Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live from Rockefeller Center, New York City, New State Studios, joined by uh John. How over here? How are you doing, John? Doing great, thanks.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You and you hulin it up strong. You know.
In the big city. Yeah, yeah. Got Joe Hazen rocking the panels. What's up? Hey, hey, hey.
Welcome to the show. Yeah. Uh got over there in Los Angeles, we got some Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. How you doing? I'm good.
Good. Uh got a recovering Jackie Molecules who had a little bit of the sickness. How you doing? Oh yeah. I'm I've been better.
Yeah? Yeah. And in the upper left, we got uh the Quinn. How you doing? You you're feeling better though, right, Quinn or no?
I've been worse. Yeah, I'm better. You know, there is balance in the universe. So well, you're saying that there is some there's some kind of number whereby like that's it. That's all we get.
And then like someone has to feel bad in order for someone else to feel better. Uh evidently. Sweet. Um, so uh what do you guys got? This week it's no tangent Tuesday.
So if you have any questions for us and you happen to be a Patreon member, call in your questions to 917-410-1507. That's 917-410-1507. Uh, and if you want to know why or how to become a Patreon member, and we're gonna answer two that came in off the Discord. So this is not a joke. This actually happens, but uh who we get, John, you gonna take it this time?
Yeah, why not? Uh go check out patreon.com slash cooking issues. There's a bunch of different subscription levels. Uh, you get access to the Discord. You get uh uh, you know, some memberships, access to the live video feed.
Uh you get to listen to the episodes before they get released to everyone else. You get awesome discounts with our great partners like Kitchen Arts and Letters and Glassfin and so many others. Um Grove and Vine. So uh yeah, check it out. Patreon.com slash cooking issues.
All right. Um also um sometimes we release exclusive uh recipes, so sometimes uh Dave's recipes, or uh I've got some uh sorbet uh calculators coming up soon. So yeah, so what do we what do we got this week? Jack, has your sickness prevented you from uh going out and having a uh festive time in this past week? Well, let's see.
Me and Nastasia had a festive time before that. Um we had some bad pasta and pizza. Oh wait, so wait, bad pasta, good pizza? Bad pasta, good pizza? No, neither neither neither one was very good, but it was a it was a great vibe, and we got to see the basement where Mama Cass lived.
Uhang canyon. Mm-hmm. Well, didn't she also for a while live Nastasia in the house that we used to rent? Or did she just go to parties there? I think so.
Yeah, yeah. We used to go to this, um we used to go to this house uh right by like right underneath the Hollywood sign where all you needed to do is jump one fence and then you could walk up and like be at the Hollywood sign, like a small fence. And um, yeah, that like the mamas and papas used to hang out there, a bunch of stuff happened there. Get this. The bathroom had period carpet in it that we're pretty sure is about 50% human products.
We're pretty sure, right, Stas. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I didn't bring slippers with me, uh, because I don't do that. And so, like, uh I I pretty much cut my feet off when I got home and just bought new ones because there's no way you're gonna clean off whatever was on that carpet. It's just like like an like an age of Aquarius freaking bathroom carpet in the Hollywood Hills where all the rockers used to go.
No, thanks. No, thank you. Thank you, No. But the house was nice. We should have murdered the people who lived there and taken that house, right, Stas?
I mean, not to say that we would do that, but we should have done it, right? No. No, come on. You love that house, no? No, I I actually the last night we were there it wasn't great.
Um because of the house or because of the people? I think the people that we had encountered that we brought with us. All right. So uh what was terrible about the pasta? Describe overcooked, undercooked, poorly sauced.
Actually, terrible no terrible might be an overreaction, but it was just, you know, uh you know sometimes when a place is just like the the vibe, it's like this old school kind of great vibe. Um you're not there for the food, put it that way. You know? Hmm. Okay, but like what was the what was the what what was the shape of the pasta?
Let's start there. What was it? Like linguini and clams, right? No, okay. It was linguini and clams.
And the clams came from a can, and so you got bent. Hey, did the shell did they have shells that you had to get rid of right after we had that conversation? No, no, there were shells. Yeah. There were shells.
Yeah. Did you look at the server as you picked up the shells and angrily threw them on your bread plate? No. We were a genius because we got the clam pasta and we got pizza. It was like a flat, thick flatbread, and so we could dip the crust in the clam sauce.
So we made a good choice. Okay. That's true. Okay. You know what my favorite pasta word is?
It just popped into my head. Pre-stranglers. Yes. Oh, yeah. Strozzo pretti.
Priest stranglers. It's like, because it's not actually about it's not comelli? Oh, I thought that was I thought it was Strozopretti, but maybe it's the same. Maybe I think it's Statza Pete. Yeah, but it for those that are worried and that this is a gonna be a violent show.
It's it's it's referring to the the collar, the priest's white collar, not walking up and grabbing a priest by the throat and uh, you know, going on speaking of uh and a Vatican, Pope on the mend I hear, and Dax was just at the Vatican. Dax is Dax is traveling through Europe just at the Vatican, and so he broke his record as soon as he left Paris a couple of years ago, Notre Dame burned down. So he went, the Pope was sick, but he didn't do anything bad to the Pope. So Dax breaks his record of you know, ill ill winds following Dax around. So that's good, right?
Good. Yeah, good, good. Uh what are your feelings? Speaking of clams and pizza, I have very strong feelings, and I'll say right now I'm for very pro clam pizzas. And what is your ideal clam pizza?
Hmm. What's the ideal clam pizza? I don't know. What's yours? I I I can't I can't think of I wouldn't really get a clam pizza.
I mean, I guess like the new like the Connecticut style. But what's that place? The famous Peppies and there's Sally's. So Peppy's is the one for fresh fresh shucked. That's their steak, is the fresh shucked.
But I actually really like Sally's clam pizza. I also used to like Lombardi's clam pizza. Uh they they stopped delivering it, and I don't go there. So I don't know if it's good anymore, but it's kind of hit or miss. But when the when the Lombardi's clam pizza was good, it was really good.
And it used to be they would deliver it, and I would say, hey, can you put bacon on it? And they'd say, sure. And then at a certain point they said, no. And then at a certain point after that, they were like, no, we won't even deliver you the clam pie anymore. And I'm like, what?
What? I was like, maybe they didn't realize this, but I have good technologies to reheat said pizza. I can make that pizza perfect. In fact, no offense to Lombardi's, but by the time it gets to your house, the crust is steamed and it's no longer good. So you need to refresh that thing.
Maybe with uh what's that? What's that thing that turns a blowtorch into a uh into a broiler? I can't remember. I mean for like butane torches and those kinds of things. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Turns it into maybe by the end of the show I'll remember what those things are called. But that thing is good at re crisping the bottom of a pizza crust, I'll tell you what. I will say this. When you are using that device, it's a Sear's all. When you're using that device on the bottom of the pizza, if you let it stay any one point too long, as soon as it starts to brown and go black, it's gonna catch fire.
So just don't like go talking to your buddies while you're doing it because like you'll catch the pizza on fire. It doesn't ruin the pizza, especially not a Lombardi's pizza that's half burnt anyway. So, which by the way, you remember when the pizza guys, when Magoya was on here, and he hated on New Haven style pizza because it had burnt parts. And we all looked at each other like we're like I like that. I like that.
He's like, You like it burnt? I'm like, Yeah. He got he was mad at me though, because everyone was taking him to task for crapping on New Haven pizza unnecessarily, right? As like a traditional style. So I don't think he was happy with me for that.
Whatever. What are you gonna do? Whatever, exactly. What do you gonna do? What are you gonna do?
Uh yeah, so anyway, so that's my I love a c I love a clam pizza. If I had a lot of money, going back to what we were talking to uh a couple episodes ago, not the ice cream episode, because I think clam ice cream would be gross. I don't want clam ice cream. It would be nasty. But I would love to make it work.
Please don't. Uh onion ice cream, good because you cook the onions long enough for uh the heavy onion to go away and it just has like a light sulfur left over, kind of like a non-stinky durian kind of a situation. Like are we talking like Vidalia onion or red onion? It uh you know what? After you pressure cook it, it doesn't really matter because all the sharpness is blasted out.
We didn't use reds because they look nasty. I love onions I love onions. So, like I mean, like I'm just interested to see if there was any kind of well, you pressure cook them in milk, and then you puree it after you pressure cook it for like you could pressure cook it for like 20 minutes. They come out and they're fairly neutral. And then uh you blend those in.
We we just blended them into an on glazed base uh with a little I forget whether we added any more sugar to it or not. I think we just blend it into an on glazed base, like a rich no, there's there is brown, there's brown sugar in the pressure cooking. In my recipe, yeah. Oh, maybe. It's been many years since I've made it, but uh I I made it a few years ago.
Okay. I mean, I believe it. If that's what it was, I mean, Nils and I used to make it slightly differently, so I don't know which recipe we published, Nils or mine. But our on glaze base is relatively rich. It's like 50-50 milk and cream, and I believe it's I believe it's per liter of liquid, so 500 and 500, I think.
It's 10 eggs, 10 egg yolks. So pretty rich. I think 250 sugar. I don't remember. It's been a long time.
I'm doing it all from memory, but I do remember this. If you vacuum bag your creme anglaise mix, it tastes a lot better than if you just ziplock it. If you're going to do low temperature cooking, for some reason, if you just ziplock it and drop it in the low temp, and the way the best way to do it is to set your circulator at 85, drop it in Celsius, drop it in, and then turn it it'll automatically drop down to 82, and then put it at, I forget whether it's 82 or 83 and let it ride there for like 15 15 minutes, I think is the answer. You can let it ride longer and it'll get thicker, and you you just have to have it enough to kind of pasteurize it and then you know kind of functionalize it and thicken it. The trick is after you pull it out, is you put it on the table and whack, whack, whack, whack, whack it, whack, whack, whack, whack.
Because if you don't, it gets clumpy. That was something that was discovered many, many years ago by the Rokas when uh probably Jordy Roca was doing his first kind of low temperature sous vide um anglaise mixes in like 2000, you know, or 2001. And I tested and and they hang straight, they're they're right on that, got to whack it around. But when we tested Ziploc versus vacuum bag, there was a bit more of and it won't matter if you're doing onion ice cream, funnily enough, but there's a bit more of a sulfur note in uh an anglaise when it's cooked not in a vacuum bag low temp. I mean, that crap flashes off when you're cooking in a uh on a on a stovetop.
Although, again, randomly, there were chefs, um uh Sam Mason comes to mind, who whose ice creams are terrific, you know what I mean, who don't like to cook their egg bases because they they don't like the flavor of cooked egg, even when they are using eggs for their emulsification and functional properties. So they don't they don't cook them, or if they do, they cook them at a very low temp just to pasteurize them, but they don't want that cooked egg aroma. As opposed to Heston Blumenthal, who overcooked his eggs and makes scrambled eggs uh ice cream and sold it for a lot of money and got a lot of press. I made scrambled egg ice cream by mistake once and I threw it out because that was gross. It was gross.
The first time anyone makes a large amount, well, if you've ever made a tried to make a large amount of creme anglaise and you're a home cook, and you are like, Oh, I'm doing it on a pot, and you have a little saucepan and you're like, Well, I I'm good at this. And then you're like, I'm gonna make a s I'm gonna make a giant stock pot's worth because I have a whole bunch of people coming over and I found a soft syrup machine on the street and I need five gallons of ice cream base for this party I'm throwing. Well, as soon as, you know, if you're not skilled and you haven't done it before, you know, scaling up from a small sauce pot of creme anglaise to a giant, giant stock pot of creme anglaise is a recipe for making Heston Blumenthal's uh scrambled egg ice cream. And it damn the fact that I was like watching that thing and not stirring it enough and had too much heat, and then I just saw the curds goo and like float up to the top, and I was like, I could still fix it. I'm skimming the curds off the top of this busted, busted anglaise.
It's just a nightmare. And I tried to spin it anyway. God was it terrible. Not only that, one of the freezers was broken and I hadn't fixed it yet, so I tried to chill it with uh dry ice, and so it was also vaguely carbonated, so it was vaguely carbonated like uh like scrambled egg saucer. It was a nightmare, it was abysmal.
But for years afterwards, because I used to make Zabayon all the time. I love making a Zabayon, you know, eggs, like uh acidic uh white white wine, um, but sugar, blah blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but you whisk it together, it gets nice, thick and foamy, you know what I mean? And then uh, you know, you pour like a marsala or something, you pour it over uh um anything really, but you thicken it. And for years afterwards, I wouldn't heat the Zabayons enough, and they would come off fluffy and die instantly. You know what I mean?
For years after I messed up that on glaze base. Took me years to get back to where my Zabayon once belonged, so be wary. Um we get into that. On your ice cream? Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. No tangents today. No tangents. No tangent Tuesdays on cooking issues. Oh man.
Uh you know, I can't wait. Like, Stas, in like a year, we'll probably just be able to like have bots come on in our place. For all I know, Nastasi's already done that. For all I know, I'm speaking to a fake Nastasia right now. And you know, I hope for her sake that the real Nastasia is like somewhere like having some nice procedure done that she wants to have done, some sort of like self-care procedure that she enjoys.
Anyway, um what I tried? What? I answered like a bot to someone on a dating app. Did you get a date? No.
I mean they asked for a date, but I was like, this is disgusting that they think that this is me. Well, they don't know you though. They don't know you though, right? But you and just in general. Well, the me, the memey started off, and then it didn't, it wasn't going so well.
So then I was like, I'm gonna I'm gonna try this bot thing. Did you tell the bot what the story was? Did you say hey bot? I was the bot. I was I was the bot.
I was answering like a bot. You know, I don't say L O Like L. Oh, so you weren't you didn't actually sick a bot on the person. I became I became a bot. I see, I see.
You treated yourself like in the same way that like when I'm in an uncomfortable situation, I try to pretend I'm dead. You tried to pretend that you were a bot. Yeah. Okay. Yes.
Well, it worked. So he liked the bot better than you. Yes. What's up, big boy? Like that kind of stuff.
Like just like the being interested in the use the use of LOL. Literally, the use of LOL is like makes people feel so much better about themselves, and I find it disgusting. What are you wearing? LOL, send me a pick. Wow.
What a line to draw. Yeah. I'm just trying to imagine Stas going like Uber bot. Or like, or like because the thing is, let's not forget that Nastasia the hammer Lopez was a poetry major. So she could do different levels of bot.
All right. I'm just being being real here. So she could be like, am I gonna be like a like a good bot? Like Chat GPT four or like three? You know what I mean?
Like, where am I gonna draw the line? Am I like, you know, a scammer bot? Like what what am I? So, you know, anyway. Um sad.
So, but the ch the thing is is that it's good to know if they respond to something that you hate, that's good to know. Cause then, you know, swipe left. Yeah. Yeah. What about something where it initiates reac like like interactions in a way that you hate, and then when they swipe left, you're like, no, no, no, I was just kidding.
That was a bot to see whether you liked BS. You know what I mean? Like, was that possible to code, you think? Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Like that.
You know what I mean? I don't know. Weed out. I was just disgusted person really liked the the bought me more than the beginning me you know yeah I mean you know although word to the wise if somebody changes their personality drastically that is a there's something's gonna happen you know what I mean anyway uh it's weird that they would be like whoa finally she sounds like a lady I can date you know what I mean Dave I think you should be a nastasia dating coach uh that'd be a terrible idea like I had exactly one success in my dating career and I'm married to her right everything else nightmare so um uh yeah yeah uh all right uh any uh any other food what do you got Queen I know Quinn's got some food garbs what do you got yeah I made um we did a rabbit Japanese curry so we butchered a rabbit brazed the legs and rabbit stock added some you know standard vegetables the pre-made Japanese curry which one is that is block which which one's the which flavor is is quote unquote Japanese because they make a bunch of Japan makes a bunch of curry blocks like which one which flavor was it wasn't Vermont curry was it I hate Vermont curry um no offense people who love Vermont curry it was the um I just don't like it yeah I also don't like curry verse the golden curry okay the golden curry brand all right yeah. Familiar.
Medium or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. And then a little extra uh allspice. You know, some ginger, some onion, you know.
So if you pretty normal stuff. If you had rabbit stock, that means somebody, some poor sorry sap had to bone that freaking rabbit out. Who was it? Well, so here's what we did. We had the whole rabbit, we took the legs off, put them aside, we took the loin off of the main body, and then we had sort of the spine and the rib cage, and then we just roasted off those bones and made like a very, very, very basic stock.
Uh was what's the name of that Glenn Close movie where she boils the rabbit? Where like she's a she's a psycho and she takes the family rabbit and sticks it in a soup pot. No one any of you saw this movie? Very famous movie. It's like uh penetle attraction.
There you go. Ding ding. Is it yeah, right? I think that's it. And uh so did you also put the head in the pot?
Was it a little bit of a rabbit rabbit head stew? Or did they not give you the? Uh yeah. Uh now on the loin, did you leave the bones on the loin or no? No, we basically took the the loin off of the back and then sliced it.
And then that we became uh little katsu, little cutlets. It was really good. I bet you get like one tenth of one ounce of rabbit per rabbit. I mean, it's just such a n boning rabbits is such a nightmare. Such a f such a freaking nightmare.
Now, how was the loin how'd you say you'd cook the loin again? Again, the loin we took it off the carcass. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cut each loin into like two or three pieces, and then pounded it out to like before. Oh, cut it.
And then bread it in bread. Oh, that sounds good. Yeah. Hey, Stas, how how dry you think your mom could make a rabbit loin? I don't know, Dave.
I don't know. I don't know. Because like I'm trying to think of a meat that dries out faster than rabbit. The cutlet is actually I think a good call in this case. I think cutlet is a good call.
Because you can flash cook it, right? Wait, did you say you did you fr you panned it like like just floured, like a salting bulk or like a schnitzel with full-on egg and breakfast? No, no, no, no. Like a like a like a three-stage uh breading on the cutlet. Thank you.
Because again, we're going for like Japanese cuts of curry, right? So the legs are in the stew and then the cutlet is the loin. Yeah. Yeah. Well.
Poor little bunny. I don't mind like I think it's weird when people don't eat animals because they're cute. You know what I mean? It's like, like, why why is it more why is it morally not that you've believed, not that any of us believe this, but why is it morally better to eat animals that are ugly? Doesn't make sense.
Doesn't make sense. Plus all animals are cute, almost. Almost all animals are cute. And if we're going for animals that like we like not to eat, then why don't we eat pandas? Is it because they're endangered?
Nobody likes pandas, right? Pandas are nightmares. Wait, who why do you think it's a good one? No one likes pandas. I mean people's things on earth.
They're the worst. They're the worst. Pandas are the worst. Like I like I can't figure out like which animals you'd rather, less rather have. If they were people, what animal would be worse to have at dinner?
A panda, a goose, or a sloth? A goose. Yeah, the goose terrible. You're right. Goose, right?
Yeah, yeah. Sloth will bore you to death. The panda will be there murdering its children. And then they, you know, the goose will be murdering everybody, and the sloth just won't do anything, won't help with the dishes, won't do squat, have crap growing out of its fur while it's sitting at your table. It's like when someone comes to your house and like they're they anyway, whatever.
Uh here's for you, Quinn. J. Ray Ray writes in, hey Quinn, we've been loving your chocolate gelato generator, uh, especially as we can adjust it for single origin chocolate we use in our very small restaurant on a tiny island in Denmark. By the way, Dax is going to Denmark for school. So if anyone has any fall time recommendations in Copenhagen, he's gonna be there.
Uh we currently also use the creamy. Creamy, but we have a larger catering uh thing coming up for 55 folks, and we would have access to a commercial/slash industrial ice cream machine. Yeah, but you know what, J. Ray Ray, do you when you say commercial industrial, do you mean like the whatever the modern equivalent of an LB100 is, like a couple of quarts, or do you mean like you know what I mean? Because there's like a huge difference between those two things.
Anyway, uh, we would have access to a commercial ice cream machine, uh, but could this recipe translate with such a machine? If we produce the gelato a few days beforehand, we won't be able to spin it, probably meaning that the resulting gelato will be rock hard when we want to serve it. What kind of tweaks could we integrate to make sure it is servable and not immediately meltable gelato? Wait, so Quinn, before you get to this, I'm trying to understand. So he wants to spin it in a regular machine, right?
So I think he wants to use your creamy recipe, but then he's gonna put it in a regular freezer prior to service, so he's wondering whether it should be at that. Listen, whatever Quinn says, J, I'll tell you this run a freaking test. Run a freaking test beforehand. Make the make the thing however you're gonna make it. It won't matter how you make it if you do the test of how service is gonna work.
No matter what you're gonna do, don't do it for 55 people first. Anyway, all right, Quinn, go. Well, my recommendation was because the calculator can you can set the service temperature anywhere between uh negative eleven and negative twenty. So depending on what your setup actually is, you could just cheat and make the regular sort of tempered service recipe, but instead of worrying about physically scooping it for service, you could put the gelato into some sort of either circling mold or your actual serving dish and just have it portioned in the freezer. Um this leads me to think about so last week we had uh Douglas Goff, world famous ice cream scientist on.
And by the way, here's another Patreon benefit. So we weren't able to get to all of mathman's questions, and so we had Professor Goff answer them off air and put them uh and Quinn posted them to the uh Patreon. So it's another advantage, like you know, where else are you gonna get someone like Douglas Goff answering your ice cream questions in a personal way without even my loony intervention in between? So he just answered it directly, right? Uh uh, but what the thing that I'm really interested in that no one's been able to run down, and I wonder whether we could get somebody at the University of Guelph for something because they have we spoke a little bit about it last week, but melt melt speeds.
So have you ever weird discs, the you need the hockey puck and you need the disc and you need the chamber to test it. Tested the melt rate of uh tempered ice cream versus from the freezer, like ice cream that's tempered from the freezer, quin style. Uh directly. Yeah, because for a catering event, melt rate is really important because you have to portion it, and then the service captain is gonna look at you like with a weird stink eye, and then you have to like, you know, and then it's not ready to go out, and they're sitting on the pass too long, and then the chef starts screaming, and then something else happens, and then somebody gets up to have a smoke break or terrible things happen, and then like all of a sudden the stuff's sitting out for a while. So it would be good to know if there is a melt rate difference.
This is like a test that I wish I'm not gonna run it because I don't even have ice cream machines anymore that are instantly available to me. Uh but I think it would be an interesting test uh to run. Like tempered ice cream. Obviously. Yeah.
I mean, uh you're assuming the same formulation or different formulation. No, I'm assuming you're gonna serve somebody tempered ice cream, right? There's quin style ice cream that's tempered at minus 20 or 18 or whatever your actual number is. Don't get that, it's not quibble about the actual number. And there's ones that are there's ones that are meant to come out of a dipping cabinet, which are a good like eight, nine degrees look warmer, right?
So then they like, and you know, one of them's gonna be rock hard in a freezer, and one of them's gonna be scoopable out of the freezer. The question is, is scoopable out of the freezer one melt any faster if you have to service it and send it out? Like what is the time, what is the sit time you get once it's out of the freezer? Advantage is well anecdotally, I would say it does. Does what?
Affect it. Yeah, I mean, but it'd be good to know it melt a little faster. It would just be good to know. Because like then you could tell people instantly being like, what what is your situation? Now, an advantage you w one of the disadvantages of having something come directly out of the freezer is if something comes directly out of the freezer, a plate, let's say, it gets instant condensation on.
Everybody hates when someone served a dessert that's clearly been stored in a freezer. You're like, what are you, a joker? You couldn't plate this thing fresh? Why is my plate have like this freaking condensation all around it? We all know what I'm talking about, right?
So like if it's gonna come out of the freezer and be that's the one advantage sometimes in doing mass platings and things that are tempered. You can get cool plates, right? Like, you know, but not ones that are gonna get huge amounts of condensation on them. And then you temper it up and they go out as you do them, right? Whereas there's a certain awesomeness to be having a freezer there, but then you still have to then take it out of the freezer and pop it on the plate so that the plate is not itself a nightmare of condensation.
And in a catering event, very few people and very few applications, do you have enough freezer space to have fully plated a frozen McGilla for all those people and then and then pull it out? So it would just be an interesting thing to know from uh workflow standpoint, like what the melt rate is compared, like a uh a tempered norm tempered normally or a quin tempered, you know what I mean? I mean, they could definitely make a little batch of each, like even like a 500 gram batch of each, and they could run that test. Yeah. If only I was thinking about it.
If only somebody at Booker and Dax liked to make ice cream all the time, they could run this test. Hey, Styles, do you know anyone like that? Yeah, yeah, I'll I'll I will run the test as well. All right. Uh all right.
Um how do you Kjadlin? Kajadlin? Kajadlin. What do you think, Quinn? Ke Kajadlin.
Yeah. Kajadlin. All right. Yeah, I uh yeah. Cajadlin.
Uh a friend asked this question. I swear it's been covered on the show before, but I'm having no luck searching the transcripts. Uh anything would be appreciated. Uh I wonder if anyone's done the experiment of compar of comparing bread made with Stas, you're gonna hate this question so much. Most of the questions.
So anyway. Uh I wonder if anyone's done the experiment of comparing bread made with soft flour. So by soft flour I mean soft wheat flour, low protein flour, uh, to bread made with strong flour and seeing whether you can tell the difference. All right. I'm gonna try.
Goodbye, everybody. Goodbye, everybody. So rough, man. Stas is so rough, man. It's like, you know, what am I supposed to do?
What? Soft flour plus extra gluten versus high protein flour. Oh, right, right. In other words, like, can you mix I think it's like can you mimic a high protein flour by taking a soft flour and adding uh gluten to it? Well, um, yes and no.
So people who, like, for instance, let's say you're English. I don't know, maybe you are English for all I know. In England, most of the flowers, the AP flowers, are made by milling local grains which are softer and adding a bunch of very hard um spring wheat from like North Dakota and Manitoba to uh to it to strengthen the heck out of it, right? And so that that is possible, but like most of the flowers that we get, whether it's soft, like white lily or you know, uh, or whatever your cake flour is, or ones that are hard are refined, meaning, no offense to them, they're relatively flavorless. If you're milling your own wheat, there's a huge taste difference between softer wheats and harder wheats, just in the way that they way that they taste.
So we're gonna subtract that and just talk about kind of functionality. The main, there's a couple of main differences. Also, like most soft flour, a lot of soft flours that you buy have been uh chlorinated, and uh that increases their water holding capacity and makes them really good for cakes, right? So let's subtract that out. And you're just saying that you have like a biscuit flour that has been not, you know, chlorinated, not bleached that way, and you're like, can I strengthen it?
Again, you can make it a lot stronger by adding gluten to it, but what you're not gonna be able to do is um damage the starch. So soft flour is one of the things that is kind of cool about them is because the wheat, the way it breaks up, uh is soft enough that it doesn't break the starch granules and damage them, is is that in general it takes a very small amount of water to hydrate uh a uh a soft flour. Whereas a hard flour, protein wants to absorb a lot of water, so you have to add more water to it. And also broken starch absorbs a lot more water than uh than you know, intact starch does. So those two things change the water binding of the flower.
So you can't directly mimic it just by adding protein in, uh you know, gluten protein. You have to also add in kind of broken starch, and at that point, what's the point? But you can make it stronger. So if you have a flower you love and you want to, you know, gluten it up, go ahead. You know what I mean?
Did I answer the question without taking the whole show? Think so. Yeah, all right. Yeah. Sea stuff, did she actually leave?
That would be hilarious. Um I'm here. What it w like you know what the problem is though, is that like phones now. When I was a kid, the one of the awesome things about phones was when you were mad and you slammed the receiver, people could hear it. Oh yeah.
You know what I mean? Yeah. It was like, people were like, oh man. Damn. She's bent.
You know what I mean? Someone should develop AI generated phone slam sound. So it sounds slams down. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, you know, like mic drop a phone slam.
Yeah. Crash. Yeah. Great. Because remember, remember, well, for those of us that are old enough, is like, first of all, when you were trying to listen in on people's conversations, you would because people don't realize this, but everyone's phone was connected to the same physical wire.
So like five people could pick up the phone without being on a conference call, and you'd all be talking on the same line. So what you but as soon as someone picked up a line, you hear, right? And so you'd know something you're like, who's listening? Who's on my phone? Right.
So you'd slip your finger under the receiver, and then you'd lift the receiver up to your ear, and then you slowly lift your finger up so you can hear what they're saying. And then when you were done, you'd be like, you slowly push it back down and put the receiver back down, then move your finger away. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Good old days. Good old days. Uh I mean, not that they were good. They were old though. They were.
Yeah. Isaac writes in, uh, here's another one, Styles that you're gonna love. Uh, I didn't quite understand the way it came through, so I mentally autocorrected it, Isaac, see whether I got the your the gist right. Does nixtamalizing uh well let me see? Does nixtimalizing have a final lasting impact on crispness after frying?
Okay, so so okay, so first of all, I'm gonna start. There's alkali treatments, right, with cowl, and then there's nixtimalizing with which only works with grains. So I think Isaac's is interesting, Isaac's interested in using calcium hydroxide or slake lime or cowl or whatever you want to call, which is what they use to turn corn into masa for tortillas. And before I get further, I'm sure most of you already know this because we've done shows on it and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But uh there's a couple of things that happen.
You pre-gelatinize, because you're cook, you're not only adding this alkaline stuff to it, right? So you're pre-gelatinizing, you're adding calcium to it, which has an effect, and you're alkalizing it, meaning it's become more alkaline. So all of those things, that's the smell, right? All that, all of those things go into making uh a masa. And then you, you know, the the cow helps dissolve the outside of the seed coat, so part of that's wiped off, and how much you wipe off makes a different niximalization, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But uh, alkaline things also, uh, the calcium also strengthens cell walls. So it means that if you cook something in uh in alkaline water, uh it uh wait, opposite, destroys cell walls. So if you add, if you add um if you add alkalinity to uh like vegetables like baking soda to vegetables or to beans, they get soft fast, right? Uh and because they're alkaline, they also I think tend to stay greener as opposed to acids, which tend to kind of make the chlorophyll and things go go crappy, right? Cal is interesting because even though it's alkaline, so it makes things cook faster, the calcium cross-links it so that the pectin doesn't break down even a higher temperature.
So you can have things that stay crisp but are alkaline, right? So it's like they stay green, but they're also crunchy. So we used to use it uh cow for uh crosslinking bananas. So we would cross-link bananas, it's a t old tie trick, and then you can cook the hell out of the bananas without them breaking apart, even though they're ripe, right? And you can do the same thing by pre-treating with cow, especially you can pre-treat with cow, and then you can leave, you can adjust the alkalinity so that they're no longer alkaline if you want.
But anyways, there's two different things going on here, right? Niximalization or using calcium and or using alkalinity to shift something in cooking, right? Okay. Um, for example, if I were to treat cabbage leaves with quick lime before frying, would they fry crisper or stay crispy longer? So if you treat it with cowl beforehand and then keep it and then kind of don't have it be too basic, you'll cross-link the calcium, and the leaf itself will have less tendency to wilt than it would if you hadn't treated it, right?
Will the coating you put on it stay crisper? I don't know. I mean, like people, in general, what's happening when you're doing, and then you say, um, I've done some experiments using slake lime in liquids as a liquid replacement in batters and have yielded very crisp product, but I'm not 100% um on the source. When you're using an alkaline product in a in any time you're shifting something alkaline and you're deep frying it, you're going to increase the browning rate dramatically, dramatically. And then also, if there's acids in there, you're gonna have an acid base reaction, which will create leavening, right?
So when people put baking sodas in, they're a shifting something more alkaline, soda. They're shifting it more alkaline, which is gonna make it brown faster, but also that stuff will decompose even not in the presence of an acid in frying and create leavening, bomb, burst out and make a little bit crisper product that way. I don't know what's gonna happen in in an actual nicked malized product is you've drastically increased the water holding capacity. So if you wanted a high amount of water in there, which means you have to fry it longer to get all of the water out, but then you have a very, very porous product that can be very crunchy. So a lot of people who like a masa batter, they want a thicker batter that's like cooked like like way through that is like like crunchy, but also gonna absorb a lot of oil.
You can't ever win. That's my guess. My guess. But you you tell me exactly what you mean, Isaac, and I can answer more. At Huhe's end, I'm going to attempt bagels and all the good recipes I've found recommend just baking soda uh or malt syrup.
It's not necessarily an orb, you could do both. Do both baking soda, I use baking soda and malt, or baking soda and honey. You need a reducing sugar. The point is putting a reducing sugar into the boiling water. Uh I wasn't sure uh if that was a liability thing or why they, or if they're just worried about getting sued, if they misuse lye, or if these other meth methods are preferable.
The internet seems extremely mixed, so I don't know what to think. But of course, ideally like the method of the great bagel places in New York. You just want the bake the water to be slightly alkaline. And again, it's a browning thing. So in in pretzels, when you're when you're doing a lie dip in pretzels, it's to get that soapy lye flavor that indicates pretzel, right?
So if next time you put a real honest to God pretzel in your mouth, not a BS pretzel, think about soap. Like not in a bad way. I mean, like I love that flavor, but think about soap, right? Because it's got like an actual alkaline flavor to it. Bagels, unless someone's making a pretzel bagel.
Pretzel bagels could be good, right? But unless someone's making a pretzel bagel, then it's not going to have that alkaline note. So they're not looking to make it excessively alkaline. They just want to shift the water into the alkaline side such that you get good browning on the bagel in not too long a period of time. The malt, right, and or the honey, which is why you knew reducing sugar there, not like regular sucrose, is also there to add instant kind of browning impact on it, right?
So the combination of an alkaline environment and a reducing sugar means it gets briddy bridity bridity brown, right? But not pretzel brown, right? So I I would say that it's not just a uh, I would say it's much easier to use baking soda. I wouldn't, I wouldn't bother trying to go get live for that. Uh Calvin H, uh, I have been enamored by the spirit Batavia Arach, the Van Oesten brand, which is brought to you by House Alpens, by the way, the good folks at House Alpens, for use in my tiki drinks in the past couple of years.
I noticed that the mash bill calls for Java Red Rice, and from some cursory research, Java red rice seems to be a variant of Chinese red yeast rice, a koji cousin. How close are these ferments in flavorslash enzyme? I can't find action, I can't find much info on it. Um are there any other interesting liquors that make use of Koji cousins cousins outside of Japan, Korea, and China. Well, I don't know the answer to that last question.
The next time we get rich on, we can ask. Okay. What do you got? Well, let me answer the question on this first. Because I spoke to I spoke to Josh Holly at House Alpens, and he believes, although it could be wrong, that they are using a fermented rice in a ball format, right?
So he says, it sounds um, he says, I've heard recently from Eric, Eric Seed is the you know, the owner of uh House Alpens. Um he believes that they actually are using a red rice. There is a Javanese like Javanese red rice. So he believes that it's starting with the red rice, not there the the red yeast rice is a particular mold strain that produces a a purplish bloom on the outside of rice. And the Chinese red yeast rice is not, does not start life as red.
Whereas like the Javanese is just an like an unmilled uh like rice whose the hull of it is red. Okay. And that that's he believes what they use, but I haven't been able to speak to Eric directly yet. Um what I've heard recently from Eric is that the red rice component really starts the whole thing off, uh, just like you would in a rice wine, uh, like a coo or a jiku, but not it's not a solid state, it's a starter ball of yeast. So it's like one of those balls, like you can buy those like kind of kind of like yeast balls that are really yeast and bacteria.
Uh, the rest of the way is sugar cane molasses. Sounds like they don't use a lot of copper in their stills, so there's some wilder aromatics that are partly due to the starter and partly due to the still. Alright, what what were you gonna say, Quinn? Well, just the final point of the question about interesting liquors. Um of the talks at KojiCon is actually about Indian mixed grain liquors.
So there is actually a whole tradition in a very specific region of India of, you know, mixed fungal bacterial yeast, started um, you know, grain wines that um you know hasn't been really exported at all. So just if they're interested in other koji, you know, um adjacent products that's and you can afford to fly there. Well, it's like it's sort of research. So they they're they're made with again a similar sort of uh ball or disc uh starter, where it's a mix of um of cultures of microbes. Do you remember the name?
Do you write it down? Uh no, I forget. All right. Um but they can uh Google Cobo ferments. They're an Indian-based Koji and other uh fermentation company.
And they gave the talk. Are they are they like extremely northern or are they southern? I wanna say this was like Eastern India? I forget. Well, maybe someone will chime in.
Dr. Smokehouse says, uh, I make and cold smoke my own hams. And what is your take uh on the best temperature to cook a RE cured ham? Currently, I favor lower temperature cooking. I currently also do not have a steam oven, but I'm considering one, and so would like your take on that.
Well, my take on that is if you're curing your own hams, get you a steam oven, right? Now I haven't used uh the new, you know, again, if they want to send us one to test, I will. I've used the old um ANOVA uh steam oven, which is the by far the cheapest uh steam oven that you can get. It's a real steam oven. And something like it's it's for certain kinds of things that you would want to use a combi oven for.
So in a in a restaurant, everyone loves the combi because it's just a freaking monster. It can go from steaming to roasting like that because it's got it's basically burning enough power to to like electrify a whole town. You know what I mean? It's just like an absurd amount of power going into it. You know what I mean?
It's like a race car uh with a price tag to boot. Whereas the APO is the exact opposite of that. It's it's taking one weenie little, you know, 15 amp, or you know, I think it's I don't even think it's dedicated 20, 15 amp, like you know, 125 vol or 15, depending on how you think of it. American convenience socket outlet, the bane of my existence, right? And it's trying to power a relatively large box where it's boiling liquids, which is a really energy intensive product process.
So it's viciously underpowered. But if you take into account the fact that you know it's viciously underpowered and you're gonna be doing things for a long time, it's really great at certain things, like reheating and like hams, which is basically just a reheating problem. Um you're not looking to cook it, right? You've already smoked, it's already cured. You're not looking to cook it.
You just want to bring it up to a gentle temperature. I keep it typically below 140 or you know, uh 60, below 60 uh Celsius. So I like to do like 135 in that range, 100% steam, right? And then keep it in a wrap, because I don't want, I don't want to steam. Oh, in these steam ovens, a lot of times there's a lot of transfer in between the steaming condensing all the time and running off onto the bottom and the product.
You don't want that. So the last time I cooked a ham, I like literally left it in the foil it came in. You know what I mean? Uh, you don't need a huge barrier, but you need some barrier to, you know, just to washing away uh, you know, the outside of the ham over time. And just let it ride for hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours.
It's a long time, basically infinity. You know what I mean? Just wait for it because it's gonna take a long time for the ham to heat up. And then if you want to, again, if I can remember the name of that thing that you can use to turn a uh a blowtorch into a into a broiler, or you could just throw it into a super hot, you know, oven and and crisp it off. Now, what the old timers used to do is they would use a five gallon lard can.
So back in the days when people used to buy uh lard by the five gallon can, you would get a five gallon lard can and you'd uh fill it up and you would put the you would put the ham into the lard can and then you would put the lard, you put water in it or whatever you want. You pre-soak it sometimes first, depending on whether you're a country ham. If you're a country ham, you're pre-soaking it a little bit first. You put it in with water and whatever other aromatics you want, right? So here you're not trying to prevent kind of crosstalk from the ham and the liquid, right?
And then you fill it and you bring it up to the to the boil, you put the lid on the can, and then you wrap that sucker up and you just let it ride for a long time in the lard can. And then by the time it has kind of cooled off, it's been cooling off as it's cooking through to the center of the lard can and you got yourself uh oh. So you could do that like in an igloo, right? I don't think you need to go all the way up to boiling. Um I could do the math eventually.
Huh. I could do the math. I could do the math. Because uh what you need to do is you need to figure out the the uh load in your igloo and then figure out your drop rate in the igloo, which I used to have calculated back when I used to think this was interesting. Back when it used to be that, oh, maybe not everyone could afford a circulator back when they were really expensive.
This is the kind of thing people used to do. They would buy five-gallon igloo coolers and calculate how long the the temperature drop would be. Uh, but I I haven't done it in a while, but uh that would I guess also work and be relatively old school. Uh all right, what else? What what what do we got on the uh we got two questions on one for John and one for from Quinn on the Discord, right?
So somebody went to Dietrich's and got a Lebanon bologna. Yeah, you know. Um and they're not gonna tuck into it just yet. So what's the best way to store it? First of all, Dietrich, go to Dietrich's in Pennsylvania.
It's not from Lebanon the country and doesn't taste like Oscarmeyer bologna, right? Not it's not even related to Oscarmeyer bologna. First of all, we've spoken about in the era, but look up Lebanon Bologna. It is hard as hell and sour as hell and smoky as hell. It's those three things as hell.
So what you do is you buy it and you slice it and just have a good mustard. Maybe they could get a mustard maybe from Ghent. Maybe. Maybe from Ghent. Maybe.
Yeah. Like a crusty bread. You know what else that Gentis must mustard is so good on? Liverwurst. Yeah.
Liverwurst and onions. I know it's sound, I know like it's so good. Yeah. If you don't like to say the word liverwurst, maybe you could get something similar, like brown schweiger. Does that sound better?
Sure. Yeah. But I'm going in two weeks, I'll bring you back in jar. Oh, really? Mm-hmm.
Nice. Uh, anyways. Uh the question is how to store them, because if you do go to Dietrich's, they have a vacuum packer there. So, and they don't understand that you don't want your whole house to smell like meat. I literally, I think it had to say this on air.
I said, So I went to go buy John something. I was going to a wedding, and they're like, they vacuum packed John's, because he got what's called ring bologna, which is a little bit softer, and it's like almost looks like a kielbasa. It's yeah, yeah, but it's thinner. Again, not no relation to baloney. And uh they're like, I was like, listen, I'm going to this hotel, I'm not sure if I'm gonna have refrigeration.
I didn't have I did end up having refrigeration. They're like, well, it'll keep if we vacuum pack it. That's a dollar extra. I'm like, a dollar extra. I was like, then vacuum pack my Lebanon and baloney, too.
They're like, why? That doesn't need to be vacuum packed. I was like, because my family doesn't want my whole car smelling like smoked meat for the next, you know, three days. And they're like, why not? I was like, hey, listen, this is not an argument I want to have with you folks right now.
You know what I mean? So they vacuum packed it for like a dollar uh a bag, which by the way, well worth it. Yeah. Well worth it. But it's also something that you can do when you get it home.
Vacuum pack it, uh, vacuum pack it, and you know, it can stay in your fridge and it won't, as long as it's a decent vacuum bag, even food savers, which is I think what they were using. It's a it's a it won't, you know, over smoke everything in your in your fridge. You can freeze it. I don't think it's I don't think it has enough liquids. I don't think it's gonna oxidized or go rancid in your freezer.
I've never tested it. But I've kept them in my fridge in a vacuum bag for a long time, months, and I've been fine. Uh also, please, please. D-Trix, when they do these, when they do these things, they they smoke them in a sock. You know, not a foot sock, but like a cloth sock.
Like a handbag, really, but you know what I mean? Like like a thin cotton muslin that is no longer recognizably cotton because of the smoke that's happened to it. Take off the sock, right? Cut a little bit off, remove the the sock before because like when you slice it with the sock on, which you can do, right? Little fibers are gonna get stuck to the edge of the baloney, and then you're serving someone this slice, and you have to make sure there's no no little fibers on it.
And the older I get, the harder it is for me to see these little fibers. Whereas if you just rip the sock off, you're good to go. You've all have you had the sock problem? Yeah, yeah. No, I know what you're talking about.
Yeah, yeah. They have the sock on theirs, so yeah. Yeah. Suck. Sock on.
No, that's like a future song. Sock on, sock off. Anyway, uh, we have another question in on the uh Patreon. What do you got? Yeah, from the Patreon on Discord.
Uh I'm gonna paraphrase a little bit. Uh Ian is a big fan of liquor intelligence, and they were excited also about Trumpal standard because they want, you know, modern techniques applied to that style of drink. But they want, you know, modern techniques applied to lernernum specifically they're thinking about rapid infusion clarification, they're wanting a phalernum style product that tastes fresher and is maybe um you know faster to make. So you sound like a like tastes fresher tastes fresher, fresh. I'm not familiar with flurnum.
So the product in uh the product being spoken of is Velvet Falernum, uh, which is uh also uh brought in and made uh I don't know it's made by, but it's brought in by the House Alpens Corporation, and it's one of their early products that they brought in and um relatively popular, and it's weird product. So a lot of people think of it because it's it's like a cordial, but it's actually not super acidic. Now, I didn't know this question was going to come in, so I was looking at it on my phone, and it's very hard to look at my Excel document with my old eyeballs on my phone because you know that it's like 800 lines long and like 50 lines across. So I can't look at it on my phone. So one of the numbers I'm not sure of.
I it was lower acid than I remember, but the acid number that I've written down on my piece of paper and tried to get off the phone was ridiculously low. But it's fundamentally a spiced syrup with a little bit of alcohol and uh a little bit of lime, lime and peel, right? So it's kind of like a low acid cordial with some booze in it. So obviously, you could wrap it infuse into the into the liquor component. That by the way, that that the product is 11% alcohol, right?
It's a I'll give you the exact numbers on the alcohol and the sugar. It's 54 uh, you know, 54 to it's basically 542 to 544. I got you know varying readings, grams per liter. That's not the same as bricks. I didn't have a chance to back calculate what the theoretical weight of sugar into the into the liquid would be.
But every liter has about 540 grams of uh sugar. Simple syrup is 615, just for knowledge, right? Uh one-to-one simple syrup. Even though it's 50% by weight, right, because it's so much denser, the grams per liter is higher than 500 in simple syrup. So it's 542 or 4 grams per liter, 11% alcohol by volume.
Here's the number that I don't really think is correct. I z 0.1, 2, 3% acidity, which seems ridiculously low, but I have to go re- retest it. But that's possible. But so using those numbers, you could just backtrack the math, do clarified lime, like boil it with uh the peel and the sugar and add the add the alcohol, uh, and you could get kind of pretty close. I don't know that you would need to use rapid infusion because I don't know what kind of benefit it would bring.
Rapid infusion usually works better in the alcohol. So you could you would have to wrap it infuse into the alcohol portion, but I'm not sure which one of the spices that are in it that you would want to necessarily wrap it as opposed to just making an infusion or putting it into the into the uh syrup base as you make it. But I don't know, is that a decent answer or no? Yeah. Yeah.
Um and I'll try to look at, I'll tell Quinn next time I speak to him what the uh I'll try to see if I tested the acid. I might not have actually tested the acid. I'm cause I was may have been reading off of like uh you know one of the vermouth numbers, which is close by. It's like I say it's really hard to look at my phone. Um, but you could also make it however you want.
It's your recipe. You can do whatever you want. You you could even like quote. So they reference making it a little less weak, a little hairproof. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, I mean, like, I mean, the nice thing is is that if I ever publish it in the edition, and I can give you numbers. If you tell me a target, I can tell you what how to hit it, right? Uh it's not easily, it's not like straight one-to-one, like, you know, because as you add sugar to something, you also reduce the alcohol by volume. You increase the volume of it by adding the sugar.
Just so you know, you uh I this is off the top of my head, but it's it's the density of the like what you add in volume is about 0.6. Every gram of sugar adds about 0.6 or thereabouts milliliters to it. So you can figure out if you're adding a bunch of grams. You can do the math and figure out I can give you a better number next week. If if you someone reminds me, if Quinn puts something in, I can give you a better number for trying to guesstimate what the ABV and the sugar per liter will be given a starting ABV and dry sugar.
So if anybody cares about that garbage. You know what I mean? Sometimes, like like Jen's been reading like the you know, the updates, and she's like, Does anybody care about this crap? I'd be like, I'm like, I'm like, I don't know, like if I make it a little bit thicker and give Nastasi another copy, it'll keep it'll keep the casserole a little warmer, you know? You know what I mean?
So I don't know. Who knows? Uh all right, do we have any guests coming up next week, or we got another no tangent? No tangent? As far as I know, no tangent.
All right. Well, send us some questions, and if you don't want Nastasia's head to freaking explode, like, you know, maybe something not about the stuff that everyone wants me to kind of talk about. Cooking issues. That's crazy, Dave.
Timestamps may be off due to dynamic ad insertion.