Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live from the Heart of Manhattan Rockefeller Center, New York City News Stand Studios. Joined as usual with John, how are you doing? Doing great, thanks. Yo, made myself almost pass out.
Need to breathe when I do that. Like I got like super dizzy. Like I just took whippets or something. Oh nice. Yeah, maybe it's it's the a it's the age creeping up on me.
You know what I mean? I haven't done whippets since high school, so you know. Perfect. But that's that memory stays with you. Yeah, no, it definitely does.
Definitely does. Yeah, yeah. Got uh Joe Hazen rocking the panels. How you doing? I'm doing great, man.
Good to see everyone. Yeah, great to see you as well. We are again Nastasia Les, but uh holding down Los Angeles. We got a Jackie Molecules. Jack Insley, how you doing?
Yo, I'm good. Good, good, good. And off of the coast in Vancouver Island, Quinn, how you doing? I'm good. Great.
For any of you guys listening live on Patreon, calling your questions to 917-410-1507, 917-4101507 for this uh further all tangent Tuesday. Yeah. Uh all tangents, all tangents all the time. Uh so what's going on, guys? What do you got?
Um, what do we got? We got some guests confirmed coming up. We got uh Paul Carmichael and Dennis No coming on to discuss um some things Momofuku and Kabawa and what Dennis has been doing as our chef. Supposedly, I would very much like to go. I went there.
Uh I was they only had reservations at the bar. I went there, what was it for? I don't know. I don't know whether it was anyway. I went there.
And uh, you know, Paul's, you know, great cook, you know, back in the States from his stint down under uh for years he was in Australia. And uh I was like, you know, it's gonna be good. That was really good, actually. That's what everyone's been saying. I really need to get over there.
Really good. Yeah. Like delicious. Yeah. Yeah.
Like the the move if you can't get if you can't get into the main restaurant, right? If you ask real nice, they might bring uh food over from the restaurant. But maybe it could have been just for me, but I don't know. Yeah. Probably.
But I mean it's the same people. You know what I mean? It's just, you know, the bar menus abbre abbreviate different. Different different abbreviated. But anyway, yeah, great.
So I'll be happy to uh have him on. Although, geez, when are they coming on? March third. I think I mentioned this on air. Uh Paul's got a liquid nitrogen doer.
I'm not exactly sure what they use it for, but he's got a liquid nitrogen doer over there. And they use the evil nitrogen stealing hose that everyone sells you, the transfer hose that's like six feet long and sucks like ten liters of liquid nitrogen to chill it down every time you use it. So someone remind me the week before he comes, I'll order the parts and present him with the way the way that the uh the baby Jesus wants it to be. You know what I'm saying? Yes.
All right. Uh all right, great. Uh so for those of you who are not members of the Patreon and for instance don't want to get such things as listening to uh episodes that we weren't allowed to air but did anyway and had to be re embargoed. Uh what what can they do? What can they do, John?
Go to Patreon.com slash cooking issues. Um the couple different membership levels there. Every membership level gets you access to our Discord, which I always talk about, but it's such a great part of the Patreon membership. Um you get access to discounts from our friends at Kitchen Arts and Sun Letters. Just spoke with Matt who helped me place a good book order.
Um yeah, so it's just a great what'd you order? The new disfruitar cookbook from Barcelona. It's a hoide toy, you know, cookbook from Spain that I'm never gonna cook out of, but I'm excited to read it. Is like it's like like a whole chapter just on Boca Ronance or something? No, it's like El Buy Disciples, kind of like documenting and doing what they have been working on over the last three or four years.
Yeah. And what is it? Well, I don't know yet. I haven't gotten the book. You didn't look at it in the store?
No, I just ordered it online. Oh, all right. It's in Spanish or in English? English. Yeah, or catalog.
Yeah, no, Spanish. Um, but not just because my thesis work back at UConn was all about Fraunadria and kind of the food as art kind of thing, which we don't need to get into now. We had this discussion before, but did you ever go to the bully? No, I did not. No.
I would like to. Um but yeah, so this place kind of has a similar philosophies and ways of looking at food as he did, so it interests me and looking forward to reading it. Nice. Yeah, all right. Uh anyway, so you were saying about joining the Patreon.
Kitchen Arts and Letters. Yeah, Kitchen Arts and Letters. Plenty of great reasons to join. So check it out. Patreon.com slash cooking issues.
And actually, for our Patreon members, I think we'd probably like to know who would you like us to have on as guests soon? Um could use some recommendations, things like that. Um so let us know who's of interest. We'll see what we can do. Yeah.
Yeah. Oh, and correction before we continue with the show. Maybe last week, you know, time. It blurs, right? Uh I said that uh someone dropped off German ingredients at the bar.
Well, Michael D. wrote in, and rightly so. And I Quinn, if Quinn hadn't told me this, I was going to correct myself anyway, because I went and read the label on the grill mustard. Grill Zenf, right? Which comes in a very heavy metal tube, like super heavy metal tube, right?
Uh I'm not used to mustard it too, but I kinda like it. It's kind of like feels because it you know, like the those tubes that feel like they're made of lead when you crinkle them, they're so heavy, like old paint tubes. Anyway, uh it says right on it the most popular mustard in Austria in German. So it's in German, but is Austrian. Yeah.
All right. Right. That'll be cut like calling a Brazilian person Portuguese, I guess. In a way, but not the same, but I mean, these guys live next to each other anyway. You know what I mean?
But anyway, so all the products were uh Austrian, and uh and I uh did a little more research on the beans uh that uh Michael left and uh I'm gonna mis mispronounce it here, but uh like uh uh kaffer. A umlaut, I always get it wrong. I used to know how to say kafir. Uh Kafer Bonin, uh, which are Scarlet Runner beans, but from Austria, where apparently you make the like sinequanon of Austria Austrian bean salads. You make it with this runner bean and the the uh pumpkin seed oil that he left.
So now, Michael, I have to at some point soon make this Austrian like r scarlet runner bean salad with the pumpkin seed oil. I'll let you guys know. Uh anyway, all right. So uh go ahead. What do you got?
What do you got for the week? Week in review. Other than ordering a book from Kitchen Arsenal Letters. What's it? They don't have yet.
No. Well, I that I don't have yes, yes. Um well, I every year around this time of year, my family does like a galette d'Hois, so it's the French equivalent of king cake. I've never had a French one, by the way. Oh, you're missing up.
I've had Catalonian ones, I've had Louisiana ones. Oh, they're delicious. I've baked them, but I've never, I've never had a they're so good. Like the almond filling on the inside is just similar to the Catalonian one, right? I've never had the Catalonian ones, so I don't know.
Is it when you say French, is it from the Pyrenees? Is it that part of France? No, more northern France. Yeah, yeah. All right.
Okay. Like I think Southern France has its own sort of derivative of it. But sanding sugar on top. I don't think so. No, it's just puff pastry, gold.
Crazy food colors? No. It's just puff pastry, really, and then almond filling. Um puff pastry from what the research I've been doing, it's brushed with egg yolk and milk. Okay.
Um which I never heard of, but I don't know anything about pastry. And where do you order it from? My mom got this one on Goldbelly, but like around here, you can get it from uh Dominique Ansel's place or Danielle Bellou. Does he does he laminate the hell out of it? Do you know that Dominique Ansel will laminate any damn thing?
Yep. Yes. Like anything. You're like, like some things he has. You're like, dude, why did you laminate that dude?
It's like he doesn't know how not to laminate. It's like, I'm trying to think of like what's the last thing on earth that you would laminate? He'll laminate it. Yeah, exactly. You know what I mean?
Yes. I don't get it. I mean, he's great. Great delicious, yeah, yeah. But laminate it.
Yeah. You know what I mean? Yes. Um But yeah, so the almond filling is like almond flour, some almond extract, orange zest, a little rum, eggs, butter, I think too. Uh yeah, no, definitely butter.
Um, and yeah, baked in puff pastry, but I don't know, they one I had last night was just chunky almonds inside. I didn't like chunky almonds. Yeah, like marci penny. Yeah, no. Didn't like that.
Here's the thing, you know, you can just buy that stuff. Oh, I'm gonna make this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, I mean almond paste. No, I know, yeah, yeah.
But I want to make this gotta day one thing. I'm not gonna make mountain puff pastry because f that. But um I used to do it. Yeah. When you did it once, I know how.
I used to do it. I used to do it like at least once a week or more. Why? But uh I never did uh see there's a there's ten cooks, ten different puff pastry recipes, right? Yeah.
Like, do I make the detent, do I not make the déchomp? You know what I mean? I never did. I used so what I'm talking about is like some people will need flour and like some of the flour with the butter, I guess, to make it more malleable, and then use that as the butter center in between the flour layers. But I'm pretty sure I just use straight butter.
I didn't make the flour butter paste. Yeah. It's less it's been so many years. It's been it's less flour than a bermani. It's not one-to-one, I think.
I think it's just enough to basically turn the butter into a dough. And I think that the reason is is so that as it's chilled and rolled. The main one of the main difficulties with puff pastry, obviously, when you're using butter instead of a shortening that's made for puff pastry, is they the temperatures need to be just right so that the butter doesn't melt into the flour, but also such that the butter is not so firm that when you roll it out, you tear the the dough that the butter's not so hard that it tears the dough. So it's like this middle zone situation. You know what I mean?
Yeah. Um yeah, anyway. I used to be okay at it. Yeah, well, I'll just go buy it. Yeah, who's he gonna buy?
Uh he's uh used to work at Danielle here and now has his own line of like charcuterie and frozen doughs and things like that that are pretty good. He makes out in Long Island City, I believe. You can get locally. So Long Island City. Yeah, indeed.
A lot of interesting weird things have happened in Long Island City. Yeah. That's where the talking heads are from. Oh, interesting. They had like a loft space out in Long Island City.
No, but a lot of uh like commissary kitchens popping up out there doing things like that. And so yeah. All right. But you said that they they so it was chunky nuts and what else? Chunky nuts, and I don't know.
I think chunky nuts. There's never the filling to puff pastry ratio is never correct. There's always way too much puff pastry to not enough filling. And they really like layer up the puff pastry on these two. I think like I was looking at it.
So you're like Nastasia with tamales. You want more filling, less mass. Like I was looking up David Liebovitz's recipe for this, and he takes like two puff pastry sheets, stacks them on top, then filling, and then double puff pastry sheets on top too. It's just like that's that's too much. Whatever.
Personal preference, I get that. But uh, but yeah, that's my gripe for today. Are you one of these sharp knife, don't crush the edges of the puff pastry? Oh, I don't care about that. Want to get to the filling.
No, no, I meant when you're when you're when you're forming the stuff. No, you remember when they say you're forming it, like they used to be like if you just push the cookie cutter in, you'll you'll crush the dough levels together. You know what? You know what? Forget it.
Do you remember this? For the those of you that are old enough. Do you remember that people used to always like do like a like a wheel pinking shear cut on the side of puff pastry, get the weird little sawtooth action on the side. Super goofy. Yeah, unnecessary.
Uh wait, what are people's current thoughts on grill marks on food? Hopefully, dying out. I think they're trash. Okay. This isn't it.
What about anyone else on the phone? Jack, Quayne, what are your thoughts on grill marks? Like on a fish, sure, but on meat and chicken, no. Are they gone? Are they dead?
Yeah, they must be, yeah. I don't know. But uh I here's the issue with it. Like, if you used to read like a lot of the professional recipes and manuals back in the like 90s, early 2000s, they would literally just put grill marks on it, the quadriage marks, as like a sign of cooking. Yep.
And so it might as well just be it's it's like the it's like just like the the hunk of parsley that you throw on a plate for no reason, right? Not fried parsley, which is delicious, but just parsley. What the hell is that all about? You know what I mean? Yeah.
So anyway, uh I also therefore became a hater of quadriage marks. And then it got to the point, no offense for those people out there who love these, but the grill pan was invented. In fact, I was gifted one by my family, right? And if you don't know what I'm talking about, it's a cast iron pan, often enameled on the outside, which I don't know why. But then uh with like a grill mark in it, the idea that you can put grill marks using your stove, but they don't cook food, the grill pan.
They don't cook the food. You know what I mean? So it's like I don't really I don't I don't understand them. Yeah. I don't understand them.
No, not a fan. Yeah. No. Uh good. Yeah.
Especially like when you see it when you're at a restaurant and you get the really wan grill marks where it's like literally like it was on that grill for the minimum length of time to leave those little sad pale. Yeah. Yeah. Not a fan. Not a fan.
Unnecessary. I'd rather have every the whole piece of meat have that color. Yeah, we know you didn't cook it on a real grill, dude. You know what I mean? Just pan, like pan that sucker.
Let's get like a crust across the whole thing. Broil that sucker. Yeah. Yeah. You know what I mean?
People want to grill at home. They're not coming out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Or use a real grill. Like be one of those restaurants that uses a real grill. In which case you're cooking it. Yeah. Why did you pick it up and move it 45 degrees?
Exactly. Did you not know when you were supposed to pick it up and flip it? Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah.
I don't know. Not for me. Listen though. If you serve it and you love it, I'm not against you doing it. I don't want to do it.
Same. I don't enjoy it. Yeah. Yeah. Not how I would do it.
Yeah. Do we have these fools back yet or no? We haven't. All right. So what what do you guys think of uh grill marks on food?
Look at I I I don't I don't mind them if they are a byproduct of grilling. Like if you if it's something delicate and you don't want to manipulate it a lot on the grill, then therefore it produces grill marks. I don't mind that, but yeah, I'm also anti- uh grill pan or other such the classic grill marks though are uh are an actual sign of manipulation because they the recipes used to be put it down, pick it up too early, turn it not, you know, turn it 90 degrees or 40, whatever they say to do to get the quadriage marks so that the grill marks are crossing each other. So it's like literally a sign that you touched it too much. You know what I mean?
They weren't doing like the old Harold McGee where like you know, flip the burger every 10 seconds, right? Which is more of a it's a different phenomenon, but yeah. Against uh against, all right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Same, same.
I I echo Quinn's sentiment exactly. Yeah, yeah. Like it's un unnecessary. Like uh sorry. I I kind of I go back and forth.
So like if I haven't had something for a long time and someone presents me with an unnecessary flourish at a restaurant, I'm always like, oh, you know what I mean? Yeah. But you know, in general, for my own life, I'm not so much with the unnecessary flourish. I'm with the unnecessary work for minor improvement. That's my whole life philosophy.
Unnecessary, ridiculous amount of work for minor improvements. That's you know, my motto. Yeah. Uh that's what I just does that fit in the same category as the flourish. Oh, yeah.
Well, in in my in my bar life, obviously, there is no unnecessary garment, although we have them now, you know, like uh there's a couple of stupid unnecessary garnishes at the bar because I said I don't really care anymore, do what you like. You know what I mean? But me personally, I don't come up with them. Like now, if you were gonna make some sort of like Rube Goldwater like mousetrap game garnish that like, you know, like took like five minutes to like operate and the ball went around, and like all of a sudden now you had a line out the door from like insta jerks like putting it online. I'm for that because I'm for business.
You know what I mean? But uh now I gotta design something like that. My next thing that I want to build that I haven't had time to build because I don't have time to build it, is I'm I'm finally gonna get the pinata machine going. I'm finally gonna get a pinata service at the bar. It's been decades that I've wanted a pinata service.
Now describe that. So when Booker and Dax first opened in like 2012, the the bar, uh 2011, 2012, something like that. Like, I wanted to just hang pinatas, and then you could just order a pinata, and we will go outside and smack it, right? As part of the service. And we would fill it with all kinds of cool candies.
And the chef was like, no. I was like, okay. You know what I mean? So then we would only have pinatas for special occasions. So like, remember, at Booker and Dax, we had a baseball bat and existing conditions, and also at Contra, we have a baseball bat that hangs, and everyone who works signs the bat.
So I have the XCON bat, the, you know, the existing conditions bat. I have the I have the Booker and DAX bat with all the bartenders, all the servers, all the like the runners, everyone that's ever worked, they've signed a bet. And uh occasionally at Booker and DAX and I at XCON, they would get me a pinata for you know, not during service time, and you would pick up the bat and hit the hell out of the pinata with a real bat, not with a stick, and with no blindfold. So the bat's not for intimidation, it's just for the beating of the pinata. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay, cool. So they got me once, uh, I don't know, this was like 2014 or something like this. They got me a chili pepper pinata, and they hung it up at Booker Index, and I uh I didn't know this. I thought it was filled with candy. They filled it with airline bottles of liquor.
I hit it, they didn't expect me to do this. I hit it as hard as I could with a baseball bat, and the pinata exploded and shot. We used to have this long hallway between the bar and sombar, which was not a bar, but it was a restaurant, and and it just like rained airline bottles into their space during service. They got real mad. I got real mad.
It's like have some have some fun. Have some fun. Anyway, I then what? Why didn't they expect you to hit the pinata? Yeah, I don't know.
It's a good question. It's an excellent question. Uh interestingly, some of the airline bottles survived. You know? Um, so some of them were plastic, I think.
Those are, I think the one and so at existing conditions, I wanted to build an automated because they're like, you can't hand, and this is true, you can't hand someone a stick or a bat after you've also handed them an alcoholic drink, even if they are not visibly inebriated, right? Right? Bad idea. Having them swing a bat in a c in an in in a closed restaurant when you're serving liquor, or probably anytime. So I wanted to build a machine that would just explode a pinata, right?
So I tried to build something with a compressed air tank and like a big solenoid valve. And the problem was I I never sealed, I got a donkey pinata, and I hooked up this like like air cannon to the donkey pinata, but it didn't somehow the donkey was too leaky, so it just looked like it was blowing candy out of its rear end, right? So it's kind of a failed failed thing. But I think I have it figured out now. I'm building a pinata destroying thing out of garage door springs.
So it's just got like a crossbow latch on it, and like and then and so then you when you press it, it releases and the the bat attached to the garage door torsion springs, wham, smashes this, smashes the donkey. Perfect. I'm assuming we're gonna start with donkeys. That's kind of like the standard piñata is a donkey. Right?
Yeah. Wouldn't you say? Yeah, I guess. Yeah, yeah. I haven't done pinadas in a very long time.
So the standard American, obviously, the actual real standard pinata is like a clay ball with spikes coming off of it that is wrapped in paper mache. Like that's the originals, like round with like star-shaped things coming off of it. But I'm talking about like standard whitebred American pinata donkey, I think. Spirit animal. Yeah.
Yeah. Donkey. Yeah. They're they're uh interesting animals. Do you know that uh I have never seen, although I heard someone call in to a radio show, the miniature donkey that carries beers.
Have you seen these? You hire them for your event. It's a miniature donkey with saddles on it that just walks around your event with a bunch of chilled beers in its in its side saddles. And I'm like, Nastasi and I were gonna try to get it for the for one of the parties we were gonna do, but I don't know. Never never worked out.
Never worked out. All right, Jack, what do you got for us, man? Rent a donkey. Rent a donkey. I'm uh headed to New Orleans for my 40th birthday, and uh just in time for record freezing lows, so I'm excited about that.
Record freezing lows means what though? Like how freezing is freezing? And they say low of 25. Oh, that's real, dude. So that's yeah.
Happy 40th, dude. Thanks. Where are you gonna where are you gonna go? Do you have reservations yet or what? Yeah, I'm gonna check out uh St.
Germain. Um supposed to be great. I'm really excited about that. Nice. How long are you going?
So the fun thing is I'm going for like 10 days. I'm gonna work from work remote out of there. So I'm just gonna kind of post up. All right. Hang out.
So you have you I mean, do you go a lot to New Orleans or no? Yeah, yeah, I love it there. Hey, when I was a kid, I used to like going to that place, Cohen's. It sells like coins and antique guns and antique swords. You ever go to that place?
I've not. That's a great tip though. Yeah, it's in the quarter. You go there and you kind of pretend that you're gonna buy some sort of crazy antique, like Napoleonic era gun. And of course you don't, because what the hell are you gonna do with it?
You know what I mean? What the hell are you gonna do with that? I mean hang it up. I don't know. Wow, I'm looking at the site now.
This looks awesome, actually. But what I wanted to buy is um they're uh what's the name of it? Like they they they sell the the coin like uh I think they're called Pikayunes that the that the newspaper is named after like this like Louisiana like little coin. Anyway, whatever. Um, uh nice.
Uh what do you got, Quinn Quinn? Before we get into these questions. Uh yeah, uh the made more baguettes, getting slightly better at the end. How are your baguettes? Speaking of which.
They're good. I mean baguette. We know baguette, not actually the good sandwich bread, but bon me bread. So I know John might be working on some sandwiches going forward. What are your thoughts on the on making Bon Me style bread?
What were you talking about? Are you allowed to talk about it? Yeah, why not? Meatball sub. Meatball sub on the Bon Me bread.
It's the way to go. Here's my other issue with uh Meatball Sub. Here's my other uh issue with meatball subs is that I find that they lack acid. Yeah. They're poorly acidified.
Yeah. Is this a school group? It's gotta be, man. Some all girls school, yeah. They're just they're going for it.
Uh so I've never baked Bon Me bread. Have you? I have not. I've heard there's a lot of finagling to it. I mean, just f follow one of the 8,000 recipes.
They have contests for it every year. The stuff is incredibly well documented. I mean, that's the thing about it. I know Andy Rickard did a lot of research on it recently. He was posting about it on Instagram.
Wisconsin trials and tribulations about baking bon me bread. Yeah. All right. So uh your baguettes, how are they turn it out, man. Okay, they're turning out pretty good.
I just finished reading uh modern baking at home, the truncated version. So I'm gonna try a few tricks. Like what? Um well again I'm using 40% high extraction flour. So I want to push the hydration up a little bit.
But obviously, I don't want it to be harder to handle. I mean, standard brickett's a white flower game, though. I mean it's a white flower game. I'm not making standard bags. White flour.
White flower game. So that's why I don't make them. I want to try. I'm I'm gonna try some a little a little little little bit of a gelatin in the water. Why?
To make it handleable as I increase the hydration slightly. But if you're using if you're using high if you're using high extraction flour, it's already got more bran in it, so it's gonna absorb more water anyway. Yeah, but I'm finding it's still kind of slacking a little. Why gel it's like one of the things that they do? Because that stuff's only gonna give body when it's cold.
Like why not? They recommend it to help to help make it shapeable. But like why would you do why would you do that? Why gelin? Why would you do that as opposed to let's say like uh prehydrated starch, let's say.
Oh, speaking of weird things to try out, get this. So I think I said last week that I've been kind of deep diving into crisp old Crisco recipes. Proctor and Gamble, so I'm very curious about uh Procter and Gamble invented Crisco. Uh they sold off the Crisco brand 20 years ago to someone who sold it again. So all their archives are gone.
So I called the chief archivist from Procter and Gamble because I was like, I want to know who your bakery team was, because they had a different team for professional industry people versus home people, and the recipes are different, right? Different flowers, different things. And they sold it, and the the second time it got sold it, the archives got quote unquote donated to Smithsonian. But I cannot find who in the Smithsonian has these things. They're probably like in like some Raiders of the Lost Ark situation, like buried, not digitized.
Waiting to be accessioned kind of a thing. Now, if you want to know about the stuff that Procter and Game, if you want to know about Ivory Soap, I can give you the name of everyone who ever made ivory soap. You know what I mean? Because they still have the archives for ivory soap. But Crisco, nothing.
But there was in the I think 40s through whatever. So the original Crisco, for those of you that don't know what Crisco is, it's just hydrogenated uh vegetable oil. Originally, actually cottonseed oil. So it was a way to take cotton seed oil, which was not like useful and crappy. They first they figured out how to deodorize it, then they figured out how to hydrogenate it.
So it was sold as like hyper pure. They never really talked about cotton seed oil, right? Because it didn't have such a great name. But like Chris, the co in Chris Co. is cottonseed oil, crystallized cotton seed oil that was then fluffed.
Uh and so it's zero percent water. So they did and it's very neutral and stable, right? So that was what they based everything around: purity, stability, neutrality. So they wanted you to just note how incredibly neutral it was as opposed to other fats like lards, which you know people love now, but back then when they couldn't achieve neutrality, they're like, oh, neutral is good, right? So it was sold on those kind of things.
And also remember, it came out pretty soon after the Pure Food and Drug Act. So it, you know, Crisco came out, I don't know exactly when, but sometime around like 1910, 1912, and Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906, right? Around then. And so it's like people were worried about purity standards at the time. Then also they got to sell it as uh they have a whole uh set of early recipe books before World War II aimed at Jewish housewives because Crisco is inherently parf.
And so they're saying you can use it, you don't have to store it in the fridge, and you can use it for both meat and dairy dishes. So reading all this old interesting stuff, but they kind of went against this grain somewhat. They came out with a product, I don't know exactly when, called Golden Fluffo. Have you heard of Golden Fluffo? No.
So Golden Fluffo is Crisco that's been whipped because one of the other things they say is they whip it for easy handling. So it creams well into cakes. So like they like the a lot of the like once they develop this creaming process further, they show these cakes that are made with Crisco, and oh goodness, they're so amazing because they've already been kind of pre-fluffed, so there's already kind of aerated a little bit. So that doesn't gonna help that's not gonna help you if you melt your Crisco to fry in and then re fry with it. But golden fluffo, they add beta carotene to it, right?
Now, I believe that they literally added beta carotene. So they weren't using like red palm oil. You can now buy neutral red palm oils that don't have flavor. I have not bought them, but you can buy them. I looked it up.
But beta carotene, if you heat your oil high enough, it can you can dissolve it into um into your thing. And the colors they got on their fried foods, amazing. So they have all of these ads from like the 50s where they're like the right hand of the pan is fried in golden fluffo and the left hand left side of the pan is fried in regular oil, or they'll have the right side is a tray of biscuits made with golden fluffo and the left side is a tray of biscuits made with just and like the little bit of orange and the browning you get out of it, so guess what I did? I ordered I ordered a bag of beta carotene to show up at my house. Now I can't fry yet until my new hood shows up.
You know, more on that when it when it shows up. But uh so I'll let you guys know my experiments with beta carotene melted into my fry oil. So now, Dave. Uh-huh. I actually have like relevant.
They still have it's not called golden fluffo. I actually just bought Crisco Gold. Which is a lightly colored, and I believe probably like um what's the butter flavor? Yeah, golden fluffo is not butter flavored. Golden butter, golden fluffo, but but like so I wonder whether there's as much beta carotene in golden crisco as there was in as there or yellow, whatever, as there was in golden fluffo.
I'll have to try it out. I just bought them. Yeah. So I'm gonna like I'm you have to heat up to really get a like a decent amount of berry, but I don't know how much beta carotene I'm gonna add to it, but you need to heat it up to about 150 C, 140, 150 C to get it to go in really, really well, and then kind of probably recrystallize and whip it to get it back to where to the golden fluffo standard. You know what I mean?
But uh we'll see. We'll see. I'll let you guys, I'll I'll let you is know. What I really want to do, what if what if you melted the butt real butter, right? Then added the beta carotene, like to clarify butter, save the milk solids, and then when it gets warm when it gets warm, re whip it with the milk solids in it.
Because you know what the clarified butter for baking, unless you need it to be clarified, you lose so much flavor with milk solids, you know what I mean? But what if we made a golden fluffo? But it clarify would be better for frying, but I mean for for biscuits. Oh yeah. That'd be good.
Yeah, golden butter, golden butter fluffoe for biscuits. Yeah. There's experiments to be done. Because here's what I don't think is true. You know how everyone says, oh, you need the water content in your butter to get puff or flakiness?
It's not true. It can't be true because the shortenings that were designed for this very purpose don't have water in them. So if you can make, and I don't believe even I don't even believe that puff pastry shortenings have water emulsified into them, but I could be wrong because I didn't look it up before I came on air. But I think the it's just a function of separation and not a function of the water vaporizing in the butter itself causing uh flakiness because there's enough water in the dough matrix to flash and to create the separation in between the layers of fat, and it's the fat alone that's important. Does that make sense?
You believe that also don't don't people say that European or French style butter is better than that? They say it's better because there's more fat and less water. They do say that. The water puffing. They do say it.
I don't know if it's true, but they do say it. I know. Same thing. Your theory would align with that. If it's actually just the fat separation that is important.
Yeah. When I'm making fresh butter, I need it, but I don't rinse it. I think it tastes better like fresh butter. It doesn't keep as long, but when you're making your own butter, I never I never rinse it or soak it. I do like light kneading to get some of the stuff out, make it somewhat homogenous, but I leave more whey in it.
I think I like I like the taste of it better. Um you know there was a Kerry Gold recall. Oh, yeah, what'd they do? Is it's just old poop butter. Is this the poop butter?
No, it's not poop butter. It has to do with the packaging that is uh was there's a there was a poisonous leak or something that um altered the butter that made it um yeah non non savory. Yeah, I think it was only the gold foiling. Who had the poop butter though? There was a company that made butter that had poop in it, not human poop.
Let's see. Cabot? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There was a recall. Wow, last April.
Yeah, yeah. It's a poop, a poop recall. Yeah. Poop butter. Potential.
Potential potential potential. Don't go slandering that company like that. So if I had potential to it, it's all right. I guess. Some people say.
Some people say the butter had poop in it, then it's allegedly poop. There we go. Allegedly. Allegedly poop uh laden butter. So while we're on the uh subject of uh old oldie timey things, I just uh I got an so Hamilton Beach mixers, right?
So like the old milkshake mixers, like um Mike Capafari at Thunderbolt and Night on Earth in LA, he loves them. And Garrett Richard, obviously at Sunken Harbor Club, lerves them. It has been telling me for years together, and I never got one. And I think I might have said this on air before, but I realized that the original Hamilton Beach like milkshake mixers were badged Arnold. AR, my name, like last name, Arnold.
And so I picked one up, like patent, probably early 20s, Patent Date 1919, Jadite base, model number 17. So it doesn't require, it's pre- it's grease lubricated and it doesn't have oil spouts. The earlier ones you have to actually oil them. And it came beautiful. Chrome, decent shape, everything good.
I needed to rewire it, right? Because like the wires, first of all, you know, old wires have asbestos in them. Just to let you know, old wires have asbestos in them. So like cut them off, throw them away. So I'd start rewiring it and then I take it apart.
I take the motor apart, I clean the motor, I you know, renew the brushes, I've sand the commentator down and put it all back together. But I I can't get the actual switch out of it because I can't separate. I've put a bore scope into it, so I now understand that if I ever want to actually take it fully apart, I need to make a one-inch uh um pipe with a notch in it that I can jam into it and use as a wrench to separate the two things off. But anyway, so I'm like, you know what to hell with it? The switch is still operational, so I'm gonna use the original wire that I can't cut off.
So when I put the new cord on and jammed it back in, the the insulation is so brittle that it the insulation cracked, touched the side of the unit, but I didn't I didn't test both sides of the plug to the unit. I just tested both sides of the plug against each other, and they were okay, they weren't grounded. So I plugged it in and then touched my countertop and the unit at the same time. Boom! Yeah.
Blew me, blew me back. So yeah. So now I now I have to uh I I have to slide insulation over the wire up into the unit and then rebolt it back together for it to work. But it works like a dream. That motor is still going strong, like over a hundred years old, a motor's a demon.
Don't make things like they used to. Yeah, you have to be careful when you take it apart. Like it's non the bearings are non-standard, so you have to be a little bit careful that you take pictures as you go, but it's pretty sweet. The other one, I saw when I was researching all this garbage, a uh a bunch of cookbooks that were sold on QVC in the late 90s by a woman named Thelma Allen called Recipes from Sweet Yesterday. And I was like, what the hell?
They're like five dollars. So I ordered some of them because they have all these old old recipes. And so here's some recipes that I want to search down. One of them, one of them I think she cribbed from a parade magazine in the 60s, because I've done some research on it. But get this it's a cinnamon roll, a quick bread cinnamon roll, so not a yeasted one, but I think you could modify it to be yeasted.
So what you do is is you make a basic cinnamon roll. So you make it your dough, you roll it out, cinnamon, sugar, roll it up into pinwheel, cut it, put it in your dish. But then the entire time you're making it, you have boiling apple cider vinegar and sugar in a pan. And right before you bake it, you'll pff and pour the apple cider vinegar and sugar boil boiling over the things and then throw it in and bake it. So I I want to find the original parade version.
You know what I mean? Because it claims to be an 1880 recipe. The reason I know that she cribbed it from parade is that on the internet people who do it say that it came from a parade that said a parade magazine recipe that says it's from 1880. So it's too much, too much whatever. So I want to find the original parade magazine, make it maybe I'll tell you guys about it once I once I made it.
Is the vinegar like reduced or it's just quickly boiled to dissolve the sugar in the middle of the room? Well, the recipe the recipe clearly says to start it. So some of the some of the more recent ones just say warm over low heat. So I don't know what that means. Her version of the recipe, which I don't know whether it's closer to parade or not, is uh you set it to boil as a first thing while you're making the dough, in which case it will be reduced somewhat.
And it's gonna reduce when it's baking, because it's baking for you know a good amount of time. But she says they come out quote unquote golden brown. So you know that by the end of the time the water is evaporated off and you're good to go. So I'm gonna try that. Uh but another weird thing, get this.
This is the craziest thing. There's a recipe in it, first of all, for Chinese Christmas cake, has no Chinese ingredients in it whatsoever. And then even worse, even more horrifying, Japanese fruit cake, which I had looked up on the internet, was a Southern American and Appalachian American thing, has nothing to do with Japan. And it's an old recipe from like the early part of the 20th century, has zero Japanese ingredients. It's basically uh it's a spice cake, nutmeg, allspice, cinnamon, and raisins with a coconut pineapple lemon icing.
Nothing to do with Japan. It's called Japanese fruit cake, but here's the best part. Underneath the recipe, it says we've been making this like for as long as I can remember, and underneath it it says, we didn't make it during World War II. I'm like, ah it's the craziest thing. Yeah.
It's like, oh, we're so anti Japanese that even this thing has nothing to do with Japan, we can't make. It's like the Freedom Fries situation, as though French fries are French. Yeah. Anyway. So stupid.
That's my story of that's my old old recipe dive uh for the week. Um Jack, did you what you would what'd you talk about already today? You're going to New Orleans. Oh, New Orleans. Go into New Orleans.
Go into New Orleans. You know that when uh Katrina happened, they thought that um uh fat's domino had died and he's like I'm not dead yeah uh found him on the roof yeah yeah he lived for a long time afterwards and he stayed in New Orleans the whole time that's Dino man wow uh Elliot Elliott uh from Berkeley writes in what mesh do I sift to when I'm milling soft wheat for things uh like pancakes also the same question for my Sonoran white flour tortillas or you know what amount do you end up letting through well I don't sift either of those things actually the nice thing about pancakes in general is that uh you could fill them with BBs they don't need that much uh gluten to get them to work so uh you know whenever I used to make pancakes I would just dump up to like 25% of whatever I wanted into the recipe so 25% of the flour in any standard pancake recipe can be replaced with oats or you know just name name the ground up thing of your non-gluten thing of your choice and so for me whenever I do pancakes and I use soft wheat because soft wheat is amazingly delicious uh also like wheat brand wheat brand's a great thing to add to pancakes like standard if you're using white flour get yourself some Kretschmer's wheat brand and uh that stuff is uh not brand germ sorry did I say brand germ wheat germ Kretschmer's wheat germ wheat germ it brand's not delicious don't I want to tell you brand's delicious. But uh wheat germ is delicious. So you sprinkle it into your pancakes. You can use quite a bit of it.
And none of these things damage your pancakes or how fluffy they are, especially, you know, with the eggs and like the fact that it's a quick bread and it's thin, like none of that matters. Your pancakes are not going to collapse unless you're a freaking lunatic. You know what I mean? And all of those quote unquote BBs in it uh help to um reduce the toughening that gluten would have if you're using AP flour, let's say, which of course you're not. So you're using soft flour, don't sift it.
Don't bother. You know what I mean? Don't or don't you can sift it if you want to like you know get rid of clumps because you packed it, but you don't need to sift it to get the uh stuff out. Uh you especially don't want to take the bran and whatnot out of the uh flour tortillas because you want the maximum water hydration for a given level of machinability. And having the bran in there, uh, first of all, like a lot of the higher protein stuff is right near the bran coating, so you're gonna get a higher protein.
And that so what you want with the with the snoring white is not like a lot of snapback, not a lot of gluten activity, but the high protein that gives the kind of texture of the cooked tortilla, so it's not too soft, right? And you want the maximum amount of water for a given dryness that lets you roll it out because it's the water in the tortilla that gives it the puff when you're cooking it on the griddle. So I would not sift it at all. That said, when I do sift flour, and I did make a pie crust, I think I talked about it a couple of weeks ago. I made a pie crust for the uh for my pot pie, and I decided finally to try to make an old school pastry flour, and I sifted uh my soft wheat with through a 60 mesh, uh, which is 250 micron holes PS.
That's the whole size. Um, and it made a superior pie crust. It did. But what was the Popeye comment we got, by the way? Did I say that earlier?
You said it to me before. No, no, we talked about it, but then John came in and said, Oh, yeah. Oh, just inheritances. Yeah, it's apparently Tucker Carlson. If uh he makes he he's got that Swanson money.
His wife, yeah, apparently. She's one of the Swansons. Yeah. Hungry man. Yeah.
Hungry man. Yep. Uh all right. So uh okay, covered smothered. Yep.
All right. And Elliot wants to know. Nastasia's not here, so I can't ask her, but uh I feel that she he wants to know does Nastasia also hate making your own non pasta noodles because uh because uh Elliot's gonna attempt to make ramen. Yeah, she would hate that. Probably.
She would hate that. She'd be like, buy ramen. Yeah, she would hate it. But whatever. I mean, I'm not saying that you have to hate it, but you want to know what Nastasia would think.
My guess is she would hate it. I have a quick uh Patreon question. What's that? Uh from Narrowlogic DC. Jack, this applies to you too.
I don't know if you saw it in the Discord, but I'm stay suddenly in LA, staying in Culver City from DC on the Jackie Molecule stocking circuit slash for work. Are there any shops with specialty kitchens slash bar supplies that I ought to prioritize? I don't have much control over where my body is until Thursday morning, so I'm hatching a plan for then. Any recs. Yeah, so I said restaurant world was the one rec that I gave, um, which is like a restaurant supply store.
I think like kind of near there. Well, maybe more like West Hollywood. Um, but I don't know, Dave, if you had any others. Me? I'm not an LA person.
Like you could drop me in LA. I could be like two blocks from where, and you could tell me everything, and I'd be like, what? Listen, if you go to LA, it's just not listen. Listen, go to the Museum of Jurassic Technology. That's the only thing I'm gonna say.
And like Nastasia, I don't think's ever been there. Have you ever been there? No, I've never been there. Dummy. Dummy.
Go to the Museum of Jurassic Technology. It's I believe close. There's an there's an in and out right there. So if you haven't done that, you know, you can go to the in and out afterwards. And you don't even don't even bother talking about the fries.
We know they suck. I don't need to talk about it anymore. It's a known fact. They suck. You know what I'm saying?
Real bad. Real bad. Yeah. So like if you want to get the fries at In N Out, bring a deep fat fryer with you, ask for a seat next to a plug, and then do the second fry at the table, and then I'm sure they're gonna be fine. You know what I mean?
But that's the kind of content we need to make, Dave. We need you to actually do that. Do you know how much trouble we would get in if we brought a deep fat fryer into an In N Out burger? Like an old school, like legitimate fry daddy, like the little the little fry daddy. Who knows?
Yeah, gorilla, gorilla crack. I have a van outside. Yeah. So you need a car with like a real power outlet. So most inverters that plug into cars won't deliver 1750 watts.
They're like, so we would need a serious inverter. Or yeah, just buy like a Honda or like rent a Honda generator that can do like a couple thousand watts, like a couple kilowatts. And if you want, I can bring, I can bring my double, my double fryer, that one that like uses two circuits. Brilliant. And then we could fry for everyone in the restaurant and be like, bring your fries.
Come on, bring them out. Shh. Anyway. Uh yeah. All right.
Um wait, so wait, where were we starting with? Oh, uh, so the Museum of Jurassic Technology is just they don't say what's real and what's fake. Some of it's real, some of it's fake. Gift shop book selection, choice. Choice.
Choice. They have like they have like 15 volumes of like the Cat's Cradle Society, like doing all kinds of like, you know, the string tricks from when you're a kid, like all different weird string tricks. They have like, I think, eight or nine volumes of like the British Bell Ringer Society manual there. They have like, it's it's just a place that you just need to go. And all of these morons that live in LA don't go.
I don't get it. It's not the Statue of Liberty, it's not just for tourists. Not that the Statue of Liberty is just for tourists, but it is. You know what I mean? Yeah.
Or the Circle Line. It's not just for tourists. Although I've said on the air that like, if I could guarantee that when you came to New York and you got on the circle line, you would get the drunk line captain tour guide that I got. I would say that everyone should be forced to take that that trip, but I can't guarantee it. He's he's probably dead.
Umsane Irish uh wrote in and said, I am now the proud owner of a Linder Pygmy 25k chiller. So for those of you that have no idea what that is, and that is 99.999% of you. That is the Seltzer chiller that I now have at well, it's for beer. It's a beer chiller that I now have. And so uh unlike an ice bank system, which is what I, you know, what I would use if I could, it only chills one glass at a time, but has a chilled tap.
So you take in warm product, it chills like a glass of it at a time, you extract a glass from it, and then in two minutes it'll chill the next glass. So it's got like a it's got like an insulated aluminum thermal block on the inside of it that holds a full drink's worth. That's how that's how it works. And it does two, right? So it's got two tabs one for seltzer water and one in my house that's labeled filth that is flat water um anyway so uh I'm now the proud owner I plan on running one carbonated tap and one flat tap makes sense for whatever reason my unit did not come with any taps at all neither did mine uh my question is whether or not the Becker tap uh I recommend in my YouTube carbonation video will easily mount on it or if I need to look at other options.
Okay my taps I did mount them on it. So for those of you that have never run a system with taps before the way that faucets right so if you want to look them up on the web beer faucets or soda taps or soda fountain faucets there's a shank and the shank is uh well by the way you're worried about European threads don't worry about it if it's if it's badged with a US uh which mine was a US power supply on it so it like takes 120 in then it mine took standard beer shanks right so you can swap the beer shanks the problem is the the the actual um the actual backup uh the actual back of the shank wouldn't fit the compensator tap so that was the issue so I had to swap out the I had to swap out the shanks but the fitting on the back of the shanks works fine so you can put regular regular taps on it. The one modification you really should do is you should buy uh a quiet fan because the fan that's on them is really loud. Uh they are the one I used that is much quieter is the AC Infinity 120 millimeter by 38mm low speed AC fan. It's a direct swap in for the fan that's on there, and it knocks the sound uh that the thing makes down by like three quarters.
So if you're gonna have it in a kitchen the the fan that's on it is just intolerably loud. So that's the one thing I would do. But I have my regular taps on it. It fit uh American uh threads fine, but I did have to switch the shank. All right?
Is that covered? Smothered. Uh all right. Hey, uh Lionel Hutz, uh, I assumed, oh, by the way, I have a new system coming. We'll see.
I bought another, it's partially Linder, partially another corporation, because the problem with the Linder Pygmy, aside from the noise, which I fixed, and aside from the fact that you can only draw one cup and then you have to wait two minutes, and my family always comes and pulls an entire picture of seltzer thinking that it's like the way it used to be, where I had an ice bank that could pull infinite seltzer and stay at temperature. My old system, I could just sit there and pull the tap. You could set a timer for five minutes, come back, and the glass that you put underneath when it was running continuously for five minutes, would still be ice cold, right? This can't do that, right? Because you're not storing up the energy that way.
Uh so I have a new system coming, though, because the one thing that I don't like about it is that it's got the big unit on top of the counter, which is fine for going to events, but in the kitchen it takes up counter space. So I'll let you know in a couple weeks if this thing ever shows up uh off of eBay that I bought, uh, I'll talk about it. Uh Lionel Hutz, I assume Dave will probably get into it in the next episode, but in case I do not, I wanted to ask if I could break down my setup for using a pressure cooker to inject steam into an oven. Would this work on most home ovens or just the Bosch one that I have? Okay.
I'm assuming that most people out there, if they can have electric ovens, right? I have a gas oven. So the thing about gas ovens is that they must have uh relatively easy to uh uh access vents, right? Because you're burning gas in them, right? So they make combustion.
Now, electric ovens also have vents. So um I don't know where they are in your oven. Uh for instance, like I'm thinking of making a steam injector for my Breville Smart Toaster oven because it's already in pretty bad shape anyway, but there's no obvious way to uh get a tube without drilling a hole in it, right? Which I think I'm willing to do. I'm willing to drill a hole in it, right?
In the Bosch, uh I have a boroscope, right? I have a flexible boroscope, so I looked into the vent to see where it was going, and I just kind of figured out how long it needed to be. I had a bunch of quarter inch stainless steel tubing lying around, and because who doesn't, right? And uh I was gonna build a chiller at one point, like a wart chiller with it. So actually, no, I was gonna build a rotovap with it.
Anyway, so I uh just bent I kept on bending the thing until it could fit into the vent. So it's like just uh it's a I can put it on the Patreon, the shape that it I used, and then you just have it into the vent, it lays in there, and then the the gr the grid, right, the spider for the uh burners fits right over it, so you don't even see it's there. I put a slight flare into the end of the tube so that when you shove the silicone onto it, it will um you can put a clamp over it. And I use squeeze clamps so that it won't pop off. But it's not under a lot of pressure, so you don't need to worry about it, right?
So then on the pressure cooker side on the Coon Recon, I bought quarter inch hose barb like through bulk bulk bulk uh head connectors off Amazon, like cheap, stainless, and one part screws on and one part doesn't. So the part that is solid, I put an O ring on, drilled an eight millimeter hole uh on the other side of the uh of the first, like, you know, the first release on the on the Coon Recon lid, screwed it in with the with the uh what's it called? The O-ring underneath so that it automatically seals, tightened it down. Then you put silicone over it, silicone tube, quarter inch silicone tube, hose clamps, and then I just used a pair of hemostats to with hemostats. So I stole all my hemostats in the 1970s when my mom was like, you know, in med school and intern residency, and I used to hang out at Columbia Presbyterian Babies Hospital.
I would just steal hemostats and I would use them. So I always just had hemostats around the house. So anytime that you're like, I'm gonna want to, yeah, well, yeah, I guess they would make a good roach clip, Joe's telling me. You know what I mean? Mine don't grip fine stuff anymore because I used to use them for soldering, so I would get like soldering gunk all over them.
And but yeah, hemostats are God's tool. Like if they're good enough to clamp your blood vessels from bleeding, they'll work on a silicone tube. You know what I mean? Anyway. Uh and the other trick is is that you want to really heat up a good amount of water because you want to build up, as they say, a good head of steam.
Uh and mine can steam for at least at least 10 minutes, because that's what I did. And it didn't drop all the way down pressure. I mean, it wasn't delivering as much, but it gives a very satisfying sound, which I don't think probably came through on the video. When you open the hemostats up, it goes and you're like, yeah, baby. But once I hook up the Breville toaster, that's gonna be like it's the overkill anyway, right?
So like I have to figure out the thinnest area of the brevel so I can drill and put the bulkhead fitting into it. I'll let you know when I do it. I've got to find the thinnest, least. I mean, my my Brevel's way out of warranty. Like all the knobs on the front are melted off.
You know what I mean? Of course. Because I used to have it above my my stove, and my stove was well, it was six twenty-five plus, 30 30 K BTU burners, right? So when I would do all of my stone bowls, I would crank them and just like it if you felt like you were like working at Tepanyaki station, like your face was getting grilled off. You know what I mean?
So all the knobs on the front of the of the toaster melted. And you know, my family's like, this is not okay. I'm like, it is what it is. Like, I'm like, yeah, no choice, no problem. And guess what?
It still makes toast. Still makes toast. You know what I mean? Uh oh, by the way, back to what Michael said. I used that mustard.
So I'm I did an extra fillip to my, I did my grilled cheese tomato. This this week's family dinner was grilled cheese tomato soup. You know, and uh, you know, I put Harvey's bristle cream, that's my special secret sauce in my in my tomato soup. Other than cooking a ridiculous amount of onions for like an hour and a half on the induction on the induction burner so that they're super caramelized. The other secret recipe, the ingredient, you know, cream, obviously, and better than bouillon, no beef uh beef stock flavor, is uh yeah, Heartwich Bristol cream.
But the fillip that I added to my Gruyere grilled cheese, because I do like I do multiple grilled cheeses. This week my Italian grilled cheese had pesto on it, which I hadn't done before. Pesto mozzarella, like a parmesan fricot outside, mozzarella inside with a pesto, very low on oil. So you make a very dry pesto with almost no oil in it, but pignolis and and parmesan, basil, salt, a little bit of uh lemon peel, garlic, right? And then you wipe that on, then mozzarella, then the other top layer of bread, frico with the parm with the palm, good.
But the fillip that I'm talking about is my Gruyere on pumpernickel with caramelized onions, which is one of my standards, I put the Austrian mustard on. Okay. As a win. A little bit of sugar in the Austrian mustard. Nice.
Nice. Semi-sharp. Horseradish. Uh anyway. All right.
Uh, WTS writes: I'm reading fermented vegetables by Christopher and uh Kirsten Shockley and have a couple lacto fermenting questions. Uh, I remember Dave saying that I pull a vacuum on mason jars to store grain. Would there be a benefit to pulling a vacuum on a lactoferment to help limit oxygen? Um if you seal it, it's gonna blow up, right? So, like it's kind of tough.
Like you're gonna limit oxygen at the beginning, but what you have to do is prevent oxygen from getting back in after the CO2 forms from the lactic acid bacteria. So, what I recommend if you're doing mason jars is they make what look like little baby bottle fittings. They're like nipples, like nipples that you put on, and then uh that's what I'd recommend, not necessarily sucking a vacuum. We used to use uh vacuums on vacuum bags, but not in jars for that because you can't seal them, although they'll puff and blow. Uh, although I did read a recipe that we're gonna talk about later because we're gonna run out of time of fermented gingerbread that you have to make it with.
It's a honey, you looked it up. It's a honey, it's a honey gingerbread. You add the spices later, but you ferment it for like three months before you bake it. We'll talk more about that later. Nathan from Apalachio writes in huge fan of the show, avid listener, for over a decade now.
I'm a professional chef looking for recommendation for my next circulator. I want something with analog controls. It doesn't require me to use my phone to work. I've been looking at the poly science creative series, but I'm looking for the most powerful one on the market that can handle large water baths for big cooks. Price is not an issue.
Uh, thanks for your recommendation. Well, the price is all over the map. I I have not bought all the old circulators are 750 watts, and that's not what you're looking for. And they the other thing is that I'll say this because I'm gonna run out of time. Oh, Rock Baker wants to know what kind of glass I use for red hot pokers.
I just use a regular pint glass, like tempered glass pint glass. They work fine. Uh, don't touch it too much with the thing and use a handle hold it away. Back on immersion circulators. Take with a grain of salt how whatever anyone says about how much you can do in it, because the amount of liquid you can use really depends on how uh how hot you want it to be, right?
And how well insulated your your container is. But what you want is is you want it to not have to stay on for a long time to maintain heat. So you want it to have enough power that it can be like bip, bip, bip, bit with the heater. Uh, I have never used one, but uh they can range from $2,000 down to $100. But the most powerful one I saw uh that plugs into a regular socket is $1,800 watts, made by Winko, right?
So I don't think anything is gonna freaking matter. They I they all can control to within a tenth of a degree and they're accurate. Some say within a half a degree, some say within a a degree. These all these cheap ones are relatively manual. So the Winco 1800 ESVI, I have no experience with it.
I would just use one of them. But if you really want cheap and you want to see whether it does what you want, Vivor, who like manufactures all of these things in China, puts their badge on it and ships it in, has a 1500 watt unit, so about twice what a normal circulator is for $97. So you can get five of them for the price of one of the other ones. So I would give it a test and see whether whether you like it. Um yeah, so like looks like 1800 watts is the upper limit, but I would go at least 1500 if you want to really get double the old thing.
Anyway, I don't have experience with them, so I can't recommend them personally. Uh see you guys next week. Cooking issues.
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