Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you alive from the heart of Manhattan, Rockefeller, New York City, New Stand Studios, joined as usual with John. How you doing? Doing great. Sweaty, sweaty, sweaty today.
You are, yeah. I'm super sweaty. But like looking at me makes you sweaty. I can see you sweating more since I walked in. I had a spicy breakfast.
Spicy breakfast. What was your spicy breakfast? Uh some beef empanadas from this Colombian taco truck or Colombian food truck. We can talk about that because it's unusual for Colombian food to be overly spicy. Okay, we'll get to it later.
Right behind me, rocking the panels, we got Joe Hazen. How you doing? I'm doing well. Great to see you. Hot and sweaty.
Oh my God. You know what? Like, yeah, it's just I know Quinn, he gets first dibs at crispiness. When the crispy comes out, Quinn gets first dibs at crispy, right? When we're all gonna be Casper crispyed, like Quinn Quinn gets first dibs.
Like I have a long list. Like, you know, either the headlight in the middle of my forehead with bioluminescent or like, you know, fix my night vision, kill the sweatiness, whole bunch, bunch of stuff. Anyway. Quinn, how you doing? I'm good.
I'm I'm very comfortably cool. Yeah. Air conditioning. Can you imagine? Like, uh, we'll get to it later, but like whenever I used to visit my relatives in like Phoenix, I was like, why?
Like prior to air conditioning, just why? Like, and no wonder everyone got shot in the old west. Can you imagine it's like a hundred and twenty degrees? Dusty is all get out. Like you're burning up.
Someone comes into the bar, you're trying to drink yourself into not understanding what's going on anymore with your body because you live in an oven with no relief. And the guy walks in and starts arguing with you. What are you gonna do? You're gonna get up and argue back? Or are you just gonna like do the easiest thing, which is to pull your gun and and shoot him?
You know, obviously, number two. This is why it's easy to get shot in the old west. My theory. My theory. Uh in the lower left, if actually, we're like a Los Angeles heavy crew today.
We have Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. How you doing? I'm good. Yeah, yeah, good. Uh we got uh, I believe we have uh Monsieur Le Molecule, Jack, uh Jackie Molecules, how you doing?
Yes, sir, I'm good. And our special guest is from Los Angeles today, but formerly from DC. Uh, we got Ed Cornell from Cafe Tropical in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, here. Hi uh, formerly of Milk Cult. And uh Ed, did we ever have you on when you were doing milk cult, or did we just like talk a lot because of uh questions and back and forth and whatnot?
I was on hey, how's everybody doing? I'm very nice, not sweating very much here in Los Angeles, but I was on probably back in 2015 with David Carp and Ariel Johnson at uh in the back of Roberto's. Yeah, yeah, back on the Voldemort Network. That's a good crew, though. That's a good crew.
Yeah, I ran into David, I ran into David Carp at the Santa Monica Farmers Market two years ago, and I was like, I know you, and he said, No, you don't. That's good. That's very strong. Until until until I finally reminded him of where we've met before, and then he's been nice since then. You're like, no, no, pornographic apples.
Don't you remember pornographic apples? He's like, Nope. Nope. For those of you that don't remember, uh Carp is a fruit expert that uh Nastasi and I met when we did the Houdini party. Isn't that when we met him, or did we meet him before then, Staz?
Uh uh, no, that sounds right. Yeah. And uh, so other than being an aficionado of uh it's easy to be an aficionado of good fruit when you're in SoCal, you know what I mean? It's like, oh, I I go to the date farm and I get all the best dates. And did you have the date in rootab for them you chowed?
You know what I mean? Or did you uh and like uh so it's like serious like fruit FOMO whenever you're talking to him. But then if you prod him, if you ever meet him, right? If you just a little bit of prodding, we'll get him to start to talk about French pornographic apples, wherein you you paint over the surface of a young apple before it reddens, and then you know don't do it with a green apple. Don't be a moron.
Don't do it with an apple that doesn't change colors, or you're just being a dunce. Anyway, you paint, uh you can paint anything. It doesn't have to be pornographic. However, the traditional, the traditional is kind of a soft core porn thing. And then you wash off the uh you wash off the coating uh after the apple blushes, and then you have a picture on your apple.
So that's like you know, it just takes a tiny bit of prodding to get him there. It's kind of like me and and uh Monroe Boston Strauss of of Pi. It takes a tiny tiny nudge to get me to start spooling off into infinity. Um I had something else on. Oh, yeah, you know, there's a lot of weird old like before like everyone could just turn on their computers and get pornography 247.
There's a lot of weird. Are you guys familiar with any any doctor people or doctor adjacent people? Anyone here familiar with uh what's the name of that company? Is it Davis and GEC? Something in GEC.
They are uh a suture corporation. They manufacture like the stuff that you know, sutures that you sew people up with, you know what I mean? Yeah, fancy butcher's twine with needles, you know what I mean? Yep. And in the I think 30s through late 40s, they did a bunch of things called uh history of ancient surgery, sutures and ancient surgery.
And they hired, there was a there was a cadre, a very well known at the time photographers, one of who happened to do the portrait for Monroe Boston Strauss in the original edition of his book. Anyway, so he they they have all these crazy studio, like like beautifully lit, almost like uh like uh like a pre-raphaulite painting of like historical things reenacted with models. So it's nine tenths is a bunch of dudes, usually older dudes, pretending to sew up naked women in weird positions, and these were intended to be put in doctors' offices. Weirdest thing ever. Like pornographic apple.
Like, why do you need your porn on an apple? That doesn't make sense. You know what I mean? Yeah, it's weird. Yeah, it's we it's weird and creepy.
It's weird and creepy that you know about all this. I was researching the didn't say I was a collector. Didn't say I was a collector. Anyway, um all this stuff gets served to me. You know how I'm a rabbit hole kind of a guy.
I know you are. Yeah. So when I yeah, I got to it, believe it or not, through pie. Through through pie. I believe it.
Yeah, yeah. Anywho, huh? And an interesting thing about a lot of these uh commercial photographers who are also, you know, fundamental, it was a weird interlace between commercial work and artwork at the time. And uh, but by the time these people died, like that, all of this work, which wasn't always like pornographic sutures, it was also like interesting commercial work as well. It wasn't really respected.
So it just ended up on street corners, just thrown out. Like no one saved it, archived it, donated it to anyone. So there's whole swathes of this that's only the only the ephemera exists, not the actual original. It's kinda sad. What a shame.
I mean, in some cases, it's a shame. Not in all cases. Anyways, uh, if you have questions, call your questions in to 917 410 1507. That's 917 410 1507. But to do that, you have to be a Patreon member.
And John, why don't you tell them, other than learning about weird uh suture pictures, why they might want to uh join the Patreon? Well, if you go to Patreon.com slash cooking issues, you'll see that we've got a couple different membership levels, uh, different perks at every level, including uh video access to uh the live stream if you want to watch that. Um you get discounts with a bunch of the people that we work in partner with, including Glassfin and uh Groven Vine olive oil and Kitchen Arts and Letters. Uh, you get access to our uh Discord with uh the rest of the community, and it's just a great resource. So yeah, check it out.
Patreon.com slash cooking issues. Random food thing that I'm not gonna remember, but it just caught my attention. Dad, I need to find out if anyone in the Patreon in the Discord has worked with this before. But you remember like 15 years ago when everyone's like when b when like bubble tea first started hitting hard, and everyone's like, I'm gonna make my own boba, I'm gonna make my own booba, and then you're like, nah, I'm not. This sucks.
Doing this sucks. You know what I mean? Well, I don't know how I got on. Oh, I know, because there's a question about boba, right? And uh, so I I tried it a couple times and it sucked.
And so then I would just go to 10 Ren or whatever and buy them because they would sell you the sacks of the pre-made commercial boba, and I was like, Oh, this is what I want. Anyway, I looked up some recipes on how to do it. Are any of you who like carp fisher people like fishing for carp? Not I. No?
No one? I used to. Really? Okay. Did you use boilies?
No, we used uh large clumps of lettuce. Really? Weird. Okay. So in your vegetarians.
Okay. Interesting. In uh in England, carpfisher folk have developed this thing because they're English. It's got a dumb name. Boilies.
Boilies. What's a boily? Good question. So it originally started out as like flour and like, you know, a binder like egg or whatever, and then um some flavoring mixed in that the carp would like, and they would boil them like a boba, right? They're round, they're perfectly round, like boba.
So sits well on your hook. Yeah, right? And it's right, and and they can make them float so they float up off of the off the bottom, so you can put your your hook, your your sinker, your hook, and your and your boilies, and they float there, and they make them in all different sizes from nine millimeters all the way up to 25 millimeters, right? But the English sell a boilie maker. So if you're interested in making boba or any sort of BB-shaped or ball-bearing-shaped extruded dough, and it's not even expensive, and they sell them in the US.
Look up Rollerball, one L on the roll, roll a ball, rolla ball. And so it's basically you what you do is you take a modified caulk gun, which they call a sausage gun, and it's got uh you get a different tip depending on what size quote unquote boiler you're gonna make, and you just go and you pipe out a line along what looks like you know, a bunch of scooped out, you know, like a bunch of scooped-out scallop lines, and then you put the mating surface on the top, it squeezes it down into now, they've been rounded on two sides, and then you roll the board just back and forth, bop bop, bop, and they roll off perfect, perfect boilies or bobas. So that's the way. That is the way. There we go.
Anyway. They're not very good fighting fish, they're just big lunks of logs that come out of the water. Well, I'm not advocating necessarily because I've never had a carp where I've been like, you know what I want more of? Carp. You know what I mean?
And also, like when you go, you know how you like you like when live carp are butchered, they just put the they put the they butcher them and then the live guts are there and you can see the heart beating. I just don't like it. Carp is just carp to me is like it's just I don't know. It's not it's not what I'm looking for. I know that a lot of people like carp.
It's just not what I'm looking for in the fish. It's not the fish I'm looking for. Has anyone here a carp lover? No. No.
Indifferent. Indifferent, yeah. Someone's like, oh, what are you having today? Grass carp. All right.
No, you know what I mean? Doesn't happen to me. Again, it's me. This I'm not trying to yuck anyone's carp yum. Uh like carp crudete.
Or just munch on carp scales. Anyway. Uh yeah, not my not my favorite fish. Did you finish talking about the Patreon? My brain's a bit.
All right, so what do you guys got this week? What what what do you what do you got in the way in the way of uh cooking? I went to a friends and family the other week uh for Haymarket. It's uh somewhere in Chelsea, Sixth Avenue and something. Twenties.
Um, really great spot. Uh friend who grew up in the UK of Caribbean descent, has worked at a bunch of great restaurants, has some really great food there. She's got this uh Perry Perry chicken. I had a berry berry chicken over the weekend. Oh nice.
Yeah. Oh mine was delicious. I don't know. This nice ranch. You know what that sauce goes good on?
French fries. Yeah. Dip your French fries in that crap. Yeah, that would be great. It's good.
Yeah. Yeah. Um, what else? Great salt cod fritters, like really, really great. How is the chicken served?
Uh half chicken, deboned. Debone, nice. Yep. Um sauced, you know, like on a sizzle and then moved to the plate so there's no like excess drip on the rest of the plate, if that makes sense. Yeah.
Well, you gotta be careful when you take it off the sizzle, right? To not need to do a wipe. If you're gonna do a table side, it wasn't table side, yeah. Oh, I was gonna say, yeah. When you do a table side, you don't get the chance to go, whoops, shoop.
And you like take the thing off. You know what I mean? Yeah. People are like, oh, how are people so neat? We use towels.
Yes. You know what I mean? Like, uh, yeah, all right. Yeah. Uh how uh the the breast was dry or not dry?
No. No. No, not dry. It's good. So uh remember when Sam Yu from across the street came in and say that he disassembles his border house so that it cooks properly?
That's a strong move. You think they're deboned, you think they still cooked it in one shot? I think so. They salted the heck out of the breast so that it had some uh wiggle room. Yeah.
Okay. Yeah, that was great. Yeah, if anyone's in New York City looking for a place to go, I'd recommend it. It was very good. Yeah.
Yeah. Uh I was in Boston unplanned, and uh they have really good fireworks in Boston. Get this. They light all the fireworks, they do what you think is a finale, and you know how sometimes they have a false finale, but this time they waited so long between the false finale, it's right on the River Charles. Right.
They waited so long between the false finale and the and the real one that like half the people just got up and started walking away. Like it's the middle of a baseball game or something. It's crazy. It's like, don't are any of you the kind of I mean, not that I go to baseball games, but whenever I have gone to a baseball game, all the people who like lit leave during the eighth inning, I'm like, what are you stupid? You know what I mean?
Like I hate those people. Like, why even come to the unless you're the people who are listening? I don't hate you. I'm just saying I don't understand. You spent all this money and time, right?
Baseball is one of the few games that's just not over until it's over. You know what I mean? Um so like, you know, is it that important to get out of your parking spot that quickly? I mean, oh, maybe you're I don't know, maybe you have a dinner date. I don't know.
You spend all the money to go to the game. The people that leave uh the people that leave before an encore at the concert, too. Same thing. Idiots. Like, what's wrong?
Get this. If you go to see the messiah, right? Don't be that person. The the hallelujah chorus in the messiah is like two-thirds of the way through the thing. I've seen it happen.
You know, hallelujah. Everyone's like, sit down, get up, walk out. Get up, boom, gone. I'm like, idiots. You know what I mean?
They're like, whoa, well, I I heard the uh we like sheep and I heard the hallelujah chorus. What else you got? What else you got, Handel? You know what I mean? Ridiculous.
Ridiculous. Although I did a very similar thing in college. I had a class that was an hour and 15 minutes long, but I thought it was the standard 50 minute length. And I only found out the next year when I became friends with someone else who was in the class that I had been just getting up in the middle of class every single time and just walking out without looking at anyone else or just getting up and leaving. So I guess in that case, I'm that guy.
All right. Uh what do you guys uh oh I went to Eastern Standard. Haven't been since they reopened. Good. You know, I think eating in Boston is slightly less money per unit value than New York.
Does that make sense? Yeah. That's probably right. Yeah. Less money per unit value.
That's my feeling. All right. What do you guys got? What what what do you got in Los Angeles for me for the week? I was in uh Seattle.
That's why I was actually on on plane why I couldn't be on the show last week. But I had some really, really good meals out there. Um Atoma, this restaurant that was nominated for best new restaurant at the for the James Beards. Um just incredible meal, incredible service. They had this like radish cake with gooey duck as a s as a starter.
How was the gooey duck done? Killer. It's a great question. It was like sliced very thinly. You wouldn't I wouldn't have even really known what it was unless they told me it was gooey duck, you know.
Um they didn't come out to the table and like rip the condom off the gooey duck and slice it there for you. No. It's the grossest grossest. It is. You're better off not thinking about it.
But it was really, really good. And then um uh Cambodian restaurant named Sofan, who had uh there were really great food, spicy food, you know, a ton of fish sauce and everything. But um one of the cocktails they had was this like green onion infused whiskey cocktail, which kind of blew my mind. Blue Your Mind good or Blue Remind interesting. Good, good, yeah.
Would order again? Not not I would, yeah. So I'm a little bit triggered back from Booker and Dax days when Sambar, like every core container smelled of scallions. We did do an onion cocktail, but it was with gin. So like but the idea of a non like Gibson like a bourbon cocktail, like I'm just like I'm like my head's twitching a little bit just thinking about like all of those things.
So the sulfur notes of the green onion came off nicely. Yeah, it was subtle and uh had like pandan in it. And uh it was great. What's the what's the color of Pondan whiskey and uh green onion? Is it like I mean it just looks like whiskey.
Oh you know, maybe a a slightly lighter, it's like a slightly lighter brown. It doesn't look like uh like an Apache helicopter or something, it's not like that like dark olive drab round thing. No, all right. All right, sounds good. The last Seattle wreck, real quick was um in in Pike Place, this uh it's like it's called Oriental Mart.
It's just like a market, and then there's a Filipino food stall there that um is been there forever, family run, and uh, you know, you can order like a trust me plate, which is basically you know, the woman just serving you what she's making that she likes, and that was incredible stuff. Probably the best longanisa sausage I've ever had. So you trusted her and you felt glad that you had. I did. It was yeah, I was rewarded.
Have you ever trusted someone and they've shafted you? In the food industry, I don't know, rarely. That's that's pretty egregious. That's pretty bad when that happens. You know?
It can happen. If someone is not if someone is just told to sell what they're what they're long on instead of what's good, then you can get shafted if they're not good people. You know what I mean? Anyway. Yeah.
Um all right. What stas, you got anything? Ed, you got anything? What do you got? I was sent by my friend Jesse who cooks at a place called 88 Club.
He sent me to a 24-hour donut stall in Burbank this weekend. And I gotta say, they've been around for a long time. It's called Donut Hut in Burbank. And you know what? Their donuts are really good.
They just do yeasted donuts and they're open 24 hours, which I feel like is kind of rare, but they've been around for a long time. Now, what time of day did you go there? I went pretty early in the morning. Like how early is early. Uh like 8 a.m.
Okay, okay, but not like hyper early. No, not hyper early. Not like not fresh out the fryer, but you know, so stuff had been sitting around for a bit. But they're not frying all day. They're just open 24 hours a day.
They're open 24 hours. I do feel like they have a reset at some point, but I haven't been there at midnight, so I wouldn't know. Yeah. Do they does yeasted extend to crawlers or no? Like French Crawlers?
Yes, it does. It does extend to crawlers. And also, like we do, we do a couple yeasted donuts at Cafe Tropical too. So I've been working on our curlers and our yeasted donuts for the past year. Agree or disagree.
The Crawler, the French Crawler is the god of yeasted donuts. Completely agree. Yeah, they're just so there are, I mean, there are a lot of very good yeasted donuts, but Kruller is god deer. Yeah. There are other gods, but it is one of the gods.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because like, look, a good pillowy, like, you know, not greasy, like good texture. I, you know, unlike Wiley, who detests yeasted donuts and only and when he was trying to make a yeasted donut, he made it chewy because he does not like yeasted donuts, right?
Like uh, I like them, but just something about like the texture of like the old school French crawlers when they're done right, it's just I used to go get them uh every day at 2 30 in the morning, they would come out at the at the donut shop right across where my sculpture studio was. And so my studio mate and I would just go get them every day. It's like, oh my god, right out of the fryer. Are they hard to keep? I mean, like they're especially God tier when they're fresh.
What's the trick on a French crawler since you've been working on it to keep it staying good after it cools down and sits around? Oh, I mean, I mean, you can try to keep it away from air. Like you can try like we could probably put it in like cases with desiccate, unless you look at packets. But in general, it's just like you just try to sell them out and then you know I I I don't I mean, it's just like other fried things, like it just doesn't sit around well. Yeah.
Do you know what's really good for yeasted donuts with a glaze on the outside, and I'm looking at them is just like a short like a very short nuke. Like just a micro nuke, a micro microwave, like a short nukage can bring back one of those donuts as long as you're gonna eat it right away. It ruins it if you're gonna hold it. You know what I mean? But if like some if like if you walked up to someone and you had like a cold one there, and you're like, Are you gonna eat this right now?
And they're like, no, nope, take it cold. You know what I mean? You're gonna eat it right now? Yeah, I'm gonna shove it in my face right now. Me ding.
You know what I mean? And then wakes right up. I feel like it because it's re-steaming the donut. It's like activating all that water that's still inside it. Yeah, yeah.
But the problem with nukage is if like someone overnuks it even a little bit and a little bit of it dries out and turns hard, everything's ruined. The entire effect is lost. You know what I mean? Uh like uh also I don't think it works as well for it works for donuts, but it's like harder because it takes a lot longer, and so they get a lot goopier. That's the nice thing about a nuke is that you can just do it until it's just perfect and pull it so it's not getting like burning you in one place, not getting too soupy.
That's like conveyor toasters great for cookies. I feel like they're not as good for donuts. What do you think? Yeah. Yeah?
Yeah. Yeah. What are the what's the team's thought on the old cake donut sliced and half and fried? Pan fried. Uh yeah.
Okay. Pan fried, yeah. Pan fry. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Pan fry.
Yeah. It's like pound cake. We talked about this. Yes. Fried pound cake.
Yeah. The pan fried. Pound cake. Whipped cream. Pound cake.
That's kind of like the the sp the split and grilled muffin is pretty much similar. Yeah. I was at a very bad. Delicious. Yeah, it was delicious.
I was at a very bad hotel. It's not their fault. Like, they're not catering to being good, right? But their quote unquote breakfast that came with it was they put a like very mid commercial muffin. They nuked it for like 30 seconds.
And I was like, you know what? Okay. Corn. The corn was better that way than the bad blueberry. I'll take a bad corn muffin over a bad blueberry muffin.
Agreed. Yeah. Bad blueberry is always so disappointing. I know, right? What is it?
Not enough salt? It just have no flavor. They're just useless. They have very little use. Whereas at least a corn muffin has an interesting texture.
If it has nothing else, it has an interesting texture. You know? Agreed. Yeah. Bad corn muffin can be saved with butter too.
Yeah. True. Yeah. What are you gonna do with the bad blueberry muffin other than throw it out or like cry or put on clown makeup? You know what I mean?
You know, uh, I don't know, like what's brand muffins usually have so much oil in them that you know it's basically just an oil muffin with brand in it, right? So it's like I don't know what my thoughts on brand muffins are. Really, I always either get blueberry or corn, depending on oh cranberry. You know what I mean? Like a cranberry is just a blueberry muffin by another name with a different berry in it, right?
Yeah. Yeah. What are your thoughts on lemon poppy seed? They're good. I'll never find myself going for it though, but if it's the only thing there.
What about lemon pound cake with poppy seeds in it though? Oh, that's fine. I like a poppy seed. Everyone's thinking baby seeds. Usually is I love poppy seeds.
Yeah. Not useless. Not useless. No. What about poppy seed filling?
Delicious. Like Hungarian. Yeah. Yeah. That's good.
Very good. Yeah. All right. So, uh, Quinn, Quinn, you're the only one who hasn't piped up with any sort of food catastrophes. What's going on?
Yeah, I was uh just making sure everyone else got a turn. Uh I actually did some frying over the weekend as well. Uh had some friends over. And we did uh pizza frita, so fried pizza dough, and then topped after and uh chicken wings. And it turns out pretty good.
Yeah, what's the advantage of saucing dough as though it were a pizza after it's been fried? Do you still have to like melt the cheese? Or were you doing some sort of abomination like roso situation? As it is, I mean, you know, the dough is hot, you just top it up and eat it. Of course, we also did some like filled dough.
It was previously make uh miniature calzone and then deep fried it. Yeah. I like a calzone. I love a calzone. I like a calzone.
I enjoy a calzone. Are you guys all fry calzones? Or some of you bake are some of you baked calzone folk? Baked, I think. I mean, if it's done well.
Like, you know, at the old cooking issue spot, the their calzone was very good. Yeah. So what's the difference between the calzone and the stromboli? I I feel like stromboli is like usually a drier feeling. It's like rolled up so there's like a spiral of dough in the middle, right?
Can be. I don't know that it always is. That's my question. I don't have enough knowledge. I'll tell you this stromboli is more fun work.
I mean calzone. I could take it or leave it, you know. I think the fried calzone is called a panzerati. That's pretty fun. It sounds like many it sounds like a tank.
I don't necessarily want to have kind of like Nazi references in my fried dough. Panzer? Yeah. Panzer tank. But a calzone too big to be fried.
Depends on your fryer. It's like a mini, it's like a mini. It's like a mini version. I used to fry full-size turkeys and made these. Yeah, I mean, like depends.
Really depends. But y what you don't want is one of those suckers spewing molten cheese into your fry oil. You know what I mean? That's why I always used to like. That's why, like, you know, all speaking of battle tanks, when you make like mozzarella sticks, just like the coating you put on those things so that they don't start bleeding into your fry oil.
The biggest fry nightmare I've ever had in my life was when I forgot to, I don't know what I did, but I improperly bound my falafel mix and I put in like 20 20 falafel or you know, 10 20 falafel balls in at once into my 40-pound deep fryer and they all instantly disintegrated and fell to the bottom of the fry oil. I was like I was like, oh, not only do I not have dinner, uh I'm I'm in this for hours getting this crap out of the bottom of my fryer, you know what I mean? Yeah. Cause like most fryers, re real ones, they have like a like a mesh coating that stops like big things from sinking down and poisoning your oil. And you don't usually let that much crap float to the bottom of your oil, but just like, oh my god, I hated it.
Hated it. Anyway, um, all right. Yeah, we did we did uh out outdoor frying just uh uh in a walk. Worked out pretty good. Yeah.
Well, how powerful is your wok burner? Uh pretty good. I mean, we were we had the oil at like two something Celsius, 200 something. Yeah, it's really hot. We we were listening, we were flush flush running the wings because they were they were in the uh ANOVA oven.
Yeah, uh yeah. I I need to try the new ANOVA at some point. But uh here's the thing. If you have enough power, I said this many times, if you have enough power, there's no need to overheat your oil, right? There's really no need ever to go above I mean I would say 365, but I'm gonna I'll I'll be generous and say 370, which is well below, you know, 200 is like 400, right?
And if you have enough power and enough surface area such that you can recover your oil in, like recover your oil temperature in less than, I don't know, whatever you're drop, it depends on how much you drop, but like a minute and a half or so. Like don't overheat it. Overheating is a technique that we use in homes because our stoves aren't powerful enough to recover fast enough. And so we're using the excess thermal energy stored in the oil to cook. Real frying, like frying the way it's supposed to be, does not use the stored thermal energy of the oil as a heat sink.
It just uses it as an amazing heat transfer mechanism, right? And you need to have enough of it so that it doesn't drop. But real, like the best frying is all about high energy input into the oil over a large surface area to accommodate almost instantaneous recovery without having to overheat it. Anyway, uh what I've never owned, Ed, is a donut fryer. Do you like yours?
Oh, I just have a regular lime, hot line, 40 pound fryer, but I would love to have the space for a donut fryer. We just we just reset every day. Yeah, donut fryers. And fry donuts at like four or five in the morning. Yeah, donut fryers are like the opposite of everything that I know about a fryer.
So for those of you who've never seen a donut fryer, they're like shallow and like wide. So they have a huge kind of a surface area. And uh because you're not dripping a bunch of stuff into it, you know what I mean? Yeah, you want to be able to essentially drop like 60 donuts all one time, very shallow. They have the large, they look like perf pans and you drop them all in at once.
Yeah, they're great. They're great. Do you have uh do you do cake and yeast? No, we only do yeast. So we do filled yeast donuts, kind of like the the old Polish donuts, those style, Larounds.
Um I'm using an old uh modification of an old Justin Gallately recipe. Uh the guy, I think was he at the British baker. Uh and then we have like our own pateo shoe recipe for a cooler, and it's like 50-50 cake flour and AP. Nice. And so but so the the those you're piping out?
Yeah, we pipe it. Actually, the thing that's nice about the cruelers is because it's a pateo shoe, like it freezes really nicely, and as long as as long as you temp them and saw them correctly, they they have a nice lifespan. So like basically pipe them out, freeze them, but you have to store them airtight, and then if you thaw them properly, they fry, they still fry off really nicely. Of course, like piping straight into frying liquid is like the best, but we allows us to do curlers like three times a week as opposed to every single day for the piping them. So if you had to guess, would you say 95% is good or like 90% is good?
I'd say they are 90% as good. All right. You know what? I'll take it. That's good, especially if you can get them right away.
What's the t what's the thaw slash tempering time? In other words, you're like, I want crawlers, or let's say you're gonna make crawlers all day and you want to stage them out. Like what's the how much time do you and what's the window of life? I'd say I'd say you want to pull them from your freezer. So first air, like definitely air seal them in the freezer.
We have those big plastic covers that go on the full sheets. Right. So definitely seal them in some kind of container in the freezer. Pull them and let them temp at air like regular room temperature. Our bakery is a little bit humid overnight because we're doing the bakes so like it we they only probably need to temp for like two hours but if you can temp them at room temperature like normal room temperature for three hours that's perfect.
And then how long do they live after they've been temped? Like what's your window? After they've been tempted they can oh um 30 minutes probably that's tough. Um they'll start to soften up a little bit too much and then they'll become hard to handle. So they're they have a good lifespan but they just become like too difficult to handle and like you have to be really really sensitive once they're room temp.
Okay. Or else they'll break up. And what's your fry time on something like that? Fry time a little bit the coolers fry for a little bit longer than the donuts so I'd say probably a five and a half minute fry total and then sometimes it pushes to like six minutes. So like three plus minutes on each side.
All right. Can you do I would guess that uh two and a half to a three minute fry is sufficient to set the dough. Can you par fry them and then and then re-fry them to finish or do they never come back to the way that they're supposed to I'd say it's like a pretty good chance but you'd have to go like super light and also like there's with the shoe pastry there's like a lot of moisture left on the inside unless you take it all the way, and I would worry about what's happening with that moisture that hasn't cooked out in the meantime. So you don't think it would just all balance out to where you want it when you when you when you finish fry it? By the time they're golden on the outside, that last bit of moisture has truly started to like in a good way, like cook out from the inside.
If you take them under, they'll still be pretty wet and eggy on the inside. And I wonder, and I think that they would sog out, they would sog out if you just left them. And you don't think they would recrisp on the second fry, you mean? Maybe, but wherever you kept them in the meantime, I think that weight would just like, but I mean I I mean I'm happy to try it, but I think that weight of all that moisture left would kind of really, really destroy them whatever wherever they're sitting around. Right.
Because it would be nice if you could it would be nice if you could like pipe them in directly into the oil, like keep them blonde, set them, right? And then freeze them and then throw them in the fryer from frozen. That's basic. I mean, you're just basically describing what we do with the churro, which is almost the same dough piped straight into the hot liquid, and then take them like part way, freeze them, and then take them the rest of the way later. But you don't think it would work on a crawler?
It's a little too fragile, but it might. But I think their fry is a little bit more softer than a churro fry. Right. And uh you know, we have a churro place. I've never been, I've never purchased a churro in the United States from a place that you had to walk inside of.
Same. Yeah. They have a place here that does it. Where uh at least they did do it right on Delancey Street. It might be called churro or something like that.
And they have like a big, almost like a Belgian style like kettle fryer, right? And then a thing that a machine that just or maybe it's a there's a guy there, but I think they also have a uh you know a depositor that like you know, boom, boom, boom, boom, puts them in. There's one in Cape Town actually on 32nd Street and Fifth. Have you been? No.
I've never walked inside to get a churro. Maybe I need to change my maybe I've made poor lifestyle choices. Maybe. Maybe I'm that that guy in Indiana Jones that picks the wrong cup and then gets vaporized. You know what I mean?
Yeah. I chose poorly. Yeah. What's your favorite churro uh coating, Ed? Are you you're not a purist, right, are you?
Who only eats either straight or like cinnamon, or are you do you are you one of the well, what do you do? I mess around, but uh so I have I have no allegiance, but I'm probably gonna go cinnamon sugar, but I don't have a dog in the fight of what churros should be covered with. Although I will say chocolate and orange peel is a slapper. Yeah. So how like zest?
Like microplane zest, or like like candied orange peel. Like candied, like dipped in dipped in chocolate and candied orange peel, yeah. Cinnamon sugar and the chocolate dip orange peel are the two that I stand out. So what size are the what size are the pieces of orange peel? Uh we're talking subdam sized.
What size? I couldn't hear you. Fuzzed out for a second. Below a dime size. Below a dime.
Back in the 70s and 80s, my mom's favorite candy was dark chocolate covered orange peels. And I have to say I still have a saucepan. Big appreciation. Yeah, yeah. They're good.
You don't see them as much as you used to. Delicious. You find them on the cannolis as well. Yeah. Yeah.
All right. And it doesn't, it doesn't weigh the churro down too much, huh? No. And also I think I'm I'm talking minimal amount, like almost like a small decorative amount, like not covered in decorative amount. Like it.
All right. Okay. Uh okay, couple questions before we get into the nitty-gritty. What made you move from DC to Los Angeles? Why do you think Dave?
Wow. Wow, nostalgia's coming in hot. Yeah. I mean, there are many reasons, Nastasia. I mean, that's a good question.
Um, I was closing my I was closing my ice cream company with my former business partner who is still we're still pretty good friends. Uh, and it took us a year to close the business because we had a we had accounts in like 500 grocery stores, and if we just like closed the business, we would owe a lot of money. So it took like a year to close the business. Um, because we couldn't scale with like a larger manufacturer. It was just like during COVID, finding a larger manufacturer to take our product on just became more and more difficult every year.
So I decided to close up the ice cream shop, um, meaning the production. And then after that, I was just consulting a bunch and just kind of looking for work. And I thought, like, oh, well, I can I'm sure I can find some work out in LA. And I was working on a hotel opening out here, so I moved here full time, and then that contract ended, and I just started cooking in a couple different restaurants. Decided to stay out here.
And I was uh cooking at a restaurant, a pizza place called Quarter Sheets in Echo Park. And do they in fact cook their pizza in quarter sheets? They serve it on quarter sheets. Uh huh. And they cook it in those Detroit style tins, but it's not exactly a destroy style pizza.
All right, but they cook them in the standard. It's so good. It's so good. Because d like the standard Detroit pans that I bought from Detroit are not part of the stand of the st sheet pan standard size ranges. So right.
So I guess you cook it in that. I can't remember what it is, but they do have they do have their own size and range. And there's a shallow and there's a deep. The shallow, they would use it's probably a two one and a half inch to two inch pan. Uh and they do Sicilian style squares in those, and then they used a two and a half to three inch steel for their regular pies.
I see. For those I don't know, I'm I don't know who I'm talking to now, but for those who don't like live that sheet pan life, right? Get sheet pans, right? And if your oven can hold a full-size sheet pan, then you made good some good life choices. But if not, like half sheets, but also get some quarter sheets.
Uh and I even like the the other, I guess it's an eighth, a little one. Yeah. Yeah. And just get a stacks of them. Yeah, don't get sizzle plat plates.
Get the get the eight sheets. And then yeah, and then like, you know, they're just and here's the other thing. Don't buy rolled parchment paper. Just make the investment, buy the full sheet sized parchment paper in a stack that's pre-cut, and then if you fold it in half and cut it with a knife, guess what it fits in, people? Half sheet.
If you fold it again, guess what? Quarter sheet. And like it just this is the way, this is the way. You know what I mean? Anyway.
Uh sheet pans. You can beat the after a while. You need to replace they can take a pretty heavy beat. And they're so cheap. Yeah.
And they stack so well. They stack so well. Yeah. And get this. And then you get and then you get a small speed rack through the kitchen.
Yes. I heartily agree. Here's another thing. Guess what they sell that fits inside of all the standard sheet trays? They fit, they make cooling racks that fit in all of the sheet trays, which are also good things to buy.
Anyway, uh it's one of the you know, one of the few like professional things that I think everyone should have. You know, I was told we're not we're not a core container family anymore, unfortunately. Too bad. Bad for me. Why?
What happened? Oh, I don't know. There's you know, can desire to go all in glass rather than in plastic, but you know, I uh I just love I miss core containers so much. Not just quartz pints, even the eight ounce, even the half pints, guys. I mean, uh, they all take the same lids unless you're gonna move up to half gallons.
The the lids are made out of a different material, so if you accidentally overheat it, the lid blows off before the wait. Why aren't you doing core containers anymore? That's weird. I don't know. Like the desire was to move to an all-glass storage system.
Here's the other thing. When you're bringing something to some other how your house or you're bringing it to work and you pack it in a core container, you don't care if you ever get it back or not. Also, they all stack within themselves. Yes, they do. I'm not a standing, Dave.
I don't want to get into it. Not getting into it. But like. Not understanding. Okay, but I miss them.
I miss them. So get them. No, I can't. I still have I still have a small stash. But like it's just like the only problem, the only problem with core containers is that polypropylene gets very brittle in the freezer.
And so you have to be a little bit careful if you're if you're freezing stuff out. Um that's the only problem I've ever I've ever had with them. I hate it when a core container gets cracked in the freezer and you don't know it, and then you start thawing something and then it's leaking everywhere. A nightmare. And there are disreputable core container manufacturers that do make lower quality.
They're more shatter prone even at normal temperatures, but the average core container is a very good thing. Uh once you also the other problem is once you do mess up one of the lids, they're never the same again. Once you overheat one of the lids and it puffs out of the top. And also, I don't enjoy, I used to harvest them. I like now I get them like if we ever get takeout, and they send me a core container.
I'm like, yes, because they get a core container, but they always put the they always put the vent holes into the lids, which kind of takes me off. Nastasia for Dave's birthday, you just want to get him a couple sleeves of these containers? No, you're gonna give me no, no, no. Next year, no, he's he's being, I can't remember the word henpecked. Hand pecked?
Listen, the amount of crap that I bring into that house that is completely unreasonable, no one's gonna say that, you know, it's ridiculous, it's ridiculous. Ridiculous. All right. Uh Ed, talk to me. I heard that you were getting the last I read of you on the internet, you were, and I'm sure this was a while ago, so I'm sure it's happened.
You were getting a soft serve machine and a Carpagani to run ice cream. So, how's the soft serve working? And which machine do you have? How many flavors can it pump out? So I did pick up a Carpigani 100B earlier.
Oh nice. Uh sorry, mid mid-last year. So I've been doing a little bit of like scoop ice cream, but we're only open during the day. We've only been open during the day till 3 p.m. So we don't do a ton of ice cream.
But then I was waiting around on eBay to find a Carpegani soft serve machine for basically a couple years. And finally I came across a gravity-fed UC 1131G for this is so it's like new, it's probably a $20,000 machine. And I think my model is from like 2020 or 2021, and I got it for two grand. What? What?
Is it water cooled? Yeah. It is air-cooled, which is good for California, but it is single phase air-cooled, and it does has two hoppers, so it's two flavors and a split. Oh single single phase like 220, though. One single phase 220, which like our our building, our building just does not have free phase.
Like the bakery's been open since 1975, and all the electrical has been exactly the same. Yeah, the big tailors and the big electrofreezes are three phase, right? They're 208 three phase, I think. Correct. Almost always.
Almost always. Um hey, does anyone make for California like a water to air conversion where like you pipe water like to like the roof or something and put it through a fan, like through like a heat exchanger? Or no? Uh they do they do that for walk-ins a lot. I believe so.
Yeah, I think they do that for walk-ins. Like they'll have a separate heat exchanger that's that's far away. Like our we have a walk-in in the bakery and our heat exchanger is on the roof. And I'm sure somebody makes an a water cooled heat exchanger that pipes the cool fluid down to the actual thing. Here's something I don't know that anybody does, but this imagine this, right?
So you know how everyone, not everyone, but like a lot of people are installing like geothermal heat pumps. If you had a new construction out in California, you could just dig a well hole, right? And you could just put in forget your heating and cooling, but just put in just a circulator without a heat pump and use it as your um use it as your fluid in your uh ice cream machines, your ice machines, and your refrigerators, and it would just constantly keep at 50 all the time. 50, 55 uh Fahrenheit. All the time.
I wonder whether anyone does that just for their refrigeration in a restaurant situation. Because it uses the same it's closed loop, you know. I'm sure that would work, but it's I feel like with the California building codes and agencies, they just hate something they haven't seen before more than anything else in the world. Right, even if it's better. Even if it doesn't matter if it's better.
If they haven't seen it before, they don't want it. Yeah. Because you don't need that much of a hole because you're not talking like heating or cooling a whole place. You're talking about just the heat exchanger in your walk-ins and your ice cream machine. So it's you probably only need one borehole.
You're probably talking about it's not cheap. Probably talking about like a ten thousand dollar problem. You know what I mean? But then your thing runs more efficiently forever and reduces your air conditioner load because you're not dumping all of that hot air into your place. You're dumping it back into the earth.
You know what I mean? Anyway. Someday, someday, Ed. Someday. Um so you were also saying in the thing I saw that uh you're very actually very diplomatic about you're like, listen, I know no one out there is going to make your own soft serve base, but I want to make my own soft serve base.
But I know no one's gonna do it. So what are the challenges in making your own soft serve base? I think the only challenge is doing something that will hold in the machine for a while. Like if you're when you're going through a lot of product, it doesn't seem to matter that much. But doing something that will hold in the machine and won't butter out super easily, I think is been the only issue.
Like, so where I've had to do is like if stuff is sitting in the machine for too long, I'll have to do a bit of a draw and release some product so that like the next feed doesn't get something that's like kind of bad. Because just like everywhere else, like, you know, if there's a time where you're super busy and the only thing you're worried about is the recovery rate on the machine, and then you have times when you're super slow where you just don't want bad product to sit in there. And not bad in terms of like going bad, but just the the butter particles separating out from the water. What do they add to the commercial mixes to stop overturn? Um mostly lecithins and monoglycerides, and then sometimes I've I mean I'm using guar, but I've seen other people use guar.
The the funny thing is is I think for some manufacturers, like I was noticing I made our vanilla as close to McDonald's vanilla as I can possibly do it, but they are doing something with their recipe where they actually don't have any salt in their ice cream recipe at all, which I was kind of I was kind of shocked by. It's not is not a listed ingredient. They have something else, they probably have a natural flavoring that mimics the presence of salt, but they have no salt in their ice cream base. That listen, that's gotta be some joker thing they're doing where like they're getting the sodium from something else, like round up people. You know what I mean?
And the chloride from like a third, you know, like it's one of those when you have that much money, you know what I mean? You can make the label say whatever you want. You know what I'm saying? It's like those things are hilarious. Um they do include vitamin, they do include vitamin E, I think, in their ice cream base.
And I can't tell if that's for like health standard means, so they can call it something else. No. Or but but vitamin E is not it's not, it doesn't mimic salt, as far as I can tell. No, that's their that's there for uh for stability, right? Vitamin E for stability?
Is it isn't vitamin E tocopherol? It's there for uh oxidative stability, I think. Ah, I think it's been a long time. Uh oh yeah, most most of them just use monogly monoglycerides. Yeah.
Here's uh here's a here's a question for you. You prefer okay, you call them something nice. You call them cake cones. I call them styro cones. Yeah.
You like the cake cone. Why? I do. I think it is a very nice vessel specifically for soft surf. And if you I agree with you 100%, if you just pick up a cake cone and you take a bite of it, it's gross.
100% agree. But with sauce serve ice cream sitting in it for one to three minutes, I think it becomes something completely different. And at the end of eating your ice cream cone, it transforms into something else completely. Something else good? Yeah, I'm just messing with it.
I'm just messing with it. You know what? All right. We're gonna answer some questions, but before we do that, I want to talk about your Feed the Streets project. So why don't you give us a give us like I'll read what it says off of the uh web is that uh you're basically bringing uh hot meals that are donated uh every Sunday at two locations and also doing coffee and donuts a couple mornings a week to people that uh have food insecurity in LA.
But you want to flesh that out for me and tell me kind of how how you got into that, what's going on? Sure thing. I kind of lucked into it because my business partner at Cafe Tropicall is this guy, Danny, who's like the best human being in the world, and he started he is he's not currently active with it, but he helped start this program called Feed the Streets, where they basically take meals, coffee, other stuff down to Skid Row and MacArthur Park a few times a few mornings and a few nights a week. And they started that like four years ago. And then when the fires broke out here in California in January, we started doing meals for fire relief four to six nights a week, and they would go out every morning to display people who lost their homes.
And then since all of the fire relief has wound down, we still do food and donuts and coffee out to Skidrow and MacArthur Park uh between two and three times a week, and then we do a couple things every other week. And we basically have some volunteers. Actually, it's really nice. It's mostly neighborhood people in Silver Lake. They show up at the shop on Wednesday evenings and I'll cook a bunch of food.
It goes in our walk-in, and then first thing in the morning we reheat it, and then more volunteers come in and distribute it, take it and distribute it out in MacArthur Park and Skid Row. Yeah. And so why don't you tell people how they can either like help I don't know by giving you product, cash, or volunteering? I would say direct them straight to Feed the Streets website in their Venmo. I believe it's at Feed the Streets LA or just at Feed the Streets, but go to Feed the Streets website, and all donations and help inquiries get can get directed straight through Feed the Streets because I'm lucky in that all I have to do is provide some food and a space and they help manage all of our volunteers.
Now, I also noticed by going to the Cafe Tropical website that you're also acting somewhat as a community center. You have meetings there like every day of the week for different groups. So how'd that happen? That was actually one of the previous owners started that, and that's kind of how I came into the business is back in the early 1980s. One of the previous owners uh came, his brother came back from Vietnam, and the bakery owner, he went to his brother's and was like, Hey, like you have this big space in the back of the cafe, and I just use it to have some you know 12-step group meetings back here, and the guy's like, Yeah, sure, I don't care.
And uh they started some meetings back there, and then over the between the 1980s and early 1990s, it just turned into a community room. And then in the late 90s, early 2000s, the community room uh became part of the bakery, and they moved the community room into another space that was behind there. They essentially bought out another space. And so there's a community room behind the cafe that has every day it's between four and six just community groups come in and meet, all different, you know, there's just a a hodgepodge of of people come through. And yeah, anyone's free to meet back there as long as the time is allowed as open.
Nice. Yeah. So go on their schedule and look at it. That's a very it seems like a nice uh amenity to provide for the community. Now let's rip through some questions.
Anyone chime in if you have an answer. Uh the germ 87 wrote in making a Thai iced tea ice cream and wanted to put boba in but concerned about it freezing too hard. Couldn't find anything online uh after quick search, not sure where to start uh if anyone has any guidance. I think it's gonna get too hard. I don't think there's enough I don't I don't know that you can make it sweet enough sugar poach.
Well yeah you're supposed that's a sugar poach maybe it'd have to be a lot of sugar, right? So I would use very, very, very, very I would go very high in sugar as high as you can go, right? And like invert, like not sucrose, right? As high as you can go of invert in a sugar poach. You think that's going to be enough, Ed, to stop it from getting too hard?
I mean I guess there's only one way to find out. Make the pieces if you get the smallest boba you can and then do a sugar poach. Like those two those two things combined could probably save you. Right. Well if you also do it do it like other people do and and and add it at the very end.
Like don't freeze it, just add it as a topping. Right. Well if you follow the recipe online where you get the the boily maker you can make your own and then you can add sugar or invert into the dough as well as as a sugar poaching maybe. What were we gonna say, Quinn? Yeah I was uh that was a a form question.
Actually, so I did read an initial comment. I was also thinking Jack the like soaking syrup with like vanilla extract or some sort of appropriate alcohol-based that doesn't like overpower the flavor. And that could help as well. Yeah, a little uh AFP. As long as it doesn't leach out into the ice cream too much.
Um Catherine G, yeah. Catherine G had a question about nut butter, and I'm not gonna go uh too much into it now by using with the masa grinder, but the question was how much oil, salt, sugar to add when you're making the nut butter, especially putting it through a masa grinder. Do not add sugar to nuts before you put it through the masa grinder. Do not add sugar to the nuts before you put it through the grinder. It could very easily seize your machine.
When you add sugar, like it causes the oil to bleed out as you're grinding if you add it before you grind. And and I've had nightmares. I almost blew out my next tematic by grinding it with sugar. Um Dave Kleiman writes in wrote in and said, I don't Oscath, I still haven't figured out what the cookie was back at Booker and Dax, the one that uh uh Tozy made for Booker and Dax. So I'm gonna look at it.
Dave Kleiman says, trying to make a Canada dried ginger ale. It's not available in Thailand, so I want to make it from scratch. I've made ginger ale, which tastes fine, but I want to most closely mimic the commercial beverage, so I'm guessing there are tricks. What's the process? I'm not looking for any shortcuts, and so the test that you ran, Dave, has like a lot of a lot of ingredients in it.
Canada dry, if you look at the actual ingredients, has less than two percent of anything other than water and sugar in it, right? One thing I'll say is that ginger rails uh have a relatively high bricks. I haven't measured one in over 10 years, but it's on the order of uh 12, right? And I would just I mean, simply I would just boil, I would thinly slice uh ginger and boil it in uh in in sugar sugar water to make a syrup. Use that as your use that as your sweetener, and they use citric acid and I would tweak it with some other flavors.
They might add a little hot pepper stuff to make the to adjust the burn, but that's pretty much what they're doing uh along with some preservatives. I I I took a picture, I'll look for it again next week. I took a picture on my phone, but I don't have time to look for it of the actual ingredients on the back of the Canada dry can. But that's basically what they're doing. They're not doing any, they're not doing any rocket surgery.
Uh Malkith wrote in, oh, I have to I have to go. Malkith, we'll talk about uh talk about ambergris next week, and L Butts will talk about caramel next week. Ed, thanks for coming on. I appreciate it. Uh, you know, uh I'm gonna be in LA soon.
Maybe we'll uh come try some of the some of the product cooking issues.
Timestamps may be off due to dynamic ad insertion.