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 Center, New York City News Stand Studios. Joined as usual with John, how are you doing? Doing great, thanks. Great, great.
I got Joe Hazen rocking the panels behind me. What's up? Hey, hey, hey. Spo spus bectrum is making our phone lines bad once again. However, if you wish to call in your number, we're we're we're allowing call-ins again, right?
Uh yes, we are. All right, call in too at 917-410-1507. That's 917-410-1507. On the West Coast, we are hammerless today. We have no nostasia, but we do have Miss Here Lajie Molecules.
How you doing? Yo, good. Yeah? No? And uh, you know, and in the upper left, our first Canadian of the day.
We have uh Quinn. How you doing? I'm good. Yeah, yeah. And then uh John, did I already say hello to you?
Yeah. All right. And then uh for our in-house uh guest, another Canadian who's now living in the United States in Philly. Yeah. You know, but Canadian nonetheless.
Alex Kemp. Thanks, Dave. Executive chef of my uh John, give me a give me a serious uh French pronunciation of of uh Lou. Lou. Oh, John's a natural.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. One more time, one more time. Lou. Yeah, not say on Dive. En Dive.
Yeah, this guy's like, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, but so wait, before we start, Alex, are you so you're Canadian and like that like Quebec, right? Uh yeah, I grew up in in Quebec and then I grew up in Ontario. I moved around a lot in there. But are you actually Quebecois or no?
Quebequis, yeah. So can you do the accent? What do you want to hear? On Div? I want to I want to hear uh uh oh, Chef Alain said that the kitchen work was okay, but I have to go out skiing, so I won't be around during lunch hour to take your call.
Okay, that's a bit long here. Sure. Yeah, yeah. That's what I used to deal with. Oh, Chef Alain, he uh yeah, he said the keychain was okay and uh Oh yeah, that's the anglophone Quebec.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. But my family does speak French. Oh, yeah? Like in the house?
Yeah, my grandparents uh had like the French accent. Like, Alex, go get your bicycle out of the driveway. And then my mom was English. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
So uh, but like, does the French uh does the Quebecois side of your family are they mad to speak English to outsiders? I get it I get it when you're mad to speak to Canadians in English, but what about outsiders? We had no bone to pick in this fight. Yeah, you know what? My my grandfather on my on my father's side was actually one of those classic like separatists who thought that Quebec should be his own country and was like very sticky about the English.
It was kind of a tough place in the house. Sounds fun at uh Canada Day. You know, Quebec on, yeah. Yeah, I really like so like but did do the Quebecois even celebrate Canada Day, or like that's a crappy English thing. Yeah, no, I I think they do.
There's Saint Jean-Baptiste in in Quebec as well, they celebrate. It's pretty big. All right, all right. And uh I had something else on on French Canada. Well, we'll show you.
I'm sure it'll come up naturally. Yeah. It'll flow, it'll flow naturally. It'll flow up it'll flow naturally. Uh all right.
So this is the uh part of the show where we discuss uh things that have happened over the past week that we wish to discuss. Okay. Usually food related. Not always. All right, not always.
So uh what do you guys got? What do you guys got for me? I went for some phenomenal Thai food out in Queens. Sri Popai and got some cow soy, which was delicious. Some what noodle curry dish from Northern Thailand from Chiang Mai.
Yeah. Um Different kind of noodles reminded me a little more of Ramen San Looders, a little more alkaline, a little more like bounce and chew to them. Um is that typical of that part of the thing? They they add like some sort of alkaline. I believe so.
With a yellow? Yes. All right. Yellow and bouncy. Yep.
And did you enjoy? Very much. So what shape are these noodles? Kind of ramen, like curly. So they bought some ramen.
They bought ramen. I don't know, maybe, but it was delicious. All right. But whatever. Either way, that is like also that style of noodle for like when I was in Thailand and that part.
That's what I happened to do. What's your least favorite style of noodles? One. And two. Oh God.
And two, question. What what noodle are you like? I get it, but like meh. I I don't know. I love all noodles.
Don't lie to me, dude. Noodles are great. What's what's your least favorite noodle? How's that possible? I'm about to get a bunch of hate.
Go. Okay. Uh I love watching it. Hand pulled noodles, not the best. The texture of them's just not the best.
They're not the best noodle. Or they're like this, stretch them out. Because what you have to do to the dough to make it do that doesn't produce, I think, the best noodle. I don't think they're bad. I just I think that everyone goes loony for them because of the crazy technique.
Showmanship. If you're gonna stretch a bunch of stuff, do dragon's beard candy. That's delicious. You know what I mean? Or whatever you want to call it, whatever culture you do that does the stretch sugar candy, do that.
I'm just saying, I'm not against people who do, but in the same way that I don't like, uh it's not that I don't like it, but uh tempur is not the height of fried foods. You know what I mean? What's the height? What's your height? Oh man.
Gotta get him back at his game. Yeah, no, no, no. Yeah, what's up? So that's an excellent question. What is the height of fried food?
So we're talking. Are we talking a dish? Are we talking a technique, or are we talking what are we talking here? I think we could do either, but the real question is are we gonna are we gonna separate it into things that are simply fried or things that are fried in a batter? Because I think it's two different problems.
Yeah. Right. But in other words, like some sort of, so for instance, like you could dredge your fries, but then you're you're what are you? Means you can't make a french fry. I think French fries are the height of I can really fry.
And you know, the french fries and like skin on chicken. Those two things are like if you can do either of those well, I'm like, props. You know what I mean? I agree. Um things that are mostly bad but can be good, like super wet fries.
Like I love it when a fried mushroom is good, mostly bad. Yeah. I love it when like uh depends how you fry it. Yeah, yeah. I you know what I you know what I love?
I love, and I've almost never had a bad one. Fried okra. I love like deep fried okra, especially whole because it gets gooey on the inside, but the outside's dry. Fried shrimp. Fried shrimp, good, good.
Here's my issue. The more I get to taste good shrimp, people don't fry good shrimp anyway. No, that's the point. Yeah, but but like like freshwater shrimp, it's just freshwater shrimp. Fried is still good.
I mean, look, it's still good. Don't don't get me wrong. You know what I mean? Yeah, I get that. Uh really good, like, really good like fish filet for like a like a like a good fish and chip style thing.
Beer batter. That's a good question. I've had really excellent beer batter when I was in uh Alaska. They did some good beer batter. I appreciate most of the styles of fish fry.
I'm not huge bread crumb fresh guy. Well, here's another fry one. We didn't even talk about this. If you're gonna talk soft fry, soft fry, so not hard fry. Schnitzel.
Okay, you're gonna get a pan in a pan of shallow fry. Yeah, yeah. Shallow fry, a little bit soft, a little bit yielding, schnitzel. I'll I'll tell you, I think I think the French fry, a classic French fry and a Heinz ketchup combination, to me, is one of the greatest things on earth. Oh, yeah, Heinz.
Heinz. It's gotta be Heinz. Heinz. Yeah. It's the best.
Yeah. I mean, like, why do they I don't want to go to a gastro pub and have some homemade ketchup on it? Oh no, that's the dumbest idea in the whole world. That's the stupidest thing you can do because you know what that means? You spent energy trying to trying to beat Usain Bolt.
Do you know what I mean? The wheel. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It works.
It works. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're not like, and you could have spent that energy making something else delicious that cr uh Kraft Heinz doesn't make. That needs work. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. For yeah. What would that be? Oh, what needs work?
Like something everyday. Don't like not too niche. What do you think? Well, I think Heinz has got everything on lock. Also yellow mustard.
I think like unless you're really good at it, you're not gonna beat a really good hot dog maker. Unless you're really good. You know what I mean? You're not gonna- I'm not saying you can't beat them, but it takes a lot of energy to make the best hot dog in the world. Beef.
Just cooking beef. Oh, yeah. Oh, beef hot dog. Oh, yeah. But I mean, even the thing is once you once you had the hot dog spices, you know what it tastes like?
It doesn't matter what it is. I remember I'll never forget once. I you know, I did the whole thing. I I I uh I par froze. I, you know, I I I got the duck, I got the fat level exactly right.
I parfroze the stuff down, ground it all, emulsified it, boop, boop, boop, in the in you know, in the mixer, stuffed it and all that. I was like, you know what this tastes like? Hot dogs. When you when you're doing something like that, do you have music on? Are you is this an afternoon?
What is this? Like it's gonna paint a picture here. Oh, that was a long time ago. So I've that was in my old kitchen, I think. So I solo.
Yeah, no, yeah, yeah. You don't do that with other people in the house. No, no, no, no. No, no, no. But but I'm a firm believer, I do this.
Is terrible. I do cook in my stocking feet, which is stupid. What is that stocking feet? No, it's like socks on. I don't have shoes on in my own kitchen when I'm cooking.
That's all right. But it's not, you know, smart sharing that with us. Yeah, it's not the smartest, in other words. You know what I mean? Like for dropping stuff on stuff like that.
But uh You also keep lying in your kitchen too. Keep what? Lie. Not anymore, man. I got in so much trouble with the lie in the kitchen that like you know.
Yeah, part of uh part of um, you know, staying married was getting the lie out of the kitchen. So that that means I have to, yeah. That means that I have to now, in order to do anything with you know, heavily alkaline stuff, I have to bake some freaking baking soda and turn it into sodium carbonate first, like a chump. Yeah, you know what I mean? Couldn't even do that.
But I'll tell you what. Tell me not to do that. I'll tell you, well, you got a nine-month old. You can't have any highly basic although you know, I'll tell you what. You have a nine-month-old.
Nine and a half, yeah. Nine and a half, yeah. It's uh interesting time. Wait till they can walk. Oh, I think we're almost there.
Oh god. We're opening another restaurant, and thinking about the timeline as if like she's always gonna be eight months, but now she's starting to move around and things are getting a little bit more difficult. All right, so before we talk about the rest of our week, why don't you describe so uh you and your wife uh Amanda Shulman own two restaurants in Philadelphia? One's a restaurant, one's not a restaurant, whatever. It's a supper club.
Restaurant. It's a restaurant. Yeah, it's a restaurant. Yeah, we're gonna. And so you have two of them, right?
And basically, I think like the way the vibe I get, even though I haven't been to Philly in a long time, is that kind of you you spend most of your time at one and she spends her time at the other. Exactly, yeah. Okay. And then you also have like a nine and a half, dude. Dude, did one of your parents move to Philadelphia?
Like, how's this work? We're just making it work. We're just making it work. And you're opening another restaurant. We're opening a third restaurant, um, Pine Street Grill, set to open probably sometime the next month or two.
Um, and they're good, they're all completely different, I think. How close are they physically to each other? All within eight to ten blocks. Oh shit. Yes, and we live in the neighborhood.
So the reason we opened the third restaurant is that we wanted a place that, you know, every time you you hear about restaurants, everyone's like, what's the concept? What's the concept? I just want a neighborhood restaurant that you could sit down and just like just a classic American restaurant. Yeah. So here's the, you know, so the thing is I think like uh I've never done it, so I don't know, but let you let me know, you know, give me a call back when it happens.
And is it like kind of dogs where you're like, oh, one, okay, I have a dog. Two, it's more work. But like three is like not more work than two. And so it's like because you can use one to feed the other. You can you can like be like, uh, I need a new staff at this, and now you have a big enough staff roster that you can kind of swap people around because it's only 10 blocks.
I truly have no idea because we're not open yet, but I imagine that it's gonna be a little bit more difficult. Um, but what's nice now is that my wife's a chef, like you've mentioned, and I'm a chef, so we can kind of worst comes to worst, we can each be at one spot and it's under control. So we're gonna find out here really shortly if uh the third one is tough. Do you guys both have the same closed days? Yes.
That's nice, which is nice because fam time. Yeah, yeah. You have to have at least one family. Yeah, one chill day. Yeah, walk around, drink coffee.
Yeah, you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. Light light people on fire. Yeah, yeah. That's what we do.
Yeah, Philadelphia. I mean, isn't it though? Yeah, you know, Rebecca, uh, the the boondoggler, the palacinator, who used to be, you know, part of the cooking issues uh team, she she works with you. She moved to Philadelphia, and like the first week she moved there, she's like, Oh, yeah, yeah, I almost got stabbed. I'm like, hey, you're living the dream.
Yeah, that's Philly. It's part of life. You're living. Yeah. If you don't feel the danger, you're not living.
Yeah. Oh, come on. Everyone, but everyone ranks on it. Philly can't be that dangerous. No, I I have never had any bad experiences, to be honest with you.
I used to live in, I used to live off the uh the J, the Chauncey J, yeah in New York and Brooklyn. And I I held it. Of all of the dumb name stops, is Chauncey the dumbest? Chauncey. Yeah, that's a good question.
And it's actually kind of rough as well. So it's like it sounds lovely. There's a Chauncey Square in uh a Yonkers, and every time I pass it on the road, I'm I I want to get out my monocle that I don't own and be like, no, Chauncey Square. You wouldn't fit in. No, but it's not uh yeah, they they're never as like they don't sound like uh they they sound like a butler, but they're not buttly places.
Maybe that's the point. Uh just kind of like a like gouging their eye, a little bit, a little bit of a rubbing it in. Yeah. All right. Giving giving them as we say, the schkut and gorp.
Yeah. All right. Fair enough. Uh all right. So back to uh what we've uh done this weekend now that we've gone on a severe.
I have to say food-related tanks. Yes, food related tan. And you never said you youasled my way out of it on a noodle that you thought was subpar. How about a sauce for noodles that you think is subpar. I have like just Asian noodles or we talking own noodles.
Oh. You could any noodle, dude. Any noodle. Any noodle. I have yet to have like and this might be like the also fit the overly hyped thing too, is uh pasta ale or oleo.
I just haven't had a good one. I haven't had a good sauce on it yet. It's just oily pasta. Yeah. You know what I'm gonna second on that one?
Rosso pizzas, crap on them. Yeah. Keep it. Yeah, fair. Keep it.
Uh you know, give give me a piece of your let me taste your sauce. Give me some of your dough. I'll judge it that way. Now make me a pizza. Yeah.
You know what I mean? That's my feeling. I'm welcome to it. Yeah. Uh wait, but you s you said something, wait, you said something else that piqued my interest, something else that I hate, but I forget what it is.
So we'll have to let it we'll have to let it slide. I was about to I was about to give you another needle, but I don't know. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, we'll come back to you. Yeah.
What about you, Quinn? What do you got? Oh, well, I've I've got a lot of stuff. Uh with a busy few weeks, we found a source of uh heritage apples. You'll be happy to know.
Well, at least next year we'll be able to taste uh ashmead kernel. So we found a source. My favorite. For this season. Yeah.
So we got it. We got three other uh varieties. What are they? Spit it out. Orange Pippin.
A cocks orange pippin', okay. I mean, like I I think of them more like an English apple. How do they grow in Canada? Although you where you live is relatively temperate. So maybe they can grow like more temperate kind of apples like Cox, I think of as like the quintessential English dessert apple, you know.
Another goofy name, a cocks orange pippin'. Yeah. Jonah Gold. Yeah. And um last one is uh Gravenstein.
Yeah, good. I once did uh I once did a comparative tasting of uh cox orange pippins, all grown in the same field at the same time, different root stocks. Cause you know, hey, look, if you people who know apples, right? Yeah, they're they're all clones, right? So you you you take a cutting, you graft it onto a rootstock.
Typically now, either dwarf or semi-dwarf, so you don't have to have giant machines to to get the apples. And uh the taste but on the different root stocks was surprisingly different. Yeah. So it's like the the root stock makes a difference, and obviously where it's grown makes a difference, right? So I've had the same apple grown in different latitudes same year.
Like wine. Yeah, a totally different what? It's like wine. Yeah, yeah, exactly. There's a huge so like my my my theory on apples, and you're welcome to it.
I'm gonna give it to you anyway, right? Is that uh every named apple has a reason it existed. So it it it fulfilled a function in a place for a person at a particular time. And then the ones that become popular are the ones I think that either they have some quality that allows them to generalize more, right? So like uh most of the ash meads I have are good, although you gotta make sure Queen that they're stored properly because they lose a lot of their acid if they're sweated out.
Like you get some weasel that wants to make cider out of them and they sweat them out and they're and they're they lose some of their malloc snap, and they're still good, but you know the versatility as well, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean we'll try we'll try to catch the orchard early this evening next year. Do you get a do you have any good russets up there like uh like rox berries or uh I actually really like like some of the less acid ones like uh Hudson's Golden over here, Hudson's Golden Gem. It's like a kind of a low acid, like real crunchy russet, like it the russety outside like kind of start shading the the texture vibe into uh what what do you call Asian pears now?
What's it what are they supposed to be called now? Apple pears. That really yeah, I got into yeah, that was just the other day. Yeah, yeah. I still call them, I think they're still Asian pears.
Yeah, yeah. Well, that's bet uh I think I've uh cause I've asked this before and since forgotten because I'm old and stupid, but the old, like, you know, not you know, American English name for them, real not friendly, sand pears. Yeah, it's not this is not doesn't sound delicious at all, does it? No, no, it's like calling an avocado an alligator pear. Yeah.
Doesn't make any sense. Doesn't make any sense. No. I don't think it's because it's from Florida because it's not, even though we grow them there. And I don't I think it's just because the skin is kind of like alligator-y.
Yeah, like yeah. Yeah. Not pear-like. No. You're doing something wrong.
Although I do like Asian pears. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I I got in a huge argument once with Dave Chang. Huge. He tried to convince me that the Asian pear was better than the, you know, what we were calling the standard European pear.
And I was like, Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. No way. You need to you need to hold back. I was like on that one. I was like, maybe.
I was like, but I've never, I you know, you go to the st you go to the store and there's like a variety of uh what do you say they're called now? Uh apple pears. Apple pears. There you go. There's a variety of apple pears.
No, no one's like, I'm going to get a cox orange apple pear. You know what I'm saying? But the the thing about the pears is like you you can use this argument. It's like, have you know when the pear is so almost overripe? Yeah.
And it creeps down your chin. Yeah. You don't get that with Asian pear or the apple pear. The apple pear. Yeah.
So like, I mean, that the the to me, and I've had this discussion also on the air many times, pear is the biggest heartache of all fruits. Like all the fruits, in the sense that like you need to order it before it's ready. Yeah. You need to sit there and agent. Yeah, wait.
Yeah. And then it's ready for just one second and then it's jam. Yeah, yeah. And so, like, you know, it's like you can do that at home, but like uh, I mean, I'll never do it again at a bar where like, you know, we get like a flat of pears as tall as one or two. But meant quickly as well.
Yeah. Yeah. Cause you gotta you gotta wait until that one second when it's right, and then you gotta process the whole flat and then sandbag it and freeze it. Or your toast. You know what I mean?
No thanks. You know what I mean? But we're on team pear, right? Oh, still, yeah. Hey, yeah, yeah.
I mean, like, listen. Of course. Okay. Apple pears, as you call them, have a pleasant texture. What's the name of that pearliquor we had, Dave, that had the texture on the bottom?
A lot of them do. A lot of those O de Vs, paro de Vs, like we were, we were tasting Reest Wiesenbauer or whatever his name is, who he has a vodka now, by the way. Oh. Yeah. Oh.
That's made uh, I think like maybe with like the EC people. They came by the bar. Anyways, hey, he's a good uh O de V maker. He grows all his own stuff. He has a farm, he has a tasting room, he has a kitchen, he's got a family.
Now that's life. Yeah. You grow like you grow carrots, you grow like eight million pounds of carrots, and then you make like this delicious carrot O de V, and everyone's like, I don't need carrot O de V. And then they taste it and they're like, I did need carrot O de V. Exactly.
You know what I mean? Like I feel like you'd look like an Oopalumpa eating oranges all day, though. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. You know what? I have always wished I could eat enough carrots to turn orange.
I don't know if it would actually work. I think it's content, I think. John Malkovich. Was that in being John Malkovich? Was it in the case?
Yeah, because the guy ate carrots all the time. We turn orange. My mom told me it's real because you can you can like bio stockpile the uh beta carrots. I think the same thing when you do when you do with the mercury thing, whatever it is. Yeah, I wouldn't uh I wouldn't biostockpile uh mercury.
That's real dangerous. Or but the the colloidal silver people, yeah, they turn mercury. Sorry, sorry, the collector silver people. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They turn blue.
Do you know there's a whole I don't know if they're still alive, but there was a uh a a gro a family in Kentucky that was blue because they all had this uh they all had a genetic like uh uh a thing where like their their blood didn't oxygenate to the full amount, and so the entire family was blue. They weren't in Morocco, were they? No, I think they were like, you know, probably of X you know, German extraction before they went to only reason I say is because of that one city that has all the indigo that everyone breathes in. Oh, huh. If they're big Wildcat fans, they could just go to the games and blue.
Just go go as blue. Go as blue. There you go. But now, unfortunately, not or not unfortunately, I have the song Blue Moon of Kentucky going through my head, and it's not gonna leave. Okay.
It's a good tune, though. Maybe you can sing it at the end. I will not, but okay, but the now, but now I've got the version from Plains, Trains, and Automobiles, which is the greatest Thanksgiving movie of all time. So for those of you that have never seen Plains, Trains and Automobiles with John Candy and Steve Martin, and you enjoy a Thanksgiving movie. Okay, it's you know, good.
Anyway. Check it out. Uh uh, what about you? Uh so wait, so Quinn, so what about what about apples? What are you gonna do with these apples?
You're saying you found them and you're gonna let me know next year what the hell's going on? Uh I don't know. We we bought the uh bathtub, each of those varieties I told you, and then we processed them. We made a custard and a florvet from each type that we ended up with uh six products and we were able to cross compare. What is process mean?
You mean you mean juiced? Or cord and cut and cooked? What does process mean? Yeah, yeah, mostly juice, and then with the sorbet, there's some juice and some like actual cooked uh apple flush. Here is uh I'm gonna make I'm gonna make a pitch for apple butter.
Apple butter is delicious. Delicious apple butter, is at a puree thickened with a ton of butter? No, although that also sounds good. No, you'll you just take apples, you cook the you just c you cut them up, you cook them wo down real slow, then you strain it to strain the skins out after you've gotten the skin flavor into the so you you cook it down with the s I do cook it down with the skins so that and it for hours and then uh you strain it and then you can either cook it all the way and strain it or you can like parcook it and then strain it and then you cook it down until it turns into its own jelly. So you're just good big in Pennsylvania.
That's where my family like would get it from. Uh and like you can make like really high grade apple butter, especially if you throw a like if you throw a little bit of ascorbic into it, you know, while you're keeping keep it while you're cooking, you can keep some of the varietal notes, even though I mean the point of apple butter is you're cooking it way down. But if you're using high acid varieties, you can get like a real snappy uh apple butter. Because it's mainly made with just like drek. You know what I mean?
Like apple wise. It's the same way as like schnitz. Like uh, do you ever go out, you ever hang out with the Pennsylvania Dutch people down there? Never. Okay.
Well I'd love to though. One day. Well, so uh the schnitz and I don't know how they pronounce it, but schnitz and gneep, which is the the uh dried apple slices and ham dish of note in the Pennsylvania Dutch area. Like one of the interesting things about drying apples is that the act of drying them reduces their tannic nature. So you can take apples that would be spitters and you can dry them, and then when you cook them again, the tannins have been condensed, so they're not as a stringent.
Anyways, um oh, caller, we got a caller. Caller, you're on the air. Hi, everything's um uh long time listener, first time caller, as they say, coming from Dublin, Ireland. Ah. Um my question um is I'm trying to dial in a disc.
And um I'm lean lobster generally and uh pretty happy with the results I've been getting. But um I'm wondering about uh thickening and your thoughts on kind of flour or other liaisons or uh even rice, which I know is more classic. And then I was uh about six months ago in Alaska and I heard of a fantastic bisque being made and tried it, which was 48 hours of slow cooking down of king crab shells. And I wonder if there are a way of doing the same with lobster. Uh you actually cooking it them down until they're soft and then blending them into the mix.
When I tried with lobster, I got a very chalky result. Um I'm just wondering about your thoughts on uh thickening and maximizing uh lobster flavor or shellfish flavor. Well, I'm gonna well well, I'm gonna send it out to the crowd here, but I know and thank thanks for calling by the way. Uh I w whenever I do lobster shells, back when we used to do this constantly at the French Culinary Institute, we would always like like abruptly end the boil out of the shells before what what we deemed the broth would take on a calcium kind of a note. In hours, isn't it?
Yeah, yeah. And so like, you know, and if you go beyond that, so there is I'm sure some magic temperature below which that doesn't happen. But I don't know in other words, without knowing this, like, you know, infinity protocol for crab shells. Yeah, and by the way, never done it with it's not true, I have, but I've never, like, I haven't done it a lot of times with crabs. Um, there might be some magic number and also honestly an acidity level, because remember, the more acid something is, the more all that calcium stuff is going to be soluble in the broth.
The more basic it is, the less that calcium stuff is going to be soluble. But I have never even considered doing a long cook on lobster shells. Now, we would do we would do sometimes we would do a butter heat first, extract some of the stuff into the oil because you're not going to get any calcium stuff into oil. But most of most of the time we were kind of in what, you know, quote unquote a hurry. And so we would just boil it with the thing.
What do you guys think? I no, I mean, I'm interested in hearing this too. Like I've tried to cooking a lobster shell, I think, for three hours and then blitzing it in at the recommendation of someone else, and I really didn't like the texture and flavor of the phone. Sure, Alex is gonna say you have to use a four shoe lobster anyway. Canadian hard bottom cold lobsters.
No, no, well, my thought on one of the what one of the things that I heard there was that maybe using the head and body, you get a a better result than the shells. Maybe there's a different balance of calcium. But when I did it with the shells, uh I was very unhappy with the result blending it in. Yeah, I would never ever do it with the shells. No, I never do the shells.
So I I used to use the carcass on the inside, you clean up the gills. Yeah, clean up the gills. Yeah. Um, but I agree with Dave. I I think you go anytime you go over an hour, you're not getting any more yield.
You're you're losing product and it's not the flavor's not improving. So if you wanted to improve the flavor, I see what you guys think, but I would just re-fortify it again, right? With the shells and never go past an hour. And the most important thing is the roast at the beginning without catching. Yeah.
And all your and all like that's the biggest part for me, anyways. Yeah, and you know what? I'm gonna I'm gonna double up on on what you said, Alex, is it like I think the thing that people don't do enough is multiple stock things. If they really want to get a flavor thing, like multiple, especially on like fast cooking things. I mean, whatever, with your with your beef bone, do whatever you do whatever God tells you to do.
But like with things like uh with birds and fish, like I'd much prefer to have like like a double or triple short stock. Yes, you have to you have to fortify it two or three times for big sauces for sure. Yeah. But what about thickening? What do you think about a liaison?
I would berminier it. Really? Yeah. Okay. Now let me ask you this.
Are you a believer in the what Escolfier used to say, which is that if you do it with Burmani, you can only let it heat through, and then you may not let it cook another so you have to cook it another hour. Remember, he used to say he's a big thing. Yeah, the flour tastes. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that was also in what year was that?
Uh 1912, 17, I forget something like that. We're past that. I think we're past that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thankfully, yes.
Yeah, we took the information. Well, but Escolfier said in the in the uh in the whatever intro, whatever you want to call it to the geed, that uh, you know, in a hundred years we wouldn't be using flour anyway. He thought we'd be using arrowroot and other things like that. We're still using because of him, jerk. Yeah, you know what I mean?
Uh but uh so you're your uh flour and butter. You know what? I never think it's a good thing. So because it's you can adjust it afterwards, you know? Um like drop another nugget in, drop another nugget.
Yeah, you get and you can just whisk it and obviously the bone, you do it when all the shells are out and everything's training. I would I would redo I would reduce the the stock itself to the right consist um not so much consistency, the flavor. You can steep tarragon in after you can steep in whatever you want. Do you ever dope seafood stocks of gelatin? No, I've seen that done before, but no, I don't do that.
I do I do that. I think it works quite well. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's I think it's a matter of choice. It's like definitely if you're gonna do that, obviously do it after reduction.
Yeah, do it. Yeah, yeah, but obviously after if you're gonna dope something with gelatin and do it at there's nothing worse than over reduced gelatin. Yeah, like you see the diner there and their lips are getting glued together and they can't talk anymore. Yeah. But like I'm not a I don't do it, but I'm not against like a little bit of pow little, you know.
A little more traditional, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. One other thing to throw into the mix, and I I I hope it doesn't count to the second question. But I I know there's a chef um in Spain at the moment who's using chitinase um to uh what he describes as degrade the the the uh shells of shellfish, um both from a flavor extraction point of view and a texture point of view.
Um I doubt that's gonna have any useful impact on the chalky calcium taste. Um but do you think that there's any value in terms of flavor extraction? And do you think there's any way of of telasing calcium or am I really just better off remoisting and remoistening after by stopping at an hour? So the the for those that couldn't hear because the the the sound is a little choppy, the question was uh there's a chef apparently I don't know who it is, I I don't I didn't know this is using chitinase. So the the structural backbone of arthropods, so that's all crustaceans, bugs, whatever, is chitin.
It's also the not you know, not uh what we're made out of, not you know, cellulose that plants are made out of or lignin or any that's chitin. Interestingly, also fungus, which by the way, are more closely related to us than they are to plants, right? So and I think I've never used chitinases, but uh so things that can break down chitin. Uh I would be more interested to try them on mushrooms to liquefy mushrooms, because to me, that would be freaking nice. But uh I don't know.
I mean, I would think it if anything, breaking the shells down would make them worse. In other words, like my problem isn't necessarily getting the ex like extraction out of the shell. It's just I don't want yeah, all of that stuff that's trapped in the shell to end up in my in my stock. I feel I feel like sorry to cut in here. I feel like the way from listening, picture like a debit card and then like the calcium's like the overdraft.
And I feel like you're just like you're tapping it up. Like we need to pull back. Yeah. Yeah. You don't need to boil shells for two hours, you're not gonna get any value out of that, right?
Is that fair? I mean, I think so. I mean, uh like I say, the only thing I have circulated longer is I've done butter for longer at a lower temperature. You know what I mean? Uh, you know, making like uh shrimp shrimp shell butter.
But you also gotta remember, yeah, like the shrimp shells that we get have no flavor in them. They're like paper almost. Maybe in Ireland. I don't know, yeah. I don't know about I don't I don't know.
I last time I was in Ireland, I remarked, oh, they have really good products here. You know what I mean? Like they have good products. We at least could do. Hey, since I have you on the line, let me ask you a question.
And I know we have a horrible connection, but spice bag, it's a thing or not a thing. Oh, it's a thing. Yeah, it's uh it's a late night, heavy boozing type thing, but it's a thing. Good thing or not a good thing. No.
No su no such thing as a high quality spice bag, but then uh quality is uh quality is a relative thing at that stage of the uh of the evening anyway, isn't it? Yeah, and I um the I last time I was there was I don't know, like eight years ago or something. I did not have a spice bag now. What is a spice bag? What are we talking about?
It's like you're m missing out. It's like comic experience. Yeah, it's like I think it's like hacked up pieces of like it's like French fries, and I think hacked up pieces of fried chicken, whatever else they've got, and like spice mix all kind of jumbled up, and you eat it. A lube sauce. And you have a beer.
What? I don't know. What do they serve a sauce for spice bag or is it just like a crunchy thing that you eat? Sounds dry. Yeah, curry sauce, vinegar all thrown on top.
But basically the kind of the dregs and the the dry of any fry fry fryer setup at the at the end of the night. So you know, 3 a.m., 4 a.m. spice bag, doesn't it? Spice bag. And does it actually come in a bag, which would make it even better?
Or is it come in a cone? It it comes in a bag. Nice. A foil, a foil bag, yeah, foil line bag, foil light paper bag. And is Dublin the place to get it?
Dublin, yeah. It it's the originator of the spice bag. There you go. Okay, there you go. There you go.
So, you know, you know, fly into Dublin. You know, you know what? I've been to Dublin a couple times, never went to the Guinness Brewery either. No, me neither. I hear it's a nice idea.
Overrated. Oh, it's nice. Yeah. Hey, let me ask you this. I'm gonna get you in trouble with your friends.
Guinness is a beer that I really like to have one of. I I disagree. Yeah, but say a lot of people like to have like four or five of them, but like for me, a Guinness is a well-made product to have one of. But I'm maybe I'm in the I'm and I know I'm in the minority, but w where are you on this? I wouldn't try to get you in trouble with your local friends.
There are nicer, richer steps that you can enjoy more of the sipper. So if you're really only going for one, I wouldn't opt for a Guinness. But I think that a Guinness works for two or three. Yeah, I think that's that's that's reasonable. All right, it's like a hop house protein, which is uh, which is a which is uh a more nuanced uh stout.
Alright, well and uh works more substantially better. But again, the guinness that you get in in Dublin and in Ireland in general is is better than the guess that you can get anywhere else. Um that's definitely definitely the case. Well, I appreciate it. Hopefully, call in again and we'll get our phone system in order and we won't you won't be chopped up like you were, but uh thanks for calling in and uh hope to speak to you again.
Uh so uh Mr. Molecules, how's your connection? Uh I'm here. Yeah, I can't believe that you're well again it's the whole reason I get like especially when they're poured well is like to have multiple. Uh that's why I would have guessed it.
Yeah, you're totally right. That but that's what I'm saying. Like, you know, what they say, like, you know, in taste is not to be disputed. I'm not saying it's not a good product. I'm not saying any I'm not casting any aspersions.
I'm just saying for my body, I'll have three daiquiries and one Guinness, not three Guinnesses and one daiquiri. Wow, wow. Wow. You know shocking to me. I don't know.
You know. Uh no, the other the other thing I had uh I I was trying to say earlier about quickly back to the noodles. Angel hair pasta has to be. That was on my own. Let me say something nice about angel hair pasta.
An anchovy sauce, like like a nice, like a light anchovy sauce, Christmas Eve, angel hair pasta, breadcrumbs. Which niche that makes it about hair noodles. It's but that the only thing that it's good with is anchovy sauce. That makes it a bad noodle, I think, right? But but can't you picture that?
I mean, I can picture it, yeah. Here's another thing. I also like it sometimes in in not in huge quantities, right? But like if let's say you're gonna do a small dish with a creamy sauce because the noodle itself becomes creamy, and so it almost becomes a gloop. Yeah, yeah.
But like but th that's the thing with angel hair. There's a super there's a super super super fine line where like someone makes a sauce too bound and then it sticks together and it sucks. Yeah, cooper brick. Right. Or they make it too soupy, and then what?
It's like but like when they get it just right, when when the sauce texture and the angel hair texture is just right, and you don't have like a plate the size of your head, you know what I mean? Like a little plate. I think there's a place for it. Okay. But again, this is my opinion.
I'm full circle here. I'll take it. Cause I guess sometimes I enjoy um what's the really like fine one in Chinese American food? Chow fun Chow Mei. Yeah, yeah, the really like thin one.
The sauces are usually lighter, right? I feel like my favorite fine noodle like that is the Singapore My Fun, which is like Singapore Chao My Fun, which is like got all that crap hacked up in it, and the noodles are usually shorter because they get all hacked up. Good, dry. I like a dry noodle. Yeah, I like it.
I think eatability is important too, right, guys. I feel like you gotta have an eatability. If it's an easy bite, it's nice. But if you got the big gloop with a big chunk, then that makes it unpleasant. I also I also hate having to I also hate having to slurp and flap noodles around and all over the colour.
And your socks, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like you're gonna, ow, my sock, now I'm boiling water all over my hell with that. You know what I mean? Like, or like when I have to when I have to sit there with a spoon and be like twirling around the spoon.
It's like, listen, just give me something I can use, like a like a like a front-end loader, push it in my face. Yeah, yeah. Hey, of the Yeah, you see, there's a lot of some of the newer pastas, the shape is good and they fall apart. I hate that. Well, give me an example.
Uh, I can't remember the names of them. But some of the one new ones. I don't even know what it is. Like the dry noodle is. Yeah, dry one.
Like when you cook them. Well, to you know, next week, by the way, for those of you who are keeping track, we could uh be talking about this next week because on next week's show we have Joshua McFadden who wrote a book called Six Seasons of Pasta. What? Two weeks. Two weeks is the same as one.
One and two are the same. Same order of magnitude. Anyway, six seasons of pasta, a new way with everyone's favorite food. What does it mean to have a new way with pasta? What does that mean?
I don't know. Like you don't put it in your mouth anymore? I'll have to ask them. Where do you put it? Strangler.
Oh, the Strottopretti is a great word. That's like the best all-time Italian pasta word. It's also great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Up there.
Top three. Strangle some priests. Yeah. Yeah. Nothing wrong with that.
I mean. Family friendly. Family friendly. I mean, like, it's such a great term. I wish Styles here.
She also loves that term. She's uh well, she'll be here for the pasta episode, I hope so. Okay, so listen. We have some uh qu how much time do we have? We have some questions to get to, but let's I want to go over so one of the shticks that you do at uh you guys got anything else over there?
In between your cutting in and out of uh your your choppy voice, Bill. Anything on that West Coast? Oh me, no. I I no, I'm good. You're still in shock from the Guinness.
I yeah, chopping out a little bit here too. Did you have a uh did you have any uh like uh low quality what was it? Did you have any interesting beers when you were in China? Any fake Guinness? Do they still do that?
Actually, yes. I can no, I can tell a really quick story though. I went to this isn't gonna put me in the same category as eating the whale. I I went to a North Korean restaurant, I went to a North Korean restaurant because it's a thing you can do. Um but not in North Korea though, right?
No. Yes. Yeah. So so you basically ate all of the food that North Korea produces for that day. You ate it all, and no one in North Korea got to have any of it.
Wow. Wow. I mean I really I I really drink beer mostly. I didn't really eat. I was there just to kind of like see that what it looked like.
So uh what's what's what's an export? What's an export quality? Yeah, what's export quality North Korean beer like? It was great. And then I kind of asked the journalist friend of mine, like, what's the deal?
And they were like, oh, they just bought uh an entire brewery from um like England at some point and just brought it over. So it's not really like, yeah, yeah. That made sense. It was just a really good blogger. Anyway, I had a whole bunch of them, right?
Uh it was on my last night in China in Beijing. And then I made the mistake of all the waitresses look like it's like twin peaks or something. Like, you know, it's crazy. Like they're in these kind of 50s outfits and they're being friendly, and she asks where I'm from, and I'm a few beers in, and I'm just like, the US. And she's like, USA?
And I was like she ices me the rest of the night and never comes back to the table. What would have been the right answer? I was like, wow. Canada. Maybe maybe Canada, right?
Exactly. Ireland, you know, Ireland might have done me fine. But if you had said I am Dennis Robinson manager, you would have been fine. Yeah. Robin's got a good name credibility.
Yeah. They loved, you know, that's he he's the he's the like American uh lover of North Korea, right? Still that was back in the that's a long time ago. Yeah. That, you know.
All right. So uh how what was the North Korean food like before you got iced out? Uh bad. Wow. All right.
All right. Yeah, it was just like it was like you know, they have like a picture of it was like Korean barbecue sort of style, and then they had a picture of like the marinated, um like the you know, like one of the marinated pieces of meat, and it came and it was just really they cook it there. It's just really fried out, bland. Well sad. It made me think that there's really just one meat that they're serving, and that menu was kind of like what do you think the meat was?
Yeah, yeah. Dissident. It was it was uh braised dissident. Yeah. Was there a picture of uh uh Kim Jong il in there?
Oh yes, yeah, it's one of things. Yeah, yeah. Fully state running. No, I'm a terrible I I am the low quality person for for going there, but I just uh it was a it was a journalist friend of mine and in uh low body. I think it's yeah, you gotta try it.
You're not like that, uh remember like a couple of years ago, there was that U.S. service member who was over there and he was about to be court-martialed for doing something, so he tried to take a runner to make it to uh North Korea when he was in South Korea, and then they got him and they're like, We still don't like you. They arrested him. Remember that? Yeah.
Good luck. Yeah. Bad news. Bad news. All right.
But I appreciate the story. I think I'm gonna go ahead and say that like uh that's more uh that's okay compared to the whale. Just I think the whale's okay too. Alex, I'm gonna ask you this. Someone served you a wo if you if you went to a restaurant, so Jack says that he went to the restaurant and whale was served to him, but he didn't order the whale.
Tasting menu or was it what was the situation? No, it's like a kaya, you know. Like I was like an experience. I was assuming I'll I'll have whatever you're serving. Okay, so one of the pieces is whale.
I mean, but I would also I would order it, Dave. But hold on. Who who's saying you shouldn't? You're saying you shouldn't eat whale? I'm just saying, I mean, yeah, it shouldn't eat the whale.
Shouldn't, shouldn't. What do you say? I wouldn't order it, but I need it if it was. I'm on the I'm in the minority here, maybe, but I believe in eating everything once and trying it out. Yeah.
And I'm also Canadian. I think we have a monkey. Take Halloween to pupil up, eat a lot of whale. Monkey? I would eat monkey in a second.
Huh. All right. I would push it. I would push it. But if it was done right, I wouldn't go to the North Korean restaurant and order monkey.
But I would order it maybe somewhere else. You know? Uh fair enough. Fair enough. All right.
All right. I don't know, man. Life's short. Dangerous to eat monkey, too. Eating something too close to yourself.
I'd probably do some Googling before I do it. Yeah, yeah. And you know, this is why cannibalism is bad. Not just because you shouldn't eat people, because you shouldn't eat people. It's bad for you.
I would I don't think I would eat human, but would No, you try monkey? I would definitely I would eat people over monkey. Well, is it farm raised? Sustainable? People?
All people are farmers. No, the uh the monkey. Oh, no, you can't farm raise a monkey. I'm just saying, we don't know. Got a point.
Uh geez, Louise. Uh we've gone off. We've gone off in off in the rails, as they say. All right, hold on. Oh, first of all, before I go into your current uh place, so uh when you read your bio, it's just uh it's uh it's a what's what of your visa running out.
Yeah, tough tough stuff. That's life, right? But so now that you're an owner, like what is it? How does that work? Married, I'm married.
My wife's American. Oh, okay, good. I got a green card. I am I'm here. It's not green though, right?
Uh it has a tinge of green to it. A little bit? A little bit, yeah. A little green, a little purple. Yeah.
All the colors. So they can't send you back over the over the border anymore? I mean, I think they still can, but I think I'm I'm okay for now. You good? Yeah.
Yeah. All right. Uh because like you're reading the vibe, it's like, oh, did this, did this, and boom. Oh, by the way, when were you cooking uh at the uh Pied Ducchant? You know I've never been.
Their cookbook when it came out, what is it, like 15 years ago? Yeah, the first one or the sugar shack. The first one that came the cookbook came out. Everyone in the United States was like, what? And then that was before like a lot, like that was like the first of the like like uh gluttonous over the top food.
Yeah, yeah. And and the way the cookbook was written and presented, like what era were you there? I was there the f this um the year Bourdin ate at the sugar shack. And I didn't work at the restaurant, I worked at the sugar shack. Oh yeah.
Um and he was there. Yeah, I said he can't eat at the restaurant. I was there. It's pretty cool. Cool experience.
But it is you hit the nail on the head. It is over the top. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Let me ask you this.
Does poutine really need foie gras? No. I I I don't think so. I'm like, goes back to the pasta. I'm a bit of a romantic.
I don't think it does. But people, like we spoke about earlier, like to come down or come up and eat it. And it's part of the experience, I think. Yeah. See, I think if I was gonna have foie gras, I think foie gras and french fries sounds good, right?
But I would want like I'm sure it was hot prep, right? Yeah, definitely. I really like hot prep. I prefer hot prep to cook. Yeah.
Uh it depends. It depends on the season. In the summertime, you know, uh you're getting you're you're getting the melons and foie gas or something like some cold preparation or terrine that's delicious or poach, cold poach. I liked like a good terrine, but just like like the like the meat like the big tranches of of of mikue with cold starch. No, I don't know.
Oh, I like that. With the apple butter you were talking about earlier. That'd be great. That'd be good, but give me some starch. Yeah.
Give me some starch. Well at the restaurant we do, we do like a little French toast, a paint perdure now with it. Different variations of carrots and stuff, which is good. Right. It needs the it needs it needs starch.
In yeah, in the early 2000s, I want to say people were doing like relatively large portions of foie gras and not enough starch. Well, you need it, you need to lap it up, right? Yeah. I and I I'm on team starch for sure. Treat it treat it like it like almost like it's butter.
Yeah. Or your or on a protein. I'll eat it on a protein. Like if you have a really beautiful, like classic tonod with a big chunk of foie gras on top, like I think that's really nice. But to eat a whole trunche, or would you call it?
I don't know. Whatever. I don't know. All right, chef. Okay.
Uh that that to me is like a little intense. It's a lot. It's a lot. Whereas I could eat, I still want starch, but I could eat more of a hot prep, especially if it's got that nice crust on the outside. A little cold outside.
You know? You need a little nip on. See, I don't is that true? I guess it is true, even for me. I was gonna say, I don't pay attention to the seasons when I'm eating, but I do.
It's a it's a feeling. It's not necessarily the temperature, right? It's just you feel like, oh I'm gonna eat this big piece of four gram. I'm feeling like crap. Yeah.
Yeah. So how big, and not that it you I know you weren't there you were doing, but how big is the poutine dish with the foie gras on it, like physically compared to like your head? I mean, everything is bigger there, right? So it's like it's it's hard to say. But she's everything she's over the top.
This guy was like, it was like we did a whole poached foie gras and bechamel with truffles. We did uh we did an omelet with calves brains, sweet breads and and uh caramelized onions. It's the whole restaurant itself was there was no thought of like let's bounce it out, you know. And if they did it, if it was light, it would be like it would be like a little bit of lemon juice on the arugula on top of the calves brains on top of the cheese on top of the egg. That's the lightening it up.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. See, the thing is it's like it's so funny because like that seems to me to be like like that kind of like throttles up. Does like seems to me like a super American attitude, but yet it's like hyper Canadian. You know what I mean?
Yeah, I think what he was doing at the time was definitely like it was different, right? But it's still kind of if you look back at old French food, it's like a lot of it is it's heavy, right? It's heavy, you know, get brioche, you got beijamels and all this like so. When you go to an old school bistro, do you do the steak fruit or do you do the duck confit? Uh I don't, I don't duck's harder to get right.
Right? I feel like people are I'm more opinionated on my duck. So you so if you don't trust them, you get the steak, but if you but if you want to see what they can do, you get the conference. And if it's really sketchy, I'll get the chicken. Wow.
The culero tea, always good. Yeah. Right? Safe. I think like I don't see the any reason for like an old school bistro to have any more than those things.
You gotta get the mool frit. You gotta get the mool frit. But the thing about mool frit is people always often don't reduce the liquor after it's made it and make a sauce out of the liquor. So it's just this like watery broth. Yeah.
It drives me nuts. It's like we do the restaurants, we pull out half of them, and then I put some shocked ones as well, and then we mount the sauce and like you know, add sofrito or pernot or fennel or whatever it is. Oh, pernot, huh? Okay. Go and answer it.
Fancy, I'm fancy. Yeah, fancy. But uh wait, you reminding me something when you were talking about the uh Moole Frit. Oh, son of a gun. Oh, I once went talking about the frit, because this is apparently the French fry episode.
I don't know, but I went to a bistro once and they sugar lacquered their French fries. What? What does that mean? They they put sugar on them to I guess keep them crunchy, and they were like gum. Like, I was like, you've ruined my steak too, because I got the steak frit that day, and uh my steak is ruined.
Well, that's really dumb. But like the thing about French food that everyone thinks it's like this like corner bistro run by like to do French food right, you know, it's all coming full circle here, like with stocks, for example. A lot of people just take the bucket demi and they just make a sauce out of it. But there's a certain art in taking a sauce, an old school sauce that you've a red wine sauce, and getting, you know, we do a chicken bones for for affordability at the restaurant, but to do it right and to make a white stock and then fortify that with more bones and then fortify that with more bones, and then you fortify that with the chicken wings. Like that's an art that no one does anymore, maybe because of cost.
But I love French food. I think it's the best. Yeah. So well, this guy likes Belgian food though. Well, I mean, yeah.
I grew up in Paris, too. Yeah, you know what I'm talking about. Yeah, 100%. Everyone just puts the gloopy like demi sauce in your eyes. It looks like HP sauce.
Yeah. It's trash. Hey. Uh, do you know that A1 sauce is no longer called A1 steak sauce? It's now just A1 sauce again.
Ain't no one putting on a steak. Who's gonna put that on a steak? Whereas I've had this conversation with my wife the other day, A1, which is a brown sauce in quotes, but not English, right? Is it English? Uh yeah, all those brown sauces are English, and it was originally English.
Uh we make it here now. It's owned by I think by Graftines. Uh but uh, you know, and so like all of those ones are like some sweet things, so usually a ra raisins or and or tamarind, yeah, and or yeah, and or apples, and or because there's a bunch of different brown sauce variants. Anyways, um, yeah. So they, you know, in the 70s when I was a kid, all steak was overcooked.
Mm-hmm. You got steak and you they're like hammered. Yeah, would you prefer it overcooked or viciously overcooked? Yeah, yeah. And so then like it needed a steak sauce on it.
But when was the last time anyone saw someone put steak sauce on a steak? It's one of those things you don't know you want until you get it. Right? Do you agree with that? I think well, I had this conversation again yesterday, so I'm fresh in my mind.
My wife goes, and I think rightly so, even properly cooked. My wife was like, you know what? Steak sauce, not on steak, on pork, on a pork chop. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah. Might do that next week. Yeah, there you go. There you go. I'm trying to think of the last thing.
A one on the steak. I think it was at a waffle house. I shouldn't be ordering steak up with it. Like are you eating? I'm in a backyard barbecue and someone makes like a bad steak for some you know, like sure.
Load it up with A1. That'd be fine. Yeah, but that means you have to bring it in your side pocket because you know your buddy can't cook a steak right. Yeah. Well, exactly, because now now it's an option.
You're like, oh, let me try it. If it's an option, I might try it. Oh, here's a here's a a good tip for anyone listening, although I hope, you know, whatever, just fix the first problem. But if you know that you're a bad cooker of steak, get a bottle A1, put it out with it. Loads of condiments, mayonnaise.
Yeah, yeah. Heinz. Oh, listen, mayonnaise is the solver of many problems. Uh-huh. Onions.
Nope. Oh, okay. Yeah. You mean like a like like cooked down? But not fully, not fully caramelized, right?
Like still a little bit crunchy, but a little bit brown. Oh, I I uh I love like j because I you know I have the control freak because whatever. And uh I just love that I can just let onions ride there for like an hour and they never burn. So I can cook my onions way the hell down. Good.
And also makes the best grilled cheese, like Gruyere, Gruyere and like the long caramelized onions on like rye for grilled cheese. Well, crap. What about that's good? Yeah, it's a craftier. Yeah, I grew up on craft singles.
Yeah, it makes a good grilled cheese. Oh, yeah. It makes a different but also good grilled cheese. I'm not against it. You know who loves craft is uh is uh Heinz is uh America's favorite ketchup.
Uh Wiley, Dufrey, my brother in law. He likes crafts eagles. Loves well, he loves American cheese in general. That's the best. Have you had the fancy have you had the fancy American cheese out of the Midwest?
I forget the name of the um Cheddar, Wisconsin. Uh some sh it's a collab between some chef and apparently it's real good. Oh with the guy in LA? I don't know, man. I think so.
We'll have to look it up. We'll have to get Wiley on. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. American band.
All right. Uh so back to the uh menu. What is a whitefish donut? Uh in the whitefish in the donut, is it like a bacalayo? It's not like a brioche style donut.
It's if we to be it's more like a fritter. We do um pata shoe mixed with smoke surgeon cured hotspot surgeon. We make little canals so it looks fancy. So you you use sturgeon and call it white fish? Oh, well, it depends on the menu changes so much.
What is this one here? Uh no, it's not sturge right now. What's this from Monday? Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
So that's it. Both of both you and the uh you know, at your both restaurants, it seems like heavily market driven. What a pain in the butt. Yeah, it is a pain in the ass. And no one talks about that, but it's a pain in the ass.
To actually like you when you say market driven, you mean we just like get sucks. Nightmare. And there's a reason why I print these menus off every day. And it it's tough, but it's it but it's it's special. It's what makes the restaurant special.
That's part of the DNA. What's what's the I mean, I only ever go to the tourist market there, like Reading. What's the market that that chefs go to in in Philadelphia? There's well, there's Head House, um, and then there's the Ritten House market. Um, but we use a really cool um uh company called Local Bound, and they it's a co-op with all the different farms in in the area and they bring really nice stuff.
So, but how long because uh for those that don't have to do this for a uh like a living, right? I mean, the idea of not necessarily knowing what you're gonna get today, but having to serve guests later that evening is like you know. It's daunting. Stab me. You know what I mean?
It's like uh the way that I cook, and and uh and sometimes our accountant doesn't like it, is that I literally go, I just order because everything is so cheesy, but what really what grows together does go together. So if I get like Punterelle, chicories, pears, uh apples, and what else? Broccolini. You can make an chicken, you can make a dish of it all, it's all gonna go together somehow. When did broccolini happen?
I know it's happened, but when did it happen? All of a snuck up on me. Like when I was a kid, no such thing, and then all of a sudden it's broccolini. Yeah, it's broccolini. It's like a zampic.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, they're like, it's like, hey, and so it's like, you know, it's like uh no, no, don't worry, this one's not bitter. Yeah. You're like, what? Yeah, I don't know.
You know what I mean? Yeah, I know what I mean. Because it was nowhere. Yeah. And now it's everywhere.
A little bit of anchovy on it. Uh also good marketing. People are like, broccolini. It's cute. Yeah, broccoli.
It's cute. No, and I can charge you more. Because like a head of broccoli is like a lot of broccoli. Yeah, but it's hard to prepare as well. Uh well, it's hard to prepare in one shot.
Yeah, you blend it, do you roast it? It's like people throw away the damn stocks on broccoli. It's great to puree. You can braise it as well. It's yes.
Yeah. Uh what is it? Kalen broccoli? What? Broccoli?
Broccolini. I don't know. It's I thought it was just like a thinner, like thinner, thinner version. It's like it's like look of broccoli. Look of broccoli rob, taste of broccoli.
Yeah. Uh but the uh remember, like uh, this was mapped 12 years ago. Uh Steingarden and I think Lydia Bastianich and a couple other people were trying to bring back overcooked broccoli. Remember this? No, I don't, but that's no.
I mean, is that everyone has their opinion on it? Yeah, I mean, it's its own taste. You know what I mean? But they were they were they were like, you know what you need to do? Put that lid on it, make it turn olive drab, and just keep going.
Yeah. You know what I mean? Oh. Oh man, we only got two minutes left. Jeez Louise, hold a sec.
Pickled shrimp, you pickle them like ceviche style, or you cook them in. No, we don't cook them picking brine, Sevigi style. Okay, okay, because uh I didn't talk about it, but uh Twitty, who's on with a Southern Cookbook, he pickles cooked shrimp, which I forgot to ask him about because I ran out of time. I like the texture better, raw. Yeah?
Okay, here you have uh uh razor clams. I just gotta ask God's clam, right? God's clam. God's clam. All right.
Uh Maine Sea urchin as opposed to California. Every single time. Really? Yes, in season, live. I get them live.
Yes, have to get them live. No one does, but that's the thing, but like what if we could do the same thing with the West Coast urchins? We need to fly. We need to get a group of us together, fly to the middle of the country, have someone from Santa Barbara, get a bunch, have someone from Maine, meet in the middle, like at the UPS warehouse in Kentucky to bring Kentucky back into it. Yeah, yeah, get the blue guy, come in, you know, with the banjo.
It'll be great. If we'll get it, uh, we'll get it done. All right, we got more. Uh blah blah blah blah. Baked clams, baked stuffed?
Like hawhogs? No, no, no, no. Uh, I don't know what that means. I I get the clams in and chop them and make up. Yeah, I guess stuffed, yeah.
Yeah. But like what size? Uh top necks today. Okay, okay. So it's like served clams, you know.
I think that maybe the gateway for people who don't like stuffed clams is having them that size. You have to chop them, probably. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But like, you know, we used to do it with the ones that are like served clams. I'm getting them this week on the stuff.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh oh, you know what? I can't remember. What is what is uh Sharky Chair's sauce on your hanger steak? Uh well for us it's it's tongue, uh it's corn tongue, bacon, cornichons, pickled marcy seeds, shallots, and a butter wine sauce with mustard as well, black pepper.
Hello. Now listen, you'd love it. We don't have we don't have a guest next week, right? So I can get to all of these uh user questions. Were there any ones uh in the next 20 seconds that uh we need Alex's opinion on?
Anything? Oh, here's one. We have someone who keeps asking what do they can keep he keeping their house to serve their kid? What do you think? They want to cook, but they have a kid, much like you do.
What's something they need to keep around in their house so that they can bang out something nice? iPad. I honestly don't know. Yeah, it's hard, right? It's hard.
Yeah, I'm sure you don't cook when you're home because who would want to? My wife loves to, I really yeah. I just no. That's also her shtick. I eat to survive.
She's eat to survive? Yeah. All right. Nice. Going back to the Ozempic thing.
All right, all right. Well, uh, Alex, thanks for coming on. Welcome anytime. Cooking issues.
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