Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live from the heart of Manhattan Rockefeller Center, New York City, New Stand Studios, joined as usual with John across from how you doing? Doing great, thanks. Yeah? Yeah.
Nice. Nice. Here. Got Joe Hazen rocking the panels. What's up?
Hey, how are you doing? Welcome back. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Uh got in, well, she's gonna call in any second, but still got in LA back from the doctor's visit to Coachella.
By the way, Nastasia was talking about you like a dog last week. Uh Jackie Molecules, how you doing? Oh, why why? What did I do now? She was basically saying that the doctor you're going to is Coachella.
That's what she was saying. Is that what she's thinking? I'm not gonna say yes, because I'm not gonna put words in there, but that the words that came out of her mouth was Jack is lying. I don't know if that was in her heart, but that was in her mouth. That's okay.
I don't need it. I don't need it. This is not, you know, junior high. Hello. Hey, we got Nastasi the Hammer Lopez.
How you doing? Everything good? If yeah. Um it's not Coachella. It's just not Coachella.
Oh, Christina's sake. Okay. I'm never gonna go in my whole life. I could call it like I could call it pigpoop.org. It doesn't matter.
You know what I mean? Anyway. Uh what? What is the type of music that you play on a thing that's a disc? Wait, vinyl?
No. What's the other word? That starts with an A. Accordian music. No.
What is another word for vinyl? Uh record? Discs. Clatter? Album.
Album. Uh yeah. Uh, what about album? How do you say it? You always say album.
And I'm like, he they put out a good album. No! No. Heartbreak City was a great album. It's not album.
Okay. And in the upper left, we got some we got ourselves some Quinn. How you doing? Hey. I'm good.
Yeah? Yeah. Nice. Uh so did you not go to did you not go to Coachella? I did, but I went on Thursday.
I don't know why anybody thought I was there on Tuesday. And how bad was the festival food on a scale of how bad was it? Yeah, yeah. Didn't they didn't they once uh hire someone who tried to make it really, really good? Well, do they do this like outstanding in the field dinner, which I've covered.
I used to I covered for the old network. I did sort of interviews about that. The Valdemar network fine fine. It's like, you know, yeah, yeah. It's like, you know, it's like a four or five course seated meal.
But it's just I found it silly because you're like right next to these enormous EDM tents, and it's just like the table shaking from bass, and sometimes the festival sold out, so the people you're sitting with at the table are just kids like on drugs that needed to get a ticket, and this was the only one available. So they're just fighting through this expensive meal. So you're saying you're saying that the people there aren't necessarily appreciating what they what they had, and they put it in the wrong place. Is there a mellow part where they could have put this tent? You know, uh that was many years ago I had that meal, so I don't know if they've improved it, but that was my experience back then.
I'm trying to imagine a young Jack Insley hating on EDM. Um, I mean, yeah, imagine it. I mean, it will EDM could mean a lot of things, I guess, right? So there's a lot of different flavors of the colour. Electric discharge machining.
You're you're talking about electric discharge machinery, right? Oh, you did? Were they good? Yeah. Were they good?
They're yeah, fantastic. Are they are they alive or are they mannequins? No, it's it's one remaining original member, but then they've sort of rotated people out over the years. Is it one 95-year-old person and then two teenagers? That'd be amazing.
No, they're they're all very old. So But do they have like actual supports holding them up on stage or no? No, no, no. They're still they're standing at their little, you know. The oldest station, the oldest famous person I ever saw was John Lee Hooker, like a like a couple of years before he died.
And the only time he stood up was when he went on the stage. He was on a chair in a chair the rest of the time. And I was like, okay, fine. You know what I mean? Good.
Got to see. Yeah. It's not also like he could have been playing. I guess maybe he always kind of played sitting down, maybe. I don't know maybe he wasn't a standing kind of a guitar kind of a kind of a fellow.
I saw Ray Charles when he was soup dupe old too, but he was at a pyana. So that's why. You know what I mean? Like if you're sitting seated at a piano, you're not expecting someone to get up and do like Jerry Lee Lewis shenanigans at a piano. Hey, piano player, you know who lived for here's someone who lived a lot longer than I bet you thought he did.
If you had to guess how old Fats Domino was when when he died, you would probably guess pretty young with a name like Fats Domino and being alive all back in the day and being a rock and roll musician. You know what's funny? I was just talking about him just the other day. Didn't he pass away during COVID? Yeah.
He lived like for a long time. He was like there was a weird thing where he was found on his roof. Yeah, well, he during Katrina. Oh, Katrina, right. During he didn't die during Katrina, but they thought he was dead.
People were like posting, you know, rip fats. And he's like, still here. Still walking through New Orleans. On the roof? Yeah, yeah.
And like, you know, and he was much more influential than people kind of gave him credit for because we only know the you know, most people only know the blueberry hills song, which is good, but that whole rolling piano sound, that was kind of his sound. You know what I mean? So how so how old was he? I don't know, but he look, his first hit was in the 50s, right? He wasn't exactly a youngster when his first hit came out, and he was alive up until COVID.
Oh. So dude had to be, you know, as we say, enfrancae, old. Mm-hmm. You know what I mean? Mm-hmm.
I'll say old. Yeah, yeah. Vieille. View. Vieux.
View. Uh we're gonna get into some Francophile crud later on. But did you uh see any uh good uh good you saw craft there craft work there? I know they were playing in New York. Yeah, there they were that was really like one of that was my highlight.
Um how much is a ticket into the how much is a ticket into there cost? Because it cost the cheapest seats in New York were over a hundred bucks. Right. Well, it's like five hundred, six hundred bucks for the weekend because it's a three-day thing, but you're seeing, you know, I saw probably seven shows that I really liked. So the cost works for me.
Um we go every year. So it's kind of just like I like checking out stuff that uh I don't even necessarily love. Like Lady Gaga was fantastic. I was about to say, did you are you saying you don't love Lady Gaga? Because that would be an inappropriate thing to say.
She's great. I was uh I went to school with her, weirdly. Come on. Really? My freshman or yeah, my freshman orientation buddy was dating her.
Like before she was Stephanie, she was Stephanie. So what would you germ it out? What was she like in high school? Um, just like a singer songwriter that, you know, had posters all over school about the show. She's she played like the bitter end and all that, but it was not what she became that was very like, you know, like girl at the piano.
Weepy high school stuff. Uh sort of a little bit. Maybe a little musical theater y, but I mean it's just it's so it's weird. And she's on stage and she's like, you know, I want to thank you all for being here on this journey with me for the last 20 years. And I was like, geez, you've you've done a lot more in 20 years than I have since we were at school.
Yeah, but you know, it's a different different thing. I mean, she wasn't famous back then. It wasn't like in high imagine in high school, she was like, Mama Mama. You would everyone would be like, what the hell? You know what I mean?
Like her dance anthems are fantastic. You know what I'm saying? Like Lady Gaga has like say what you like about her, right? Fantastic dance anthems. I mean, like, you could just sweat yourself to death on some of those tunes.
You know what I mean? Anyway. Yeah. Regardless of what you think about her as a musician or a person. I don't know anything about her as a person.
She's really talented and apparently very nice. So I mean, how nice can you be at that point? Yeah. You know? I mean, you're not really connected to the earth anymore, right?
Like, how you're like floating, like someone's holding you down with a thread and you're like floating around that. I mean, how what does niceness even mean at that point in your life? You know what I mean? How many ultra ultra ultra? Yeah.
Well, that right, I guess you could not not be terrible, but like when you're completely disconnected from anything normal, like it's gotta be hard to not just be like we lee. You know what I mean? Yeah. The more the more people you know that have no checks on them at all, aren't they in general just like in their own kind of lala land? You know what I mean?
I mean, does it happen with chefs? Oh yeah. Not always. Uh oh yeah. Oh yeah.
Yeah. They're surrounded by people who tell them, yes, chef, all the time. Yeah. They go bonk alks. John, back me up on this.
Yeah, no, 100%. Um I think it's always well again, it's like it's a low bar in a sense, you know, but I always enjoy hearing of celebrities like being good people when they're at restaurants and not being total dicks. Yeah. Um, and treating staff like human beings and not entitled pieces of crap. Who's the case?
But it's like that's how everyone should be. Um who's the favorite person you've ever served? Celebrity person. I haven't served a celebrity in a while. Um but I don't know.
It's like going to there's a restaurant I enjoy going to, uh, done by Temperance, Manetta Tavern, and they get a lot of celebrities, and you can see some that are real self-centered, not nice people, and some who were actually really nice and kind on the way out. And I always appreciate seeing that. Nastasia deals with that all the time, but she can't talk about it. She's gonna get mad at me for even mentioning that she can't talk about it. That's how much she can't talk about it.
But I will say the coolest, Steve Busemi. Oh, is it that? Steve Semi. Super cool. Super cool.
And he came up, Stas, you were there. He came up to get a drink from us at that, at that uh what's it called? That uh the Thanksgiving farm uh thing that we were doing, and I had let Jen, my wife, serve him because I forced her into duty that night. Super cool. Super cool dude.
Yeah, I guess I don't know. Like the coolest person I cooked for was Roger Waters, and he wasn't particularly No, he's not gonna be cool. No, he's a known. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Like Yep. You know? Yeah. Please.
So at when Roger Waters is in, do you play music specifically to troll him? No, we should have, though. That'd be amazing. For those of you who are don't know what we're talking about, Pink Floyd. Pink Floyd, the wall.
Yeah. Uh all right. Uh what do we got? What do we guys? What do we get?
What do we got? What do we got? What do you got this week? What's going on? Oh, by the way, if you have some questions and you're listening on the Patreon, call in your questions to 917-410-1507.
That's 917-410-1507. And if you're not on Patreon, John, why don't you tell them why they might want to be? Go to patreon.com/slash cooking issues, and you can see all the different uh benefits to the member different membership levels. Um you get access to our Patreon, or no, sorry, through the Patreon, you get access to our Discord. Um, you get discounts with uh great people that we work with, like Matt over at Kitchen Arts and Letters, who's finally coming over to a temperance tomorrow night for dinner.
Yeah. Um you can invite him back on the show to do the classics in the field. Yeah, we should. We should. Um what we should do?
We should have him do roundups of books that are coming out and then have those people on after he does the roundup. That that is that is a good idea. Yeah. Um but yeah, all these great things and more, just go to patreon.com slash cooking issues. Nice.
Uh all right. So what are you okay? Nastasi, you got anything? Or are you gonna tell me no again? You can tell me no, or you're gonna give me something.
I have to think. All right. While you're thinking, Jack, I know that you were sick for a long time. Did you finally get your teeth ripped out or what? Yeah, two two more weeks, uh three more weeks?
I don't know. Your dentist can't be that good, dude. Oral surgeon, excuse me. Your oral surgeon can't be that good. It can't be that good.
I I don't ha I don't have dental insurance. So I am uh, you know, I have to play a little bit of uh of shell game here to get the right like get a good oral surgeon that's not gonna kill me with money and it's it's how much cheaper would it be just to like go across the border? Either border. You know, I I considered that, but then who's driving me home from Tijuana? Like, you know, that's I already brought up the cars once, but you just brought up who's gonna drive you home tonight.
You just you brought it up. You brought up who's gonna drive you home, not me. Um but you could stay over. You don't need to drive home the same day. I mean, I have work to do.
That's you know, I can't just go to Tijuana. Okay. All right. I mean, I wonder I wonder how much cheaper and better it would be down there, though. Probably a lot.
Apparently, yeah, a lot, I think. Yeah. But yeah, my mom's visiting this week, so I can't do anything. Does she drive? Uh I mean.
All right. Uh, all right. All right. What about you, Quinn? I know you I know Quinn.
I know Quinn's got something for us. Anything more on the butter roundup on the spins all anti-butter roundup? Yeah, I'm well, we had I I did ask uh people on Instagram what we should call it. Do you want to hear some uh highlights of their suggestions? I like that you're only gonna give me the highlights, which leads me to wonder what are the low lights?
I kind of want to hear the worst suggestions first. Well, I mean, I don't want to I don't want to call anyone out. Oh, and by the way, whoever is about to get called out, this is Quinn's opinion that you're the worst, not ours. Okay, I'm kidding, quick. Go ahead, guys.
I'm not I'm not gonna name name. All right. I'm just gonna tell you. Because no one could look it up on Instagram. Okay, go ahead.
Yeah. Uh butt future. That was one. Wait, but future? Fugure.
F-U-G-E-R. Oh. I was thinking no, yeah, that doesn't work. Butt fugure. I like I like anything with butt in it.
But but but but not not not no. Okay. All right. What else you got? Uh heavy G cream.
That's a good. Heavy G. Yeah. All right. All right.
Heavy G. Because of the high G forces. Yeah, alright. Yeah. Centrifudge, which doesn't make sense.
But although now I'm thinking, is there some sort of could we get cocoa powder into the cream and somehow make some sort of like fudge solid fudge cream? Now I'm thinking about it. I tried something like that a while ago. The cocoa powder goes to the edge of the rotor and the butter still goes in. Right.
You we need to we need to somehow I wonder what you could do. Yeah. Astro butter. That was interesting. Why Astro though?
Cause because uh I don't know. Because everyone likes Astro World, the uh Travis Scott album. Spludge. Not not feeling that one. Spludge.
I can't even say that on the radio more than once. If there was an FCC, we would be, we would be knocked out right now. What else? Butter is all. I like the spirit of that one.
Yeah, yeah. It doesn't trip off the tongue though. Butter fuge, like that's you know, similar to the first one. Right, but you gotta remember, but without without sounding like butt butt butt. But the remember the issue I had with all these before is that if you say that it's butter, you're going to carry with it the idea, unless it specifically is making a distinction with butter, because the the emulsion is not inverted.
So for those of you that have no idea what we're talking about, if you if you put cream, heavy cream, you know, high high fat cream, into a uh centrifuge and you spin it, you get a butter-like solid that is delicious. Even Nastasi will agree it's delicious. It's delicious. Uh, and something that resembles kind of skimmy milk stuff uh or milk, right? Out of it, but it's not, we don't think, inverted.
So, like cream is the continuous face phase is water-based, and in butter, the continuous phase is oil-based, you know, butter fat. So it is a solid but liquid continuous phase thing is what we think is happening. Anyway, so uh all right, so what else you got? Uh-uh. This is a good one.
I don't think we can just stick, but just the gloss. The gloss, as though it's like is it gonna open for the weekend? The gloss. I don't know. Like lip gloss?
The gloss. I don't know. Here's my issue. Whoever put that out, it's relatively matte in appearance. It is not, it's not like as shiny as butter.
It is relatively matte. So if you've ever painted with casein as a pigment, it's got that kind of like, or if you've seen those like whitewashed buildings, it look it's got a matte kind of appearance to it. You know what I mean? It's not shiny. Doesn't have the shit.
Hyper churn. Hyper churn. You like hyper. I know you're you're pushing, you're you're a hyper guy, but to me, like like hyper cream or something. I don't understand how the word hyperlink ever happened, to be honest.
I mean, hyper, like hypersonic means many times more than, right? Like hyper, like more than much more than. So, like, where why is a hyperlink, why is it called a hyperlink? Why did that become an acceptable thing to call it? And then everything became hyper, it's not more than butter, it's different than butter, right?
It's like high I don't know. I can't, I can't, I can't co-sign on hyper because it's just sputter. Yeah, I don't think we can call it sputter. Yeah, all right. Whatever.
Yeah, I can't call it sputter. First of all, it just sounds like someone's spitting in your food. And sputtering is a thing, and this is not made by with a sputtering technology. You know what I mean? Alright, what else you got?
Uh oh, roto butter. That's kind of cool. Yeah, I don't I don't hate roto butter, but except for the fact that it's not butter people. What about rot of cream? But if you call it cream, people are thinking it's porrable.
Let's call it solid cream. This doesn't sound delicious. No, it doesn't. Sounds like something happened to it. Yeah.
Bad. Solid cream sounds like I had an issue when I was going to the bathroom. Solid cream. Sounds bad. You know what I mean?
Doesn't sound good. Sounds bad. I think it's back to the drawing board. So far, the only ones that I'm okay that you came up with was anti-butter that I'm okay with. What do you what do you folks think?
I'm the only one weighing in here. You guys are s like silent. I'm not sure. I haven't heard anything. Yeah.
So none of you. We're catching up. By the way, I just keep thinking of that word they said in Star Trek. Was it V'ger? V'ger.
Because they misspelled Voyager because the OI, like somehow, some computer from like 1973 gained consciousness. Good luck. You know, you know what I mean? And then, like, uh, you know, it's got like three chips in it. It's got like two transistors.
Suddenly it's like, I'm here, I'm V'ger. For it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm coming back. Um, but the that movie was bad.
The first Star Trek movie was bad. It was some boring. I was a little young kid, so maybe that had something to do with it. But I was like so excited to go see Star Trek. We go to the theater.
I come out, I'm like, that's it. That was the movie. The Vitripuge. Yeah, that the Veterfuge. Oh my god, that movie was such a disappointment growing up.
Now, Star Trek 2, Wrath of Khan with Ricardo Montelon, sick. That movie was great. When I saw that movie in the theater, I was like, oh yeah. Oh yeah, that's a movie. First of all, Ricardo Montabon, not a young man at the time, so sexy.
Have you seen that dude's chest in that movie, dude? That dude is ripped. And he was like, I think in his 50s. I think he's like my age at the time. Dude looks jacked.
Amazing. Ricardo Montelbon, amazing. You know what I mean? Such a gentleman, too, when he spoke. Oh, I know.
So polite. Oh, I know. Oh my god, he always looks so sharp. You know what I mean? Like my first mentor in the food business, um uh Michael Batterberry in the business business side of it, Michael Batterberry, he was also that kind of sharp dressed man, always sharp, always smooth, great voice.
You know what I mean? I appreciate that. I don't think I know anyone now who's like that. Do any of you know anyone who's just always sharp and smooth? Garrett Oliver.
Yeah, he's pretty sharp. Different kind of sharp and smooth, but sharp and smooth. Yeah, yeah. Always fashion. That's true.
Always looks good. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, all right. All right. Oh, we we have we have one more name suggestion from Brock Baker, but it's already taken.
By by whom? Creamy. Oh, yeah, no, no, that cream. That's we're just being trolled. Rock Baker's just trolling us, creamy.
Also, I did actually do some actual cooking with it uh this weekend as well. Um I did confirm that cultured cream well, it needs more time or it separates less readily than a sweet cream. Well, also uh did you did you re-chill it before you spun it? Yes, yeah. Oh yeah.
All right. I was about to I was about to lay into you, you saw that ahead of time and you uh had the fully chilled cream because when you're doing it, you make sure it's obviously cold. But you I was also had some issues. How did it taste though? Wait, what?
Stir fried. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Sorry, sorry. You lost me. It went from cultured butter to San Francisco garlic and noodle.
What's the connection between those two items? Well, San Francisco garlic noodle is like a stir-fried noodle with butter, garlic, uh various like soy sauce, fish sauce. Right, but how do we come to be talking about that? You use this product for that? Is that what you're saying?
Yes. Now let me ask you this. Why? Like what what made you think that this is the killer app for this product? Well, I did basically my normal recipe has a certain amount of butter.
Uh-huh. So I stir-fried with the clarified butter, and then the rest of the butter was the actual, you know, spinzall cultured cream. And then I mixed that with the uh dark soy and some cheese. That's part of the recipe. And then I tossed that at the end to make it very uh creamy.
Right, but what was your hope as opposed to the normal recipe that it would be more emulsified, it wouldn't oil out, it wouldn't break away yeah more more, yeah, more creamy, less stir-fry oily. And was it yeah it was really good. Alright, so it was this so you Quinn, you gotta start so people know why you did a particular thing, like why this recipe. So you're saying in normal nominee get to it first. I make this mistake when I'm writing all the time and this is why my my wife walks up to me and slaps me in the back of the head.
You gotta tell people right away why they're listening or reading what you're saying. Tell them right away why and then tell them how. Why, then how you know I mean so but you're saying it was yes you said again therefore you were gonna tell me something what yeah I I will be doing more testing where I separate uh well spin the cream a little more because in this this cultured cream was like I estimate only like 50 60% fat. There was definitely more toward the cream than less a butter like product. This is really good how have you run the did you you said you ran the test so we were talking before last week but he hadn't had time to run the test yet but I know he said he was running the test.
So we're trying to figure out kind of what the yield is like what it's it's difficult to directly measure fat content with the equipment that Quinn has at his house or that I have in my house so that anyone has at their house, right? Uh so what I told him to do is take the product, whatever we're gonna call it, antibutter or whatever, like you know, heavy G or whatever we're gonna do, and uh weigh it very accurately, then uh put it in a low oven and do you know almost like you were clarifying it and evaporate all the liquids off. Then when you know exactly how much is evaporated off, you can assume that that's the vast majority of the water, and presumably if you haven't put the heat too high, the milk solids that are in it will not have scorched out too much. So you assume that they have the same weight they did before, and you just estimate that the milk solids proportion uh that's left will be the same proportion to the water as it would be in skim milk. Understand?
Make clear? And so by doing that, you can then determine how much fat is in the sample that you have, and because you know how much fat went in in the cream, how much fat is left in the you know, leftover liquids, the milk alloyed part of it. So, did you do those calculations or no? Yeah, I did I did run one test like that with an older batch of the sweet cream based product. And I only got 13% water.
So I that's possible. I don't know if it's possible, but even after it stopped gently bubbling, you know, I kept it going for you know a few more cycles in the oven. Well, it's a it's about the it's about the weight changing. Did the weight keep changing or no? Yes.
Then you can't stop the test until the weight stops changing. So the way that drying tests work is you know you're done when successive measurements are the same. That's how you know you're done. Would be better. Because it feels like you weigh everything.
Yeah, everything. I think stirring might be helpful. Because it looked like unless the milk solids layer were sort of like trapping some moisture under the clarified butter. Yeah, but that's not how that works because you can trap it in the solids because they can be bound, but the milk solids aren't strong enough to hold down water vapor. You know what I'm saying?
This is not how that's just not that's not possible. I had the best uh DJ name for Harold McGee. Uh better than MC Ghee. MC Gee, but wait, wait, wait, what is this, Sas? M C G, but D H E E, like the Indian butter.
He's Indian. No, well, half, yeah, it fits, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He reps it out.
I mean, like, we have called him that to his face, have we not? I don't know. I'm pretty sure I've called him MC Gee to his face. I mean, he would be fine with it. Remember the guy dressed as Zoltan for a party.
So he's Zoltar. He would definitely, he would definitely go to a party as MCG. In fact, we could probably get him to do a gig with Dan the Automator, where Dan the Automator, I'm sure we could get Dan to do a gig with uh MC Gee. Maybe he would even dress as the handsome boy modeling school character. That would be amazing.
Are you down with Dan the Automator? Yeah. I don't know if really. Yeah, he's a bar. He's a bar, he's a bar and restaurant lover.
Oh, I know. Yeah. Cool. I love his work when he did with the gorillas. Yeah, I mean, he's done a lot of great stuff.
You know, Dr. Octagon. Kiss stuff. Dr. Octagon.
Although, cool keith. Weird, weird. Weird dude. Weird dude. Jupiter.
That's right. He's from Jupiter, right? Uh I think he's from Jupiter. Yeah, yeah. Well, he says he's from Jupiter.
There's a whole theory behind it. Yeah, Jupiter, Jupiter, the Bronx. But he's like, he's a weird, weird dude. You know what I mean? But good music.
Uh MC Gee. Uh, so Quinn, you gotta keep weighing it until it stops giving up weight. Why did you stop? It was getting late. All right, here's a secret.
You can just lay it aside and start again the next morning. Hey. All right, so we don't know yet. The answer is we don't know. Not yet.
Okay. But you you you you definitely didn't like lose a lot because otherwise you would have number would have been much higher. If you had lost product, your number would be much higher, and it was relatively low number. Yeah, I was very careful that it didn't get spilled. Yeah.
Okay. Well, run the test. Run the test. We're trying to tell people about a new technique. We got to give them some numbers, Quinn.
We got to give them some numbers. And Quinn was supposed to run the same test on the liquid that was left over so that you would know the fat content from the same kind of analysis that way, because it's impossible when you're trying to get the solids and the liquids out of the rotor to not lose some. And then how are you gonna guess with any sense of accuracy, like whether you lost more solid or lost more liquid or b beep or boo boop or bop? The one thing I will say is I'm gonna assume that there is very little evaporation. But it is much, much better to just do an evaporation number in an oven with the mil with the solid part and the liquid part.
So maybe next week we'll have that information. By the way, Chris Young is gonna be so Nastasia the Hammer Lopez is gonna be in studio next week. Is that correct? No, two weeks. Oh, two weeks.
One week, two weeks, all the same. So next week is just the same as the same as normal? Yeah, before I do. All right. Two weeks.
We have Nastasia Hammer Lopez, and then also maybe calling in or live. Chris Young. Uh Chris would be calling. One of you, by the way, is clicking like a mother. One of you is a click monster.
I'm gonna kill you. It's annoying. All right. Uh got some questions in uh hi Dave and crew in some older punch recipes, i.e. the Grub Street Punch Royale and Wondrish's punch book.
Uh where was Grub Street? I didn't realize Grub Street was an old thing. I only think of the website. What was Grub Street originally? Like where is Grub Street?
What doesn't some of it get published in New York Mag? No, no. If it was in David Wonderich's punch book, it was before Grub Street, the website, right? Because Punch came out, or is it a a recipe that he wrote for Grub Street, the website? Is Grub Street in the same way that like Cannery Row is a particular place?
And like a lot of places have it, you know. No idea. Is Grub Street a place? It's a website. Yeah.
Sorry. You know what I mean? Yeah, I don't know. Uh I realize that it's a website. Yeah, I don't know, I know, but it's I just I can't think of anything else.
Yeah. Did they name the website after a an historic place that, for instance, had a punch? Grub Street. That's catchy. First of all, Grub using the word grub for food sounds like I'm eating maggots.
I hate that word. It's nasty. It's a terrible word. Yeah, you know what I mean? I agree.
Grub. Although I will say, you know, to each their own, uh, Hervé Tees, the whatever, the uh the the clown prince of uh food science, he he hates the English word food because it sounds bad to him as a French person, the English word food. I'm like, I'm sorry, it just doesn't sound bad. I mean, like I speak English, I say the word food all the time, and I'm okay with it. You know what I mean?
Like two Yeah, is this French words don't sound bad? Come on. I know. Why does everyone say French is such a pretty language? Jack, talk to me.
Why do people say French is such a pretty language? I'm the wrong guy to ask. I can't speak illiterate. Well, you know who we have right in front of us here is Jean. That's right.
He loves his French. It's the most romantic language in the world, you know, that's what they say. Which they all the days. Pepe Le Pew says it. Who else says it?
Like by the way, Pepe Le Pew should totally be canceled. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Has he been canceled? Do they still?
What? He's so handsy. He forces himself on all the cats. But he's friends. Oh man.
Oh, Stud. Oh, geez, Louise. Stas like, Stas is like, I'd do that. Pepe Le Pew, I'd do that. Yeah.
Oh, gracious gracious. All right. Uh, how the heck do we get on that? Grub Street. That's how we got on it.
All right. Grub Street Punch Royale in Wondridge's punch book. They call for Ambergriss. So uh it looks nowadays. So Ambergris, by the way, uh, for those of you what don't know, is a is a fatty deposit that is pooped out of sperm whales.
And uh uh according to uh accounts, there's a book you can read on it. I have not read the book, but for those of you that are interested, you can read Floating Gold, a natural and unnatural history of Ambergris by Christopher Kemp. Uh but apparently when it's eject, so you can get it from killing the sperm whales, which is why, and just because you're not allowed to trade. I didn't realize this, but you're not allowed to trade in ambergris at all because it comes from an endangered animal. So even though it's poop from an endangered animal, in the same way that you're not, did you know you're not allowed to own uh Baldi feathers?
Did you know that? Did I tell you about this? No. So I went to a place called Eagle Beach in Alaska, and there's this eagle feathers littering the beach, just littering the beach. So I'm picking up eagle feathers.
I'm like, eagle feathers, and then I get back to the hotel, and it's like, no, you're not allowed to. So I had to get rid of them all because you're not allowed to have eagle feathers because they can't tell whether it was molted or whether you shot the eagle and ripped the feathers off. Yep. So anyways. So I didn't know I was being, you know, an international, or not international, a national, you know, criminal endangered animal smuggler.
But in fact, I was. So uh for the same reason you're not allowed to have ambergris because it comes from a sperm whale. Now, uh, I'm I don't want to blow up anyone's spot, so I'm gonna change you have to age it, by the way. Do you know that? You have to age it.
When it first comes out, uh, it is quote unquote freshly produced ambergris has a marine, a marine fecal odor. And then finally, after all of that stuff is washed away, because it floats in the sea for like years, right? Floats in the sea, is washed up on shore and then picked up. By that time it's got the sweet kind of uh ambergris, which I don't even really know what it smells like because I couldn't tell you, but supposedly it's musky, sweet. Um anyway, by the time it gets there, it's washed out and it's like that.
And so I'm not gonna blow up her spot because I didn't realize it was illegal, but I know someone will just call her Bandy Maftel, right? Who has like hundreds of years old aged uh Ambergris that she says is just kind of crazy phenomenally cool in her maybe not legal collection. You know what I mean? Uh anyways, so the qu that's what we're talking about, ambergris. And I will tell you this one other fact.
In 1988, I did a summer program at Cornell University called the Tell Your Ride Association Summer something tasks, right? And uh there was in Ithaca, New York, a graffiti, uh uh graffitied line of dog roll, which I remember to this day, and it goes like this. And it didn't make any sense at the time. Ambergris, that's whale fat, popper cherry jumper rat. And I was like, what does this mean?
I was like, you know, I was like in high school, I was like, what is any of the I I've decoded some of it since, but like it made no made no sense. I'm like, it's not really whale fat. I mean, it is fatty, but it's more like poop. And being the concrete young gentleman I was at the time, I was like, that poem is incorrect. Anyway, uh, so on to the actual question.
Um, it looks like nowadays ambroxide is used as a synthetic analog in food flavoring and perfumes. Have you ever played with it? Any tips? Maybe this is a question for Ariel. Well, we will ask Ariel when we see her next.
However, I did go on, I have not used it, but I have gone on eBay, and the trade name for uh that is Ambroxan, A-M-B-R-O, X-A-N. Uh, and I bought some on Instagram. I bought, I mean, I on um eBay. I bought 10 grams and it costs 14 bucks. So I bought 10 grams for 14 bucks plus another like $13 in shipping.
I should get it in a week or two. It's getting shipped out of India. I will let you know how it works. But so 10 grams. So for those of you that remember the Jasmin fiasco, Jasmin is a chemical that smells like dirt.
It's in beats, I don't like it. Anastasia doesn't like it. And so I bought some to make a dirty martini just to be a jerk, but the amount that I put into my dirty martini was enough, Ariel told me, uh, was enough to flavor an entire swimming pool. Olympics. Olympic size swimming pool.
Yeah, not not like a kiddie pool, not like an above-ground pool, an Olympic swimming pool. So uh I looked up the numbers already before this arrived, and we're looking in the like parts per million range for for this product, right? So and I think less than one part per million, but I I gotta go look it up because I looked it up this morning. So let's say it was one part per million. Okay, let's just say it was one part per million, and I think it might be less.
Uh that means that that each gram, each gram makes a thousand liters of product. That means that this amount is at least ten thousand liters worth of uh uh ambroxan. So I have enough. So if you get to spend this $14 if I like it, and you get and you guys want to go get it, it's enough forever. Forever.
You know what I mean? 10,000 liters is a lot. Yeah. That's like more than a little. Yeah.
Like for just for reference, a 20-pound CO2 tank, if you're in conservation mode in a carbonator, probably does uh 40 gallons. So let's just multiply that by a four by eighty, so it's like uh like three hundred and twenty gall 320 liters. Right. So think about that. Like think about the level of stank that's gonna come out of this bottle.
Uh all right. So uh uh Malkith, we will let you know when we when we get it. Uh Elliot writes in: I have now read various people in books describe things about how fine. Sorry, Stas, it's gonna be a milling question. About how fine to mill hard red winter wheat for normal lean sourdough bull.
Uh 100% sifted for now. Elliot, when you say 100% sifted, does that mean that you're sifting 100% of your flour or that you're just sifting it, but 100% is going through your sifter? If that's the case, I highly recommend that you get like a 60 mesh and uh and and do like you know, 87 to 90 percent extraction. Anyway, um and run some tests. Uh and I'm mostly just confused.
Well, aren't we all, Elliot? Aren't we all? Uh specifically, I don't understand how fine to mill relative to the point at which the burrs start to make a noise each other against each other when the mill is empty. Okay, listen, listen, listen. Before I go into this, so that see, before I go into this, let me explain to everyone who doesn't know what the heck I'm talking about, what I'm talking about.
A home, mo ninety-nine percent of home flour mills just have a little grinding stone, like smaller than the span of my fingers, like maybe four inches or four and a half inches across, that looks like you took it off of the side of up of a bench grinder in a metal shop. Okay. It's literally that kind of a grinding wheel. And it's got two of them. And the one on the bottom spins because it's attached to a motor and it's got a hole in it.
And the uh and the one on top is held still, and you pour the grain through it, and what you do is is you adjust the top stone down with some mechanism. There's various mechanisms, but the one we use, you screw the entire top down and you push the stones down against a spring, and the wheat itself floats the top wheel up and keeps it relatively, you know, in tram, so flat relative to the bottom stone, right? So you're not mechanically holding it, you know, uh even with the bottom stone. The wheat itself or the grain itself is doing that. So that's that's how these things are operating.
And so uh obviously, you know, if you're if your stones are not uh true, if they're not flat or if they're you know incorrectly made or whatever, you're not gonna be able to get a very fine grind because the stones can't get close enough together to get a fine grind. So we're talking about how to adjust the fineness. And so one of the techniques is to just is to take the sp spin the thing down. And by the way, Elliot, you're in luck. You said you have a Como Mio, I have the exact same, I have the exact same uh mill.
So I'm gonna give you experience that I've had with your mill, like the one that you use, uh, although I've done them with many others and they all have the same kind of idea. So what you do is you turn the thing finer, finer, and finer until you start hearing this. Because the stones are touching, right? Don't run it that way a long time. But when the stones start touching, then you dump your wheat in, right?
And then depending on how hard the wheat is, you either back it up one so it's a little bit coarser, so that would be your fine your soft wheats. Any soft wheat that you mill has a tendency to smear and glaze your stones, right? So you take it to the shit and then put the wheat in, back it up, make it slightly less coarse, just slightly, or you'll or you're in for a world to hurt. And remember, when you do glaze your stones, clean it with uh white rice, not brown rice, because you're trying to have something that's fundamentally fat-free and hard as hell. So you want like very vitreous, like white rice.
Uh doesn't take much, a half cup. Uh, and then you know, clean it out. So, but when you're milling a hard wheat that's not going to glaze over your stones, you can put it one half of a after, like finer when you drop it in. And you can tell because the speed of wheat coming out is going to be directly related to how fine the flour coming out. It's going to be directly related to how fine you're grinding.
And you can put your hand in front of the chute and feel how warm it is. And a higher, uh finer grind is going to be slower, hotter, and have more. These are these are all related, and you can read the papers on it, right? Slower, hotter, and uh and have more starch damage. Okay.
Uh now, some places say you should turn the mill on without making noise, blah, blah, blah. Uh other places say you should grind to the point before they chirp, and then not do that dance, which presumably produces much less finely ground flour. So other places say you should grind as fine as possible, and don't mention uh the chirp at all. And so basically, your question I'm gathering uh is what's the difference, right? I prefer it to be ground as fine as I can for the style of uh bread that I like to make.
Uh I like remember though, I'm sifting you have all of your, you're not gonna need as much damaged starch uh as I will for a given hydration level because you're not sifting out the brand the way I am. Uh everything depends. There's no one answer, right? And that that's I guess the issue. That's why you probably get confused reading stuff all over the net, is because if you're not sifting, your your brand, which absorbs a lot of water, is going to take some of the water handling capability that I would get out of my damaged starch, but it's gonna reduce low volume because all the extra brand is gonna reduce the low volume and also make it taste more brandy.
Once you have it in like my situation where I'm at like 87% yield off of a very fine grind, I need a little more damage so that I can get uh higher uh a higher water content in it to get the kind of bread that I want. So there it's confusing just because you're working with multiple variables at once. Is this okay? Is that all right? Yeah.
Okay. Um Andrew L writes in, I'm spending some time in Paris later this year, and Dave mentioned a few weeks ago that it's a remarkable food city in Europe. Uh, I mean, obviously, right? Uh, does uh do we have, and you know, John's gonna have more recommendations than I have, but uh, do I have any bar or restaurant restaurant recommendations I might might check out? Well, Andrew, in fact, the last couple of times I've been to Paris, I've been there with uh small kids, and I'm not that guy going to fancy restaurants with small kids.
It's just not I'm not doing that. You know what I mean? Just because I just I'm not doing that. It's just too much, it's just too much, too much money. But like with large groups, right?
Or with people that don't necessarily care about food. But I'll give you some shopping recommendations. I think I've already mentioned them on the air before, but if you like cheese, and I hope you do, uh Bartolome on uh near Rue de Bach uh stop uh on the uh Rue de Grinnelle is like one of the great cheese shops on earth. They have a reputation for being surly, but they've only ever been nice to me. Um even though I don't speak French, but they during it's too late, but they you know, during vacherant season, like their Vacheron is amazing.
Their uh their Camember game is great. Um they they just they this fantastic cheese shop. Another cheese shop. If you're gonna be there uh on uh a weekend when stuff is closed, right? If you're gonna be there on a on a Sunday, uh a shop that's open every day of the week where you can get some fun stuff is uh if you're gonna be near the um Luxembourg Gardens down near the uh Place de Odeon is uh the pronounce this we don't pronounce this one, I'm not gonna butcher that.
Yeah, and it's just it's called uh uh or le la coop. Maybe it's le co-op. La co-op? La coop. Yeah.
So it's uh la coop and you go there and it's all uh Savois food. But the kind of star of the show is Beaufort. And Beaufort has said this on the air before. It's not underrated because people love it, but people don't, I think, think about it very much in uh the US. And when you go there, they have the coolest cheese slicer because if if you were gonna do an action movie and there's gonna be a chase through a cheese shop, you would definitely murder somebody with this cheese slicer because it's just a giant uh hydraulic cleaver.
So it's a huge Beaufort wheel, which is, you know, big, you know what I mean? Big. And then this thing, and they just step on a pedal and blah the cleaver comes down and cuts you your perfect piece, and then they can spin the thing underneath it and cut. They're usually cutting like two or three different wheels at uh at once at any given time, depending on like how old you want. You want the old good one, just get the older one.
The other one's just skip them. But uh they have a bunch of other cheeses there as well. But go there uh just because Beaufort's a delicious cheese. Now, where else should they go, uh John? Late Tour d'argent if you want to do fancy.
Oh, have you done that? I haven't. I'd love to, but we're just saying that because you want to go. I want to go, I couldn't go. Well, yeah, I haven't tried going, but if I go, I'd like to go.
I'm just saying it's a good thing. Like 1780 something? They're one of the early 90s, maybe. 1790. They were one of the early post-revolution restaurants, right?
So like maybe are they before 1800? Are they in the nineties? I think so, but I'm not positive. And that means what do you think? It's Tower Silver or Tower of Money.
Silver. Silver Tower? Yeah. Yeah. So you're go to the Silver Tower and tell them what they're famous for.
Canar la press. Yeah. So it's like, and you know I've made that several times. It's it's not so the the w pressed duck, the w have we talked to us about this on air recently? I don't think so.
So the way pressed duck works, it's horrible. Like like please don't get mad at me. This is how it's made. You you get a uh a young duck, right? Caneton, right?
Young duck. Yep. Uh from a ruin, right? And uh while you're there, you know, uh get get other things, get some get some sparklers. And then uh you they they break its neck because the idea is is that you want to keep the all the blood inside the duck.
So unlike any sort of normal uh slaughter process where people are trying to remove as much, they're trying to exsanguinate the animal as much as possible. When you're making pressed duck, you do not. They then like very, very quickly roast the the duck. You know, they gut it, I think, right? And then they and then and then they but they roast it whole.
And then they cut off the the legs, save them for a separate prep, then put the entire and the breast, and they tip put the entire rest of the stuff in a press and they squeeze it. Now I've used both a real duck press, and by the way, if you should ever buy an ornamental actual uh French duck press, they are not as strong as they look. Do not gorilla force a French duck press because I gorilla forced one and I snapped it in half. And then we had to like the rest of it we had to like all fix it. It was a gift, also it was sad.
It was a gift from I believe either Andre Saltner, Rest in Peace, or Sayak to the to Jacques Papin who gave it to the French Culinary Institute. So it was like, you know, it had some provenance. They were not happy that I broke it. I took it out of their library to take it into the amphitheater to make the press pressed duck with. They're like, they're like, it's in the library.
You can't use it. I'm like, it was put on earth to press ducks. And so I took it out of the library, brought it in, broke it, and then had to pretend that I hadn't broken it, and I took it back. Anyway, I've also used an enterprise uh sausage stuffer and fruit press, um, which works well and can take gorilla force. Um anyway, so then you squeeze out all the juices, and then I forget what liquor do you put in a in the pan with it.
Do you remember? I don't. And you do like a quick, like a like a livery, it almost like a like a it's like a bloody livery sauce that you put over the breast and you eat it. That's can't be. And when you get it at Tour d'Arjec, you they give you a signed, like they give you like a certificate with the number of your duck, so that forever there's a record that you have participated in this monstrosity of strangling this poor duck and squishing its body in a press.
But I cannot wait to try it. I like I I don't think I'm ever gonna do it. And I'm never gonna do it. Because it's fantastically expensive. Yeah.
And I don't think they they now I think they keep changing the name of it, right? So it might just be called now like uh Canot Tour Tour d'Ajon or something like that. Like they like if you look on the menu, you can't always find it, but they always have it. Okay, let me bang out a couple other things here. Um Cheoles, which is uh kind of between the Louvre and uh Notre Dame.
Around uh uh Notre Dame, you've got uh L'Hutrerie Regie, so just like a really great old school oyster shop. Um my God. Don't poison yourself. Listen, when you go to Paris, you're gonna go to like uh what's it, Mario and what's it called? Well, Mario Kart, what's the famous bistro?
Balbert. No, Mario and um what the hell is it? It's super famous. Uh anyway, and you're gonna get some freaking like fou de mer platter, and the Parisians for some reason give you raw muscles. And in most of these fui de mer platters, most these fouetter platters are made like an hour before or two hours before you show up, and it's these desiccated raw muscles on these fui de mer platters.
And if you look at a map of Paris, it is in the center of the country. It has no business selling you seafood. But like how they got famous for these kind of like going to a bistro and getting a fouit de mer platter. Twice members of my party have been horribly food poisoned going to those things. Two times.
Now, maybe we, you know, maybe not everyone I'm traveling with has the belly of steel, but even I felt not okay after one of the fruits de mer platters. So beware, I guess. Then uh you know what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah. No, I mean it's it's weird, but yeah, it's I don't know.
I've had good experiences. Yeah, but if you get a fouet de mer, padmoul, padmoul. Yeah, okay. No mussels. Yeah, yeah.
You know what I mean? Um I love muscles too, by the way. When you do it like a la Belgique. Yeah. Well, they also do them raw there, too.
Um, but Albert is another one to go to. We got like two minutes. I'm gonna get some of these out. We got three minutes and seven seconds. Three minutes and seven seconds.
Um if you go to Chejonge, which you definitely should, go nearby to uh Ed Del Rhin, the cooking store. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Are they still open? Yeah. It's pronounced De Hillarin.
If you go in there, like they have all sorts of like really old stock stuff. So it's kind of the way bridge kitchenware used to be if you lived in New York in the 70s and 80s and 90s, like I did. Um Chélamijon is another classic. Um, and then one that I really love and not many people know about her. It's like off the tourist beaten path uh near the Invalide is called au pied de fouet.
Um, at the foot of the whip is what that translates to. And that is one of my all-time favorite bistros. So definitely go check that out. What's the name of the uh what's the name of the uh charcuterie shop you sent me to? There's like a couple of branches.
Gilles Verot? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a great place too. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Really good terrines and pattes and things like that.
I go to Cedric Grolet's uh pastry outpost near the Louvre. He's doing some really tasty and impressive stuff there. Um, it's plenty of great, plenty of great places. What do you think about when you go? Where is it?
Uh Woods. Don't go anywhere with a menus in English. What about uh uh do you like their mustard? They there's a Maye shop there. Yeah, there is.
And do you go there and laugh at their mustards? I mean, I've never been. Never been? Yeah, I've never been. I know I know the store and I can picture it and I know where it does.
If you're an American traveling in Paris and you have a kitchen and you're gonna cook some meals for yourself, go to a gibier and make sure that because like you can get some interesting like uh birds and fowl on like uh with feathers on them in markets in Paris, which is at least you could years ago. Last time I had a kitchen in Paris. And so it I highly recommend if you can cook at least one meal on your own, find like some good uh produce that you might not be able to mess with back here in the States and you know get get a whole hold of that. It's always kind of a a good call if you want to do that. Uh right when you say yeah, definitely.
Although uh the last time I tried that was many years ago, and I had to pluck a pheasant, and it is not easy to pluck a pheasant after it's been dead for a long time. You know what I'm saying? It's like I ripped the hell out of that skin. I obliterated the skin, and also I was cooking in someone's house that wasn't done yet, so I had to rip I they had extra floorboards, so I I I broke up a bunch of oak floorboards and used those to cook the pheasant over. It was a good pheasant, but I'm not gonna say it was a pleasant experience.
I do not like plucking birds. If I had to go the whole rest of my life and never pluck another bird, I'd be like, you know what? I'm good. I'm good. There's things like that that I don't need to do anymore.
I don't need to catch on fire again. I don't need to pluck more birds. You know what I mean? Agreed. Yeah, I don't need wait.
Wasn't it you that told me there's a a leak trick so I don't have to hate leeks anymore? No, I don't think so. I'd love to know about it though, but I do like leaks. Alright. But they suck cleaning.
Cooking issues.
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