Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Marrow, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live from the heart of Manhattan Rock. Doing great? Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. Wow. Yeah.
All right. Got Joe Hazenrock in the panels. What's up? Hey, how are you doing? No uh no city bike today, huh?
Yeah. Well, not in the studio. Oh, in the state. Yeah, no, no. We thought maybe you might bring the whole dock in today.
Yeah, the nice thing about the winter time is that not as many people bike to work, so these docks are actually not as jammed up as long as the bike's working. Uh in the upper left, Quinn, you there? Yeah, I'm here. Quinning it up. Everything Quinny Quinn.
Everything is green, right? All right, good. And uh with Trepidation, we ha in Los Angeles, uh, we got uh Jackie Molecules. Yo, yep. Um I'm here.
Nice. And uh Nastasi the Hammer Lopez. Hello. Hey, so uh before we get into it, uh how's the how are the conditions on the ground today? Is it getting better or worse right now?
It seems like it's getting better, but every day it's sort of another scare. I mean, uh we don't have the winds that we did last week. Right. Not quite at least. Yeah.
I mean, I think it's supposed to be today that they do. Um it's been I don't know, it's been crazy. We both have so many friends that lost homes and uh it's just a really psychedelically weird time here. And the the the Altadina fire is the one that's closest to you guys, right? Uh yeah, and then there was a Hollywood fire that kind of spooked everybody for a night that was very close.
I mean, you know, even even uh the one in Pasadena when Stas and I went to go um visit Mike's bar, we we we could see burning flames from the highway. It was very weird. Uh the Palisades. Palisades, that's I meant, sorry. Yeah.
Huh. And uh and what's the air like there to breathe? I mean now. Yeah. That's what they say.
I mean, but they're also it's like it's like sort of the same thing with um 911 where somebody buildings go up and it's like, you know, you don't know what other stuff is in the air. Right. Other than regular wildfire smoke. So I mean Yeah. It did smell on 911 it it smelled different.
You know what I mean? It wasn't like normal. Yeah. Um did the I mean, because I only the only reference I have for a big fires like that is you know, the ones that were hundreds of miles away in Canada that affected us here in New York, and those even hundreds of miles away choked us. Like, you know, everything turned black from soot.
You couldn't really go outside for too long without a mask. I mean, I hope it's not that bad over there. Yeah, it doesn't seem like it. I mean last yeah. Yeah, last week was like that.
Uh awful. Well, luckily my air purifier my air purifiers just showed up. Perfect time. You you didn't you didn't get one uh like uh like you didn't buy that first post-pandemic or pre you know pandemic era air purifiers and everyone bought them? I had one, but it wasn't enough to cover this whole apartment since we both uh my girlfriend and I both work from home.
So, you know. So which one of you got the clean air? Did you give her the clean air or did you keep the clean air? No, she got the clean air. Oh, nice.
That's nice. Good man. Good man. Uh or like the idea that one side of your apartment is clean and the other side's like a like a soot factory. It's anyway.
Um are uh are people going out still or no? Like what's it, what's it like? Are people still trying to go about their normal business or are they hunkered down? Yeah, I think so, right? I'm I'm seeing more people trying to.
Yeah, we ran out. Yeah. We did. Yeah. And well, was it was it fun?
What do you what do you got for me in the way of food? Now now back to your f food, uh, food, food phenalia. Would he did you eat and or drink and or cook anything of import or interest in the past week or so? Yeah. And then we went to what was the cuisine?
Indonesian. Yeah, I wasn't even. You guys are just going through zombie life. Yeah, you're going through zombie life. I understand it.
Yeah, yeah. I get it. Yep. Yep. Yeah, I get it.
Uh yeah. Anyway. Uh Nastasia, by the way, Jack, is trying to convince me to go out to Los Angeles in a in a couple of weeks to do something. Yeah, dude. I know.
I I told Jack, and uh, Jack said that he would even DJ at the at the thing that you might bartend at. But I also know, Dave, that getting you to come to LA or do anything with me is really hard. What? As opposed to with other people. Just so that that first of all, Nastasia, that's the biggest load of horse crap, tiniest violence situation.
It really is. When was it? When have I said when have I said no? Nastasia, like when some people say, Here's here is a budget and a brick of money. Come do X, Y, or Z, we're like, okay, I will take said budget and said brick of money and come do XYZ.
Like, I don't go anywhere, like just at the drop of a hat. That's not my life. I don't just like pick up sticks and go and go do things ever with anyone. No one. No one.
In fact, like it's only the past year that I started taking like normal, like, like, you know, where I go pla I I just don't do it with anyone. I don't know why you think that it's somehow a slight against you. Like, who on earth call in anyone that knows me or has ever met me, ever. Any human being who can hear my voice, call in too, if you're a Patreon listener, to 917-410-1507. That's 917-410-1507.
And tell me a time that I have gone and done anything with anyone anywhere when it wasn't for business. All right. Uh right? I mean, John, have you ever known me to do that? I'm staying out of this one.
Yeah. Yeah. Not getting in between you two. But I mean, you did come to see me. It's true.
Right, but I was visiting a coworker, and it was for one day, and it was on the way to Alaska. And the Canadian officials at the border were real buttheads. And I'm not ever looking forward to meeting those people again. You're going to visit a guy for one day? What are you crazy?
On Vancouver Island? Anyway. Uh yeah. I forget what I snuck into Canada that I wasn't allowed to sneak in. There's something.
Some food stuff. Oh, the sandwich. Oh, the sandwich. Ooh, the contraband sandwich. What was it?
It was a muffaletta from New Orleans, right? Yeah. Yeah. Was that any good? Do you like muffaletta?
Yeah, I uh my my brother and and and dad. I think we're over here. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's a very specific sandwich designed for working folk and meant to keep for a long time, which is why it's the ideal thing to bring you know on a on a cross. In fact, what do you call it when you're across one country border?
It's not cross country, it's I don't know. Uh so yeah, Stas, if we can make it work, we can we can make it work. You and I have to talk about the other garbage. Uh all right, so nondescript, maybe Indonesian food wasn't bad enough to you for you to remember, wasn't good enough for you to remember, and Mike's bar, which I'm assuming you liked again. Yeah.
Oh yeah, it's the best. Yeah. Uh what about you, Quinny Quinn? What do you got for me? Uh actually this week I made some hazelnut butter, all local hazelnut.
We roasted them fresh and ground them in my, you know, conch slash uh wet mill, however you want to refer to it. The wet mill wet mill sounds good. Yeah, and that's what it is, but it sounds real gross. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
John, are you pretty good? Are you familiar with uh I know you are because you're an art history person. Marcel Duchamp? Of course. And uh the famed uh painting on on multiple sheets of glass called grinding your chocolate.
Yeah. Yeah. So so for those of you that don't know, like uh the stuff that what Quinn is using is a a repurpose and I think rebranded because you don't have one that's branded to make idli, right? A Indian uh like made wet grinder for things like idley batter and other wet things where you take pulses, you soak them, you put them there with water, mmm, two stuff, two or three stones, depending on which one you have. Grinding forever, also great for mustard, but it've been repurposed recently, i.e.
the past 15 years for uh making chocolate at home, right? Right, right? You with me? Stas and I have had several, whatever. Mine was like branded for chocolate.
That's what I'm saying, but that's really just a rebadge. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah, it's just a rebadge. I mean, if it makes you feel better, this says chocolate on it.
Hey, great. Uh, but my point being that like that's where it's from now. It is in fact very similar to the old style chocolate grinders, and so the image that I'm thinking of, I think has three big wheels on it, uh rolling around and crushing uh chocolate, uh grinding chocolate in this Marcel Duchamp thing. But tell them what grinding your chocolate means in French. What do you mean?
Well, I was told when I was taking our history back in the day that that was uh that was slang for uh Oh, I d I'm not familiar with that slang. Slang for you know, getting yourself to the finish line. Huh? Grinding your own chocolate. I don't know that one.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm gonna have to Yeah, I'm curious.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Thanks for teaching me something now.
Yeah. Well, I thought I figured like some it could be a lie. It could that could be one of those lies that they teach you, but that sounds like Duchamp, because he's that kind of a guy. Yeah. Yeah, that kind of a play on something.
Absolutely. Yeah. Do you who is it? Remember with Seth Saz. Remember when Seth Godin was on and he said, because he's like a student of the woman that Marcel Duchamp ripped a lot of stuff off of.
Remember this? Way back when he came on. Yeah, it's blurry. Yeah. I was I remember when he was on, I don't remember that's correct.
What was her name? I gotta look it up. Anyway. Uh so how was the hazelnut butter? Good.
I think I need to tweak it a little bit because I I actually like the flavor of you grind everything together so you get like some of the astringency. When you say grind it together, you mean the nuts? Or do you mean you didn't take the skins off the nuts? I I don't I don't shake off all the skin. Okay.
Alright. So you like you like a little bitter. You like some bitterness? How roasted were they? Yeah.
Um, I did like 300 Fahrenheit for like between 35 and 40 minutes. Oh, that's a weird number. So like I would say moderate, moderate roast. That's a strange number. Long time at a low temperature?
That's some weird. What do the inside of the hazelnuts look like? I hate I hate it when hazelnuts get like burnt in the middle. I would say it it was a subtle, a subtle color change all the way through. And what why do you where did you come up with that number?
Why that number? And why that time? Uh just some trail hair from other nut roasting. Again, you know, I can't check it myself, so I always tend to go a little lower in temperature and then set a timer so that someone else can check it. By the way, we had a question in on nuts and nut butters that I don't have the answer to, and they said maybe we should wait for Ariel to come on, and maybe we will, but I'm gonna say it on air live in case anybody has the answer and wants to get into it with us.
Where where is it? Uh oh gosh, where is this question? Oh yeah, from Monty Z. Why do freshly ground nut butters taste so different from the nuts alone? That's an interesting question.
I mean, I I I have a hypothesis. Okay. And wait, if you're gonna give me a hypothesis, you also have to give me information about how someone might go test it to see if that hypothesis is true. Otherwise, the hypothesis is of no use. Yes, I mean I would guess that if if you are roasting them whole, and then again, if there is especially in the case of that that sort of exterior skin component, once you're grinding them, there is interaction between exterior components and interior components.
That is just going to, you know, that is some chemical reactions are gonna happen from grinding, especially over a long period, or just the completely homogenous mixture will taste different than what k you know what you can achieve by just like chewing them. But Monty hasn't said how they are grinding the nuts. There's no information about whether they're blanched, whether they're roasted, whether they're skinned, whether they're salted, not even what nut it is. The whole point is is that regardless of what technique, roast level, and not even like you say grind level, right? Like could be going through a champion juicer with the with the blank screen in, which is a good way to make butters, or uh, you know, I we used to use the the wet grinder, but first we would, you know, Roboku or Vita Prepped them so that they're small enough to to rock and roll in the thing, get them a little warm.
It could be the heat thing. Like I I've uh started using a did I mention the nut oil press on the on the air? I think so. When Madame did maybe you posted about it. Uh w no, I didn't post about it yet.
When Mad's reflins came on, uh he was like, You need to get a nut oil press because it's gonna change your life. Well, so I got one because they're really cheap now. Like you can get one for like a an inexpensive one, like uh like the ones that have a better brand name cost more, but like the ones that are very similar but don't have a brand name, they're like I think they're under under $200, right? And I've run some initial experiments with it, and the oil yield is incredibly, incredibly dependent on temperature. Like incredibly.
So when you run peanuts, which I know aren't a nut, don't get started, Quinn. I know it's not a nut, but when you run peel, you know, peanuts, an oil seed, a legume through uh the unit and you don't jack the temperature, you get no oil out of it, like none. But what you do get is an and I actually used it as this, you get an amazing nut powder out of it that um that is kind of really fluffy and not pasted together at all. So uh I made uh maze pan with it. So because for those of you that don't know, like I can't tell you how many times, even at Economy Candy, I went to Economy Candy, which is our local fancy candy store down the lower east side, and I said, I think I even called them, I was like, Do you have mazapan?
And they're like, Yes. And I show up and they hand me marzipan. And I'm like, listen, I know that my Spanish is garbage, but like mazapan and marzapan are not the same thing. You know what I mean? But I don't think we get a lot of people, at least in the lower east side, eating mazapan.
The well in LA you get mazapan everywhere, right, Stas? You can get mazapan everywhere. Uh yeah. Yeah. Uh so for those of you that don't know, it's like it's not an almonds, it's peanuts and sugar compressed into what look like giant alka seltzers, you know, like discs or like tiny urinal mints or giant alpha seltzers.
And you you they're in like a they're in like a wrapper, I think with a rose on it or something, right? And then when you eat it, if you make if someone makes a what you need to do is give one to somebody and then crack a joke when they're eating it. So they have to breathe in. They breathe out a little bit and then they breathe in and then all peanut dust and powdered sugar goes into their lungs and they're coughing for like a week. That's what you got it.
That's the trick with mazzapan. Also get people to eat it over their lap without a knacking because it's like it breaks into a million pieces and it's dust everywhere. But it's delicious. But you can make maze pan with this nut grinder but when you jack the temperature up to like like higher than you would think, jack the barrel temperature up into like you know a hundred and something Celsius. I forget I have the number somewhere you get massive amounts of oil.
So the oil yield, right, and therefore probably also the flavor of what's happening as you say Quinn with it is vastly dependent on temperature. But I'm assuming that you're doing a cold grinding and they're doing cold grinding. You're trying to keep the oil in the nut trying to although you know whatever you can emulsify it out. So nuts are dependent this way but um I think Monty is saying that there is some difference in general in the way the homogenized nut tastes from the individual nut and I just don't know the answer. But I think it's you know like you say it's probably something to do with you're turning it into homogeneous paste.
But it could also be that you're releasing more aromas by grinding and releasing oil in a way that your mouth can't do. I mean there's all sorts of theories but Ariel might know. Yeah I know I mean it's said that like the flavor of chocolate also changes from extended clenching refining even when the particle size is at the proper size if you like a lot of keep going often. Well, there's multiple things with that, right? There's the mouthfeel on the particle size and like aroma release, but there's also literally the volatilization of uh components, especially the way that we do it at home, where we're doing it for a long, long, long time, longer than anyone else would do it, eat it commercially, right?
Typically, you're flashing off notes. The same way that when we used to go get the crazy water from Saratoga, and all the people were like, How can you drink that? It tastes like sulfur. I'm like, the sulfur flashes off. You did when once you carb it two or three times and you and you burp it, you f you know you fluff it out, like the the sulfur goes away.
You know what I mean? And it's the same thing with conching, you're getting rid of uh aroma. But I don't know if that's what's going on. There might be something more, more blah blah. I don't know.
But it would be relatively easy to test if you had the equipment. But they also specify freshly ground, so you could compare like crushed nuts, very ground to fresh nuts, and then like a recold ground nut. I love how Quinn, you're like, it's fairly trivial if you have like a GC, you know, MS system. If you have if you have you have a, you know, if you have a you know, GC MS system with a especially if it has a sniffer port. I mean tasting the difference.
Well, I mean, Monty can taste the difference, wants to know why. You know what I mean? And the the fact of the matter is is that knowing why would help you figure out how to control it. I mean, that's the reason why it's good to actually have a hypothesis you can test. Because if you can test a hypothesis and you know the answer of why something happens, it helps you make better culinary decisions, right?
That's the whole reason to know the science behind anything when you're when you're cooking, isn't just so you can feel smart, it's so you can make better decisions when you're when you're cooking. You know what I mean? And what I don't do often enough, get rid of unnecessary steps. I can't tell you how many recipes I have that have unnecessary steps in them because if it worked the time you did it when you wrote it down, who has the time to run through and get rid of all of the steps? Stas, do you remember the uh do you remember the egg bread?
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So we did this whole thing where like we had discovered that if you take egg yolks, getting fish bowl. If you take egg yolks and then you just yolks and sugar and salt, and I think I think it was baking soda, it could have been baking powder.
I gotta look it up. I think it was baking powder now. I think of it. And you mix it up, and you you you blend it, get a little air into it, and then you pressure cook it, it turns into like a bread that's made entirely out of egg yolk, right? So it's on the blog somewhere, you can look it up.
And so we were like, oh, that's another application for the pressure cooker. Guy named Jeff Butler, who's uh, you know, was uh teacher at the FCI was like, I put it in a steamer and it worked just as well. I was like, oh, snap. You know what I mean? I was like, because you in general, when you're doing a a lot of recipe testing, it's very, it's very hard to go back and retest you all the hypotheses.
So I had the hypothesis was that you needed the pressure cooker. Wrong, you know what I mean? And so I didn't test it. And this happens in recipes all the time. And no one has the time energy to go back and figure out which one of all the little things they have are real and which ones are just their intuition, which could be right or wrong.
You know what I mean? Yeah. Stas, and we're like, go for it. Because it was on the menu at Lake Cole. We're like, they're like, is it okay if we don't do it in the pressure cooker, Stas looked squarely in the dude's face and said, I don't care either a little bit.
Uh yeah. Anyway, uh all right, what else we got? What do you got, John? I went to La Tador on Saturday night, Daniel Bellou's new steakhouse restaurant thing. How was Danny B?
It's Goldenhead? Yeah. Is it related to Golden Eye? I don't know. I didn't ask.
Is that Pierce Brosnan or is that Daniel Craig? Pierce Bresson. I did run into DB on his way out, though, which was nice to quickly see him for a second. Um but yeah, that place really exceeded my expectations. Well, well, what were your expectations?
I don't know. It's always kind of like expectations. Low in general going to a new place. So you liked it though. I loved it.
It was great. What style of steak? Um, all of them. I mean, it's also really expensive. I'm gonna say deck broiler, pan, grill, wood grill, also like prime rib trolley, which I appreciate.
Danielle knows how to do some old school uh tableside Caesar? Uh-oh, how was it? Pretty good. Wood bowl? Yeah, wood bowl.
Rubbed garlic? No, they had some of that like already pre-I know. No crap on them. Get out of here. Cut the garlic in half, rub it on the inside of the bowl, or get out.
Get out! If I'm gonna do it with regular garlic, I might as well do it in the back like an a-hole. You know what I mean? Yeah. Whatever.
I'm sure it was delicious. It was. Well, how was the romaine treated? Uh just like thickish kind of thing. Sliced.
Yeah. Do you mind uh so I, you know, my mom came over for the Christmas, and she's still on the thing. She's like, I tear it. I'm like, all right, Ma. Uh is anyone else here still a tear freak on uh on lettuce?
Does anyone remember when tear became a thing? Oh yeah. Hell yeah. Yeah. You're like you would go to someone's house and the lettuce was sliced, and you're like, no, I see that you're one of those people who slices their lettuce.
And then after a while, we're all like, the hell, this is fine. Yeah. Doesn't need to be hand ripped apart and yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Although I will say this, I wonder, because I haven't done it in a long time, I doubt there is. I don't think there is now that I'm saying it. You know how, like when you cut onions with uh a carbon steel knife? Yeah, everything goes shit crappy. It's everything's the whole night's ruined.
Like then the knife has that smell forever, the onions turn black, everything's terrible, life is bad. I wonder if there's something with lettuce with carbon steel blades, maybe that's where the ripping came from. Huh? I mean, a stainless steel knife, shagunk straight through the lettuce, ain't causing a problem. Does not make the lettuce wilt.
No. You especially like a firm lettuce, you could you could slice that thing. It is, as we say, fine. You know what I mean? Yes.
Huh? What's worse? Tiny, tiny pieces of lettuce or too big a piece? Too big. Too big.
That's why you don't tear. Yeah. I hate it when you go to a restaurant and you get like the whole leaf as the salad. You know, like a bunch of the whole leaves. Unless they even if they mean it.
Yeah. Yeah. Cut it up. All right. So let me ask you this.
Everyone picture a romaine leaf. All right. I like the middle section. I don't really like the floppy ends. If I'm gonna have romaine, I want that crunch.
I don't want it too close to the end where it gets a little bit not, and I don't like it at, you know, I don't like it at the green end, and I don't like it at the stem end. I like the kind of kind of that solid center section of the romaine. Does anyone prefer the floppy outside? No. No, right?
No. Now, if you had to erase from existence butter lettuce or romaine lettuce. Butter. Yeah, me too. What about you?
Anyone keeping butter? Yeah, I guess not, though I do love butter lettuce. But between the two. You're erasing iceberg or romaine. Romaine.
Wow. So keep the iceberg? Nothing I'm icing. Iceberg. Yeah, I say, oh, that's.
Or application. Yeah, I don't know. All right, but but a wedge salad will never be the same. That's true. I really do love a good wedge salad.
You know, listen, as a child of the 70s, for those of you that are like more recent vintage than I am, do people still like blue cheese dressing as much as I love blue cheese dressing? I hope so, but I don't think so. No? Joe Hazen doesn't like the blue cheese dressing. He's got this wave in the head.
There's only one, I know that salad bars are filth, like literal filth. I mean, but uh as a child of the 70s, I grew up with loving salad bars, and I always was a blue cheese dredger. I would take that like horrible beige ladle that and I would dredge all the way to the bottom of the blue cheese and pull the giant chunks up and then like all of the bacon bits and all the croutons on like three pieces of lettuce. That was my jam. You know what I mean?
All right. One more salad question. Half a hard boiled egg, yes or no? No. No?
No. Because it's too big or because you don't want the egg? I don't want the egg. Usually, yeah. I love an egg on a salad, but it's too big.
Hard boiled egg in what context? As a salad ingredient. As a green salad ingredient. No? Anyone else?
Anyone else? Pro egg? Yeah? Okay, here's one more for you. Sorry, I said I was done with salads.
In the 80s, in the 70s and 80s, it became a big thing to have quote unquote chef salad. And what chef salad was back then was a regular garbage salad, right? With dressing of your choice, and then like strips of cut up deli meat and strips, blocks sometimes, sometimes strips of cheese, and then pieces of egg, a lot of times put through one of those like wire slicers, right? And then all kind of on top, and then you chummed all that stuff up with garbage tomatoes, like you know, crunchy tomatoes, you know what I mean? And I have to say, delicious product.
When I think of that kind of thing, I think of the cob salad. I love a good cob salad is God salad. Yeah, it's so good. Cob salad, I think might be the height of saladry. Yeah.
The cop salad is delicious. It's so good. Yeah, so good. Yeah. Just works.
Do you like it when it becomes more of a meal and they chicken ize it? Yeah. Me too. Yeah, definitely. Me too.
Even with like overcooked, crappy like chicken tenders. I almost prefer it that way in a weird way. Wow. Especially when you have that like really hard char on there that you don't really want when you're cooking and you know what you should be doing, but I don't know. Like it still works.
Right. Can I give a suggestion for if you want charred and you happen to have a uh a like an outdoor grill? Go high heat. This is for this, go high heat. Take your chicken, take thighs.
Don't take the tenders. Take thighs. Bone them out, get them flat. Then uh salt, sugar, pepper, beat the crap out of them with a mallet, then put them into a marinade of your choice of like oil, uh, plain yogurt, a little bit of a little bit of uh sugar, lemon, olive oil, garlic, spices of your choice. So you could do cumin, you don't have to.
You could do, you know, parsley, you don't have to grind all that crap up, marinade that for a while. That's gonna soften it even more, season that sucker up. Super high heat grilled tandor style, like like off on, off on, off on till they're done. Drench those with butter, eat them day one. All your leftovers, cob salad.
Yeah. That is the ultimate cob salad, charred chicken, McGillakudi right there. Yeah. You know what I mean? Anyway.
The key to the marinade, obviously, the acid, the yogurt, and the acid. Uh and the other key to chicken that you've grilled the hell out of is dousing that sucker with butter when it comes off of the grill. Just like a like it you whenever you're gr doing super high heat grilling, God help you if you don't have just scads of melted butter around. You know what I mean? Even when I'm doing like flour tortillas, I know I'm supposed to use lard and I'm supposed to, but I brush everything with butter.
Cause why would I not brush everything with butter? Especially if you have vegetarians who who do dairy, yeah. Butter. Yeah. Butter's delicious.
It really is though. Yeah. Yeah. I don't use butter in my tortillas instead of lard. I use olive oil.
Whatever. Yeah. What are you gonna do? How the hell do we get on this? Oh, you were talking about Daniel Balud.
Oh, yeah. But so you're saying wood grill. Yes. Yeah, but then also some things panseered. I don't know.
They just did like the whole mix. I don't think they're I didn't see a broiler, a big broiler there. Do you remember when they used to do like like prime rib service? You could ask which section of the prime rib you wanted out of so you could get it more or less done. Yeah.
What'd you go for? Did you get prime rib? The person I was with got prime rib. Of course they did. Yes.
And it was great, like perfect medium rare. How thick. A good inch? Three quarters of an inch? Do an inch?
How burnt how burnt up was the outer was the outer deck of the hot cast. Not enough, yeah. Because that crunchy crap. Yeah, it's the best. That's I mean, you know what I mean?
No, it's great. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean everything on the menu is really good. The service was on point.
The desserts were great. I mean, it was just uh it was a beautiful space too. Um, usually like I've liked Daniel's food in the past, but I don't know. I also think you know, when you go to like Cafe Baloo or things like that, it's still very good, but it just feels a little dated, especially with the plating presentations and all that stuff. It's supposed to be though.
Yeah, no, no, I know. That's that's like the that's it his thing. But um and when you anyone busting out like any tableside or Gyaradone stuff, I'm like, yeah, baby. Exactly. Don't care what it is.
Don't care what it is. And you know, I've only had their their table side stuff at like you know, Danielle, the flagship Danielle. But those those fo folks were skilled, man. Yeah. Like they did the whole fish, uh, like uh the whole fish in the in the coffee, open it up.
Beautiful, no touch filleting, you know what I mean? With like this guy. I love that stuff. Yeah. Really is.
Yeah. So what it set you back, you'd have to say that. Okay, well, Dave, that's dated, but now now the trend is for like a new trendy restaurant to just bring you out a whole piece and a knife and be like, have at it. Yeah, you do it. I know.
I hate it. That drives me crazy. I hate that. Here's another thing. I hate it.
Why would I want to wear it? Yeah, I don't like I don't like carving anything either, which is why I debone almost everything that comes out. And people are like, Can you cut it? I'm like, no. You know what I mean?
Like Stas and I once Stas and I once sent a uh a half chicken back to the kitchen to have them cut it. Well, I was like, you do this, I'm gonna ruin it. Don't I don't want to use this crappy knife and and butcher this thing. Yeah, they weren't gonna give you a discount, right? No, and it's on a tiny little cutting board.
That's like pieces. To hell with that. That is trash. Although I will say this story. So my niece Mabel likes those little seaweed snacks that also Booker likes them.
They're like, you know, they're the same little Nori things that you would wrap around an onigiri, right? So they're not full sheets, but they're not tiny strips either, right? And so Travis, my brother-in-law, goes to the store to buy them the snacks for Mabel. And the person behind the counter hands hands him the like the giant, you know, the industrial pack of Nori wrapper for sushi. That's like a hundred of them.
You know what I mean? So much cheaper. It's the best way to buy Nori by far. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
And he goes, but do you have the ones that you know are in the she he goes, she goes, you cut it. He's like, all right. So now now, no matter what, when you when you see something, he's like, you cut it. Anyway. But not at a restaurant.
No. It's good advice when buying Nori. Because why am I paying them all that money to cut Nori up into smaller chunks and sell me a bunch of plastic to carry it around? But uh yeah, I agree. Carving sucks.
How do we get on that? Oh, because they don't do make you do that at Danielle. They carve it for you. Yes. Of course not.
No. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, it's it's a lost art. Things that are things that some things that are dated are gonna come back.
Hopefully, like the thing is that you don't want everything to be like that, but it's nice to have an incredible level of service every once in a while if you can afford. I know how much did it cost. Are you allowed to say? I didn't pay, thankfully. You know what?
The best steak house is? The best. The best steakhouse is free steakhouse. I recreated the um I can't believe I'm blanking it. The fill I didn't do fillet, I did the dry dribeye with the foie, the truffles and the sauce pirigaux.
What's the um I'm blanking on the escope name for that? But whatever. It was delicious. I was glad to finally have it. And I was glad not to pay for the bill.
So did they did they do a fresh slice over? Of uh foie? No, did they with the truffle? Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
And and did they look at you and then wait for you to nod? No, they didn't. Oh, that's my favorite. That's my favorite. And does does Monsieur have the weavos?
And you look at it and you're like, oh, keep going. And then there's beads of sweat as the money is just going on to your food. Shink, shhing. Oh my God. Uh I've never had any.
I've always wanted to have a service thing like that where I could make someone who's trying to impress people like really sweat on like how much ridiculous money that they were, you know, shaving over the top of their food. You're gonna do that at temperance, like something crazy. Yeah. And just see when they stop. Yeah.
We'll see. It would be amazing, like in the future when we all have like uh augmented reality, like you know, glasses, and we're never looking at each other in the real life anymore. We're only looking through these like giant like Apple display situations. Like if it could like have it like ding ding ding up top, like actually have the money rolling over like over your head as you shave so you can see it. Like like when they play football and they can live put like the lines and stuff over it.
That's the future. Yeah. Um for that specific application. It's worth it just for that. Yes.
Like, you know, everything, everything good and bad that's gonna happen, it's all just for so I can see someone sweating as the money racks over their head when shaving truffles. But uh okay. Uh did I have anything in food? Oh, today's my kids, both my kids' birthdays. Yeah, because they both had the same birthday three years apart.
Booker now 23. And why is that? Schedule, Stas. Schedule. Once a year, I have a schedule.
Anyway, uh but uh so both my kids are in their 20s now. Uh one of them in the state of New York, well, 23, and one of them is is 20 in the state of New York, but 23 in the state of Pennsylvania, if you get my drift. I was like, I was like, how old is your fake ID say you are now? And he's like, Oh, I'm 23 now. Like, sweet.
Sweet. It's such a weird fiction we have in this country. Like, he doesn't own a car, so why can't he drive? I mean, why can't he uh why can't he buy alcohol? You know what I mean?
It should be one or the other. Yeah. Every New York City kid that I know of would go for a drinking license as opposed to a driving license if they were given a chance. Who grew up, who grew live in the city and don't have a car, whatever. Oh, so I have to make squid again.
You know, Booker's gonna eat an entire three-pound box of squid. By the way, for those of you that don't know, I have uh before I said that it was impossible to buy clean squid. It's now that was only like during the pandemic for like a year or two. It was hard to buy clean squid. It's very easy to buy clean squid again.
But here's the thing. So, what what do I hate most about cleaning squid? Answer everything. It's all a nightmare job. But uh, I really hate when it they're frozen and you haven't thought it enough, and they're so hard that when you cut through it, you realize you cut through the pen in it, and then you have to go back to all the tubes and pull that little piece of pen cartilage out of each one because your knife went through it because it's so cold that you couldn't feel it when it was thawing out.
You know what I mean? Yeah. I hate that. But here's what I hate about the new clean ones. They leave they take the beak out, thank God, right?
You know what I mean? But like they leave a chunk of meat on the tentacles that you would never serve. So I have to go back and trim it. Why? Like, I'll pay you an extra nickel to get rid of that for me.
You know what I mean? It's like, right? I mean, like, I'm not, I'm not haggling with you over the price of the box because you're selling them to me in a frozen box anyway. So just trim that, trim that garbage out. Because no one wants that.
Did you know? I asked this question. I was at Aqua Best buying a box, two boxes of it. And they're like, you want, you want tubes or tubes and tentacles? I was like, I want just tentacles, fool.
And he's like, we don't have just tentacles. I'm like, well, what do they do with the tentacles? Just the tubes. From just tubes. And he goes, I don't know.
So if anyone knows, I want to know what happens to just tentacles. And what do you guys like better? Do you guys prefer tubes or do you prefer tentacles? Tubes. Yeah, I guess tubes, but also legs are still really good.
It's called that tubes. Tubes. Yeah, I tell you what though. I I look in general, I think it's easier to cook a tube. You know what I'm saying?
Like, easier to cook a tube, easier to pick up a tube, easier to dip a tube. But when a when the when the tentacles are nice and it's got all that textural variance and you know what I mean? Here's something I wish was more delicious baby octopus. Baby octopus could be more delicious than it is. Have any of you had a baby octopus that lived up to your expectation of how delicious that baby octopus should have been?
No. Me either. No, not that I can remember. Yeah. Gizzards.
Delicious, right? Menu item. Nice. I love octopus. I'm just saying it's like a lot of people botch it.
And okay. So there are many ways to botch an octopus, which is probably why they're so disappointing. What's worse for you? Okay, there's tough. There's there's way chewy.
There's like just completely botched, right? Then there is That's what I'm talking about. All right. Then there's tough, right? Then there's so tender it's mushy.
Right? And so all of those are terrible. And it's only when it's those are all bad. I'd rather have it a little too tough than a little than too mushy, though, if it's me. I don't know.
I think a lot can I think it's really hard to cook fresh octopus too. People think the fresh octopus is better, but I think it's easier to cook a f a frozen thawed octopus than it is to cook a fresh one and get it and get it, get it good because the freeze thaw cycle just, you know, k-unk, like you know, takes a little bit of the out of it. Do you like cold octopus or hot octopus? I like them both though. I don't think I don't eat octopus.
Yeah, I know. I know. So it's kind of freaky, you know. Well, you know, I I don't think like it doesn't really matter. I don't like it that much.
Oh no. Oh yeah, right. A valid choice. I mean, my feeling on it is is that uh one, if they lived long enough, they would totally be our octopus overlords. You know what I mean?
They would totally have taken over and they'd be driving around in like, you know, like aquariums on land and telling us what to do. So I'm saying to hell with them. The other thing is they are, they don't live very long anyway. It's not like you're, it's not like you're taking 40 years of life away from an octopus. You know, here's here's an interesting thing, and I I don't know what the answer.
What percentage of octopuses that are caught are at the end of their life cycle, I wonder. And does it make them better or worse? I'm sure that like female octopuses, when they octopi whatever, when they are uh, you know, watching their eggs brood, right? They're blowing water over them all the time to keep parasites away and to guard them. They don't eat that entire time, right?
So they're like wasting away. So I'm presumably that would be a bad tasting octopus. Presumably. Well, I don't think you would catch those. How do you know what you catch?
Because what well, they wander off and die. Saying that like the males, when the males mate with the female octopus, right? Then they go loony boons and they just wander around the bottom of the ocean waiting to get tagged by a fish. Is that are those the ones we catch? I don't know.
You know what I mean? Like, are we catching healthy octopus? Like, how do we even catch like what are we doing? You know, I have no idea. I should know.
You know what I mean? But I don't. I know I ran a test once where we cooked all of the legs of the octopus separately and tasted them separately, all different. Different tendernesses and va obviously vastly different from tip to uh base of the tentacle. Anyway.
All right, how do we get an octopus? Oh, that was what disappointed Jack. I think gizzards are really disappointing how considering how delicious they are. Duck gizzards, I had a duck gizzard salad in France. I'm still trying to figure out how they cook the gizzards.
Those gizzards were not. You know how when you boil a gizzard, like or you pressure cook it, it gets soft, but it's not interesting anymore. They had a gizzard that had just the right amount of bite to it. Still had all of its flavor in it. I don't know how the hell they did it.
I love gizzard though. By itself, as just not as just serving to people, but gizzard. Not as good as a heart. A chicken heart, duck heart. Yeah, really good.
Come on. Delicious. All right. Lord Naboo uh wrote in and said, Oh, I was gonna give my squid recipe. Think people want the squid recipe?
All right. So uh a box of uh tubes and tentacles when thawed yields about 879 grams of uh of squid, a little bit of ice chunks left in it, whatever. So I I thaw it as fast as I can under running water. I chop it up, and then uh I add to that to the 879, 15 grams of salt, 200 grams of buttermilk. The acid's gonna help tenderize the uh, what's it called?
The uh squid, uh, and then 15 grams of sugar, stir that all up, soak it in a ziploc bag, get rid of the air, soak that in the fridge for however long you want, a couple hours, what doesn't matter. Then uh I drain it in a colander. When you drain it, uh I then I save the this the buttermilk and all the stuff that it's been in. It's also gonna release some liquid because you salted it, right? So you're gonna get more than 200 back.
I add an egg to it, chuck, chuk, chuk, chuk, four grams of uh soda, six grams of baking soda, six grams of uh baking powder. Uh then I go, I take the squid that's in the colander, throw it into flour, then you know, toss it all around in flour. Remember, you don't need to pepper and salt the flour. I don't add pepper to this, by the way. Normally I would, but Booker hates pepper.
So there's no pepper in the in the soak. I would normally add it. And then uh out of the flour, put it back into a dry colander, chack, chak, chak, chuck, tack, knock off the extra, into the liquid, back into the powder, deep fry. That's what I do. Solid.
Yeah. Yeah. That's what I do. Uh you can do it, you can do it differently, but then you're not making the one that Booker wants. Well, what was your oil temperature?
Uh hot. Uh like I'm doing it at like 360, 365. Like uh, you know, this is another point. It's gonna come up in a second. About uh well, it's gonna come up frying is gonna come up in in a second.
But oil temperature, it used to be back in the day before I, you know, would low temp chicken before I did my my fry offs. Maybe it was better, maybe it was worse. I would have to constantly ratchet my oil temperatures up and down, right? So, you know, I would fry chicken at a much lower temperature than I would fry French fries at for the for the final fry. And uh, you know, per Jose Andres's uh advice when I was much younger, uh, why don't you just write every recipe to cook at the same temperature?
Right? So I've told the story on the air, right? So like I I was interviewing him about planchas because they were becoming huge. So I interviewed Danielle because Danielle had had a new jade plancha was being designed, like Spanish styles. The first time a Spanish-style planchas were being designed by American equipment manufacturers.
Jade was the first one to do it. So Danielle had one at some restaurant he was opening in Vegas. I interviewed, you know, people who were using like American grills as planches and flat tops, like uh Andy Nusser over at Cosimono. And I call up Jose Andres and talk to him about Atlantico, right? And I was like, oh, so you so you uh so you what do you you you have all the different sections of the griddle and you turn them on different temperatures so that you mimic a planch.
He's like, no, I have it all one temperature and I write all the recipes so that everything cooks at the same temperature, so I don't have to worry about where I put something down on my freaking griddle for it to cook in the exact amount of time I want it to cook. I was like, oh. And at the time, I was like, that's crazy. And then the older I get, the more I'm like, that's so smart. That's so smart.
You know what I mean? That's so smart getting rid of variables. There's no there's no truth to like the heroic person who can has to juggle around. It's like remove variables, man. Anyway, Jose Andres.
Um Lord Nabu was reading in the food lab. Uh uh, stumbled across the claim that binshe potatoes aren't particularly good for making fries. French fries, Belgian frites. Fritz. Uh this surprised me, as is it is, as far as I know, the preferred potato in Belgium for exactly that purpose.
This has led me to a number of possible conclusions, and I would like to hear the opinions on which is possibly correct. One, perhaps there's a difference in North American binshees and European uh ones. Uh two, perhaps the binshe is more suited to Belgian style of cooking fries, uh, because they want the binshe flavor, they adjust their recipes. Or three, Kenji is wrong. Uh okay, well, all of these can be true, first of all, or all of them could be could be false.
Uh it is possible that the binshe are slightly different because uh binshees, my memory serves me. I looked it up more last week. I didn't get to get to this question because we had, you know, had someone on. But uh binshees are relatively early tubers, right? And the longer something leads.
So first, let's just back up for a second. What's what's at issue here? It's the starch content, right? So a potato has a couple of things you gotta worry about. One is the flavor.
Do you like it? Right. And then two is uh what's the starch content of it? And the importance of the starch content is that it is that potatoes are, you know, we consider potatoes mostly to be starch and water, right? So the higher the the gravity, the higher the density of the potato, the specific gravity, the more starch there is, the less water there is.
And at a certain point, right, a potato has so much starch in it that when you cook it, the starch grains swell and shatter the cells of the potato. And that's why that's the difference between fluffy and waxy. So in a fluffy potato, there's so much starch relative to water that when the starch granules puff up, it creates that classic baked potato, right? And for French fries, we typically Americans, that's also what we want in our French fries, that kind of fluffiness. And so, like, you know, you can look at those, and when you do a baked potato, and I hope you all do this, you make the school, you bake the potato, you do the score line down the middle, you put your fingers on both ends and go boop.
And when it comes up and like kind of busts itself open and you see those little grains, that's how you know you've done a good job. Now, uh specific gravity is the density of the potato, which is like I say, a good proxy, right? And you want the you want the starch to be relatively high, a relatively high density for making French fries, because aside from the texture of the starch, it also means that you have to remove less water. Because remember that French fries are a moisture management situation. So in order to have a crispy outside of the French fries, you need to dehydrate that area of the fry enough so that you uh remain crispy even when they're hot and moisture keeps coming out of the middle, right?
That's the whole trick of French fries, which is why you need to do twice fried. And then in America, we typically do a water blanch, maybe we freeze them. All of these are dehydration techniques and cooking techniques to try to get the French fry uh perfect and still crunchy on the outside. The Belgians, by the way, for you know, all for even if you look at the way that I, you know, has said it on the blog or the way most of us do it, it's a very multi, multi, multi-step process because we're not willing to just really control the first fry. The Belgians, who by the way, if you here's what you should do.
You should go to Belgium, right? In if you have questions about the Belgian fries really uh that good, go. You know what I mean? Like you go and you're like, oh yeah, these it's like the average idiot in Belgium at a fry shop does a better job of fries than we do. Period.
You know what I mean? It's same with waffles, you know what I mean? And so it's kind of settles a lot of arguments, and you can ask them, what do you do? And it's better than the ones that we typically do. Now, um so binshees, if you're talking about gravity, are medium high, right?
So they can be on the, they can they're they're medium high. Uh the standard Idaho potato, right, has to have a specific gravity of at least 1.08, right? That's that's that's the kind of magic number where they start to fluff out. Anything below 1.07, so 1.07, it's denser. It's like so water is one, potato 1.07.
So, and you can test this at home if you really give a crap. An 11% brine, 11%. So, like 11, uh 11 grams of water and sorry, 11 grams of salt and 90, no, 11 grams of salt and 89 grams of water, 11% brine. That is 1.08 density. If if a potato floats in that, it's going to be fluffy.
And if a potato, sorry, if a potato sinks in that, it's going to be fluffy. And if it floats in that, it's on the line. Uh I'll give you some other ones. Uh 1.1, which is a dense potato, uh, 13.25% salt, and uh a 1.09, 12.14% salt, and 1070, which is Idaho's minimum for fluffiness, which is kind of where binshies are, right? Is 9.5%.
Here's another thing about potatoes. Dax, I think I said this on the air, has started to prioritize potato flavor over necessarily uh texture. So he wants me to come up with techniques that get the correct texture while maximizing the flavor. And what that means is you don't soak them beforehand. Whenever you soak a potato beforehand, you're reducing the potato flavor if you actually do side by side soaked and not.
So then you need to figure out, okay, does the binshe have too much sugar in it? Because if you look at Belgians, I don't think they're soaking their fries, John. I think they just go bam into the first oil. They cook it for a long, long time at a lower temperature, so longer and lower than we did. So last time when I called you, I did my test at uh 300, I think 260 or 300 Fahrenheit for like 11 minutes.
Nine nine minutes. It's kept them blonde, pulled them out, did the second fry at 365, crisp as hell, no soak, just cut them and immediately took them and put them in the oil. And I think that's probably gonna be the best tasting fry. I I gotta do some more tests, but anyway, so I would uh not argue with the Belgians on what potato to use. And the technique that you use is gonna be all important on exactly what you do.
And there's a billion ways to make a a potato delicious even when it's fried. Something that looks so simple as a French fry, there's a million ways to get to that. So is that covered, smothered? I'd say so. All right.
Covered and smothered. Yeah. Ven Groff writes in Whenever I visit France, I marvel at the quality of chickens for sale at affordable prices in ordinary markets. You go to the uh, you like a you like a French chicken? Yeah.
Good poulet de breast. Oh, I knew you were gonna say have you had the new the American ones that are like breast chickens? I have not. I've heard really good things though. I yeah, I also have heard good things, but never had one.
No, I haven't, yeah. Has anyone here had or no? Uh the flavor and texture are miles ahead of anything we can easily get at home. Well, Vengroff, what do you mean by the texture? Do what how do you like a chicken?
So American chickens are the softest chickens on earth. Like our chickens are salved. You know what I mean? So do you like a chewyer chicken? I I don't know exactly what you're looking for.
I mean, in general, the French have a chewyer chicken, do they not, John? Yeah, they do a little tougher. Yeah. Um flavor and texture are miles ahead of anything we can easily get at home. Uh I think to first order, it's mostly due to fat content and sanely sized breasts that don't dry out if you cook them in the wrong way, but I'm sure there's more to it than that.
Where can I get decent chicken like this in the NYC area without breaking the bank? I don't know, man. People used to, because the problem is that like most chickens they're sold here are still gonna be, you know, six weeks or younger, like very high uh or very low feet, whatever you look at it, feed conversion ratio. So, like they're trying to plump them up as fast as they can on as little food as they if as they can to keep the prices as low as possible. And if you do that, I mean, that's not a recipe to make an intensely flavorful.
It's the same thing with like strawberries when you jack them full of water. When you buy Driscolls that are jacked full of water, they're jacked full of water. You know what I mean? So um, I don't know. I mean, uh, you know what's interesting to try in New York?
Have you guys ever cooked the bantam silkies? No. They're good. They're tough. They're very, very flavorful, but they're tough and bony and expensive.
And people will give you weird looks if you because they they wonder why you're buying them. If you're not buying them for TCM reasons, they're like, why are like, why is why is this white dude coming in and buying this these bantam silkies? And I'm like, well, I want to eat them. And but they are quite flavorful. They're good.
Um I haven't bought both in New York City. There was a place probably still exists called Bobo that had and it had the little markers uh on the Buddhist chicken that you would get the little, it would have the little metal tabs on the wings called Buddhist chicken. They were cut with the heads on, and they were supposedly slightly better. You could probably uh Patrick Martin's over there at Heritage Mead. I haven't spoken to him in years, but I'm sure you can get good chickens from him.
I don't know. Remember those, remember those giant lambs that he had? Wait, oh, because the ones he couldn't get rid of? The giant lamb rack removal pad. Oh my god.
Am I allowed to tell that story? I think so. What chef was it? Do you remember? I Carlo?
I have no idea. Was it Carmelini? Did we ever do anything with him? I don't know. He only tried to choke you out.
Yeah, yeah. So like it was uh so I forget what chef it was, but like we were we were doing this event for Mofad, and you know, they ordered a bunch of rack of lambs from Patrick. And Patrick had gotten the order wrong by like an order of magnitude. He thought that the chef was asking for like all the lamb on the Eastern Seaboard. You know what I mean?
And like, because they asked for like 50 racks or something like that for like 150 people. They asked for like 50 racks, which is reasonable. You know what I mean? Or whatever it was. It was reasonable.
I looked at the numbers, I'm like, that's reasonable. A rack is gonna get, you know, however many little chops, each person's gonna get two for this dish. You know what I mean? It's like totally reasonable. And he was like, he was so like zoned and crazy.
First of all, he goes crazy on the chef. And I can say this because I forget who it was. He's like, they use the cheapest meat, the cheapest meat in their restaurant. They never buy from me in the restaurant, only using the cheapest meat. They want all of my lamb.
And I was like, Patrick, they asked for this number of racks. He's like, and he had the how many pounds was in a rack of lamb off by like a factor of three. I'm like, Patrick, Patrick, he's not asking for that many pounds of freaking lamb, brother. It's only a like, like a rack doesn't weigh that much. It's like you sell these things for a freaking living, man.
Racks weigh nothing. They weigh nothing. Hmm. Uh good times. Uh good times.
Uh all right. Um, uh, okay. So I didn't answer Van Groff's question, but maybe someone can send me or put onto our Patreon McGill good chicken in the New York City area. Good chicken. Does uh does Ed Edwards doesn't do chicken, right?
No. We have to get him on too. Um, I don't know. Like all the good restaurants have their own relationships with the you know, the people who raise the chicken, it seems. I don't know.
Yeah. Xander, when making rapid infusion, how do you test slash adjust flavors for consistency? I found variations in the strength of my coconut vodka infusions, any notes. Time is really important, and also how much liquid you have in the container is important. I highly recommend do it now before they become illegal.
Buy a tank and a regulator so that and uh and an adapter so that you can just do it by pressure alone, and that's gonna take almost all the variables out. Then it's just you gotta get your times right because you're gonna get your pressure the same every single time. That's probably it. Could be the fact that your coconut are changing, but most likely it's it's the uh volume in the in the container is is changing. Tyler got a meat slicer and would like some unholy version of a loaf deli meat, thinking of deboning a chicken and grinding them together, then gluing the ground chicken, wrapping it into a cylindrical shape, and then low-temp cooking it.
Will this work? Should I do something else? Be careful. If you bind meat together that's ground with meat glue in a tube shape uh that's and it's ground and and you salt it, it's gonna get hard as hell. Hard as hell.
So you either need low salt or only a tiny amount of meat group. If you add salt and you do it together, you shouldn't really need meat glue to bind a loaf together if you're gonna cook it. Uh depends. I should say if it's gonna be meatloaf and it's coarsely ground, sure, meat glue it together. But if it's gonna be emulsified like a deli loaf, then just be careful.
Meat glue plus salt equals hard like a ping pong ball. Was that is that okay? All right. Uh let me see. Uh in Salumi by Ruman and Pulson, they claim there's some special effect that happens when you cure Lardo for six months in a marble cast made with marble mined and colonata, and they it's career style.
And they speculate that it's from calcium carbonate in the marble that makes the final lardo creamier or something. They claim the marble specifically has this effect and won't be the same if you cure it in a different container. Could this be true? And can you think of a mechanism? I don't think that's true, but there has been some studies on uh curing in marble, and I think it's mainly the fact that marble is poor, not porous enough that you won't die if you get put yourself in a coffin made of marble.
But it's relatively porous, and they have done tests. They did a test, I looked it up, but it's really dumb. It's because they ran a test on uh curing it not in marble and curing it in marble, but when they did it called it not the style on the marble, they also added the rosemary and all the other stuff that you add to Lardo, and then the one that they dry cured that tasted different when they did GCMS on it, right? Uh had different fatty acid profiles. I don't think they used the rosemary, at least it didn't say so.
So that's also a problem because it has, you know, effects other than uh has curative effects, has preserved effects. So there is a there is a a difference, but I don't think it has anything to do with the calcium carbonate. Um all right, so I'm gonna have to get to uh Lucas's problem on the next uh go-around and also Andrew's non-alcoholic uh liquor question next time around. But next week we have Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt Sardwell from Kitchen Arts and Letters. So please ask us all of your classics in the field questions.
Yeah, cookie issues.
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