Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you alive from the Heart of Manhattan Rugged Fellow Center, New York City, New State of Studios, joined as usual with John. How you doing? Do great thanks. Got Joe Hazen rocking the panels.
What's up? Hey. Sorry about that intro right there. Mess that one up. Yeah, I'm just sitting there like an idiot, staring in his face.
You know, yeah, true to form. Uh got Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. What's up? Hi. Hi, hi.
We do not have Mr. Molecules. I don't know what he's doing. I'm hoping he's getting his teeth ripped out, so I don't have to hear about No. Oh, son.
Oh, no. So he's so he's that he's at Doctor. He's at Dr. Coachella, I bet. Uh I wonder whether he saw the uh Weezer set after the uh the the wife of the Weezer guy uh shot shot at a cop and then got shot in the shoulder.
Or no, she didn't shoot at a cop. It's the weirdest story of all time. Someone's running through her backyard, right? So she comes out with a gun and then gets shot in the shoulder. Random.
And then they play Coachella like three days later. Yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy. Yeah. Yeah.
Hollywood, crazy place. Yeah. Crazy, crazy place. Uh, and in the upper, upper left, left, left, Quinn. How you doing?
Hey, I'm good. Good, good. Um, all right. So it's just us today. What do we got?
It's a uh, you know, no tangent Tuesday, which of course means only tangents. If you happen to be listening on Patreon and want to call in some questions, call in live to 917 410 1507. That's 917 410 1507. Uh, and tell them why they might uh wanna be on the Patreon so they can call in. Other than just calling in.
Yes, no. Whole bunch of uh perks. You get your questions answered uh first when you send them in, or you know, within the most timely manner that we can do it. Um then uh discounts with a lot of the great people that we work with, like Matt over at Kitchen Arts and Letters, uh the great folks over at Glassvin, uh Nick over at Grovenvine Olive Oil. I mean, yeah, just a lot of great things.
So check it out. Patreon.com slash cooking issues. Captain Oily, Mr. Mr. Bansuri, Bansurian bass.
He plays anything with a B in it. You think he can play a bassoon? Probably. Stas, see if you can play bassoon. I used to play a bassoon.
Really? Mm-hmm. Middle school. Wow. Taller than me.
What made you pick up the bassoon? Why the bassoon? Tallest instrument in the class. And that's what you did. You're like, give me the tallest.
I'm the shortest, and I always play the tallest. Man. So my double read. So how does that like so how's that work? Um it was a really interesting pucker on the mouth.
Um, but it was the two reads basically vibrating. It was cool. I just really enjoyed the instrument. I did really well with it. I played violin too, and um didn't really enjoy that.
So what made you drop the bassoon? How come you're not a bassoonist? We call them a bassoonist. Um I excelled very much in playing piano. Classical music.
I read classical and I just took off with it. Yeah? Yep. And so you're like, this bassoon is not for me. Nah, I mean, I was very good with my fan.
Yeah, yeah, good with the hands, played very fast. So, as a multi-instrumentalist, did that make you good at arranging? No. No, no. Didn't write my own music.
I played everything. I played every I read everything. Um, but I played everything that I enjoyed by ear. So, but arranging no. I was never a ranger.
I'm not a good sound designer. No. Not really. I know your skills, man. I I I have good ears.
I know what I like, but um, yeah. All right. Yeah. Uh so anyway, so what other B instruments can we get greasy to get on and play? Well, well, he'll learn it.
He'll learn. You know what? Joe can give him lessons. We'll rent, we'll rent a bassoon. Can you still go to a place and just rent an instrument?
I'm sure. Um, somewhere over here on like 34th Street and where the instruments are and all this. Well, I guess they're all gone, aren't they? Yeah, they're dead. They're all gone, right?
Yeah, yeah. Rogue music is gone. I I don't know, like, but that entire district is dead. Yeah, like you know, like everyone used to be like, oh, we're going in. We're gonna go see, we're gonna go.
You know what I mean? And like it's gone. We did it all the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All the time.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's awesome. Yeah. I mean, but uh I saw Rico Cassick in that neighborhood once back when he was alive. Weird dude.
Anyway, on to what we are uh what we were talking about. So, Quinn, what have you been doing with the spinzall and the uh uh so okay? So Quinn's been doing some experiments with uh spinzalls our centrifuge, right? So one of the things we've always done is make quote quote unquote butter, but we've never actually tested it to see that it is butter. We put it in the we put cream in the rotor and a solid comes out.
So your first thought is butter. Butter. Butter. But actually, we had some speculation before maybe it's not butter, maybe it's and Quinn thinks maybe the term of art, and we gotta talk this out, anti butter. What do you think?
Quinn, why don't you tell him tell him the tell him the story here? Uh yeah. Anti-butter or hyper cream. I like paper cream. I don't know.
Hyper cream just sounds so broy. You know what I mean? Hyper cream. And do you click on the cream and then get taken somewhere else? Cream?
What? Heaviest cream? Because it's already heavy cream. See? And light cream.
I didn't mind heaviest. I didn't mind it. So the whole point of it is is it's it's the um or inverse, it's the it's the actual. So butter is 80% fat, roughly, right? 82, right?
Percent fat. And the continuous face is phase is fat. So it is a solid fat with liquid water inclusions. It is a water in oil emulsion, right? Cream is a liquid, right, with probably solid fat globules suspended in it, but they're very small.
It is an oil in liquid emulsion. So the stuff that comes out of the spinzall, we think is still an oil in liquid, oil in water emulsion. In other words, it is like mayonnaise, just thick. So it but the benefit of that is that you can thin it out. And it so did you done have you had any successful tests with this yet, Quinn, or no?
Again, just my initial test where I essentially recombined the uh butter product, the butter phase, let's call it for lack of the phone. The anti butter phase, the inverse butter phase. It's not don't think of it as butter because if you no, but if you think of it as butter, yeah, but yeah, but so it's cheese. I mean, if you think of it in in as butter, then you're thinking of it. Here's the issue I have, and I've just wrote a whole crap ton about this about people who say milk clarified, right?
If you use improper terminology, even if you understand the difference, you're meant mentally in the back of your mind, pulling all sorts of other things into your mental conversation. And when other people who don't understand what you're saying hear a word that you use, right? They pull all of their like thoughts and ideas into it, and it leads to not understanding what you're doing. Not just in cooking. This is in every field where you have improper terminology or poorly made terminology.
Another one, milk washing. Crappy term I came up with. I should never have come up with that term. It was just one of the dumber coinages right up there with Hustino as stupid idea for me to have come up with milk washing because it's super confusing with fat washing, right? And then instead of using washing because it confuses people, people then say they're milk clarifying.
And the problem with saying you're milk clarifying is that then you think that using milk as a clarification technique is a neutral clarification technique, like using a centrifuge or even some gel techniques. Fact of the matter is it's a huge flavor stripper. So I think using proper or tr like thinking about your terminology isn't just a matter of, you know, being like correct or precise. It's a matter of making sure that the your future decisions will be good based on the intuitions that come with the terminology you use. See what I'm saying?
Anyway. Okay, well, let's let's go out the solid phase. Since it is solid. I mean, all right. The stuff that comes out of the rotor, what's what's chunky?
Yeah, all right. Yes. In my initial experiment, we re I recombined the solid phase with the original liquid phase that is separated from, and with relatively little you know, effort, it seemed to just recombine back into cream. Yeah. Um.
So yesterday I tested a different liquid that had less success. But I think I chose the wrong liquid to try first. Well, why do uh why why you why are you being so coy? Just tell them what you were doing so they know from that to start. What what was the liquid?
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Mainly because it's what I had around. I was drinking the tea all day like all day. And like, well, at least also I wanted something with the color so that I could see if it was like incorporating homogenously.
You don't own food you don't own food coloring? Well, okay, I don't I might not actually. But like my point is is that like I'm I believe before you did it, I was like, I don't know. T's pretty pe T's got a pot a lot of polyphenols. Gonna bind with the casein.
Might seize it up. I don't know. Somebody might have said that. Who was it? Oh yeah, me.
Me. Anyway, so I'm gonna I'm gonna run another experiment today with a more chemically neutral uh liquid. Although again it was interesting, the solid phase I made yesterday did appear more yellow than the one I made on Sunday. You mean prior to seizing? Yes.
Yeah, because one of the reasons that uh originally we thought maybe then you said you spun it. Was it was it warmer, colder? It should have been same same similar tinture. Right out of the fridge. Yeah.
And then same time. Hmm. Yeah, because usually the unit is not strong enough to break emulsions. So uh like that. So same brand of cream, same age.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, it was just what was left in the previous you know, jug of cream. Both no salt. Correct. Hmm. Interesting.
And one with a fresh container of cream. So I'm gonna do a double batch today. I might do just like two minutes left of speaking. And if that changes the yield a little. Yeah, so the our next step is to try to figure out what the fat content of this solid is.
And write in, see what you guys think the good term for for it is. You know, you've heard, you know, Quinn's ideas and you know, my lack of ideas. He thinks it originally what I like the problem with anti butter is it still has the word butter in it, but it is anti, right? So that like that helps because he's like it's the positron equivalent of like an electron in that it's the exact opposite. Because yeah, both because you got positrons and electrons do share a lot of other properties besides their charge, which is why it I think it works as an analogy, because other substance and butter do also have very similar properties in certain regards.
Yes, but they don't uh they don't annihilate each other and produce uh energy though. That's the one thing they don't read. I haven't tested it yet. That's true. I've never mixed I've never mixed regular butter with this product, but so uh what we're interested in what there's already a a brand of product called I Can't Believe It's Not Butter.
What do you mean it obviously? How do you not this isn't like always in the back of your head somewhere? And when you do it, you think of it, I think of Fabio, I can't believe it's not bothered spray. And then you gotta think of him getting hit in the face with a bird on the roller coaster. Which this is peak internet.
Watching Fabio get hit in the face with a bird, and he's not even he doesn't have a good sense of humor about it. You know who Fabio is, right, Quinn? Yeah, yeah. No, I'm saying it's a shame that already exists. Because wouldn't that be a great name for what we're making?
I can't believe it's not a butter. Yeah, you know what my friend always called it, I can't believe I bought this crap. Only he he used a slightly different different term. Oh man. Like I remember an era.
So okay, okay. So my grandparents, both sides actually bought margarine because they were depression era people. So they grew up like, you know, margarine because it's cheap. You know what I mean? And then my parents' generation were told to eat margarine because it was quote unquote healthy for them.
And then only the current generation grew up knowing that margarine not only tastes bad, but it's also a poison, right? And then they finally figured out how to make it, I guess, without the tr not that I, you know, necess I don't really know what the effects of trans fat are, but you know, I've read this in studies, but you know, I don't believe hardly anything that anyone tells me ever. You know, sky's blue, okay. That I'm good with. But the uh yeah, so now uh I saw another thing that now people are going back on on butter saying that whatever, just don't pay attention, eat what you like until your doctor has a specific reason why your particular body, your body in particular, shouldn't have X, Y, or Z.
That's when you gotta start start thinking about things, right? You know what we did? We tested you and we figured out that you in particular uh get hypertensive uh when you have extra salt. Not just, you know, you as a statistical number in space, but you an actual individual. Oh, okay.
Then you change your habits anyway. So also they they did do that too with my dad. They did do that. Son of a gun, I'm so sorry. So, like, so they but can he have all the salt he wants if he takes the proper medication?
And then that seems like a good choice. Like, I don't know what the side effects are, but if the side effect of not having the medication is I have to reduce my salt intake, I take the meds a hundred percent of the time, unless it's my nose falls off. Then well, if my nose falls off, but I can still smell, maybe I still keep the salt. You know what I'm saying? I don't know.
So what is there a medicine that can fix it or no? I don't I don't know. He's already on other medications. Like I don't know if there's like interactions. No, I'm gonna I think he's giving he's giving those other salt to try it.
Hey, Stas, what would you get? What would you give up? Would you would you get would you take the medicine no matter what the side effects were, or would you would you try to cut back on the salt? So um uh probably the medicine. Yeah, yes.
Yes, yeah, you take the medicine. Like like the side effects, like I say, would have to be severe. You know what I mean? Like to have because even if you didn't worry about salt, just the idea of having to worry when you sit down at the table, having table be stress instead of joy, is not worth it to me. You know what I mean?
Table as stressor instead of table as source of joy. Nightmare. Nightmare. Uh, you know what tastes bad? Salt substitutes.
I know we have some listeners, uh, you know, Patreon members who are uh who can't have salt for various reasons. I like, you know, there's gotta be a uh there someday I hope that like we get all I am hoping for all the technology in the world. I'm gonna get so crispy. When crisper when when we can just go to the pharmacy and crisp ourselves up and get crispy, like think of all the stuff we're gonna be able to do. Not just my flashlight in the middle of the forehead, which is what I want.
True. So you know my vision's bad. So everyone's like, why don't you just crispy your eyes so you can see in the dark again. I'm like, oh that's so much smarter than a flashlight in the center of my head. You know what I mean?
Some someone you know I think I'm getting I think I'm I'm I'm gonna cut mine for CRISPR first. I think I get I think I get first dibs. Yeah, yeah, yeah for sure. Are they are they working on stuff that could crispy that could help you out crispy? I mean I'm sure they I'm sure someone somewhere is doing if not exactly my condition, I'm sure they're doing something similar.
Yeah yeah yeah so you're saying we might not get like super crispy but you'll settle for just like a you know a little bit of a little bit of a nice pellicle on the outside of the crispness just like you know little little help. Yeah it it is it is just two genes. So well listen if anyone if anyone here is uh a crispy scientist, you know, we're here for you. Like you know we have uh you know we're all right Quinn? You're you're you're saying you want your you want to be first in line to the crisp parade.
Yeah. Oh yeah crisp yeah uh all right so uh what do you anyone cook any technique? I speak of pellicle I do have other cooking. All right what do you got? We broke down a um water buffalo chuck roast that we dry aged for 70 days and then we ground it into uh burgers.
It was quite good. So is there enough fat to protect the outside, or did you have to trim a boatload of meat off the outside of it? Uh we had to trim some, but it wasn't crazy. Uh-huh. And you know what's interesting about uh those kind of things is that you can really only measure drip or water loss off of the whole thing.
It's very hard for people at home to figure out how much they've lost out of the meat versus how much they've lost out of the outside part, you know what I mean? I think it's a it's a dish because no one has a as far as I know, or I haven't researched it. Maybe it is easy to like just jam a probe in like a soil moisture sensor and just be like boop boop because all of the meats, even when they're quote unquote dry, are still relatively high in moisture, right? So I don't know how I don't know how uh what's it called? Um how much resolution you get on those meters at the upper end of the scale.
Uh but uh yeah, because it would be interesting to know. Yeah. Like, did you measure the weight loss over the time on the whole piece or no? No, actually we we forgot to check beforehand. Because again, we weren't going for a particular you know, percentage loss, like with charcuterie.
Um, but I'm just curious to know what the loss is. You know, we had yeah, we had planned we had planned to unwrap it a lot earlier, but just life happened, but it was still good. Yeah. Oh, but it was it was totally wrapped in in the in so is wait, is it wrapped and in the fridge or where was it? Yeah, it was in the fridge.
Again, I use um it's called it's like uh I forget what the material is. It's some sort of plant-based like gel membrane. Like it's dry, but you wrap up your piece of protein, and then it just sort of regulates the moisture loss. So it slows down in a regular fridge. So like a collagen casing almost.
Yeah. But plant. Because God forbid you have meat against your meat. God forbid that an animal is killed to wrap your giant hunk of water buffalo. Okay, I think I think it just it just has the right uh properties in terms of regulating the moisture loss.
You know what my favorite uh my favorite like age, I think the age is just right, ground meat is Edwards. Very true. Edwards H. I have we're not all so lucky. What do you mean?
If they mail it, they can't mail it to you because of Canada. I mean, I I would assume not. Because I don't know. I mean, have you checked? I guess I could check.
Yeah. The only issue is you have to order the only issue with Edwards is you have to order a lot of it because if you don't order a lot of it, the shipping will kill you because it's shipped in a you know, it's an expensive way to have to ship meat. You know what I mean? Meat shipping meat is not cheap. You know what I mean?
So I think you you win more if you get more of it. You know what I mean? But his ground his ground beef. That far away, he's in California. I thought he was in the East Coast still.
No, Northern California, even. Yeah. Literally, he could put it on a paper airplane and throw it up to you. Well, not really, you'd have to go over Oregon and Washington. But does anyone even count those states?
Just kidding. You know what I mean? North that's northern Northern California. Just kidding. Just messing with you folks.
Um, yeah. Anyway. I try not to order from far away. You know this, Quinn? Have you actually looked at the numbers on anything that goes in a truck has completely wiped out the like the uh any sort of offset you might have?
Like the cheapest way is to ship something on a boat. I mean, carbon cheapest. You know what I'm saying? Like, it's like they're so efficient and they're so huge. You know what I mean?
That like shipping something a lower distance isn't the only metric of how much you're damaging the earth. If you just want to have stuff close to you because you feel like that's an interesting problem for you to have, kudos. You know what I mean? But like it would be so hard to actually judge things based on how much of a dent you're putting into the environment based on their shipping without a lot of knowledge. You know what I mean?
Whatever. I mean, knowledge I don't have anyway. Maybe you do, I don't know. Maybe you sit around studying this stuff all the time. I don't know.
It's it's interesting. It is still interesting to work with local water buffalo. I mean, that's just yeah, that's just fun for the whole family. Regardless. Do they make water buffalo cheese up there?
Uh yeah, I think one brand makes ricotta and not the real. Yeah, of course they don't. Not the water buffalo. Uh I can't get the milk. It sucks.
You can get the milk or you can't. No, I can't. You've tried and they save no crap on you. No, they're gonna go there and they just they turn all of it into stuff. Like yogurt as well.
Yes, okay, but if they turn all of it into stuff, then you if you email them and be like, I will pay whatever, give me like two quarts of it to F about with. You're saying they wouldn't? You're saying they're such a big operation that there's not a human who could be like, oh car. You know what I'm saying? I think we've tried that.
I have to go back and check. Yeah. I think my dad's tried that as well. Yeah. It all depends on who you get on the phone.
You know what I mean? Like sometimes you get really cool people on the phone. Sometimes you get it might be an insurance thing. They might not be licensed to sell you uh, you know. Yes, yeah, that's the other thing.
But you know, if it's not an insurance thing, there's nothing what's the skin off their nose? Like the one that makes me angry is I came so close to getting the two billion year old water from the Timmins mine in uh in northern Ontario. It's a huge, it's a it's this, I think zinc mine, and it's like a couple kilometers deep. They tapped into a reservoir of water that hasn't been evaporated and re-rained, hasn't gone through the water cycle in over two billion years. I'm like, you can get me some.
You know what I mean? And they're like, it tastes bad. I'm like, just get it. Just get it. You know what I mean?
And they're like, and this guy was like, I have some on my counter. I call I'm looking at it right now. I'm like, give me some. And then like it's privately owned, and I think that like their boss was like, nah, and then he moved his job, so I never got it. I wanted to make the old fashioned with like a little bit of like this in as like a bittering agent, because it's got like so it's so heavily mineralized because it's been chilling underground for two billion years.
That uh, and then like it just never happened. But it and it's literally just leaking and getting wasted. It's literally just like they're a mining, someone hit it with a stick, Moses style, water comes out of the rock, and it's just leaking. You know what I mean? It's just a waste.
You know what I mean? Hate it. Hate. Hate. Yeah.
Hate. So it's just a question of who you get on the phone, man. Get yourself some water buffalo milk. Hey, Stas, you want to hear something you're gonna enjoy? Yeah.
Okay, okay. So I'm riding to the show this morning, right? And this truck is you know how trucks can be a pain in the butt. Like they can't decide what side of the street they're gonna be on, but either side, they're gonna, they're gonna tear my like you know, human form into shreds on my bike, right? So I go around them, but then I have to stop real short.
I stand up like I'm gonna stop. I go back down onto the seat. The seat catches my pants just wrong, rips the crotch straight out of them. I am basically wearing chaps at this point around the city, and I have no extra pair of pants. So I'm just walking around, breeze coming into my, you know, in into my legs.
I'm like, you know what? I don't care. I don't care. Crap on all these people. You know what I mean?
Anyway. Uh it's like um, I'm akin to the uh remember the cowboy, the naked cowboy who would wear underwear? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I'm like that, but not buff.
But walking around all my all my all my stuff on display. Well, what what little there is. So I thought you'd appreciate that, Stas, because you like whenever I have an embarrassing situation happen in uh public, that's your that's your feeling. So you're like that, you're like that right now. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. Big big old hole. I I could yeah, big old hole. Like, big old hole, big old hole. Yeah, yeah.
Like, and in like the weirdest, like literally, like imagine you're coming back down on the bike and the point of the bike seat grabs your pants and it's like, nope. And just like, because it and it just goes in at the seam and just goes shroom and just like you know, rips it open. That's how I am right now. I mean, I can still button them, but it's like I say, it's like chaps. Yeah.
Remember, I know everyone's always said this, but just they're just chaps. You do not need to say that they are assless. Just chaps is all that's required. You know what I mean? Show me the pair of chaps with a butt, and then you then you have your your point.
Well, I guess mine still have a butt. There's crotch. These are more crotchless pants. These are more like if Frederick of Hollywood made pants for me, it would be this. You know what I mean?
Crotchless pants. Uh oh, hey, we're still selling the spins all 2.0 on sale, right? Gotta do that. Sell it. How much will I still on sale for $850 USD?
Yeah, and I think we're gonna keep it on sale until the ones uh are off the water. Right now we've got, you know, centrifuges on the water, fire in their eyes. Bam, bam, bam. We're gonna see when those things get in, you know what I mean? Anywho, uh, it's a good time to buy a centrifuge, especially if this trick with the butter, because what Quinn wants to do, and the issue is is if we can make it not seize, right?
Is imagine Quinn's goal is to make like a Burmonte that's refrigerator stable. Like texture of bur Bermante with those flavors in it, but it's just a liquid that you could just keep in your f in your fridge. And just you could do it cold, you could do it what I don't know if it's gonna work or if it's gonna seize up. I'm also gonna test basically a holland day that you assemble cold, stir it in the fridge, and then just drop it in a bath and see if it'll work. Yeah, why wouldn't it work?
Why wouldn't that work? I mean, like people have been I I you know, no one no one I mean everyone does from cold hollandaise now. I think nobody does the old school. Yeah, but then you have to don't you have to blend it afterward. With a whisk.
Oh, yeah. You don't need to like do anything crazy. Right? I don't do anything crazy with it. Hollanday is delicious.
My favorite. So good. So Hollandaise, you know, it's just a delicious, delicious, delicious sauce. Eggs Benedict is my last meal. Really?
It's like a tub of Hollandaise. Okay, so what is what is your ham of choice on a Benedict? Oh. You know, I'll admit I hadn't really thought that one through. You cheap or expensive?
Taylor pork roll? Taylor pork roll, good. Probably not Taylor pork roll, just I don't know, regular like quote unquote Canadian bacon that we have. No, no. Don't no, no.
No. First of all, if it's gonna be Canadian bacon, like like send away to Toronto and get real P meal P meal bacon, because that stuff's actually good. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Here's a good what?
Benedict with uh Mortadella. That'd be pretty good. I thought that'd be good. Yeah, probably good. Needs slightly more salt, but good.
Uh get this. So for those of you who are eating for a small group of people, like one, two, right? And you want to get yourself a tailored pork roll. If you don't know what a tailored pork roll is, why haven't you lived in the New York New Jersey, Connecticut major metropolitan area ever? But whatever.
It's like a it's like a describe this shape, John or Joe. Describe this shape. Taylor pork roll shape. Cylinder-ish. Yeah, but it's like it's like imagine if a liverwurst got big.
Yeah. No, but it's a cylinder and the edges are rounded, right? Yeah, but it's more like uh, yeah, it's it's like it's pretty big around. Like a big long pill. And they weigh like, I think two and a half, three pounds or something like that.
You know what I mean? They're so so it's it's it's a lot, right? Considering that you're only eating a couple slices of it. So what you should do before is you should uh pre-slice it, separate it with parchment, put it in a ziploc, and freeze it, and the parchment will make it so that it's super easy. That's what I've been doing, because I'm the only person in my house right now that eats it because Dax isn't away.
And so, like any time I'm cooking a breakfast, I'm like, I'm just gonna get two slices of tailored pork roll. And it lasts for infinity because it's in the in the freezer. The parchment they pop right out. They're so thin they thaw instantly, almost like the old stakehams used to, they stall saw instantly in the pan. So I don't pre-pac man them.
I pac-man them after they after they start to render out a little bit. I could pre-pac man them. You have to pac-man a tailored pork roll, otherwise, if you don't if you don't make that slice into the center, they cup up like a pepperoni, and then you're the the underside's not touching the pan. And then when you flip it, then only the one point touches. So you're just doubly dumb.
You're just the worst person in the world, two times in in in five minutes. So if you just Pac-Man it, if you just make that slice into the middle, then it lays flat. I've already talked about this on the air, but to any of you guys, when you were kids make what's called sea sausages? No. Oh my god, really?
So if anyone has kids, this is uh this is a I loved this. Of course, this was the 70s, right? You take hot dogs, I think they must have been skinned, right? It was the 70s, I don't know. And you cut them long ways in half, and then when you cook them, they bend into C's because the the this outside shrinks and the inside doesn't, so they turn into like C shapes.
And so we used to call them sea sausages. I eat the heck out of those. Well, I've seen a similar concept where you maybe turn hot dog pieces into little octopus food. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like that.
But uh well, I guess like who else? Some people do that. Some people score their hot dogs and do all like Toronto does some weird crap with their hot dogs, right? When they cook them. Weirdos.
Uh I can't think of something in particular. Yeah, but anyway, it's a good trick. Kids I used to love it. We put all kind of spices on the hot dog when you were gonna make because hot dogs you don't spice, but sea sausages, you can spice. Because spice sticks to the cut side.
You with me? Yeah. And then you can also like before they curl, you can get that cut side down and you can get some crispiness on that, and they put around, but you can even just make them in a toaster, they'll curl up in a toaster. I like anything that does that. You know what uh the old trick they used to teach for squid when you're stuffing squid, turn the squid inside out, and then they they close up on themselves better when you stuff them.
So you take the area you're gonna stuff, pop it inside out, those weird fins go on the inside now, and it makes like a nice trim-free squid machine. Yeah. I like that. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. I'm here for you, man. Although I cannot cook squid in my house less and it's fried. Because Booker will brook no other form other than calamari. You know what I mean?
Other than fried calmari. And it is delicious. It is delicious, but it just smells so the leftovers just smell horrible. Like squid trimmings, like is it our house perpetually smells like some form of squid, either like that iodine note that squid ink has, or f and it like it smears everywhere, or like you know, squid drippings or salmon or salmon drippings or salmon skin drippings or tuna filth. It's just one big like fish place.
It's like freaking nuts. Drives me crazy. Uh right. Stas, you have any good food this last week or no? No.
No. Any any any uh any interesting uh like going home and mixing your your chicken and rice? I still haven't tried this rice. They don't have it at my local Trader Joe's. I gotta get a brand name.
You have to go to Whole Foods. All right. I will try. Uh Elliot writes, I've heard people mentioned damaged starch as a consideration for milling flour. Uh at times I get the impression that milling finer makes more of it and that it absorbs more water.
That's both of those are true. Uh there's a direct relationship between in a stone or in a in a disc in an attrition mill as opposed to a roller mill, there is a direct relation between the for a given wheat, uh, between uh how finely you mill, how hot it gets, and how much damaged starch there is. Um, you know, especially on a single pass milling situation. Uh I don't know what to do with that information. If I want to make a cool, tasty sourdough with freshly milled hard red winter wheat, how do I decide how fine to grind and how does it interact with how fine to sift if I'm sifting?
Well, uh, I'm trying to figure out the second part of that. Um, you know, more info in a couple of months. Um I am might get access to some really cool equipment that lets me actually measure the uh all of these things out of home mills, and I have an invite, which I need to get back to them on, uh, to go up and and measure it, in which case uh I can tell you, but I have to wait until uh I'm done with my current round of bull crap before um I can get to it. But basically, the harder a wheat is, the finer you can grind it before it starts smearing. So if you take a soft wheat, so for instance, uh a wheat that I had really liked in the past was um uh Rouge de Bordeaux.
It's a great, it's a French wheat, kind of like a nice French wheat, got a great flavor. And I had been milling it for a while, but it was out of stock. Like you couldn't get it for like over a year. You couldn't buy it. And I bought, so when it came back in stock, I bought 40 pounds of it, right?
And so 40 pounds of it comes to my house. Now I have 40 pounds of rouge de Bordeaux. And this stuff doesn't mill anything like the rouge de Bordeaux I had before. It still has a nice flavor, but this batch is a lot softer. It didn't have a protein number on it, and it's a lot softer.
And what that means is that when I really choke down on my mill, which is what I normally do for when I'm grinding for flat for bread, uh, because I I I choke down on the mill when I'm trying to do that, right? Is it smears and glazes over the stone. So it just it dies. And then you have to take the whole thing apart, you have to grind rice through it to get your stones clean again. And so I haven't been able to make as good a rouge de Bordeaux bread with this stuff.
Made great pancakes, but it hasn't made as good a rouge de Bordeaux bread as I had before. So a lot depends on your wheat. If you have a hard enough wheat, you can then choke down and get like a decent amount of starch damage, right? But it's very hard to know uh when you sift, because when you sift something that's been ground differently, it looks a lot different. If you take a microscope or even your iPhone, if you have an iPhone, I mean I'm sure Google phones do it as well, but you do the macro mode and you get close, you can get a pretty decent picture of what the brand looks like post-sift, and they look very different.
So it's very hard to know. But typically in a soft wheat, the stuff the uh starch granules aren't bound together as hard. There's not enough protein holding those starch granules together. So when they break apart, they tend not to get damaged. So no matter how finely you grind a uh a softer wheat, you'll have less starch damage than you will in a hard wheat, where just the act of cracking it apart is gonna break some of the starch granules.
And broken starch absorbs something like three times, you know, three or four times as its weight in water as opposed to regular starch, which you know, uh which if you take cornstarch and you make a one-to-one mixture of water and cornstarch, it's a liquid. You know what I mean? Because that starch is absorbing almost nothing. You know what I'm saying? Whereas uh damaged starch can absorb tremendous amounts of water, so it really, really, really increases the amount of absorption that you have.
However, when you're baking, if you have amylase activity, like let's say you add malt, then it can die out in the uh in the in the oven because the amylase, as it heats up, it's a fairly high temperature enzyme, will eat that damaged starch, you'll lose your water holding capacity before you set the set the protein in the dough, the protein structure in the dough, and boop, you collapse out. So damaged starch is one of those things where like you want some of it, but you don't necessarily want too much of it. Now, if it's a flatbread, then go for it, you know what I mean? Because then you if you like like a pita, uh well, I don't know about pita, I haven't studied it actually. But like it like a tortilla or you know what one of these kinds of things, you or shapati, like damaged starch is your friend because it's increasing the amount of liquid you can dump into the dough and still not have it be sticky.
And you want that because you want it to puff. So you want a very high hydration dough that's relatively easy to handle, and so damaged starch is your friend. And that's why when they're measuring the flour that's coming out of the atta, the atta flour they're coming out of the uh, oh, what's the word? CH something, the grinder they use to make the Indian uh atta flour, it's very, very hot, and the starch is very damaged. And so because they're looking for maximum water hydration, uh uh hydration for that double.
Anyway, I hope that helps. Um we did this, did we decide that this person is butts or butes? I think it's butts. Or butes. Or buts.
But uh, is there an easy way to convert the absolutely diabolically stupid system of imperial measurements uh from cups, ounces, teaspoons, tablespoons, or three quarters of a teaspoon directly into grams or milliliters. No. No. No. There's not.
So no. No, look, get this. Guess how stupid this is. So let's do this as a group project. So, Nastasia, like we're never gonna build that scale, right?
Oh, I don't know, Dave. I mean, don't give away your shit because you like it's not working out right now. God. I thought we weren't okay. All right, anyway, point is no.
Uh uh, no, you can't because it could well look. You can blame all of this on a group of very well-meaning people uh in like the late 1800s, early 1900s who were trying to quote unquote make cooking scientific, and they did it with these units in the United States. And then we've been stuck with them kind of ever since. Like the Fannie Merritt Farmers of the World, uh, you know, the Boston cooking schools of the of the universe, like all of those recipes. So you went from a system of no measurements at all to something much more scientific, but using implements that you might have around the house.
And it's just a nightmare. So, like, for instance, whenever I see a recipe and it's like two cups of slivered almonds, I'm like, oh. What the hell does that mean? You know what I mean? Am I measuring the nuts and then slivering them?
Like, what the hell? Like powdered sugar, do I pack it? Do I not pack it? Brown sugar, everyone knows you gotta pack brown sugar, right? And so in general, what I'll do is I keep my own list of uh kind of my standard, like what those things are.
So, like, flour is widely variant. So if you ask some person what a cup of flour is, they'll say it's 109 grams. Other people say it's 120 grams. It really depends. It's that's a very big range, right?
I think my standard is I forget like 112 or something like that, really also depends on the kind of flour you're using. Powdered sugar did a weird, you know what I mean? So no, there's not an easy, there's not an easy way because if things had a uniform density, then you could just look up a number. But the fact of the matter is is that they don't have a uniform density most of the time. Certain things, sugar even granulated sugar, you can you can like quote unquote tamp it down.
If you take a if you take sugar and then put it into a cup, strike it off, then cover the cup and tap on it, you'll settle it about 10%. You know what I mean? So even something as you would think fully densified as granulated sugar is not. So it's just a nightmare. Liquid measurement relatively easy, right?
Relatively easy. Liquid measurement. Um, so no, no. Uh I know that one couple of things. Yeah, the real trick.
Yeah. Is just whatever you're especially for baking, again, because the flour and the sugars are so variable. Just crave hope. Somebody in the UK developed a equivalent recipe to what you're looking for. Yeah, but then you have to trust someone from the UK.
That's even worse. Just kidding. Just kidding, UK. Um, but the I mean, I always pray for uh, you know, both units. Uh and I, you know, in my recipes, I'll always put both units.
There are some things. So you remember when so I think it was Sola who was here, and she was saying that, you know, in her book, she said, I didn't bring it up because I didn't want to get into a whole crap storm, that like she actually prefers things like teaspoons, tablespoons for things like, because you can do a half of a teaspoon, whereas a lot of people's scales aren't accurate enough to weigh, let's say, a half a teaspoon of baking powder. And like I kind of get it, but on the other hand, just give both. Because the the the reason to give real measurements, and like sometimes people give me crap on some of my measurements I gave, they're like, you gave out to the decimal. I'm like, well, what if someone multiplies the recipe by 10?
I want the recipe to work, right? I would rather you I would rather give you a number that's unachievable in accuracy for you, so that then when you multiply it by a billion, you're not increasing your error error by a billion. You know what I mean? So it's like, you know, give if you know what the real number is, give the real number and let someone be inaccurate with it. That's my my take.
And then if you want to give somebody a teaspoon measure, then give it to them. Now we're now, like Madame or Monsieur Le Boot, we are about to, we're about to get into something that I do disagree with you on. Also, can somebody please explain what uh whatever the loving heck a hell a pinch a pinch equates to? Whose pinch are we talking about? Was there a guy 3,000 years ago called Jimmy the pinch?
It would be amazing if 3,000 years ago that I wonder how you say Jimmy the pinch in in Latin. Does anyone here know any Latin? Jimmy the pinch. Jimmy the pinch. Did he create this pinch and how much is a pinch?
All right, listen, here's what a pinch is. It is, I don't want to write down the amount that I'm adding. That's what a pinch is. A pinch is add some, I can't do the math, shut up about it. Or it's it needs a little bit, but really depends on all of the other crap that you've done, and I don't really know your taste or your cook cooking, and so just add a pinch, or it's like unmeasurable, but I want it to be there.
That's what it is, right? So as someone who has to write recipes for people, I will use this. So for instance, I'll be like, add four drops of 20% saline solution or a pinch of salt. Because I'm like, at that point, I don't care. If you're not measuring, right, then like what does it matter?
You know what I'm saying? Uh I don't know what you think, John. Yeah, no. Sounds yeah, pinch on it things. For me, it's like a three-fingered thing, but that's insult.
I don't know, yeah. But it's yeah, yeah. But the point, the point is it's is it's it's a way for me to just be like, uh Yeah. Yeah, yeah. How much?
Well, my other favorite unit, some my most favorite unit, as anyone who has ever actually cooked with me knows, is the correct amount. How much should I add the correct amount? You know what I mean? Uh yeah, duh. The amount that makes it taste good, moron.
You know what I mean? Like that that's the that's the amount you should add. Because some stuff's just unknowable. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I would say there's like there's like especially baking or certain mixtures that you can't like just taste easily.
You know, I think there's other ingredients, the ratio of them is more important, and then minor ingredients are just less important to be precise about if they are just for flavor and not for some sort of like structure. Yeah, minor ingredients would be a great punk band, wouldn't it? Minor ingredients. It's like minor threat, but like more of a cooking theme. Can you imagine how bad an only cooking themed punk band would be?
Like an old school or like a hardcore band. Yeah, terrible. Yeah, not good. Even Jack wouldn't go to that show. Talk about him like a dog.
He's now at Dr. Coachella's, as far as we know. You see, what if Stas, Stas. What if the spin doctors got back together and he was actually seeing the spin doctors at Coachella and could then actually say he was at the doctors? Yeah, that's good.
Why do you call it Coach Coachella? Well, I've never been there. I don't know. Isn't it next to Palm Springs? Yeah, but that's not the point.
I don't know. What am I supposed to call it? Coachella? Yeah. Isn't there an A in it?
Yep, but why are why are you? That's not the way it's like it's like coach. It's a coach. Coach, yeah. You don't you don't buy co-ach bags and coach coach cheese?
Um, I guess. Coach is coach. So you think it's I don't know, it just looks like Coachella. If it was gonna be an Italian word, how would you pronounce it, Quinn? Uh Coachella.
Cause C H is heard Card. Should I go with that? Yeah. Sure, sure. Jack is at the Coachella.
Right? Let's say it like that. Anyway. Uh at the doctors, seeing the seeing the spin doctors. The spin doctors, by the way, people won't believe this, but if you even remember who the spin doctors were, when I was in high school, they were playing all, I was wasn't cool enough to go, but all the cool kids would go into the city to like a place like the wetlands, which was a like a very well-known club here in New York, and they'd be like, Oh, I'm going to see the spin doctors.
And they were actually cool. Think about this. The spin doctors were this is what happens when you get overplayed. The spin doctors were like legit cool, right? And then, like, you know, they they this got saturated on the airways, and then all of a sudden no one, no one who had the cred before would listen to them, and all of their new people didn't stick with them long enough.
So they got spun out. Sad. You know what I mean? Fun out. Spun out.
But you know, little miss, little miss. How many billion times do people my age hear that song on the radio? Like infinity. Saturating it. How many years does it take when you're saturated with a song before you can hear it again?
Like, have you guys ever had any songs that like were ruined for you, and then you thankfully didn't hear it for like like a decade, and when it came back on, you're like, okay. Or you still like I don't. I've made I've saturated myself listening to songs, and then took like three or four years to get back to them. Like if you throw up on gin. Ugh.
And then how and then it takes you a while to come back to gin. Yeah. Yeah. Ugh. Yeah, that takes a while.
Everyone's like, you know what? You know what I can never get back to? Southern comfort. I had a bad Southern Comfort experience when I was young. Oh, dude.
For me, it's Jose Cuervo Tequila. Can't do it? Horrible experience. You don't like a lot of tequila things as a result of that one time with uh with your boy Jose. Treated you so wrong.
Chef boy RD, yeah. It's terrible. You know Chef Boy R D was a real dude? Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, I've seen videos. Looks awesome. Really? Yeah. They're out there.
I tell you, my crazy uncle, my crazy uncle Ralph, Pit Boss Reno, once I once asked him a cooking question because he had an opinion about food. So I asked him a cooking question. What am I chef boy RD? That's what he said to me. I'm like, no, Uncle Ralph, you are not Chef Boy R D.
But I which was like that was the pinnacle of cooking to Uncle Ralph with Chef Boy RD. Anyway, Jimmy the pinch. All right, Catherine writes in, I've been baking focaccia at work, but I've had issues with it rising like a loaf of bread rather than staying flat and bubbly the way a focaccia usually does. I'm using fresh milled Glen Wheat sifted at 90% extraction at about 14% hydration. Uh sorry, 14% protein with about 80% hydration, using 8% uh olive oil and 20% of a starter.
No, good info. I like the wheat for its flavor, uh, but it's gluten maybe contributing to the structure that gives it that rise. Uh, I also like I also stretch and fold throughout a four-hour bulk before an overnight coal proof, which may be adding too much structure. I want it to rise and inflate in the oven, just don't want it to dome the way it does. Well, you know, unfortunately, Catherine, I am not, I don't bake a lot of facaccia, so I'm not a super focaccia expert.
Now, if you say it's bready, not just the dome situation, but uh a lot of stuff, I mean, if you you must know this because you're doing a lot of it, but like uh these high extraction flours tend to have more bread like in the sense of like uniform crumb structure. It's more difficult. Because remember, even at your protein, and I looked up Glenn, it's uh hard, hard red. Oh my god, was it a hard red spring? I think it's uh I think it's a a spring.
So the question is really like gluten versus gluten versus protein. But here, I don't know. I'm gonna have to think about it. I gotta find someone who works more in in facaccia, because it seems like if it's doming in the center, I would just I don't understand why it would dome in the center unless it's too elastic and pulling back. In which case, when you're panning it, right, I would give it a rest when you pan it.
Like, you know when you do Detroit pizza and you don't want to deflate it too much, right? So you oil your pan, and then you because I used to do Detroit pizza quite a lot with high extraction flour. And sometimes if it was a little too snappy, did you say uh how how you did it? Hold on a second. Uh I don't know.
Did Catherine say how long it's it's uh it's doing bulk four-hour bulk overnight cold proof. So with that a length of time on a lot of the uh high extraction flours that I use, the dough will get slack, so I would be surprised that it snaps back that much, especially at that hide hydration. I'm suspecting that the doming is because of snap back so that it's actually higher in the middle when it starts than it then it would be. And the way I get around that for, like I say, for um Detroit is just a double pull. So you just you do your oil, you do your stretch, you lay it down, you cover it before you proof, and then you wait like 15, 20 minutes.
The dough will relax again. Then after it relaxes, you can stretch it out the last bit of the way and get a real really even kind of thing before you do your final proof. And it might be difficult because you say that you're doing you're doing a cold proof, right? So maybe if you if you shape it a little bit before your bulk, right? If you shape it a little bit before your bulk and just have uh uh you so if you if you do a pause between when you bulk it and you overdo your cold proof and just put an extra stretching step into it, maybe that'll work.
Get back to me and tell me whether whether I'm on the right track or not. Uh Gene W writes in, My chicken shop recently closed. I'm so sorry that your chicken shop closed. There was a chicken shop down by me that closed that I really, really liked. I like a good, I like a good, you know, independent chicken shop, especially if they're doing like cool or interesting stuff.
Kung Fu Chicken down by me closed, and I still miss it to this day. It was right next to the Chinatown bus, and they had like anyway, whatever. They their squid game, their fried squid game at the chicken shop was anyway. Uh my chicken shop recently closed, and I still have a hennypenny 30 liter pressure fryer. I would love to hear you all muse about what you would do with it besides fried chicken.
Well, uh, well, Gene, I've never owned a pressure fryer. I've always wanted a pressure fryer. So why don't you tell us? Because I would do nothing but sit around all day being like, yep, nope, yep. Right.
So you wouldn't want to do here's what you wouldn't want to do, right? You wouldn't want to, in my mind, you wouldn't want to pressurize a French fry because you're trying to get rid of water. Right? So, but maybe I'm wrong. Like maybe, maybe the initial blanch out, you want to keep the temperature low and you want to really cook out the inside of the French fry before it dehydrates, you could do a pressurized low temperature cook step, then turn the uh heat up heat up and blast out some of the water, then let it wilt.
I don't know. I don't know. Maybe there's some sort of ramp profile. How much I don't also know because I've never owned one, what pressure they get to. So what the quote unquote internal maximum internal temperature of the thing is.
But what you anything big that you wanted to deep fry would be awesome in it. Anything physically large, so that you want to increase the temperature of the liquid of the liquid inside the meat so that you can get faster cooking, I would think maybe a prime category. What do you think, Quinn? You got anything you would want to do? I wonder if you could do some variant on like a granitas.
But why do you need it to be a high, I mean like with like a one-step? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I don't know how what pressure it gets to. So if you were going to do like when I what and also you you get a lot of moisture loss.
So, like when I'm doing those things like in a second ring environment, I'm still looking at like 20 minutes, right? So you're looking at a 20 minute time at 259 Fahrenheit, right? Whatever that is, Celsius. So 20 to 25 minutes in that range, uh, and then shred and fry to get the crispiness. I don't know.
I don't know. Because I don't think the stuff is getting that hot, is it? In a handy pan. I don't know in other words, like the oil is hot. For those of you, the the you have to in your mind, what's awesome about a pressure fryer is you separate the temperature of the cooking medium, but in a regular air air fryer that you're frying out in the air, not an air fryer.
An oil fryer in at atmospheric pressure, the liquid on the inside of the meat can never go above 212 degrees Fahrenheit ever. Or you know, 100 Celsius. I mean, that's the rules because you don't have any pressure on it. You know what I'm saying? Uh so you know, salt, whatever.
Don't get nitpicky with me. Especially you, Quinn. Don't get nitpicky with me. Anyway, but then when you pressurize it. I know.
You're thinking it though. When you pressurize it, right, then all of a sudden the liquid on the inside of the meat can get to a higher temperature, right, than the regular boiling point. And things like collagen that you want to break down respond to that increase in temperature quite dramatically. So you can take things and break them down. You can cook through faster to the center, which is why they use it for chicken, but you can also uh you can also just um increase the rate at which you break things down like collagen.
So there's got to be some sort of like fried pot roast that you could do. You know what I mean? I don't know. I don't know, Gene. You tell me.
Uh Michael M. writes in there's a cocktail at Schmuck, which is the relatively recently owned bar down uh uh opened bar down here in uh in New York, called strawberries and cheese. It reminds me a bit of your clarified and carbonated strawberry margarita. I'm 90% sure it's just clarified strawberry juice and tequila, milk punched with parmesan powder and carbonated. Have you ever tried using cheese powders for clarification?
No, I don't know that they would work because like they've already been clotted, right? So like I don't think that they'd be as good uh clarifying it. But things that you can do if it is parm, first of all, the easiest way is to just use lactic acid. So you add any form of milk like whey stuff and just use lactic acid, and people are like, oh, it tastes like cheese. But uh another thing that uh you can do is uh make a parmesan broth.
So Wiley used to do this, a lot of people used to do this. You can buy the rinds cheap, or you can save the rinds if you use a grating cheese of Parmesano, you make a broth with it. The broth is clear. So then that then can be used as an ingredient that has that cheese flavor. Then you jack it with you jack it with lactic acid, and then it gets the sourness that you would want uh in uh in a cocktail.
No, I mean, no I mean. I wanted to do a cream cheese uh syrup and fabulous at the bar was like, well, we'll just add lactic. We'll maybe do a regular cream syrup and just add lactic acid. I was like, come on, man, I want to make a cream cheese here. Because I want it.
We were gonna do like I don't do food in general. I don't do food, you know, it's food style drinks, but we were gonna do a New York cheesecake. That'd be good, right? A New York cheesecake drink? It'll be good, it'll be good.
The question is, how do you get the gram clack cracker flavor? Do you need an infusion? Like a brand, like a like a like a like a bran and like like cinnamon sugar infusion? What? What do you do?
I don't know. Yeah, you guys tell me. Cooking issues.
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