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+[0:00] You're listening to a quick ad. You know what else is quick? Selling your car on Carvana. Just put in your vehicle information, and we'll give you an offer. Ton.
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+[0:09] No hassle, no negotiation, no guy from an online listing lowballing you. Which means by the time I'm done explaining this, you could have basically done it. Still haven't started? Hey, better late than ever. Sell your car today on Carvana.
+
+[0:28] Pickup fees may apply. ACast powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show we recommend. More than 1,000 episodes. For nine years, Creepy has been delivering you horror stories every week.
+
+[0:43] Dark tales from the internet, urban legends, haunted places, and horrors that feel a little too real. And this October, we're taking things even further with our annual 31 days of horror event. For 31 days, we're releasing two stories a day, every day in a run-up to Halloween. That's 31 chances to find something that gets under your skin and refuses to leave. This is creepy.com.
+
+[1:44] Great thanks. Yeah, yeah. Still alive, still breathing, everything good? Yeah, yeah, for now, yeah. I just gave myself a little bit of a head rush.
+
+[1:50] Maybe I'm getting too old for the intro. Who knows? Maybe. Who knows? You do put a lot into it, yeah.
+
+[1:54] Yeah, yeah. A little blood pressure goes to the brain. You know how it is? Mm-hmm. Uh, did you ever used to do that thing, John, where you would like purposely like squeeze so that your blood would like and and your head would start vibrating?
+
+[2:05] No. And then you like almost go black. You never did that? No, I didn't I did not do that. Yeah.
+
+[2:09] Yeah. Just me? I I think. Well, I don't know about just you, but not me. All right.
+
+[2:14] Uh we got uh Quinnie Quinn in the upper left. How you doing? I'm good. Yeah? Nice.
+
+[2:21] And uh do uh do we have Nastasia the Hammer Lopez calling in from the road? I am here, but I can only stay on for a little bit. Ah, how's the road show treating you, Stas? Um great. Wonderful.
+
+[2:35] I all the text that Nastasia sends me regarding her current job on the road, she you know, she is the road crew, and if you're a motorhead fan, but she uh there's not one that we can say on a family show. Like not one, right, Stas? I can't believe it's still a family show. The kids that listened 15 years ago are now like 20. Fun fact even though uh birth rate has been declining in most parts of the world, uh they still make new kids.
+
+[3:04] I don't know if you knew this. Interesting fact. Uh the uh why not keep we can we can insult each other all we want without going without going, you know, blue as they used to say back in the day. Anyway, uh we got uh Jackie Molecules, the Jack Insley Master. No Innsley, no Inslee.
+
+[3:25] Even Nastasia, who's literally like had to like stick her head out of a bus to make this call is on the call. Oh, well, what can you do, Stas? All right, so I was on the bathroom on the table, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Uh hey, have you gotten so far uh any like places that literally had bed bugs yet?
+
+[3:45] Oh god. I don't think so. Let's hop. I think it's a thing of the past. It doesn't really happen anymore, does it?
+
+[3:52] I'm sure it does. In hotels? Probably. Really? Yeah.
+
+[3:56] What people bring it with them and then they don't like what probably uh I don't know. Don't they like to have some sort of nuclear attack they can do to the room and probably don't do that every single time. Yeah, probably true. Yeah. Yeah.
+
+[4:08] What are your thoughts before well, okay? First of all, in the studio today, uh, we have guest uh Brian uh Heffling. If you're looking for him, he's an author, he's written out of five books. Four. Four books.
+
+[4:18] Uh if you're looking for him on the internet, remember there's an O before the E in Heffling. Right? We were talking beforehand that like, you know, back in Austria, it would have been her fling. Anyway, uh so what are your all thoughts on when they take a roll of toilet paper and tuck it into a triangle so that you know that they've looked at the toilet paper, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they've made it clean at all. What are your thoughts on the triangle tuck?
+
+[4:45] I think it's I don't know, it's useless because it's just the one time and then it's gone. So what's the point? Yeah, but they keep doing it. Even if the roll's half done, they put the triangle tuck on it. Yeah.
+
+[4:53] I looked at it. You know what I mean? I don't know. I feel like it's meant to signal that someone has attended to the bathroom before you've gotten there. I guess.
+
+[5:01] I guess. I guess. What are your thoughts on when you go to a super fine dining restaurant and someone's waiting outside the bathroom to like fluff it when you when you when you leave? Hate. Hate.
+
+[5:11] Don't let me see that. I want I don't want someone inspecting the bathroom after I leave. It makes me feel self-conscious. You know what I mean? Here's what they should do.
+
+[5:22] This is a terrible idea. But if you're really rich, what if they had a secret door to the bathroom? It'd like a little secret door, and someone could like crouch in after you leave until you never saw someone go in. That would be super creepy. Yeah.
+
+[5:34] If I had the money, I would totally do it. Anyway. So, Stas, what do you got? What do you got for the weekend review since you have to leave first? Um we made pickled eggs on the bus last night.
+
+[5:46] This sounds like a terrible idea. I love it so much. A farmer gave us a bunch of eggs from their farm, and we were like, we have to use them. So we made pickled eggs, and then tonight we're getting a slow cooker delivered, and we're going to make a pot roast for dinner tomorrow because we'll be in Alabama, and we decided to just sit outside and eat that pot roast. Okay, okay.
+
+[6:09] Let me ask a question. Like, do you this a it's a big bus, so you can run these pieces of equipment with no kind of yeah. Cause when you're when the bus is running, it can just run off their system. It's not using, you don't have to fire. I guess you have a generator for the whole dang bus anyway, right?
+
+[6:23] Yeah. Yeah. And a slow cooker, not that much energy, which is a good call. As opposed to some other things where you're actively boiling. Once a slow cooker's hot, it doesn't have that much that high of a heat input.
+
+[6:32] Smart moose. Uh but uh on the pickling eggs. And I and I got uh Sears all delivered today. Oh snap. Oh, I saw that.
+
+[6:42] I saw that. She asked for a rush delivery to wherever the wherever the venue was that night. So she's Sears all proline proline on the book. You gotta get some content. I know.
+
+[6:52] I know. And then we'll share it on the well, I'll share it, we'll share it on all three of our accounts. A four if John wants to, but we'll share it on all all three, all of our accounts, or four if Quinn wants to. You know what I mean? Uh yeah.
+
+[7:03] Anyway, that sounds awesome. I can't I can't wait to see On the Road Sears all in. Sick. The um I know it's gonna be ridiculous, especially because it's a pro. You know what I'm saying?
+
+[7:14] Because all we have left is pros. And for those of you that have only used Steersol 1.0s, the pro is, shall we say, more professional. I still don't have a pro. Well, if you had stayed on the job a little bit longer, you know, you don't get your perks forever, John. Yeah, no, clearly.
+
+[7:30] Clearly. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. I but I like I so every time Nastasi and I would talk to someone about like partnering with the Sears All, they're like, why don't you put it on a hose? Remember this, Doz?
+
+[7:42] Yeah. Yeah. Why don't you put it on a hose? And I was like, nah, no. I don't want to deal with the liability of it.
+
+[7:48] You know what I mean? Because to me, it's like it's just rife for somebody like really doing something terrible. So obviously what I'm gonna do is put one on a hose for myself. You know what I mean? I actually researched it like uh they make torches that uh attach to hoses, right?
+
+[8:07] And then you can uh they put like arresters on them so that you have to arrange it such that if you burn through the hose, the drain out of the hose is so high that it immediately shuts off the safety valve on the tank, right? So like that's the way I can make it safe, but I can't guarantee that you will do that. Also, like you need your own regulator because the torch needs a high pressure in feed, not like a barbecue level in feed. So someone if they plugged it into a barbecue level in feed, it wouldn't work for them, right? And I'm also gonna need a torch that has a high enough BTU output on propane, because no torch has a high enough BTU output on propane for it to work well in a pro.
+
+[8:45] That's why we recommend you you use uh, you know, map pro gas. But if I get to choose the orifice size, i.e. if I modify it a little bit for uh like an outside grill, then you could do a torch on your grill and imagine having the Sears All Pro like like like pistol gripped on the side of your of your grill anytime you wanted to use a little more you know what I mean? That'd be great. Be sick.
+
+[9:12] Yeah. Be awesome. I'm gonna do it. Cause it's only me I have to worry about. I don't have to worry about Jane and Joe Knucklehead.
+
+[9:20] No offense, Joe. Like, you know what I mean? Like going crazy and like blowing up their house. Anyways. Uh so that sounds fun.
+
+[9:27] Now let me ask you this. Were you like, what smells worse than cooking eggs? Cooking pickled eggs. Yeah, but every I mean, we were watching football cooking eggs and like going across Tennessee. So it sounds about right, right?
+
+[9:40] Yeah, yeah. Well, the thing is, is the tour long enough for the eggs to be done? Um, yeah, we have another ten days. All right, so at the end, it's gonna be just eggs on eggs. Now, did you go beet?
+
+[9:52] Did you go mustard? What variety of pickled egg? Well, the farmer also gave us some basil vinegar that they made. So I got regular vinegar mixed with basil vinegar, and then uh they gave us string beans and baby tomatoes, so it's all in there with the eggs. So it's so it's it's c it's a clear, it's a clear brine.
+
+[10:11] Yeah. Okay, okay. I have to say this. Uh maybe an old school opinion. I love pickled eggs.
+
+[10:18] I love them. That weird texture they get, I love them. You know what I'm saying? It's like you Oh, and they gave us duck eggs too. So they're those are in there.
+
+[10:27] Gonna take a little longer on the duck egg, probably. Bigger, right? They're bigger. Yeah. You gotta let me know.
+
+[10:34] The uh the you know, the thing with um you ever buy hard boiled eggs in a in a bag? Do you have them in there for on our fridge, yeah? Yeah. So the hard-boiled eggs in the bag have that hard texture without the awesome vinegar. They seem like it's the worst of both worlds.
+
+[10:52] Compared to what you're doing. You know what I'm saying? Compared to the pickled anyway. I like a mustard pickled eggs. Uh I'll let you know how it goes.
+
+[11:00] I gotta go. All right. Well, good luck with the eggs and the slow cooking and the Searsal and show us the content. Yeah. I will.
+
+[11:07] Next week. Bye. Bye. All right. For those of you that are uh I don't know which which side has which side says cooking issues with my hat.
+
+[11:13] Which sidephones are covering it. Oh, the headphones are covering it. So uh our good friends at uh Flower City and uh Public Provisions uh made flower hats that say cooking issues on the side. Oh, I love that. Any of you in the great city of Rochester, land of Jenny cream ale and the garbage plate, and also Public Provisions and Flower City should check them out.
+
+[11:40] Uh they have my favorite swag. I have a flower, I have flower hats. I should have brought you one, John. I'll bring it up. You should have, yeah.
+
+[11:46] I have one. Would you like red? How about red? I've got two reds. Sounds good.
+
+[11:50] It'll match your pizza planted shirt. Perfect. All right. Uh yeah, I got flour, butter, bread, and biscuits. Nice.
+
+[11:58] Yeah. Love that. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway.
+
+[12:01] Uh all right. So uh well, Brian, did you do anything? When did this book officially launch? It tails? Uh it it was officially published in uh mid-August.
+
+[12:13] We had uh we had an early shipment that we were able to get to Tails. Yeah, I see I see. Uh all right. So normally on this program, what we do is we ask you anything that's happened in the last week of note for you. Cooking wise or drinking wise, or just I tripped and broke my face and it got it fixed amazingly well in the last five days.
+
+[12:29] Anything you want. Well, I'll I'll tell you cooking wise something uh interesting and recent for me. I went, I uh I had a dinner with some friends where we tried to make um recipes that were sort of Roman in origin. Um I found something that basically it was medium boiled eggs, which is I think why I'm thinking of it right now, with a sauce made from just crushed uh pine nuts, honey, and and black pepper. Honestly, delicious, would make that again.
+
+[13:01] No fish sauce? Uh oh, and fish sauce, I'm sorry. That's come on man. No, no, no, you are right. Um, which for my purposes, I sub uh I use just Worcestershire sauce, which I I feel like there are maybe closer approximations than that, but it's not bad for him stand in.
+
+[13:16] So you live in uh Cambridge, Mass Massachusetts. Indeed. Uh and in the great state of Maine, they make a product called Maine Garum. It is not cheap. Really?
+
+[13:28] Yeah, it's not cheap. And it is fairly close in flavor to the Garm the one of the Garums that Sally Granger, who someday she's the uh I think current leading world garum expert. She how I met her once many years ago, and she gave me a sample of her garment. This is like twelve, thirteen, fourteen years ago. She gave me a sample of her garum, and I was like, this tastes like ishiri, which is a Japanese all gut squid gut fish sauce.
+
+[13:56] Uh very hard to get, but if any of you can get your hands on uh it on uh Ishiri, like the squid one specifically, not squid brand, squid gut ishiri. Fantastic. This small bottle one. I've had ones of varying quality, but that one that's all squid guts is and I was like, this tastes like that. She mentions it in her Garam book, which came out only I think three years ago.
+
+[14:18] But main Garum is delicious as well, slightly different. It ain't cheap. I'm just gonna go ahead and tell you it ain't cheap. Uh, but I would spoon eat it. It's delicious.
+
+[14:28] So yeah, you should definitely. And if you think about it, like Garam back in Roman days, this is one of Sally Granger's kind of big, you know, tenets is that Garum came in many different levels. There was rich folk garum, there was poor folk garum, liquomen, muria. There's like various levels of like uh how hard it was to make something. So all gut was more expensive because you had to gut all of the fish and then make it, right?
+
+[14:52] And and I think the yield was lower. That would make sense. Yeah. And she's using less salt than I mean, I should stop talking about fish loss. You know why?
+
+[15:01] Why, John? Because we've got Dennis Noan, Andrea Nguyen coming on uh in a couple of weeks to talk about it. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. And he's gonna, I think he said he was I saw him.
+
+[15:11] He was in he's from Houston, and he was in Houston, and I saw him, I did a pop-up this uh what did it what day is it? Tuesday? Two days ago at Agnes and Sherman. Uh, you know, uh Nick uh Nick Wong was on the show uh when he did his pop-up here at Golden Diner, uh, you know, Sam Ju's place right across the way. And I did a pop-up there with uh St.
+
+[15:33] George Liquor, and I had an awesome time in Houston. Awesome time. You ever go to Houston? I've never been to Houston. Okay, do you like Houston rap?
+
+[15:42] I have no idea. Hmm. Uh I love Houston rap. Okay. And the but like so, so they took me to see uh the hu Houston has its own.
+
+[15:50] What I like about Houston rap is that I mean, there's like the the normal thing people talk about in in rap, but a lot of the lines are like you can tell that the people grew up unpopular. You know what I mean? You know, back back in the dude. Yeah. Yeah, dude.
+
+[16:09] But like, you know, like they and but like they also there's a lot of raps just about their cars. You know what I mean? It's like straight, like it's not anything, it's like, what's my car like? You know what I mean? And so like it's specific, like they have a specific car culture, slab, slow, loud and banging.
+
+[16:27] And it's like, so in 1983, 1984, Cadillac had these uh like um, you could buy them from the factory, but they were uh rims where the spokes poked out, swangers, and they made them in 83 and 84, two different styles. And then they discontinued them because they broke all the time and it was problematic, and I don't know whether they sold a lot of them, but they became like the Houston thing, and then eventually so many people wanted them, they cost so much money to buy originals uh that someone started reproducing them. Oddly enough, Texan Wire Wheels is not in Texas, it's in California. Odd. But uh they now make them up to like 24 inches wide.
+
+[17:03] So definitely not street legal, right? I looked this up on the the widest your car can be without an oversized sign on it, you know, in all 50 states is eight feet. And most highways, it's a little bit wider than eight feet because of internet, I think it's like eight feet six inches or something like that. But if you take a Cadillac, which is of course what you should take, and then you put 24 inches on either side, that's an extra four feet. So they're like, you know, clocking over 10 feet.
+
+[17:29] Those are street legal exactly nowhere. You know what I mean? And the entire trunk becomes a subwoofer, right? The entire trunk becomes a subwoofer. So don't try to bring anything.
+
+[17:41] You know what I mean? And the back, the back where you would normally put plush crap, you know, plush e animals or whatever, or your baby on board sign or whatever the hell you have, it that's where all of like, that's where all like the mid-range tweeters go. You know what I'm saying? Then so you have the you have the you have the elbows, the swang is coming out, then you have the speakers in the back. And they don't all have this, but like grant wood grain wheels, it's just very specific.
+
+[18:04] And then the most important, candy paint. You need to go to Ike's and get candy paint on the car. And I happen to, I can never drive one, because it would obviously it's New York City, and like, you know, I'm a 55-year-old white guy, but I love these cars. And so, like, you know, uh anyway, whatever. Not not for nothing.
+
+[18:22] So we made three drinks. Uh Houston really came out. We like had a huge crowd on on the fry uh Sunday. I was kind of surprised. I was like, Sunday, who's gonna come out?
+
+[18:31] People came out, had uh a bunch of good meals. I ate it, Agnes and Sherman, of course, had their uh stuff, which by the way, I still think like uh we talked about it. He may say uh Nick makes a uh like a cheeseburger fried rice. It's ridiculous. Yeah, it sounds delicious.
+
+[18:48] It's ridiculous because it's like it's so spot on. And it's got on it, well, here's what to me what makes it so spot on. First of all, it comes out with two slices of American cheese. If you look at his at his fridge case, not the walk-in, but the regular fridge case, he's got like row after row of like eat, like, did you know that they make a special easy peel-off, unwrapped, sliced American so that they don't stick to each other? Yeah, because I hate peeling off the off those blocks, but he has this special like interleaved one that is like easy to peel off.
+
+[19:20] Anywho, so it like the key to me is is it's got slightly wilted shredded lettuce on it. You know what I'm saying? And to me, that's what makes it taste legit. You know what I'm saying? That plus the fact that he like he really like he he walk uh burns like not burnt, but walk, like sears down like a bunch of ground meat and I for I forget what what he puts into that, and then like that forms the base with like the secret sauce on it.
+
+[19:46] And you're like, where's this been all my life? And one's like, you know, if he said some people, because they posted, you can get his recipe for it, by the way. He posted it maybe on the Houston Chronicle website or something like this. It's posted. You guys can go find it.
+
+[19:58] But people were making comments. Lettuce, ew, no thanks. Hey, grow grow up. First of all, a lot of people use lettuce in cooked uh in cooked preps, right? And don't knock it until you try it.
+
+[20:11] What are you, moron? You what are you second-guessing, Nick? Anyway. Uh I went to another restaurant, live fire called Basso, that uh so much live fire. I was looking, I was like, imagine trying to do this in New York.
+
+[20:22] John, can you imagine having full wood live fire in New York? Modern, not like 20 years old and your grandfathered into it, but like just so much heat pumping out of it. Oh my gosh, so much heat pumping out. I don't know how people could work that kind of a station. Yeah, went and I went to Josephine's where uh oh my god, the chef's name just popped up my head, but he's on the food and wines uh 10.
+
+[20:46] Yeah. Nice. Which is like obviously a great, great honor. Anyway, so uh had a good time. Nice.
+
+[20:52] Good time was hopefully had by all. People tend not to have a good time when I'm working with them. I have a good time working with them though. That's not true. I think they had an okay time.
+
+[21:00] Uh so shout out to everyone. Uh Agnes and Sherman, Nick, Lisa, and of course, David, who's uh running their bar program, uh had a good time. Um what let's talk about it. Hey, Quinn. What do you got for me this week?
+
+[21:14] Uh not too much this week. I didn't do anything too experimental. I mean my usual sacaca, but with some uh uh sesame oil in the dough and on the dough, sort of uh referencing uh the bread from the um the guest we had a few weeks ago. Um dancing lion, that uh chef couple. They make uh a facace like bread with sesame.
+
+[21:47] So I did sesame seeds and pumpkin seeds on top. Turned up pretty good. All right, so what what kind of sesame oil? Light or dark? Uh I think it was a darker toasted.
+
+[22:02] It was uh a fresh bottle. No, but like it was it was wait, it was toasted or it wasn't? Because there's different levels of sesame. You know what I mean? It was.
+
+[22:11] Yeah. All right. And so you enjoyed it. Yeah. You know, the next time I'm gonna make facaccia, never no, I'm kidding.
+
+[22:22] I'm kidding. The thing is, like, I figure like everyone's working on facaccia, I don't need to. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. That's like when you're making a recipe.
+
+[22:31] It's like, well, people are like, people are like, uh, hey, uh, why don't you work on aquafaba? I was like, other people are doing that already. It's not necessary. Unnecessary. Right?
+
+[22:43] What do you got, John? Anything uh you want to talk about it? Uh not no, nothing yet. Yeah. All right.
+
+[22:51] Nothing yet. And Brian, any more uh other than the eggs, anything else show up? Did anyone make Numidian chicken? Uh nobody made Numidian chicken. Um somebody did make a uh a beef dish that was cooked that was sort of like heavily reduced wine and cooked with fruit.
+
+[23:08] And it did, I think remind all of us that like uh you you see often in older recipes the use of sweet ingredients with meat in ways that we don't really do as commonly anymore. Um but it's often a very pleasant combination. Yeah, I think the Renaissance killed that for European cooking. Yeah, I think so. You know what I mean?
+
+[23:27] If you look at like all of the like just pre-Renaissance, like late middle ages crap, like the court food, the international court food of the time, had a lot of sweet meat dishes. Not sweet meats like we meat that is sweet. Uh I forget which one of them, whether it's form to curry or whatever, has like a pretty sweet chicken salad recipe where it's like like pretty sweet. You know what I mean? Because it was a luxury item, so of course they over they oversweetened.
+
+[23:56] They're like, you know, luxury. Yeah. You know what I mean? You want to show off how much of a sweetener you can use. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
+
+[24:00] And you know what's funny also, obviously, is like any time someone like includes austerity measures, then the people who have money will find ways to make that quote unquote austerity, they'll co-opt it into something only rich people can afford. It's the same way. It's like anything, anything can be co-opted. If there's a reason to do it, it can be it can be mutated and co-co-opted. But uh how do we get on that?
+
+[24:21] Oh, by the way, if anyone on the Patreon is interested in this, uh, I will post if if you ask Quinn or John, whoever's reading the Discord, I will post my Numidian chicken recipe, which is I have a modern uh adaptation of the Apecious recipe, uh, that I did when I was going to write an article on it in the New York Times, and I forget why that article fell through, but I went through the entire process of uh and Roman a lot of Roman birds and Roman foo uh foods, before they were roasted, they would be kind of lightly poached before they were roasted. So, you know, obviously that's a horrific idea from a modern kind of perspective, but I think it's a mistake not to follow the recipes. Now we don't have the same chicken they had, obviously. It's a different chicken. But uh, and I wasn't able to source, I built it around a modern American chicken and not like, you know, uh an older chicken.
+
+[25:12] But um the, you know, I do my best when I'm looking at old recipes to instead of saying that's ridiculous, being like, well, someone actually cooked this way at some time. So let's do that. You know what I mean? And see, see what happens. I obviously, since laser is maybe or maybe not extinct, people think they maybe they found laser.
+
+[25:29] So laser is the is the uh resin or like root resin that is now usually replaced by assafetida, which is one of my or hing, which is one of my favorite uh spices that I don't use as much as I should, along with fenigreek. So uh the Romans liked it so much because it was not able to be cultivated, it was wild that they that they drove it to extinction, harvested it to extinction. Supposedly Emperor Nero was the last person to have it, which checks out. Yeah. Uh but so the modern uh replacement for it is Hing slash acetata, but there has been research in the past five years that maybe people think they have found the actual laser, which would be nice.
+
+[26:10] That'd be very cool. Yeah. Anyway, so uh if that wait, John, what do you say? You say what'd you say you did this week? Nothing.
+
+[26:20] Okay. Well, no, I don't know. I've been working, but some things that I will announce, but can't announce yet. All right. Yeah.
+
+[26:25] Oh, that's why you said not yet. Yes. Not yet. Yeah. Yeah.
+
+[26:29] Uh. So Brian's new book is Dryads. How do you like to pronounce it? Like that? Dryads, yeah.
+
+[26:38] But like, no, but like the like doesn't. Dryads. Dryads. Okay. Spirits of the trees.
+
+[26:44] Spirits of the trees. And so I went to uh I went to your launch party at Tales of the Cocktail, and uh you had humans dressed like trees. Uh we sure did. Yeah. Um shout out to Paper Doll Promotions in New Orleans.
+
+[26:57] They were great to work with. But yeah, we I mean the the uh the word, of course, is is Greek mythology. It's a tree spirit, tree nymph. And uh we thought that would be a uh a nice touch, I think, for the the real um the grand unveiling of the book of tales. You're getting an odd my wife uh wanted me to ask you, are you getting an odyssey bump?
+
+[27:16] Uh I haven't seen one, but uh but maybe uh as as that sort of filters into the into the I do see more people talking about Greek mythology than I did a few months ago. Oh, I mean that's not uh I mean that's uh obviously true. You know, this is how this stuff works. Like what's his name? The uh what was that Percy Jackson?
+
+[27:35] Like Percy Jackson came out, and a whole generation of kids likes Greek mythology. Now this can't comes out a whole generation of people like seeing the movie, they're gonna be like, oh, Greek mythology. You know what I mean? Mm-hmm. It's strange how our culture works, but that's it.
+
+[27:48] So you gotta ride that, gotta ride that dryad. Now, so this is a term that you coined for tree-based spirits. I technically am not the one who coined it. Um I I I sort of came up with the notion of the category, and I was describing it to uh a a a dear friend. Um, in advance of Tales of the Cocktail 2023, we did a seminar that was on this concept, but before the book was even uh before I'd even had the thought of doing a book about it.
+
+[28:15] Um and I was talking to to uh my friend Elizabeth on the phone and and um saying one of the things I'd like to come out of that seminar if possible is let's standardize what we call this. Is it gonna be tree spirits or sap spirits or what is it? Because it's this is not sap spirits. Well, and not in English, and sap. I mean, it clearly I agree with you, right?
+
+[28:34] In the end I didn't settle on that. I was just I was rattling off, you know, the the names that had occurred to me up to that point, and she just said dryads. I was like, come on, that is brilliant. We have to use that. Um she does not remember this conversation.
+
+[28:47] So it didn't happen. But I do, I can tell you exactly where I was standing when I had to. It's hard to do a double take on the phone, you know, but I did. Um yeah, so so credit to her for the name. Um, but uh I have I have taken it and I've run with it.
+
+[29:01] Yeah. I mean, uh I was thinking about this on the way over, and uh coinage is coinage is such like uh a and usage is such a thing because like uh you know, over the years, every thing most things that I have ended up coining, I regret intensely. You know what I mean? Like uh some of them thankfully no one else uses, like Hustino is so stupid for the t for the process of blending a spirit and fruit and and then and then spinning it out in a centrifuge and then using the resultant liquor as a uh as kind of like a straight poor old-fashioned dumb. Uh but thankfully no one's picked up milk washing, I regret as like a uh like a bactivism to fat washing because it's not the same.
+
+[29:39] It's caused a lot of confusion of like why you're doing that versus just like milk punches. Uh I regret that. I regret. I regret a bunch of stuff. I also like give up on coinages that I hate, some coinages, like for instance, well, it's not coinage, but like the use of sou the term sous vide to apply to temperature control.
+
+[29:56] I detest it. I viscerally hate it because it's inaccurate and leads to bad thinking. But most miscoin, this doesn't leave to yours doesn't lead to bad thinking. But like most coinages lead to bad thinking. That one does, right?
+
+[30:10] Um like uh people calling like vacuum infusion, pressure infusion back in the day leads to wrong thinking. Uh so but I gave up on sous vide because that's just what the world calls it now. Yeah. I'm still railing against the use of the term reverse, unless you actually mean reverse. You know what we reverse?
+
+[30:31] Reverse cooking, where I take cook stuff and somehow magically make it raw. That's reverse cooking. You know what I mean? But like uh things that don't necessarily have a set direction cannot be forward and or reverse. Rockbaker, who we were just talking about, is uh mentioning dry branding.
+
+[30:49] Yeah, okay, trying to also get me. It's called salting. We have a term for it. And he's just trying to push my buttons. Yep.
+
+[30:56] Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if you know this, but um, people have been salting uh uh things since let me think forever. Forever. Prehistorically.
+
+[31:12] Anyway, uh I mean, okay, whatever. I can't get I can't do it. Okay, so you're and even before you had that seminar, you you write in the book, you're like, there's this category that somehow doesn't seem to exist in Americans' radar. Most, most even like, I guess, not unless you're extreme northern European, like not even Europeans' radar, right? Uh, of spirits that are made from tree liquids, not like tree exudates.
+
+[31:45] We have like resin-based crap that we do all the time. Yeah. But like uh tree sap, like, you know. And so you're like, this is a category that the more you researched it, like the more you're like, oh, this has actually always been a thing, and it's a thing like a lot of places, just not here. And so, you know, in your desire to further the drink milieu, uh, you decide to go do some like heavy diving on.
+
+[32:10] Is that accurate? Would you say it's accurate? That's that's uh pretty accurate. So since the majority of people who listen to this probably have never tasted a tree-based spirit, they can't get it in their local uh liquor mart unless they look carefully uh or know what they're looking for uh or why they would want to look for it. Why don't you give us the pitch on tree spirits?
+
+[32:31] Um sure. I I will say uh more of them might have access to them than than they might think. Um one of the things that I've done as we've geared up for the launch, we have a companion website now, um, drinkdryads.com, everybody. Um and there's a page on there where I give uh I I list which dryads are available by US state, um, to my knowledge, and the name of the either you know, the distributor, the importer, the producer, whoever the sort of statewide point of contact seems to be. Um I think in the end, uh there are twenty three states plus DC that are listed on there, which I had never organized that information in that way until I was doing the website, and I would not have guessed that the number was that high.
+
+[33:19] Um but part of the reason for that also is that there are a handful of U.S. states where there are sugar maple distillers um active, including right here in New York. There's three of them. Um lots of sugar maples in New York, as it turns out. Um these are uh I I think I'll start the pitch with the the way that I came to it in the first place, which is if you think about what sugar sources we use to make alcoholic beverages, distilled spirits in particular.
+
+[33:45] It's not it's not a long list if you limit yourself to what's going to be available at the local liquor store, what's going to be on a given back bar. You know, there's a lot of flavors that get incorporated into spirits, but the the base distillate is very often coming from a cereal grain, sugar cane, um, some species of fruit, usually grapes, and once you get outside of grapes, the the the quantity of production, you know, in a in a commercial way like that uh falls off pretty rapidly. Tubers, some tubers. Some tubers, yeah. Some sugar beets.
+
+[34:16] Yeah, some starchy, you know, people who don't really care what the input is. They're people who don't even list what the input is sometimes. Also true. Yeah. Um and that has uh for a very long time that has seemed to me like what well surely we're more imaginative than that, aren't we?
+
+[34:31] There's gotta be there's gotta be other things that we can make spirits out of, and as it turns out, there are. I use carrots as an example a lot, but it does it does feel like there was a there was a point maybe a few years ago where there was carrot O de V all over California. Well that was because of what's his name, Riesitbauer. Yeah, delicious. And that stuff's amazing but unaffordable.
+
+[34:49] Yeah. He grows his own carrots, and he and it's it's great. But you know, unless you're rich, it's a taste. Yeah. Whenever I go to Skernick carries them here in New York, by the way.
+
+[35:04] And so if you if you any of you are fortunate enough to go to one of Skernick's uh larger tastings, he will sometimes come out and then you can ask him for whichever ODVs you wish to try. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's how I taste all these things. Because we don't we can't put that on our back bar. No one will buy it at our back bar.
+
+[35:22] Sure. You don't have a big enough back bar. Anyway, sorry, go ahead. Carrots. Yeah.
+
+[35:25] Well, no, I so there's a there's a distillery in Maine that makes a gin from a carrot distillate base, um, which I first had, I don't know, 10 years ago, something like that. Main carrots are delicious. Um high in sugar if they let them stay in the ground long enough. Good. Um underappreciated, I would say.
+
+[35:41] Um so there's there's things like that. You know, I I was aware of Sri Lank Interact, which is a coconut palm sugar spirit. That's chapter one of of Dryads. I I you know, because Salon Iraq is, you know, uh back in 2013-14 when I was starting to get interested in this sort of stuff. That was one of those names that you would see in the books uh that would talk about spirits that used to be available in art so much anymore.
+
+[36:04] Um usually you'd see Ceylon and Batavia together and uh in those lists and then Well you got Batavia back. Right. Uh so though for those of you that don't know what we're talking about, back in the uh back, you know, in the before time, before information was widely shared and widely available on everything all the time, there were a couple of references slash people that you know all cocktail nerds would read. And, you know, in that list you would hear people rattle off spirits that you could not obtain normally. Yeah.
+
+[36:35] Batavia Rack was one, of course now Skernic, uh Skarnick, uh House Alpens uh brings in Batavia Iraq at a good price as all house alpens products are. Um Although that's not strictly speaking, is there any tree stuff in that? Um no, although interestingly, historically, it seems like there probably was. Um That's it's rice and sugar cane. Yeah.
+
+[36:57] It's mostly sugar cane. Uh my understanding, um, and I I think that this is something that I got from Dave Wendrich, um, is that at one time it would have been uh palm sugar and rice. And then over time their uh you know, sugar cane cultivation is gets very widespread in Indonesia. It's you know, it's it's a less expensive sugar source relative to palm sugar. So you end up with all three going in for a while, and the sugar the sugar cane proportion keeps rising until eventually there's no palm sugar left.
+
+[37:27] Yeah, money's money. Yeah. Yeah. Um the other's Okaleho. Uh, from Hawaii, uh coleha, I think is how it's like And that is being produced somewhat or was a couple of years ago.
+
+[37:39] I've never tasted it. I've seen a couple of distilleries that have made products uh that are labeled that way. I'm not I I think at least one of them is in infusing uh T root into a spirit that's made from something else, but I at least one of them is actually fermenting and distilling the the root. Um this is T T I, I think. Um these are like the unobtainiums that we used to read about and I'm like, oh geez.
+
+[38:04] Yeah. Anyway. So I mean the O colihao again is another spirit that's made from something that, you know, wait, what's that? What are you talking about? This th there's a root that I've never heard of that grows in Hawaii that you can make a whole spirit out of?
+
+[38:16] That's amazing. Um of course, people in parts of the world they're making, you know, spirits out of uh bananas, right? Or out of uh I think there's a cassava distillate that's a very good thing. Um sure. Starch.
+
+[38:27] Yeah. Um they do uh Jerusalem artichoke, topin and bo topinamburg. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. In Germany. Uh yeah, I think also some people in France, but Germany, I think, is the one.
+
+[38:37] Yeah. Yeah. Better b better to do that than to eat it and and uh and toot your brain out if you eat it. Listen, cooked, cooked, they're great. But like really cooked though, not lightly cooked.
+
+[38:49] You know, for those of you that I don't know, have no like, you know, gut like you know, microbiome and you can consume it without inflating like a balloon. Good on you. Anyway. You don't want them, you don't want a medium rare. No, right, right.
+
+[39:04] This is why people don't chomp down on like raw agave pina either. You don't want to like be pounding inulin, you know what I'm saying? Anyway, yeah. Cause you can't digest it, but the bacteria in your gut certainly can. You know what I mean?
+
+[39:18] Um. Um well, yeah. So that this this is sort of my source of curiosity. That was the the loose thread that I started pulling on was you know, what are these other spirits that maybe somebody's making, maybe you're more theoretical, but like why why can't I get them in my liquor store? Why are they not on on back bars when there's so many plants that we cultivate as sources of sugar and starch, and in any given place I'm seeing like 10 of them being used as sugar sources for spirits.
+
+[39:48] Um maybe 20 if you're at a place with a really broad selection of like fruit brandies or something along those lines. Um and for me, that was that was the thing that ultimately led to realizing wait, and just within that, there are so many trees that people are are using. I mean, there's a ton of different species of palms that are that are being used across South and Southeast Asia and West Africa in particular. Um and that's before we get into the the sugar maples and the birch trees. Um so I I think the the core pitch for me was curiosity.
+
+[40:20] Like I I want to try the spirit that's made from a sugar source that I have never seen made into a spirit before. Um and I would not be terribly surprised if a lot of listeners to this podcast feel the same way. Yeah, exactly. So uh speaking of that, uh if anyone listens, they have a question about tree-based spirits in the next 20 minutes or so. Call in your questions to 917-4101507.
+
+[40:41] That's 9174101507. If they want to know how to listen live, so they can call in. What should they do, John? Go to patreon.com/slash cooking issues. There you can find all our membership levels.
+
+[40:51] Um each membership level gets you access to different uh features, uh, access to the Discord, access to our live in studio feed, um, prioritize questions getting answered, uh discounts with our partners. Edward from Edwards Age Meets is going to be sending us that goat zoom, which will be exciting. Kitchen Arts and Letters discounts. Especially on dryads. Yes, exactly.
+
+[41:11] Especially if you want to purchase right now the book Dryads, a kitchen arts and letters, now might be a good time. Now would be a great time. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, check it out.
+
+[41:17] Patreon.com slash cooking issues. Yeah. Uh here's a random question before we go back into the actual subject. Since you can make it from spirit, like randy any any fermentable source. And since I know, because I I used to have books on this subject, don't ask me why.
+
+[41:34] You can convert chicken poop to uh fuel grade ethanol, right? So it stands to reason that if you had a good enough still, you could make chicken poop vodka. I uh I suppose I can't argue with that logic. So I mean, I have to say, I don't know that I want chicken poop vodka, but I know that I want somebody to make it. You know what I'm saying?
+
+[42:02] You see the difference between those two things? Yeah, I do. I definitely do. Yeah. Uh sometimes I say I feel like your motto must be don't try this at home.
+
+[42:11] Yeah, definitely don't. Definitely don't. Definitely don't. You would need a really good still. You don't want any of that stuff coming over.
+
+[42:18] Yeah, you really know what I mean? You would definitely want to triple distill that one for sure. Oh yeah. Yeah. Anyway, yeah.
+
+[42:27] Okay, back to trees. Back to trees, yeah. So now in your mind, do you separate like monocot stuff, i.e. palm-based and uh, you know, deciduous tree products? Uh that's a great question, and I don't.
+
+[42:42] Uh I'm using a very um uh what you might call a social or cultural definition of what a tree is. Um is it a is it a tall thing that you can rest in the shade of? Great. Can I lean on its trunk? Awesome.
+
+[42:55] I'm counting palms as trees. Um I know that botanically that is a little bit. I mean, it's not I think it's good, but I mean like they're definitely, you know, they're different. Like they're you know, they're you know, again, monocots and dicot, they're different. So I just wonder whether there's a whether there's a flavor difference between them that's noticeable.
+
+[43:13] There are flavor differences, um, but the those probably come from a few different sources, not just not just that. Uh like how wide is the palm range flavor-wise? In other words, just based on the not the technique of the maker, but on the actual sap that's coming out. Yeah. Um the there's a pretty broad spread, even within palms.
+
+[43:38] And again, we are talking about a bunch of different species. Um I I can throw out a few kind of specific tasting notes to to give a sense of this. The uh the palm spirit from the Philippines, Laminog, um, is uh very uh I I often find a lot of like sour and fungal notes. I get green olive and like kind of overripe papaya. Um but of course, bearing in mind Does overripe papaya mean diaper?
+
+[44:07] Uh no. Not specifically. Um papaya is like a not good papaya smells like diapers. I uh will have to see uh in the spirit of don't try this at home, now I feel like I need to get a papaya and just let it sit a little bit too long and see if it also smells that way to me. Aaron Powell You can accentuate that by uh circulating it uh I forget the numbers.
+
+[44:32] We I used to have the numbers that people would do to like fast ripened papayas in circulators, but when they're in they they would come out oh I don't like I like papayas where they grow. I don't like papayas here. Sure. Um fair. Uh uh I I will say to be clear, I I I meant this these tasting notes to be positive.
+
+[44:55] All right. Uh hey, diaper's not always bad though. Okay, great. Yeah. As long as we're on the same page about that.
+
+[45:01] Cat pea's not always bad. We wines. We were we were just talking about making fun of cut of chicken poop. So I and I use the word we very generously, I think because I say a question, dude. Just a question, man.
+
+[45:12] Um But so in contrast to that, i i think uh think sort of in the in the rum agricole kind of family for some of these palm spirits because they are uh gonna be fermented using exclusively wild yeast. Right. So what's the bricks coming out of a palm tree? It is um like I want to say it's on the order of uh t 12. So high in meat that you can do a direct ferment.
+
+[45:38] Yeah, I mean it's it is fermenting in the collection vessel before you even Yeah, I mean it's kind of shocking when you rew what you're saying and what I've heard from other people, like how fast this stuff ferments and when it comes out. Um but I mean in other words, no one with uh with a broadleaf tree is getting a sap higher than like probably three or four percent. And so they need to either concentrate it or dope it with sugar. Are you allowed to dope it with sugar in your mind? Uh I would say no.
+
+[46:04] Um, but uh you know, no one has yet appointed me the official regulatory authority over that. But you would prefer not. I yeah, I feel like in the same way that uh I would hesitate to um you know endorse that in an agave spirit, for example, right? Like I mean, if you if you're doing it, if you want to make a spirit that way and you're disclosing that uh fine, make the spirit if it tastes good, great. Yeah.
+
+[46:27] Um that's always the answer. If it tastes good, great. Yeah. Unless you're poisoning the planet. Uh I I right.
+
+[46:32] Ideally don't do that. Um but you know, my my interest here is in spirits that are getting some sort of interesting character from the trees themselves. And I think that uh I I would be much more interested in seeing a spirit that is uh just sourcing its sugar from that tree. That's I mean that's that's the source of the project in the first place, right? So so to go back to something you said earlier, agriculture, for those that aren't like, you know, cane spirit people.
+
+[47:02] So like, you know, the the big breakdown in cane spirits is do I uh make a molasses or a concentrated uh sugar syrup out of it, or do I use the the cane juice directly? If you use the cane juice directly, you have serious time constraints because it's, you know, you like anyway, it's just a different, it's a different process, makes different things. So it's the molasses versus kind of agricultural. I'm sure the same thing applies here, no? Oh, absolutely.
+
+[47:30] Um and this is actually uh th there was a there was a moment when I was researching this book when I got a taste of a laminog um uh a spirit that is intended to be as close to lambanog as possible, but is made in California. Um in California, there is not an active like palm sugar tapping, toddy tapping industry in the way that there is in the Philippines or in Sri Lanka or in Indo or in Indonesia. So they're making the spirit using just palm sugar, refined palm sugar that is available as a as a you know, as a commercial product. Um and when I tasted it for the first time, that that was that was another like uh kind of double take moment for me because it was as though someone it's as it's as though there's there was some sort of an algorithm that you could run on a rum agricole to transform its flavor into that of a molasses rum. And someone had r had had taken lembanug and had done that to it.
+
+[48:24] Which is, of course, exactly what happened, right? It they did transform the flavor by an analogous process of cooking and preserving the sugar before uh before fermenting, and of course having to use a cultured yeast rather than wild yeast. So it has many overlapping flavor notes with the with the sort of fresh fermented lambanog that I've had in the Philippines, but also it has some of those kind of cooked sugar notes. I would say the total number of detectable flavors is reduced. Chaotic again is is is not a bad thing here.
+
+[48:58] Um but it was it very dramatically mirrored the the sort of molasses versus fresh cane um distinction in a way that in retrospect is obvious to me, but had not even occurred to me until I experienced it by tasting. And uh in a similar vein, but it it's so funny. So if you're gonna use molasses nine times out of ten, it's molasses made to be nine times out of ten, not always. It made to be a byproduct because I made sugar with it and sold sugar, right? Yeah.
+
+[49:28] Uh whereas here, when you're dealing with broadleaf trees, you could either reduce to use for what you need for fermentation, or you could reduce to syrup and then redilute it. And I know for a fact, one of our listeners uh is a maple syrup, or was a listener anyway, but probably still is a maple syrup maker, said that there is a huge uh difference between different maple syrups depending on how they were reduced. And they in fact didn't like this is what why I'm coming to this, they didn't like vacuum-reduced maple syrups because it didn't have as the same cooked taste that like a straight fired all the way under atmospheric pressure maple syrup did. Because remember to make maple syrup, folks, you have to take it down from whatever its tree bricks was to uh 66 in order for it to be, you know, around 66 bricks. Uh and so it's gotta be the same thing when you're using these sugars.
+
+[50:23] Like how cooked down are they? Like how were they cooked down? You know what I mean? It's gotta be a difference, but it's probably not enough producers of it for you to be able to do that research, right? Aaron Powell Well, uh what I can tell you, uh the something I've heard from uh from a number of the maple uh of the maple spirit producers is uh some of whom also have you know maple syrup businesses that they are, you know, that they're running and this i in some cases keeping the lights on as they scale up their small, you know, maple distillery.
+
+[50:54] Um a lot of the time these days you will get maple syrup that is um you know uh where water gets stripped out by reverse osmosis or something along those lines um to to concentrate it a lot of the way and then they'll boil it the rest of the way. Right because it takes energy to boil um so in terms of like how much of the process is is it a hundred percent boiled down, that's uh that is not something that I have had enough kind of granularity to be able to um investigate between different products. Right. Also for I mean, this is unlike you know something that is like a more tropical item. I mean, one of the big things about deciduous tree runs is they happen at a certain time of year.
+
+[51:39] Right. So, you know, it's probably hard to also worry about making a distilled spirit from a lightly reduced thing when you're screaming like a demon to get all of your sap preserved into syrup. Yeah, you know what I mean? Uh and also, but here's another thing that I was thinking about is that uh deciduous trees, the sap changes radically from the beginning of the run and you know, after the thaw and when the tree starts coming back, you know, uh uh to the end. And usually like towards the end is much higher.
+
+[52:11] Well, I don't know, but the sugar level is such that when you get the proper level of reduction for sugar, there's also like a metallic kind of taste that you don't necessarily love, which is why what they don't call them A and B anymore. But like A, you know, I'm a B guy or what they used to call B, but then you know, they they will, if you ask them, because they're not technically supposed to give you like the the later runs as a syrup. But I wonder whether those are the primary ones that are getting made into maple distillates. Oh bingo. And yeah, has anyone done like an A, a B, and then like the late runs to see what the difference in flavor is, or maybe maybe those metallic notes have no impact on distillate flavor.
+
+[52:44] Yeah. Um so uh from the for the folks that I've talked to, um the one of the advantages of using that kind of later season sap is uh that it is um less expensive generally. Uh you know, sometimes that might be diverted for like industrial flavoring applications rather than for table syrup, but you know, it's still been produced. Um and even some of the producers who have their own sugar orchards have said it is m the most logical thing for us to do is to sell our early season syrup as syrup because that commands a relatively high price, and then buy the it's still maple syrup, so it's still expensive, you know, relatively per unit of volume, but the less expensive um like late season stuff from other producers and use that for our distillations because the the character you're describing that makes it inferior for you know putting on your pancakes does not appear to be a problem for the uh for the spirits that are produced. Uh maple spirits do have an interestingly uh sort of mineral quality, I've noticed.
+
+[53:54] And and I do find myself now wondering whether that is perhaps derived from the uh the character you're describing in the syrup, um, just at a at a level that is more acceptable in a distilled spirit um as opposed to sort of overwhelming the flavor of the floor. Well it'd be interesting if if if one of those producers has like a small test like pot still that they use for testing out ideas just to get them to do a to do an early run and a late in a small volume just to see what the difference is, you know? It'd be fun. It would be. Um I might have to pitch the pitch this to a couple of things.
+
+[54:28] And and and uh by the way, uh people, normally I I try to say that there's no such thing as better or worse. It's just different. And I wanted to love late run syrup, so I bought a bunch of it. And I just could not find a decent use for it. It's just not, you know, it wasn't good.
+
+[54:45] I thought I thought, you know, maybe not good in pancakes, but that that it's gonna make this cocktail taste more interesting. Nah, I wasn't able to wasn't able to do it. You know what I mean? Yeah. You gotta try fermenting it.
+
+[54:55] Yeah, I can't. Well, yeah. Duh. Now I know. Well, fermenting and distilling.
+
+[54:58] Fermenting and distilling, yeah. Fronting and distilling. Uh for all I know, the minerals actually are better for the fermentation. I don't know. It could be.
+
+[55:06] Um it could be. Are they difficult to ferment? Uh maple it maple is. Um this is something that I've I've definitely talked to. Uh some of the producers have have said it took them a while to figure out kind of how to get a consistent uh fermentation out of it.
+
+[55:23] Um one of the people who's who's distilling in Quebec is uh a microbiologist by trade. It used to work for a for a yeast vendor. Um so she had a bit of a head start, one might say. Um but uh yeah, it it is it is tricky. And I have also attempted a little bit of maple fermentation myself in the course of working on this book.
+
+[55:45] I was like, oh I what if I reversed the um you know that molasses versus fresh cane thing I was describing earlier? Like every maple spirit is starting its life as maple syrup. No one that I'm aware of is using like, you know, uncooked maple sap. Right. Well, like I say, you would need to reduce it by at least three or fourfold to get a decent level of alcohol.
+
+[56:07] Right. You know what I mean? Um which you can do without cooking if you're using a verse osmosis machine or if you're uh using uh concentration by freezing, which is the thing that I experimented with, which is uh is possible um and is uh uh time consuming and inconvenient, but it can be done, right? Um this is this is how uh this this is a way that maple sugar was concentrated, or at least one of the ways that maple sugar would have been concentrated before Europeans got to this half of the world. Um uh th th it would have been boiling in in earth and wear vessels as well.
+
+[56:39] Um but like it it is a very ancient indigenous technique to freeze maple sap. Because guess what? It freezes overnight when maple sap is running, um, and to use that as a way of concentrating the sugar. Now, you will lose some of the sugar in the ice also, which is a disadvantage of this technique versus the others. Um but this is all sort of tangent off the fact that I was uh very interested to try concentrating maple sap without book it without cooking it and seeing if I could get it to ferment after that.
+
+[57:04] I will need to run this experiment again. Aaron Powell So it did not ferment well. It uh something happened. The flavor definitely changed. There was some sort of microbial activity, but I wasn't I I don't think I was getting significant alcohol content.
+
+[57:18] Were you pitching or going wild? I was going wild, which is uh, you know, perhaps another uh another issue. You're running two experiments at once. Pitch it. You know what I mean?
+
+[57:26] Pitch the yeast. In a way, I was running even more than that because I've I have done no intentional home fermentation in my life prior to this. I've left a you know a bottle of apple cider open in the fridge a little bit too long a few times, but I've never actually home brewed before. So can I do this at all was another experiment that I was running at the time. Yeah.
+
+[57:46] But uh it's always weird how different because like because as you say, the palm ones, it's like you would have to go to Herculean efforts to not have them ferment because they ferment so fast. And there's at least one producer that does. They bring uh they bring like uh cultivated yeast to the to the the plantations where the palms grow so they can you know pitch that as soon as possible um because they want to control the fermentation and their distillery is back in the city, so it it would be pretty far along by the time the the uh the the palm sap got there if they didn't do that. Right. Now uh one of the things you you mentioned is how uh I see if it was a while ago that I I read it, but kind of like you know, a cautionary tale against kind of uh exoticizing these things because these they're not exotic where they come from.
+
+[58:33] They've been there forever. They're not new or like you know, some sort of like like Johnny come lately product. This is like things that have massive cultural lineage, it's just we don't happen to know about them. Uh and it's uh if my memory serves, like you could this kind of struck you as you were traveling around and like going to the places where these things are made and consumed on a daily basis. But I don't know if you want to talk about that.
+
+[58:55] Oh, yeah, sure. I mean the analogy I think I I think the analogy I use in the book for Sri Lanka in Iraq is uh if you're in Sri Lanka and you find out someone drinks Iraq, it's like being in the United States and finding out somebody drinks bourbon. It is it is uh, you know, not everybody does, sure, but it is an extremely normal thing for for a person to do. Right, it's not niche. Yeah, exactly.
+
+[59:15] And of course, if you're if you're in Sri Lanka, like what are the main ways that Iraq is being consumed? If it's not being drunk straight, it's being mixed with coke, it's being mixed with ginger beer. It's you know, uh which is again like socially on the level of going into a bar and saying, I'll have a gen and tonic. It's it is extremely normal. Right.
+
+[59:31] Now, if you go, which you should go buy dryads the book, one thing you've done for people is you have uh compiled a bunch of rest cocktail recipes for use with these spirits and how to get them uh obviously not as up to date probably as your website on it, but like uh of spirits, but not just your cocktails, you went and got like a bunch of uh fancy bartenders to do it as well. I yeah, I I wanted as much as possible to reflect the way the spirits are already being used. Um and to I I I collected recipes from the countries where the spirits are produced, and in some cases from other places where they've been made available. Um yeah, I I I didn't think the book that the world needed this book to be full of just my cocktails. Right.
+
+[1:00:11] How open, uh we have a minute left. How open were the different producers to you coming in and doing all this research? Were they a welcoming crowd in general? Oh the producers were very welcoming. Um, you know, there were people that I reached out to that I never heard anything at all back from, but I I very rarely got someone saying no thank you.
+
+[1:00:31] I would get I you know uh I I would get people who say, Oh yeah, we're we're gonna set aside a day, we're gonna give you a tour of our of our facility. We're uh like I got I basically got to tag along on a on an education trip in Sri Lanka that are they had already planned for a group of bartenders from Singapore um that one of the distilleries had organized. So the the producers were were very, very helpful. All right. Well, thanks Brian Hefling for coming on and talking about dryad spirits of the trees.
+
+[1:00:56] Go drink you some tree sap, folks. Thank you, Dave. Pleasure to be here. Cooking issues. Here's a show we recommend.
+
+[1:01:27] There's a reason Greek mythology is still relevant after 3,000 years. And it's not just because humans always love a monster story. Whether you've just become hooked on Homer's Odyssey or are a died-in-the-wool nerd looking for a deep dive into the depths of myth and history. Let's talk about myths, baby, is for you. Every week, I, Liv Albert, bring you stories and histories from ancient Greece and the wider Mediterranean.
+
+[1:01:59] With over 800 episodes and counting, we've done the research, so you don't have to. Find Let's Talk About Myths, Baby, wherever you get your podcasts.com.
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+[0:00] Mr. Monopoly here. Miss me. Monopoly is back at McDonald's with millions of prizes. A 2027 cheap cherry.
+
+[0:09] A carnival cruise vacation. Gift cards from Tour Dash. And best buy. Get your bag. No purchase necessary.
+
+[0:18] 50 US in DCH 18 plus. See play at McD.com for rules and play at McD.com slash AMOE for info and playing without purchase by mail by November 2nd. Chesscard Gamens, November 8th Game Ends November 22nd, 2026. See Rules for Prize Details. Monopoly is a registered trademark of Hasbro.
+
+[0:30] ACast powers the world's best podcasts. Here's the show we recommend. More than 1,000 episodes. For nine years, Creepy has been delivering you horror stories every week. Dark tales from the internet, urban legends, haunted places, and horrors that feel a little too real.
+
+[0:51] And this October, we're taking things even further with our annual 31 days of horror event. For 31 days, we're releasing two stories a day, every day in the run-up to Halloween. That's 31 chances to find something that gets under your skin and refuses to leave. ACast helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere. ACast.com Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues.
+
+[1:37] This is Dave Aron, your host of Kicking Issues coming to you live from the Heart of Manhattan, Rockefeller Center, New York City, New Stance Studios. Joined as usual, John, how you doing? Doing great, thanks. Yeah. Yeah.
+
+[1:46] Got Joe Hazenrock in the panels. What's up, Joe? Hey, hey, hey. Welcome to the show. Thanks, thanks.
+
+[1:52] We do not have Jackie Molecules because he has been disassembled and reassembled in Belgium, but I think he's gonna be back for the next program. We do have Quinn in the upper left. What's going on? Yeah, uh, not too much. Although uh my brother and mother did destroy the water main yesterday.
+
+[2:12] So we have no running water in the house. Sweet. Kicking it, kicking it 1880 style. I appreciate that. Uh question for you.
+
+[2:21] When you think about them, when you live that far north, not that you're that far north. When you live that far north, do you still think of a map where the North Pole is above you? Or have you flipped it around so that the majority of the world is above you? No, I mean I still think about like the classic uh what is it, the Mercadian projection, whatever most like the one we use. Elementary school map.
+
+[2:46] So you're using the same thing. All right, so so you you feel that you are yourself in the upper left corner, not in the lower right corner. Yeah, exactly. Okay, okay. Uh and I'm not sure.
+
+[2:59] We have like a 50% chance of Nastasia. She is somewhere in Tennessee. So if any of you fools are looking uh out the window in Tennessee and see Nastasia running around somewhere near Nashville, that is her. But I don't know if she's uh gonna make it to call in because she's wrangling uh bunches of uh cat-like humans. Anyway, uh so uh what do you guys got for the weekend review?
+
+[3:27] I guess I will go. Um, not food related, but food career related. I will no longer be going ahead with a deli. Um, while just while I've been working at Marquette, a another offer came along without me looking or anything like that, and it pays significantly more money. Like a like a lot more, like down payment on a house, new car kind of stuff.
+
+[3:53] You still get to do food. So get to do food. I'm gonna be working out of the Inc. 48 hotel, which is in like Midtown West, right off the like cruise ship, you know, terminal areas. The ink with a K or Inc with a C.
+
+[4:09] Um be running uh a wine bar downstairs, there's a cabaret section, which is apparently new, and then a rooftop bar which has really beautiful views. So if I go, you're gonna charge me full boat? Obviously. No. Um Yeah, but no, so I'm excited for the prospect.
+
+[4:27] It was a really difficult decision and one that I think like a lot of us in the industry wrestle with, you know. It's like what point, you know, for me, and what I mean by that is like for me, really what this decision was was like about passion versus money in the future, you know, and everything I've done up to this point in my career has been passion driven, you know, and by that I mean like, you know, being in my mid-20s and being an intern at the museum, you know, and like working all these other side jobs and just kind of doing whatever it takes to make ends meet to keep like chasing this dream, you know, that we all have as young cooks, you know, that you keep having as you grow older. But ultimately it's like, you know, I can't keep doing that forever, and I can't keep doing things at a discounted rate, you know, especially now that I'm engaged and want to get married, or you know, going to get married and want to. I like that. Um you know what I say about fiance.
+
+[5:18] Yeah. Least permanent title there is. Yeah. So yeah, I gotta get serious about all of that. It was a really difficult decision.
+
+[5:26] Listen, like as like someone who's had people that you know were important to what I was doing, leave because they needed either like more money or benefits that I couldn't provide. You shouldn't get mad about that. Yeah, no, it's n it's nothing personal. No, and like you know, it's just yeah, you know, like but part of the I mean part of the sad part about running businesses that no one wants to talk about is that as a small business owner, you don't have a lot of wiggle room in what you can provide. Yeah.
+
+[5:55] So and if you want the best for your people and they get a job that pays more, it's like, you know, hate the system, not the person. You know what I mean? It's like the system's not set up for to, you know, yeah, pay everyone what we want, yeah, what they're worth. You know what I mean? Exactly.
+
+[6:11] Whatever that means, whatever somebody's human being's worth means. You know what I mean? But uh yeah, so congrats. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, so it's exciting.
+
+[6:19] It's you know, been like tearing me up inside also because of my friendship, you know, with India, you know, at Merketon, who was I was gonna open to Roselli with and everything like that. But yeah, ultimately I think you know, it's you gotta do what's best for you at the end of the day. Yeah. You know what I mean? The real shame as far as I'm concerned, is like I thought we were gonna have all these sandwich power rankings.
+
+[6:37] Me too. And now, you know, we were gonna have the sandwich power rankings and then have them show up maybe on the menu. Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah.
+
+[6:43] And all of that. You just threw that in the dirt for what? For what? A comfortable life? Yes, exactly.
+
+[6:48] For what? So that you could buy a house, so that you could get married? You you got rid of our power rankings for that? Yeah. Come on, sorry, man.
+
+[6:55] No heart. No heart. No, yeah, that's the thing, no heart. Yeah. Well, you know, uh when life ends up staring you in the face, what is it?
+
+[7:03] That rancid Nazi Heidegger said, uh, you know, your horizons close as you get older. You have to when you start your young, your horizons are very wide and they're narrow down. You know what I mean? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
+
+[7:14] Uh some of that like uh horizon narrowing is artificial that you you impose it on yourself, but some of it's very real. Yeah, absolutely. You know what I mean? 100%. In the sense that A, people won't ask you to do things that uh when you're older because they'll go with someone that you know makes more sense to them.
+
+[7:31] Yeah. B, you literally don't have as much energy, and see a lot of these things take years to to you know come to fruition, and you know, you already have bills to pay if you're an adult, and so you can't wait years again unless you're born rich, which is the best solution. That would have yes. The best solution in life is to be born rich. Yeah.
+
+[7:54] The second best solution is probably marry rich. Yes. That I'm also not doing. So you know, yeah. Everything else isn't also ran.
+
+[8:02] Yeah, yeah. You know? Mm-hmm. I in my opinion. Yeah.
+
+[8:09] What about you, Queen? What do you got? All right, besides the uh Oh, water main break. Talk to me about this. Who did it?
+
+[8:17] Your mom or your dad? Yeah. And how my brother. Your brother, your brother. How did he do it?
+
+[8:22] My brother helping helping my mother. She was trying to put in supports for a tree in the front yard. Ah. Drives down like a stake into the ground. Well, I'm familiar.
+
+[8:38] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I was like, you know what? This tree needs longer stakes.
+
+[8:46] Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if you know this. Yeah. But uh in general, it's considered good practice to uh check where all of your underground services are before you put any big holes in the ground.
+
+[8:57] Just saying. You know this now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
+
+[9:01] Oh, I I I probably would have thought of that if I had been involved in this uh endeavor, but uh sadly no. Good news is you know where your water main is now. Yeah. Must be nice. Yeah.
+
+[9:16] Do you have uh overhead power there or or buried power? Uh I think buried? Yeah, yeah. You know, next time you dig a hole. There's a lot of big there's a lot of big trees in the neighborhood, so I think it's underground.
+
+[9:33] Well, we have a lot of big trees, but no one had the money to bury the power, so the power consequently goes out constantly. Uh but uh yeah. Uh yeah, please uh have them check where the uh electric service is before you dig the next hole in your backyard. Uh because uh a water main break is one thing, but that's a whole nother ball of whacks. You know what I mean?
+
+[9:54] Uh I do have cooking related uh updates. Yeah, oh by the way. Well, you know why. Before you finish, how impressive before you finish, how impressive was the water main break? What did it look like?
+
+[10:07] No, apparently it wasn't that impressive. You know, it's a small spike, so they like put in the steak in the ground, and they're like, oh man, that's a strange sound that this tool is producing, and the sound was gurgling water through soil. But you didn't get the like the uh truck over a fire hydrant effect, which is awesome. No, no. Yeah, all right, okay.
+
+[10:33] All right. Now, now uh, what were you saying? Go ahead. Sorry. Well, you know one bit of news.
+
+[10:39] I finally found Ash Mead's kernel. Yeah, nice. How was it? Was it everything I told you it would be and more? I hope you refrigerate it.
+
+[10:49] And I haven't tasted it. Oh, it's just refrigerate them. Oh, yeah. If you don't refrigerate the ash meads kernel, the malic acid in it will get converted to sugar. Or not sugar.
+
+[11:02] It'll get converted to non-acid. And so, like, it'll like ash mead's kernels, once they're picked and and stored, they'll kind of lose their acidity, which is good if you're going to process it into a cider, but bad if you're going to like a fermented cider, but bad if you're gonna eat them or you know, use them in uh in cocktails. So I would eat one now. You know what I mean? Well, yeah, we we've been eating them.
+
+[11:27] And then yesterday I pressed it, processed it a bunch, most of it, into a sorbet. So I'm gonna taste that today because it's still freezing. Ascorbic acid? Uh a little bit, yeah. Good, thank God.
+
+[11:43] Nothing's sadder to me than taking an apple of that quality and turning it into fresh juice without using ascorbic acid because it just turns into juice. You know what I mean? If you just let it go brown, it just turns into juice. What's that all about? Like, why'd you spend all that money in time?
+
+[12:00] It turned it, it still turned pretty brown. Well, next time more ascorbic acid. By the time you you know, spin it up into a sorbet, it it it's actually a pleasant warm, almost caramel color. Yeah. It doesn't look fragmentantly.
+
+[12:17] I mean, ash meads kernel, because the skin is already um brown and can be ruddy in spots, uh, it's not gonna produce like a green juice, but you don't want it to get oxidized because then you're gonna lose some of the characteristic flavors. Well I I always like you can do one of two things. Like if you're doing large quantities of them, you can just toss some in as you chum them up. So like if you're using a cider press, I would add it at the chum up stage and before the press. But if you're using a juicer, I would just um throw some ascorbic into whatever you're juicing into, and after you juice the first, you know, two or three apples, you just stir the juice with a spoon that suspends and dissolves enough ascorbic acid that all the remaining juice is ascorbicified like the second it's made.
+
+[13:06] Uh so that's what I've always done for the past, I don't know, 25 years or whatever. Uh, you know, small, small period of time, quarter of a century. That's all. You know what I mean? But like that's in general what what I uh what I do.
+
+[13:19] Uh all right. Well, let us know when are you are you doing uh traditional spin or are you doing uh in a ninja creamy? Yeah, no, we're doing the we're doing the ninja. Yeah, creamy. What a name.
+
+[13:31] And I've got two other varieties of apples on deck. We're picking up some more probably this weekend. So I'm gonna do at least probably three uh surveys with my apple calculator, which again patrons have early access to. Once I finish my testing, I'll probably release the calculator. But how are you getting the uh acid levels for it?
+
+[13:57] Um mostly uh data or estimation. Yeah. But that's the same thing. First of all, the data set has acid a lot of who does? I you know, I have data on on a good number of apples that I've actually titrated by hand.
+
+[14:11] They're in the data that you and the Patreon people all have access to, if only you folks would use them. In my ingredient list I have maybe I have maybe fifteen apples. And the the thing about apples is I got a I've got a hundred. That you tested? I mean, these are ones I physically tested.
+
+[14:29] No, that I've that I've cobbled together from other papers. Yeah, I don't trust any outside paper ever on things like apples because you shouldn't even trust my data because my data holds for apples grown between about New Hampshire and New York, you know, in the in the Hudson Valley and up the acid levels uh in various apples is going to be very different, not only depending on where it's grown, but exactly when they harvest it, because that apple the acid quantity changes dramatically over time uh for an apple, and then as I said, upon storage will change again dramatically. And so, you know, Ashmeat's kernel alone, you know, I've had, you know that like are like a a factor of five different in different directions depending on how it's grown and and how it's stored. The good news is when you're acid adjusting something that you know, as long as your target goal is higher in acid, which is not gonna be for sorbet, but which it is for like acid adjusting in a cocktail, like being off by half a percent isn't a big deal because you you're adjusting up to six. But when you're adjusting uh you know, when you're adjusting only a couple of percent, that's when being wrong is a much bigger problem.
+
+[15:54] And so, you know, you on something like an apple, which is going to be very different from location to location, uh, because apples are extremely terroir dependent in their flavor, which is why you can't judge an apple. Like I tell you Ash Mead's kernel is my favorite apple, but it you could get one that's grown under conditions where it's not maybe a great apple, although I think it's a great apple everywhere. Uh that particular one. But um you're gonna have to use your palate somewhat. You know what I mean?
+
+[16:21] Like uh Yeah but for my calculator, uh the acid level just dictates like there's always a little ad additional malic acid in the recipe, but there's a narrow range that the calculator will adjust up or down slightly depending on the reported uh acid level. Right. So it's more just about trying to make the apple a little more characteristically either more or less sour, depending on what the character is sort of supposed to be. Right. But it's still a pretty small amount even at the maximum.
+
+[17:03] Well it's hard it it's actually hard it's hard to judge there's two things. One is that the acid level of an apple is very much harder to judge by your palate than the acid sugar ratio. Because some apples are, you know, take a Wixen. A Wixen is both very high in sugar and very high in acid, right? But it tastes similarly balanced to an apple that is both lower in sugar and lower in acid.
+
+[17:31] So if you were judging it simply based on its acidity, you might underjudge it compared to an apple that has the same amount of acidity, let's say like a granny smith, but has uh the granny smith has less sugar, so it tastes tartar, right? As a as a uh more sour. But so it can be a little bit, it can be a little bit complicated. But yeah, I think grouping into is this thing sour, is it medium, or is it like, you know, very not sour? Is it a Fuji?
+
+[18:00] Is it a Fuji? Is it, you know, a Spitzenberg or a or Ashmeat's kernel, right? And so, like in that range, uh, you know, like I think like even just having three settings would be useful useful for most people who aren't going to be able to measure. Anyway, um, I'm glad to hear you're getting good animals. Don't call for measuring the acid level in the recipe is because that's like a lot of material to like well, you know, I have I have an easy way to do it.
+
+[18:29] I have a way with no material. I've I've told you how to do it with baking soda, right? It's just a pain in the butt. It's a baking soda, yeah. I know.
+
+[18:35] But I'm saying, yeah, I'm saying that also requires, you know, some amount of the actual ingredient, right? Uh yeah. I mean, some, not a lot. It's not hyperaccurate, but the it the main problem with that technique is it's a pain in the butt. That's what sucks about it.
+
+[18:51] And the and the any the fact of the matter is, is like I think you're probably better off just kind of guessing. I would just be careful about using like a paper from Turkey to tell you what an apple grown in Canada is like. Which a lot of these papers aren't from the locale where you are from, right? And so like I've read papers on like apricots from other continents. I've read papers on like many fruits where the numbers are coming in in dissimilar growing environments, don't have things that are necessarily useful for you where you are in general, wherever you come from.
+
+[19:29] You know what I mean? Although the the recipe does with the calculator does require you to measure the uh bricks with a refractometer. So that's no the sugar is sugar. Sugar is easy. Like, you know, you know, any any anyone anyone who wants to invest, you know, $20 in a cheap refractometer can measure the sugar.
+
+[19:51] Anyway, uh what did what did I do this week of cooking note? I got my tandoor, but I haven't fired it up yet. I got a more on more on that later. I got my tandoor back. I might have already uh mentioned that.
+
+[20:05] Uh what else? I went to traffic court. That was unpleasant, but not cooking related. And the judge, if you want to call this person a judge, made errors of both fact and logic. So now I have to uh appeal it.
+
+[20:19] So like the officer, and I'm not blaming the officer for this, because they it was one of these things I was on a bike, right? And they stopped me for ostensibly going through a red bike light. I did not. I was not in the bike lane. I was in the car lane, which had a green light, right?
+
+[20:34] So officer could have written me a ticket for not being in the bike lane, and I would have been like, fine, I will pay that. But they wrote me running a red light, which I did not do, right? And so I show up at the uh at the hearing, and the judge is like, you had to stop at that red light. I'm like, in fact, I didn't. It wasn't in my lane.
+
+[20:53] It's like all of these, you know, it doesn't make sense. If you let's say, let's say that bike lane meant that red light for bikes meant bikes in any lane must stop. That means I'm in a traffic lane. They want me to stop in the middle of the traffic lane. No, it's dumb.
+
+[21:07] It makes no common sense. It's also, I think, legally wrong. So, and the the officer, again, not throwing shade on them because they were at a traffic stop. So they just write up the whole thing and then just add the particulars of the name for who they pull over, right? Because they're doing this like 20, 30, 40, 50 times in a day to generate revenue and to get bikers to obey the traffic like rules, right?
+
+[21:28] So it's a dual pronged thing. By the way, the ticket for running a red light is three times the amount of money of the ticket for not being in the bike lane. So I was like, I will pay the one that I did, right? Judge, maybe. Here's what really ticked me off, though.
+
+[21:44] The officer made two incorrect statements of fact. One that I was in the bike lane and went through the red light. Incorrect statement of fact, which by the way, when I said that's an incorrect statement of fact, the officer did not rebut me, did not say, you're wrong. Was just like, you can't see me unless you're a Patreon member, but do one of these. You know, like one of these.
+
+[22:04] That my shoulders are going up and I'm giving you the like the squinty eye pursed lips, like that. The second statement of fact that was incorrect was, and this is what really really ticked me off, because for those of you that know me, like in some ways I'm incredibly imprecise and don't care. But when it comes to certain like things, I'm highly precise. The uh the officer said in in his sworn sworn statement, I pulled him over, pulled, you know, Mr. Arnold over.
+
+[22:33] And I was like, he didn't pull me over. His partner pulled me over. His partner jumped out in front of me in the bike lane and pulled me over. And the judge said this that's just a figure of speech. I'm like, whoa, I pulled you over as a figure of speech.
+
+[22:47] It takes so much longer to say my partner pulled him over. Right? It's the same kind of figure of speech as I observed him going through the light. Moron. It's not a figure of speech.
+
+[22:56] It's an incorrect factual statement pointing to the fact that this statement was written after the fact and not an actual indication of what happened at that time. Jerks. Anyway. Uh morons. Also not cooking related on the way into the show today.
+
+[23:12] I she must work somewhere at Rock Center, but I felt so bad for her. She's like a 20-something year old woman who's wearing a sweatshirt, a light blue sweatshirt with giant letters on the back that said, Ask me with an exclamation point. And I'm like, oh my God, this poor woman has to walk down the street with a giant sign on her back that says, Ask me. Now in New York, you know somebody will. Like most of us are gonna be like, I'm gonna ignore that.
+
+[23:42] I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna make this person's life a living hell. But there's gotta be. In the eight billion people you well, okay, eight billion. In the in the 50,000 people you might pass in a given day in Rockefeller Center, one or 12 of them are gonna be that guy. Yeah.
+
+[23:57] You know what I'm saying? Don't make your don't make your crew wear shirts, giant sweatshirts that say ask me on the back. Don't do it. Yeah. You know what I mean?
+
+[24:06] It's not considerate. It's not considerate. No, especially, you know, especially a young woman here in the city, please. You know what I mean? I'm sure she has enough problems.
+
+[24:16] Um, anything else for the week? Are we going on to questions? By the way, if you want us to answer your questions, you need to be a member of the Patreon and also to watch these things. And John Winnie tell them why they might want to do that. Go to patreon.com slash cooking issues where you can find out all the different membership levels.
+
+[24:33] Each membership level gets you access to different perks, uh, like the video feed where you could have seen Dave's imitation of the police officer who was in court. Um get I'm not even doxing them though. I could. I should dox the judge because he's worthless. Well, to see all this live, go to patreon.com/slash cooking issues.
+
+[24:53] Yeah. Yeah. Like I said, not blaming the officer on this one. Yeah. The the quote unquote judge.
+
+[24:59] Hmm. Maybe. Uh the uh worthless this person. You know what? There's a huge difference between like judges in a court and like these kind of administrative judges, at least in this one case.
+
+[25:13] I'm sure most administrative judges are great, and I just happen to get the turkey of the bunch. You know what I mean? I'm sure. Moron. You know what I mean?
+
+[25:24] Okay. Oh, uh speaking of the Patreon. Owen Kay wanted to last week when we when we were ostensibly talking about uh tree-based, tree-based uh what's it called? Spirits. And by the way, after everyone left, uh he said, Brian said, Oh, I happen to have one with me.
+
+[25:42] You want to taste it? And we're like, yeah. And so we did. We couldn't be tasting on air, but it was a birch-based uh spirit. It was good, right, Joe?
+
+[25:51] Delicious. Yeah. It was a birch-based spirit, and it was uh it was made from I think Scandinavian birch uh like syrup that was distilled in England, and I thought it was good. Had a very had a very specific taste, uh, enjoyed it. Anyway, so uh for whatever reason, we ended up on Garam.
+
+[26:10] We had a huge tangent on Garum and fish sauce uh at the near the beginning of that episode. And I mentioned the recipe that I was supposed to be writing for the New York Times, 15 years ago, uh uh called Numidian Chicken, which is a restaurant from a peaceus. And Owen Kay wanted uh to know that recipe, and I have given it to Quinn with all of my write-ups uh and steps and some photos from when I was uh talking to the New York Times about it, and so he's gonna post that to the Discord if he has not already. But uh, you know, most of it's about what I was talking about before Asafetida, aka Hing versus laser, which is this like flavoring thing that was used a lot in uh in uh Roman recipes and uh fish sauce and chicken. I even pulled out some of my paper bag cooking technology because I didn't have a rummertuf that would uh hold a whole chicken back when I was doing it.
+
+[27:04] So you ever do paperbag cooking, John? No, I haven't. It's old school. I mean, not old school, it's like medium school. Yeah.
+
+[27:10] It's it was developed, I don't know if you know this, after the paper bag was invented. You don't you don't say. Yeah. I mean, before that, there was of course on papillotte, and before that, there was uh, you know, cooking in things like bladders and and in leathers and stuff like that. But you know, paperback cooking, I think really took off after the invention of the mass-produced paper bag, yeah, as you as you might guess.
+
+[27:31] Yes. And when I was a kid, I used to I used to do it at least once a week. I mainly did it with chicken. It was mainly a chicken-based technology, which is why for me, which is why I ended up using it in this in this case. You know what?
+
+[27:46] I wonder what would happen if you did paperbag bread. Only one way to find out, I guess. Well, because results next week, I guess. Well, because I don't know if I have time to run it because if you think about it, what the paper bag is doing is sealing some of the steam in at the beginning, right, and then letting it go later. Yeah.
+
+[28:05] So I wonder whether it, you know, if it's a a substitute for something like clay cooking, would it substitute for something like clay cooking in bread? Who the hell knows? Not I. I have not tested it. Hmm.
+
+[28:18] Uh by the way, if you guys look up the original paperback cookbook, one of them, which is by a person, I forget his first name, but his last name is Sawyer, claimed to be a relative of the very famous Alexis Sawyer, writer of the gastronomic regenerator, who was one of the most famous chefs in England prior to when Escolfier started the uh Savoy with writz in uh in London. Before that, Alexis Sawyer was the man. He was, you know, the classic French guy brought over to England to French E up the food for the fancy folk. He also did a lot of food for uh poorer people uh and did uh cooking stoves for the military. Interesting dude.
+
+[29:00] So this other guy was trying to catch some of Sawyer's shine, uh, but he was uh, as it turns out, a charlatan. But he still did write a book called Paperback Cooking. Paperback Cookery, because it's British. Anyway. Uh so yeah, you can find that uh Numidian chicken recipe on uh our Discord.
+
+[29:17] At WheatsNet, would love to hear about my plans for my kitchen slash outdoor cooking setup at the new place. What's indispensable uh what's not? John, are you thought about uh cooking in Lyme? Have you set up anything at your mom's place? No, not really.
+
+[29:32] That's more because she won't let me. Um, but I would love some kind of wood fired like base cooking and then adjustable um like greats, whether that be by chain or you know, swapping it into like a counterlever kind of thing or something like that. I don't know, but yeah. How how large a thing do you want to fit on this kind of human human size? Be nice to like do like a lamb thing.
+
+[30:00] A whole lamb. Yeah, it would be fun. Nice. So for me, I I have to have a compact space. And there's certain things that I would like to have that I don't know if I'm going to be able to have.
+
+[30:09] I I think you need running water. To make like an outdoor kitchen y thing like reasonable, you need some form of running water. Now I'm not allowed to do that where I am because I can't drain anything outside. So what I'm probably gonna do is use a uh a garden hose hookup to a sink that's detachable because then and then drain it into like a five gallon bucket, because then I don't have to permit the water. But like being able, and I might even foot pedal it.
+
+[30:38] But like because to be able to just rinse your hand off while you're especially if you're dealing with lots of skewers full of like, you know, meat with all sorts of goopy stuff, like having to have your hands constantly filthy is a nightmare when you're cooking on a grill without water, right? Yeah. Nightmare. Uh another thing is a because I'm gonna do tandoor and also regular horizontal grilling, I want to place uh like a re a rod where I can hang skewers and like hang like meats and pots and stuff to keep keep them up out of the way, where if it drips down, it's easy to clean. Now, I want to have triple fuel capability.
+
+[31:12] And by that I mean I want to be able to use wood, I want to be able to use uh charcoal, and I also want to be able to use gas. Now, the one thing I know I'm gonna run on gas is my uh deep fryer. So I already have my old, what used to be an indoor 20 uh 40 pound deep fryer, commercial deep fryer. And I've already converted that from 10 years ago when I used to have a place in Connecticut 12 years ago, to running on propane. The issue with uh those is that you can't run them effectively off of single 20 gallon tanks because the uh the valves shut off.
+
+[31:46] When you when you suck that much energy out of it right away, the valves can shut off. And also you need to heat the propane in a 20-pound tank to get it to deliver the amount of gas you need, especially as it gets cooler outside into that. So, what I'm gonna do is get a hundred-pound propane tank. I'm gonna put three regulators on it. One is gonna be the low pressure regulator that's used for like grilling, and I'm not gonna put a gas grill in, but I am gonna get gas burners that I can put into.
+
+[32:13] I didn't mention this yet. My for my grilling area, what I want is a raised Roman focus style hearth. I've only ever cooked on one once, but the idea of having a hearth high that you could build a fire on and or put grates on and move stuff around is and you can put shields in front of it so you can make it act like a regular, like uh regular barbecue by like moving like shields of grates around, but you can also move coals wherever you want them or fire wherever you want them and put a tripod over it. You can hang things. It's just it's treating your outdoor grilling almost like a flat top or like a stove where you can just move stuff around.
+
+[32:48] And I one time I cooked on it, I was like, this is nice. And then usually under that is where you have kind of wood storage, right? So that it it keeps your wood dry and it also like you know gives you a raised cooking area. Next to that, I would like a small retained heat masonry oven that I could also fire with uh with a gas burner if I want. And I have my tandor, which I want to like do for vertical grilling, like in between and down.
+
+[33:14] So that's my main live fire cooking setup that I want. Then I want my deep fryer and I want a gas uh walk burner outside. Now the gas walk burner, the what you you don't want to use an indoor walk burner outside. I'll tell you why. They run off of low gas pressure, and that's fine, right?
+
+[33:31] But outside, there's a lot of wind. And so the wind can really mess with like a low pressure walk burner. So you need one of the higher pressure walk burners. They run around 20 PSI, I think, right? Whereas like, you know, the your barbecue grills, all of those burners are running like under one PSI.
+
+[33:48] So right there you need two regulators. And the third regulator I'm gonna use, I told you guys, I'm gonna I'm gonna put a Searsol on a stick on a on a on a on a hose for like lighting stuff up and touching up. That one's gonna require 60 PSI. So I'm gonna need a triple regulator, and I'm gonna try to run it off of a hundred-pound propane tank, which I store around the corner from where the thing is. So that's the main and with an awning over it.
+
+[34:10] So that's I want to try to get that as compact as possible. Uh I'd love to have a fridge, but I don't know if I'm gonna have room for it. Wouldn't it be nice to have an outdoor fridge? It would. It would.
+
+[34:18] I don't think I'm gonna have one because you have to make sure to shut it off and it's uh outdoor electricity, me, me, me, me, moo me, me, me. But like, would it be nice to have? Yeah. Hell yeah, okay. Can't have it all though.
+
+[34:29] Can't have it all. No. Yeah. No, not like Bogey and Bacall. They could have it all.
+
+[34:33] You know what I mean? Yes. Does anyone even know that song anymore? No. People.
+
+[34:41] Do people even know who Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall are anymore? I doubt it. People are the worst. Yeah. No memory.
+
+[34:47] They're like, um, you you know, that was a long time ago. Yeah. So what? You know what I mean? A lot of things were a long time ago.
+
+[34:55] You know? Yeah. People still have to read Chaucer in high school. Yeah. Yeah.
+
+[35:00] Civil War. That was a long time ago. Yeah. You still know about it. Yeah.
+
+[35:03] I hope. You know what I mean? If you're an American, you know what I'm saying? Yeah. All right.
+
+[35:08] Um, was that uh was that good to covered and smothered on the uh on the outdoor cooking? Yes. Covered and smothered. The one thing I need to figure out that I had a problem with last time is sealing up the fryer. So Wiley, my brother in law, Wiley Dufrain, he has the Cajun fryer.
+
+[35:24] What's nice about the Cajun fryer is it's got a lid gunk that closes, and that sucker is sealed. Sealed. Ain't nothing. Ain't nothing getting into it, right? Problem with mine is it's a it's a commercial fryer, so like it's hard to seal because the back flu of the fryer goes high to get past where the oil is.
+
+[35:46] But I can't figure out a way to effectively seal the oil container because the water's gonna come down, hit the the flu, you know, the the flue, and then even if I cover the flu, it's gonna go in on the I I have to figure out how to seal this damn thing. You know what I mean? In a way that's fast that preserves the oil so I can leave the oil outside when I'm not using it. Because you you don't you don't one and done on a 40-pound fryer. Yeah.
+
+[36:13] You can get like six, seven fries out of it if you're if you're being careful. Um so I just need to figure all of that out. Also, you know what you don't want? You don't want mice or voles building nests inside your tube burners because they'll get crispy when you turn it back on. I know this from experience, but it's not it's not the best.
+
+[36:35] Yeah. You know what I mean? It's like pretty hardcore. Anyway. Uh crispy.
+
+[36:42] All right. Uh tupe. T-O-O-P-E. Toupe? Yeah.
+
+[36:47] Toup. Toup. Yeah. Tup road in. Uh I want to eliminate or subdue the coconut flavor from coconut milk.
+
+[36:54] Quinn's probably got some some stuff on this. Coconut milk is great in curry dishes, but sometimes he wants something less coconutty as an alt milk for mashed potatoes. What would you do? I mean, I'm like I mean, like, if you can have nut milk, why why not just like an almond milk which has a good bit of fat in it? Or, you know, if you're rich, although I'm told pistachio milk doesn't really taste like pistachios.
+
+[37:16] The commercial stuff. I've never tried the commercial pistachio milk. Uh oat milk has fat emulsified into it, so it can act like milk. Um almonds. I would also say, like, you can also make a potato with like stock for a liquid, and then just like add a little oil or I mean if it's lactose, concern, clarified butter, or just some sort of neutral.
+
+[37:46] Yeah, I'm guessing this is a vegan. I'm guessing this is a vegan situation or a non-milk situation, not a lactose, all that's not clear. Let the coconut milk separate, skim off a bunch of the coconut fat in theory, and then mix that with what like the little bit of water that's left in the bottom and use that, maybe. Well, you could, but then it doesn't have fat. And then how are you making mashed potatoes?
+
+[38:09] Well like you could use you could use all of them. You could use you could use, I mean, frankly, you could just emulsify olive oil into something. Uh you know what I mean? But like I think like Yeah, I mean, I mean, like what what the question toop is what what do you have against almond milk and or oat milk and or pistachio milk and or cashew milk and or and or hand or again, they pay it they pay us milking, but Joy, J O I makes a paste that you can convert water into these milks, and they work fine. Although I would stabilize them with uh a little zer arabic and sand thing what are we saying quinn like a bit nut milk would be pretty delicious in potatoes then you gotta make it you know I've never figured out why when you roast a hazelnut it gets darker on the inside it's completely backwards hazelnuts burn from the center out anyone else noticed this it's a true story think about it maybe the middle is higher in sugar don't know we have that question coming up later by the way higher in sugar which I know Quinn already knows the answer to so we'll see if he pops through the phone to give it before we can but uh all right um so what do you think covered enough we need more information from toop yeah I mean I think if we need more information to know what is yeah what the problem is I mean I like to use cream in which case you need something with a very high fat content like in and around 30% I know some people are butter only people but I think it would be crazy to use a non emulsified butter is emulsified it's just a reverse emulsion but I think like you know you probably get fat float out if you were using straight I've never tried just straight olive oil.
+
+[40:01] Have any of you tried just straight olive oil I have not I I I made um still with dairy but I made a really pretty tasty um scallion mashed potatoes to go over an experimental shepherd's pie. I believe it's like just like a scallion oil emulsified with like water or vegetable broth would be a pretty good idea. So the main fat in this was scallion oil. No, I did well, I did scallion butter. So I'm saying for tubes.
+
+[40:33] Well, what I'm saying is is that was the butter clarified? In other words, was it was was the water taken out of the butter, or was it still an emulsion? And they fried, and then I added cream. So it was still it became multified. Yeah.
+
+[40:47] So I'm wondering whether an emulsion is necessary in this case. And by the way, you know who are in general not considered an experimental sort of people? Shepherds. You know what I'm saying? Like you have all these sheep, and if you if you mess with them and they die because you experimented, your your livelihood is toast.
+
+[41:07] You know what I mean? It's not a it doesn't, it's not conducive to massive amounts of experimentation. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Good point.
+
+[41:14] Yeah. And also, I don't know if you know you think about this, but this is a job people have had since biblical times and before. This is not like, you know, shepherd come lately situation. You know what I'm saying? Yep.
+
+[41:26] Yep, good points. Yeah. But maybe they experiment with their pies. Maybe as far as you know, maybe that's where they do all their experimentation with their pie. Shepherd's pie are good though.
+
+[41:36] Delicious. Yeah. Uh what do you like better though? The shepherd's pie or a chicken pot pie? I mean, probably a chicken pot pie.
+
+[41:45] Chicken pot pie. One the other day was fantastic. Yeah, chicken pot pie is delicious. I'll get this. There are people in my family who love a chicken pot pie.
+
+[41:53] Don't like pearl onions. Saddleball. I don't know. Had Lime Country Market near where you're at in lime makes a very good frozen chicken Popeyes. Yeah?
+
+[42:01] Yeah. Big fan. Hey, here's a question for you, John, since you turned me on to the frozen pearled onion. The frozen pearled onions I can get in the store these days are too big. Does anyone freeze the small ones?
+
+[42:11] Oh, I have no idea. I haven't looked recently. I prefer a smaller gauge, John. Yeah. Yeah, sorry.
+
+[42:17] If anyone out there knows who makes the high grade small gauge, like whatever the petit pois version of pearl onions is. How would you say that? Onion uh Petit Pois d'Onion? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
+
+[42:31] Whoever makes that, you have a customer here. If uh if you know who it is, you know what I mean? Because y y I get what my family says you don't want them too big. Yeah. Yeah.
+
+[42:43] Did you ever find anyone who sells pearled uh pre-frozen cipolinis? No. That'd be good. That would be. There's gotta be someone.
+
+[42:52] Yeah, be good though. Yeah. You'd eat the hell out of that, right? Yeah. Wouldn't you roast the ever loving snot out of those things?
+
+[42:57] Yeah. Because once you roast, it doesn't matter that's frozen. Yeah. You know what I mean? Just toss those in with your potatoes when you're roasting them.
+
+[43:03] Yeah. Underneath your chicken. You get your you get your sheet pan, right? You get you you toss the the potatoes and the onions with some like, you know, oil, salt, pepper, rosemary, a little sugar. Put the chicken over it, you won.
+
+[43:16] Yeah. That's it. You're winning. You know what I'm saying? Yes.
+
+[43:19] In my opinion. Uh Zach, if you eat chicken and onions. So if you're not a Jane, right? I would like to get a Jane. I think someone just recently wrote a Jane book.
+
+[43:32] I would like to get a Jane, because that's a cooking style, like where you not just vegetarian, not just vegan, but you can't use onions or alliums. I would be very interested in Jane cooking. I know that there's a pop up in New York once a month that does a Jane dinner. But I I know zero about Jane cooking. You'd be interesting, right?
+
+[43:54] I know there's similar restrictions for like um like you know in like Korean Buddhist temple cuisine. Also, no onion. I don't use any of those Yeah, no onion or garlic. I think it's still allowed chili. But yeah.
+
+[44:13] I don't know. I don't know the Jane theory of peppers. But I guess you're just not supposed to inflame the emotions, right? I would I would love to know more uh uh about it. Um by know more about it, I mean uh taste some food made by someone who knows what they're talking about.
+
+[44:29] You know, you know what I mean? Um Zach from Pittsburgh, what's up, Jans? Way back in the early days of cooking issues, Dave commented that he could give fewer technical uh cooking tips if I wanted to, specifically mentioning what you could do with a ham bone. I don't think anyone ever actually took the bait. So say I have the dried out end of a country ham, what should I do with it?
+
+[44:47] Uh assume I have stockpots and pressure cookers big enough for it, access to standard home kitchen range, oven microwave toasters, basic tools. Well, uh water is gonna be your friend uh with uh these hand bones. So in general, the smaller, like the the dried out side of the ham plus the bone, I usually reserve for long cooked wet things. So uh one of the problems with country hams is that for for people who are used to cooking only what you know, what I call a city ham, like a like a wet cured ham as opposed to a dry cured ham, is that especially when they get older, the fat takes on a very particular twang and the meat is like very dark. So it's not necessarily the flavor you're kind of expecting.
+
+[45:28] So I would taste some of the fat first. Uh I like it, but it's like very specific. Um that said, uh peas, like, you know, like split pea soup. If you eat ham, which of course you do, otherwise you wouldn't ask this question, but split pea soup made with uh a regular ham is delicious, made with a country ham is like double delicious. You know what I mean?
+
+[45:50] Any kind of bean soup, uh any kind of uh, you know, like stocks on their own can be a little overwhelming because of the country hand taste, but once you have things like beans in them, that's basically what I do. I don't see a reason to do anything else. You know what I'm saying? By the way, I know I've said this before, this is a city ham, but the honey baked ham corporation makes a good city city spiral ham. You know what I mean?
+
+[46:15] Yeah. City cured spiral ham. It's a good product. I mean you can't take that away from them. You know what I'm saying?
+
+[46:22] They also sell a bean soup kit, which sounds ridiculous because it's just beans and spices. You could do this yourself. You know what I mean? Good. Yeah.
+
+[46:30] It's good. Yeah. Yeah. So if you get the country base, if you get the the spiral uh ham with the bone in, get the soup mix. You know what else they sell there?
+
+[46:39] They sell just the bones. So if you if you're like, I don't want to, you know, I don't have a hundred dollars or whatever it is to buy, you know, a honey baked ham and I have a hankering for the soup, you buy a bone in the soup mix. There you go. Anyway, uh Johnny Baseball writes in, I just bought a rabbit from a local farmer and he says the bucks, which is the dude rabbits, taste worse than the does or the female rabbits. I know in pigs, they usually castrate uh the boars to avoid bore taint, but is that an issue in all animals?
+
+[47:13] Well I know they castrate uh cows to make uh or bulls to make steers. But uh in the papers uh that I was able to find a a comparison of the quality of meat from female and male Californian and Flemish giant gray rabbits by Tomas uh Daskowitz in 2020. Uh they were not able to find any difference between uh the taste of male versus female, although there was a difference between the Californian and Flemish giant, uh although I don't remember which was considered better. But uh they didn't see a statistical difference in flavor between the two. Now, I I also searched the paper for any mention of castration, and there wasn't.
+
+[47:55] So they weren't castrating them. Um, in the methods section. Um yeah, I don't know. They they say there's not, but I one thing uh is that all of the rabbits in that study were slaughtered when they were 91 days old. So maybe it's true that like these kind of uh you know sex changes in hormones that affect meat flavor in rabbits develops after 91 days of age, which is roughly three months.
+
+[48:22] Uh so I don't know. I don't know. You know, the paper said specifically sex had no significant effect on the majority of the analyzed meat quality attributes. However, further research is needed to investigate why the meat of female rabbits had consistently higher vitamin A content. So who knows?
+
+[48:40] So that's all I got. That's all I got on rabbits. Uh polymax writes in, or maybe it's polymax. Polymex polemax. Who knows?
+
+[48:48] Who knows? Everyone knows I can't pronounce anything. Hey, Dave, uh first time, long time. I love to drink Chinese tea, specifically puer tea. Uh the good stuff is delicious.
+
+[48:56] So for those that don't know, Puer tea is a tea that is compressed, uh various kinds of compression, various styles, but like the most famous is cakes. Well, and then aged and then aged for a long period of time. Yeah, but that's not how they make it. They turn it into loose leaf. They age it in cakes, right?
+
+[49:19] No, no, no. You can get mountain. Which is the just loose tea. They age it loose. Yep.
+
+[49:28] I mean again, uh a new trend now is is fresh puer. People are drinking this year's harvest, too. Okay, well, t when I'm thinking pure, I'm thinking of a cake, it's pressed, it's aged for like one to twenty years, right? I'm assuming that's what Pol Max means. I don't know.
+
+[49:44] Like, I don't know about your newfangled puer, but like uh I'm assuming that's what they mean. Anyway, in general, this is gonna be the brewer brewer is also only from a specific region of Union. Yeah, I used to also graphic. I used to buy the ones that weren't aged that much, but they were pressed into little pellets like in paper. You know what I mean?
+
+[50:05] You have seen those? They look like like juju bees. Neither. Like they have like an indent, they look like a like a juju bee or something, and they they're in the yeah, yeah, I've seen that with. Yeah.
+
+[50:18] Um, uh, I love to drink Chinese tea, specifically pu'er tea, the good stuff is delicious. So delicious, in fact, that I want to add that flavor to my food. Do you have any tips on how to incorporate tea into baked goods? I need you guys to focus on that baked goods, uh, so I can actually taste it in the final product. I've tried vacuum sealing dried fruit with the brewed tea and baking with that.
+
+[50:38] Presumably the tea would go into the fruit, you know, but not into the batter itself, right? Uh, I've tried uh adding quadruple strength brewed tea into the batter or dough, but even with these, I can't taste it in the end. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Well, Polymex. One thing that you have just discovered is that flour, flour covers a lot of flavor.
+
+[50:58] This is why if you want to make red pasta, just dump in ketchup. And it doesn't matter. You can't taste the ketchup. Assuming you're baked good, and Quinn can go off on whatever he wants here, but um I wouldn't like a lot of your baked goods aren't going to have that much of a liquid base in them, depending on what you're doing. And so I might consider also putting it into the fat, right?
+
+[51:21] So if you like a lot of the aromatics, not not the astringency, not the caffeine, not some of the umami things, but a lot of the aromatics in tea are fat soluble. And so if there's a lot of fat in your recipe, I would consider uh circulating the tea with the fat for a while or heating it with the fat for a while to extract it into the fat. Uh what were you just gonna say, Quinn? Well, yeah, I mean, this is the type of tea that I do drink quite a bit, and I have played around with um cooking with some of the tea. I mean, it is challenging because I would say the deeper you go, especially into puer.
+
+[52:07] Well, now the main question I would have for them are they talking about the raw brewer or fermented brewer? Because I actually think fermented brewer and other types of fermented teas could be a little more conducive to incorporating into food because they are actually sort of suited or not designed, but they are traditionally a lot of fermented teas are boiled hard and they don't become, you know, overly astringent or or bitter. I mean, um Polymex isn't saying they're having a problem with astringency. Polymex made a quadruple strength brewed tea and then couldn't taste it in the end. The main problem is just getting taste through.
+
+[52:52] So like with with matcha, I think they're probably adding the powder directly to the snake. This is another thing you could do. You could just powderize it and add it directly. I will tell you though, eating tea, I've never it's not true. Very rarely have I felt worse from ingesting food than when I ingested a whole tea bag.
+
+[53:09] Oh my God. Wrecked me. But like, you know. Um another baked good would be something with a liquid filling, like some sort of custard tart or like, you know, that you're either gel filling. You're cheating.
+
+[53:27] Like Polymex wants to get the flavor into the into the dodo. Right. So it's like I don't know. Well no, I mean they they experimented with getting it into the a dried fruit component, so I'm just suggesting other components in a baked good or a dessert that are higher in liquid and therefore. I mean, tea picks up in cream quite a bit.
+
+[53:56] So just adding like a a tea based whipped cream, we used to do that constantly, like infusing the tea into into cream. You have to if you heat it at all, you have to chill it for a while after you heat it or the cream won't whip right. But uh, we used to do that all the time. Mainly with Lopsong, but we did it with a bunch of different teas. If you also try a alcohol-based tincture and just see what is what is extracted and what is that like, you know, deployed into a a cream or uh or uh uh using low moisture is gonna be hard.
+
+[54:33] It can be difficult with alcohol. Uh high strength tea alcohols and creams can tend to break, depending on how much you add, can break milk components because the you're destabilizing it both with alcohol and with the polyphenols that are in the tea. But you know, I've done many, many alcoholic extractions of tea, mainly for redistillation, like many, many, including poo-air. Uh, but um yeah, I mean, you could do an alcohol infusion and then like if it's cooking off, you know, you could you could probably add it to something and boil it down more and get like a super concentrated thing, you know what I mean? But um, I don't know.
+
+[55:13] Let us know. Let us know exactly what you think. Uh Polymex of these suggestion. Caesaric writes in, or maybe Cazeric. Who knows?
+
+[55:24] Uh how can I get my homemade breakfast sausage to brown better without making it too sweet? I currently use roughly 25 grams, uh roughly 1% of brown sugar per five-pound batch. Use lactose or dextrose instead. You can add more for a given level of sweet. Or dry malt extract.
+
+[55:43] Uh yeah, I mean, DME, malt, but like in order for browning, I mean lactose should work, dextrose, both reducing sugars. You want to reduce sugar that is less sweet, right? So uh brown sugar is not that malt extract about half the sweetness of even dextrose. Yeah, but yeah, but I don't know. Like a darker yeah, I don't know it's browning capability on a PR in sausage.
+
+[56:08] I've never tested it. I mean, I've used DME in uh I've used DME or even just maltose in mashed potatoes before. You ever done that? Malted mashed potatoes? That's good.
+
+[56:20] You get dry DME powder and dry malt extract powder and you add it to mashed potatoes, that's good. That tastes good. You know what I mean? Oh my god, I haven't done it in so many years. I gotta start doing that again.
+
+[56:32] I don't stock DME anymore. Anyway, but uh also in terms of flavor, especially those like darker dry malt extracts, they do also have some of that flunkiness of a really dark brown sugar, like some some flavor overlap. So you know you could do a combination of like dextrose and a little dark DME if they wanted that like actual brown sugar flavor, you know. Well, I would say keep the keep the brown sugar if you like it, because it's easy to source, right? And then just dope it with dextrose, which is what the standard the standard thing that people do is.
+
+[57:11] You know, the standard thing that you add. Both in this case and also when you want microbes, you know what I'm saying? What in the Discord also mentioned um a slight uh pH adjustment, which would also help, but you just don't want to overdo it. Oh, I hate when it goes alkaline. Like all of the tricks where people baking soda their meat, I hate them.
+
+[57:37] You have to correct them afterwards. Like, unless, but like let's say we don't know the breakfast sausage, I'm assuming the breakfast sausage isn't allowed to age much, so you're not getting much of a pH drop. It is true that if it's gone acidic at all, it won't brown as easily, right? So for sure, that's 100% true. But like, like, I don't know, like you have to be super careful when you're alkal alkaline adjusting meats so that you can't so that you can't taste it.
+
+[58:02] You know what I mean? All of those tricks that people used to do where they would like add baking soda to the meats and then pressure cook them and get them real dark. I just never found that I liked them. Yeah, they got brown. You know what I mean?
+
+[58:15] Uh and then you would add like like acid to them afterwards to like, you know, undo what you have done. And I do it with beans sometimes to get them soft, right? And then you adjust it back with acid. And I guess you can't tell when it's done, but I just hate the soapy smell of them cooking with the with the with the baking soda. You get you know what I'm talking about.
+
+[58:34] Yeah. That weird soapy smell. And I think maybe I am more what's it called? What's the word? More triggered by it than some folk, maybe.
+
+[58:43] Yeah, maybe. Uh also, Sazrik wants to know what is the minimum temperature for pasteurization? I thought it was 55 C, but I've heard you say previously, uh, and other info indicates that lower is possible. Well, it depends on what you mean by pasteurize, right? Uh pasteurizes temperature and time.
+
+[58:59] The lowest numbers for pasteurization that are really available are 544 C, which is slightly below uh, you know, 131 F. But, you know, are lower numbers supportive of life? No. Like down to 52, stuff's not going to grow. However, you're not necessarily killing stuff at a reasonable rate either.
+
+[59:19] So pasteurization temperatures are always temperatures plus times, right? Uh, if you're talking about killing trichinosis, uh trichinosis at 52C is killed within 47 minutes, but you have to hold it at 47 C, uh, sorry, uh, yeah, 47 minutes once the center has come up to that temperature. Um Dr. Smokehouse uh says Has anyone heard of blood-baked bread? I just learned about it from Magnum Nielsen's Nordic Baking.
+
+[59:44] Uh it was a way to preserve harvested bread by baking the bread uh blood into biscuits and then drying it like hard tack. Uh these could be used later uh for simmering in a broth, freshly made. They remind me of New England brown bread. Dried and added to broth. It was not transformational, but would be a good sustenance on a cold winter's night.
+
+[1:00:01] I've heard of it, but never tried it. Blood bread. Apparently it doesn't taste irony or bloody uh when you're done. Uh Z Banks wants to know what is the best way to get fresh crisp cucumber flavor into cocktails? Is there a specific type of cucumber that is better for this?
+
+[1:00:14] I don't use the English ones. I think they're bitter, the seedless ones. I use the American ones that you know are standard cucumbers. I find them to be less bitter. My attempts tend to end up with too little taste, muddy or with green bitterness.
+
+[1:00:25] Peel them. The a lot of the uh bitterness is uh in in the peel, right? And you can either like infuse them. Remember, cucumber water is for customers. I don't know if you ever seen Better Call Saul, but like it will infuse eventually if you just put it into water.
+
+[1:00:37] It's not a strong taste, but it's there, in which case slicing finely is going to be your answer. Or just use an American cucumber and juice it. Uh be careful if you're going to carbonate because they can be somewhat foamy. Uh Francis says he's interested in having a or she is interested in having a home seltzer tap. I seen a recall Dave was using a linder product in his current setup, was wondering uh where I am today.
+
+[1:00:58] Linder appears to make a dry chiller plus carbonator line, which looks perfect, but it's 240 volts and only available in Europe. Um there's also the Kegland Benchy. Um or is it really the best option still a McCann carbonator, a cold plate and ice maker with a drain? All right, listen. Yes, the best option, uh uh I l my linder is loved by everyone in the family but me, because it makes one cup of seltzer dramatically, you know, the chiller very well.
+
+[1:01:23] Second and third cup, it's not chilling as fast as as I would want to, and chilling not chilling it is the enemy. I looked at their actual, like just in a box carbonator that takes like tap water in and uh what's it called? CO2 in and seltzer out. And it's gonna have the same problem because it doesn't have that much of a temperature drop in it. So they're using a lower pressure and a higher temperature.
+
+[1:01:45] And so I bet you the first cup you pull, fantastic. And the and like the next one you pull in 10 seconds, not as good. If you have the money in space, like a McCann with a bigger chiller, so that you're chilling more than just like you know, one cup is the way to go. I mean, ice ice tray is a pain in the butt, but they make chillers that are they're gonna they're gonna be better. The other way you could do it if you want to use this system is pre-chill the incoming water, like have the water being fill fill fed out of like a kegerator, and then it'll be good.
+
+[1:02:15] You have a whole video for this, don't you? Kind of, yes. All right, cooking issues. Here's a show we recommend. There's a reason Greek mythology is still relevant after 3,000 years.
+
+[1:02:47] And it's not just because humans always love a monster story. Whether you've just become hooked on Homer's Odyssey or are a dyed in the wool nerd looking for a deep dive into the depths of myth and history. Let's talk about myths, baby, is for you. Every week, I, live Albert, bring you stories and histories from ancient Greece and the wider Mediterranean. With over 800 episodes and counting, we've done the research, so you don't have to.
+
+[1:03:19] Find Let's Talk About Myths, Baby, wherever you get your podcasts. Acast.com
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