Hello and welcome to Tokyo Shoes. This is Dave Arnold, your host of cooking issues coming to you live from the heart of Manhattan, Rockefeller Center, New York City. New State Studios joined as usual with John. How you doing, man? Doing great.
Yeah? Yeah, yeah, just peachy. Local weather. You look better than I look for sure. I'm moist.
Moist. And not in the managed way. I'm in the unmanaged moisture mode. Yeah. Joined in studio.
Nastasia the hammer Lopez. How you doing? I'm good. Yeah. It's good to have you back.
It's been I don't like it here. I don't think she Joe Hazen. Joe Hazen rock in the panels. Hi. I don't think she means your studio.
No, not your studio, Joe. She means our fine city. Don't you need to recharge on hate? Let the hate flow. No.
I think the traffic is worse here than LA. Well, it's just different, right? Like in LA, you're going for a long while. I've got Jackie Molecules. How are you doing?
You're going a long way here. Here it might take an hour, but you're only going like five miles. I know. That's crazy. Yeah.
Use your hate. Strike me down. This does he's going on the dark side here back in New York. And I think up in the upper left, we got Quinn. How you doing?
Yeah. I'm good. Good, good, good. Uh, we were supposed to have uh on the show today uh thermometer entrepreneur, extraordinaire author of uh Modernist Cuisine, the original, and former research chef and maybe exec chef, I can't remember what his title was at The Fat Duck. And also a glider pilot, Chris Young, but he cannot be on the show today, uh, because he had to take care of somebody.
Anyway, uh, so if you are listening in uh on the Patreon, call in your questions to 917-410-1507. That's 917-410-1507. I think we're gonna reschedule Chris, so we might save some of those questions, meaning it's a good day to call in because even though I could probably prattle on for the full hour on any sort of tangent, right? You know, I hadn't prepared to do so. I hadn't psyched myself up, listened to some.
Although, anyway, well, we'll get to it later. If I need if we need to go on tangents, I'll just say this: for well over two decades, well over two decades, like 25 years, I thought that Lenny Kravitz hated Warren Beatty because I had illegally okay. So I owned whatever album Lenny Kravitz put out that had uh Always on the Run on it. You know, he's in black and white on the on the cover. I forget the name of the album.
Like his first huge album, right? I don't know if it was his first album. Anyway, so it was easier on Napster at the time to download the illegal like live version, which I don't think had been released yet, of him playing Always on the Run with Guns and Roses. And I already owned the CD, but I it was a pain to rip CDs back then. Anywho, so I downloaded, and then after that song, he goes into a minute, someone goes into a minute and a half diatribe about how much they hate Warren Beatty.
And I always thought it was Lenny Kravitz. Turns out it wasn't. Turns out Nastasi's like, that's not Lenny Kravitz's voice. I'm like, what? She's like, that's not Lenny Kravitz's voice.
I've never heard him talk. I have no idea. Axel Rose. Huh? Axel Rose.
Okay. Oh, well. He hates everybody. Yeah, but like apparently this song, uh some double talking jive, blah, blah, blah, whatever it was, he would regularly just launch into like minutes-long diatribes dedicating it to people he was angry at at the time, including his guitarist. Okay, ex-guitarist.
Um not slash. The you know, the other one, his name always escapes me. Anyway, so I feel bad now thinking that Lenny Kravitz was this freaking psycho for all these years. Turns out wrong. See, you can make an assumption based on one piece of data about another human being.
Yep. Hold it in your heart for decades and just be wrong. You know what I mean? Yeah. Anyway.
Yeah. Yeah. Bub bum bum. Anyway, okay. Uh so uh what do you guys got this week?
Oh, but you want to tell them how to join the Patreon, John? Should they choose to do so while my glasses unfog from all the yeah, you are quite the site today. Funny, foggy, fuckgy, foggy moist man. Um check out patreon.com slash cooking issues if you're thinking about becoming a member. We got different membership levels, you get um great perks at every level.
You get prioritized your questions being prioritized, uh being answered when you know it fits in with the episode. Um, well, let's be real. Let's be real. We have a guest that's hard to get him in. Uh although uh to f to that note, though, come on, people.
We're trying to get good guests on. Give them some questions. Yeah. Give them some questions. Yeah.
Otherwise, it's just gonna be me like asking them like the random questions that you're using. What do you think about it? It's like some random what do you think about this kind of pork? Wait, you don't want to hear that all the time. Yeah, especially.
Although I did have magic pork over the weekend. Nice. Oh, yeah, it's so good. Magic pork is so good. And I have to say, I re I re I've reused again and again and again my my Airzot's hood, my mini hood.
And I love the mini hood. If anyone out there has a decent supply of cheap Nomex fabric, I want to make one that's like instant up and down. The one I'm using now is is um what's the brand name for it? You know the stuff they make mailboxes out of the white plastic, corrugated plastic chloroplast. Is that the brand name?
I think so. Anyway, it's polypropylene, which is decent, like it can withstand boiling temperatures. But right now I only feel comfortable putting it over my fryer and over my induction unit. Now, if I were to make one with like a tubing that works almost like one of those centipede tables with no mex fabric as the outside, well, hell, that can do like 700 degrees, and when it doesn't burn, it just kind of decomposes. So I could put that right over a real burner.
Boom. But to keep this no tangent Tuesday going. Uh so yeah, patreon.com slash cooking issues, uh, different membership levels, you get access to our Discord and a whole bunch of other great things. So check it out. John, there we go.
Imagine, imagine a world where you could cook whatever you want on any stove at any time with no smoke in your house. That would be pretty amazing. The hood's all. Oh jeez. But anyway, but like the point is it's like dude, like I it's a game changer because like there's always there's always one person in the house, not always, there's often one person in the house who wants to make smoke when they're cooking.
Because why? Because why? That's just what needs doing. Because the food will taste bad. Yeah.
What needs doing for the type of meal? Yeah, exactly. Right. Yeah. And then there's other people for whom that amount of smoke in the first of all, it's probably toxic.
I've said this for years. It probably really is bad for you. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah.
Like no joke. But uh, but there's always somebody in the house for whom that smoke has now ruined the meal, no matter how good it tastes, because how good the food tastes, as Nastasi will say, you'd rather never talk about the food. Yes. You know? Yeah.
Food shows up, it's smoking now. I was like, I'm getting out of here. What the hell is this? You know what I mean? They're like, but but you're like, hell with you.
You know what I mean? Stas is like, I'm not gonna say who it is, because that would be listen without saying who it is, what was your gripe about the very nice restaurant you went to, Nastasia? Oh, they kept interrupting and telling us about the food. Nastasia's like, I don't care. Oh, yeah.
I don't care which restaurant, it was Attaboy. Wow. Calling people out. We do not call out. Back in New York, baby.
I mean, in general, we do not call out our fellow industry folk, you know, because that's their business. But we ordered calling them out. They're doing like a good job, it sounds like it's just something she doesn't like, you know. But if you're in the middle of a story, and then they don't care. Oh, yeah.
They're they put the food down and they tell you what you ordered. But I know what I ordered because I chose it. You know? Yeah, but that's it. I mean, I mean, that wouldn't work for me because I'm like, I don't know, this what did no one order yet?
You know what I mean? Like, but uh, I mean, okay, I'm not I'm not defending them. How long was the story? I'm just messing with you. I'm just messing with you.
Listen, I mean, there are people though who want to hear about every little godsy, so it's hard to read sometimes, but you know, you give a pretty good get the hell away from me face. So if they were reading one of the best, yo, oh, right. So, like, you know, for those of you that don't know Nastasia, like, if you walk up to Nastasia and she stares straight at you with the dead inside look, just stop. Like you know what I mean? It's like, it's over, you've lost, you know?
And like, you know, like, you know, like I I have the which I didn't even know until I saw myself videotaped. I have a death, I have a death dagger look. Yeah, you didn't. At that point, stop. Yeah.
Like, like are you're not getting through to me anymore. Same with you. When you have the dead inside look, that's your that's your look of uh as uh Milton wrote about the devil in Paradise Lost, obdurate pride and steadfast hate. Uh which is like the only line from that entire book that stuck with me. I was like, I read that book too young.
So all the parts with the devil, I'm like, right on, devil. Like the devil to me, the devil is kind of the good guy in that story, because I read that book too young. Yeah. You know what I mean? Because the devil's kind of like, you know, he kind of is kicking ass.
He's like, he's chucked down, you feel like it's unfair. He's in this like, you know, hell escape. You know, literal hell escape. Anyway. Uh so yeah.
So uh she did not enjoy. So if Nastasia the Hammer Lopez is ever in your restaurant, just let her eat. Yeah. She knows what she's ordered. Beep, beep, beep, beep.
You know what? It's not fair to say it's it's nice to tell people what they are, especially but like, what if you what if you weren't you? What if you didn't know about that's the other thing? You're already inculcated in all this garbage. So it's like you feel like, you know, I I know what I ordered.
But like there's a lot of people who are like, what's a blah? What's a blah? Because everyone writes random ingredients on not random, but they write ingredients on their menu, and it's nice to have one or two obscure things that are like, well, I haven't had that before in that worry. You know what I mean? But then not everyone knows what it is.
So they say, I don't know. Yeah, I could see both sides, but you clearly gave them death eyes, so they shouldn't. No, I just stared at the dish. Oh wow. You're like, I wish I was eating it and finishing my story.
No, I told you I almost got kicked out of a very fancy restaurant. Why? Because they brought the thing and they started yapping, and I just ate it. Yeah. I didn't wait.
They're like, what are you what are you doing? What are you doing? I'm like, uh it's food. I'm eating it. I will hear after it's done.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I do. Yeah. Three stars.
Not one Michelin restaurant in our pajamas in China. Not two Michelin stars. Count them. Three. Three Michelin stars.
She had on a cat sweatshirt, pajama bottoms, and you ready for it? My least favorite uh clothing item on earth, the flip-flop. Like oh man. Yeah. Yeah.
She like rolls out of the shower, puts on her hotel clothes, goes down to the lobby, and so yeah, how about we're like, it's raining out. I don't feel too good. How about this three-star Michelin restaurant? Okay. It was not expensive either.
It wasn't so bad. And also it was it was uh pandemic times. So like very few people were out. So they had reopened, but like they needed to fill the tables. I think, and they treated us pretty well.
They must have thought these people must be really rich. If they're coming here looking like this much of a slob, they gotta be like Microsoft money or something. You know what I mean? Yeah. Because only some weird like tech weasels would dress this effed up.
You know what I mean? I had that happen one other time at Peck in Milan. I showed up like looking like the scruffiest scrub. It was from my 20s, and I got super blown out there. Like just super super best service all time.
I still remember it. I was like, they rolled me out of that place in a barrel. I was pickled. You know what I mean? And like, we like my you know, Jen and I like broke, not broke into, but somehow got on the roof of the of the of the cathedral in Milan, and we're running around in the cathedral taking pictures, wasted out of our minds right after lunch.
You know what I mean? Like, love that restaurant. That was, I think, it was famous, but it wasn't famous for like what it's famous for now. But peck, man, I still think about that. You ever heard many meals like that?
You just think about them. They were so awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's what makes how many?
One. One? Mm-hmm. Oh. Probably like four or five.
What was yours, Dus? Um, I was traveling from Switzerland to the south of France to meet Cesare at uh Cassella, our friend. Yeah. At uh oh, I don't remember the name. But it was a very fancy place.
Who's the guy that fell in the tree? And like Ducas. Yeah. It was that one there. And the guy that, you know.
He cooks good. He cooks good and he was in a tree for like a week. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Ducas. Anyway.
Anyway, okay. So you were at a Ducasse joint in Switzerland? In south of France. Yeah. And it was it was really special.
It was super special. Cesare had to wait two hours for me because the train was late. Was it at the Abbey? No. Wasn't the Abbey?
No. And how did Cesare deal with waiting? They he was getting sauce. They just kept bringing more and more pain. Oh, yeah.
It was fun. Yeah, that sounds good. For me, Peck. Um my Noma meal was fantastic. The meal, a couple of meals at a place that's closed called Harold's that was run by the chef was the wife, and uh uh Maider D was the husband, I think, bearded marriage, because I think.
And like, you know, they were in their 80s when they finally closed it down, and they did like straight up, not French, continental style, you know, like uh post-world, but he was doing like 30s, 40s style food. They she was, but they smoked their own trout that they they raised there, and it was just the best service in the world. He would reach under your crotch, grab your coat and pop pull it down so that your shoulders would look good when he put your coat back on you. I was like, oh yeah. You hate being touched.
He didn't touch you. That was the thing. He somehow reached through your crotch without touching you. In a way that wasn't creepy. Anyway, fantastic food.
Harold, man. That was a good place. And uh La Cyric when they gave me baby lamb. A couple things stick in your head. You know what I mean?
Yeah. Tableside, tableside service at Danielle is pretty good. When you and I went to that place with the bird shot, that was memorable. But not in the way that you enjoyed. Yeah.
They went to Hicks in London, which is, you know, uh, I'm sure it's still there, right? A well-known restaurant. And uh Hicks, the chef is famous for his game menus. And so I'm like, you can't get this. They shoot these suckers in Scotland and then they bring them here, and they they they're you know, grouse and whatnot, you know, Woodcock and Grabbicas and uh Woodcock.
And so I get it, and they're like, watch out, there's bird shot in it, and they haven't been gutted and they're real bloody. And then this stinky pile of rare bird shows up on birdza, shows up at our table, and like I'm trying to talk to Nastasi and little bits of blood and babies are like sticking to her forehead while I'm talking. It was like a nightmare. Oh my god. Yeah, the worst, right?
And it had that blood smell, you know what I mean? Can you smell it? That like that, like I'm sucking on a penny, like iron nail blood. Yeah. Yeah.
Period. Wow. Taking it there, taking it to the streets. Uh, all right. Uh did you wait, John?
Did you already go? No. Um, for me, honestly, the you know, I'll just say one, the the biggest one for me was WD50 back in the day. Oh my, I forgot I mean yeah, WD-50. I once went to WD-50 right after going to Essex House, which was Ducas' flagship here.
And I was like, I prefer WD-50. Yeah. Because it was, you know, I don't know, you know. Yeah. Uh yeah, great meals.
Yeah, some good meals. Yeah. Like older you get, the harder it is to have a fantastic meal. It truly is. And it's so disappointing.
I went to a two Michelin star restaurant last week. And I'm not gonna name it, but I'm just I'm I'm done with that. It's just not give yourself a couple of years anymore. Give yourself a couple of years. Maybe, yeah.
Then like styles will either come back or change, and you go and you'd be like, Oh, I miss it. I I don't know when you pay that $700 bill at the end. It's just like, what the trick is get rich. Oh yeah. Well, yes.
Yeah, yeah. Then it doesn't matter. Yeah, no. Then a hot dog, two-star Michelin, same. Yeah, true.
Same thing. True. I had a really good meal at Le Pray Catalan, actually, three-star. Oh in the Bois de Bologne. Did I tell a story on the air already?
I don't think so. And so uh wasn't no, when was it? It was pretty soon after I was married, so I was still in my twenties. And my mom and my stepfather were like, You gotta go to Le Pray Catalan, the cheese plate, which was amazing. Anyways, so like uh the Bois de Bologna is is this park where the hookers are, the sex workers uh are, right?
And we're going there at dusk, and we don't have any money, we're spending all on Ronnie on the three stars. So we walk there, we're trying to walk there. We get off at uh, you know, the the metro and we're trying to get there, and we get this is pre-cell phones, we get wickedly lost. So we start trying to ask in my busted French sex workers where Lepre Catalan, the three-star Michelin restaurant is in this park. And they're like, you know, want to date?
I'm like, no, no, no, pod weren't you with your work? Pod sex, pod sex. Yeah, but they don't know. What do you care? They're just they're working for a living.
You know what I mean? It's Roscoe, he's working. Anyway, so like so we made it. Uh uh, so we were like two hours late, and they were so gracious to us, and they gave us the whole meal and but French service. I don't I don't no make this though.
Yeah, you know what I mean? Like that that reserve, they were really nice to us in a very reserved French way. Yeah. But the cheese plate, oh my God. And they're uh they're what's it called?
This is like 30 years ago, still, you know, 28 years ago. They're um marrow in the cleaned out bones and their like sea urchin soup in the in the thing, and they're and they're uh what's it called? They're um their pigeon. Oh my god. No God's so good.
Anyway, what about you? What about you on the other side of the line? Any meals you guys uh specifically remember? I um I I feel like the first time I went to grammarcy back in the day, that was my first like amazing service moment where I was like, oh, this is yeah, this is special. And then when uh like the beginnings of Nakazawa, um, you know, because I was at the other network and it was such a hard res to get the other network.
I was able to get one, and that was my first like really good, you know, uh Michelin star omakase thing, and how much did that set you back? Um good question. Probably like with a drink pairing 500 person, maybe maybe a little bit more. Did it last longer than 22 minutes, which is how long uh Nastasi, all right? Well, that's the other thing.
Like, I did do a two Michelin star, and I I'm the worst, I forget the name of it. It was in Tokyo, like one of the Tokyo Michelin um star omakase experiences, and it was like too stressful for me. I I felt like I was messing up or like I was gonna do something wrong or make the wrong thing. It was too how were you gonna mess up? Were you missing your face?
No. No. Just I mean, it I don't know how to describe it. Because you know, like I'm like the only American person there by myself. Yeah, I just didn't feel wanted.
And for the money I was spending, I was like, damn, this is that's probably true. You probably were not wanted. But like I mean, that's just probably the actual fact. Well you're spending seven hundred dollars on a meal, it's kind of like you you sort of want to feel wanted, you know. Yeah, yeah.
I'll just say this though. Here's a word of advice to uh to anyone who's young and is nervous going to like you know, places like crap on them. This is your money, your time. Yeah, yeah. You know what I mean?
Don't ever don't ever feel bad about what you like or don't like, and don't ever let someone give you the you know business or make you feel lesser than like it's their job to make you feel like yeah, that you're royalty. That's their job. If they're not doing it, that's on them. And especially the more you pay, this is the problem with having like a this is why all those people are uptight, right? It's because there's zero room for error when the money gets that large because you know, zero room for error because stuff that you'll let fly at uh, you know temperance sell things are the best things.
It's true story. Um about you, Quinn. You got anything? Any meals you remember specifically or dishes? Oh boy.
I mean I don't know the restaurant. They have very memorable meals. Actually, I have a whole treasure trove of untapped stories. Did I ever tell anybody here that when I was 11, my mom drank dust around Europe the five months? I mean, I know the story.
I don't know that the l I don't know the listeners know the story. I mean, it's not just us, yeah. One memorable, one memorable meal. I don't even know the restaurant, but we were driving around Florence, sightseeing. We were at a gas station.
We asked some guy for directions. He was like a roofer. And he's like, Well, I'm not working today because it's raining. It wasn't really raining, but whatever. And we basically kidnapped him, and he became our unofficial tour guide for the entire day.
Oh man, it's awesome. Good hospitality. Yeah. So what do you write to like David with him? Like we went all over the place.
And then he took us to this restaurant. And I distinctly remember this like just cherry tomato garlic pasta that we had at this random restaurant that he knew. And I've never been able to replicate the pasta that good. Well, of course you can't replicate it because part of it was what happened. That's the issue.
You know what I mean? Like yeah. So I have a similar Italian story on my honeymoon. So this is 1995. I was 24.
And uh, you know, again, no money. So we I I went to Tivoli, which is outside of Rome, uh, because one of my favorite Italian gardens, the um villa, the uh Villa d'Este is there. Beautiful, yeah. Oh, beautiful. And for some reason there was no one there that day.
I don't know whether all the tourists died or what, but there was no one there. The one bad thing I remember that day is a person asked me, they're like, Are you Canadian? I'm like, hey. Anyway. Sorry, Quinn, don't worry about it.
Well, we definitely made that very clear when we were in Europe. We had like Canadian flags. It was very critical. Even back then. So, anyways, we're in uh we're in um Tivoli, and we had taken a bus from Rome, right?
And so we don't know where we are. We're walking around and we see this guy, and we tried to ask him how to get to there's a I wanted to see the the area. There's like a like a a spring near the top of Tivoli that feeds the the villa. And so I wanted to see all the stuff. And he's like, what?
He's like, you're here by yourself. And he puts us in his car, drives us, gives us an Italian, unfortunately, we don't understand a driving tour of Tivoli, takes us to a restaurant, parks his car illegally in front of the restaurant, takes us into into this restaurant, talks to the guy in Italian, basically saying, These are my new friends, treat them right, like you know, blah, blah, blah. And then we didn't have to talk to those guys. It was an amazing meal, all like some random Italian guy who wanted us to, you know, see his talent. They're really the best.
They're really the best. And the worst. And well, and because I didn't speak Italian, I couldn't talk to him about poop stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or digestion.
Yeah, yeah. Which is your least favorite thing. Yes. Yes. What do you hate more?
They love it. What do you hate more? Talking about the food or talking about the digestion? Talking about the food. Really?
Because at least the digestion is entertaining, you know. All right, well, you know, that was the old uh that was the old Mofad uh exhibit I wanted to do, farm to toilet. And no one was like, people were like, no one will come see farm to to Toilet. I'm like, why? If you want a circle, it's gotta go all the way to the toilet and back on to the dirt again.
You know what I mean? Skip the middleman. Yeah. Oh my god, just for but anyway. All right.
So uh now that we've reminisced, anyone got any food, uh food garbage from this past week? Uh well, the kids came. Well, the children of one of our listeners came to both of our places the other night, Liza and uh her two brothers from the public house up in Rochester. It was nice. Yeah, I saw them at uh at uh what's it called?
Contra, yeah. Yeah. No, nice. Good good people. They're doing they're doing the rounds.
Yeah, they had a list. They did. They had a list. Yeah, I thought their dad left for them. It was uh solid list.
Yeah. I know, but that's kind of like it's a lot to have a list that your dad's like, you must go to these places. Why don't you just come? Not like on the yellow pad, like folded piece of paper and everything. Yeah, I think uh I think they uh I had I I think that was this one.
I signed one of our menus and said, next time you come. Yeah. I think it was his name is Keith or Kenneth. Next time you come. Anyway.
Uh all right. Uh what about anyone else? Stas, you were traveling, so you probably do you have anything other than that one thing you already talked about when you called someone out on talking too much about their food. I didn't I said the chosen thing. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
All right. What about molecules? Anything? I just got back from Austin, Texas last night. And um, I actually for the first time finally saw the bats.
You know about the bat? Oh, yeah. I've seen I've never seen them fly, but I've seen a couple ones roosting like just after the season. At the bell tower? At the at the bridge at that at that bri uh, whatever canal street that is.
Why were you doing something at the Yeti store? I love that Yeti store. No, no, no. I was on a I was on a boat for uh my friend Helen's birthday. She had like a boat, uh uh what do you call it?
I don't know. That that river is on a boat. That river is like on the river, the Lady Bird, yeah, Lady Bird Lake. It's like six inches deep. What were you on?
Like an inflatable raft? No, it's deeper than that. Really? All right. Yeah.
So when I tell you I saw the bats, I thought this was gonna be like, oh, you'll see some bats come under a bridge. This was literally a million bats. And it was like a constant stream of bats that lasted 20 minutes minimum at like dusk, sunset. It was very unsettling. And I did not realize there were one and a half million bats in Austin.
Wow. Which is more than there are people in Austin. How long did it take to go from cool to no thanks? Uh, I would say like after three minutes it started becoming unsettling. And then after like 15 minutes, it was really unsettling.
Yeah. There is a didn't, you know. Imagine seeing all the rats in New York City at the same time. I feel like I've done that. I feel like I've done that.
Don't hey people, if you're visiting our city for the first time and you see a big trash bag and it's moving slightly, don't throw a rock at it. Don't kick it. Don't. Um don't do it. Uh your story about seeing the bats and like kind of like the horror reminds me.
You know the you know the the composer, uh uh Steve Reich, minimalist composer? Yeah, yeah. So it's gonna rain. Yeah, yeah. It gonna rain.
So he has a piece which is like because that that's like you know, I understand it's important, but unlistenable. But like he has a piece called like two piano, I think it's called two pianos, and they go they're very similar, but it's like played real and they go in and out of sync. And when it first playing, you're like, oh, this is really cool, it's delightful. But then it's so long that at a certain point you're like, is this the rest of my life? Is my life always gonna be like this?
Am I always gonna feel on edge? Am I ever gonna feel calm again? You know what I mean? And then you have that thought, and then it goes for longer, and you're like, it releases the whole rest of my life. And then finally it's over.
It's like that. That's what Nastasia thinks when the server's talking about the food. Zing. I love it. Okay.
Uh no one uh Quinn. I know you I know you have a food thing you're gonna want. Did you ever measure the freaking butter or whatever we're calling it? I gotta I gotta do it. Do another test.
Uh do you have any preliminary measurements? Uh again, I have the measurements for the pseudo butter milk. Okay, and how much fat was in those. Well, again, we can't calculate the fat. We try to calculate the water.
Whatever's left. You calculate the water, you assume what the non-fat milk solids were. Remember, we went through this, and then the rest is fat. Yeah, I gotta have to run those numbers down. Okay, okay.
So maybe maybe next week we'll have some numbers. We don't know how much protein is in isn't the butter. The assumption that we're gonna make the liquid phase is the liquid phase, and there are only two phases liquid phase with milk solids in it, and that milk solid ratio stays the same in all of the liquid water-based phases and an oil-based phase. And only those two phases exist. And when you evaporate the liquid, you have left fat and the solids that were in the liquid phase, and that solids always stay in the same proportions.
That's the only assumptions that we can make because we don't have the equipment to do any other assumptions. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Next week, people, maybe we'll have some data.
Stas is Stas was about to lean into the microphone and say, don't count on it. And then she thought better of it. She leans in, I can see her mouth start opening, and then she just goes past the microphone like this. It says not. I have the I have the cream.
I have the cream in my fridge. Oh, speaking of cream, I did a cream experiment yesterday. Ready for it? So uh have I talked about cream syrup on this uh show? No.
A while ago during the pandemic, I think. Yeah. So it's one of the so it's one of the uh it's one of the ingredients that we use uh at Contra. So I used to make for years I made milk syrup. So, you know, the funny thing about milk is is that um it's stable where at the pH where it is, right?
When you add acid to it, it destabilizes and breaks. However, it also becomes stable ish again if the pH goes much lower than its isoelectric point. So the isoelectric point of a protein is where the charge like goes to the charge in solution goes to zero and then switches signs when your pH goes through the isoelectric point, right? So when you're taking uh milk to the isoelectric point, it curdles bang. If you can get it through the isoelectric uh point without forming big curds, it's stable again.
So I figured out that that is what is happening in milk syrup. You are adding so much sugar to it that you can't curdle all the way. Then you add the acid to it, take it all the way through its isoelectric point to acid. And now it's like a stable kind of semi broken state that you can then shake in a drink and it doesn't curdle or cloud or anything, it doesn't like break in the is it kind of like an emulsion in a way. Like I know it's not an emulsion.
Maybe that's the wrong word to use because then associating things with that, but I well, it's like a it's um it's um it's a suspension, right? So it's like in other words, you're maintaining the colloidal suspension. I don't think it's technically a colloid anymore because I think over a long period of time it will settle out. Okay, you know what I mean? But it's it's a fairly stable suspension.
That's what it is. But you know, the emulsion, you're not breaking the emulsion though, so that it's also there's oil emulsified into it, which is what we're talking about with quin and the butter measurement. But so uh, so you can also do the same thing with cream. So it's a 50-50 milk syrup, like make simple syrup with milk, uh, add acid to it, it'll break, you know, pseudo break, it'll thicken like yogurt, and then it's good to go. Uh you can do the same thing with cream, you just gotta be careful not to whip it too much as you're putting the stuff in.
Now it's a great ingredient. We use it right now primarily in low alks, but you and non alks, but what's nice about it is is that the cream really mellows out wooded spirits, so you can do some like fun stuff with it. The problem with it is it's pretty sweet, right? So yesterday, for the first time, I made polydextrose, which is the non sweet sugar substitute. I made polydextrose cream syrup so that now we can I can add that cream to a shaking cocktail without adding sugar.
So I can add the bases, I can add like whatever sweetener and acid I want and add the cream separately in a non breaking form. Does that make sense? And I'm calling it creamy D. Yeah, that's so gross. Nasty.
But if you guys have polydextras, you got my you got my name for the butterloiter band. Yeah, but I'm not trying to sell somebody this product, so it doesn't matter whether anyone does it or not. Like we're trying to sell people spinzall, so we can't choose a name that's ridiculous for that. You know what I mean? Speaking of milk wash was a terrible idea.
I should never have used the term milkwash, right? I should never have coined the term milkwash. And so when I was, you know, Jen, my wife was Did you claim that? You created that? Yeah.
Really? Yeah. I mean, you can search in vain for someone else who talked about it before me. Which one? The one I'm redoing?
Yeah. Yeah. Everyone knows that. Yeah. Oh, I don't think they do, though.
Yeah. I didn't know. I mean, like, who knows whether it's ever gonna get done? People, people have asked about it. Anyway, point being that Jen is reading my, you know, the the update to the washing chapter.
And I, you know, at the beginning of it, I'm like, I'm really fe I really feel stupid. Like, next to Houstino, which is the second dumbest term I ever came up with, like, coming up with milk washing as a term. I came up with it because it like I was like, oh, it's like fat washing, but in reverse, but it's confusing, right? And then it leads people to say things like their milk clari instead of saying milk wash, they're like, oh, I'm milk clarifying. I'm like, no, I mean, milk is not a neutral clarification aid because it's such a huge flavor stripper.
So like to think that like milk is a clarification aid that you can use just like any other clarification aid, it's not the case. You know what I mean? Because you're just ripping so much flavor out. So Jen's like, well, this this is your opportunity. You you know, you can now change it and say you're gonna call it somebody else, call it something else.
But then I was like, you can't call it like flavor stripping, because then who is gonna read a menu and say they're gonna have milk stripped, like milk stripped vodka? You're gonna be like milk stripped. It doesn't sound good. Milkwash sounds at least okay. You know what I mean?
So I don't know. How did we get on this? I don't know. I don't know. Nobody knows.
Nobody knows. We brought cream syrup. Oh, cream syrup. So yeah, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter.
Creamy D. I can call it whatever I want because I I don't care. I'm not trying to sell people creamy D. You know what I mean? Gross.
Creamy D. It is hard gross, though. Hard. Yeah. What do you got, John?
Um, I got a question for you in the Discord. Where did that go from? What freezer do you use a Contra for the carbonated cocktails? Randell specifics, please. No, uh, so we had a Randell uh by unified brands at um at Booker and Dax, they have a Randell at Contra in the kitchen that uh they use for the culinary side.
But ever since um existing conditions, the what we do for carbos is um we take a uh an ice well and then put you know that you know the drain tubes for sinks? Yeah that you stick to so that the sink doesn't drain. So we have one of those uh in it so that we can fill the sink, and then we fill the sink with a mixture of the world's cheapest handles of vodka, and then uh we take it to about 20% alcohol, and then we have an aquarium pump that circulates it, and then we pump uh chilled glycol through the cold plate so that we're using instead of using the ice well to chill the liquid in the cold plate, we're using the liquid in the cold plate to chill the liquid in the ice well. So a reverse ice welling. And uh, yeah, it just sits there and we have all the bottles.
I built a little um, I built a little, you know, like when you get a case of wine, it has the little cardboard dividers. Yeah. So I built one of those things of carbon, but they're steel and they're perforated so that the bottles can stand up. One of the problems with putting carbonating bottles into an ice bath is they bob around and they fall over and it's a nightmare because especially like the emptier they get, the more floaty they are, right? And so my solution has always been if you can keep them in these kind of sleeves, they just float to the level of the liquid.
So that's what we do. Anyway. But uh Mike Capafari uses uh, you know, uh he uses cheap, like, you know, um refrigerators that you get at like, you know, I don't know where you get it, where you live, wherever, I don't know where you guys live, like PC Richards, I don't know where you go. You know what I mean? Lowe's one of these things.
And then uh he uses, and I've I've used them a lot as well, Inkbird, because I think they're the cheapest. And what they are is they're just little temperature controllers, and you plug the temperature controller into the wall, and then the temperature controller has uh a temperature thing that you stick in the fridge, and it has another plug, and you plug the refrigerator into it, and then you just turn it on as cold as possible, and then the the machine, if you buy a freezer, not a refrigerator, don't do this with a don't do it with a fridge because uh they'll ice up over time, trust me. Um, and a freezer is designed designed to do this. Uh, and then that's it. Then you can set it to whatever temperature you want, and it can be very accurate.
I will say this remember, don't hook uh a fridge or a freezer up to a PID controller. Okay, I'm gonna say this one more time because it doesn't make a lot of sense to people. Do not hook up a fridge or a freezer directly to a PID controller. Because for any of you who have ever used an immersion circulator before, when you look at it, right, you'll see the light that designates the heater is on, goes on, on, on, on. And you know what the worst thing in the world for a compressor is?
On. Yeah, kill it. You'll wipe out your you'll wipe out your compressor in like 45 minutes. It's gonna be toast because it's huge in rush of current. It's just terrible for it.
So instead of that, you want good old-fashioned bang bang control, and you want to set, depending on what you're doing, about two degrees of hysteresis. You could try one, but you you also some of them, I think the Inkberg can, you can set a minimum length of time between cycles. And I wouldn't want my fridge cycling on faster than about once every two minutes or so. So, you know, you you can set it like that, but please do not send uh a regular PID signal to a compressor, you know? Hey, I want to remember once at the French Culinary Institute when they did the uh one of the renovations, and they they tried to cheap out.
Remember they would always cheap out, they would do all this nice stuff, and then they would cheap out at the last minute. So one of the things they cheaped out on was um they they had remote. Okay, so for the for any of you who've ever had like a you know restaurant with there's here's a thing. Am I gonna have remote compressors or not? John, you know what I'm talking about, right?
No. So, like if you have a new construction, you like m a lot of our home refrigerators, the compressor for the refrigerator is right by Stas. You know what you're what we're talking about. It's like, yeah, for your walk-ins and whatnot, where's the compressor gonna live? Oh, yeah.
Right. So, like the most efficient thing is to have your compressors like outside and way away from everything so that you can reject the heat, right? So, first of all, they stick all of our compressors because they had no other place for them, and they they couldn't figure out how to vent it, into a tiny cube right right down the hallway from where we are, right? So it's just loud and hot as hell, right? And then they couldn't run enough electricity to them from one panel, so they split the panels, and we once lost a whole panel in the building so that one leg of our compressors went out, and no one was trained to be like, oh my god, these things are only running on one leg of their three phase and go turn them off and it wrecked them all.
It wrecked them all. So just gotta be careful with your compressors. You know what I mean? Yeah. Anyways, awesome times, good times, great oldies.
Uh all right. So uh I'm sorry, uh, I still have not gotten my amber gris yet. It last time I tracked it, it had made it to Frankfurt. It had made it from it was coming out of um Mumbai. It made it to Frankfurt, but it hasn't made it into the United States of America yet.
I don't know whether our new the new customs have been like, we need only United States made fake amber gris. You know what I mean? But maybe that's what happened. I don't know. We'll see whether I see whether I can get it.
Uh okay. Uh moron labne, which is interesting. I I would guess that most lobna is not uh smart, it being not a human. Um I love that stuff though. That's something good to make in the spinzall, by the way.
Yeah, love labna. Yeah, spinz all is made for that. You know what I'm saying? Delicious. Uh occasionally someone will ask about the food safety of oh, this is for we're gonna ask Chris about this.
Should we wait for Chris or do you want me to wait for Chris? I mean I mean, yeah, but I would say maybe the Simon question and also anything after Simon is more general, and especially uh Johnny and Kevin's question are from like last week. All right. Well, listen, I'm gonna just I'm gonna put this out there for people to think about. Moron is asking, or Labna, whichever one you want to go with, is asking, like, is there a verification that your swarma/slash donor kebab, the big old hunk of meat on a vertical rotisserie, hashtag vertical grilling, whether or not those things maintain a safe temperature on the inside of the meat over prolonged periods of time?
And was wondering whether Chris, and maybe we can ask him because you know we're gonna come later, maybe he can just like sneak into a swarma shop, just shove a combustion engineering thermometer into one of them and measure the temperature through the middle of the of the swarma machine. You know what I mean? Yeah. Maybe depending on the trumpo, would it be big enough? I mean, yeah, I mean, like, well, some of those swarmers have a really big diameter.
Well, I mean, he can hammer one into it. You know what I mean? I mean, the guy has thermometers. Mine got stolen, by the way. I don't even have one.
I can't even test it. Mine got stolen. I would took him to a demo and they got stolen. Sweet. So anyway, so like uh uh Chris, the Chris, uh Quinn, email Chris and tell him when he reschedules, give him this question and see whether or not he knows anyone he can run a test on a swarma and give us the data.
I mean, he he would love that crap anyway. This way we'll know the actual answer instead of just sitting around theorizing like knuckleheads. You know what I mean? Anyway. Simon writes in.
Oh, but this says it's for Chris and Dave. You don't want to ask Chris? Yeah, yeah. We can ask him again. All right.
First of all, Simon. Go to the next question. First of all, Simon, you're saying lots of chefs. Why don't you tell me which chefs are saying this so I can go to their house and have words with them? No kidding.
Uh, lots of chefs say that there's nothing much left today from the molecular gastronomy and scare quotes era of cooking that was done at restaurants like El Bully, the Fat Duck, and WD-50. What would you say to those people? Well, I mean, in the bar world, that crap is going strong. And I'll say that there was only ever a few restaurants that kind of were leading the forefront of development, but all of the restaurants were using all of those techniques. So you might not see all of these techniques.
It's not being done in the same way, but it's not like the advances that were made at that time have been thrown away. I mean, people still use circulators, people still use vacuum machines, people still use hydrocolloids, people, you know, all the stuff is still getting used. It's just kind of uh, I don't think that in the restaurant world, in the bar world, yes. And I don't think in the restaurant world there is as a bullion a uh a nature of kind of playful weird food whimsy as there was, you know, in 2004, five, six, seven, eight, nine. Uh, but the techniques I think are still there because they're valid.
I mean, always some techniques are gonna stay and some techniques are gonna go because some are good and some are not. You know? What do you think, John? Yeah, no, I mean that's yeah, nothing really bad on that. Yeah.
Yeah. Well said. Uh Johnny Baseballs writes in some of the best beef tartar I've ever had has been in Belgium. I saw John as tartar on the menu at Temperance. Would you be willing to share his recipe and tips for making sure the beef is safely prepared?
Well, beef being safely prepared, that's just getting it as fresh as you can, grinding it cold and keeping it cold after we keep it buried in ice and portioned deli cup containers. Um gloves and hands. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, just being as clean as you can throughout the whole process. Um as for the dressing, so it's ground meat, not cubes.
Um the original 1924 recipe calls for piccolilly uh mixed with the aioli. So picolily is a 18th or 19th century, like British pickled condiment, really heavy on the turmeric, so it's really yellow. Uh it's got gherkins, cauliflower, pearl onions in it. Um pearl onion. Yeah.
Um I mix that with uh mayo, Worcestershire, Tabasco, black pepper, and then at the end I add uh fresh elves, chopped parsley, and mix that up with the meat. Um I can't think of the ratios to all that. Uh send send us your email and I'll I'll send you the recipe. But also more popularly now that's done with ketchup instead of piccolilly. So also when you go to Belgium now, everything is a little bit more of a red tint as opposed to the yellow one.
A little bit worse. Different. Hey, uh, did I mention on air I discovered from uh shirtle uh did a thing that uh Wisheshire sauce's base used to be soy. Really? Prior to World War II, Worcestershire was a soy sauce-based sauce with the anchovies and tamarind and all that stuff in it.
Yeah. Uh huh. And then they move to uh vegetable, whatever, DV, whatever. Yeah. Interesting.
Hydrolyzed vegetable garbage now. No. So I kind of want to kind of want someone to make and like an OG soy-based Worcestershire sauce. That'd be delicious. Right?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You should do that, Dave, with all your free time. Yeah, yeah, right.
Someone out there, someone out there's gonna do it. I'm telling, I'm saying, do it. Yeah, do it. It's a great idea. Yeah, yeah.
Do it. I don't know why the Leon Parents doesn't come out with like, they could charge whatever they want. You know what I mean? Yeah. And just be like, here's like here's the you know, 19, 10 or 18, whatever version.
Yeah. Eat it, buy it. Yeah. It's four times as much. And you'd be like, fine.
Exactly. You know what I mean? Fine. Who cares? Maybe we should uh pitch that to like uh Bob Florence or something.
He but would he make wishes he might send him an email see whether he would do it. Yeah, Bob's good people. Bob's great people, but like he like he's interested in what he's interested in. So if he's interested in it, he could do a really great good job of it. If he's not interested in it, he'll be like, that's not what I'm interested in.
You know what I mean? Yeah. So but yeah, his stuff is good. I just I just went through another bottle of his uh his ones with the mushrooms soaked in it. He has a couple different mushroom ones and the rye.
Any do the rye? Yeah, it was his ride. That was good. Oh, real good. Yeah, real good.
Again, it's like, you know, it's uh expensive, but it's like a luxury that you can afford to have. Yes, because you know for the people who don't know about this. This is Bob Florence out of uh Mystic. Well, kind of stoning. Uh Moromi soy sauce, uh artisanal soy sauces being made out of Connecticut that are really delicious.
And he trained with some uh some like old school soy sauce producers in Japan and like he's still in contact with them. So he's very respectful of the process. He's not like you know, he's not he trained over there for a long time, didn't he? Yeah, well he's he's an ex-plastics engineer, so he spent a lot of time in uh like working on like dashboards for like dupon like DuPont materials for dashboards that wouldn't like degrade in the sunlight, and I guess not also like mess you up when your head hits it he like did like iPhone cases for you know he's a lot a lot of plastics engineering and I believe his words he's you can go back and listen to the recording because he's I said this on air uh so hopefully I'm not misquoting him but he's like I was sick of filling the world with plastic so I wanted to I wanted to make soy sauce I'm like oh nice yeah um I got a Discord question for you too one by the way how do you stop met myoglobin from forming on the ground meat when you're storing it you ever lose any you ever get any brown forming on it no not usually I mean I just clean the steak pretty well I feel like I don't know when I get it out of the package just like some brown on the outside um just trim all that off I save that for my uh steak opa sauce to brown off later um but met myoglobin actually isn't bad for you it's just unappealing yeah I don't get issues with it yeah yeah it's nice and once you mix it it should well how long do you beforehand how like how long does it sit in the mix? Uh it's element.
Yeah okay all right so you you grind for what you're gonna use that day? Uh like two days. Two days? Yeah keep it nice while submerged overnight keep it nice yeah uh all right Kev writes in hey Kev uh back when I was a student at the FCI in 2009 and then a an aside that oh crap old true yeah yeah yeah world world is like that uh you were doing some experiments with isousionol and clove oil uh on fish pre-ikime um now let me let me just say what that is because it's been a while since we've talked about it. Ikajime, I believe means fish killing.
Uh, and it's a series of techniques that were uh originated in Japan for uh increasing the quality of fish flesh by destroying the brain of fish and then sometimes doing what's called shinkanuki, destroying like destroying the spinal cord. So one of the things that we used to do all the time was destroy the spinal cord at the FCI was we would run tests on different fish killing techniques to see whether they made a difference in the quality of the fish. Short answer, yes, it does. Uh we then learned that there was a fish anesthesia. We talked about this.
You can hear about this when uh uh Michael Fabro was on back when he was with at Oracing Salmon. Uh they used to use Aque S, which is a clove oil-based uh fish anesthetic, because if you remove stress from the fish by anesthetizing them before you kill them, the fish tastes better. And we ran those tests, and it was true. The lady who sold us the aqua S uh out of New Zealand also said it works on shellfish. And so we ran a bunch of tests on lobster and showed that aqua anesthetizing uh shellfish before you kill them does in fact make the meat taste better, as opposed to just boiling them live, right?
Boiling them unesthetized, rather. Uh, and but uh aqua is difficult to get. So we used clove oil, which you can buy at a Whole Foods as the substitute. That's the background for this, okay? Okay.
Um I'm gonna go into some trials involving a variation similar to the popular Korean dish, uh Ganjang Gijang, which is raw marinated crab. The beginning of the process uh involves working the fresh with fresh live crab and then soaking them in shochu and then a salty flavoring medium. Almost all the recipes recommend freezing your crabs for a few hours to quote unquote put them to sleep. But I'm wondering if isousinol can let me avoid putting my fresh crabs into a freezer. How much further did you get on the isousionol technique?
I know you did lobster, but that was so many years ago, I suspected you've since refined the technique. Well, I haven't actually refined it more, but we did it a lot, a lot back in the day. So in fact, we did it on crabs. We used to get king live king crabs. So True World Foods used to bring us live king crabs direct off the airplane in styro.
So they were fresh, like out of the water like the day before. And we used to anesthetize those. And good. So here's what I would recommend you do. If you want to anesthetise your crabs, you can either make fake seawater, which is what we did at the French Culinary Institute, or since you are, I'm assuming you're Kev that I know, you're in Copenhagen, just get some seawater.
Yeah, yeah. You know what I mean? And then I'll read you off the blog because it's hard to find now. Um clove oil usually comes in 10 milliliter bottles. Uh I did the calculation on the clove oil that uh I had uh at the time.
You it's not water soluble, so diluted in ethanol. So 10 mils of clove oil into 90 mils of grain neutral spirits to give you 100 milliliters of clove solution. Uh the clove solution that I had, you want to dose at uh see, you want to dose in it dose about for fish, it says point six point three. I'll give you the, it's gonna be super boring about the hot the blog is still there. 0.53 milliliters of the clove oil solution uh that I was telling you about per liter of uh water that you put it in.
So you get you take the syringe, you suck up that solution, you spray it in, it pastices out, like it like disperses in and makes a white cloud. And what happens is is at first like nothing happens, and then the crustaceans start moving around. And with lobsters, I can't remember with crabs because we didn't have a box big enough for them to move around. Lobsters will start walking backwards. So like they'll go from like moving a little bit to not moving to moving backwards.
And that and then they kind of stop moving again, but they're not dead. That's when you get them. That's when you get them. So after they start moving backwards and then they stop again, that's that's when you get them. And that's that's the dose.
So yeah. Okay. Covered smothered. Yep. Yeah.
Uh yeah. So wait for them to do the backwards zombie walk. And as soon as they stop zombie, we tried a maximum dose of it says uh 0.8 milliliters of that solution per liter um of seawater. And uh the problem was we sometimes kill them with that. You know what I mean?
So I would stay below 0.8 in the kind of 0.53 to 0.6 uh milliliter zone. Um that makes sense. Yep. Good covering smothered. My God, that was the best crab.
Oh my God. That crab was so good. Were you there for that crab, Scott? No, I don't remember the crab, but I do remember the fish that you killed, and we immediately ate it like raw or sushi style. It's so good.
Yeah, man, back in the day we had we hit the nice thing about the French Culinary Institute, even though Nastasi and I worked literally in a garbage room was like literally like uh what my God. So we used to show up in the morning. I don't even know why, right? Show up in the morning because we weren't allowed to cook until three when the class was over. And then we had like two hours before we could cook before the next class came in.
So we would go in, and they would have just filled our quote unquote office with trash and chairs. So what would I do? I would just go in there, pick up the chairs, hurl them down the hallway. So bad. Well, it was so disrespectful to what we were trying to do.
You were talking about last night, like chefs throwing things and how wrong that is. I mean, I wasn't talking about that last night. Yeah, we were. You can't throw things at people. No, he didn't though.
Yeah, I didn't throw it. Who threw something at the point? What are we talking about? Oh, you know, you said that the people that were around him said it was wrong. I never said it was wrong.
Oh. You oh, you said people shouldn't throw things. They didn't throw things like at like other workers. No, no, no, against a wall. Oh, yeah, you shouldn't do that either.
We didn't throw, I was just getting rid of the chairs. I was getting rid of the chairs. No, you weren't, Dave. You were angry and you would hurl them down the hallway. It was crazy.
Anyway, but point being like, you know, we never we were always very pleasant to people. Yeah. Uh you had to be. Because that was the messed up thing about teaching at a culinary school is is that even though the people who were there, you had to treat them like they were going to be restaurant employees of someday, they're also the guest. Some were not cut out for restaurants.
Yeah, but you you see the you see the issue? Yeah. So you have to treat them like they're part of a brigade in a real kitchen, and at the same time, they're the guests. Remember when our interns would stand behind us and you'd say, stop effing creeping up. Yeah, so Stas and I are sitting there.
Oh, we're on the computer. What does that mean? We're on the computer, and you're standing behind there like a creep. Don't creep on people. You know what I mean?
Dave and I shared one computer, I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh my god. The other thing I loved. I'll get to the last question.
Hope we have time, yeah? I got yeah, we'll get to the last question. I'll do the question. So, like uh, I had a keyboard and one of the shift keys was broken. And uh I was younger at the time, and they come and they're like, there's another that the cave you tried like pushing on the shift key.
So I literally like got on like on the put my feet on like a stool behind and did push-ups on the shift key trying to get the thing to remember that's us? Yes. Get me another keyboard. You cheap bastards. You know what I mean?
Alex M, uh, bread question. Sorry, Nastasia. I recently cooked a cooked a loaf of bread with activated charcoal for color or recipe from modernist bread. It worked fine, except I noticed the crust was noticeably less crusty than normal. It came out thin and chewy, equivalent to a bread that is barely cooked and blonde on the outside.
All other circumstances uh are identical to a recipe I've cooked hundreds of times, and most of them come out extremely extremely bien quit, you know, crusty. Uh I've had the same experience with bread that includes matcha, which comes out of dark green, and I wondered if anyone could explain or speculate why a bread with an extremely dark crumb cooks less than a bread with a normal light crumb. I'm cooking in Dutch ovens in a home oven. You know what, Alex? I don't know.
It's an interesting question because I would think the opposite, right? Because, although, to be honest, bread, even though it's white when it most bread is white when it starts cooking or blondish, uh, it's still in terms of infrared radiation, pretty black. You know what I mean? It absorbs a good bit of the infrared radiation. I don't think it's that reflective.
But uh Quinn, you have Magoya, who was the uh one of the authors on Modernist Bread because he was on the show like at least once, maybe twice. Why don't you email him the question and see whether he can get a response for Alex for next week, uh, direct from the horse's mouth, since he did use their recipe. Uh, all righty. Thanks. Another week.
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