Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live from the Heart of Manhattan and Rockefeller Center in New York City, News Dance Studios, joined as usual with John behind me. How you doing? Doing great, thanks. Yeah, everything good?
Yeah. Not wearing your Kent, you're not no longer repping Kent, Connecticut. You're on to Pizza Planet. Yeah, I guess. It's not really a planet, whatever.
Rotated. Whatever. Whatever. Uh got Joe Hazenrock in the panels. What's up?
Hey, how are you? Welcome. Yeah, yeah. Uh Los Angeles. We got our Los Angeles crowd.
We got uh Jackie Molecules and Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. How are you folks doing? How are you? Yeah, yeah. Uh huh.
Good, good, good. Upper left corner there in Vancouver Island. Quinn, how you doing? I'm good. And today's special guest in the studio, actual longtime friend, uh known for a long time, both Nastasi and myself, fame chef and uh now expat Andy Ricker.
How you doing? I'm doing just as well. And you, Dave? Um great. So uh for those of you that don't know, in like the mid-aughts, mid-awds.
It was the when I when I opened here. No, the original Apocalypse. Oh, the original Pac Pac was 2005. Yeah, yeah, okay. So 2005.
Uh, people were like, the best Thai restaurant in America is in Portland. And we're like, you're stupid. You're a dummy. What the hell do you know about anything at all? This is like, first of all, like 2005 was probably the height of New York chauvinism in American restaurant scene, because we had kind of thrown off the shackles of needing to look up to our uh, you know, European counterparts, and we were we were our own people.
And then but definitely it was New York. And so the idea that like the best Thai restaurant that you could easily go to in the United States was run by a white dude in Portland, Oregon, was absurd, but yet true. Well, it was absurd, actually. It's completely absurd, and I agree with that. Yeah, yeah.
But that was 20 years ago almost. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then like, I don't know, like 10 years later, you like opened some pockpox here. 2011, I planted the flag, very end of 2011. All right, yeah.
So yeah. And uh, and then uh, you know, right before the pandemic, you were like, I'm out. Or like, or right after. Right as the pandemic descended on us, like basically I was in Thailand, and I was, you know, I was there from Christmas of 2019, and we started seeing, you know, the local news was covering China a lot, and there was like there were drones in the street telling grandmas to go home. Oh, yeah, yeah.
You know, in Wuhan or whatever. Yeah. And we had direct flights from Wuhan coming into both Bangkok and Chiang Mai. I think one of the first documented cases of COVID was a Bangkok taxi driver who died of it, and potentially a woman died in a hotel room in Chiang Mai as well around then. And so I went home on like March 12th or something.
Home to Chiang Mai. Home to home from Thailand back to Portland. Right. And, you know, arrived in America. And, you know, meanwhile, like a whole nursing home full of people died in Seattle.
I landed in Seattle, and nobody was wearing a mask, nobody seemed to give a shit. Crap. Yes. Yes. Oh, sorry.
Oh, yeah, yeah, that's right. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Can't wait to hear the beep on that one. Yeah. Um, you know, it I in my opinion, I thought, oh my god, we're doomed.
And it didn't take me long. By April of 2000, no, August of 2020, I was in Thailand living there permanently. I had sold all the leases on my restaurants, I had sold the property that I owned. I had sold my clothes. Uh I sold a bunch of my guitars and stuff.
I just I was like, this is it. I'm out, and I just shut everything down. But when I spoke to you, you're like, man, this is making me happy. You're like, you're like, dang, I'm so happy. It seems like I should be depressed, but I'm so happy.
To be done with it all? Yeah. I mean, the guitars even. When's the last time you ran a restaurant? Uh well I'm about to do I'm about to work on it again, unfortunately.
Yeah. Pandemic shut down the last place I had to, you know, it was bar, but you know, the last place that I had to like worry about, you know, was everyone gonna get their paychecks and all that stuff. And yeah. Well, I I had at the time that we shut down, I had a hundred and seventy-five employees, like eight restaurants. And I just didn't I was like knocking on 60 Floyd Cardo's had just died.
Yeah, which scared the shit out of me. Uh and was terri a terribly sad thing too, because he was an awesome guy and a great chef. Um, and you know, Tony had died, Tony Bourdain had died, you know, the year before, and I started just kind of thinking about my mortality. Um and the fact that I was tired and just, you know, did the math and decided that uh it's time to to just give it up. N iron nine Thailand flipping.
Howardly, maybe? I don't know. Who cares? No, what's it that's in the face of the charge? I backed down.
That's the uh that's the thing I think that kind of ticks me off most about like uh any any profession, which is a lot of them, which are underpaid for the amount of work you have to do to do a good job. So, like that's a ton of jobs like that, right? Like architects, chefs, you know, all these jobs. It's like uh the only way that they continue to work at a high level is for everyone in the industry to self-reinforce that that somehow if you can't keep doing this thing that is in some ways not really okay, that you're the problem. You know what I mean?
So it's like I don't know, you shouldn't buy into that crap. I don't know. Yeah. Well, you know, for me it was I had I already had my life was mostly in Thailand already. I had my my wife was there, my cats, all six of them were there.
Uh it was the only place where I like to be. So you sold the guitars and not the cats. Yes. Yes, the cats wouldn't have fetched much. Were they fancy guitars?
Yes. I had a I had I had uh started collecting vintage instruments at some point. Like what kind? You know, the usual fender guild Gibson more of a telly, more of a strat. Like what are you anything?
Anything but a strat? Yeah, I bought that's a telly and he's the he he was like uh kind of strat. I'm like, no, everyone has a strat case. Also, strats are a bit to play if you're not like really good, because they've got that volume knob right at the strings, and if you're like really good, that's great. And if you're not, if you're a thug like me, you're constantly like turning the volume off on accident while you're chugging away.
Also, unless you're in a hair band, why do you need that wahwah pedal? A Wawa, that uh tremolo freaking bar. Oh, yeah. Yeah, why do you need that? The whammy bar.
Yeah, why do you need the whammy bar for? I don't know. I was I was like, I was my job in bands was a rhythm thug. I was primarily a bass player. Oh yeah, and then when I played uh guitar, I was the rhythm guy, so I didn't need any of all that stuff.
I was just like, you know. Plus, you know, I don't know if you know this, but your finger can bend the strings. So you don't need to be able to do that. Oh, you don't need that. Yeah, dude.
You don't need to like let go playing instruments since I was like 12 and I never thought of it. Yeah, yeah. Your finger can do it. Damn. Yeah.
And you sit there like the only way to make the pitch change is just to take this bar and be like you know what I mean? Like I mean, like, I don't know. I guess there is something very 80s about just dropping the whole thing out into like Slack and then like coming back up into it making those noises, but I don't know who needs to be. You can do it with a pedal now. So yeah.
Yeah. Do it all electronically. You don't even need you don't even need to get guitar, right? You don't even need musicians. Watch this.
Hey Joe, uh write some a write some AI crap for us right now. Like write give me some give me some AI. I would like uh I would like uh something in the vein of like uh Rick James uh and uh George Harrison. Yeah, I mean and it can write it. Yeah, who needs who needs people?
I'm kidding. No tangent Tuesdays on cooking issues. Uh we skipped over, we should go back to this is the portion on the show where we uh shoot the breeze over uh uh anything we've done in the past week. Uh you're here for a pop-up, so any interesting cooking problems you've had. First of all, what's this pop-up and why now, why here, why uh so I'm doing uh a moldy little pop-up at mom restaurant um on Laurie's side with uh Joe and his wife Nung.
Uh I'm only doing the chicken wings, and the older I get, the less interested I am in doing like like very complicated pop-ups. So this seems pretty suck. It's a pain in the butt. It's rarely beneficial to everybody except for the people who come. Yeah, you can source chicken wings here too.
Oh yeah, no, I we went right back to our supplier that we used to be in the neighborhood back when we were here and got exactly it was Debraga. Oh Debraga, yeah. You weren't a bobo. No, they get them from like Pennsylvania from the Amish or something like that. They're good quality.
Yeah. You got your Buddhist chicken, your Amish chicken, and then all the other chickens. And then, but you know, when you only use wings, yeah. I don't I I've never tried to get wings from Bobo before. You ever they just sold whole chickens, right?
Or they do everything. Yeah, no, they have whole chickens, Buddhist chicken with with the little with a little tag in uh in in the wings. Yeah, we used to do that. We used to do that when we made some of the northern Thai dishes, but you know, for the wings we use this other stuff. Your wings aren't fermented like your ribs used to be, are they?
No, they're not fermented, they're uh marinated in fish sauce, sugar, salt, garlic, like overnight. So it's kind of like a brine, but like a really thick brine. What's your what's your go-to uh what's your go-to, not crazy expensive fish sauce these days? Well, um for this we're using uh red boat. Yeah, red boat, good product.
And uh I have visited I was a s I have to admit I was a red boat skeptic uh because of the price and and everything. But then I visited their factory in in Fuquak, Vietnam, and I was I'm a convert. I do think they're making some of the finest fish sauce in the world. Yeah. Yeah.
Um but if I'm not using that, I'll use Mega Chef blue label. Yeah, uh, I like Mega Chef because of the way it's sound. I imagine the original chairman from the original Japanese iron chef saying mega chef. Do you know who the original Mega Chef was? No.
David Thompson. Come on, really? When they released the first For those of you who don't know, he wrote he wrote this thick, thick, thick book on Thai cuisine. He's Australian. Umpteen years ago that was for a while in the English language the book, right?
It kind of still is in a way. Like yeah, he they uh it's actually made by the squid brand, which is the most ubiquitous of all fish sauce and pretty good quality. And um they wanted to do a premium product, so they approached David to be the and for a while there you could go to the store, buy mega chef brown label tie tie Thai formula, and there'd be a hang tag with David's face on it. Really? And so we used to call them mega chef.
I think in my phone I still have them as Mega Chef. Mega Chef. Which he hates, by the way. Mega Chef. Uh, what's the difference between the blue and the and the brown?
We only get the blue. You can get the brown as well, but the blue label is their Vietnamese formula. Right. Lighter, sweeter. Um, and I did they launched it here because they wanted to compete directly with Three Crabs brand, which the Korean market uses for making bunchan.
So they wanted to compete directly with that. So they undercut uh the three crabs in price. But it's a very good product though. Yeah. It's not available in Thailand.
You can only get it overseas. Mega Chef, man. Mega Chef, baby. Uh Paul Adams, other friend of the show, did a uh thing where they measured the uh like the amino content of like a bunch of the different sauces and mega chef had with had a high umami huallop. Oh, how interesting.
That was a long time ago though. Things might have changed. Who knows? I yeah, I I think they stuck with the formula. Who knows, man?
Who knows? Who knows? I mean, my have you have you tried the new uh Garum from Mitica out of Spain? Nope. It's ridiculous.
Nope. But it does taste good though. I tried some very, very expensive, very pure stuff from uh I think it's from Portugal, and they're like making it in the old stone basically. It's like all on that coast. Okay.
And it's brought in by Mitica, who's primarily a Spanish brand. Oh, okay, okay. I mean, I'm sure it's the same folks. I mean, how many people could do it but then the problem is the Italian, like so DiPalos, you know, my folks down there, I got they're like, it's like Colatura. I'm like, it's not like Colatura.
Not like Colotura at all. So they carried it, but I can't get them to taste it. So they have it on the shelves, but I don't even think they've tasted it. It's really good. I tried it in Lisbon.
I had a I had like a I had like a pin drop dropper taste of it costs because it costs like 30 euros for 100 milliliters or something like that. It's just crazy. Yeah, yeah. But you know, it's some it's some dude, you know, naked pulling fish out of the ocean. And yeah, I don't know what the hell could be.
That's a nightmare right there. Yeah. It's like Saturn eating his sons, people with fish, like pulling fish out, chewing them and spitting them and their guts into a bucket. Yum. Uh what about you guys over there on that coast?
Anything interesting happened this week in the in the world of food? Not this week, but uh andy, I have to say, man, I I cooked through I'd say maybe 60, 70% of your book, the pop pop book, through uh during COVID, it's what kept me sane. And I hunted down all the spices and ingredients. There, I was living in DC and Falls Church had some good markets where I could get most of this stuff, and uh it was great. So that's awesome.
Thank you so much. Um I have to say that the that you've you've been beaten by one couple. This it was a Polish couple who moved to they moved to Iceland and then they cooked my entire book, reshot it, like shot pictures of every dish, did a desktop publishing thing and sent it to me. Now, but every herb was substituted with lamb's head? They they made it look really legit.
I don't know. Maybe there's like some kind of flight that goes from from Bangkok to Reykjavik or whatever. I don't know. Um, but they did it. And so when people say, Oh, I can't find the ingredients to do, I'm like, you know, Polish couple emigrates to Iceland, recreates the entire book.
I bet that couple was rich. Maybe. Or maybe they're just bored. They just didn't because I have to say something like Iceland's incredibly beautiful. It's so expensive.
It's so expensive. Yeah. Especially as an outsider. I you know, I that you just triggered that memory. I that happened kind of several years ago.
I have to go back and find that thing. Because that was it was kind of it kind of blew me away. I didn't really know what to say or do. I just get their permission and like post the side-bye. Oh.
They're like the uh who's who's that who's who uh what which director did the shot by shot psycho? Remember that? It's like Gus Van Sandy. Yeah, Gus Van Sandy, yeah. Yeah, completely redid psycho, Hitchcock Psycho, shot for shot.
Like, why? It's like being a cover band and like doing all the same vocal McGillas that the original person did. Why? You know? Maybe it was for the cruise ship customers.
This is why I like a cover like uh Stevie Wonders We Can Work It Out. Totally different. Totally different song from the Beatles. Yep, absolutely. You know what I mean?
There was a guy in Portland, Oregon, um, named Rick Bain. He had a band called The Genius Position or something like that. And he he recreated pet sounds entirely on like weird instruments on a cassette deck. So he's like the whole pet sounds album like ween style, like on like a four-track. Yeah, on a four-track, using like unconventional instruments, and he completely recreated the whole pet sounds album.
It was amazing. Yeah. It sounded okay. Sounded great. Yeah.
All right. McBean. All right. Uh what about you, Quinn? You always have something uh interesting going on up there in the upper left.
Uh I I didn't have too much this weekend, but I do have stuff I didn't talk about last week. Um, actually two weeks ago. All right. I did a stuffed saddle of rabbit, which turned out pretty good. All right.
Did uh did you have the bones removed? I hope. Uh-oh. So how many bones were left over in it? Or did your brother do a good job?
Yeah, because what we did is we took off like you know, all the legs. We ground the legs with pork belly to make like a farce. And then my brother did a decent job uh burning out the actual like spine. Oh god, I hate boning those things. That's why I don't cook them.
Well, you could just go Fifi Fo Fum and grind it up, you know, with the bones in it. Yeah, that's a totally culturally different thing. Can you imagine? Like, if I serve that to like my normal crew in like little b little bones, like how hardcore would you have to go to emulsify? Like you writer prep the whole thing, turn it into a hot dog situation and just pulp the whole thing.
I don't know, man. Uh so uh question. Should we call things farces here in English? Because it sounds bad. Sounds like a farce.
Sounds like a farce, right? Like we don't have the French connotations, as we know, say it earlier, throwing off the shackles of that uh of the Franco No offense, John, of the Francophile stuff. I mean, like, why call it a f stuffing? Doesn't sound good, right? Isn't it just a force meat?
Isn't that a good thing? Yeah, it's meat meat stuffing, right? Meat force meat, yeah, but you sure, but like what if it's not in something? What do you mean? Like you don't have to stuff first.
Then what is it? Then it's then it's a moose, like that's been caneled or something. Yeah, but you don't it's gonna say smooth. No one no one says here's a ball of farce. You just is that would be a farce.
I couldn't describe the meatball mixture as a farce. You could, but then why would you do that though? What else do you gonna call it? Meatball mixture. But you don't call a sausage a farce either.
Yeah. So it's a bit of a sausage meat. No, I mean a cased sausage is is not called a farce, is it? No, but when you know, because when you buy it loose, you it's still called sausage. Call sausage meat, yeah, loose sausage.
But see now we're we're we're getting deep into it. When you say sausage to me, the first thing I think of is a tube steak. Oh tube steak. You know, like something inside. I never ever call things tube steaks.
Speaking of tube steaks, the Danish, the Copenhagen like hot dog in a baguette could be so much better than it is. It's so not good compared to what it could be. It's only it's only edible if you're really, really drunk. Yeah, but there's so many things are like that. Like if you're going to be drunk and eat something, the correct answer is donor kebab.
A correct answer. Oh there's not one correct answer. But that is one of the things. But if you had a if you had someone handing me a donor, and then other person handing me a poorly made tube-shaped bet faux baguette with a hot dog shoved in it, I go for the donor. I mean too.
Have you ever been to Sweden? Yeah. Have you had the half special? No. It's like the Danish thing, except for they put like shrimp salad on it.
Oh, shrimp salad, yummy yummy. Shrimp salad. Shrimp salad. Yummy yummy. You're familiar with wiggles?
Yummy, yummy, yummy, yummy, shrimp salad. No, we have to pay them if we do anymore. And they have that weird kind of atonal ah salad part. It's fruit salad, is what it is. I don't know how to do that.
Have you had your fruit salad today? Uh-huh. You don't know the song? Nope. Joe, you know where I'm coming from.
Joe knows. Joe's got the Joe's got that wiggles wiggles action going on. The wiggles, it's like uh every generation has their own kids bull crap. And so like my kids was like late Rafi, but like prime wiggles. They're exceptionally weird.
The wigs? I really do. The wiggles are they look like they're on that Star Trek. There's all look like they're on like some kind of unusual speed that we've never had here. Well, they're from like Australia.
That's okay. That's okay, I get that. And they are high out of their minds. Yeah. They're very good musicians.
No, I'm gonna have to look this up. Yeah, like uh what's your what are your favorite wiggles tunes, Joe? Um, you know what? We uh we we we we left the wiggles. Now we're on to um uh Steve and Maggie.
Another I think they're uh that might be Australian. So the magpie and uh uh someone named uh Steve. That's not that's not it's not in my it must be newer it's newer, the songs are great, his smile is bizarre. Do you know who doesn't? You know who takes himself so seriously in a good way is Rafi.
Have you ever heard Rafi talk? No, I've no I've actually we haven't watched Rafi yet. Okay, so Rafi, you know, famous, like uh um Canadian of uh Egyptian Egyptian extraction, Egyptian ethnicity Canadian singer. But like you're like, oh, dude makes kids songs, right? But when you listen to him talk, he's basically like Mr.
Rogers in that he takes children extremely seriously, in other words, as people and as you know, like something to be kind of like treasured in a good way, like Mr. Rogers. Like, you know, like you know how you you see old footage of Mr. Rogers and people try to like get him to like be like, oh, you're this is goofy, you do kid stuff, right? He's like, no.
And that's it, like totally dead. And I was like, well, I didn't expect Rafi to be like that. So where are you accessing all this stuff? Is this like YouTube stuff? What like it's all spotifiable now.
You know what I mean? But how would you know to look for it? Every cause like it these kids' music, if you if you're ever like kids. Yeah, if you're ever in that kid stuff, it's like, you know, but you've you've probably heard you've heard Baby Beluga in the deep blue freaking sea. Swim so wild and swim so free.
Yeah. Banana phone. But you don't know about Baby Shark yet, do you? Uh oh baby shark. I've had to do baby shark.
You know that song I'm a Banana? No. That's the only kid's thing that I've heard. I don't think it's a kid's thing, but it's uh it's pretty hardcore. It's just some dudes screaming, I'm a banana at the top of their lungs.
I'm glad that this was the only thing that I was in uh like my friend uh bow and dylan from Bolan restaurant in in uh Bangkok. They've got kids, and these kids find stuff, and then they make me listen to it. And that was that was the the best thing. Is it better or worse than the Buckwheat Boys peanut butter jelly time? I no idea.
You've no peanut butter jelly time. No, we can put them up against each other in City Matters. Peanut butter jelly song time is one of the great early like early what? Early like 21st century? Uh did it come out before?
It was like 2002 or 2001. I listened to Dr. Demento when I was when I was a kid. Hell yeah, dude. That's my little fishheads, fishheads, roly pulley fish heads, fish heads, fishheads, eat them up yum, all that stuff.
Dr. Demento 70s and 80s and stuff. Dr. Demento, yeah. Like he used to collect really like weird, wacky albums, but like stuff that I used to hear.
That's stuff from the 30s and the 20s and and like all the way up through. Yeah. And a lot of like like 50s, like 45 novelty tunes like uh like uh Monster MASH and all that kind of but even more obscure and and and sometimes risque. Yeah, you know, with a name like Demento, wasn't he a West Coast dude? I can't remember.
I was young. Yeah. Yeah. I was saying this earlier. This has nothing to do with food, but like you know what people don't have anymore?
Like um people who are LP people, right? Like vinyl, like when in the 70s, when you had a vinyl record player, you put like five discs on top of each other, and then you had that little L-shaped arm that rested on top. No one would ever do that to their vinyl now because it's scratching the hell out of their vinyl, right? And then as soon as the the it got to the end, it would go boom, it would lift up the needle, move it over, it would go click Dak, and it would drop the next LP on and go. You could listen to like three hours, but only one side.
Only the Aces or the whatever the beast. Yeah, yeah, yeah. My dad had my my uh my father's Sansui, or is it Sansui? No, uh oh shoot, I can't remember the name of it. Uh, anyways, yeah.
He we I broke it as a little kid. Yeah, of course you did playing my little Ernie and Bert. That was what we used to call lo fi. Lo fi. Lo fi record players.
Have you when's the last time you guys saw one with the tall center post that it could do that? I don't know. We didn't have a loaf. We my father had a quadriphonic setup, so it was pretty bad. But he still had the turntable that could stack?
Yes. Wow. It's really bad for the records. So bad. Oh, dual D-U-A-L.
But that was the very Oh, dude. That that was like super high quality. That was like kind of the the one that you wanted to get. Yeah, it was it's a very coveted record. It still is.
All right. So for the old for the old folk, I had all I had a lot of tandy stuff from the Radio Shack. Oh, yeah. Remember Radio Shack? Remember Radio Shah.
What? I never thought I'd ever hear anyone ever say that. Do you remember Radio Shack? It's it been long enough to forgot to do that. Yeah, it has been.
Like that was one of the great early mess ups. And they sent an email to everyone uh saying R E your former job. That's how they fired like all of their people. Really poorly run corporation towards the end. I remember I used to.
It was too early to game stop them too. Yeah. I I used to buy so much stuff at Radio Shack, like components, that a guy offered me a job once. I was like, nah. I was like, no.
No. So back to the music thing. When I was in bands and we recorded, there was like a really famous mic that you got at Radio Shack. And it was, I can't remember what it's called, but it was it came on a metal plate and it was used as a room mic. It was cheap.
It was like 40 bucks or something like that. Um it was a little a really specific model of Radio Shack mic. That was like bulletproof? And every studio had it. It was the P is the realistic PZM.
Is that what it was? Really? Sure was. Oh, yeah, because realistic was their other brand. Yeah.
That was the in the the in-house company the company. The PZM was the uh oh, what is it stand for? Um it's a flat where it's a mic that picks up basically 180 degrees. Yes, exactly. Yeah.
So they put it on the floor in front of the drum, or they put it on the wall to pick up the the the whole the whole room. It was pretty uh it was pretty cool. When I was a kid, my dad is double E engineer, right? And so he re and he's used to build computers, that's what he did computers and lasers. And so in the like right when they came out, everyone was getting these Apple II E's.
Remember the green screen Apple II E's? My dad got me the Radio Shack, the TRS 80. And so like I didn't even want to use it because everyone else, all the cool rich kids in my neighborhood. And my dad was like, but these specs are actually better. Nobody cares about specs.
I might as well have had the shirt with the dragon on it instead of the polo. For those of you that remember that shirt from Sears. My grandma got me that shirt from Sears. You know what it's like to go? Like, you know, I don't know.
Like all the kids in my neighborhood when we moved, all had all that polo crap. And I had my my grandma's little dragon shirt from Sears. Makes me feel like an idiot. You know what I mean? I don't know.
Anyone else have these kind of experiences growing up? I'm sure people do. Everyone does. Uh oh, I'm being told by John back to food. Uh all right.
So uh do you guys uh what about you, Stas? Do you do any food? Uh I was in Sedona with my sister, and there's no good food. That is not true at all. There's gotta be at least a Tuckeria or two.
Or 12. I was just in Phoenix. I went to a Mexican place and there was no spice in the food because there's so many white people in Sedona. Oh my god. Well, Sedona specifically is full of freak shows and weirdos.
No offense to them. But like it's like super pretty, but it's like I cannot get out of that place fast enough. My my father-in-law used to fly in there out of Phoenix. He would fly into the Sedona airport. And man, uh, if I never see another person like, you know, cross legged with a crystal in there in you know, in front of them, like in that kind of situation again, like it's too soon.
So maybe it's just Sedona, but I had a lot of good food in Phoenix when I was there, which is pretty close. Yeah, I'm sure Phoenix is great. We did not spend any time there. Why Sedona? Were you doing some sort of crystal healing thing?
Were you like uh shoving uh crystals in your unmentionables or something? Yeah, actually, we put them like that. No, not particularly, no. No. Uh what were you doing there?
Why why Sedona? Just hiking and going through. What time of year is it? I just never the Grand Canyon either. Oh, you went up to Flagstaff?
Yeah, when we went to the Grand Canyon. Yeah. Yeah. Cold now. Did you go all the way down?
Very cold. No. I went there once during this time of year, and I slipped and fell. And I'm told that I was like a hundred feet away from the edge, but I'm so afraid of heights that I screamed in such a high timbre that someone thought that a small child had been punched across the parking lot, and we were like, hell with it. And we never went.
I just got as close as I could see over the edge, and we never walked down. I'm never walking down that Grand Canyon, not ever. No way. You can Mr. T me, you could knock me out and then put me on the back of one of those mules and take me down and have me wake up when I get to the bottom, but I'm never gonna walk down the side of that thing.
Did your feet hurt? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm told that.
That was good way to way to get it back on food. Yeah, I was just thinking the same thing. I'll give you some food. I'll give you some food. So uh I was uh uh you know, I do family dinner every every week, and so like I did got a bunch of cheese from Dupalo's, and my one of my favorite cheesemakers is uh Beppi Ocello, who is uh he's uh you know Piemonte guy, and he makes this cheese teston, which means hard head, it's a variety of cheeses.
My favorite of his two favorites he makes is he makes it's a mixture of sheep and cow's milk cheese, aged for you know, like 18, 24 months, something like that, wrapped in chestnut leaves. Stupendous cheese. He also does one like that with uh with uh wheat that you know uh some wheat and whiskey on the outside. Also fantastic. But he made one that he called pizza cheese, which is the same testum, but with like weird, like American style, looks like a deep dish kind of pizza.
And so I served it to Wiley Dufrain, my brother-in-law, who you know makes pizzas, and he was like, it tastes like this person. This is his conception of what an American eating, because he doesn't sell this in Italy. This one is like his is his perception of what an American thinks pizza is. Weird. That's my only food store.
Bizarre. Yeah. And I've been trying to make that Portuguese uh bread broa that I talked about with uh Ariel, and I can't get it the way that I used to make it because I'm not using any, I just need to move to maybe using refined flour. I'm using all completely fresh um, you know, homegrown stuff, and I just I just can't get it to be because I used to do it all the time. Oh you might need to use a mixture.
I don't know if I'm gonna use a mixture. I might just go all the way to you know, good old-fashioned American roller milled products. You know what I mean? I mean, they have their place, just not in my house. What am I well either go one way or the other, my man?
You know how I feel. You feel your way, I feel my way. That's it. You know? Uh all right.
Um, so uh see. Uh oh, I was reading the intro to PacPak, or not the intro, David Thompson's intro. So, like you got into this whole cooking thing because of a mushroom. What's this mushroom? What's this fancy mushroom?
Um, the I was well, first of all, I got into Thai food seriously because of mushroom. I'd been cooking since I was 15 by the time I got to this. I was uh wage earner. My first job uh was a dishwasher at a fondue restaurant. Oh my god.
You know who loves fondue? Who's that? Nastasia. Don't ever be a dishwasher at a fondue. Oh, Jesus, that sounds like a nightmare.
Baked on cheese. Um, but the the story with mushroom was that I went to Thailand in 1992. It was the first time I'd been to Qiungmai. I'd been in Thailand before in the mid-80s. And uh I was there to visit a good friend of mine, his wife Lakana, who is a professor at the university there, was like, Well, do you like Thai food?
And I was like, Yeah. She said, Well, she took me to a few places that served like kind of regular, you know, stuff that I might be uh familiar with. And then she she was like, Well, do you want to try the local food? And it happened to be this was May, and during April and May, right around this time of year, uh, there's a mushroom that comes up after they burn the forest and it rains. So, uh, and they're called uh head top, and they look like a puff ball in kind of that same size but darker color, almost black.
Um, and they have this incredible aroma, almost like it's not like truffle, but it it the intensity of smell is almost the same. Uh and um when you cut it open, hopefully it's nice and white and puffball inside, but sometimes it's not kind of uh, but but they have this sort of like earthy uh taste and that smell. And we went somewhere and a guy was making a dish called Ganghead Top that had like pork ribs and lob spice and uh bitter herbs and tamarind and these mushrooms in it. And it the flavor was unlike anything I'd had before, Thai or otherwise. And it was kind of a uh an aha moment for me because it was like, well, oh, so this is only this time of year, so it's seasonal.
Uh this is a northern Thai style dish. So there's regional cuisine. Uh this guy makes a specific version, so it's local. Uh so Thailand has local, regional, seasonal cuisine, uh, also based on what ethnic group you come from. And that was a revelation to me because before that, you know, uh you go to a Thai restaurant anywhere in the world and it was the same 50 to 100 different dishes.
Because kind of institutionalized international Thai like Yeah, and and it was those are good dishes though. They're good. But it wasn't like there's no indication that there was anything else but that if you go to Thailand. And you arrive in Thailand and you go to all the tourist places, and they're catering tourists. They're basically reinforcing this idea.
Um, so that was the beginning of like, holy crap, I've gotta notice I said crap. Um, I've got to start looking at this more in depth, and that was it. I just kind of went started going back again and again and again and trying to learn more. Uh speaking of uh learning more and like weird things that nobody ever gets to eat, or not weird, but things that nobody ever gets to eat. You told me years ago that David Thompson was in possession, or maybe it was uh maybe it was Weep who told me.
You ever meet Wee Pop, Soup Supapipot, uh the person who did Nomiku, who's one he's he now owns nightclubs in Bangkok? Uh no, I don't think I do. Well, tell me whether this was you that told me this or Weepop, but um that uh because he also knows uh Thompson is in possession of old court cookbooks and like no one's ever translated them and they're nowhere available, like old Thai court cookbooks. Yeah, so that type of um knowledge, uh David's not the only one who has them, like everybody has them now. Uh, but he was the first one, I believe, who really started digging into that and applying them and and putting them into into modern use.
But now he and his acolytes and you know various other people who have who have entered the fray or have been in the fray also have access to them. But it's true. It's in the in the this was like this is like you know 15 years ago or something like that. Oh longer longer talking about 30 years ago he'd he had um or more. Yeah he and and basically a lot of what David's cooking has to do with is reinterpreting these things because the recipes aren't exact.
Right. They're they're very vague. I've never had his food by the way. Well you're gonna have to come to Thailand then. Yeah.
Yeah. Um but what's that what's that what's the in other words what's the spin on that because from what I gathered from what people have told me it's an entirely completely different style of cooking cork cooking. Yeah so imagine a time when there were the the haves and the serious have nots. So like almost a feudal kind of structure. Like today yes yes but except for there's a large middle class there now.
Right. Um oh we got Hello Kitty and Supermalls at the moment. Um so the only place that really could afford to to experiment with food were the royal courts because they had money and they gathered ties people would bring them stuff they could import things um so and the and food was a very important thing and and um so a lot of the people who worked in the in the kitchens in the in the royal courts would uh kind of apply not only ancient ideas but modern ideas as well to to the to the recipes um but like I can't read those things and you know, um, but m my understanding is that you know, the the the uh measurements would be like one rice bowl of pork ribs, one bot of palm sugar, you know, like kind of like old. Bot the unit of money? Bot, yeah, which is based on a weight and uh and one spoon, like what kind of spoon?
Nobody knows. So basically the the ingredients are there and the technique is there, and um, you know, uh David would would work with these things until he got something that tasted good, and then he'd refine it and change it and refine it and change it. And that's you know, that's a lot of his cooking is based on that. Yeah. Yeah.
Uh do you still uh so right now you're running food tours, right? Can anyone get one of these things or no? Uh yeah, anybody who has money. Well, that's the idea. But like how like how like but like, you know, you've been going there since eighty seven, regularly living there.
You used to live there even like a couple of months a year no matter what. I'd be there three to five months a year for, you know, uh well, yeah, for for a long time now. Right. So it's like I mean, how much how much different of experience do you get like being plugged into someone who's an outsider but an insider, right? Because you, you know, we were talking before the show, you still very much realize that you are an American when you're there.
Yeah. You, even though you're living there, right? Yeah. Even though and your wife is Thai, right? But you're still feel like an app.
Right. So about how like what kind of different experience because you I guess you just have the knowledge if you you know that's I think it's the same thing that allowed me to do what I did at Pac Pac, which is that I, you know, I have a nominal understanding of the Thai food culture, and I've got a very good understanding of American food culture, and I'm able to interpret both ways. So um I I'm able to answer questions that Westerners are likely to ask. I guess is the best way to put it. Yeah.
I mean like I'm just thinking about that when I'm dealing uh with uh you know in business environments with other cultures like yeah there's a that's a very specific skill. And and I I'm you know I'm still absolutely a student of of Thai culture and cuisine. There's so much more to learn. But the stuff and I and you know there are people that that I go see again and again and again and I um uh you know I'm able to to show people like here's here's this thing and it's this is what it means and this is what it represents and here's the people who are doing it they've been doing it for X amount of time. Uh here's the little tiny technical like if we go to visit a Konome Jin factory for instance a place where they make the rice noodles uh of a particular type I understand the process that they're going through if you walked in you would be able to figure it out because you're you know that's what you do you figure it out like that stuff stuff yeah and but to the to the casual observer they'd be just like what is going on here I can't I like just don't understand it.
And I'm able to say well look you know they're gonna boil the fermented rice flour dough in the water till it's half cooked because that's a in food technology what is that when you boil half like half cook a dough like you mix a cooked dough with a raw dough. You mean like you would for like a shoe pastry or broa which I'm thinking about or like wrappers or things like that. Plus just increasing the hydration of the it's increasing the hydration of its ability to hold uh water by pre gelatinizing some of the starch. Right. Yeah exactly I'd I wouldn't have been able to place but that's what they do and I don't think that they could could uh um necessarily uh the people who are making it could necessarily express it that way.
But they know that they have to do it. So I'm able to explain what's going on. Whereas if you just came, uh you might get uh with a a local tour guide who isn't like focused on food, uh, might not have uh the the right way of explaining to a Western tourist more precisely what's going on. I'm gonna use that by the way. Yeah, yeah, there you go.
Yeah, but why you know why would uh why would someone why would somebody know what a food nerd wants to know unless they're m themselves a food nerd? This is true. You know what I'm saying? This is true. Do you have any food tours that revolve around going to that rocket festival that you used to show me videos of?
No. But by the way, for these who don't know, you gotta what's the name of the thing? People gotta look up this festival. It's called um bang fifa, which is and it's held in various different places in Isan. But essentially it's it's a a way of uh inviting rain to come for the rice harvest.
And they shoot rockets like into the sky. People homemade, big, dangerous, big. And like people are like walking up and lighting with a match or with a torch a rocket that is like four times taller than they are. Yeah. Like I'm not talking these are like big.
And they used to make them out of bamboo, but now they make them no, they make them out of PVC pipes. Oh, PVC pipes are more or less dangerous. Same dangerous. I would say I don't know the answer to that. Um, I would say maybe a little bit less.
I mean, the the videos the videos are just like, oh my God. Yeah. There's no good food built around that though. Um, no, they just party down, man. It's just a big party and they it's all about running away.
It's about uh well, it's about drinking copious. I mean, they're all this is the other thing. The guys that are doing this are wasted on rice whiskey. That makes it safer. That makes it well, it just makes you, you know, plausible deniability that anything wrong is gonna happen.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um but I mean no, they they have like drinking food typically would be. Well, you had a whole you had a whole book. I had a whole book about drinking food. That's true.
It is true. And you also used to import these crazy like uh ma you would find people whose like business was to take one machine and turn it into a food machine. Like you had a you used to have these washing machines that this guy used to customize for you that would sit there and they would oscillate chunk chunk chunk chunk chunk chunk and be a wound machine. Yeah, you was like beer and crushed ice and salt and it would chunk chunk chunk chunk chunk and then you would open your beer and go clunk and it would just ice up immediately. It would ice up once you agitated it.
Now, this is gonna be another food science thing. It looks it should stay liquid. Yeah. Right. You had to get it just right though, right?
But you you had to get it just right. And it it the key was it would hold sort of indefinitely in there at this certain at the temperature, which is like right at or above freezing. So salt water and ice together makes it colder, but because of all of the carbon dioxide in it and that because it's under pressure and there's no nucleation sites in it, you don't get any crystallization. So you can you you can either keep it at like at its freezing point when it's in a bottle or slightly subcooled. And then when you pop it, the CO2 blasts out, which A lowers the freezing point, sorry, raises the freezing point, and and B provides nucleation sites with those bubbles.
And so you you you know, you hit it and blam oh. It just Yeah. So what what we would do, there are two two things that I would do when you serve it. Uh one would be to before you open it, you tap the bottle on the floor, just on the corner, boom, and then you turn it upside down. And when you turn it right side up again, it would wound, we'd say turned to plastic, basically.
Um so it would it would turn to slush and then you po you drink it out of a straw. The other thing you could do was take pop the lid off, don't hit it, uh it'd still be liquid, and you'd pour it into a glass with a single ice cube in it, and as it hit the ice cube, it would turn to slush. So it's coming out totally liquid beer. As soon as it hit the ice cube, it turns to slush in the cup. So it's kind of like a magic trick.
Yeah, yeah. I like a magic trick. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and then they they were doing that in uh what was that famous Tokyo restaurant that was doing a lot of super cooling and then the Spanish did a lot of super cooling like uh trade it was a thing for a while.
But then, you know, if you were doing it with uh, you know, they were doing it in Thailand with washing machines since forever, right? I thought well they do it they had the hand ones, but typ at first they were used to make like popsicles. On a windshield wiper motor, that's what it was. It was a windshield wiper motor. On a barrel.
Yeah. But they had the manual ones before, the stainless steel things. It was the same idea. You'd have a little jacket and you'd stick a like um syrup and fruit flavor and put a stick in it, and then you go like this, agitate it by hand, and those would freeze into a popsicle. And those didn't stay liquid, right?
Because there's no alcohol in them. Am I correct? Uh also on the beer that stops it from uh w uh well, I mean alcohol will lower the freezing point, but it's this shifting of the freezing point with opening it under pressure and uh the fact that the gas leaves is I think the main and it those little micronucleation sites. You can do it with with water, with straight water without uh any sort of pressure shift like that, you need to keep it very still and very clean so that there's no sights. Uh, and then you hit it or throw uh throw something in and it just crystallizes out or pour it on an ice cube, as you say.
It's a trick that like um a lot of people, a lot of people have uh, you know, done in the high-end kind of gimmick world. But I think it's cooler to just have it not just be like something that like get me a beer and it ices up. Oh, yeah. No, you go to a lob joint where you're eating raw meat with blood and oval and stuff in it, and they'll have super cool beer and they just come to the table and be wound. It's nothing better.
Yeah, ice cold, ice cold beer. I don't know if you know. Ice cold beer. There's another um Thai food technology, mic, what do you what do you call it? Uh molecular gastronomy move.
Yeah. Um which is they use uh something called Nembun Sai, which is limestone paste. Oh, I love that stuff. The sigillated water with with with the limestone paste, and you add it to batters and it makes stuff super crispy. We used to use that crap all the time on bananas.
Yeah, it makes you can cook them and they'll stay firm. Hard as hell. But do what's the difference between the red and the white lime paste? Nothing um like from a chemical standpoint. The red stuff is what you're supposed to use for food.
The white stuff is used for ceremonial purposes. Now we used to I used to use that all the time. The first I bought it, um, there's a there's a Thai grocery on uh actually it's the one part of the f old five points. In if you know New York, like uh kind of downtown history, five points was I kind of like fall i mainly because of prejudices was called like the worst neighborhood in in uh in Manhattan. But it was leveled and they built all the courthouses down there.
But it was where five streets kind of and if you watch gangs in New York, you can kind of see a recreation of that. But there's that street, Moscow, where the Thai grocery is, is one of the only places where where you can physically, if you squint just right, you can see where the five points used to be and what it kind of looks like. So that's on Moscow. Down by Mulberry, would that have been kind of? Yeah, yeah.
So Moscow is one of the original streets that ran right into the five points, and you can kind of see the angles that kind of made it. And if you don't see the big center street buildings, you can kind of feel it for a second. If you can if you feel yourself just right. So I walked in there and they wouldn't take credit card for the amount of stuff that I had to buy. And so I was like, what are these jars?
What are those? And he goes, Lime paste. I'm like, lime paste. I thought he meant like the fruit lime. I'm like, uh all right.
He's like, red or white. I'm like, I don't care. And he gave me one. And then I had to figure out what to do with it. And that's when we started uh doing these, like uh, we would vacuum, we would hit, we would make the lime water.
So it's it's it's like um it's calcium, it's calcium hydroxide, similar to what they use for nixtilization in in uh in uh Mesoamerican cuisine. And uh, you know, you have to make this water and then we would vacuum infuse it into bananas, and holy crap, you could just beat the ever loving snot out of those bananas, even if they're dead ripe and they won't break. So that that is one of the classic uses of Nembunsa is to cook bananas. So you you soak them in in in um acidulated lime water nambutsai, and you boil them and they don't get soft, and then you eat that with um with coconut cream, like warm cooking we call it uh glue buchi. Yeah.
You can do it with pumpkin as well. Good. Very good, yeah. Very good. If you overdo it, it's weird.
Yeah. If you soak it too long or if it gets it gets weird, it gets like weird. Yeah. But the number one use for it is if you want to make the crispiest fried chicken batter ever, use that water instead of water. For and uh what's and what's regular wheat starch base?
Yeah, yeah. Whatever, whatever starch you're using, just add that water instead, and you get like the crispiest. As a hundred percent of the of the of the what's it called? Yep. Yeah.
So it should also brown like a mother. Unless you add a lot of acid back to it. It browns pretty damn good, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Uh if you if you add a little bit of MSG to that, actually, your your batter will turn pink and you get a really nice color. Well, I like that. The uh is it I have not found another thing that I bought there once I couldn't find a good use for are those candles. The scented candles. Is there a is there a use that I would like the flavor of for those candles?
Well, if you don't like the flavor, then you don't like the flavor. I actually love the flavor. It's used extensively in Tide uh sweets, cannome. Um so you can smoke, uh you can smoke sugar with it. Uh you can smoke um flour with it.
Is it always waxy or is I doing it wrong? It has like a not just the aroma of the candle, but like a real well, here's the problem. The stuff that you're getting here is not high quality. If you want the good stuff, you gotta go to Bangkok and buy like these, you know, this this very expensive versions that people are still making by hand. The stuff you get that's that comes from the supermarkets here is is low-grade crap.
So you need the good stuff. Uh but if you get that, and then you you know, you burn it from both ends, you-shaped, right? Yeah. You set it in a cup, you burn both ends, you put the stuff in the same, you know, like like a cold smoke kind of situation. And uh you can smoke uh liquid with it, you add it, it'll absorb into liquid, it absorb into um sugar, flour, and then you make stuff with that, and then you get that really beautiful flavor.
I I I love it. Some people, it's polarizing, kind of like durian. Yeah, or like water bug essence. Yeah. That stuff, generally speaking, I don't dig that much.
You know what tastes just like that? It's the weirdest thing. Uh absolute pear. Yeah. Well, no, but it's because of those esters.
It's very estery. So, like uh, for those of you that don't know what we're talking about, we're talking about the giant water bug. Mengda, we call mengda. Yeah. Which, you know, everyone was trying to source, and I was trying to get you to find me a source because McGee wanted some.
Someone else wanted them here in the world. Exactly where to get it. In New York? Yeah. You go to um you go to the market uh across from C Papai.
And here's the thing. They're not I do not believe that they're legal to import as as a food product. So they get imported as fish bait. Ah, but they're frozen. They're frozen.
But you can get the same thing out of it. Are they just as good frozen? Um, to be honest, I don't I don't ever cook with them. Yeah. But it'll work.
How close do they smell to the the fake essence that you can get at all the stuff? Oh, the fake essence is horrible. That's the stuff that smells like nail polish and bananas and like the pear. It's awful. Liqueur, yeah.
Is it similar to that? Similar, yeah. Um, but the the most the the way that I had it first was this thing called nemprik mengda, which is uh nempricnum, the green chili paste from the north. Um, but they add some of the menda, some of the the gland they squeeze it sounds like it's like little bug. Yeah.
It's big bug. Big bug. And um they mixed it into that, and then I had it with like a steamed fish or something. And I and I found it to be interesting and not unpleasant, but it's not something I seek out. Yeah, so you don't have like uh a little thing of cheesecloth with a bug in it, and like like any oh yeah.
Little lemon bug. Little lemon little bug. No. But people dig it, and uh, you know, it's think well, think about think about the food of Thailand in this context. You're eating vast quantities of rice, right?
Like your your staple, and you're gonna eat, you know, every man, woman, and child's eating like a kilo or two of rice a day in the old days. So the cuisine got developed based on this idea that you have lots and lots of something that doesn't have a whole lot of flavor, and you need things that have flavor to kind of make it more interesting. So that can explain a lot of the kind of um also you're talking about people who were living babes basically at the poverty line. So anything that is edible that's interesting ends up on the plate. Yeah, what's your favorite thing to do with the black sticky that's not dessert?
Um that one you can well mostly what you use it is for dessert. But you can um I really like that stuff. It's really great. You can pound it into like a mochi-like thing. Um, but mostly it's used for for sweet stuff.
I mean, yeah, we used to use that for puffed rice. Oh, interesting, yeah. Because uh because it's tastes really good. Yeah, and it looks really good. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. You know what I mean? But like Well, you know what, you know what the other thing you do with it is you make Laokao. Uh rice whiskey. Oh, yeah.
And when you make that, it turns purple, red. Yeah, tastes like a lot of yeah, the Chinese people use that a lot actually for making Lao Kao, the black rice. All right, see. Uh oh, uh by the way, are you still selling bing chaton or no? What's what's the Thai word for binge tan?
Uh tan. Uh all right. Just minus the bing show. Yeah, tan just means charcoal and Thai. Um, so and uh you know, it's not clear to me where what the the uh what is what's how do you describe etymology?
The the the the sort of like history of the word. I don't know. It probably comes from somewhere else. But tan is uh we don't actually, have in Thailand, we don't make quote pinchetan, unquote, because that's like a really specific property. But there is somebody in Thailand who started doing it, and that's who we were sourcing from.
But I'm not involved in that in that company at all anymore. No. No. No. All right.
But you are still making cordials, vinegar, vinegar based cordials. We've just closed that cunt that company down. You're shutting it all down, man. Yeah, I'm done, man. That's it.
I'm done. Done. Hanging out. All right. So let me see.
Get to uh get to some questions here. Oh, we have a question from Suzanne Park wants to know what is uh the food item you most miss from the United States. I mean, you get to come back sometimes, but um pho. It's the very first thing I have. That's so nuts.
Yeah. I mean, look, we we have really easier just to go to Vietnam? Uh actually it's pretty easy to go to Vietnam these days, but not just for a bowl of pho. So it's it's like and we have we have plenty of other things in Thailand that are really, really good. You're like, you know, oh, I'm gonna get a burger.
Nope. Nope. Uh well, I mean, we can you can get almost everything in Thailand, but you can get really good pizza there, but for some reason the the quality of pho, they're just part partly because Thailand is not really a beef culture, and Vietnam is. I see. Uh all right.
So this is uh a question about you like cocktails, so but you know, I'm opening a new place. I heard uh hung out with Jeremiah the other day. Yeah, yeah. Jeremiah and fabulous. All right.
Uh Mark in Long Island uh saw a bottled jungle bird recipe online that calls for pineapple syrup and lime juice concentrate as well as lime peels. Uh it's from you know, it's some recipe. Listen, Mark, don't don't try he wants to know how to get the lime concentrate. Don't. Just don't do, don't use that recipe.
Just don't use that. I don't know anything about that, but you're the man, you're the man to answer that question. Yeah, so we used to do a uh, yeah, no, but I just these are just questions I have to get through. So uh and I, you know, you like talking cocktails if you're gonna. Sure, sure.
So uh what I would do is I would use uh Booker and Dax's old uh stirred bird uh recipe, which is a stir. So if you're bottling a cocktail, you're you were taking a cocktail that otherwise wouldn't be uh good bottled and making it into a stirred thing. So this third bird was uh was black strap, one ounce uh or one part, it's called part because you're gonna make lots of them because you're bottled, right? One part uh like a crucian black strap, uh three-quarters ounce clarified lime juice. Now, so what I would do if you're gonna cordial like cordialize is I would heat that three parts of clarified lime juice, heat it, and then it'll be stable with peel in it to make like a pseudo-cordial, but don't bother boiling it with the sugar because you're gonna bottle it all together.
Uh half part clarified pineapple juice, half part uh pineapple syrup, which is just pineapple juice taken up to 50 bricks, uh half uh part Kampari, quarter part overproof Jamaican like Smith and Cross, and quarterproof uh light rum like a Florida Cagna and some salt. Stir it to see how much water it needs to add to the water and bottle it, and that should be pretty stable. And that's sounds like a good recipe, not using like lime concentrated, which sounds like a nightmare. And two-thirds. Uh yeah.
Yeah, it sounds great. Yeah. Uh all right. So uh so I can answer more of these questions. Do you like these kinds of questions?
Yeah, yeah, I love them. Yeah. Uh okay. Is there any insurance technique? This is from uh Christian Sacco.
Is there any insurance technique for emulsifying sauces without egg yolks in a blender? I have the Costco uh Vitamix. You know, I'm sure the Cos, I'm sure the Costco Vitamix is as good as any other Vitamix. Just cheaper. Uh it does he mean the blender?
Yeah, no, no. They literally Vitamix make something for them. Everybody makes something for, so like, you know, Costco's gonna sell it for a lot cheaper than everybody else. So William Sonoma doesn't want you to be able to buy the same blender at Costco for cheaper than the one that they you know I'm saying? Anyway.
Uh the base of the blender cup is massive and the solid liquids do not immerse well in the blades unless there's a lot of volume. Well, I wonder if the Costco Vitamix can use other Vitamix pitchers. Right? Because they the Vitamix makes a narrow, they make a wide base pitcher and a narrow base pitcher, but at least in the ones I have, they're pretty interchangeable. As long as you don't have one of those stupid Vitamixes.
You know what's happened since you moved to uh to Thailand? They've taken the Vitamixes and they've put like chips in the blender thing so that they the base knows what pitcher is on it. It's the worst thing that's ever happened to a Vitamix. Uh you know what? I there's what's the name of those really fancy heater blender things the that everybody has in their kitchen?
Thermomix Thermomix. Yeah. I uh every time I talked to I don't use those because you're not European. You need to. Yeah.
Um but every time I talk to the people, they're like, the first generation of those things were the best ones. Uh because they just had a dial. There was no screen, there were no chips, there's nothing. Not the computer. Not the computer, and they hate it.
Yeah. Uh it's also super expensive. Europeans love it. Americans like can never wrap their head around it because we have like decent blenders. Speaking of blenders, this is a good thing to wrap out on.
I saw you give a uh I saw you basically be the uh American in charge of David Thompson's uh speech on Thai food at Star Chefs has gotta be like twelve years ago. And he was saying that you can't make a good uh like uh curry paste in uh in anything other than a mortar and pestle. Agree or disagree, Blender Man. Um if you are David Thompson, that's absolutely true. Yeah.
If you're anybody else Well, you know, very few people will argue that you can make a better one than in a mortar and pestle. But plenty of people think you can make one that's as good, or at least good enough that nobody except David Thompson would know the difference. There you go. All right, fair enough. And uh on the way out, do you remember how we first bonded over a how was it 50-pound sack of mangastines on the roof of a hotel in Panama City?
We went to Panama, we went to the market, it was horrible. There were like dead fish laying on the ground with no ice. Uh, but we found a bag of mangustines. And yes, we went to the rooftop and we sat there and we ate almost the entire bag. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. And then and then we went to uh we ended up getting taken to like a a a burlesque show. That was a nightmare. Yeah.
That place was uh was an unholy nightmare. But the mango steeds were great. Mangustines were very good. It's probably the best thing about that trip. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Because you know what the nice thing is? When you have a uh a 50-pound sack of mangastines and a couple of them aren't good, who cares? Yeah, you just throw them over the shoulder. That's it. Yeah, yeah, because you have 50 pounds more.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Oh, well, thanks for coming on, Andy. See you tonight at the uh what's it called?
The pop-up. Pop-up. Uh cooking and juice. We didn't talk about the coffee. Yeah, that's all right.
Thai coffee, it's the new thing. Yeah.
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