know, and they need just like loads of salt. They're really good though. I mean, I gotta say, I mean, all love to the Friedol Lake Corporation, but the Hawkins cheesy is a is a in smaller quantities.
It comes in a smaller quantity, which I also appreciate. 36 grams. It's the dumbest number in the world. 36 grams. What the hell is this?
Do they actually like like drop thing and weigh it and then type 36 grams? I mean, who chooses 36 grams as the package size? It makes no sense. I know, but like why ever make that size? It's the dumbest.
It's like, I don't even understand it. And uh maybe it fits in a particular pocket. Oh, yeah, of the of the Canada Goose? That? Yeah, sure.
The Canada Goose. I love how the orange kind of gives that like there's a nice hue on the plastic. Oh, yeah. Oh yeah. It's so hardcore.
This is a good point, Joe. I'm glad you brought this up. Uh plastics have a tendency to scalp. Like, in other words, like uh things adsorb into the plastic, like flavors and aromas. And sometimes it can go the other way, which is why, you know, I always, if you smell your plastic wrap and it smells bad, don't buy that.
Only buy uh polyethylene, not the PVC plastic wrap, unless they've really off-gassed it. But this sucker, I'm assuming they didn't start with, in fact, I can know they didn't because I can see the top of the bag. I don't think they overprinted yellow on this. I think that's just scalped off of the cheese powder, which means that's hard core cheese powder action. You know what I'm saying?
I appreciate it though. John, what is uh grinotis mean? The little like snack. Corn based snack. It looks like something you get like at the uh at the uh like the uh the the PAL concession stand of the baseball, you know, as a kid.
Oh yeah, when you were a kid, the mini stuff, uh yeah, it's the best. Back when you used to be happy with like a little thing, you know what I mean? Remember how like little, like remember cracker jack when you were a kid getting a cracker jack? Oh, the best. Oh, geez.
And then like it how many how many years did it take before you're like, this doesn't have enough goop on it, and this prize sucks. It took me a long time. And there's never enough nuts. Never enough nuts. You're looking for that one peanut.
And also, also, I know I've said this before. Why Spanish peanut hegemony? The Spanish peanut is not the best peanut. Like, not even close to the best peanut. I don't even think it's the second best peanut.
Like, why do we why does everyone go ape over the why do you want those little skins flying off? Like, how many times have you, I mean, me more than I should, I guess, taking a handful of Spanish peanuts, stick them in your mouth, accidentally breathe a little bit, and one of those skins goes right down your right your throat, like starting everywhere. Yeah, right. It's dumb. It's dumb.
It's like um when someone hands you a dessert and they just put the powdered sugar on and they didn't give it time to set. You guys know what I'm talking about, right? You're like, here's oh, anything, anything like uh any, anything like uh, especially things that are dry, so it takes forever for that powdered sugar to kind of settle down, like uh on the outside of like a shoe pastry or some crap, and they hand it to you, and you just one errant inhale and and you're like hacking and hacking and wheezing. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, bad. Uh upcoming guests on February uh 13th, we have uh Michael Fabro and uh Saife Kowja, who I don't know, I don't know Safe, but uh I know Michael, obviously. He used to be at uh what's it called? Oricing salmon, which was uh, you know, as we said back in the day, our favorite fish. Interesting thing about Oracing, did you hear about this?
They ran out of stock. So they sold off all of their stock that was the right size, and they were kind of missing a generation, so they paused for a little bit. This is what I was told. They pa I was talking to the folks at Aqua Best because Booker, obviously, as a salmon aficionado, was like, Dad, they something happened with Oracing. They stopped making Oracle.
I'm like, wow, I don't know, man. And so then I talked to the people at Aquabest, which is where he gets his uh Ikura and went, I'll get this. For his birthday, which was just a couple of weeks ago. Uh my sister-in-law Miley, who's been on the show, gives him a hundred and twenty dollar gift certificate to Russ and Daughters. So he goes to Russ and Daughters and just says, hands them the gift certificate and just says French trout row.
And they just they scoop out this giant bucket of French trout row. Yeah. One, so when I used to get it for him, I was like, no way I'm paying for this crap. So they used to use what they call a bissil cup, this little cup, and I would say this very enunciate very clearly. One tenth of one pound of French trout row, please.
You know what I mean? Like so that they would know I meant a teeny bit because they didn't want to pay for it. You know what I mean? Because he would just go and suck it up anyway. So this he got 1.1 pounds, 1.1 pounds in in like a deli.
And he comes home and he just starts going boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, eating it. And the next morning it was gone. So, like, as we're going to bed that night, Jen says to him, you should do something. Like, get some bagels, not just the trout row. Like, nobody has consumed that much trout row ever.
Like, it's never happened. We don't know what it, we don't know what it does to your body to consume that much salt. You know what I mean? It's like gone. Just gone.
Hosed. I was like, oh my God. And he wasn't like, I had too much, I don't want anymore. He's like the utility monster with that stuff. It's nuts.
I mean, it's like, God bless him. But he, you know, anyone, I can't figure out what he wants to do for a living where he can afford to live the lifestyle he wants. You know what I mean? He would rather not buy toilet paper and have French trout row, but still, it's an expensive habit. You know what I'm saying?
Yeah. You know? Anyway. Uh, so Michael Farrell. Yeah.
Well, I mean, like, but the thing is, is like he just likes certain weird luxury goods. It's bizarre. But he can't, we can't afford to get it. I don't know what I don't know what he's gonna do. He needs to get it, he needs to figure out uh something that people want to pay him for.
You know what I mean? He's to work for a company that makes chow rail. Uh well, you know, they used to joke at Russ and Daughters, they're like, hey, you could get a job here someday. He's like, and then but he never but he probably could, but he would probably get fired instantly because you know he would dip into that. You know he would.
Yeah, getting high off there. I getting high off that supply. Uh yeah, like I used to do with the bacon at Domino's, which was a nightmare. Uh I told you that story. No.
I've never told you that story. I don't think so. Come on. I don't think so. Oh my God.
Okay, real quick. So uh Stas knows this story. So I was working as a delivery person at Domino's when I was in college. I was driving my mom's uh Honda Accord, uh 84 Honda Accord with MD plates on it. So I could speed.
Yeah, I could speed like a mother because I had MD plates. Cops would never pull me over. This is why I never put the Domino sign on the top of my car. But on the other hand, they wouldn't wouldn't give you shift pizzas. They had no food and like, you know, they there was also like I worked a crappy shift, and if people weren't ordering, like you were getting four dollars an hour, no tips because no one's ordering, right?
And they wouldn't let us eat anything. So I used to just start eating the pepperoni. Now the pepperoni at Domino's Pizza comes in like uh a third container. Like most of the other things are in six containers, right? So this is in a six-inch deep, like third pan.
And I'm like, oh my god, they're gonna notice that I'm eating all of this pepperoni. Because I, you know, I I could eat. You know what I'm saying? So I started pounding this pepperoni, and then I'm like, I better move. So I moved from the pepperoni to the bacon.
And I ate like, because very few people ordered the bacon on the pizza. So I I ate almost the entire six pan of bacon. And I was like, this stuff sucks. This is the worst. And someone's like, yo, that's raw.
I was like, I was like, oh, I just thought it was bad. But I ate it anyway. Because, you know, whatever. College kid. Amazing.
Yeah, dumb. Uh, so Dax Dax loves that story. Anyway, back to Michael Fabro. So Michael Favro is no longer at uh Oura King Salmon. He has his own, I believe it's Coho farm that he is now the CEO of.
Local Farmer. Say it again. What? Local Carho. Well, it's only local if you live in upstate New York, am I right?
Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. So he's uh farming coho. And what's interesting is that he is, as far as he knows or I know, the first person to work on Ikijime slaughtering techniques for uh farmed uh coho salmon in at least in the United States and maybe maybe anywhere.
So uh we'll be talking about that, and hopefully he'll bring uh some of his product, you know. Maybe I'll bring Booker. Although I think he'll be in school at that point, so I can't. That'd be amazing. What if you bring Booker?
How do you like it, Booker? Not as much or delicious. He'll he has two words great or not as much. How do you like it? Great.
How do you like it? Not as much. Those are the two things he says. Not as much. Uh all right.
Uh Justin Sherrill writes in question. Uh, I picked up some ultra spurse M uh on the impulse. What's it good for? By the way, did you know that uh um the people who used to be National Starch, the name just went out of my head. They bought T I C gums.
So that's all one company. Isn't that crazy? Yeah, we gotta get in good with those guys. Get Janet Carver on. Hey, we should get Janet Carver on.
Yeah. She was used to run all of the uh chef Outreach stuff for National Starch, which now is Ingredient, and then Ingredion bought T I C gums, who makes a lot of the good pre-mixes and stuff. Should be interesting, guess. Yeah. Yeah?
Yeah. See what I can do. Uh I picked up some ultra they make ultra spurse, by the way. I picked up some ultra spurse M on impulse. What's it good for?
I remember being mentioned on the show, but I don't have a specific use case to work from or what percentages to use. Would it work for breaking up cocoa powder in a drink? No. I mean, yes, but no. Uh so ultra spurse, there's all the ultras, you either got your ultra tex and you got your ultra spurse.
I would highly recommend that uh home folk only get spurse. So the difference is is both of them are, and there's different kinds, so you really don't need to worry about it, are prehydrated starches, right? So what that means is is that it's kind of like wondra flour. They're already uh they've already been cooked. So you can stir them in, and you don't need to bring a product back up to the boil to get it to thicken, right?
It'll thicken at room temperature or any temperature in between. The difference between the spurse line and the text line is the spurse is what's called agglomerated. And what agglomeration does, if you look at it under a microscope, it looks very kind of rough. And so it doesn't stick together. So you can take without using a blender and you can stir uh spurse things in with a spoon and you're not gonna get clumps and lumps.
Whereas Tex, Ultra Tex, you're more likely to get clumps and lumps. And what's the difference between all the different ultra spurses? I don't really know, and I don't really think it makes a difference. I'll tell you, I mean, maybe it does for allergies and stuff like this. But uh I used it just the other day.
The pro reason I wouldn't use it in a cocoa drink is it's gonna thicken your cocoa drink. So if you what you want is a really thick cocoa drink, then sure, you could use spurs. Uh I was cooking beans, I was cooking cow um uh field peas, uh cow peas, rather. Uh not black-eyed peas, cowpeas, and uh smaller, different. And um, I had a little bit too much liquid left at the end.
Uh, so it was a little soupier than I wanted, but I didn't want to do the old school of like taking a big scoop out, blending up a section of the beans and putting it back in. I wanted to keep the beans intact. So I just spooned a little bit of uh ultra spurse in, stirred it thickened right up, you know, in about 10-15 seconds, you wait five minutes or so for it to really kind of stabilize, and out it goes. And so, like that's you know, a use case right there. It's like a really good, if you don't want so Xanthan, sometimes it's easy to kind of go over the top with it.
Um, like ultra spurse, because it is a starch, it acts more like uh a starch. So, you know, if you ever if you hate making a cornstarch slurry and stirring it in at the last minute, I don't know anyone who loves it, plus then you have to bring it back up almost to the boil. Do you love doing the cornstarch slurry and then praying that you don't get those little fish eyes in it? No. You hate it, right?
Yeah. Yeah, spurs. Yeah. Yeah. And uh the only reason that they make text, I think, is because it's a lot cheaper.
But in terms of the like use on our basis, it's not that much cheaper. Your time is more expensive. Uh-huh. From uh L Butts, uh, there seems to be a new Instagram TikTok fad going around, much akin to the fiasco of uh Parmigiano Reggiano in an espresso martini. Well, what do you think about it, L?
Do you really like your? I'm kidding. Uh I did you catch that fad, Parmigiano Espresso Martini? Did you catch that? Why?
Why did you do you watch them on purpose or because of this question? And what'd they say? Yeah, sounds right. Um the new trend is using soy sauce and bourbon slash rye cocktails. Have any of you guys seen this trend?
No. I haven't seen that, but to me it's sound. Well, let me see. Just tried making uh Sazerac with one. First of all, you you you folks know I I'll drink a Saserac, a Sazerak's a fine drink, but as it contains Peixod's bitters, I would prefer if you just made it with cough syrup.
And that's what we used to do at the bar. If you a friends and family came, I would pull Robotussin up from underneath the bar and make a sazerac with Robotusin and do a side-by-side like RoboSac and uh Freegan Sazerac. They taste identical if you get the red. You know what I mean? Uh just try making a Sazerac.
And I honestly say that uh the last remnants of my written house rye, and I know it's not a special whiskey in the States, but in Australia, with our exchange rates on top of import peas, uh fees, and then throw in uh industry uh markups and whatnot, it tends to border on the special side of spirits. It was not worth wasting the so uh the written house on the soy sauce. Yet I don't know if I might have been heavy-handed with it. Well, if you added any at all, you were heavy-handed with it, in my opinion. Same.
Um interested to hear whether it's another fad that will die out in a couple of days or hold some actual ground. Thanks. I said, listen, I'm sure there is a use for soy sauce in uh certain uh uh bourb-based cocktails, certain cocktails in general. Uh Jack Shram had a fish sauce-based cocktail that was uh really good with a couple of dashes of fish sauce in it, but it's very cocktail specific. This is why people are like, oh, I don't in other words, I don't think it's like salt, right?
Where salt makes a lot of drinks taste better, especially drinks with fruit or citrus, right? I don't actually think MSG makes a lot of uh all drinks taste better. I think it makes some drinks taste better and then makes other drinks taste like this. Like like braw brothy, kind of you know. I don't know that I want umami in all of my drinks.
You know what I mean? Uh and I would say soy falls into that category. So are there drinks that would be delicious with soy? I am sure there are. I do I want soy in my Sazerac?
Probably I don't. I think uh, you know, there's what anything with like caramel or coffee or chocolate notes. You could use like drops or soy sauce. I mean, could do it. Could do, but do you put soy sauce in your coffee?
I mean, I I play around with soy sauce and like caramel application. That's it's a salted caramel, that's a salted caramel. That's fine. That's a dessert application, like a culinary thing. I think like there's a fundamental difference between like cooking something which is an agglomeration of a bunch of different flavors, like mole, right, and making a cocktail, which is like a whole different thing.
I think soy sauce, I think it's really nice. Soy sauce works with chocolate. Okay. Anything with like chocolate notes, it would be good. Or like I've got um Don't put it in my hot chocolate.
Like you can make me a chocolate thing with it. You can make me you can make me a chocolate thing with it. Please don't put it in my in my in my chocolate bar. Don't put it in my coffee. If I'm having my morning espresso, don't go with soy sauce into my espresso.
Don't do that. You know what I mean? But what we were saying, you were what was the one you were saying you were just gonna? Again, like if you combined machine, like if you have a drink with machino, which is like the black walnut liqueur. I'm familiar, yes.
And then you add a little soy sauce on top of that? Like yeah, like a few drops. Yeah. Like that would work. Look, there okay.
Look, it's possible that something would work. Here's the other thing, right? Let me tell you a little story. When I and I when I first learned to carbonate, force carbonate, with uh not with an EC, right, which is expensive, but when I first got the carbonator caps, this was in like 2005 or four or something like that, I would carbonate all the wines. And I was like, oh my God, this is great.
Every white wine, everything, I would even like make some Lambrusco-y things, right? I would just carbonate everything. I was like, this is fantastic. I love it. And then I said, you know what I need to do?
I need to taste this side by side with the original. I was like, oh, the original's better. I was like, oh, I have hurt this product. It still tastes good, but I have damaged the product. And for what reason?
Right? And I would guess that soy sauce, you can make something with a lot of things in cocktails with soy sauce that taste okay, but I would bet that you've actually done a little bit of damage. It's still good, but it's not maybe better. You know what I'm saying? That's all I'm saying.
I think there's there's a there's a huge impulse when you are trying to ideate and come up with new ideas, especially if it's like your goal to come up with new ideas, that as soon as you have a new idea, you just start doing it. And if it tastes okay, you think it's great. And then you never go back and really assess whether what you're doing is in fact better or not. You know what I mean? I think it's a huge problem.
I have this problem. I think we all have this problem. Um, and this is why you should always just test. The other thing is I was talking to someone the other day, and they went through this huge process of bull crap that they were doing for techniques to make something. And in my, I didn't want to say this, but in my head, I'm thinking, half of the stuff that you're telling me has no impact on the drink.
Like half of the stuff you're telling me has no. And by the way, I'm being generous. More than half of what they were saying had no impact on the drink. But I'm not gonna be like, you know, because you you're out at a at an event. You can't be like, no, do this side by side and then tell me.
You know what I mean? Anyway. Uh we have a caller. Caller you're on the air. Hey, what's up, Dave?
It's Josh from Northland. Hey, how are you doing? Hey, aren't you doing something with Kampari Academy on milk washing? Uh I am. I'll be up there in a couple weeks.
Oh, nice. And uh an interesting thing which I did not cover because I didn't think to cover it, but I've heard people talk about is alternative milks in milk washing. So before I run my own test, which I'm gonna have to do, what's your favorite alternative milk to milkwash? And does it have the same uh kind of uh flavor altering effects as uh milk milk from a cow? Uh not as intense with the flavor altering effects.
I found success with uh pretty much everything except for uh oat milk, which I think they just put so many gosh garden things in there to uh to make it like homogenous that it then makes it difficult to break again. I've heard Oatley will break. Did you try Oatly or a different one? I didn't use Oatley. Uh I took whatever we had at the bar, which was not a decision that I made because I wasn't particularly interested in making that decision.
Um but yeah, I haven't tried Oatley, I'll have to give it a shot. But I I made a bunch of things work. I actually did one, uh I did a trace leche uh milk punch that I made to break with uh you know all three milks. So yeah, the alternatives work pretty pretty well. Wait, so like goat, like which three milks did you do?
It was man, I'll have to remember. It was definitely sweetened condensed milk and whole milk and something else. Did it break hard? I'd have to I don'd have it broke real hard, yeah. Um I do them like I I do them real fine anyway, and then uh like for home batches, I just put them through like a reusable percolating coffee filter.
Yeah. Um, and it everything I did with alternative milks broke big enough that that was enough to uh to strain it. So like almond? Almond, no problem, yeah. Soy breaks.
In other words, like here's a question for you that I haven't tried with something like soy. What if you instead of breaking it with uh acid, what if you did a uh what if you broke it with um like Epsom salt, like you did for like you would for tofu? You think it would work? Oh. Uh I know a lot of things that aren't acid break.
That's actually a big part of what I'm gonna talk about is breaking with like tannic and astringent things. So we're we're doing one where it's just uh the breaking agent is just really oversteeping the hell out of whiskey with coffee. Yeah, coffee. Coffee is instant break. The only problem I have with coffee with no acid is the curd is so fine, it's so tiny.
So do you have a way to make the curd not be so tiny? Like the nice thing about acid break is it's real fluffy. You know what I mean? Whereas like coffee, like a coffee break is like like tiny, tiny pellets, you know what I'm saying? Yeah, I mean, then I just adjust the method I'm using for straining for that.
I don't do you find any negative results on the back end like for having a smaller curd? I'm using I'm using a centrifuge, so if like, you know, I gotta I gotta go back and test like you know, just using like an like an 80 mesh back. Anyway, you want to push this before you ask whatever question you were gonna ask or say what you're gonna say, you want to push out of the class so that people can go look for it? Yeah. Yeah, so we added uh added a second day, which should go live today, but I'll be teaching uh class on milk punch and milk washing at uh the Kampari Academy in the Grace building uh Tuesday, February 13th and Wednesday the 14th.
So if your Valentine's Day plans uh include talking about homogenous uh protein emulsions, then you know, come hang. And why shouldn't they? And why shouldn't they involve that? Nothing's more romantic, right? And uh by the way, yeah, than breaking milk.
Why do they keep calling that building the Grace Building? WR Grace is one of the most evil companies. Like they they haven't met a village that they can't poison. Like, why is it that they still call that building the Graceville? Isn't that weird?
It's not like Grace, like, you know, Grace Church or or Grace, like, you know, God's good graces. It's WR Grace, evil, evil mega overlords. You know what I mean? I'm happy I'm happy to rebrand it to the Kempari building with other stuff in it. Yeah, a little long.
You need to tighten that up. Workshop it, tighten it up, get it back to me. Yeah. So uh for those of you also that never been to the Kampari Academy, go check it out up there on the 19th floor. They got a they got a nice little space.
All right, so what was your question? So uh I'm I'm making a soup on this uh nice cool Virginia afternoon, and uh I'm gonna use leaks. And I know your stance on leaks and not wanting to deal with the dirt. What I've always done is cut them first and then washed them. And I'm wondering, does this is there a reason that this makes me a low quality individual?
Is this like monstrous behavior? Or it depends on what you mean by cut. The the classic thing is to slice it almost down to the root in half, break it open so the root stays intact, and then like fudge it around and then slice it into rings. You mean you slice it in rings, put it in the spinner, and then go blah blah blah blah. That's probably the smartest way to do it.
That's what I do too, yeah. It's smart. Smart. I mean, that's the way I that's the way I do, you know, cilantro, and that's the way I do parsley, it's the way I do everything. So I just never thought to do it with leaks because I had been taught the old idiot way, you know.
Because if you but if you don't ring it, you can't do it that way. You can't do the classic leak cleaning technique that way. Yeah. You know what I mean? God bless the sales binner.
God bless the colander. You know what I'm saying? How many how many rinses do you need on the rings to get them clear? Because what I hate about leeks is also like some some celery, but you're celery's not as much of a pain in the butt because you're not doing that much of it. Is the persistent, the persistent dirt on the bottom of the leek.
You know what I'm saying? Do you have to sit there and scrub a lub? You know what the best way to clean leeks is, by the way? Have someone else do it. It's for sure the best way.
It's for sure the best. It's like peeling shrimp. The best, the best shrimp peeler is somebody else. But uh no, that's a good uh that's it's good technique. I mean, I just you know what?
You know what? I'm uh I'm I'm grown now, I'm uh 52 years old. Maybe I'll go back to leeks. I'll do it, I'll do it your way. I appreciate I appreciate the impetus.
I can stop my my I know stop my hate talk. But uh still. I just wanted to make sure I wasn't sinning by doing it. No, I mean, I mean, look, I don't I don't think anyone's gonna get mad at that. I mean, theoretically, you're leaching a little bit.
Who cares? You know what I mean? Like, honestly, who cares? You know what I'm saying? Um, anyway.
Uh was that was that uh we just wanted to add I think uh you're doing fine. And uh go uh check out uh check out your uh Josh's class at the the Compari Academy. Maybe we'll put something up on the Patreon so people know where to get it. All right. Oh cool.
I I swear I wasn't calling for the plug, but I appreciate it very much. Thank you. Why not plug, right? Uh all right. All right, Gordon Stahl writes in baking soda science.
Uh, how does baking soda reaction work in honeycomb candy? So honeycomb candy, sea foam candy, foam candy. Uh you guys know what we're talking about here. So you you take a sugar syrup up to a real high temperature, like on the order of like 300 Fahrenheit, you stick baking soda into it. It foams up like real cream.
Yeah. They call it different things depending on where you are, but like it's big in Buffalo and it's delicious. And you can cut it in blocks and then dip it in chocolate. It's good. You like that stuff?
It's kind of like uh not an aero bar because that's chocolate, but that's and that's done with a vacuum. But like if you guys have you ever done the vacuum chocolate, yeah. It's good. Yeah, it's good. I mean, like the flavor really, whatever.
It's fun. I like it. Weird texture. Do you remember? You remember Stu Pak, Alex Stupak used to do uh ice cream in a vacuum?
I don't think I tried that. Any of you guys ever had a styles? Did you have that from a sto from Stu Pac? No. So, like what he used to do is a food saver used to make these weird little food saver things that were like hard containers.
And so um, you know, Stupak was using like uh a Carpagani LB 100 was his uh was his ice cream maker down there at WD. And he would do a draw directly into the food saver, and then he would stick it right in the vacuum machine and would suck a vacuum, and the ice cream, all the overrun will go pfft. And so all of a sudden now, instead of it being like, you know, 30% overrun, is like 300% overrun. It's like super high. Uh and then um when the air went back in, it wouldn't go back into the container.
So it maintained its vacuum. And then you would throw it in the freezer and you would uh hard set it at that. And I think he must have put some stabilizer in it because when it came out, you know, other than crema or whatever, uh when it came out, it ate almost like angel food cake, but it was ice cream and then it would melt. It was the craziest wild. It was the craziest texture.
Yeah, it was super cool. Uh anyway, so back to this. So uh it's the baking soda with uh with the honeycomb. I recently learned how to make my grandma's print peanut brittle. It's aerated with baking soda, similar to the British honeycomb candy.
Back on my first attempt, it came out too pale in color. So I assumed I didn't cook it hot enough or long enough, but it also did not inflate. That got me thinking about how these candies actually work. There's no acid in the recipe, and at 300 Fahrenheit, there's hardly any water left either. Uh so is this some kind of direct thermal decomposition of the baking soda and what gets left behind in terms of the sodium from a thermal decomposition, I might guess sodium carbonate.
That's also what I would guess. Uh, but that would be horrible. Interestingly, there uh also isn't any salt in the original recipe, but there's a whole lot of baking soda. So I could imagine that the sodium that's left uh might be critical for the flavor, but what form would it be in? Uh yeah, you know what?
It's an interesting question. I've always taken that it is thermal decomposition because baking soda will start dec uh decomposing uh, you know, uh once it gets over uh about a hundred Celsius. It'll just start randomly decomposing. It'll lose a third of its weight, but you will get sodium carbonate over. I'm wondering whether it doesn't taste too much like it because it's, as you say, not really in solution, like somehow locked into the sugar.
Maybe that's why it doesn't taste overly basic, but it's a really interesting question. I'm gonna have to raise that with the next kind of candy theorist uh that I speak to. Um Math Man had another baking soda, baking sodium carbonate-related question. I recently tried, uh yeah, I think you just weren't hot enough. You weren't hot enough, is the issue.
Uh I think that that's gotta be it because it needs to be hot enough to stay and to decompose and to and to and to air up. Um so get it hot enough and it should work. Uh or yeah. Uh hey cooking issues team. I recently tried making uh the caramel syrup that I talked about uh on the podcast, two to one sugar to water with sodium carbonate cooked in a pressure cooker for 75 minutes.
When done, it had a nice caramel color and a heady, uh, sweet pretzel smell. I neutralized the acid with citric acid instead of malloc, like he recommended since I was out of malic. While the pretzel smell went away, it didn't taste very caramelly. It had a metallic or strange uh aftertaste, um, no matter the level of neutralization. I assumed uh was it a citric or is what's wrong?
You know what? You know what, Math Man? I gotta think about this. Uh it's weird when I neutralize those things, they do in fact go lighter and lose some of their caramel. So I I'm gonna work on it more.
I don't know the answer, but it's an excellent question. Why does it kind of uncaramel when you add the the uh stuff? I didn't get a metallic taste in what I did, but I'll I'll run another couple of tests and you deserve more answers, so I will get it to you. Bruce Blink Brinkstein writing, going to Paris in April. Any recommendations?
I like everything. Wasn't there some cheese shop you mentioned a few years back? Yeah, look, there's a million cheese shops. My favorite is Bartolome, if you like uh the kind of cheeses I like. Is it still cold?
Uh April's gonna be a little bit too late for Vacherin. Sorry, my sorry. Sorry, Bruce Bullingstein. You're gonna miss the Vacherin Mondor, but you still you should go to Bartolome. Uh what other we'll on the Patreon?
Let's get a good list of uh of cheese shops. Uh, you know, I always go to Bartalome, but also you should go to the Beaufort place. Holy crap. They only do like Beaufort and other like from that from that region, like and like you know, beer from that region, but like the Beaufort that they have makes all other Beaufort look like idiots, and it's run by the commune for Beaufort. Took me three days of going there every day for them to finally be like, you're okay.
Uh Justin Cheryl writes in uh nuts question. I make chocolate nut barks from uh nuts, I dunk in simple syrup, then roast and process and scatter over chocolate. So far, so normal. I found the nuts lose their roasted color after a few weeks. The flavor might be reduced a bit, but it's hard to tell if that's just from visual association.
Why do they lose color and how can I avoid it? I needed someone to tell me or send me a picture because I have not experienced this phenomenon. Have you experienced this at all? Like a roasted nut losing its color over time. I don't think so.
This is not something I'm familiar with, Justin. So someone, someone, if they're also familiar with it, uh, send me, send me it. Um also, if there's any art history people out there, I'm looking for an I think it's an art forum, an article from 1990 to 1992 about the difficulty in performing critiques on art that's related to personal things like personal stories and personal like your body, like like illnesses you might have, because I want to see how cringy that is now if I read it 30, you know, 20 something years, 30 years later, because uh that's what we were used to reading art history back in the 90s. So if any of you have a line on that art, my Google has failed me, so I wasn't able to Google it. But if any of you know what I'm talking about and can find me that article at Appreciate It, Cooking Issues.
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