Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arald, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live from the Heart of Manhattan, Rocket Four Center, New York City, Newstair Studios. No John today, because uh John's in Belgium, kicking it in Belgium, getting me some fancy, fancy mustard. But I do have Joe Hazen rocking the panels. What's up?
Well shaking. I'm excited for that mustard. Yeah, must and must have listed. And over there on the West Coast, we got Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. How you doing?
I'm good. Good. Uh got Jackie Molecules. We gotta we gotta get molecular early in the show because uh he's only gonna be here for half of it. So what's up?
What's up, uh, Mr. Lemolecule? I'm doing alright. Yeah, you feeling better? Yeah, yeah.
It uh turns out that uh uh I'm gonna end up needing my wisdom teeth taken out. That's been one of the culprits here of like this mystery sinus ear thing that I've been going through. Okay, listen. Listen, listen. Get the good painkillers.
They're gonna say they only do it that way only do it that way. The way you thought the way you got it done is insane. They only give you a painkillers. That's just not true. I don't know, that's just not the case.
I I went when I went to an No, no, no, no. I got half of my wisdom teeth taken out 20 years ago, and I got half taken out two years ago. Or three years ago, right before the pandemic. And five years ago. And it's like uh yeah, no, it's still the situation that they're like, well, I could give you the good stuff, but it's gonna be an extra 600 bucks.
You're like, what? Yeah. Yeah. Pay it. That's what I'm saying.
Pay it. Pay it. Here's what I'm gonna tell you right now. Pay it. The other thing they're gonna do is they're gonna try to convince you to do it in stages.
Let's do two now and two later. Why? In case you have a bad reaction. Well what cares? Yeah, who cares?
Get them all out. Because you could have a bad reaction both times. There's only two left. Okay, all right. Whatever.
Anyway. Yeah. Miserable though. You do not want to be sitting there watching them rip those things out, man. It's just not how it goes.
I will pay, I will pay $600 anytime I go to the doctors if I can be like put out with good drugs. You know? If I were rich. If I were super rich, yeah. Well, if I was super rich, like like my idea, right?
Well, like if you're super rich, I guess you f fry fly private, but anesthesia airways is the money idea, right? Wow. You know, that is a money idea. Yeah. Oh, yeah.
You get on. You put me out for like half of the things I have to do in life, you know. Yeah, yeah. And they're and they're like, well, but what if there's a what if there's an accident? No.
You know what I mean? No, I'll sign a waiver. How about that? You know what I mean? Please.
Yeah. Yeah. You could have you could have Prince and Michael Jackson's face on the outside as the ambassadors. Yeah. Get this though, right?
Because like if you've if any of you have ever been lucky enough to have a colonoscopy, you know what I mean? Like when you wake up, like, even though you're only out for a little bit, you feel great. Imagine if you landed and you you didn't have to go through the feelings of being in that tube for hours and hours and hours, and instead you woke up incredibly refreshed. You know what I mean? Unbelievable.
And they could stack you like cordwood because you're out. You know what I mean? Anyway, you'd have plenty of room for your carry on. Yeah. Just stack you up.
Who cares? You know what I mean? Uh anyways. Quinn in the upper left, what's up? Hey, I'm good.
Yeah? Nice. Nice. Uh yeah, wisdom teeth. The whole thing.
Hmm. How old are you now, Jack? Uh 39. Yeah. I was like, they tried to convince you when you're really young to get your wisdom teeth out.
Did they do this to you? They did, but mine were straight, so it was never like needed. You know, it was like we could, but you don't have to. And I was like, well, if I don't have to, then I won't. Ding ding ding ding ding.
It just causes so many problems later. Yeah, right. Well, no, but that's the thing. You it's gonna be problems getting it out, right? So they're like, if you don't get them out now and go through this horrible thing right now, what what's gonna happen?
Well, maybe it'll maybe you'll need to take them out later. You're like, okay, later then. You know what I mean? Great. Easy choice.
Easy choice. If the choice is, oh, you may have to have them out later. Yeah, yeah. No, preemptive wisdom teeth taken out, please. Use car salespeople.
No offense to use car salespeople. Anyway, uh what's up? What do you guys got this week? What's good? Ugh I've been sick, so I've been miserably, you know, trying to just be healthy and eat salads and drink smoothies.
I don't know. See, that was your mistake. That was your mistake. Trying to trying to trying to like salad your way out of feeling bad. Like you like, Jack, you can't take away like years of abuse, and then you know, five days, you're like, I'm gonna switch this out in the salad facilities and it's gonna make it all better.
Yeah, you know. That's what I tried to do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like that's invalid. Yeah.
First of all, there's no such thing as oh shoot. There's no such thing as detoxing. That's not a thing. That's that's that's fake. You know what I'm saying?
I want to start, I want to start a bunch of spas for retoxing, right? If people actually believe that they can somehow detox. This is kind of like goes back to people. Used to think that, like, you know, I don't know, that your intestines were some kind of crazy cave system where like, you know, evil sentient food beasties could like hide out forever, and you needed to like clean them out via like like weird, like this is like 1800s, even even beforehand, crazy food nonsense, and it still kind of lives till today with this idea that somehow your body isn't constantly processing whatever you're eating, and that you can quote unquote detox. You know what I mean?
Please. Like, you know, what's the basis of this? Do you know what I'm saying? I'm not saying like obviously there's certain poisons, certain things you can eat to take a while to leave your body. There are things that you are physiologically dependent on that take several days to work their way out.
I'm thinking caffeine headaches, alcohol, etc. etc. But in general, I mean, it's not like you know, it's not like yeah, like Nastasia says, you can undo a billion years of uh of you know being a human being by eating salad, you know what I mean? Anyway, also retox is a is a great name for like uh energy drink, yeah. Retox or like a metal band.
You know what I mean? Or literally a liquor brand. Well, we can get it, we can do the band and the liquor brand at the same time. But like what kind? Not like Norwegian death metal.
Does anyone actually like Norwegian death metal? Like anybody? In small doses, I guess. Like how small? Like a whole song?
Huh? Yeah. Like one song. Like one song, yeah. Okay.
I saw Godfresh as a new record out. Yeah. Yeah. Sounded pretty good. Half of the actual Norwegian death metal people are in jail for murdering people, right?
That's legit. Or not, right? Like anyway. Or not. But uh right.
So, you know, retalks up. You know, I'm a firm believer, and I have no data. So let me just say I have no data to back up what I'm about to say. So it is probably completely false. However, I firmly believe that if you eat things that make you feel good about being alive, that you will probably end up having less stress and a better day, and then overall be more healthy.
You know what I'm saying? I like that theory. Yeah. Could be false, but it's what I'm gonna go with. You know what I mean?
Uh anyway. All right. Well, so if you didn't eat, what about you, Stas? What do you what's on the food front for Nastasia the Hammer Lopez? Oh, I don't think I ate anywhere special.
Oh yeah? What's your current yeah, I'm gonna cook dinner tonight and I have 15 minutes and I don't want to worry about it? Um, Whole Foods sells these like pre-seasoned chicken things, and then I do frozen broccoli and a bag of rice that's already been cooked. Okay, hold up. How far is that?
What's the sad sad sad schmadd? Like in what format are they the beaten-up looking pieces of chicken that look kind of like whitish that are in a plastic container? Yes. And when you reheat those, because I'm assuming you're reheating them, although listen, I'm sure those things are fine in a cob salad. Cods cob salad, speaking of you know, got gods, that's a god salad right there.
That's a god level salad, the cob salad. I'm sure they're fine in a cob salad. Um do they reheat okay or do they get dry and nasty? Oh, wait, no, these are raw, these are raw chicken that's been pre-seasoned. Uh are they is it slightly acidic or just salt-based, salt sugar base?
Uh it's there's a bunch of different flavors, but mostly salt-based. Yeah. Right. So they're not mushy. They haven't gotten like that acid mush.
Oh no. Oh no, no, no. No, that's fine. What's wrong with that? I think frozen broccoli is fine.
I tell you what, it's better than a frozen Brussels sprout. Frozen Brussels sprouts are maybe they're listening there. You can use a frozen Brussels sprout in scenarios where you're not eating the Brussels sprout by itself if you're chumming it up into a pasta, let's say, right? Or something like this. But like they just don't have the right texture.
Whereas like frozen broccoli, I feel can be fine. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. I like it.
What else sucks frozen? Hmm. Uh I mean, the best frozen stuff is what? Corn and peas, right? Corn and peas.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Peas are number one. Yeah.
Because like you can't get a good pea. Back, in fact, when I buy fresh peas, like half the time I'm like, oh yeah, fresh peas, and half the time I'm like, ugh, starch bombs, garbage. You know what I mean? Like a frozen pea. Yeah.
It's a good. Although, is anyone on earth good at having them not be wrinkly? They come out, you cook 'em, they're perfect, and then they cool and they get all wrinkly, and you're like, how can I not do this? What is wrong with me? Like I'm I'm fifty-four now.
I just turned 54, and Miley made me a chicken pot pie, and then my niece Ellery carved a an incredibly accurate, hand carved a piece of uh pastry that says days fifty-four. And she put the apostrophe in, and I was like, nice use. I like the apostrophe. She's like, I wasn't gonna do it, but my dad Wiley forced me to. I was like, Well, good call, Dad.
The apostrophe I noticed things like this, the apostrophe. By the way, Miley makes a really good chicken pot pie. And chicken pot pie is a good product. If you eat chicken, chicken pot pie is a great product. You know what I'm saying?
She's also made turkey pot pie. Good product. Great product. I would have to say I would enjoy possibly a pork a pork pot pie. I've never had one.
I know a beef pot pie would be good. Anyway, what I'm trying to say is a pot pie is a good product. Uh wait, what are we talking about though? We were talking about frozen things that were good. What else is good?
What's bad? I mean, a lot of fruit is bad if you care about the texture. Yeah. If you want the fruit to be raw, it's garbage. But if you're gonna cook it anyway, then you know, it's often better to buy frozen than to buy trash fresh.
You know what I mean? Cheaper, better, more consistent, like the six million dollar man. Better, stronger, faster. But the um what else is terrible? But they are terrible fresh.
I always keep frozen blueberries because I mix them into my pancakes. That's my probably my largest use case for frozen fruit, other than at the bar. Hmm. Lima's aren't very good. A fresh lima is so good, and a frozen lime uh starts to get that like pasty, that pasty action.
I don't know, I have to think about it. I have to think about it. But we we can all agree frozen broccoli. So it's frozen broccoli, the seasoned chicken strips. Are they tenders or are they cut from thigh meat or breast or what?
Unfortunately, they're breast. Yeah. Alright. You know what? I actually cooked chicken breast yesterday, last night.
Last night I I did uh my uh chicken salting boca. You know, I haven't made actual veal salting boca in probably two and a half decades, because I just make it exclusively with chicken now. But it's actually a really good quick dinner. You know what I mean? Like it's so fast.
You just beat the hell out of it. You just take your chicken, you cut it out. I like thigh, but my wife actually prefers me to do the breast. You cut it out thin, salt, a little bit of sugar, pepper, both sides, plastic wrap over it, beat the hell out of it till it's flat as flat as uh anything. Then uh sage, prosciutto, flour, that thing.
I use a little meat glue just to keep the prosciutto stuck on it. You know what I mean? Because I I used to use toothpicks, I hate the toothpicks. I hate toothpicks. Hate them.
In the meat, hate it. Also, it stops it from touching the pan properly. Then you butter it up and then you know, little lemon, a little what are you know, deglaze it with uh, you know, a little uh sweet wine or whatever. Nice. Good uh weekday, good weekday meal.
That's what I had last night. Anyway, so chicken, rice, you use the pre-cooked rice, brown, white, unflavored. The one in the back. Like the jab, man. It depends, you know, I switch it up.
But they make pre-cooked frozen white rice. No, no, no. They do pre pre-cooked, non-frozen in the aisle rice. What? In a bag.
And it's already cooked. Yeah. How the hell do they do that? Yeah, I have that a lot with um they've got Korean brands of like cups of precooked rice. Those are quite good actually.
But how do they make it? I'm gonna have to do some research. I don't know how I don't know how they're able to have it in a bag, shelf stable, but there must be something in the bag that's not creating botulism. Well, uh uh be serious. Uh besides microwave.
There's no and and they're not hard and they re f they re-therm nice and they get fluffy as though they were rice, or are they like coated with oil so it's always like semi-fried, like free-flowing stuff. No. Not oil, but also not doesn't get fluffy. It's just it's just fine. You know, like you should really try it.
It's really fine. Fine. Huh. All right. I mean, like, I thank goodness that I have a rice.
It's like it's like a short grain rice. That's supposed to be like a little sticky anyways. So it's it's good. Okay. Doesn't.
I'm not gonna uh I'm not gonna poo poo something I know nothing about. You know what I mean? I gotta test it out. I don't really go to Whole Foods anymore though. Anyway, I'll try.
I'll go. I'm sure they have it uh at my local whatever Mart. Uh what about you, Quinn? What do you what have you been cooking uh this last week? Oh boy, uh I I've got uh I've got multiple things.
Uh I've I got out one of my experimental uh guanchales. So one of my recent Guanchali experiments, my usual sort of seasoning base, and then I actually cured it in a vacuum bag with a little bit of sage essential oil. Okay, why I looked up, there is a there is well, I want sage flavor. Okay. Not to be, but why not just use sage?
Why the essential oil? Well again, I find that when I've done spices or even spice extracts on the surface of something at least like like a guanchole, that the flavor never really penetrates the protein. There's also a well known phenomenon of uh in vacuum bags of spice burn where like uh it's not actually burned, but what happens is like the whole leaves will like make an imprint and then put like a weird color mark on the piece of meat where the spice was, and they'll also like leave kind of weird bitter notes right there where the contact point was. You know what I mean? But uh Yeah.
So again, even like Essential Oils make me nervous 'cause they don't taste like the actual thing. You know what I mean? Because they are the oil soluble components only. You know what I mean? But I mean, if you like it, you like it.
Did you like it? Well again, that's also the experiment because my my thinking was well if the it's a flavor I like, you know, in theory if I let it cure for several weeks before the actual like drying phase, that some of those you know, fat based compounds should diffuse into the like fat you don't think so? I mean, some, right? But think about it. Think about this way.
It's a strong substance. Think about this way. So when you cure, uh, when you uh dry age a piece of meat from for weeks, weeks, weeks, right? All of the fat, most of the oxidation is happening on the outside. And when you trim it away, like a lot of that oxidation doesn't penetrate, right?
So it's like there is some penetration, but you know, diffusion of large molecules through a solid, you know, fat medium is relatively slow, right? So it depends on how long you're gonna like handle. This is this is math that someone can do. I mean, like, I can't do it, but someone can look at the you know, size of the molecules, figure out roughly what the what the diffusion coefficient of it is, figure out roughly what the you know what it is you're trying to put it through, and figure out like how long it would take to penetrate. But my guess is a long time.
You know what I'm saying? Well, it it didn't work. Well, well, if you want to see, really, right, what you should do is get a block of meat, then do whatever you're gonna do, and then cut like with a very sharp knife, like six very sharp knives, so you never use the same knife again, cut off all the sides of it so that you have only a cube in the center of the meat and taste that tell me what it tastes like. You know what I mean? Like that's so there's uh Greg Blonder whose uh blog Genuine Ideas, he used to do penetration tests, but on larger molecules like salt, and there, you know, there he would use indicators to go through, but nah, I don't know, you'd have to figure out an indicator to see how fast the stuff diffuses through.
But this is knowable stuff. People work on cured meats all the time. Like Fidel Toldre used to be the world's grandmaster of cured meat like research articles. Anyway, I digress, but you enjoyed the taste of it or no? Did it taste like sage?
Yeah, it tasted good. Really good. And we were able to try there's a new local dried pasta brand that we tried their pasta. It was really good. What what shape?
What was good about it? Uh macaroni. Like bent macaroni, like macaroni with a hole in it. Like it was like sort of like elbows? Like average like uh like a like no, not elbows, but like sort of like a slightly elongated rigged to me.
Okay. All right. I mean, if you just say macaroni to the average person, they're thinking elbows. Anyways, uh, I don't really like using essential oils. If you like it, you like I don't I've never had I've never had a result with essential oil where I've been like, oh, thank God.
Now, uh, I know that like, for instance, Mike Capoferi over at uh Thunderbolt and Night on Earth, shout out to them. Like uh, they like, and a lot of people like to use things like orange essential oils or citrus essential oils instead of expressing peels because A, you use by the way, in a professional bar situation, we go through a boat ton, a boat ton of citrus. So you have to find uses for the solids, the actual fruit, because I go through so many peels. In fact, that's why I started, you know, I came up with acid adjusting because I needed a use for all of the freaking oranges that we had when we were, you know, using orange twists, right? So it is, you know, quote unquote, not quote unquote, it is more like uh cost effective and sustainable to buy the oranges you want for juice and use those peels for something, but then just spray the citrus oil on.
But somehow I I need to do a side by side with Mike. I was too busy during service to do it. But the next time I'm in LA, Stas, let's go over and do a side-by-side blind. We'll blindfold ourselves. We'll go to we'll go to uh Thunderbolt and Night on Earth and we'll have somebody make the same cocktail with the spritz and with the peel, and uh the you know, three of us or four of us, Jack, you come over, you know, five of us, whatever it is.
We can do a side-by-side taste and see what we think. You think it's a good idea? Yeah, also for everybody, uh Dave might be in LA at the end of April. Maybe maybe get your LA on. And this time, if we do do a pop-up with Mike, we will be sure, and I apologize to make more product because we sold out in like 22 seconds.
And Nastasia, who said she was gonna be there early and actually helped me set up, didn't show up until we were actually out of products. That's what happened last time. And then gave me the stink eye probably because they didn't want to tell me, but probably based on last week's show, because like Nastasi wanted to get something to eat, and then you know, Jack ordered an extra hand roll and they couldn't eat it in time to get to the to the bar. Probably what happened. Just saying.
Wow. I wish I could tell the real story of what happened. Also, you can bring food into that joint because they don't have a freaking. Who did who who wanted to go? That's a creative.
I'm I have to defend my honor on this one. Which on the hand roll or on the other one? No, I wanted to go on time. Okay. But what prevented you?
I I have no Nastasphia wanting food. Yeah. But she could have had food the whole day. P. S.
She had the whole day to get food. We had this one thing we were gonna go to. She's like, I'm not gonna go all the way over there. I'm not gonna get, I'm not gonna wear what I'm wearing now, then go eat, then go home, then get dressed. Just get dressed in the during the day.
Go eat near the freaking bar. No, no, Dave, it was this. It was driving and drinking here, right? So like it was it was all all of the the getting to it. What it was is that you weren't willing, you weren't willing to just be out earlier.
You're like, that's gonna be like 45 minutes when I'm gonna be not at my house and I don't know what I'm gonna do. Nope. I won't do it. And so like you like you wouldn't just like get ready to go earlier and Uber over at like four. Here's the honest truth.
Okay. You were you're only here for like 24 hours, and I was like, hey Dave, let's go eat, right? Or something. Let's go hang out. And I was like, you don't need they like night on earth and Thunderbolt, they prep everything, they have their own style.
You don't need to be there three hours before. Like, why don't you and I hang out? You need to go take to be there. And plus they want to say hello, they want you to do pre-shift, all these things. They don't though, because I don't think that you like bartenders that fly in, they like show up right when the event starts and they go.
Like, so I didn't want to sit around while you're testing and wait wait, based on what based on what? How long have you known me? 17 years. When when have we ever, with the stuff that we do, when have we ever in 17 years? When have we ever been able to just walk into a place and do something?
You know, Mike, by this time has like he perfects everything for you. Yeah, but we still need to get together, get on the same page and taste it all and figure out what's going on when there's time to adjust it. If it wasn't Mike, it would be a day early. I would have to go in a day early, and like half the stuff wouldn't work. Like, you know, with Mike, I only have to go in like an hour and a half early, check it all up, and then I could have walked out and got something to eat, but I couldn't, because you weren't there.
Also, Mike wanted to get something to eat. But Mike was running around. I know there's one guy who I know ate with Mike that day. You know who it was? Me.
Because I was with Mike. Yeah. We went to this some place where some a bunch of people got murdered, but they had like good food. They had good food, but there's a little bit of a stink on the place because like a bunch of people got murdered in the restaurant. I can't remember the name of it.
And they and they gluten and they glutinified his food twice. They like, he was like, I can't have gluten anywhere near my food. And they put it, they they made it, it was delicious, super garlicky, and then they just like dumped a huge pile of pitas on top of his food. So he's like, now I can't eat any of it. So he like had that bagged, and and then as a sorry, they gave him a cake made with gluten.
Anyway. The murder restaurant. It's a murder restaurant. Well, I guess they wanted to keep it going. You know what I mean?
Like they had some murders there, and then they wanted to keep it going. Oh, speaking of uh it's not murder the chefs. Yeah, exactly. Speaking of uh murder, P.S. I just did you find out this?
I'm sure Nastasia doesn't trust it anyway, but do you hear the 23andMe is going bankrupt, and so like no one knows who's gonna own your your data about your about your genes? I can make a guess who might own it. Delete it. Wow. Delete it now.
Delete. It's all going to green ones. Oh baby. No, man. I don't know.
I don't want to get into it. I don't want to get into it. I don't want to do it. All right. Um how the heck did we get on this?
From sage? I don't know. That was good. From Sage? All right.
What else, Quinn? You said that you did your guanchali, you enjoyed it. By the way, by the way, I'm gonna say when I buy Guan Chale, Guan Chale for for those of you that cured pig face, all right? Let's just be blunt about it. Cheek cheek.
What part of the body is the cheek on, Quinn? Yeah, remember that. I've done it. It's cured pig face. Okay, okay.
And what do you call that? Face face chiale. Face it chiale. Anyway, uh, but there are a bunch of different styles of it, right? And uh, but they roughly, when I've had them, they either break into like a wetter style or a very dry style.
And like the commercial available one in the United States is uh the most easily available one in New York City, anyway, is from a company called Volpe, which is like a big kind of company that makes like a bunch of cured meat products. And they make a wetter style, and I have to say I prefer the wetter style. I prefer a wetter, like balled up guanchali to a flatter, drier guan chale. That's just me though. Because what I like to do is like almost cook a pizza and then throw it on and just kind of flash it in the on the top of the pizza or in a pasta.
I mean, guanchali is delicious, straight up delicious, but you barely need to cook that stuff when it's wet. Anyway, so which style do you make? The wet or the dry? Don't say in between. You have to choose one.
What? Well, again, I don't know how well the moisture lock on the two cells you're talking about. I hit like 25% moisture loss. And then I start call it. Polly.
That is what people how people judge, right? How they used to judge. So you'd weigh like something like a ham before and after. But in a guanchali, in order to understand what moisture loss means, you need to understand the actual fat content because you're not evaporating fat. So if you're losing 25%, if it's 50% fat and you lose 25% of the weight of the guanchali, well, really, like the meat has lost 50% of its of its moisture.
You get me? Yeah, but I'm thinking I'm still calculating how much moisture is low. Well, let me how relative to other pieces of what? Yeah, but I'm saying it's like what's gonna control mostly the texture. I mean, the fat's gonna get harder a bit because there's moisture in the fat as well, but the meat is gonna be a more affected.
Do you cure it rolled or flat? Flat. All right, so it's gonna be dry. It's gonna be dry. Is it how flexible is it?
Can I take it and go on a table? Or or when you push a knife through it, does it kind of uh probably cool through the first sound effect? Yeah, so it's so it's so it's hard. He could have just said, I uh I cure it dry. It's good.
I like that, I like it like that, but like for things like that, I like to use it for where I like it to be kind of just soft and like uncuous. By the way, my wife, Jen, told me, because she doesn't think about food as much as I do, that in when you're talking about people, think about this. When you talk about people, uncuous is an insult. It means kind of like you're slimy and oily. And I was like, that's weird because in food talk, unctuous usually means good.
You know what I mean? So, like when I say something's unctious, she's like, ew, because she thinks it means that, like, you know, it's a slime ball or skeiz ball, some sort of creep. You know what I mean? And I'm thinking, ooh, you know, like got that like nice texture. Anyway, that's how I like one chali.
Uncious. That's just me though. To each their own. And we we and we did pizza on uh Sunday. Yeah, I don't cook pizza anymore.
I've got one of the old uh moonie brands. Yeah. Pizza oven. Yeah, I stopped making pizza ever since Wiley opened his pizza restaurant. It's just like why?
What's a heartache? You know what I mean? Like, well, why do it? You know what I'm saying? It's like it's like when you have someone in your family who makes something professionally, you just don't you just don't do it.
It's like also like I don't make cocktails at home. Like, why you know, it's like, no, I don't. You know what I'm saying? I don't watch food TV, I don't make cocktails at home unless I'm doing uh you know, work. Like if I if I'm like trying to develop a new cocktail, then I'll test them on people at home.
But otherwise, I don't know. You know what I mean, Stas, you're with me on this, no? Oh, I'm totally with you, yeah. Yeah, it's like, you know, it's like I do like to cook at home, which is weird. You'd think I wouldn't like to cook at home, but I do like to cook at home, but like I don't want to consume food as a professional thing or as a media thing, or like what I do at the bar.
I don't want to do that at home. It just doesn't, you know what I mean? Just give me a bottle of wine and call it a day. You know what I'm saying, Stas? Yeah, that's all I wanted to do with you in California.
And instead, you went really good. Well then don't ask me to do work. We like first of all, we don't have the money that we can just hang out. Like that's you know, I mean, like we like we have to work like morons. So it's that we got paid by Amazon the week after.
I guess it was good because we would have went way too crazy if it had happened when we were together. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, partially paid. We gotta figure it out. Although someday we'll be able to tell you folks the in the entire saga of uh of Amazon.
Uh Jack already had to leave, so I didn't get to bust it, bust him more on his hand rolls. I was gonna bust him one more time on the hand rolls. You weren't on here, right, Stas, yes uh last week when he was talking about you like a dog about about getting mad at him on the hand rolls. So now you can have your say without him here. No, I was here.
I was here. No, I he John wasn't here. Yeah, but the hand Um the hand rule thing with Jack and I was really bad. He had a great time, and I I had a horrible time because we missed the thing I wanted to see. So was it Pauly Shore?
No, not Nastasia loves the loves the poly shore. I told you Nastasi is gonna start a new club in Los Angeles called Catch a Falling Star, where it's just like you know, people from like Paul Shore generation, you know what I mean? Like like my generation. That's kind of what that's kind of what I'm doing now. I'm throwing these dinner parties, which Dave's gonna be a part of, and we have like all these old rock stars and stuff show up.
Catch a falling star. Uh you can you call it that? No, no, no. You should take get that Instagram. People would follow that Instagram.
That is bad. That is bad, and that's not like that's not what I want it to be. All right. So before I forget, midway through the show, Spinzall. Spins all spinzall.
Also, if you're if you're if you're listening on Patreon, call in your questions to 917-410-1507. That's 917-410-1507. Quinn, why don't you tell them how they can join the Patreon and call into that number? Yeah, they can uh go to Patreon.com slash cooking issues and join uh any of the uh paid tiers, and that gets them access to all the Patreon feed where you'll get uh live and early episodes of the show. You get prioritized when you submit questions, you'll get access to the Discord, which is filled with lots of uh like-minded people that are always discussing interesting things and also giving uh you know feedback on problems people have, and uh, you know, there's also uh deals we get with Kitchen Arts and Letters and various other uh related uh producers of food or food-related products.
Alright. So uh going back to what I was about to say before I did that, spinzall 2.0s. By the way, I like the spinzall 1.0, spins all 2.0, just a better machine all the way around. Clarifies better, stronger, faster, as I said I said earlier. But we have another shipment on the water right now.
So monitors, they're big in the warehouse. So we're doing a clearing out inventory sale of the spinzall 2.0 right now. You can have it instead of 11, what is it, 1199 instead of 1199? What's the new price? 850.
850 is such a weird number. Couldn't it be like $849.99? Well $849.99. That's $849.99. Get your spinzall 2.0 now.
Get them while they're cheap. Because I tell you what, I really don't know what the price is gonna be when uh we because we're paying the we're paying the big tariff on the next batch that's coming in. So get them where they will probably literally never be this inexpensive. Yeah, from the source. Yeah, yeah.
But uh, you know, if you were on the fence and you're like, man, I don't know if I should get one, now's the time, right? Okay, or if you already have one and you need more, they're like potato chips, they're like potato chips. I was at the uh second best, you know. Everyone knows I don't believe in best anything, but I was at what you know the Pellegrino people, Paradiso Bar in Barcelona, what they think is the you know number two best bar in the world. Great bar, by the way, fantastic time in Barcelona.
And I went to to their uh production lab afterwards, and they have a big centrifuge, right? The big one, and they're like, Oh yeah, because you know, we need this, we have we have a big production. I'm like, you're the truth of the matter is take it from somebody who knows centrifuges, okay. I there is no one in the bar world, and I'm not I'm just saying it's like I've done it longer, and I build centrifuges, right? So it's like I know centrifuges, and it is more efficient to just own four spinzalls than it is to own one big centrifuge because what happens when your big centrifuge breaks?
Your toast, right? And plus, in a spinzall, you can do four different things at the same time, right? And you know we also have new stuff coming out that's gonna make it clarify in continuous mode better etc etc eventually like they it already does clear it clarifies much fa the 2.0 clarifies faster than the than the 1.0 both of which work faster than the big centrifuges do for a variety of reasons that are too boring to get into now but it has to do with fixed angle rotors versus uh you know swinging buckets blah blah blah although swinging bucket would be a good like country band right sounds like a country band like bluegrass swinging buckets anyway um all right did I talk about the sale enough Stas Yeah yeah but also it's like uh you know very limited time because it's basically based on how much uh you know space wherever the clear so if you're hearing this and you're considering it uh double check modern spantry and you know buy early if you want it all right Liz Quinn don't say that you have to check just give me a ballpark number how many do we have left in this in this in the current batch that we need to get rid of that I do not have roughly a billion or like three I think it's more on the order of like a couple hundred we have right yeah I would say it's a couple hundred yeah there you go see ballpark uh all right so uh question from uh Rob Lax I've always bought branded sugar the Domino's brand which is made from sugar cane given that the price of Domino has roughly doubled in the past couple of years you know what I'm like certain things have gone up out of proportion to how much they cost. Because I'm looking at you, diamond co kosher salt. Diamond kosher salt, the actual stuff that like we all use, they know that we like it.
So they've like quintupled the price. So, like Morton's trash can like kosher salt is sitting right next to it, and it's gone up a little bit. You know, it's gone up because of inflation. And diamonds sitting there, like, boop boop, we know that you you love us, so we're just gonna hose you, and it's making me mad. But it's not like I'm gonna switch because my hands are geared to using diamond.
Like I've spent my entire adult life like knowing how to reach into a container of diamond kosher salt, pick it up and use it to season things. And now I'm being punished for it, and I don't enjoy it. I don't enjoy the new colors, I don't want to enjoy the new art on the box, and I definitely don't enjoy the new price. They can suck it. You know what I'm saying?
Anyway, um, but I'm still gonna use it. I'm not one of those guys who gets mad and then like, you know, I'm gonna boycott that wow, I'm gonna shoot myself in the foot. I'm gonna use something that I don't like using. I can still afford it. It's like Mach 3 Gillette Razors, right?
When the Mach 3 came out, you were like, I'm not gonna pay $10 for a razor. Razors are like a dollar, you know what I mean? And they're like, Yeah, but it's like marginally better, plus you can afford it. So you are gonna pay $10 for a freaking razor. And you're like, oh.
And they were right. Jerks. You know what I mean? No tangent Tuesdays on cooking issues. Yeah, yeah.
All tangents all the time. Anyway, Rob has always bought uh dominoes, but given that the price has roughly doubled in the past couple of years, much like eggs, salt, flour, and all sorts of other things, I'm inclined to start buying the generic brands, which are sometimes half the price or less. Most of these off brands don't say that they are quote unquote cane sugar, and I'm assuming that's because they're made of less sexy sugar beets. I've been advised not to use beet sugar in making jam because it won't gel, although I've never put that to the test. Can I safely buy generic sugar for baking?
Are there any applications where I should be more discerning about my sugar per purchases and use only cane sugar? Hey, speaking of eggs, I'm not gonna talk about the price of eggs, but I will say this. Trader Joe's, Trader Joe's, my local Trader Joe's, has given up on eggs entirely. They don't even have a section in the cold case anymore for eggs. They've put something else there, and they're like, that's how far in the future Trader Joe's egg pricing is not working because like their system is about that just in time, getting it really cheap.
Remember, go re listen to the episode of The Secret Lives of Groceries, which was a good episode we had. And like that's how Trader Joe's works. And so it's so bad that our Trader Joe's literally does not have a section for eggs anymore. Dave, I have a question. I have a question.
Why, if eggs have gone up, hasn't the entire chicken like cutlets and things also gone up? That's a good question. It's a it's a great question. I don't well, here's one theory. So when when it's a theory though, I haven't looked looked it up, but uh when one chicken gets ill, because the avian flu is so fast, right?
It's like such a fast, like, you know, Ebola-like thing for chickens, right? That when one hen g uh shows up positive or gets sick, they wipe out the entire hen house. Okay. Now, the chickens that you eat only live to be about six weeks old. So they don't have a lot of time to become sick.
Whereas like laying hen is sitting there for, you know, probably I forget what the number is. I used to know it's like one or two years that they can be productive and lay, you know, roughly an egg a day or so, right? And so there's a lot longer time they have to get sick, right? And I'm I don't know whether there's rules that they can't jack those things with as much uh kind of antibiotics well the antibiotics aren't going to help with a virus anyway. But anyway, uh so that's my guess.
It's just that that you know the meat that we eat is so young that it has less of an overall impact than it would on on laying hens. I don't know. Is that the same for beef too? Well the beef, they don't have I mean like so like six weeks I'm kind of grossed out now. Yeah no cows are much older.
Cows are like you know uh like almost a year probably you know um I forget the number I used to know exactly but it it depends right you know cows you don't want them to get too old because then you have to worry about bovine spongal form and cephalopathy so there's kind of a a maximum age that most of our cows are that isn't just determined by tenderness. Really this the slaughter age of cows, slaughter age of most animals is based on when it's no longer convenient to feed them right so a chicken like gets to you know it's its best kind of feed conversion numbers at about six and a half weeks because they're these kind of like it's it's a monstrosity really you know what I mean so like that's why they're so incredibly efficient because they plump up real fast on not very much food and if you continue to feed them you're losing money. Then it's gross to say it that way but you're losing money. With a cow it takes longer to get to full size then it has to marble out right and then as soon as that happens basically you know since most Americans are prizing tenderness once they're not getting any more benefit out of feeding it, all animals, farm animals, sad to say, are killed as soon as they don't provide a benefit to feed them anymore, right? Uh and so that that's where all the numbers um you know come from.
And that's part of the reason why, like a lot of our cured pork can't have the same kind of flavor that because there's reasons to keep, for instance, a pig alive longer in Spain when it's eating on the Dehesa, you know, eating acorns than uh an American factory pig. And so uh, you know, going back to Fidel Toldra, who wrote a lot of this early work on cured meats, like the enzyme, they the actual muscle meat of an older animal is different and it has an impact on cured meats, for instance. So, you know, there's a reason other than other than just genetics and feed that, for instance, Beota Feti Berico pigs are so good. It's also like they're slightly older, you know. Anywho, um back to Rob's question on uh cane sugar.
Um look, there is a difference between cane sugar and uh and beet sugar, right? Um, but the actual sugar molecules themselves are the same. They are identical. You're talking about like very small amounts of impurities in the margin. And a lot of the impurities that are in these sugars are what they call like higher molecular weight things that are hard to like kind of take out of the crystals because they kind of co solidify in in the crystals.
And um right off the top of the bat, one of the things that's slightly different, and maybe this is what the jelly people are talking about, I don't know, is that beet sugar is ever so slightly more basic than cane sugar, because remember when you're when you're purifying sugar, right, they they heat it. And if you heat sugar and it's acidic at all, the sugar will invert. And if the sugar inverts, it doesn't crystallize. It's not sucrose anymore. It's a mixture of fructose and glucose.
So they do anything they can to prevent sugar inversion. So you cannot have it acidic, right? Because any acidic environment, especially plus heat equals sugar inversion. And to prevent inversion, beet sugar is usually slightly more basic than the cane sugar. So that could have an effect.
For instance, uh, I would guess, I don't know this, that probably beet sugar, if you don't add anything to it, might caramelize first because uh a more basic thing is going to uh brown faster than a than a more than a less you know alkaline thing. Um the other thing is that beet sugar is known to back in the day have more things in it that when you were making, for instance, drinks, that they could throw a flock, right? So in in especially in acidic drinks, uh later on down the line, you could get a slight haze or throw a flock off if you used beet sugar. Uh I don't think that there's any sort of anti-gelling thing in a beet sugar that's going to make it uh gel. I mean, it's like I say, perhaps if you're on that very edge on the border uh of like the uh amount of acid needed to set a jelly, because remember, jelly pectin needs the acid to set, right?
Uh and so I guess it's possible that it needs slightly more acid, but I can't I can't think of anything that would stop that from happening. Someone also did some research, it was interesting. Uh, I will tell you it is sensory differences between beet and cane sugar sources from the journal Food Science in 2014, where people can tell the difference in taste tests where you're just eating the sugar, but those taste tests go away when your nose is held. But remember, you're talking about weeny, weeny, weeny, weeny little differences in the uh in the impurities that are that are in it. Covered, smothered?
Covered and smothered. Yep. All right. Uh Kev from Copenhagen writes in, hey, what's up? Uh trying to make goat cream out of goat milk.
The literature literature and empirical evidence documents that goat milk comes out naturally homogenized. Uh have a bucket centrifuge here that goes to 4,500 RPM. Remember though, in a swinging butt, you can't like just uh you can't correlate RPM of a centrifuge to what it's gonna do, and you can't correlate even uh G forces to what it's gonna uh to what's gonna happen. It's really center a centrifuge by centrifuge, so like a fixed fixed angle rotor versus a swinging bucket rotor, and it has to do with it has to do with the um how the liquids move around in the centrifuge and also how far the impurities have to travel in a centrifuge to settle out, and that's kind of why they're they're different. So it's like you can never really do apples and apples, so you really need to just run tests in different centrifuges.
That's that's just an aside. Um I have a bucket centrifuge here that goes to 4500 RPM, but from what I've read, cream separators loosely resemble the spinzall. Has anyone had luck separating goat milk into spinzall? If not, what do you reckon the time slash RPM setting should be on my bucket centrifuge to separate cream, but not churn that cream into butter at the same uh time? All right.
I don't think you're gonna spinzalls don't so I used to own a milk separator, and by the way, Kevin, you can buy milk separators fairly cheaply. But the way the milk separators work is they're uh they're not like a spinzall, they're like a bunch of discs, stacked discs. And you feed the stuff in, and the discs kind of throw out the you know the product to the edge of the disc, and then the stuff migrates between the discs, and you take off the stuff at the top and at the bottom, and the stuff that comes off the top is enriched in cream, and the stuff that comes off or enriched in fat, I should say, and the stuff that comes off of the bottom is enriched in um or deep, I guess it's more skim, it's closer to skim. And based on the feed rate that you take out of the of the top, right, then that's gonna determine, or out of the bottom, depending on how they control it. That's gonna determine uh exactly like how much separation happens, how close you are to skim, how close you are to cream.
Those things tend not to churn because they're continuous base uh centrifuges, but they're disc separations. In a spinzole, the cream is gonna float up to the surface and then it's gonna compact. It turns into a butter-like thing. However, uh I haven't tested it. I don't believe that the emulsion is reversed.
So I think, and we should run this test dots, it's actually not a bad test. I think you can resuspend the fat that you get on a spinzall, the quote unquote butter, which is really I think just like a hard cream. I think you could resuspend it and make it back into cream. But this is a test we should run, right, guys. Yeah.
Well, basically you can almost make, you know, depending on how concentrated the pseudo butter gets, you could almost make any percentage cream up to that point. Yeah. If you want to. Yeah. Um, Kev, is that I looked at the numbers and the individual fat globules in goat milk.
So, what determines whether something is homogenized is the fat globule size. Um, and they are much smaller than in cow milk. However, and some of them are sub-microns. So in general, like a micron is, I believe, a thousandth of a millimeter, and one micron is about the colloidial size. So when things get below a micron, then you're in general, this is a lot of caveats, but in general, you're in the colloidial range where it's going to stay homogenized.
And if it's above uh one micrometer, then eventually, probably unless you heavily stabilize it, like with you know stabilizers, it's going to settle out. Uh and so goat milk, uh, it ranges from about 0.73, which would be probably colloidal, up to 8.6 uh micrometers. So some of the stuff is colloidial and some of it's not. So you should get some creaming and you should be able to get the stuff to uh coalesce. All right.
Um, whereas, by the way, in uh in cow milk, unhomogenized cow milk is 0.92, so colloidial, up to 15.75, so much bigger, like almost twice as as big a size of fat globules. And the bigger something is, the more it wants to settle out. That's just how it works. Um we got that? Was that good?
Did I finish that? All right. Yeah, wait, I wanted to tell you that I met this artist person, an artist um who told me that he is the king of carbonation. So I was like, no. Yeah.
I think so. Well, what uh what makes this person believe that they are the king of carbonation? In what way? So they they had something at Rockaway Beach where they carbonated um they carbonated grain alcohol and then um dropped Adderalls into it and served them. And I was like I think this person is uh the king of bad ideas, but maybe not the king of carbonating, you know what I mean?
Yeah. So I was like, have you used this all? He was like, I don't know, I don't know what that is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I was like, well, have you like mixed juice with your your alcohol?
And he's like, no, and then it it just didn't go well. So yeah. Yeah. Also, like nightmare. Remember, do you remember that time stars that we did the uh we did the the like 47, like the bottle proof 47 AVV gin and tonics and how wrecked people got?
Oh yeah. Oh yeah, yeah. Wait, was that because Cliff gave the wrong didn't dilute it? Well, no, that that was a different this is the one where we actually went to Taylor, restaurant Taylor, and we did that like little event and we wheeled the our chiller on. So for those of you that don't know, even though we pay the most immense taxes in New York City of anywhere, they think it's quaint for us to have cobblestone streets down in Soho.
And if you've ever tried to wheel like laboratory equipment, we wheeled a freaking rotovap and like all the chilling stuff over this cobblestone, it's like and like uh we got it there, and yeah, that's remember we served those little shots that we that we had Ellen chilled all the stuff down, people got wrecked. Yeah. It was good though. Wrecked. Yeah, I've never served those things again.
This is a bad idea. The crush Addy in it. I mean, come on, please. Please, please, please. Scott writes in, hey Dave, don't know if you've answered this uh problem yet, but you mentioned a genshin thing you had to solve at the bar, and the problem is is that um certain um bitter compounds.
For instance, uh what's in Kampari, we we think it's maybe the genshin. If you add acid to it and then let it sit overnight, it becomes more bitter. Uh I wrote in a few years ago about jungle birds, and they seem to compound bitterness when you add the lime juice. If you taste jungle birds base by itself, it's super sweet, not bitter. And the lime juice isn't that bitter by itself.
Combined in the two makes it drinks as more bitter than some of its parts. I found a study on carryover effect of bitter pears. Um, and do you notice that when paired together, different bitter compounds affect each other and make things taste more bitter than they originally are? Yeah, no, it happens, but I think I think bitter is incredibly complicated. And it depends on individual people, how they're gonna react to it, because some people can taste certain bitter compounds and other people can't.
They have different reactions to it, and even you know, regardless of what you can taste chemically, right? Like what your genes allow you to taste, we also have different thresholds for bitterness, right? That are mentally, you know, that you can mentally get uh uh you know accustomed to or not. So uh yes, uh it is complicated that, but for us, the issue wasn't that when you added lime, it instantly got more bitter. It's that the bitterness changed over time, and so that's what we're trying to figure out um kind of what happens.
Also, Scott says, uh, for nitrogen infusing into cocktails. Now, I'm gonna stop here. Be careful, be careful what what you're okay. So you're saying that the best product that you've used is this thing called uh uh nitro infusure from uh enhanced beverage solutions. And what it is, it's a it's a block where you put gas in one side, liquid in the other, and you get like, you know, basically Guinness style widgeted stuff on the on the other side.
And we have another question about this later, uh, we'll get to in a minute. But when you say nitrogen infusing, you please like always be more precise. So what you mean is you're putting like pressurized nitrogen into a drink such that when you depressurize it, you get tiny micro bubbles that create that kind of rolling head look, right? And that'll happen regardless of whether the thing is carbonated or not. But when you say things like nitrogen infusing, people get confused and think that you can use nitrogen to do infusion, in other words, like make an infused liquor with nitrogen, and that you do with nitrous.
So, like, I just like there needs to be a little more precision in language so that people don't get confused about what's actually going on because people always think when I say nitrous, people are like, you mean nitrogen? I'm like, I'm pretty sure I know the difference. You know what I mean? So it's like just be always be, and it's not helped by the fact that the word nitro can mean either nitrogen or nitrogen uh uh nitrous oxide, depending on who the heck you're talking to. And the whole world needs to just stop talking this way.
You know what I mean? Like, I don't know what the answer is, but and I'm gonna lose on this the same way I lost with Sous vide. But uh anyway. Mike C says, I want to try baking semolina-based breads, uh, but the readily available product near me is the more coarsely ground stuff from Bob's Red Mill. Is there a way for me to bake with this?
I was thinking about a long autolized step would be a good start. Curious to get your thoughts. Thanks. Well, I don't know about Bob's Red Mill Semolina versus your stuff. The main issue with semolina is that semolina doesn't have any fines in it.
And it doesn't have uh a lot of like like uh damaged or broken starch. It's really just like like purified like wheat almost like well, it's stemolina, right? So they're like almost little rocks. So I don't know the difference. I'd have to like send me the brand that you normally do and Bob's red mill, but you need a longer hydration because it need it needs to get in.
Remember, the whole point one of the whole points of semolina is that it does not absorb a lot of water for its for its uh protein level because there's not a lot of damaged starch in it. That's one of the things it does. Zev says I would I was gonna say for Mike C, I would look online for semola, which is the proper labeling for like a fine Durham wheat flour. Well, it's not flour. So flour is flour and semolina is semolina, right?
So semola is a if you find a bag that says semolin, not semolina, it's usually Durham flour. I think it's fine. Yeah, but does Mike want durum flour? Or does Mike want semolina? One's gonna have damaged starch and fines, and one is not.
Right? So you need to determine whether you want to have there's coarseness of grind, and then there's whether there are fines in it or not, right? So when you're anyway, uh I gotta answer these other uh two questions. Zev uh says, I just made a pot of chicken stock and after refrigerating it for a day, found no solid layer of fat at the surface. That has never happened to me before.
I don't recall the chickens being particularly lean, but they have been cut up by the butcher, and I was in a rush getting them into the pot, so I can't remember. Uh the only thing I can think is that uh I concentrated it quite a bit. I boiled it down. You can emulsify uh if you look at like old Chinese stock techniques, they have uh like emulsified stocks where they just boil it hard, and the hard boiling along with the stuff that's coming out of the bones can emulsify it. But I would still think you would get some fat layer on the top.
So maybe uh someone, anyone on the Discord, uh, why don't you write in what your experiences are? Because I only have made emulsified stocks, uh, you know, like Chinese style emulsified stocks a couple of times. So someone like write in, let me know what you guys think, and we'll talk more about it next week. Doc Molotov uh says he wants to get a nitro press, uh, and it basically is talking about like putting nitrous into gas like uh into liquids like we were talking. Yes, but it I believe it just concentrates air, and I don't think if you're not storing it for a long time, that the extra oxygen is gonna be a problem, so I think you're gonna be fine.
And we got through all the questions, cooking issues.
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