Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arlon, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live from the heart of Manhattan, Rockefeller Center, New York City, Newsdale Studios, joined as usual with John. How are you doing, John? Doing great. Yeah, I got Joe Hazen rocking the panels.
What's up, Joe? Hey, hey, hey, hey. Good to see you everyone. Yeah, yeah. I'm rocking my Edwards Aged Meat uh swag hat.
You like that? Yeah, it's great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He hasn't been on the show yet, unfortunately, because uh I had the COVID during that. Uh over in the upper upper left, we got Quinn.
How you doing? Hey, I'm doing all right. Yeah, yeah. And then moving on down the coast there, we got uh Jackie Molecules. How you doing?
You? Yeah. Good. And yeah, yeah. And last but certainly not least, Nastasia the Hammer Lopez.
How you doing, Nastasia? Yeah. Uh all right. So this is the last show we're gonna have for uh a couple of weeks, right? Because uh next week I'm at Tales of the Cocktail, and then the week after that I'm in Alaska.
But guess get this. For Patreon folks, uh, I'm gonna try to visit Quinn in Vancouver Island. It'll be the first time in Vancouver Island because after Tales of the Cocktail, I'm going to Alaska to see my son Dax, who's selling vapes and luggages to cruise ships. If you happen to be on a cruise ship in the in in this summer in Juneau, Alaska, please go by. I don't remember the name of the shop, but it's right there by the cruise ships.
And just, you know, if you have to buy a vape, buy it from Dax. That's all I'm saying. Because he gets a he gets a bonus at the end of the year. You know what I mean? Uh that's all.
Um anyway, I'm gonna try to stop. Uh and Quinn, should we do a little like uh thing for the Patreon folk if I if I make it there or what? Oh, yeah, we'll do we'll do assembling. Yeah, yeah. All right.
And uh John, you want to tell them how to uh get on that Patreon there? Patreon.com slash cooking issues. There's a couple different membership levels. I believe even a free one. Um there's a lot of great perks to signing up.
You get access to the Discord. Uh you get discounts with people that we work with, like Kitchen Arts and Letters, um, Edwards H. Meads, Glassfin, a whole bunch of other great things and prioritize answer or getting your questions answered. I mean, just a whole bunch of awesome stuff. So check it out.
Patreon.com slash cooking issues. Yeah, by the way, Tales of the Cocktail, the crappy thing about Tales of the Cocktail is that my actual McGill is on Tuesday right during, like, you know, actually right after we would be recording. So I can't, otherwise I could call in and we could do uh we could do a live from Tales of the Cocktail with some bar weasels. We can get some, you know, all the many of the great bar weasels are at Tales of the Cocktail, but uh, you know. You were gonna say worst thing about Tales of the Cocktail is being in New Orleans in mid July.
I might as well is there any difference between New York City and New Orleans anymore? I guess not at this point. Yeah, that's totally fair. It's just one giant gross malarial swamp. You know what I mean?
It's like uh like it's a nightmare. Like really I mean, New York has never been a great weather town. No one's like, New York, New York weather. No one no one's ever said that. You know what I mean?
We get like even in the good old days, we got what, like four good days a year, maybe ten. This has been really soupy lately, I guess. New Orleans equivalent, but New Orleans had a speed for a little bit for for that. You mean like for the rest of history? Yeah, I guess.
I don't know. There was I don't know, it's just nasty here. Oh, I should stop complaining. Most, you know. The nice thing about New York is is it's so dense, so densely populated, and we have so many individual air conditioners running that the streets are like 10 degrees hotter than they need to be.
Most of the pavement's black. We don't have as as much tree covering as we should, and we run a crap ton of individual air air conditioners all day. Just pumping, pumping, pumping heat into this hellhole. And it just makes it awesome. You know what I mean?
Absolutely. It's just freaking sweet. Yeah. You know? Yep.
Not to mention like all. Yeah. Right? Right? You know, honestly, someday they will, someday they will like straighten this place out, like get some funding to rewire all of the buildings and to put uh vent systems into individual apartments so that there can be like a a single air conditioner on the top of the building that's like five times more efficient and like you know, uh uh puts the heat directly up instead of right into your face as you're walking past it, but you know, and then we can go electric on our freaking cooking, all that someday.
Probably when I'm dead, right? Probably. Yeah. We want to put those ACs really high up, so the hot air is like creates a whole new layer in the atmosphere. I mean, you're gonna do it anyway.
It's gonna go up. But the thing is you create so much less, right? You're only running what you need. Hello? And it's like, you know, much more.
Oh, does anyone think we lost them? Oh, they we m you must have muted the uh the outgoing signal to them. Uh yeah, we're good. We're good. Okay.
Okay. What? No, yeah, we hear. They can't hear us. Oh no.
Now I can't hear them anymore. Yeah, I'll just go off. I think all the internet just dropped. Oh no, so how can I hear that? Everyone's let's move on.
All right. Everyone can hear everyone. If you would like to make a call, please hang up and try again. And we're back for round two of cooking issues. We're gonna try it again after the internet turned off because it's so damn hot on the east coast of the United States of America.
We've got John, Joe, Jack, Quinn, and Nastasia in the house. How you guys doing? Fantastic. Yeah. That was terrific.
So what happened was I can't, I I haven't looked at the internet yet, so I can't necessarily say it was someone in Canada, but the last time this happened, it was someone in Canada flipped a switch. Well, I'm just saying, the last time this happened, somebody in Canada flipped a switch and blew everything up. Wasn't wasn't someone down here. That's all I'm saying. That's all.
That's all. That's all. But that's not you. It's it was like Toronto last time. But uh apparently there was problems with the internet on the uh on a lot of the eastern uh seaboards, so who knows?
Who knows? Who knows? Again, really making me uh wish I didn't move. Hey Yeah, well, you know, I I you know I have loved New York. But uh, you know, whatever.
Whatever, man. I'll s I'll see uh I'll see what I what uh the great state of Alaska uh does for me. So uh where we left off before was uh what have you guys done this week? What's going on? Oh man, I went to the Hollywood Bowl twice.
All right, all right. Uh well who do you see? What was going on? Or do you just go when it was empty and like eat hot dogs? No, no, no.
We've we saw Beck the first time and then the music of John Williams with the Philharmonic the second time. And the Philharmonic actually played with Beck the first time as well. Well, okay, hold on. The John Williams he he's alive, right? But like a billion.
Is that true? He's sick, yeah. He couldn't he couldn't be there. He usually conducts it. It's the thing they do every year.
So there's a guest conductor. But get this the guest conductor kept introducing all these movies, and they did some movies that weren't even films that John Williams scored, which is weird. But anyway, he keeps introducing them and spoiling the plot. He'd be like, So in the final scene. And then, you know, the first time there's kind of like a weird silence in the crowd.
The second time the entire crowd erupts in a boo when he spoils the plot. You mean well, in case someone doesn't know the Death Star blows up? No, no, this was like uh a film called Laura or something, and he's like, I'm not even I'm not gonna spoil it because I'm not a bad person. I won't even do that on the show today. But he's like, Yeah, in the final scene when you find out blank, you know.
I I like how you're like the least important people to spoil it for are cooking issues listeners are like, not even on the show. Like in normal conversation with a regular like, you know, jerk, I would never spoil it. And not even to you fools. But uh not even here, no. Yeah.
But like soup that low. So you weren't worried about him like giving up things that, like, you know, if you haven't seen it, you wouldn't be at the at the at the show. No. No, it wasn't like he gave away how Indiana Jones ends, you know. Yeah, yeah.
He didn't do Indiana Jones, did he? Did he? Charlie Williams? Yeah, he didn't. Oh my god.
Like, is there anybody? I mean, look, I should be rooting for the same name guy, you know, David Arnold or whatever, right? You know, and he's won an Oscar and all that. So, you know, the Dave Arnolds, other than, you know, some of us are doing okay. You know what I'm saying?
But uh, I mean, who's better? Who's better than John Williams at movie scores? I mean, even Prokofiev has done movie scores. I'm gonna say that John Williams is better. Yeah, yeah.
I mean, first of all, like uh, how long do you think it's gonna be before some of those movie scores like Star Wars and whatnot are seen as being like legitimate music in the same vein as any other composer like from all time? That stuff's great. I think it kind of is. I mean, you know, bam, bam, bam, bam, bab, bam, bam, bab, bam. I mean, like, uh, like whenever you need like evil theme music, I think of it like uh John Williams stuff.
Yeah, yeah. Although, you know what's confusing is that the head of uh Askap BMI, his name is very close to John Williams and is also a composer and is the person who wrote the music for Emma Daughter's jug band Christmas, is also alive and is in his like late 80s. Someone look up his name. It's super close. So I always get them confused.
They're entirely different people. The person who is the or was the head of uh Askat BMI, he was uh, you might recognize him from Smoking in the Bandit as Little Enos. Yeah, yeah. Songwriter, yeah. Uh interestingly, did not write the theme song for Smoking the Bandit, which is Jerry Reed's Eastbound and Down, great tune.
Yeah, loaded up in trucking. Yeah, yeah. Okay. I don't know if you realize this, but a whole movie. This is what they used to do in the 70s.
I don't think it is. Willie Wonka, right? The original Charlie and Chocolate Factory, right, was uh was meant to shill out uh chocolate bars, right? It was uh an advertising scheme, right? Movies are so expensive now that unless you're huge like Barbie, you can't do a movie as an advertising scheme.
You know what I mean? Yeah. Smoking the Bandit, the entire plot for those that haven't seen it, is that uh um Jerry Reed and and Burt Reynolds are driving from uh uh wherever they started in uh Florida, I guess, to Texarkana to pick up a load of cores, put it course beer, put it on a truck and get it back to wherever they were in Florida, uh Atlanta, they're Atlanta, they're thirsty in Atlanta and there's beer in Texarkana, right? So they have to make it back within a certain length of time to get the money that Big Enos and Little Enus, I believe Burdette were gonna pay them. And that's the whole movie is them trying to get a truckload of beer within 24 hours back to uh Atlanta from Texarcana.
That's it. That's the whole movie. Yeah, anyway. Solid. Solid.
I mean, you know, it's right up there with Star Wars. Yep, classic. Indiana Jones. What else? What else?
What else uh what else did they play yesterday that was good? Or was it no way? When was that one? Is that the first one or the second one you saw? Oh, that was the second show we saw.
Yeah, yeah. But what else do they do? Like, what else do I know that I don't even know he did? Oh, the uh they did the Sunday night football theme. Whoa, whoa, whoa, he wrote that?
I thought that was Hank Williams Jr. Are you ready for some football? Wait, Monday night? Oh, yeah. Sunday.
Oh. I mean, are you ready for some football? Do you know? I mean, I love that Hank Williams Jr. song.
Not that I'm a Hank Williams Jr. fan. Anyway, so what's that what how does the Sunday night football go? It's like uh it's orchestral, you know, it's like the NFL films music, basically. Um more like that.
Uh and then also the um Meet the Press theme and the Olympics theme. Oh. I mean, come on, man. I mean, come on. I know.
Right? Come on. Yeah, yeah. And uh Jurassic Park. Oh, man.
Yeah. How was uh how is Beck? Stars. Amazing. Yeah.
Really amazing. Yeah. Did he did heck? Did he play Loser or not? Yeah, he did.
Really? Closed the Close with Loser. So so he's because he used to hate that song, right? But now he's I guess he realizes that you know you have to play it because you know you have to. Yeah, yeah.
I mean, it was great. He played with the Philharmonic, so it's a pretty special uh arrangement. So what is he the Moody Blues now? Remember when the Moody Blues used to do that? Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. Nights in White Satin. And they had the entire London Philharmonic. Yeah. I mean, that's a weird move for a rock band to play, do.
Did he play Devil's Haircut? What did the orchestra do for that? What did the Philharmonic do during Devil's Haircut? Uh they play they played a really good arrangement, actually. Yeah, okay.
What did the what did the uh the orchestra play during MTV makes me want to smoke crack? He did not play that. What? Shockingly. He didn't play MTV makes me want to smoke crack?
Is it because no one watches MTV anymore? So no one even knows what they're talking about? That was a good song though. Didn't he didn't do Sound and Vision, did he? No.
All right. Did you eat anything? Did he eat anything? Dude, have you eaten anything in the last week that is interesting to talk about to our theoretically food related uh podcast uh listeners? At the Hollywood Bowl, there's really good wine.
Really? For real. Yeah. Huh? Yeah.
Well w what do you have to do? Yeah, it's like it's like a convenience store. They have, you know, like uh like a bodega style fridge with just bottles of wine and beer. It's it's interesting. I've never seen anything like it in a venue.
Huh. And how much more do they charge than a regular McGill for it? Like twice as much? It's no, it's actually affordable. Like I'd say they have the bottle of wine that I like that's usually like twenty-three dollars, and it was probably like thirty-one there.
And did they have uh for for Jack, did they have the yellow tail merlot that he loves so much? No, they didn't. But disappointment. Yeah. Yeah.
And when the internet cut us off, uh John was telling us about his veal balls. Yes, the bitter ball. No, braised veal held together with a roux and the reduced bracing sauce and then deep fried. It's very tasty. Yeah, nutmeg.
Uh you like uh you like a you like uh like a like a like a wintry, like a nutmeggy spice in your in your meat products. Yes, not like love love, but again, trying to like tap into the Belgian kind of way of doing things. It's like brown figer, right? Like like like those kinds of sausages, like veal, like liverware stuff has like a little bit of that, like a little bit of a Yeah, yeah. There was like a huge spice boom after the Crusades, um, you know, in northern France and in Belgium, and that's when like the Oh my god, the cookies.
The speculous speculus cookies started coming out. You know what those are? Delicious. Yeah, they're great. Yeah, love it.
Love the speculous spread too. Um Trader Joe's? I don't know if I've had their speculous spread. It was like a biscoff one. That's the one I'm familiar with.
They just chum it up, make it into a goop. Yeah, yeah. And how could it be bad? Oh, I love those Bizcoffs. Yeah, exactly.
Uh. And uh Quinn, uh, I know you're you're itching. What do you got? Well, for the uh for the patrons, uh last week I released another recipe calculator. This one is my chocolate gelato calculator.
So if you need to uh make some gelato to beat the heat, there you go. Let me ask you a question. What needs to be calculated about a chocolate gelato other than multiply the recipe by X amount so people know what they're looking to download? Right, you well, you can use You can multiply it by one, you can multiply it by two, three, you can. But you can use chocolate with theoretically any sugar or fat percentage.
Uh also a liquid with any sugar or fat percentage, and it will rebalance the recipe. I see. Do you have anything in it that when they choose something that you hate, it goes you gotta work on that. Gotta get that, gotta get that in there. You know, in theory, you can also use water as a liquid.
Yeah. Do you ever do the coconut milk as liquid? I used to love uh well, I guess not gelato then. I used to love all of those chocolate sorbets with coconut milk. What was the name of that awesome sorbet company that they still exist, but this their sorbet were so good.
It was a woman's name and then sorbet. And her chocolate sorbet with coconut milk was just great. She used a super deep dark chocolate, and it was just hyper chocolate because there wasn't a lot of fat to cover up the kind of chocolate flavor. Man, it was good. What the heck was her name?
So good. Anyway, uh yeah, check out Quinn's calculator if in your patron. If not, boop. You know what I mean? Yes.
At some point. Yeah. Yeah. At some point. Who knows what that point is.
By the way, speaking of Patreon stuff, I have so much information that's gonna go into the new book, like tables uh of things. Uh I'm wondering if I should put just put it on the if I put it on the maybe I'll release it pre-release X stuff on the Patreon because what my plan is is that like um a lot of the stuff for the book is more calculator friendly. You know, because it's like, you know, you have to, you're gonna plug in your bricks, you're gonna plug in your ABV, or you're gonna plug in your bricks, and you're gonna plug in your density and you're gonna get out sugar in the liquor and alcohol, or you're gonna add, you know, sugar and you're gonna get an ABV out, etc. etc. Uh so I'm eventually gonna put those on, I think uh a website for the book, but um maybe we put on Patreon first.
Oh, we have a caller. Caller, you're on the air. How's it going? Hey, how's it going? Not bad.
Hey, uh, against your guys' advisory, I started uh listening to uh the old backlog starting from episode one, and I gotta tell you, there's still a lot of a lot of really relevant information. I'm still taking notes and learning all kinds of stuff. So kudos to you for keeping it up for as long as you have. Oh, I appreciate it. We were ten years or eleven or twelve or thirteen years smarter back then.
So, you know, at a certain point, you know, you peek, you peek out. There's a there's like a, you know, it's like a bell curve, and I'm definitely going down that slide. I'm just kidding, I'm still kidding. Still learning, still getting better every day. Yeah.
Yeah, right, exactly. I'm in the era where uh Nastas question per caller rule. So uh I've got a couple of questions if that's allowed at this point, but I understand you can cut me off. It's not yeah. All right, well, let's start.
Let's see where we get to. Sure. So I have uh a sort of Detroit style pizza concept that I'm working on building out, and I have some a technical question, then a and then a few non-food related but still technical questions. Okay. Um in order to maintain consistency, I've found that it's great to bake the bread portion of the pizza ahead of time, pretty much like baking a focaccia, and then you just top it with your toppings, melt the cheese, lay all the sauce on top, call it good.
Um in the few times that I have tried to pre-bake these crusts, they shrink considerably. Like uh in a in a 12 by 17 inch pan, it loses like an inch to an inch and a half on each side. Just the dough. Just the dough. Yeah.
So it comes out of the oven, baked out big, and then shrinks down that much. It's it comes out of the oven shrunk. Oh, it comes out of the oven shrunk. Huh? And I and I don't know if it's because so I'm I'm baking it the same way I normally do when it has toppings on it, which is at 450 degrees in the convection oven.
Um when you do when you do it with the toppings, the cheese makes it stick to the side of the pan and it doesn't shrink when you have the toppings on. Exactly. I I think I think the weight of the cheese keeps it from shrinking, and then you get that perfect rectangle with a nice cheese crust around the outside. And so I'm trying to figure out if there's a way, other than baking loaves bigger than the pans and chopping, like cutting them out, like an insert. I hate that.
Also, I bet you it's getting I bet you it's getting thicker, right? Uh it doesn't bake as evenly. Yeah. So I'm I'm guessing like it's it's it it kind of like mounds in the middle and it's thinner on the edges. And there was also some weird like bubbling happening.
How soon though there was some like how soon after you uh how soon after you get it into the pan are you baking it. Um well that's the th the the formula that I'm using for my dough um is pretty user-friendly. Typically what I do is I will uh so it's a straight dough method. You don't even do a bulk ferment, you you make it, you portion it, um, you put it uh let it ferment overnight, put it in the pan, squish it into shape, and then at that point I normally put the cheese on top, and then it's pretty much ready to go. And you can leave it in their fridge.
Like I'll like I'll put it, I'll I'll do the stretching in the cheese phase, like maybe four to five hours in advance. And then when it's time for service, I literally can take them out of the cooler and throw them in the oven, and I get the product that I get. And it's it's pretty solid how user-friendly it is. Here's here here's here's what I'm thinking. Tell me whether you think this makes sense based on what you're telling me.
So typically, you know, I haven't done Detroit in a in a while, but I you know I went through a phase, right? And so typically, and a lot of the recipes will tell you this, especially like if you look at the videos of the people in Detroit doing it, is they'll do an uh they'll do an initial stretch out. And then if you remember, like like one of the things about Detroit Pizza, for those of you that don't know, is uh you oil the pan a little bit, right? And then you put the you push the dough in and you go. Oiling the pan makes it extremely slippery.
And so what I think is happening is is that um the dough needs to kind of relax, which is why like I do two or three like I do my initial pat down, get it like you know, almost all the way out to the ridge, and then I wait a couple of minutes and then I have to stretch it again like a couple of times to get it to relax in its open position and then rise up a little bit, right? Because then you proof it with the crap on it, some of it. I I do a like a proof with the crap on, and then it stays the size of the pan. So um my question is is that like, you know, if you're not getting that stretch back time, like when you throw it into the oven, as it expands up, it's gonna s suck in. You know what I mean?
Because it's still it's it's you know, it hasn't had time to like it hasn't had time to kind of blast out and weaken that gluten up. You're still in the in the phase where you've just stretched it and a lot. Right. It needs to be relaxed a little bit. So I'm wondering if you built in, and it wouldn't I don't think it would go that again, you know, against the flow if you built in like a 20 minute hold before you bake it out, let it just like let it settle into itself a little bit, puff up a little bit more before you bake it.
Have you like have you tried that? I hadn't, I as you were saying that I I it it occurred to me that that's probably what's happening because I think that the few times I've tested it, I've like stretched it and then pretty much thrown it straight into the oven. Because I'm also, you know, this this is for taking it off site. This is normally uh, I mean, the the one catering event that I did, it was for 150 people, and I've only got six of those pans because the pans cost like 80 bucks. Yeah.
And uh I'm I'm not busy enough to justify spending thousand thousands of dollars on the big pans. But uh I think that that might be it. That might be the difference is that usually when I make them, the smaller ones, they have several hours of just sitting. Yeah. Uh slacking, whereas the test ones that I did did not have that.
Because I had to do, you know, 18, I had to make like 18 pizzas pretty much back to back to back. And the pans were even still warm when I was like throwing the second round, second and third round in there. So and and mentally, if you think about it, it's the only kind of pizza that you bake that well, typically, other than if you're doing like a pizza hut style, that you bake on such an oily surface. So it's so slippery. Right.
You know what I mean? Yeah. Exactly. So yeah, that'll that'll make sense. That's brilliant.
All right, what was your other technical question? Okay, so when I get this thing scaled up, um, I eventually basically want to put a steel based baker's deck oven on the back of a trailer. Um if it was covered but not necessarily enclosed, would that be a bad idea? Uh well, what do you mean? Like why?
Like what are you worried about? It like uh uh whether like just uh d degradation from elements, like if it's raining or if it's sitting in a a garage somewhere collecting dust or something like that, I'd probably get a cover for it or something like that. But yeah, I think if you cover it and if you season it up, right? If you season it up so that it, you know, has like a although you can't, it's hot as hell. You can't season that thing.
It's gonna be hot as hell. This is for regular pizza. I think you'll be fine. Honestly, I think you're gonna be okay. Oh, you're gonna be.
Yeah, I think it's kind of like that. But look, let me put to you this way uh what's it called? The Cajun Cajun fryer people make their uh their grills out of regular steel and they paint the outside of it with that high heat uh barbecue paint. Uh which is pretty good. Although I think the car stuff's better.
I think the engine enamel is better than the barbecue stuff, and it comes in cooler colors. So if the outside of it's covered with that engine enamel and it's got the um it's got the uh, you know, like a like a whatever they call a tonne cover for an oven is, you know what I mean? Like I think you'll be you'll be in pretty decent shape. Um, obviously any anything you can coat in stainless, you should, but yeah, I was gonna say, I would I would I think I would say the the better question would be are are there are ovens pretty okay if it's not necessar specifically designed to go outside, is it okay if it's used outside, I guess? Or do they do they make ovens that are specifically designed to be put on a trailer and like drug around?
Pro they I'm sure they do. I don't know that I've never researched it, but I'm sure they do. I have hooked up inside equipment outside, and it can be a little bit dicey, especially if they're not if they're gas-based and you have to switch everything to pro propane, right? Which is kind of a hassle because you have to change all the orifices, you have to change like all of the stuff. And you can s and uh the other problem if you're firing off a propane is that if you're using a a high BTU uh item, 20-pound tanks are no longer sufficient.
So the way you can get around a 20-pound tank, yeah, while you have a bigger tank. This is this is this is this is my equivalent of a food truck. Like I'm gonna be strapping hundred-pound tanks to it. Oh, all right, you're fine. You're fine.
Because there is a way there is a way to use 20 pounders, but it's not friendly. You have to buy a tank heater, you know what I mean, to keep the tank hot. Because the problem is when you withdraw propane too fast out of a tank, the tank cools down and then your your delivery drops, you go below the regulator threshold, you flame out. You know what I mean? I've I I I've actually, and I don't know if you if you're friends with your like propane uh dealer or whatever, but I actually had a guy, because I had this problem when I would do uh shrimp boils.
I've got the 80,000 BTU thing, and I only have a 35-five pound tank, but they were able to make me a manifold so that I could strap basically uh strap two thirty-five pound propane tanks together and it operates as one sixty or seventy-pound protein. Right. That's cool. No, yeah. Or the other thing to look at if you can't do that and you need to do it, like because I've run I've run commercial like 50 pound deep fryers off of 20 pound tanks, because you can do it for a couple of hours if that's what you need, is uh you know, little tank heater, like a little like silicone wraparound like the springs tank tank heater, and you set it like you know, just at like you know, eighty ninety F boom, and it keeps your tank rocking the entire time until the sucker trains.
Anyway. Amazing. Awesome. One more one more question. Uh, Steam Stasi's gonna murder the deck oven.
Yeah, yeah. I know, right? I'll bring I'll bring if if I'm uh I called last year and we talked about Iowa sweet corn, and I've been contemplating if I'm crazy enough to bring a bag of sweet corn and some other goodies, and I'll bring some some cheese and champagne and hopefully that will appease. Cheese and shelly both of those things. We've got some tasty cheeses here.
Anyway, um so before I get the deck oven, I have to do all of this basically with like electrical things. Um and so I need some generators. Um and I guess what would be your best bet insights on how to handle that? So I've got currently I have a a uh half-size convection oven that pulls two hundred and forty watts. It's a two forty.
Mm-hmm. You know, you know who's an expert in this actually? Nastasia the hammer locale is because she actually had to run a food truck off of a generator. Oh nice. Well, I'm happy to get answers from whoever I get it from.
So I've got this this this one oven, and then I have a steam table that I hold my sauces on that pulls fifteen hundred watts, and then a hot like a pizza box, one of those display rotating things that also pulls about fifteen hundred watts. Would it be better to get like three smaller ones or just go for like one giant ten thousand watt generator? What do you do, Stas? M uh my advice is not to do a food truck. No, really.
I mean I would I would never ever do it again. And I know that there's websites that rent out spaces like pop up spaces that are far more efficient. I I just I have no advice on food truck because it is the worst experien one of the worst experiences of my life. But you won't even tell 'em what generator to use though? We had a gener it just kept it uh all of our things that we were running off of it kept burning out.
Like there was no it was it was awful. It was absolutely awful. Like I don't remember what kind of generator what we had, but we had the most powerful one and it was not enough. I uh yeah I don't have a lot of experiences but I would have definitely have a backup because I know Nastasia said hers went out all the time and I would get one that's quiet. I would get one that's four stroke like a hundred none that are quiet.
There are none that are quiet. The ones that advertise that they're quiet. Okay. They make they make boxes for them that you can like cover up to help mitigate that. But um so so so I hear what you're saying, Nastasia here's where I'm coming from.
M my usual up in for the last like four or five years I've been I've done like kind of private chefy stuff for small groups of people for a lot of money. And it's gone great, but I am to a point where I want to hire somebody to help me with these things and I need some busy work for them. And this particular business model is basically uh achievable by high school age kids. And so this is kind of my casting a wider net to get more of the populace sort of attracted and and have something fun and it's it's a fun model. It's really delicious product, but that's kind of where I'm coming from with doing this.
But one thing I will say one thing I will say, I gotta go to this thing is that if you're going like you can't turn completely unskilled folk loose on stu on weird equipment setups that you've cobbled together because when they break, it's totally broken, and you can't just like reboot it because it's been built by you. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? That's that's that's very good. I mean, I there would be like one skilled person there maybe that to help maintain all that stuff, and the rest of them is live like this pizza is like put it in the oven when the cheese is brown, it's done.
Like, you know, it's it's really, really easy. But uh I hear you on the food truck, and that's that's why I don't want to get a self-contained food truck because I have buddies that have food trucks, and and like every other week there's something going wrong. Uh there's so many different working parts on a food truck that you need for it to function, and uh that's why I kind of want to build it myself and have it be all sort of modular, if you will. Uh, or at least that's sort of what my approach is. Yeah, well, let us know how it works out.
Right on, appreciate it. Thank you. No worries. Uh Dave Kwikkowski writes in at one of my restaurants, we've been using Heston Blumenthal's method for fishing chips, which involves a soda siphon. So for those that don't know, he puts the batter in a soda siphon, puts it in the fridge to let it hydrate for a long time.
It's like vodka and rice and all this other stuff and beer and blah, blah, blah. CO2, not nitrous, but like puts it into a pan, puts the you know, the fillet into it, bop, bop, bop, like they do in England town, and then they throw it into the oil and bop blah blah, right? Okay. Uh, that's how it works. The result is great, but we have to refill the siphons.
Uh, they have four liter bottles multiple times through service, and it's a messy pain. I was thinking about getting a kegerator and filling a couple of corny kegs with the batter, having CO2 tank just for that. We will set up a separate tank of uh cleaner to flush the lines at the end of the night. Will this work? Will the batter hold other issues I'm not thinking of?
A couple of things. One, uh soda siphons, it it might, it might work. You know, one of the problems is that uh those soda things go, who the question is now if you read Blumenthal's recipe, he's very careful about trying to keep the CO2 in the batter so that the batter itself foams, right? But also the nozzle on that soda siphon is crap for keeping bubbles in seltzer. That's why it's really only good for three stooge marathons, right?
Because it like opens up and like really sprays the stuff out and gets rid of the stuff. So you need a way to get it out of the keg that has the same spray foaming characteristics as the uh ISI does. The other thing you need to do before you do anything, is you need to realize, try to get the corny kegs that have the removable safety valve in the lid, because uh the ones that are built in are built in at a lower pressure than you would like, and nothing sucks more than having the safety go. The safety goes way before it's set at a way lower pressure than the actual working pressure of the keg. And so you need to know what that pressure is so you do not exceed it.
You do not want to exceed that because then it stays open and vents your whole thing out. It's a mess, it's a nightmare. Uh the other thing is that uh it a batter that contains stuff like rice flour is gonna separate and needs to be agitated in between, uh, and you really want to kind of agitate it and shake it up. So either have someone shake it up or you can build a stirring unit into one of these keg a rators, it's possible to do, but then that's a whole nother freaking thing that you have to take care of that you hadn't uh thought about. That good answer?
Yeah. All right. Uh shift drinks right writes in uh for liquor above 40% uh ABV, but not high enough proof for autoistino. What Auto Hustino is is that for very high liquors like 151, which is I guess what is that, 75.5% and above, if you add fruit juice uh to it, the alcohol level is so high that the pectin immediately destabilizes and drops out. So you don't have to worry about adding enzymes and stuff like that.
That's what is being referred to. Should water be added during the blending step, or should the process blend with Pectanex rest and add water before spinning? I'm not sure why you're adding water. I never add water to uh a liquor. So shift drink, tell me exactly what it is.
Like just give me like the actual ingredients you're using. Oh, the ABV limit for the spinzall is only because I'm worried about you catching on fire. If the it, you know, it's like it's it's it's based on flash point. As long as the flash point is as long as as long as you can light a match near it and it doesn't like ignite. So you're saying they could liquor count for the moisture in their fruit or juice as dilution as well.
Yeah, it doesn't matter. The only there there's no there's no chemical incompatibility with any part of the cerezol and alcohol. The only spinzole. There's no problem the chemical incompatibility problem. The problem is is that I don't want someone to put a hundred percent uh alcohol into the the thing and create, you know, alcohol vapor that then ignites and blows someone's face off.
That's all. You know what I mean? I don't even remember what I wrote as the limit. I probably chose whatever the flash point was at like 90 Fahrenheit. That's probably what I chose.
I believe it's 40%. No, you can go above 40% at 90 Fahrenheit. Is that what I wrote? 40% in the in the document? It's just a safety issue for flash points.
That's all it is. Wenrik writes in: Does the rice polisher that I mentioned on the show require a voltage transformer? Uh no. So uh what I talked about is I I no longer sift my flour. I've run some more tests, but I don't have time to talk about it because we only have four and a half minutes because of the all the stuff that happened.
But I can talk about that later the next time that we have a show, and I'll have more tests to have run by that point. But uh what the rice polisher does is that instead of sifting, I actually use uh what's meant to polish rice to abrade the outer layer of bran off, including the hairs on wheat, which is the stuff that has the biggest detriment on loaf volume instead of sifting. So I no longer sift anymore. The only units you that I can buy are from Japan, right? They have an American style plug, which I guess Japan also uses, but they're from Japan.
And Japan uses a voltage similar to ours, but not the same frequency. And so really the question isn't do you need a voltage transformer, is do you need a frequency transformer? And no, you do not. I've been running mine and it's fine. But what you do need is Google Translate, because the manual is only in Japanese.
So you need to just take a picture with your phone and use Google Translate. And, you know, I put little pieces of tape on so I can remember what all the buttons say in uh in English because you know, whatever. I'm too stupid to remember what the uh what the kanji is. Uh Matt from Mystic writes in, I'd like to hear uh more from Dave about uh my use of the combustion uh thermometer. I like mine so far, but I find uh the finish time can be highly variable, and I find that to be a little bit frustrating.
Maybe I have Chris Young on again to talk about uh just talk about the thermo without any tangents. Um I actually love the predictive stuff on I have two of them with me right now. I don't know where the camera I have two of them with me right now because uh turns out Chris Young, I texted Chris Young yesterday, and because I'm going to Tales of the Cocktail, and we're gonna use combustion thermometers in my uh seminar with Mike Capoferi uh at you know at Tails. And I tested this because my you know one of the things about carbonation is when you carbonate the temperature rises, right? The act of putting CO2 into solution actually raises the temperature.
So to prove this during my bar training, I put a thermometer in and I shook it with the thermometer, and it's the only time I've ever had a bottle break because did I tell this, did I say this last week? Did I mention this? I thought you said it to a mare. Uh anyway. So yeah, so like, so I was like, yo, shake it harder.
What the hell are you doing? Shake it harder. Because if you don't shake it hard enough, you don't have enough surface area, right? And so I take the bottle from the person who is uh training and I shook it harder, and the thermometer went boom and hit the bottom of the of the fully inflated bottle and punctured it and started spraying stuff everywhere. It was kind of nuts.
Anyway, so um I haven't had a problem with their predictive stuff. I'm wondering when you say listen, write back in and let me know exactly what you mean, uh Matt, about all over the place. In other words, are you saying that it is incorrect, or is it just that you get different results that you expect to be the same every time, right? Because I don't really understand. Do you understand?
I don't really understand. All right. B Dunn writes in, I'm a big fan of cachaça, both as a zipper and incorporated into cocktails. I have two bottles of jambu cachaca from trips to Brazil, uh, and family will brought them back. Mostly I've used these as a party trick for the numbing power of the liquor.
Uh how do you think about creating drinks with numbing products like jambu or sichuan pepper? What kinds of flavors are accentuated by numbing and uh what are diminished? How do you make drinks that aren't just party tricks and that people actually want more than one of? All right, listen. I don't I don't use first of all, jamboo here is Sichuan buttons.
It's uh the uh Amelia Olaricia, which is an aster from South America. Do not confuse it with wax jambu, which is a fruit, right? Which has the awesome uh Latin name of Sizzy Gium Samargense. But anyway, but my point is is that uh very different. Wax jambu, crunchy fruit, uh jambu that you're talking about, Sichuan button.
I have an issue with it because it's just rides over the top of uh everything. I will say this I have run a bunch of tests and let me know what you think. If you have a little bit of that, regular wines taste like orange wines. Regular white wines to me taste like orange wines after and McGee says he thinks it's because I'm the rancidity in uh the Sichuan oils that I'm using is what's causing that. But if you have the jambu, let me know whether a combination of that, and then taste it, wait a second, and while it's still in your mind, taste white wine and tell me whether or not it tastes more like orange wine to you, whether it enhances uh like your perception of oxidation in the wine.
Monty writes in uh what is involved in making a hard candy like mince with xylitol? I'm getting tired of the flavors and the mints I buy. Well, you can use xylitol and just kind of uh get like a gum paste, which is what a lot of people do, and then mix like the powder, mix it with as little water as possible along with the flavorings and spread it out. By the way, you know what's really fun? I haven't done it in a long time, buying gum base.
You ever buy gum base? No. You buy gum base. I think Modern Spanish might have it. If not, you can get it on Amazon, whatever.
You nuke it, right? And it gets uh flexible. You mix in all the flavorings, and then you put like like cornstarch or powdered sugar down and you roll it back out and you cut it into strips. So much fun. And I put powdered acid in it.
Oh, it's fantastic. You can also roll it into pastiles, you can do anything. It's amazing. So, anyway, so those uh uh with that are molded that way. Uh, or if you really want to be fancy, get yourself a pelleting machine, but then, you know, John, tell them about how hard a pelleting machine is.
Miserable. Miserable. So you're better off making Altoid style things just by using like gum paste and putting it into molds and then popping it out. I hope that helps, Mondi. I'll see you when I get back in a couple of weeks after I go to Tales of the Cocktail.
My bar should be open by then, so go to Bar Contra. We should be, I think they're gonna open even before I leave. Can you believe that? They're gonna open while I'm gone. They're gonna open for one day and then I'm gonna be gone for two weeks.
It makes me drive me crazy. Cooking issues.
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