Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you from the heart of Manhattan Rockefeller Sending New York City and New Stam Studios. Join as usual with John, how you doing? Doing yeah, fine. Thanks.
Got Joe Hazenrock in the panels. What's up? Hey, how are you doing? Doing all right, doing all right. And in Los Angeles, we have uh Jackie Molecules.
How you doing, Jack? Good. Yeah, have you for at least a portion of the show? I appreciate it. And we have, of course, the inimitable Nastasia DeHammer Lopez.
How you doing? I'm good. Sound it. And then uh in the upper left on Vancouver Island, we have Quinn. How you doing?
Hey, I'm good. Yeah? Great. All right. So uh this is a an all-tangent uh Tuesday, so we can do whatever we want.
If you have any questions that are tangent related, you're listening live on Patreon. Call in your questions to 917-410-1507. That's 917-410-1507. And John, why don't you tell them why they might want to do such a thing and what they get by joining the Patreon? Well, if you go to Patreon.com slash cooking issues, you blah cooking issues, you can see everything for yourself.
Uh, we got three different membership levels. Each membership level uh comes with access to our Discord. You get prioritized uh questions being answered, which is great for the holiday season. Um you get discounts with Kitchen Arts and Letters, which is also great for the holiday season, um, amongst a whole bunch of other things. So check it out.
Cooking or Patreon.com slash cooking issues. Speaking of Patreon, we had a question from Patreon, Matt from Mystic, known Matt a long time. Matt wanted us prior to Thanksgiving to do a uh a Monroe Boston Strauss pie crust primer, right? And I feel like the rest of you would kill me if I went on a deep dive on that. So maybe for Patreon, I'll just upload my Excel spreadsheet to it, right?
So if you want stuff on the Patreon, there's another Patreon pitch. If you want something on the Patreon like that, just give me a holler. Or if like, you know, I've done plenty of 3D modeling for things. If you want anything that we have or that we talk about, we can put it on Patreon. Is that not a true story, Quinn?
Yep. Yeah, again, we also have uh, you know, an archive of some things. We posted your uh two percenter recipe when that first came out. We have the um adjusted high calculator, which I did update. So it's up there as well.
Yeah, anything you want, you can just let us anything you want that it seems like we might have, we can put it there for you if you let us know. But you have to let us know because we're bad at just uh what's it proactively putting stuff out there? There we go. I really hate the word proactive. It just sucks.
It's just a bad word because it's been was so overused by business people. Like what what are the current words that people just tack on to things? Oh, I hate office talk. Yeah, synergy. Yeah, yeah, synergistic.
But hold up. Before we go off into a full tangent, Kitchen Arts and Letters pies. Everyone should sign up for Matt's uh newsletter because if you're interested in Monroe Boston Strauss and his book, he will be selling a uh first edition, second edition, what do you say? Uh no, it's not the 39, it's the it's the uh Aaron's press. So uh the the initial edition was put out by Baker's Helper.
Is that true? Or is Baker's Helper the other one? I think Baker's Helper was the other one. Shoot. Anyway, it's been a while since I researched it.
He he did a bunch of he he worked for two main trade magazines. Uh um, like uh America, what was it called? My why is that out of my head? The one that became Nation's restaurant news that was called like American Restaurant or something like that. Uh he did a series for them that became uh one book, and then he did a series for Baker's Helper that I think Baker's Helper is the one that became uh Pies Pies for Profit, which is another much harder to get book.
But the uh Pie Marches On came out in 39, I believe. And that I don't own it at 39 edition. The one that most of us have is the 51, 1951 edition. But whatever. Aaron Express.
Yeah. Already too much to say about my guy. Um, you know what? I've been to California several times. Nastasia won't let me do it because she it's not that she can stop me, but she gives me super stink eye because I firmly believe that one of his sons is in his mid-80s and is alive in Long Beach.
And so I'm like, California. And so I'm like, hey Stas, can't we go knock on this dude's door in Long Beach? You're so annoying. You're so annoying because you've been here many times and you haven't done it. Like you talk a big deal.
Because you know, you no, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You literally say to me, Don't do it. No, do it. Do it. I don't want to go with you.
Do it. Long Beach. Okay, go on going to Long Beach is like going to Philly when you're in New York or something. Is it that far? We've got time.
It's like an hour and change, depending on how where you are. And literally, I'd be ding-donging this guy's door. You know what I'm saying? Doesn't it sound worth it? I mean, I don't know if he's there.
I don't even know for certain if he is Monroe Boston Strauss's son. Sounds like you get a good instinct though, and intuition. You should lean into it. Yeah. With nostalgia.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, sounds like it. Uh all right. So that said, what do we have uh for the week in review with you folks?
I think I can finally say it. Temperance is closing. Yeah. Hopefully not as soon as it's looking like. But uh yeah, it's been something that I've known about for two months now.
And yeah, the economy, um, you know, outside political factors, just a bunch of different things, and it uh very unfortunate, obviously. You know, anyone who's closed a restaurant knows. This is my first time doing it, and I had no idea. And yeah, going through it, it's uh it's not fun, not only for me, but also the rest of my staff who now have to like start looking for other work. Um yeah, so yeah, just uh not a fun situation.
Yeah, well, at least three of us here have done it. Yeah, yeah. Congrats to us all. Yeah, I'm sorry. It sucks.
It sucks real bad. You know? Yeah. You see what happens when you see what happens when you give uh full vote to friends and family. Yeah.
So for any of you who need to get your temperance on, yeah, hurry up. Yeah. And thanks to everyone who has been over the time that I've been there. Appreciate it. It's always nice seeing you guys.
So, what was your what were your favorite dishes that you made along the way? Nailing the Carbonat is always or uh the Carbonara has always been something that I've been really happy about. Um my fresh pastas have gotten a lot better. I did a really good um Zerbinati squash out of Italy, just really I don't know, intense squashy squash. Squashy mixed squash.
Yeah, with uh Louisiana blue crab and a pasta, and it was delicious. Best squash I ever had was the one Cesare used to grow on Thanksgiving Farm. Stas, how good was that squash? So good. So good.
In fact, it was so good, John, that Nastasi and I were there and they were like serving a big tray of squash. And Stassi and I'm like, the hell is this? What am I gonna do with this? Eat it? What the hell?
You just can't hand me a big tray of squash, right, Stas? Remember this? And we were like, Yes. And they were like, yeah. We're like, oh man, crap.
Okay. Squash. You know what I mean? It can be really good. Yeah.
I mean, it's good, but yeah, I'm not kidding. My wife likes it. My kid, both kids hate it. Like, you know, like you know how you have like a I told Dax he's allowed to have like one thing. Yeah.
Okay. That's his thing. Yeah. Fair squash. Especially, and this I don't understand how he doesn't like it.
Pumpkin soup. Yeah. And pumpkin soup, delicious. Yeah. What's not to like?
Because it doesn't have the texture that you wouldn't like. Yeah, it's true. I mean, what's what's to hate about? I mean, of course, I don't like melon. What's not to like about melon either, right?
Yeah. Um. Yeah. So what else? You got this fancy squash.
What else? Yeah, no, I don't know. That's it's Did you ever put a carbonate? Speaking of carbonat? Stuffed in a ravioli.
Which is still very good. It's actually one of the things people like the most. So remember the bull the bull authentic bull cook by uh by Herter, the crazy person from Minnesota, the crazy misogynist, racist, weirdo survivalist who wrote these insane cookbooks in the 60s. I think I remember you were hearing you talk about them, yeah. Yeah, they where it's all a bunch of historical lies.
Like, like you know, like this is like Joan of Arc's favorite sandwich, stuff like that. Okay, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Stas. Yeah, some worse.
I saw he has a Carbonade recipe in it. No mustard. No bread. Not Carbonat. Nope, not Carbonade.
No. No mustard, no bread? Nope. Doesn't work that way. No carbonate.
Man, I'm gonna start making Carbonade again. That's the perfect time of year to be getting into it. Yeah. I have a pressure cooker carbonade recipe that is delicious that gets gets it just right. The issue, people who don't like pressure cooked stews, the issue is you haven't managed your moisture properly.
They're too watery. You have made it too watery. You've tried to take a brazing recipe and immediately put it into a pressure cooker. You have made a mistake. Maybe there's a recipe you could put up on the uh Discord or Patreon for everyone.
Yeah, yeah. I'll go look for it. Uh you know, I developed it years ago, but I'll, you know, we'll we'll do it. Like right after the pandemic, I uh developed it. Yeah, remember that.
Yeah. Yeah. Good. Now, of course, if you guys don't have the real God's mustard, you'll get close. Close, but no cigar.
No cigar. Uh all right, what do you what do you guys got? What do you got, Jack? So I um I I was tired of my you know, we I have the the crappy refrigerator debacle with my landlord. And uh of course the next thing here is the stove, which is just not like I don't know.
I got tired of uneven cooking, so I got myself a little induction burner, a little single just to supplement, and I'm out of the time of my life out here. Yeah, what uh time what uh what price-wise, what level of induction cooker is it? Is it IKEA? I've never used the Ikea one. No, it's not Ikea.
It was like 150 bucks. Uh duck's top, I think is the name of it. Um but man, yeah, after like after a few years of really bad old crappy stove, um, you know, gas stove cooking, like it's really nice to have a consistent center going. Yeah. So um I uh uh send me the the info on on yours.
I've only ever tried the I've only ever tried I've gone from like 2,000 and $1,500, like I've used cook techs that are like two, three grand. I've used like the I almost now exclusively use the the Breville poly science uh control freak, which is like 15, maybe it's come down, but it was like $1,500. And then I've only used other ones are like sub 100, and I can tell you all that the sub 100 ones don't tell you the truth about what they're doing. So if you uh you have I talked about kilowatts on the air before? Kilowatt, I think a lot of them.
So they're very cheap. I recommend you getting one if you care about like how these things work, which maybe is one or two of you. You what you do is you plug it into the wall and then you plug whatever appliance you want into the kilowatt and it says right on it how many watts it's pulling out of the wall. So you can get a very good yeah, right. So like what I did was is I would I was doing tests on um on power into in induction into pans at different levels to see how they heated at different levels, and I noticed that the cheap induction units all would give the amount of power they said they were gonna give for like 45 seconds, and then when the units heated up internally, they would throttle the power down.
So you can't just you can't trust them. You know what I mean? Now that was sub 100, so I don't know, like maybe your like ducks blat, what's it called? Ducksplat. Ducks top.
Um yeah, it's like a hundred four hundred and forty bucks or something. I mean, you know, I've um it I I didn't have fifteen hundred. I would love a really good one, but um, you know, this is better than what I had going. So yeah, induction the induction is the way. The only issue is is that if you have like non-induction cookware, it becomes a little bit of a pain because none of the converters are worth spit.
You know what I mean? So, like, you know, if you cook with low fire clay directly on on flames, or if you have um, you know, aluminum bottom cookedware without an induction plate, you know, you're kind of SOL. Luckily now, because so many people are on induction and because that's the way stuff are going, things that used to be non-induction, new versions of them are becoming induction. So you can now buy relatively inexpensive large pressure canners, which are almost exclusively made out of aluminum with an induction plate bonded to the bottom. In fact, I just got one now, and it was only, I think, $30 more than the all aluminum one was to have one that would work on induction, but is like, you know, five gallons.
You know what I mean? So uh, you know, things are things are moving that way for for those of you who are moving in the induction realm. How loud is it? How much of a does it make? Yeah, it's it's kind of loud.
Yeah, that's the other thing. Like uh some people can't tolerate it. But you know, since you've done so much live music, you can probably barely hear it. Oh god, yeah. Uh and and shout out to shout out to Sam, who is a uh friend of my girlfriend.
Uh well, I'm sorry, uh cousin or uncle of my friend of my girlfriend's. Well, can't talk. Um, and listener of cooking issues. And he was the one during the holidays that was like, What are you doing, man? Get get an induction partner.
Oh, thanks, Sam. Listen to us. Yeah, here we are. Yeah. Yeah.
Exactly. You know, it's like I used to have, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna call out who it was. They're gone now, but we had a we had a boss, Nastasi and I, at one point, who would never listen to the experts that they hired, would only listen to outside people. Remember that, S. Yeah.
She'll eventually come back. No, who who was that? I can't think of who it is. We only ever had one boss together. And he's just trying to get me to trying to get me to speak ill, which I won't.
Which I won't. Um but it's like, you know what? If you're gonna hire someone who knows something, or if you're gonna work with someone, it's like you know, Booker does this all the time to me too. It's like, Dad, what do you know? I don't know.
This is just what I do for a living. What are you talking about? You know what I mean? What are you talking about? Anyway.
Uh if you hire people, if you hire someone, then you gotta trust what they say. Not that you need to try this wrong. Like obviously question everything, but like if you don't value the person's opinion that you've hired to be an expert, don't pay them. Don't pay them. Like don't get rid of them.
Break break ties. Anyway. Um, all right. What do you got, S well, speaking of that? Whenever I tell my mom uh cooking stuff that you say, she says, What does he know?
I'm older than him. Yeah. Yeah, that that that that makes that sense. Good argument. Yeah.
Um it's a great argument. Uh strong. So I saw Jack and his girlfriend um for dinner on Saturday, and we listened to the rant at the end of last week's cooking issue. So that was that was uh something. Yeah.
Yeah. So Dave was so right. Dave, Dave, you were so right. I couldn't I couldn't believe it. Oh well, thank you.
Appreciate it. See, I appreciate see, I appreciate it. Uh and like, you know, here's the thing, right? We all love Nick. We all love Nick Coleman, Mr.
Olive Oil. He wants to come back on and actually talk about olive oil. So like, right, which I was like, fine, great. We'll come back, talk about olive oil, start the olive oil early, right? Uh but now whenever I see people on the street, and by the way, it's still holiday season here, so morons walking down the street when they're when they're sitting there like staring up at the sky and just taking up the whole sidewalk like they're cattle.
I call it nick walking. Yeah, don't nick walk. You know what I mean? Oh boy. Ouch.
Uh all right. Well, what did you have for dinner, Stas? Was it anything good or no? No, we just had we ordered pizza. Yeah.
What's the pizza of note out there? Uh I don't know, Jack. I don't know. Do you care about it? Yeah, not by by Nastasia, and I don't know, but in LA.
I mean, I like quarter sheets a lot that has been brought up on the show. Yeah, yeah. Do you know that their spicy oil, right, that they they made is real spicy. It's pretty spicy. The sport the sport pepper oil.
No, no. It's not non-spicy. Yeah. It's a lot more. So the stuff they used to have at Roberta's that was bright red, Stas and I would have to dump it all over to get the heat out of it.
You know? There's no heat in that. Yeah. Yeah. That was that was like uh Long Island pizzeria, spicy, not not very spicy.
Yeah. I just had a I just had a uh like a a little bit of anger welling up in me, remembering our inability to get arugula at that place. While we would see it go by on platters for salads. Man, they hated us, right, Stas. Oh, they hated us.
They hate they hated us. Yeah. Hate. Yeah. Never forget.
By the way, I love I love what they were doing. I love Robert's. I love Carlo, all the stuff, right? All the and I haven't been in a long time, but they used to they used to cultivate a very specific kind of F you service, right? Especially during the daytime.
I'll never forget the very first radio show we ever did at Roberta's. They're like, you're gonna do the radio show and your payment is a pizza. We're like, Stas and I are like, pizza, like we would have paid you. Kidding. And so like we're like, we're getting the pizza and it was raining, and the guy made us come get the pizza.
He's like, I'm not gonna bring it out to you. It's raining. First, they wouldn't let us sit inside even though it was empty. And then they made us go get the pizza. Remember that, Stas?
Oh yeah. Yeah. And I was like, oh, this is how it is. Pizza's good though. You know what I mean?
I like Robert's. I've had a bunch of friends who've worked. I'm not saying anything negative about Robert's. I'm just saying that's the kind of thing that they cultivated back in the day. The the the enfant terrible.
You know what I mean? Anyway. Uh none of them kids anymore. It's been so many years. It's been like 15 years.
You know what I love? Not gonna also not gonna call it, but all the people who started out I'm just gonna tell all of you this. Just remember that a certain point you have to self-check and be like, oh, I'm old now. So people who start out like being young, they think that they they keep in their mind, because the truth is as you get old, you don't you you don't feel necessarily old, right? But you have to understand that other people see you as old.
So you have to kind of like, you know, around the time you're like 38, 39, you gotta be like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I have to start respecting younger people now. You know what I mean? You can't just crap on anyone like you do when you're young. You know what I'm saying?
True. When you're young, I had this uh real real quick, Dave. I had this uh realization at a wine shop recently, because I feel like in my 20s, I'd go in and try to like get good wine and ask for good things, and and like the young hit person would talk to me like a peer. And now the young hit people at wine stores are like, I'm not saying it's a it's not saying it's sweet as a pajar. They're talking to me like I'm an old guy, and I'm like, oh no.
Yeah, dude. The tables have turned, yeah. Terrible. So you have to horrible feeling. But like, we know, but that's the thing.
Just embrace it. You know what I mean? Just like be like, oh, that happened, and then embrace it. Like of you, like everyone should uh aspire to age into like Tony Bennett land. You know what I mean?
Like Tony Bennett did it better than anybody. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like, that's the goal. Being Tony Bennett.
Anyway. Uh, who's the Tony Bennett of cooking? Harold McGee. Harold McGee is the Tony Bennett of cooking, I think. You know what I mean?
I think so. Jack Pepin. Oh, yeah, Jackie Peeps. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, he's older too. Yeah. He's an eight million years old.
Yeah. 90, right? No. 90 something. Yeah.
90. Remember? Yeah, when he came on and we we just literally like grilled him on his chicken book, and he's like, What am I, what am I doing here? Right? Wasn't that the vibe?
It's like, why am I talking to these chods about my chicken book? Anyway. Jacques Papin, first ever chef that whose cookbook I had that had the puffy. Do you guys like puffy cookbooks? Yeah, I do.
Yeah? Yeah. I kind of like it because what I feel dirty picking them up because it's like very central puffy cookbook thing. You know what I mean? Anyway.
Anyway. I don't know how we got on that. What about you, Quinny Quinn? Uh, this week was a little bit quiet. My dad wanted a bit of a break.
So we did uh he pre-prepped, he sandbagged a bunch of uh lasagna components for like a big family dinner, and then everyone made their own lasagna. Wait, whoa, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Stop. What do you mean made your own lasagna? Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
What do you mean, made your own lasagna? You had like ramekins and you all layered it the way you wanted, like build-a bear? Like I don't understand. Yeah, like that. Yeah, I did a small ramekin.
My brother and his wife, they did like little little foil trays. Like small foil trays. And how different were the different ones? Like my mom is plant-based, so she made her own like mushroom mixture. She's actually getting into vegan cheese.
So she made a vegan ricotta, a vegan mozzarella, and then there was a plain tomato sauce. Did you try did you try that product? Uh not yet. I'm sure I will at some point. Well, you should have tried it, man.
You gotta try it. Like, here's the thing like uh the word vegan cheese bothers me in the way that like, you know, because it because I kind of has a standard of identity. I'm not saying it's a bad product, although I've never had a good one. Nastasia knows some good vegan vegan quote unquote cheese people. I've heard the yogurt.
Yeah. And was it yogurt or was it just a a good creamy product? No, it was it was it was. I mean, again, uh she's following a pretty I would say popular recipe person. Like she got the Miyoko creamery book, and that's what she's working from.
So it is a lot of the products are actually like fermented at least. So they have that like actual flavor to them. Uh the yogurt, the one particular yogurt she made did have a bit of a unusual savory quality. So I think that was from like the actual uh base milk alternative. Hmm.
Yeah. I don't know. Stas, did you actually try your buddy's vegan cheese? Was it good? I tried some vegan cheese at a party, remember, and it was really good.
I can't remember the name though. I mean, I'm open. Yeah. I would like to have a product. I just the name the name sticks in my craw a little bit, but I'm open to it conceptually.
I had scars, I had scars vegan pizza, and it was not bad. But I'm just I'm I'm a little I'm a little come up with a come up with a new name then. What's what what new name would you what would you call vegan cheese? I don't know. That's a good product name for that.
It's not my A, that's not my job, and B the people who want it want to call it vegan cheese, so who am I to tell them not to? You know what I mean? So I mean fair enough. You know, and but uh my issue with lasagna is is that lasagna is so much more about the cheese than a pizza. You know what I mean?
Because texturally, lasagna owes texture to the cheese in a way. Well, any lasagna I've ever had, like, you know, that's not has a decent amount of cheese in it. And so, like the whole ability to kind of the way it eats is like a function of the pasta and the cheese, not so much mushrooms, meat or whatever. You know what I mean? As opposed to a pizza where it's mainly the stretch on it.
You know, anyway. I've done I've done lasagna, but there's basically no cheese. Well, and you know what I don't call that. I'm I'm doing to you what you did to me on on the uh shaksuka. I call that not lasagna.
That is a different product. Anyway. Yeah, but that's like that's like baby. You have made a layered pasta. Lasagna.
Yeah. Um anyways. Um, what did I do this week? So we're having uh uh Kevin Jung's coming on next next week, but unfortunately we thought he was gonna be in New York, but he's gonna be in Toronto, so we'll have him over the uh teleophones. But send in all of your NOMA projects slash NOMA research slash uh because they they're um are we allowed to are have they announced uh the pop-up they're doing, Stas?
Are we allowed to talk about that or no? I don't have no idea. I'm not plugged in. Really? Okay.
Okay. They're gonna do a lot of. Well, you think or you know. I'm not breaking anything here. You know what I mean?
But anyway, well, we'll talk about it with him when he comes on next week. But for those who uh have been longtime listeners of the show, about a year, year and a half ago, he came on and gave me the special catclaw slicer that is used for pork in Copenhagen. And I'm not gonna try to pronounce it, but Ariel pronounced it last week. The fancy chicken, uh, sorry, the fancy Christmas pork sandwich that they make in Copenhagen. So I wanted to finally use his cat scratch fever pork machine before he was on.
So I made uh a version of the Danish Christmas pork sandwich uh over the weekend. And I have to say it wasn't Danish because you can't get that cut of meat easily here in the US, right? So uh the only real skin on cuts that are easy to get here are like pork shoulders, like pork pork butts, picnic butts, right? Things like that. So what I did was I got a half picnic, uh, like a half picnic shoulder, I think, or butt, whatever they call it.
So it's the chunk that has the biggest piece of skin and not the actual hock knuckle end of it. And then I deboned it, flattened it out, re-meat glued a portion of it back on, cat scratched fevered it down, and then did a slow roast in the oven because unlike the traditional Danish pork is a is a faster roast, right? So it the meat stays kind of sliceable. Uh this one, it turned into pulled pulled pork, right? But the skin was perfect, and you could get these crispy strips of it.
So we ended up having a mix up of like this Danish pork sandwich, and I did the rote cabbage. By the way, for those of you that don't like cranberry sauce, try doing the Danish red cabbage thing, right? So it's just you finely shred. I used my salad master, of course I did, salad master food processor, which I still love, to make like little, like like fine shred, like small pieces, red cabbage, and then you cook it in vinegar for like half hour. So you sweat it down in vinegar.
Then, and you obviously you it's hard to get current jelly here. So then a current juice. So I just added currant jelly and salt to that cooking. That's it. That's it.
Cook it for another 30 minutes with that, like get the get the texture the way you want it. So, and then I made a Danish ramelade, right? Of my, you know, a similar version of it. So that's mustard, a boat ton of more than you would think, turmeric, mayonnaise, sour cream. They lighten it with sour cream.
I use sweet relish, right, instead of sugar, uh, a little bit of extra salt. I didn't have MSG, so I added some yondu and some carrot. Uh red onion. Right. So I blended it first and then added the uh sweet relish later so that there was still some slight chunkiness to it.
Pepper. I also add pepper. And so it's that on both sides of the sandwich, red cabbage on the bottom, pork, cracklings, and then a flash infused Danish uh cucumber salad, which is basically just sugar, vinegar, salt, uh, pepper, like mix it all up, dissolve it. They heated, you don't need to vacuum infuse it in. And so I took American cucumbers, sliced them, because American cucumbers, took out the seeds, salted them, pressed them, pressed the water out, and then did a flash infusion, that on the sandwich, money, money, money.
Money. Oh, I also made pretzel buns. I made pretzel brioche buns, which I have to say, good. So I I did uh I did the Harold McGee sodium carbonate trick. So I I uh I took baking soda and I cooked it for an hour and a half at uh 300 degrees Fahrenheit in a very flat thing.
You can weigh it to know that you it should lose about a third of its weight. So you can tell whether you fully convert it or not. Then I did uh, I forget the exact ratio, I think 50 grams of that into 100 grams of water, stirred that up, painted that over the proofed rolls and baked them, paint them over the proof rolls, put pretzel salt on top, and when you bake them, right, it flashes off and gives the real pretzel color and some pretzel taste, but doesn't overpower. It's not not crazy. So that's that's what I did for the weekend.
Little light cooking. Little light cooking. And I had some I had some pescatarians coming, so I also had to fry fish. And so I pan fried some cod, right? But whatever.
You know, you do what you gotta do. Because also the Danish Ramelade sauce is very good in this summertime. They do it, they put it on fish. So I figured we could do as the Germans would say, fish max, right? So we did uh pork sandwiches for the meat eaters and for the pescatarians, we did f fried fish max.
Yeah. And but my wife didn't want me to deep fry, so I pan fried those things, and I made mashed potatoes instead of uh instead of French fries. You know what I mean? All right. So much cream.
We've gone through this before. Are you cream or are you butter? Both. Both. Yeah.
Los. Yeah. Yeah. All right. I like mashed potatoes so much.
Does one of us hate mashed potatoes here? How? How could that be possible? My Dax doesn't love mashed potatoes and Booker doesn't like mashed potatoes that much. I don't understand it.
I don't understand it. Well, we had a guest on who hated uh cream and butter. Yeah. So she said one of the things she hated was mashed potatoes. She said it off air though.
Yeah. So not gonna call her out. Yeah. But here's the other thing. It's like I here here's a here's a here's a little here's here's something, right?
That maybe this is a hot take. Maybe this is wrong. I feel that you should make the mashed potatoes creamy enough that they do not require not that you can't put gravy on it, but they should be good without the gravy. Yes. Yeah.
Agree. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because you can you can you can fix that before they go out.
You know what I'm saying? Although I think like the old school ones that are a 50% butter, like the Joel Robouchon ones or the like uh the early 2000s, like super fancy ones. The problem with those is that you can only eat a little dollop because they're so rich. I think there's a fine line. You know what I mean?
But oh I was saying like I like it, you know, so creamy that all you really want is like black pepper, you know? Yeah. Right? Save the gravy for the overcooked meat. Or better yet, don't overcook the meat.
And still I do like at Thanksgiving, by the way, this weekend, Dax is coming home. So I'm doing T2 this weekend, so we'll see how that works out. But I uh I reserve the gravy mainly for the stuffing, to be honest, in a Thanksgiving scenario. But whatever. Uh by the way, for those of you that real longtime listeners to the show, a long time ago I spent too long talking about uh Guardian serviceware, the aluminum cooking uh pans that were out of uh Los Angeles from like the I think 30s, early 30s until like probably the 50s, uh, and they were part of the waterless cooking uh phenomenon, and so they sealed well, and so their whole thing was is that you could cook potatoes in them without any water.
So you just put the potatoes cut up into the Guardian serviceware casserole dish, you put it directly on the stove and you cook it that way. And that's still the way I make potatoes right now. Just cook them directly in Guardian serviceware and then mash them with my Bam X ricer. For those of you that have never owned an immersion blender ricer, sorry, man. You know what I mean?
That stuff's money, money, pain to clean, but money. Versus food mills, which I hate. Has anyone used a food mill and liked it? Impossible. Yeah.
Food mill, for those of you that don't know, is the thing that you grab, like a moolie, and it's got two little weird wings that stick out that fit over your pot because otherwise it's impossible to control. And then you throw a product into it and it's got like a little, like what looks like a like a like a like a snow plow that moves around on the inside of it and theoretically forces whatever product you've put into this said mooley into the uh underside. It's also so poorly designed that it requires a little wire underneath the thing to try to scrape the product off. But because it doesn't work, you're always backing it up and semi-unscrewing it and then trying to go forward and pushing on it, doing all this stuff. It is the most frustrating, big piece of garbage ever.
In fact, JJ Basil, who uh, you know, used to be with me at the French culinary, then went to WD50 and then worked, you know, for the for the Momo Fuku Empire for a long time. He said he went home once to his mom's house in Washington, DC, saw one in the kitchen, yelled at her, picked it up and threw it out the front door. That's how much he hates movies. But I detest them. No one likes them.
No one who's ever had to use one has liked it. That's just what I'm gonna say about it. Enough about movies. Uh anything else you guys got for the for the week in review? Oh, Elliot from Berkeley doesn't not mind food mills.
And does Elliot and Berkeley use them themselves or do they get other people to do it for them? I think he's about to say. You know what? Some people also enjoy pain. So you know what I mean?
Yeah. It's just, you know, that's like, you know, maybe some people like to sit there and do like uh turned potatoes, turned vegetables. Oh maybe, maybe someone likes peeling shrimp. Little tiny ones, yeah. Oh my god.
The things that are the worst, right? Peeling shrimp, just like, oh my God, it when you when you're de-veining them and the and the veins stick to the knife and you're trying to get the veins off the knife and you're flicking the knife and you're rinsing the knife. Ugh hate. Hate. Hate peeling garlic.
I hate the stickiness on your fingers when you're peeling like boatloads of garlic. What are the kitchen tasks that just are terrible? I have toast points that go with my cheese plate. I absolutely hate cutting those baguettes. Really?
Yeah, for no real good reason, but I absolutely hate doing it. Huh. Yeah. Hate. Well, at least you don't have to do it anymore.
Oh. Zing, Stash. Thank you. Loveness. Oh my God.
So uh Nastasia once told Nick Wong uh when he was an intern, I think it was you, to peel caraway seeds. As a joke, and he did it. How demented is that? We pressure cook and then peel caraway seeds. Man, brutal.
Brutal. Um, let me see where we're gonna go here. Justin F. writes in hey, cooking issues, have you ever done any research with clams and immersion circulators? No.
Zing, done. Uh no, I haven't. Um, the only low temp kind of mollusk that I've uh had, and I've tried to find the numbers for it. And Nastasia, you had this too, although we went at different times, was uh modernist, uh the modernist cuisine people, book one when it came out. They used to do a uh gooey duck where they would skin the gooey duck and then they would cut noodles out of the gooey duck and they would do them low temp in a C VAT, but I don't remember the temperature that they used.
You had that dish, right, Stas. Yeah, but I don't remember it well. Yeah, that's a good dish. I was surprised at how kind of uh good that dish was because you know, most of these mollusks they'll eat them raw or they'll do them, you know, they'll do them fully cooked. And I looked at most of the sous vide numbers on them, and they're really more like flash cooked pasteurized, like in bag and doing it 90 C.
And that's, you know, kind of goes back to Georges Pralou, who, you know, uh Mr. Sausage Fingers, the guy that first uh did uh his fingers were very short and fat, by the way. Uh and he's dead now, so I can, you know, but he he was the person who for the Trogro brothers figured out about uh bagging a foie gras entier and uh cooking foie gras like uh, you know, in a in a water bath. And he, because he was so early, right? So he was like kind of the uh rival to Brun Bruno Gusso.
Bruno Gousseau who does cuisine solutions, uh, he he was juscadant, like the the correct temperature, where Georges Pralu kind of had an old school chef mindset of like, I'm only gonna do three temperatures. You know what I mean? And so his shellfish temperature was all very high. Um, I've like I said, I haven't done clams. I will say I stopped for a long time I was doing low temp work with uh sh um like shellfish, not with mollusks, but with shellfish.
And I didn't like I don't like it, to be honest. Like if you cook the shellfish uh for too long, it it has enzymes in it that get mushy. And so in fact, I used to do a demo where and I you can't do it 100% of the time, where I would circulate shrimp for a long time and they would turn to a paste. It's gross, just hard gross. And so I actually like those things kind of cooked at a higher temperatures.
And I'm gonna probably say clams are kind of similar. I either want them to be like raw or like black and blue, like so like some plancha like hit on the outside, like with razors, or is it were you know cooked all the way through? I don't know that there is a middle ground. I wasn't able to find one. Most of the numbers I found on the internets were you know relatively high temp, in which case, what's the point?
You know what I mean? Um just cook them trad. But uh I'll ask. I'll see what maybe Kevin. You know, Kevin didn't know when he's doing all those tests.
Maybe, maybe, maybe they have something. You know what I bet would be good somehow figure out some sort of abalone thing. It's just I don't have the money to be cooking with real abalone. You know what I'm saying? Yeah.
There's no the money for it. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. Um Matt from Mystic.
We already talked about the uh I'm not gonna go into the pie again because I will get myrtilated. Uh Maddie says, Maddie has two questions. Uh I'm looking to make a Fournet Branca ice cream for a pop-up. And I'm wondering about ratios to get a base that will freeze while still getting the flavor. Should I be adding stabilizers to account for the booze?
And I will be using a Paco jet. All right. Uh, yo, Maddie, just boil it, boil it. Just boil it. Boil off the alcohol.
Fournet is not gonna taste any worse if you boil off the alcohol. Just boil it off. Partially boil it off. If you want some alcohol in it, like dose whatever alcohol you would normally put into it, and then just you know, do your do your I mean, that's the answer. You know, unless Quinn, you have a better idea.
I I should I should have well again, I don't know. I had those two thir suggestions. One, uh boil it, boil some of it off. Boil it off. Let me try and find the if you want some of it fresh.
I should have a max amount you can put in. Uh the standard by the way, the standard by the way, to take the alcohol level super low. Like you could always if you boil it, you're not gonna boil off all the alcohol. But if you want to take it to like functionally nil, boiling it to one third of the volume is typically what people do when they're doing tests, right? When they're testing sugar.
So if you want to test the sugar in an alcohol situation, you boil it down to one third, and then you add uh you you wait for it to cool and you take it back to its original volume and then measure the sugar. So I would guess that like boiling it down to one third of its volume would take it to almost nil alcohol. Um you don't need to boil it down that much, but you know, a partial boil is gonna leave some alcohol in it. But also like how much of the flavor do you think is volatile though? In Fernet, like any any flavor you get rid of is a win.
Any flavor you get rid of in Fresnette Bronca is a win. You've won. You know what I mean? I don't really think it's actually like it's so bitter. Most of those bitter things aren't that volatile.
I just don't think you're gonna lose that much. You know what I mean? And if you want like aroma back, I would say boil the vast majority of it and then chuck chuck chalk in like bitters or something, you know, like a little bit at as a bitters, but I just don't think it's gonna be, I don't think it's gonna be that big of a problem. Also, there's a mint component, right? Well, I mean, there may be some.
There's so much stuff in it. Broncamenta is mostly mint. Right? So I like bronchamenta. I that's a good product.
In fact, we just put the red hot pokers back on the menu at Contra, and we're opening with Dana Corey, who's now in Berlin, but he was a bartender at Booker and Dax, his drink called uh the Bishop's Wife, which is bronchamenta, cognac, and Demerara syrup as our first hot drink of the season, right? So I I'm fine with Broncamenta. It's just I don't I think my issue with Fournet is just um I just I was getting pushed too much of it back in the day. I think if I if someone handed me this product now and said, what do you think, I'd be like, it's fine. It's good.
You know, how did it also become that like weird favorite some drink of like the 2010s? I don't know, but that's that's where my reaction. So it's kind of like you know how it took me, it took me a long time to appreciate Led Zeppelin just because of the people in high school who listened to Led Zeppelin. You know what I mean? Same with Pink Floyd.
Took me longer than it should have to enjoy Pink Floyd because I had a reaction against the culture that was built around it. But now it, you know, it's good. You know what I'm saying? Anyway. Um, for the for the sake of consistency, I would probably recommend doing a full boil down of some of it.
And then if you do want a little fresh and you're like taste a little bit of alcohol, my recommended maximum for something style would be 24 grams per kilogram. A baco jet. For the fresh 40%. You know, here's another thing that uh is messed up. Like the the AFP numbers of uh sugar, so the anti-freezing power like power of sugar and alcohol, they have there is an actual theoretical like equivalency number.
But here's what that here's here's where that's lying to you. Uh the melt rate is different. So for a given, for a given freeze point does not mean that the sugar and the alcohol solutions with the same freeze point will melt at the same rate, right? That is not necessarily the case. In fact, it is not the case.
Um Matt had Matty had another question. Uh serving venison on a new tasting and the lovely, fresh, delicious. Oh, by the way, if you want a topping for it, did you have any toppings ideas? If you want it like jack the fresh uh menta, just do a just do a fluid gel with uh with the Fournet. So you could do like you could do a fluid gel, try to keep it at about 20 ABV.
So boil like water and agar, right? Uh try to keep it around like the finish at about 20 ABV so the agar sets nicely. Whisk the whisk the um Fournet into the uh hot agar solution, making sure that it stays above about 30, 30, 35 Celsius so it doesn't pre-gel on you, right? Have that solution be about a percent or so, right? In that range.
Uh blend that to make a fruit fluid gel, mix that like up to like 50-50 with cream, and then put that through uh through an EC, and you can get a very heavy kind of Furnet, you're gonna have to add sugar, but you can get a very heavy Fournet cream for it that isn't frozen, but is like super dense. Anyway, uh Maddie's other questions. Serving venison on a new tasting and the lovely, fresh, delicious loins turned out looking terrible when sliced, as the outer quarter inch turns brown and oxidized. Any reason why this is happening with venison more than any other red meat, uh, is there any way to prevent it with seasoning or anything else? We've tried rubbing a little uh oil on it to no avail.
I did not know this, but it turns out uh if you look up post-mortem met myoglobin reduction in fresh venition in 2006, this is a well-known fact that the color stability in venison is much worse than in other meats. And I've never noticed this because I very rarely cook uh venison, especially not like you know, flat flash cooking. And I don't, the the stuff that they say on the internet to get around it doesn't make a lot of sense to me because they're like, well, putting in antioxidants. So they're talking about like uh they make these uh like rosemary uh polyphenol antioxidants that they say can help with it uh or ascorbic acid, but I wouldn't want to acidify the outside of my venison, right? Because then you're gonna get kind of textural problems.
Um so I don't know. Like maybe storing them in a like slicing them and storing them in a warm oil bath or in like a uh a broth bath like that's slightly warm, maybe that would help. Or maybe using like tocopherol or some sort of anti uh this rosemary antioxidant, you know, hopefully not one with too much flavor. Um, yeah, interesting problem. Maybe someone in the Discord has some uh some insight uh into this, uh, but it was an interesting question and something I did not know.
Um Kevin who's gonna be on next week, uh, but we can uh start this now. Does anyone have a chart or quality quantitative data on brining curve of meat proteins, but salt brining? Some way to calculate the ideal length of brining based on the salt concentration of the brine and the thickness of the protein. I feel there was a chart somewhere once upon a time, but I can't remember where it might have been. Well, listen, I don't believe everything he says.
In fact, some of the stuff that he says, I don't believe at all. But he is a very smart uh fellow. Uh Greg Blonder with uh genuine ideas uh com has a calculator uh that will do all of this. So you just go to genuineideas.com uh and find uh the salt brine calculator. And uh the interesting one of the interesting things he did many years ago, this is back when I was still at the French Culinary Institute, I think, was show that uh you don't necessarily need to equilibrium brine because when you cook, right?
So it takes a long time for salt to get to the center of uh meat, right? If you're brining. So for instance, I went on his calculator and I looked up that to do equilibrium brining, i.e., to get the salt all the way through, a two-inch thick cut of meat, a slab style cut of meat would take five to six days, right? So long time. Uh, but if you jack salt into the outside of it, as you cook it, it quickly goes into the center.
And he has ways to show this. So I would just look at um, I would look at his work on this. Some other things I disagree with, uh, I disagree with the conclusions he comes to based upon the experiments he's done. But in this case, I would, you know, I would listen. Um, all right.
Uh Elliot wants to know how can we tell the difference between a different non-volatile acid, citric mallet, tartaric, et cetera. I completely agree that I can definitely tell the difference, but also for the purposes of acids, I thought we only had proton detectors on our tongues, uh, like Ariel talks about in Flavorama, and the rest was aroma. So, what's the mechanism for being able to tell the difference between these acids? Do we have some other kind of detectors on our tongues aside from the five uh taste plus touch? Elliot, wouldn't I like to know that?
That's the kind of question I ask flavor scientists all the time. I've never gotten an amazing explanation of why the different acids taste different. Now, the easiest, most facile way is that they must also hit the bitter receptor somehow. Uh very famous cantankerous uh uh you know professor named Zucker, who is the person who first published papers on uh CO2 taste uh, you know, he believes some of it had to do with onset, so you could tell the flavor difference because of the different onsets of the of the different acidities uh when they're on your tongue, but I don't think anyone has an adequate explanation of this. So, you know, I can't answer you because I wish I had the answer.
How about that? Um Berkeley wants to know about hot non-alcoholic cocktails, but for for his wife or you know, her wife or their wife, but but the problem is it also can't be sweet. So no hot, no, no creamy sweet stuff. So no hot chocolate, no steamed milk with honey. Like hot apple cider is barely okay.
I need to figure this out. These are these are tough. These are tough. But I will say this if you want to reduce the sugar, right? I don't know, but cream.
If you want to reduce the sugar, get yourself uh polydextrose. Go on the internet, get some polydextrose, and then you can lower the sugar and keep the body the same as you heat it with polydextrose. So just start there. I'll give some more thought over it over the next uh week. Remember, we're coming back on Monday, uh, not on uh what's it called?
Tuesday. Not on Tuesday. Because yeah, John won't be here. He'll already be. Probably not, yeah.
He'll already be up in the great state of Connecticut. Yeah. Looking forward to it. Yeah, getting out getting out of this piece? Probably, yeah.
Not permanent, I don't know, yeah. Whatever. But yeah, yeah. Yeah. Do you train up or you drive up?
Train to New Haven. Then my mom picks me up there. Yeah. Drive there. You don't, you don't take the uh you don't take the shoreline ease?
Well, you hate the shorelineies? I've just never taken it. I don't know. Yeah. We used to live in New Haven.
And so they would just come pick me up there and bring me to my place and just kind of carry it over. So let me ask you a question. Hamburgers. Louis lunch, yes or no? Yeah.
Yeah? You for it? Yeah, definitely. It's not like a hamburger is, I don't know, everyone would think if you've never been there, it's gonna be a little jarring, I think like with the cheese spread, the white toast, you know, no ketchup, all that kind of stuff. But it's good.
It's really good. Yeah. I like it too. I do too. It's no longer just a lunch place.
They're open late now. That's true. Everything's a lie. Nothing changes. But it's still the same people.
Yeah, still same cooking equipment. Yeah, the crematoriums. Yeah. I haven't been in a long time. Yeah.
Yeah. Uh all right. Uh let me see. Uh uh what do you think? Tie how do you how do you think you pronounce this?
Tive mush? Yeah. Tive mush mush, yeah. Tive mush. Uh any tips on ideal temperature and techniques for popping every single grain of sorghum.
Uh these are some some some some uh kind of out of left field questions. I appreciate that, right? Um there's always some unpopped uh sorghums and uh I heat about one quart of oil that's a lot one quart I heat about one quart of oil to 420 on the stove then add about half a cup of the grains to give it a stir one quart that one quart that's so much oil. You're deep frying those suckers. Yeah I didn't I misread how big is the rondeau or stockpot a half cup of grains though.
Okay, yeah, fair yeah yeah. Right? Standard for like a half cup of popcorn would be like two tablespoons. Yeah. You know what I mean?
Uh yeah. That might be some of the issues. But we'll get more into it. Anyway, and give it a stir. Uh more grained oil seems to work better than the opposite.
I think this must be a typo. I don't think it's a quart. Yeah. Yeah. Uh I would think age might affect this, but the stuff I'm using is fresh from the distributor.
I had a chef who could pop them all using a tiny pot with a lid as one does popcorn, but I have not been able to achieve that. So these are deep frying. So here's some things. One, I saw on the internet that actually uh too fresh on sorghum can be worse than uh than not. The issue with all pop things is that you need the ideal moisture content, right?
And so uh what I read on the internets is that you want to hit somewhere in the uh like 14 to 15 percent moisture range, right? So the question is then is how do you know whether you've hit 14 to 15% moisture range? Now, what you can't do is just choose a relative humidity, you know, like make a salt brine, so the two salt brines of note that are in the right zone would be uh sodium bromide and sodium chloride, and then have those high humidity things and then temper them up. It's too much of a pain in the butt. What I would do to figure out the actual moisture content of the sorghum that you have is to put a is to weigh it very accurately in uh a piece of aluminum foil, right?
Uh weigh the aluminum foil, weigh the sorghum, make sure it's a single layer, put it into an oven at 130 degrees C, which is 266 Fahrenheit for about like two hours, right? One to three hours. And as soon as the weight does no longer goes down, you've driven off most of the water. Now, let it cool covered, like put it into a container and let it cool so it can't reabsorb moisture from the atmosphere and then weigh it. And then you can figure out what the moisture content of the sorghum was.
Once you figure out the moisture content, you can figure out okay, well, in order to get it up to 14%, how much do I need to either add or remove? And then you can uh do it that way. Does that make that make sense? You can figure out kind of where you are. Because people are successfully dry popping the sorghum.
If you're gonna dry pop the sorghum, I think the key on this is because sorghum is so small, right? You need to get it to the correct temperature relatively quickly before you drive off too much moisture, right? But not so high, because 420 is you don't need 420 degree oil to pop it, right? You really only need on in the area of like 360, 365 to pop it. So if you're you actually using a quart of oil and a half cup of seeds, you might be driving off too much moisture too quickly before you could build enough pressure to pop it, right?
So I would actually, for if you're gonna use this large amount of oil, I would actually drop the temperature down a little bit and see whether that helps you. But with a dry uh pop, what you do what you need to do is preheat the pan, get the pan. So like the this person who I forget her name, but she's on there, what she does is she throws a couple of uh uh sorghums into the bottom of the pan, waits for them to pop, then she knows the pan is hot enough. Now she pulls the pan off off the heat for a second, throws the new sorghum in, moves it around, let's say, and then puts it back on the heat and then pops them all dry. So uh I would test some of these things.
Is this a good enough answers for them to troubleshoot? Uh all right. Ian writes in, could you please share your mushroom gravy and vegan foamer recipes? They've been talked about, but I can't seem to track them down anywhere. Yeah, right.
Well, so the vegan foamer, I'll give you that one. It's easy. Now, this is just the one I use. Do whatever you like. This is just this is the one that this is the one I've used.
Uh 300 grams hottest tap water. Hot is important, all right. 4.5 grams uh powdered gum uh arabic or whatever you want to call it, acacia. Uh good stuff. Please don't buy the crappy, like big, please, please just buy good decent quality powdered gum Arabic, please.
Uh nine grams methocel F50, F like Frank 50, except no other methyl cell. If it doesn't say which methell, don't trust it. Don't trust people who don't give you the right numbers. I'm so angry about it. Uh 0.9 grams xanthan gum, all right, and 200 grams of ice.
So what you're gonna do is is you're gonna combine the uh the gum arabic, the methyl, and the xanthan gum, stir them together, right? And what that what that's doing, the methyl cell is actually uh separating the xanthan and the arabic particles from each other so that they can hydrate quickly. Then put use a stick blender, right? Use a stick blender, blend them into the hot water, right? Uh try not to whip too much air into it, right?
That's why I don't want you to use a full-size blender. Use a stick blender, right? So get the and the xanthan and the arabic should hydrate at that point, right? Don't go nuts with it. Then after that's thoroughly dispersed, right?
The the F50, it's gonna be white. Throw the ice in and stir with a spoon. Spoon. Spoon, not a blender. Should they stir it with a blender?
No. No. They should use a spoon because what when you put the ice in, the temperature is gonna drop. The methyl cell is gonna start to hydrate. If you whip any air into that product.
Any air, it's there forever. So don't use a spoon. Uh, and that's it. The mushroom gravy, the trick with that is is that I don't like to make a root. So a lot of people are you a Burmani guy?
Not as much as I should be. Yeah. So uh, like the issue with most uh gravies is is that I hate the way they're written. They expect you to know in advance exactly how much gravy you're gonna have. And so you do a roux ahead of time and you make it, and then you have to like like the easiest thing to do is to make it too thick and then thin it out with cream or cream or milk, right?
But these these are all clutches, right? The issue with a mu mushroom gravy is that you saute the mushrooms in butter or oil with the flavorings, and then when the mushrooms are done, then you can add either like a mushroom stock. And by the way, I recommend cold soaking uh shiitakis if you're gonna make a shiitake broth, and then like circulating them at 60 for a while to get the best flavor for your stock before you go. Whatever liquids you're gonna use, you don't want to then also have to make a roux and then and then put it in. It doesn't make sense.
You don't want to blend the mushrooms, so you've got to make sure that no clumps happen when you're making the gravy. So my way around it is to blend like some of the stock, cold or hot, because you're gonna blend it, but cold works best because the flour doesn't hydrate in it. Blend it together or mix it together cold, then add that slurry the same way you would with a cornstarch to the gravy. The trick is getting the amount right. And here's what no one ever tells you.
I don't know why people do this for recipes. I think that it's because they hate themselves and they hate us, right? Why does no one ever just tell you the amount of flour to use in grams for a specific amount of gravy? And here's what it is: it's between six and six and two-thirds percent. Those are my numbers for gravy.
I my standard gravy number is 6.25% flour by weight to the liquid base to get it to go. However, you get it in, whether you do it Burmani, but I don't want to add more oil, right? So what I'll do is I'll take some of this, I'll either take some of the stock cold or I'll pull some out, put it in a blender, I'll pre-weigh the amount of flour I need, boom, that's it. So I don't know why everyone just doesn't give gravy recipes in terms of the number of grams of flour per grams of gravy. It's just drives me mad.
Two tablespoons per cup. But what does that mean? You know what I mean? To avoid that, I just make a batch of uh roux and freeze it and then cut it into little cubes and then just kind of like add anything up there. Yeah, all right.
That also works, you know? I do that too. Yeah, but uh the other thing is always have like a little uh ultraspur sitting around. Yeah. And then you can tap it in.
But if you want to know what the actual like true number is, it's about six for flour. AP is what I tested. About six point two five percent in that range.
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