Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking News coming to you live from the heart of Manhattan, Rockefeller Center, New York City, New Stand Studios, joined as usual with John. How are you doing, John? Doing great, thanks. And got Joe Hazen rocking the panels.
What's up? Rocking the panels. Rocking the panels. We don't have Queenie Quinn in the upper upper left, but we do have Nastasia the Hammer. Lopez, how you doing?
I'm good. Good, good, good. And Jackie Molecules. What's up? Yep.
Yup. I'm good. So listen, people, you don't know this, but uh, you know, to the extent that we get here a little bit beforehand, we uh, you know, we we chat, and uh uh Jackie Molecule says he's got a rant for us. Bring it. Yeah, I I do.
I I had the displeasure of uh attending maybe the worst food festival I've ever been to in my life. Oh an event that should not exist. Bring it. And yeah, Nastasia was there as well. Oh, this is called ch it's called Chainfest, right?
And I don't know if you've heard of this, but get this. It's it's uh the tickets are apparently expensive. I was uh invited for free nicely, but um I don't know, talking stuff about something you went to for free. Okay. Well listen to this, man.
Listen to this. You you end up in a parking lot and all of the vendors are fast food chains. That's why it's called Chainfest. And it's essentially, I guess what they're doing is like test kitchen items. They advertise it as like exclusive like new sauces from KFC or you know, uh Domino's pizza with like caviar or something.
Oh my god. Um was that real? Hold on, stop. Stop. Did you make that up or is that real?
No, I'm not making that up. The Domino's pizza had uh smoked salmon caviar and like whipped marscopone. Yeah. On a cold piece of Domino's. Did it still have that crappy, that crappy sweet sauce?
Hey, I used to work for Domino's, by the way. So, you know. Okay. Well then, no, I yeah. Here's some of the things you you could be so lucky to try.
Cracker barrel, red robin, uh, red lobster, panda expression. Well, red lobster. Red lobster was what was their thing? Like, we're gonna exist again? It was a VIP only cheddar biscuit with lobster, which I doubt was really lobster.
It was probably like imitation lobster or something. And were they like, this is what we were working on when we clawed. Is that what they said? I think they reopened. I think they they ended up like surviving bankruptcy or something.
But anyway, the point being, right, you you go to this thing and they give you a passport, you wait in the line to get one little crappy taste of fast food in a parking lot in Los Angeles. Yeah, and then you can't go for seconds. What? How do they know? They look at you and they're like stamp your passport.
They give you a passport that gets stamped. Oh, that's um, and they're in these like activations where you take pictures with like, you know, the Panda Express panda or something. It was so gross. So a couple things I'm gleaning is it's not really for people who are interested in food. No, well, it is advertised towards those people.
But you got coverage in all the and in eater and all these other places. Food Instagram, though, not food food. Right. Yeah. If someone said, if someone said you could come and you're gonna take ta you know, taste all of these like things that like may or may not go into production, like from a food perspective, you'd be like, that's interesting to see if they were gonna give you it in good condition and let you actually taste it.
But if it's all about taking a picture with a mascot, that's a different crew, right? I think it's trying to do both. And I mean, the way it advertised itself as a gourmet chain food festival with exclusive gourmet offerings. That's their language. Let me ask you this.
If you were gonna go pay the full chump charge, how much would it cost? Something like uh 375 for a VIP. Whoa. For VIP. $375?
Well, but for VIP, we were a VIP. But what do you get for being a VIP? First of all, for those of you that have never been in a VIP room, like the real VIPs don't go to the VIP room. The real VIPs have their own room that's curated by somebody else. The VIP room is the tool.
So you're not with the fun people and you're not with the VIPs. If you've never been in a VIP room, the average VIP room is really just like hot sauce, back me up on this. The average VIP room sucks. Yeah, yeah. And we had to pay for our own drinks too, being VIP.
So it was Yeah, $22 drinks. Oh my God. Now let me ask you this. We have a caller. Let's bring them into this conversation.
Caller? Who is it? Is it is it Quinn or is it? It's just Hey, Quinny Quinn and the Get Fresh Quinn. So you can get a but listen, here's the here's my point.
Like, was it the first year that they did it? Because sometimes people are like, it's easy to put on a festival. And you're like, no. No. No, it went out there.
Not in the first year. Because like the first year that Googamoga ran, I don't know if they did it again, but the first year Google Mooga ran. I don't remember that, yeah. They they crashed all the cell towers, and instead of having walkie talkies, the event was trying to run itself off cell phones. And so no one working the event even knew what was going on because no one could communicate with each other because they didn't have walkie-talkies, right?
So there's a lot of like rookie mistakes you make the first time you run a festival, and someone who plans festivals is like, I'm gonna I'm gonna charge you like $150,000 to plan this festival. And you're like, I'm not gonna pay you $150,000. And you're like, okay. And then you walk away, you know what I mean? But Dave, the bigger issue, like, is this where we've come in food?
Like, is Monsanto Fest next? Like, this is crazy. I would go to that. Oh, if I could go to Monsanto Fest and like try a snack chip that made me glow for a week and a half, I would totally do that. Okay, fine.
Maybe Monsanto Fest would be better than Chainfest. Yeah, like, like, like, like Monsanto needs to come out with like crisper crispies that actually change my DNA as I eat them. You know what I mean? Like, that's what I'm looking for. Telling you.
And everybody loves sci-fi. Yeah, listen. When they allow people to like gene edit like like old crotchety people like myself, I'm signing up. I want that glow-in-the-dark like dot in the middle of my head so I can see at all times, especially if I could turn it off and on. Yo, if I could turn it off and on, my little bioluminescent, like, you know, flashlight in the center of my head.
Come on. Although, like Well, there was one thing, there was one really cool thing you did get at Chainfest, wasn't it? And um, that was diarrhea. Jackie Molecules, the SSS set on spray. Love it.
Love it. Stas, I'm sure uh Nastasia of the Iron Constitution didn't have such problems. No, actually, I thought, well, so Aaron Polski was there too, and I saw him like rushing across the crowd because I was like, Yeah, he's gonna go tell them that we deserve that we deserve free drinks. Like, yeah. So I like went to go taste him.
So I was like, I want to be there when he takes down the ticket person who's like, we need free drinks. So I like couldn't find him and I texted him and I was like, Where'd you go? And he said, I should go. Oh my God. Who knew Polcat was so delicate?
Now he's gonna text me. Now he's gonna text me and complain. So we were at the beach before Chainfest and we oh yeah, you talked about that, Dave. And we had like that had been sitting in the car with tuna in it for like four hours. So you know.
Could have been that. My uh maybe, but like I you know, I wonder how unsafe that is. We gotta get this riskier not people back on because like tuna done been cooked to death, right? Mayonnaise is okay, but I guess you're folding new you're folding new poison into it when you make the salad, right? Yeah.
My grandma's diluting the water or you're increasing the water activity. Yeah. Like a lot. So my grandma, who is, you know, depression era or whatever, uh, she would like she would like as soon as she put mayonnaise on a sandwich, she didn't realize somehow that mayonnaise is actually shelf stable in reality. And so like as soon as she put mayonnaise on a sandwich, like the shot clock was on that.
If you didn't like, she would put it on your plate, and if you like took a pause to like, you know, have a conversation like we're having now, she would throw the sandwich away and make it a new one. I'm like, Grandma, she's like, the mayonnaise, the babies. Anyway. But like if you go to New Orleans, man is just sitting in a jug on the on the thing. Yeah.
And New Orleans, nasty hot. You know what I mean? Like, nasty. Anyway. Uh well, that's a good story there, Jack.
Uh, Queen, what do you got for us since you're uh just freshly come on here? Uh let's see. I tried some conquered grape thereby I made. That turns out pretty good. Although it was in the fridge for two days.
So I think the fresh concord juice fermented like a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. Well. So there's a little so there's a little sunk in the survey.
Yeah. For those who don't make Concorde products, con for those of you that are, I don't know, maybe there's a French person listening. Concorde grapes, which you probably hate being the only French person listening to this show, right? Are, you know, not good wine grapes. However, ain't nothing smell better than fresh Concorde grapes.
And Nastasi is gonna agree with me on this, I'm pretty sure. Oh yeah. I mean Nastasi and I stu Nastasia hates all the weird little gotsies that I do in the kitchen sometimes, except for when it comes to working with Concorde grapes. And then she's like, Yeah, yeah, you gotta do that right, or you're an idiot, right? Uh and Nastasi and I used to go, well, remember when we used to be able to get the French culinary to order them for us and like the cost didn't matter.
Now we have to go to the farmer's markets like idiots and buy it. Yeah. Yeah. And it's w one of the rare things that we do really well here in New York. You know what I mean?
On like strawberries that we think we do well. I try stuffers are delicious. Yeah, okay, whatever. Go to Harry's Berry's Joker. You know what I mean?
Yeah, whatever. Uh what were you gonna say? But I mean, overall turned out pretty good. It was about like eighty percent like Encore material, mostly juice, and a little bit of actual like grape flesh and skin for like bulking material. But uh yeah, that was pretty good.
Before I get back to King Fox. Yep. Yeah. Go ahead. Or go ahead.
I was gonna say, you said juice, and it reminded me that I was at a sandwich shop with Dax and he ordered roast beef a jus. And the the waiter, she said, Do you want something anything else on this sandwich? And he stupidly said no, thinking it was gonna come with stuff like mustard and whatnot, right? Pickles. And he came and like, this sandwich is plain.
I was like, she asked you if you wanted anything on it, and you said no. So people who own restaurants gotta realize that sometimes jamokes, such as my son, will show up and not realize that certain things need to be asked for for the sandwich to taste good. So, you know, the server, she could have said, you know, do you really like things a hundred percent plain? Or maybe some mustard and pickle would be nice. Anyway, go ahead, Queen.
What do you say? And the second project my family did, we're all a little obsessed with the new Netflix chef's table noodles. I don't know what I have no idea what you're talking about. I have no idea what you're talking about. Netflix.
I'm familiar with Netflix, the streaming service. Yeah, yeah. But I don't watch food, I don't watch food TV because like, why would I don't. You know what I mean? But like, what like what's what's with the noodles?
What kind of noodles? Which of the billion noodles are we talking about? Cool noodles. Cool noodles. You make them in a pool.
That's a good idea. Jacuzzi noodles? I would sign up for that. That's like a Heston Blumenthal trick from like the early 2000s. Alright, so what's what's a what is the new noodle?
Again, they it it's a series. I mean, and each episode follows the shift. So the first episode was about Evan Funky, who is an American born chef, but they trained in Italy, and their shtick is all handmade fresh pasta, zero machines. Mm-hmm stash No, I know him. He's a good guy.
Alright. So is he making a kind of pasta that wants to be fresh? Because that's the thing. Make a kind of pasta that wants to be fresh. Yeah, again, yeah, you know, the episode featured many different shapes, you know, classic, just like egg, egg tagatelli, uh, you know, filled pastas, that sort of thing.
One of the shapes they showed was called trophy. And it's a semolina or Durham water dough. And you can wheat flower and egg, Dave. Well, uh, I don't know if you know this. Durham is a wheat.
You know what I mean? Yes, I do. But like be precise, you know what I'm saying? Go ahead. Is it bronze cut?
Uh the dice? Well, no, because he's not using any machines. Oh, rolling it by hand. Okay, it's all hand. Well, I mean, although pen, pin and a knife.
You know what those are, John? Yeah, yeah, machines. Yeah, go ahead. Simple machines. Yes, go ahead.
And so you take a little nubbin of the pasta dough, you sort of roll it forward with your hand to make like a small tapered shape. And then with the blade of your hand, you drag backward, and it makes a corkscrew. It's a very sort of interesting motion. So we tried to do that. And my dad could like get it sometime.
But then we pivot it to our cabin. Yeah, well, because those are easy to make. And by the way, impossible to cook. Easy to make, impossible to cook. You know what I mean?
Like that's a thing like Oricetti, I'm sorry, it's one of those pastas where, like, I understand it's like a gin and tonic. I understand that it can be good, and yet it almost never is. Pasty on the inside and gummy on the out. I like dried ordered kette, I think. I mean, it can be good.
Yeah. Or it can be a heartache. Yeah. Yeah, but I know, but these are fresh. If you like if you like the real nerve on the inside, or if you're not worried about it and getting blast out, here's an interesting one.
I was in uh by the way, back to Concords, because I need to give people some technical information on Concord grapes. So for those of you that never heard like the whole shtick on Concord Grapes before, first of all, a sign of a good don't go to a supermarket and buy seedless Concord grapes. Just don't. Don't, don't No, it's not the same. Yeah, right.
Right. Don't buy it. Not only that, and I think I get this in your voice. Don't support it. Don't support it.
Not a Concord. Not a Concorde grape. Don't do it. Second, you can't put Concorde grapes in a masticating. Any kind of juicer that's gonna shred the the seeds of a Concord grape is gonna make the juice bitter and nasty.
And by the way, when I say bitter and nasty, I like bitter and nasty sometimes, but not with my Concord grapes. So you're with me so far, right, Stas? Yes. And that's nine tenths of why it took us a million years to do Concord stuff. But when you press Concorde, the juice doesn't come out as dark as you think it it should, right?
So what you need to do is press it, and then as though you were a wine maker, I had enzymes, of course, because come on. But like press it, and then you can knead it by hand if you need to or whatever. I mean, I have equipment that'll do it for you. But uh let it sit on the skins for a long time, then repress it again to extract as much color out of the skins. You want to break it, preferably break down some of the, you know, um, break down some of the fruit so you and you want to extract the color because that color and like a lot of the flavor is around the skins.
So what I do uh when I'm making alcoholic drinks is I'll as I'll do that, I'll smash the grapes and I'll, you know, with almost like with a muddler, if I don't have my you know, hydraulic press, I'll just use a muddler and or a potato masher, and then I'll put pectinx in it and I'll mash it with the pectanex and let it really macerate for a while. Then I'll get the juice out of it by squeezing the hell out of it. Then I'll take the squeezing, this the the dry part, and I'll put that into liquor. And then the liquor will extract more color and flavor, and then I squeeze that again, and that's how I get maximum. Maximum.
Of course. We have like just a really dinky like screw press. Yeah. And it worked okay. I didn't want to add pectinx because I we were potentially gonna make jelly.
And so I didn't want to like mess with the pectin. Yeah. But even without pectanex, let it sit on the skins again and then repress it, stir it around, knead it. Yeah, anyway. And also speaking of bitter and gross, something else minor, but I uh pay the King's ransom for some moxie soda, and I tried that.
That was a mistake to pay extra for it. I actually like it. Yeah, it's fine. You know who makes a really good soda that's Coke. I don't know.
Would you pay extra? I would pay for it. I would pay extra for Dr. Brown's celray soda because that is so yeah. What about some jolt?
I know I've never had jolt. Never had jolt? No, never had jolt. Like Red Bull and a cola. But oh my god, now you put now you put uh that Simon and Garfunkel song Jolt and Joe's left and gone away, Cuckoo Kachew, Mrs.
Robinson. Oh god. Uh it's never gonna leave my head. Do you know that I found that uh someone said it's like a it it is like a known psychological problem. The the the inability to get music out of your head is like a thing, right?
That certain people like me have. So like it's hard to break the internal soundtrack. You know what I mean? I believe it. So uh I was in Pittsburgh this weekend, and of course I went by my favorite uh D-Trix on the way over.
By the way, Dietrix is uh in Crumbsville, right outside of Lenhardt's. All right. And you go there and they only take cash. So just be aware that they only take cash. They do have an ATM machine.
But I'm not gonna take two or three dollars from you when you do that. Right. The prices are decent. I stocked up on my favorite, like for those of you that don't know me. When I eat pretzels, I eat pretzels that are made with the following ingredients: flour, water, salt, yeast.
Well, uh, lye, and or you know, some sort of base for the boil, right? But other than that, I don't really want anything else in my in my pretzel in general. I don't want fats or oils because if I wanted a cracker, I would have asked for a cracker. I want it in pretzel shape. So, but they had there's one pretzel.
Oh my God, I can't remember. I've got to bring them in. I forgot the name of it. But there's one pretzel that they make there where they make a soft pretzel, butter press style pretzel, lighter, and then they dehydrate it and they're real hard. And for some reason, Ruthie's, I really like them.
So I buy a bunch of bags when I'm there, along with a bunch of other like Penn Dutch pretzels uh and other pen Dutch gear. So I got John his ring bologna, that's I said a million times. I got my Lebanon bologna, which is, you know, not baloney and not from Lebanon, the country. It's Lebanon, Pennsylvania, very sour. Anyway, so I was getting my Pennsylvania Dutch on on my way over to Pittsburgh.
Uh I was going to a wedding in Pittsburgh. And when you go to Pittsburgh, you go to the Heinz, the Heinz, Heinz, America's favorite ketchup. You go to the Heinz Museum, and they have an entire Heinz like exhibit. And here's some some highlights. Heinz used to have something in Walgreens where you could buy Heinz dehydrated soups, and the person behind the counter at Walgreens would heat it up in a special tailor-made Heinz soup machine, and with its own can openers and its weird little electric like mugs and stuff like that.
And then right next to it, they had wait for it, a Heinz baked bean, electric bean pot crock, which are s and little like like Walgreens, Heinz bean like cups. Oh my God, so cool. And it's even better. So Heinz was, they were very, very uh frugal folk, right? The uh the people who own the company.
And so he made fake pickles, right? They come in a little leather, like, you know how you have like a little leather tool case that folds up? There was a little leather leather tool case that you open up, and inside of it are four pickles with different different sizes of fake pickle. Pickle-colored, pickle-shaped, look like pickles, with a number on it. And you hold up the pickle, the real pickle next to the sample pickle, and then on the fake pickle was written the number of pickles per barrel at that size.
And then you would look up the cost, and they could determine, like on the fly, the profit they would get off of a particular barrel of prickles by using their like salesperson like sample pickle. Sick. I was like, sick, awesome. Not on eBay. I looked.
I looked. I was like, pickle samples, eBay. They're like, nah, nah. Nah. Too rare.
Too rare, even for us. Uh went to uh, so have you had the oven-baked hoagies before? So it's like it's like a hoagie, which is like a sub, you know, for there, right? But they put them in the oven and heat them up. I didn't go to Pramonty's because, you know, apparently it's real touristy, like, and so like they put French fries and whatnot, but I went to a place called Big Gyms.
And I was like, how good's the Italian hoagie gonna be? And so they make the like a standard like an Italian hoagie, and they but they they oven it so it's like hot and like a little bit stale stash crispy in a good way on the outside, you know what I mean? But then they lift it and they put the cold stuff on it on top, right? Like Nastasia does with liquid intelligence to separate the like the hot and the and the cold. And then they bring you a squeezy bottle of their own Italian dressing to like spray all over it as you eat it.
I was like, you know what this is? Good. Good. Real good. And it's on Saline Street.
So you're going across, get it. You go, swear to God, you're going across Hot Metal Bridge in Pittsburgh. You go across hot metal bridge, and then you make a right onto Saline Street. Hot Metal Bridge is named after the fact that they would melt the metal on one side of the river and then pour it on the other, and they had a bridge over the river where huge crucibles of molten steel were going over the water. And at one point during World War II, 15% of all the steel made in the United States was going over the hot metal bridge.
I was like, oh, I would have, as for as much of a hellscape as that would have been, I kind of wish I had seen it. You know what I mean? Yeah, like it was like nightmare. Nightmare. Yeah.
Uh and so on the way over to Pittsburgh, I uh I stopped by a town I used to go to all the time called, and okay, get your get it, get it out now, Chartlesville. Yes. Contains the word chart. And they named the town long before that meant like, you know, a toot that a tooth that went too far, right? Okay?
So get it out of your system. So when I was a kid, Charlesville was exactly in between my parents and my grandparents. So they used to drop me off in Charlesville. We would all have a meal at a Penn Dutch place called Hague's because my dad's family, you know, comes from Pennsylvania Dutch, like York kind of stuff, right? And so uh I went there and it turns out this entire town is shut down.
They used to have a place called also uh Roadside America with an entire miniature plate that got dismantled over COVID and auctioned off. It doesn't exist anymore. So the entire town, all of the stuff that I used to go see when I was a kid is basically gone. They don't even have a Stuckies anymore. You know what I mean?
So uh, but I stopped into an antique store while I was there, and they have the old 1994 edition Charlesville community cookbook. And let me go, I highly recommend it. I highly recommend it because they give all of these like old, like, you know, like the old, like, you know, bot boy, the uh Pennsylvania like pot pie where you make the noodles and you drop it into the soup and you boil it. So they have that, but they call it out all out in pen Dutch, like Hinkle Hinkle Bot Boy. They have like, you know, the uh, you know, the there's one called uh Bova Shenkle, which is like the uh like it's like little boy legs, and they're j basically giant pieroges that are they're like cooked over a broth and then panned with butter, and they they have those in the red.
So I highly recommend it. And it cut and it has little words of wisdom in the bottom, most of which are about God and you know, but one of which was this, which I'll I'll leave you with before I leave uh leave the uh Charlesville community cookbook. It says, hospitality is making people feel at home when you wish they were. I was like, God bless you. God bless you.
Oh, and uh there's a giant candy store in Pittsburgh uh that sells candy and tobacco, right? But puge. And uh I forget the name of it, but they had their Herb's pickled hot sausage, right? Uh Herb's pickled hot sausage, and I didn't buy it there because it didn't have price talk tags on anything, and like I can't stand that. Like, tell me what's gonna cost.
I don't want to have to come and have a negotiation for every freaking thing I'm gonna buy. Just write the freaking price on it. You know what I mean? Just do it. Um, or if you don't want to write prices, put a dot on it and then have a decoder ring if you want to change the prices every day.
If there's a spot price for pickled sausage, but so I bought it on Amazon. And it's got a nice congealed, it clearly heated up enough for some of the fat to come out of the sausage and congeal on the side of the bucket. And John and Joe, are you gonna get tuck into this or no? Oh, yeah. Man, they shipped it without a top seal on it, meaning that could have leaked all over anything at any time.
Oh, it smells a little bit like what I'm sure Polski was smelling like right before he went to the uh at the fast food joint. But let me see here. Let's see, we see what we got going here. It slices, so this is a sausage that was like pickled in vinegar and food coloring. And I don't know if you if any of you have grown grew up in the 70s like I did.
There used to be a thing, they still make it called Vienna sausage. And what it is is it's a mealy little sausage in a can full of water. And um came in a tin, like uh like sardines. Yeah, yeah. And uh this has a little bit of that squidgy, a little squidgy feeling.
Let's see whether it's got that canned meat taste that I actually enjoy. Hold on a second. Okay, okay. Okay, okay. Okay, okay.
John, you eat it and you describe it. There's something good and something terrible. But I don't know what it is. I can't describe it. What do you got?
I I don't the texture, just kind of like it's a little sandy. Yeah, well, you knew that was gonna happen when you soaked meat in vinegar after you had cooked the hell out of it. It's got a and also eating it out of an un, you know, a lid that's not really. Yeah, yeah. So uh why don't we wash that?
Don't go to put sand. Joe, Joe, why don't we wash this down with what do you bring, Joe? Give me give me give me the give me the story on Twiglets while John and I try it. Well, I mean, you were were referring to twiglets. I talked to my wife, she's a Brit, she knows twiglets very well.
So I found them at uh the local Amazon, and boom, we got twiggets in the house. They taste like yeasty but like burnt toast. They are burnt toast, yeah. Yeah, bitter, but I like them. I like it too.
I kind of found that I I enjoy I kind of went back and back for them. Yeah, yeah. That's one of those things where you're like, nope. And then you're like, you know what? Not bad.
Yeah. Yeah, there's a little bit of yeast. Burnt. Little bit of yeast. All right.
Uh um, all right. So we had a question in. I'm trying to find it because I want to make sure. Okay. Tony Tony, but spelled with a Y, not with an I.
Uh Joe's like, cover up the sausage. Cover up the sausage. Can't take it. He can't take it. All right, so um we got a question in from Tony Tony uh about Kitchen Arts and Letters.
Uh Kitchen Arts and Letters is uh selling uh a book called Tacos C D M X, like Ciudad, Mexico, right? And Tony Tony says, think of getting my son a copy of this book for Christmas, since he loves tacos and does business in Mexico City. Uh I'm not sure a book of this style is worth the hundred and twenty-five dollar asking price, though. And so then uh, you know, I said, okay, I will ask Matt Sartwell of Kitchen Arts and Letters. And so here's what he replied.
Uh, this is an amazing resource created on the ground in uh Mexico City. It's very handsomely photographed and printed with an energetic design that's very much Mexico City, and it's a slightly oversized book found in full cloth. We buy the book from a small publisher that only prints these Tucker seller tributes. There's also one for Tijuana and a new one coming for Guadalajara, probably arriving at the same time as the reprint of the Mexico City. It's a lot more expensive than a standard U.S.
published book. If someone's just looking for a guidebook, it's overpriced for that service alone. It's a cultural uh it's a cultural statement. We don't have final details of the price of the reprint. Here's where here's why you want to buy from Kitchen Arts Landers.
Get ready for this, though. Uh a hazard of working with indie publishers and coping with currency fluctuations. Uh the Mexican peso has strengthened over the last year or two. But it's possible the price will come down. If that happens, we will refund the difference to anyone who has pre-ordered at 125 dollars.
I hope that helps someone make a decision, Matt. So he says worth getting as a cultural document, and if the price comes down by the time he gets it, he'll pass those savings on to you. Matt Matt's hardwell's awesome. I mean, as you were reading that, I saw in his head like bobbing. Yeah, yeah.
Well, you know, man. I figured rather than paraphrase what he said, read what he said. We should get him back on around like right before Christmas or you know, the holidays help come up with like a guide of what's good to get up. Yeah. Yeah.
Uh all right, what else do we got here? Um I recently okay, we gotta handle this. Alexander wrote this a long time ago. Alexander, sorry about that. I recently, but not so recently anymore, but theoretically recently, uh came across a large amount of vanilla beans, 500 grams, and I'm wondering what to do with them.
I've made a vanilla extract before, but 500 grams would make a lot of extract. What are some other ways to use this much vanilla? Also, what's the best method for making vanilla extract? Has anyone tried Sous vide? I've only soaked the beans in alcohol before.
Alexander, the best way to make vanilla extract is to get somebody to do it for you. Because uh, when you visit like a flavor house, like Nastasi and I, Nastasi and I visited uh it's not called David Michael anymore. They got bought by somebody, but we visited David Michael and we asked them this same question. Remember this, Doz? Yeah.
Yeah. And they laughed at us. For you know, first of all, like they have like three people working their vanilla desk. And by the time they're done with the vanilla, it has no flavor left in it at all. At all.
So, like, like, you know, I've said this on the air a bunch of times, but in case, you know, you haven't done this first time you're listening. They walk, we walked up to a 55-gallon drum of vanilla uh seeds, right? That have been scraped free of their pods. And uh Julie Snarski, who is, you know, the person giving us our tour, she dips the spoon in, hands us each a spoon, and she says, What do you taste? And we put the whole spoon in our mouth, and Nastasi and I, what do we taste, Daz?
Nothing. Nothing. Like vaguely woody planty. Nothing. Yeah.
Nothing. Right? And we were like, oh man. And she's like, yeah, we actually sell these 55 gallon drums to an ice cream manufacturer who shall remain nameless. It's Briars.
And they dump it into their into their ice cream to make it look like they made it from fresh vanilla beans, which what they did instead was they got extract and then dumped these tasteless dots into it. Right? Those dots could just as easily be, you know, metal shavings. They have no flavor whatsoever. You know what I mean?
And it's because they have like very hardcore like ways to like decocked it once, decoct it twice, spin it out, crush it, but they had like that. This is what they do for a living, to get like the most vanilla kind of vanilla you can get out of it. And, you know, I think that the professionals, if you buy a high quality one, like what's your what you guys, anyone here have a favorite vanilla? You Nielsen Massey people, what are you? You fans.
That's usually what I get is Nielsen Massey, but yeah. Madagascar? Well, for a variety, yeah. So like if you can get Tahitian, you get Madagascar, you can't really get Mexican on the. Anyway, so like my point being that it's very hard to compete with them in terms of that.
What I recommend that you do is vacuum bag them down in almost single-serving portions so that they stay a lot longer. The enemy is not necessarily time per se in vanilla. The enemy is uh moisture loss and volatile loss. So if you can stem the loss of volatiles, right, and bags aren't perfect for it, right? So, you know, you could also vacuum them in a jar, I guess it has the correct humidity, but like the enemy of it is uh is they need to stay kind of pliable and they need to not flash off.
So I would I would recommend packaging them in a way where they don't turn as my family would say, shad yad. Um you know what I mean? Which I don't think is a curse. Close to a curse. Close to a curse.
Uh but you know, I don't know, what else to do vanilla vanilla? You eat it, right? What do you guys like? I like ice cream, I like cremong. I mean, if they have that much, I like cakes.
They could refill like 200 grams. Yeah, but like who wants to build, you know, like who wants to like be in the re- Hey, come over to my house. Yeah, like you have a coat with like a like a little, like you open it up, you have all these vanilla beans hanging in inside. All kinds of things on Facebook Marketplace. We would totally be getting some shady vaccine vanilla beans on Facebook.
Yeah, but you'd expect them to be almost free. Facebook Marketplace is for people who like who like are like too shady to go on eBay. I know that because I buy stuff on Facebook Market Page Place. You know what I mean? And you're like, I don't know.
Hey, hey, psila. Vanilla. Anyway. Uh Nick says, I live in a small apartment in Brooklyn and planning a party for as many people as I can fit. Party, I'm sure it's over, because this question came in a while ago, but we're still gonna tell you, Nick.
Uh for as many people as I can fit the apartment. I would like to serve some fried food, maybe aren'tini or fried chicken. But I've attempted deep frying during a party and it was messy and challenging in my place. There's one good reason to fry at a party. If you hate your guests, if you hate your guests, you don't have to be around them because you're gonna be working the whole time.
The whole time, right? You know, back when I used to do every week was Friday, you know, Sunday was Friday at the Carpenter Arnold homestead back in the day, because I had a 40-pound commercial deep fryer in my apartment. So I, you know, I I could crank out enough food to feed like 20, 30 people at a party. No sweat. You know what I mean?
Like literally, like, you know, four or five, you know, four pounds at a time, who and like it's fine. You know what I mean? But you know, with a normal stove, there ain't no way that you can do that. You just can't, right? So uh how's the cleanup after that?
On a commercial fryer? Fine. I mean, they're they're built for it. Yeah, you know. Uh and you know, you reuse the oil, right?
So like in a non-restaur setting where you're not abusing it and you're not going, you know, ham on it all the time, you just uh cool it, filter it, cover it, and you're good like three, four, three, four fries, depending. Really depends more sometimes. It depends on the oil you use and what you're frying. Um, you know, if you use stabilized oil, like, you know, then it lasts a long, long time. Um, but yeah.
Commercial deep fryers are much more gentle on oil than frying in a pot because you're not overheating the oil as much. So everyone knows commercial deep fryers are like, you know, from the heavens, like a gift, like they like it's like uh fryer. Uh and every day that I think about the fact that I no longer have one in my kitchen, a little tear comes to my eye. I'm one of those like, you know, uh the what's that clown? Emmett, whatever, with the tear coming out of his eye.
Uh okay. Uh I've attempted Deep Rine during a party and it was messy and challenging in my place. Is there any method that comes close to newly fried but lets me do frying a few hours in advance, or is it best just to avoid fry stuff? Well, Nick, do you have a uh an ANOVA APO precision oven or access to any form of combi, combi loid or CVAP? Because if you do, you can um those were designed to hold Kentucky fried chicken for a long time.
So what you do uh if you can do it is you set uh a certain amount of steam in the well, though you you set the depends on whether you have a CVAP, uh an ANOVA or or what, but what you're trying to do is you're trying to set the wet bulb type temperature to be roughly the temperature that you want to hold the fried food at. So let's say uh 60, right? 140 or lower, right? So like somewhere between 55 and 60, you're gonna want to have that usually set. And then you set the dry bulb temperature, which is the temperature of the kind of the the air to be uh higher so that you maintain a certain amount of crispiness, right?
So ANOVA actually sets wet bulb dry bulb temperature, whereas like uh, you know, the CVAP just has a crispy number. And so the higher the crispy maybe they've changed it but the higher the crispier number like the basically the drier the surface will be and you can mimic that yourself if you're handy with uh like a water pan, an oven and some PID controllers, but you know, probably easier just to buy the ANOVA. And the ANOVA has enough power to function as a holding oven uh in that uh capacity. Uh what do you think? Covered and smothered?
Good? Good. Covered and smothered. There you go. Uh Harris uh J says uh I try I uh I like to make uh wait I like to make oh out there kind of cookies.
My white whale has been trying to achieve a Florentine style crust on the outside of the cookie. So far I've made a sugar syrup that's uh taken to just before the hardball stage on the stove and poured a bit over the surface before baking with mixed results. I've dipped a cookie in a number of different sugars but still can't get that crystalline almost brulee top any help or suggestions would be appreciated. Well why don't you just make the cookie right and then if you you know want you can coat it with something and then just cook tweel, right? Which you know to to me a florentine's like a thick twilight right like it's butter, sugar, uh it's butter sugar and like not much else, right?
Like what's what's in those things? Like uh those crispy Swedish caramel cookies slash twil dough slash florentines. It's basically it caramelizes, spreads out the water that's in the butter or whatever else is in it like bubbles and you get this kind of bubbly crackly surface. I think that's what we're talking about. And one way to sandwich that with something else is to put after it cools to put chocolate underneath it so that there's a barrier, right?
Like that's how the that's how the the drumsticks are made. So a drumstick, like you take a waffle cone, you coat the inside of it with chocolate. And by the way, the Nestle Corporation, for as much as I dislike what they have done, they they had an interesting thing on their website that says we realize that some of our cones were getting a little bit soggy in a standard freezer. So we've increased the size of the chocolate nugget in the bottom of the cone to counteract this problem. So there you go.
So you need a sort of sort of barrier. So chocolate forms that kind of barrier. But if you're gonna eat it relatively quickly, I would say this. If you've ever cooked, uh, my mom used to call them Swedish cookies, right? And so they're like they they get huge, like a like a twil in the in the in the oven and crack, they have nuts in them too, these ones.
And then you can roll them into a tube while they're hot, and then they get hard and crispy as they dry. What if you just made your cookies, then made the twils, and while they were hot, drape them over the other cookie. See what I'm saying? Yeah. Then it's gonna set up, and then you should be good to go.
You know what I mean? I think that's the answer. I wonder if, depending on the consistency of both goes, you could almost bake them simultaneously, like uh creme crock a lay. Well, except for the I mean, like, yeah, I just don't know. Maybe you could try it.
You know what I mean? But the whole thing about the twil is that those things is that they're very, very runny. They get very, very liquid. And so they go from being like a ball to like really flat and big. You know what I mean?
Or what if you have like a bottom layer of the crackling of the floorantine, and then you put little dough on top. And then you're in. I don't think it would flash off. I mean, you could do the reverse, you could put it underneath. So in other words, like I think you need to bake them separately because they bake in different regimes.
Like that's the thing. They they are a different style of product. So I think you bake it once, but the nice thing about these things is that they are relatively uh, you know, they are uh what's the word I'm looking for? They're they're appliable when they're when they're hot, right? So like you know, you you can use that to your use that to your advantage because like like other you know caramelli and candy things, they they set up as they as they cool.
Uh all right. Working backwards through the questions. Oh, actually, no, that was forwards. All right, here we go. Uh forward.
Oh, yeah, by the way, you want to talk about uh Patreon and what people can do, why they might want to do it, and uh Rich C and all the other great stuff. Yeah, yeah. Um check out uh Patreon.com slash cooking issues to see what uh you know to one sign up for the podcast, see what kind of different membership levels we got. We got from free to a couple different uh tiered paid ones. Um being a member gets you, well, should get you prioritized questions.
Um but discounts with uh some of the great people that we work with, including Matt at Kitchen Arts and Letters, uh Nick Coleman uh from Grove and Vine, a whole other great roster of people. Um you get access to the Discord with other like-minded listeners, uh, get to share cooking experiments, all these other kinds of things. So yeah, check it out. Uh Patreon.com slash cooking issues. All right.
Uh and if you like this podcast, go to wherever your podcasts are given and try to rate us a high thing. It helps us out. It helps us help you. Uh all right. So um We have another guest in two weeks.
Two weeks or one week. We've next next the 22nd, we've got Chef David Stanridge from the shift uh shipwright's daughter in Mystic. The following week, we've got Alice and John from uh Hanamakjoli out here in Brooklyn. Um, and working on getting a couple couple other people as well. So Did you know that Connecticut is a small state, best state?
Yeah. Love Connecticut. Yeah. Right? Yeah.
Yeah. Someone said, seriously, someone said to me, Does Connecticut have anything besides pizza? Oh man. And I was like, you know what? Delease.
Like I was like, you know what? Yeah, how long do you have? Yeah. You know what I mean? Morons.
All right. Rock Baker writes in uh I found a YouTube video on an existing conditions, which is my old bar. Uh existing conditions, non-alcoholic cocktail called serendipity. Please tell me how to make this drink. So that was a non-alk drink that was um a stirred, uh, sorry, a built drink.
So in other words, it's supposed to drink like an old fashioned. And uh the spec was Bobby Murphy's spec, who's uh at Illis. And uh it was uh now I don't know if this is accurate. I got it off the old database, but I don't know it, you know, the actual database that we used, right, at the bar. Uh I don't know if it's a hundred percent accurate whether we added other stuff, but it's fundamentally uh one part uh so like 30 mils of uh clarified uh passion fruit puree, we used Goya.
Uh this was before all of this stuff took place, and but wherever you landed, we used Goya and we tried higher end ones and the drink didn't taste as good, right? So it was one of my uh one of the many times I've been shown that just because something is better on its own doesn't make it better in a drink, right? So or better in a in a cooked environment. So uh uh clarified uh Goya passion fruit puree and 60 of clarified tomatoes. We used Campbell's tomato in a in a um what's it called?
In the pl the plastic, not the cans, like the plastic juice bottles, Campbell's, right? And so we've tried tried a different one and it wasn't the same. I didn't. When I was a kid, I grew up drinking Sacramento tomato juice out of the can that you needed a church key to open, right? That's what we had in my house all the time.
Maybe because my mom was from Sacramento, I don't know. You know what I mean? But like that's what we used to have. But for this we use, and you're like, why didn't you make your own tomato juice? Well, because your own tomato juice probably sucks.
Like honestly, your own tomato juice is probably the worst, right? First of all, did you take the time to get all the skins off of because the skins are bitter? Like, did you have tomatoes at their peak of ripeness? You know what? Just go to the people that make tomato juice.
You know, like like Nastasia likes to say about pasta. Nastania likes to say this about a lot of things that you do too. Yeah, but I mean, like, you know, someone's like, someone's like, uh, you know, I I made this thing. It's called the wheel, but mine's not really round. Go to the wheel people.
You know what I mean? Anyway. Stas, you agree with me finally on this one, right? Yeah. Yeah, go to the freaking wheel people.
Uh, and then uh to that, add like, you know, so the recipe says for that, one gram of glycerin. I know for a fact we added more. Right. And then uh salt, saline solution. And I think sometimes we would adjust the sugar up or down depending on exactly how it worked.
But the the whole point of that drink, the whole point of any non-alcoholic uh drink on a rock like that, is that it has to start out very viscous. Uh and it also has to have something in it that's not unpleasant, but that's weird enough to stop you from pounding it. And so tomato, so we have a drink on the on the menu now, which I had as my working title, tomato, tomato bullsh, you know, sugar honey iced tea. And uh now that's the menu name of it because no one thought of a new name for it. And so because tomato is a very good, uh, clarified tomato is a very good thing to slow you down.
Because it it's like it's good, but it's weird enough that you're you're not gonna go pound it because then it's not like a cocktail, it's like a juice shot, which is not what we're looking for. So the tomato and the passion fruit together made it slow enough to drink, and the glycerin made it viscous enough to last over the uh dilution in the we also put a uh grape, I'm gonna want to say grapefruit twist in it. Um that's what I'm gonna want to say. Although, because that's just what I would add, but I don't actually remember, but I think that's what it was. Uh Azuo 2 writes in, I'd like to learn some general strategies for how to convert a very flavorful, salty condiment into an appropriate marinade for proteins.
I like how you just say you don't just call out the condiment, like it's like a secret condiment. You don't want to call out. You know what I mean? Like, is it that you're embarrassed or that you don't want someone else to take this secret secret salt? But then Azu does mention actually the condiment.
For example, the ingredient that inspired this question was gocha-chang. And thinking about how I would try to make gocha chang ribs. In general, it seems the answer is to find something to thin your ingredient out, but it seems like a pretty wide space to choose from. Soy sauce, sesame oil, and mirin, for example, would all help to uh get to a to a marinade, marinade. Uh, but they all you ever used to watch Chichin Chong?
Yeah. Eggs and bacon, marmalade. Anyway, uh, but they all contribute something different uh to the mix. Also, totally get it if the answer is just pick uh some flavorful liquids in the ballpark of where you're starting from and fiddle with the ratios until it tastes good. That's good advice, Azu.
That's good advice right there. I mean, you've given yourself some good advice. Any general advice would be appreciated. Well, I mean, look, I mean, gochu chang is not extraordinarily salty, so it's not gonna be bad if you water it down with something that has a little bit of a uh of a salt level to it. And you also gotta remember salt is good because the flavors in the in the gocha chang are not gonna penetrate very far into the meat unless you needle it.
First of all, everyone who's anti-freaking, and you don't get any penetration, maybe well, like marinate because they're testing it on things like chicken breast that don't have any holes in it, right? So like meats that have a lot of gaps, meats that are very thin, meats that have been needled, like these can all get flavors on the inside of them. But you know, whatever. Take it where you want. Um, you know, some sugar, some salt.
Uh I mean, you could just use water. It doesn't have to be flavorful. Like, and then adjust the salt level to to where you want it to be. If you want it to taste like gochu chang, then I would have it be almost entirely gocha chang. And if you wanted to, you know, thin it, you could thin it with water and gochu.
You know what I mean? You could buy gochu and add that to the water and make that and you know get it a little thinner and salt, right? You just need to get your salt and sugar levels where you want. That's one. What do you any anyone else say?
I do have some feedback. Okay. Um again, if a zoo or anybody else has ever done like equilibrium brining, and then you're mixing all these ingredients. You know, you want to look at the nutrition label, you take the sodium content per serving size, and you times it by 2.5. And that'll give you the actual sodium chloride salt equivalent.
Yep. That is true. Uh but I don't know they're I don't know that they're gonna they're not, I don't think they're pickling it, right? They're just we're not gonna well, I don't know. They want like a marinade that's roughly one percent salt equilibrium for their ribs, and they're using a bunch of different ingredients that also contain salt.
I don't think like math it out. I used to know how many days it would take to get to equilibrium on something like that. But ribs are so weird because of all the bone and and all the fat. Hard to calculate. Um I'm just thinking general.
Uh Wenrik writes in, hey Dave, would you consider manufacturing kitchen aid attachments that actually reach the bottom of the bowl? No. No, no. Stas, would you consider making that? No.
No, no. You'd be my you know, Winrick will be our first customer, which I totally appreciate. But on the other hand, I'd only have the three customers, and then we would get ripped off by our own factory, and then you know, we would have invested, you know, a hundred grand tooling and a year of our lives, because even like if I told those fools now, make a paper clip, they'd be like, it's a year. I'm like, it's a paper clip. They're like, it's a year.
You know what I mean? Like, yeah, yeah. No, it's it's a year and three months. Yeah. And it doesn't make it by new, it doesn't make it by Thanksgiving, Stas.
And in fact, not even that, they're not even gonna make it before Chinese New Year, right or wrong? Right. Right. Always. Always.
By the way, people, listen up. Depending, it's not a political statement. Depending on how this election goes, buy all your stuff from China now. You know what I mean? Like, seriously, as someone who makes stuff in China, and the Stas who will back this up, like if the tariffs go up to 60% again, we're hanging it up.
We're done. You know what I mean? Like, that's it. It's over. You know what I mean?
Because it's either 60% or we take another three years and find a manufacturer here that will build the spinzall for four times as much money, right? There is no in-between for small businesses like us. It does not exist, right? So I'm sorry, there is no way for us to quote unquote make this spinzall in America, right? So, like, not for what we sell it for now, which people already think what we sell for is unreasonable, right?
So, depending on how it goes, buy all your gear now. Um, speaking of, they still haven't picked up our freaking spinzalls from the dock. They're like, did you know there was a strike? Yes! I knew there was a strike.
Yeah. You know what I mean? It's over. Yeah. It's been over.
And then the guy literally, I feel like it's someone just like on the couch smoking a cigarette, being like, it's busy. I'm not gonna go till it mellows out. What? It was shut for two days. How unmellow can it be?
You know what it is, Toss? They literally don't give a rat's behind about us. That's what it is. But you know what? Modernist Panshi is pretty staying on top of them, which is really nice.
I know. Thank God somebody else is staying on top of it instead of us. You know what I mean? Yeah. I mean, not just because we're bad at it, but I mean, just because thank God.
Like, you know what I mean? Anyway. Yeah. All right. So Wenrik also adds, uh, sorry about that rant about making things.
Uh Wenrik also adds, also, I bought the rice polisher. So uh, you know, I don't know, a month or two ago, I mentioned that I bought a rice polisher on uh Amazon that is in it's Japanese and it's from Japan and it's built for Japanese current, but it works fine in the US, right? Works fine. And uh what it does is is it has a little basket and a little like spin, like a little paddle, and it just you put the theoretically you put rice into it and it boom and it like almost abrades the outside of the rice to take off the coating. So you can either take brown rice and make it into white rice, or you can make it into semi-brown rice.
It has a bunch of different settings to see how much it's gonna, or you can just take a little off the outside of your rice to like quote unquote freshen it up if that's something you're worried about. But I have it to remove the very outer coating of uh bran in wheat, right? So I use it when I'm baking bread to take knock off the outer coating, either in addition to as a replacement for sifting, because uh you can remove as much bran as you want by keep you keep milling it until you remove enough stuff that it, you know, it's almost all the brain is gone, and then run it through your your mill. Or uh you could take just the outer outer bit, which has a lot of the hairs, which some people say are very detrimental for baking loaf uh um loaf uh volume. Anyway, okay.
Uh I bought the rice polisher and it works fantastically. Do you always do just two white rice cycles or sometimes more? Uh I noticed on red fife, which is a wheat, which by the way can be either spring or winter wheat, such a pain in the butt. Uh I did it, did I tell you guys I did a test on so winter wheat is wheat that you plant uh you know in the fall before after harvest, before the the snow sets in, and that wheat needs the overwintering to really sprout well and do well germinate. So that is wheats that are grown in non really harsh environments.
Uh spring wheats are wheats that you plant and sow in the same season. So you wait for the frost to be over, you plant your wheat, it grows and you harvest it. So a lot of the a lot, you know, all of the very northern, like Manitoba style wheats are uh often spring wheats because it's harsh out there, right? So red fife is one of those weird wheats that can be grown either as a spring wheat or as uh a winter wheat. In general, spring wheats don't taste for the given variety, spring wheats are not supposed to taste as good as their winter varieties, but have like a very high kind of protein ratio.
They can be kind of harsher. And it was the, it was those spring wheats that took a long time to learn to mill properly to make the bread flour that we all use. Like can't Canadian style and northern American you know, northern Northern America style like bread wheats. Anyway, uh I digress a little bit except for I did a side-by-side test of red fife as a winter and as a spring wheat, and you know what I didn't notice? A difference.
So uh all right. Uh I noticed on red fife that there's still a decent amount of bran left after two cycles. Yeah, I'm trying to keep like a good amount of bran. What I don't want to lose, and the problem with the number of cycles, if you look in the chaff at the bottom, you'll see that um it depends on the wheat style, actually, wheat type, but they tend to degerminate. And I really like the flavor of wheat germ.
And so, like what I like, what I want to do is rub off like, you know, a good, like a chunk of the bran on the outside, but I don't really want it degerminated. So I'm I'm really kind of running the cycles to try to surf around that. Right now I'm running, I use the number four cups, which is four goes of rice, but I'm I'm adding 666, the devil's number of wheat to it. And I'm running it now usually at actually eight. And I'll run it once if I'm gonna sift, and I'll run it twice if I'm if I'm not.
Um Garrett wants to know about Contra Solariac crumpet. How does that work? It's so good. Are these traditional or are they modern crumpets? Modern crumpets.
Real crumpet is a short thing cooked in a like uh almost like an English muffin on a pan. Uh maybe, I guess they can bake them, but they're short and they're like kind of like bubbly on top. These are cooked like a quick bread in an oven and they're taller, so they're like non-traditional crumpet. Uh I'll tell you this. I don't really know the recipe I can ask, but uh I know that they cook the celery root beforehand.
They they like pre-roast the celery root before they make it, and then they make it into a quick bread, almost like banana bread. There you have it. Uh Ron Baker writes in seeking a way to preserve our wines by the glass bottle at my restaurant. Any suggestions besides the core van system? I don't have any rest uh suggestions other than the core van system.
Uh, but you know, I don't know. There, there you go. And in the minute I have left, how about this? Useless tool review. Yeah, I bought a useless kitchen tool, but I'm here to review it for.
I bought the OXO pineapple core. And so what this is, I was at a thrift store and it was like four bucks. And you you turn it in, you shove it into, you cut the top and bottom off a pineapple, and you shove it on, and it cores, and you you go and you put you twist it through the pineapple and it cuts it into one long spiral ring, almost like the apple core thing does for apples and or potatoes. And I was like, I'm not buying this. This is stupid.
And then when I picked it up, I realized I had a ratchet in the handle so that you just go, and you don't have to let go of the pineapple to do it, right? And I was like, oh yeah, for four bucks. I own this. I own this now. So I took it home and I cored my first pineapple with it yesterday.
And here's what I'm gonna say: it wastes a lot more pineapple than I do just cutting it myself. However, if you were doing it in a restaurant environment or if you juice a lot, right? I would put the pineapple into a container because you're gonna, you know, cut the top and bottom off. Put it in a container because you're gonna make a lot of juice, like, you know, basically punching your way through this pineapple. Core through it, right?
Push it down, and then juice the skins and the core and the residue to get the extra yield out of it. And then, meh, not a bad idea. Maybe next week if I have time, I'll talk about the two new flour mills that I've been using. Uh we'll be doing some bread tests on the Royal Lee Organic Mill and the Red Cell Mill versus the Como. So we can talk about that next week on cooking issues.
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