[0:00] When you open the bottle and you drink the wine, it speaks for itself, is it, you know, a wine that's made for food? Yes, those types of wines are tend to be more rustic or have a little bit more body? Are there wines that are just pure out hedonistic pleasure? Sure, there's wines like that that maybe from California that are more cocktail wines or wines that are just big jammy fruit bombs. And those, I think, appeal to certain group of people as well. I think the wines that Barberhouse specializes in is more of these food friendly, you know, rustic style, biodynamic organic wines. It tend to be a bit more earthy, come from someplace. So you can always taste a terrois. You can almost feel this guy, this senseera was grown in this slaty rocky soil. And so to me, that's the exciting part that the wine feels like it comes from someplace.

[0:54] Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues on the Heritage Radio Network coming to you live from approximately 12 to 1245 every Tuesday.

[1:06] It's another rainy, slushy day here in Brooklyn. I'm in the studio at Roberta's Pizzeria with Nastasia De Hammer Lopez. We're here to answer all of your cooking related questions, technical and not. So if you can, please give us a holler at 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. Okay, so, uh, we really, we uh, we had a question that I forgot to answer last time. So I might as well as well get into it. It's about gelatin. And the question is, basically, well, what the heck? What's the difference between all the different gelatins there are? What's the difference between fish gelatin and, you know, animal-based, regular, you know, I guess, red, you know, meat? regular meat-based animal gelatin. What's the difference between the different grades, the bronze, the gold, the silver, and the platinum? Here's the deal. So gelatins in the industry are rated on something called bloom strength. And bloom strength has nothing to do with, you know, a flower

[2:03] blooming or even the fact that gelatin, you know, swells up when you put it in water. It has to do with a dude named Bloom, who, in the early 20th centuries, came up with a technique for measuring the strength of gels and gelatin

[2:16] gels. And it's a really dumb, simple technique. You just take a, you know, a plunger of a particular size and you push it into the surface of a gelatin that's being cured very

[2:28] accurately. I'll give you the exact numbers in case you want to run your own bloom tests. It's a 6.67% gelatin solution that is tempered for 17 to 18 hours at 10 degrees Celsius. And they measure, how much weight in grams it takes to push a half inch diameter plunger, 4 millimeters into the surface of the

[2:49] gelatin? Why would they specify part of it in inches and part of it in millimeters? Who knows? makes no dang sense, right? No sense. And it's really, you know, a simple little thing. And most industrial, by the way, old school industrial measurements like this are

[3:03] quite, quite simple. Like they used to, and they still measure viscosity of a lot of things by literally like building a trough with a ruler in it, dumping some crap into it and seeing how far that stuff runs along the trough before it

[3:14] stops. I mean, this is the kind of, this is the kind of like bonehead test, but it makes everything standardized because they need to be able to standardize gelatin for various different applications.

[3:23] So, gelatins come in a wide range then. in sheet gelatin, bronze gelatin, the bronze grade is going to be

[3:30] about 125 to 155 bloom. So it's fairly soft, right? Whereas silver is, this is from an eagle thread, by the way. So, you know, I shouldn't take it without saying it's from an eagle thread. Silver gelatin is about 160. Gold is like 190 to 220 and platinum is 235 to 265. So that's the highest bloom strength. I would bet most of us use something in the in the gold in the gold range, right? Now, uh, bloom strength, interestingly, uh, has nothing necessarily to do with how the gel is going to perform in a particular application,

[4:04] like for instance, gelatin clarification. It's just a measure of how strong a particular gel concentration is as a gel. It doesn't necessarily mean it's going to make better. Marshmallows, because gelatin isn't just used as a geling agent. It's used as a whipping agent. It's used as an emulsifier because it's made of proteins. The way gelatin is made, is you take any form of collagen, connective tissue. All of our connective tissue, most of it, is collagen, right? And collagen is a triple helix, and each one of those of proteins. And each one of those helix is when it's denatured properly turns into gelatin. That how braised products work, right? You know, you braise until the collagen breaks down and turns into gelatin, which makes

[4:40] the texture delicious and whatnot and whatnot. Animal-based gelatins come, well, you would guess, from animals. A lot of it is from skin, like pigskin or from bones. When they're doing bones, they take and they wash the bones in acid for a long time to leach out all the calcium. It leaves a spongy, nasty bone mass, which they then wash, dry, well,

[5:00] neutralized, dry, grind up, and then they then or the skins or anything else, they take them that raw material, and they usually treat it either with an acid or with a

[5:09] base, and they get there's 2 different kinds of gelatin, depending on whether they do that. And that further kind of breaks the crosslinks between these triple helix of proteins, right? Makes it easier for them to extract the gelatin. And then they take and they heat it in hot water and they extract like three, four,

[5:25] 5 times different gels of different qualities. The 1st water is the highest strength, highest quality gel. And the farther down the extraction line you are, the kind of the crappier

[5:35] you're jealous. But that's how they get all the gel out and how they get gels of various different strengths. Part of the question was, what's the difference between a powder gel and a sheet gel? And the answer is nothing going into it, right? A sheet gel is you take the gelatin solution that you get out of, you know, your process product and you dehydrate it and you spread it into a sheet and let it dry and cut it and put it in a box.

[5:55] Whereas powder gelatin, they extrew it into noodles. Those noodles are dried out, and then pulverized in a mill, and then that's the subsequent gel powder, but there's no inherent difference between powder gel, powder

[6:07] gelatin and sheet gelatin. Now, there is a major difference between fish gelatins

[6:14] and like, you know, pig or cow gelatin. You're probably not going to run into poultry gelatin unless you, you know, process your own or you're doing like some sort of a, you know, a chicken skin soup and you get the gelatin out of it. But, um, but pig and mammal skin gelatins. Our pagan, sorry, cow, gelatins are fairly, you know, high strength. This is the one we're normally used to using. Fish gelatins can come from one of 2 sources. Cold water fish make a really crappy gelatin. It barely gels at all. It's really just, it's crap. It really is horrible. They're working on it, Nastasia. Did you know that? They're working on it because there are people who would like to have a fish-based gelatin that works. Now, and it has to do with the amino acid makeup of the proteins, of the connective tissue in cold water fish. It's just, they suck. What do you want? You know what I mean? Warm water fish, on the other hand, can make a gel strength that

[7:09] is okay, but the problem is, is that fish gelatin tends to melt at a lower temperature. So, you know, it's a lot harder to work with a fish-based gelatin and to get a good result. I, you know, I tend to not use it. I kind of stay away from it. We tend to use sheet gelatin for some applications and powder gelatin for other applications. And it's just a matter of which box comes into my hand first, frankly. But you shouldn't switch bloom strengths. you know, or basically the strengths of your gels between different recipes because your results may

[7:41] differ. How was that? You think? That was good. There's too much of the right amount. The right amount. The right amount. Thank you. You know, it's always nice to have at least one booster in your corner. So, uh, now, uh, loyal readers of the blog, uh, if we have any left because we've only

[7:55] put, like, we've put up like one post every 8 years at this point. We're going to get better. We have some cool stuff coming, like the centerfuge video, I promised you, and a bunch of other stuff, but I'll give you an idea of stuff we've been working on. Um, about a year ago, I think, a year? No, less than that. Are you talking about the 1st thing? Yeah, yeah. No, 8 months, 9 months. All right, so Cornell University has this project called Fab at Home. And basically, it's a three-dimensional printer, and they gave us one a while back, and it's

[8:22] basically they want us to print food with this 3D printer.

[8:26] Now, you know, what is it really? It's a syringe. So basically it's a syringe that you fill with paste, any kind of paste, like, I don't know,

[8:35] gel paste, goop, meat, paste, goop. I mean, it's basically the main criteria is that you get a pasty goop. right? But they have a new one. Apparently we can now extrude pasta doughs and masa, which we're going to work on today, which sounds interesting because cookies, they can do cookies. So here's the thing. right? It's basically a three-dimensional, it's basically just very accurately controls the X,

[8:59] Y, and Z axis. It's hooked into a computer, and they accurately control how fast the goop is sprayed out of the syringe, and they have multiple syringes so you can use different materials. Yada, yada, yada. Fantastic, right? Now, they want us to print food with it. Now, here's the main deal. And CNN, by the way, some money show. Do you know what it's called? CNN money. Well, that's easy. CNN money. They're coming to the school today, and our buddy, you know, Senor Lipton from Cornell is here, and we're going to shoot this thing with the television people today. But they have the classic kind of what I think that CNN does, awful idea,

[9:37] a horrible, horrible idea that someday you are going to go home, push a button, and your meal is going to be printed for you. God, I hope not. You know what I mean? It's just it's just a terrible, terrible idea. And, and so, and when I say this to people, they're like, yeah, but that's just because the technology's not right. I'm like, no, this is a conceptually horrible idea that we would, like, grind all of our raw ingredients into a

[10:04] pabulum like paste and extrude them into various different shapes and call that a meal goes

[10:10] against, basically everything I think is good about the world. Well, you know? Yeah, yeah. But they didn't seem to, they weren't listening when I was saying that, right? that kind of went over their head. The whole, like, I think it's evil. Yeah. Right. Now, there are some fantastic applications for the 3D printer. Not my applications, but, you know, good applications. For instance, you have a kid's birthday. This thing is like the wizard icing printing machine of all time. This thing can print a three-dimensional El Santo wrestling, like, you know, a Martian on top of a cupcake, like without breaking a sweat, right? So for things like kids' birthday parties, where you want to print out, you know, one, you know, cake with the kid's face on

[10:54] it and then, or maybe the kid's face with a dog trying to bite his face off, something like that. Anything like that, anything you've got a model of, you can print out onto a cupcake because icing is a straight up, awesome paste printing material, right?

[11:07] It's also great if, you know, if you want to make things out of epoxy or your kids want to make things out of

[11:11] silicon rubber, great. We talking food only, right? So icing is great. You can print cookies in the shape of, uh, I don't know, like space shuttles, donkeys, whatever. You know what I mean? You can print whatever. Great, great application. Not my application. For me, the, you know, I'm obviously not interested in the application that I think is, you know, one of the roots of all evil thinking in the future of

[11:35] food, that we're all going to live like the Jetsons, you know, and have our food and pill form. I mean, that's, uh, you know, uh, God help us. if that happens. But, you know, I'm waiting for the killer application where we actually produce a new and delicious food with this printer that can't be made any other

[11:52] way. And that's basically why you haven't seen a lot of work from us out of

[11:56] it because we haven't come up with that killer application. But they, you know, there's this new technique that we're hopefully going to try out today where basically you can print what looks like, you know, those like, how do you describe these

[12:10] nastasia? Like, you know the squidgy mats that you walk on that are made out of like plastic loopy

[12:15] doodles? Or those flip-flops? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. squidgy doodle flip-flops. flip-flops. Yeah. What's the name of the company? Sanook, S-A-N-U-K. Yeah, you know, Nastasia knows everything about flip-flops and I don't because I find them a horror. Like the idea of my heels slipping around. Okay, cooking it. I hate flip-flops. If any of you, no offense if you own a flip-flop corporation, but, you know, you'd sooner see me dead than in a pair of flip-flops. That's just it.

[12:40] You know what I mean? Like, I hate them. I hate everything about them, the noise when they're wet. I mean, everything awful. Like, something between my toast. horrible. Anyway, um, so, uh, how did we get on? Oh, yeah. So that material is like that like squidgy material and flip-flops, but he can print it out of any kind of food.

[12:55] So, uh, we're going to take masa dough, which is nixtimalized corn, uh, ground into a fine paste. We're going to try to print this, uh, basically spongy mat-like surface out of the masa and then fry it to get kind of a new snatch ship

[13:10] texture. That's gonna be cool, right? And we're also going to try to print out some extruded, some snacks that, you know, they can be puffed later. I mean, the other main problem with this 3D printing is it's inherently a prototype application, right? So, yes, I can make one space shuttle out of scallop paste, which is what we did the last time we printed something

[13:29] out. But if I really wanted to make space shuttle shaped scallop paste nuggets, right? I would make a silicone mold that had like 20 or 30 space shuttles in it, and then I would just, you know, strike mold everything out with an offset spatula and call

[13:44] it a day. You know, I wouldn't bother printing each one because that's a nightmare. So, you know, these are the basic problems with the 3D printer, but if you have any ideas, please call them in ASAP because we're

[13:54] gonna talk to the CNN people today, and there's nothing I'd like more than to say. One of our listeners or readers just came up with the killer app. All right. All right, let's take a break, come back, calling all your questions too, 718-497-2128, that's 718-497-2128, cooking issues. How you feel, brother? You feel good. so much bone, brother. How you feel, man? Don't call your name. I don't want people to know you're in here. How you feel, fella? Hey, Jeff. You're getting down. Look at him. We're gonna have a bunk, good time. We're gonna have a fun, good time. We're gonna have a fun good time. We're gonna have a bunk, good time. Let's take them up, Fred. We gotta take you high. All right. I wanna do it again. You wanna do it again, huh? Yeah, let's go on that. Gotta take you home.

[15:06] Brother? Yeah. Now I want everybody. Welcome back to cooking issues, calling all of your

[15:14] questions too. 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128 coming to you live from Brooklyn. All right, so I think we should talk about another project we're working on. Not strictly cooking related, but generally food related, and that's the food museum. As some of you might know, the project that I was involved in before I joined the French culinary

[15:36] team, was trying to start a food museum. And this isn't necessarily a place where, well, it isn't a place where you just go look at

[15:42] shellacked pieces of bread and muse over how awesome the food of the past was. I mean, this is going to be a place where you go and you eat, you taste, you learn, you see, you

[15:53] touch, because I really find that not that you shouldn't listen to food radio. But I find that like, you know, really, if you want to learn about food, you really, you have to eat it, you have to see it, you have to touch it, you have to smell it.

[16:04] I mean, that's the, that's what food is, you know? I mean, I love reading. you know, I love listening, you know, to ideas, but really, you know, you got to get out there and taste. That's what, you know, Jeffrey Steingarten has that. one of his big gripes. about, you know, people, you know, who are in the food business, is they want to be in the food business. They want to write about it, but they simply haven't eaten enough. So his, whenever you, if any of you out there are ever going to approach Jeffrey Steingarten, the food writer at Vogue, you know,

[16:27] friend of ours, if you're ever going to approach him and say that you're interested in getting started in the food business or specifically in food writing, please, please have a long list of places you have gone and things you have eaten and avoid saying that X, Y, or Z is the best, like, avoid saying things

[16:47] like, that's the best hamburger because he's like, whoa, so you've eaten every hamburger on earth? I mean, I'm just telling you, should you ever approach Jeffrey Steingarten to ask him for advice? That is my advice to you. Anyway, and I think he's down with the food museum. He's given us things in the past. So anyway, so this is a food museum and the idea is to have it in New York. When we 1st came up with the idea, there wasn't really, there weren't any food museums of the type we were talking about. I mean, there was copia in Napa, which is closed, unfortunately. There's a New York food museum, which is about the history of New York food, but it's a museum that's not meant to have a location. There's now the Museum of Southern Food, which, you know, I haven't been down there, but, you know, but anyway, so the idea is to start one in New York. And Patrick, you know, the Jefe of Heritage Foods, and the great leader of this radio network. Um, like the idea and say, well, let's start this project, this project up again.

[17:39] And so that's why I'm here talking about it. Today, we're going to have a fundraiser on March 27th, which is a Sunday, yeah. And it's going to be held at Del Posto, pretty badass. I can say that here, right? Badass? Yeah. pretty badass. Uh, you know, uh, our friend Mark Ladner uh, graciously agreed to let us have the fundraiser there. He'll be cooking. We haven't confirmed all the other chefs yet, but it's gonna be big. anyway. Uh, we're looking to 200 people, something like that. 210 is the limit. 210s the limit. And if you have any questions about it, should you wish to go to this fundraiser. You can email Nastasia and Lopez at Frenchculinary.com. That's N. Lopez at Frenchculinary.com. I tell you what. I'll be making some cocktails. Will you? Will I not? Okay. Well, maybe Nastasia doesn't want me to. I'm going to strong. Basically, here's what's gonna happen. I'm going to strong arm and beat all of my friends and family into submission to work on this damn thing. So, I mean, they don't even know about it yet, but I'm going to beat on Dave Chang until he says yes. I'm going to beat on Wiley until he says yes. I'm going to beat on Dave Wondridge till he says yes to make cocktails. So if Audrey's in town, I'll beat on her. You know what I mean? It's like, this, it's going to be like a full force beat down to try and get as much of the food world

[18:55] involved. well, at least our friends in the food world involved in, I'm going to give Johnny a beat down. Johnny Yazina, I'm going to give him a beat down. Anyway, so, um, Anyway, so that's that's gonna be, that's what we're working on. something that's working on behind the scenes. Another thing we've been working on behind the scenes is our raw food challenge, which, okay, listen, listen. Not a welcher. I don't want anyone out there to call me a welcher, but I have to fly to Boca Raton during the week I was supposed to do the raw food

[19:24] thing, and that conference that the event that I'm going to involves cooking, and since I will not make anything ever that I don't taste before it goes out, I cannot eat raw food during that week.

[19:41] So Nastasia is busy as we speak, rescheduling for one of the 1st 2 weeks in February to do the raw food

[19:50] extravaganza. But I'll give you some lowdown about what we've tested so far. Bought myself an excalibur hydrator, right? Which was, you know, it's an awesome dehydrator. Unfortunately, in my house, there's no place to put it. So it's like, you know, up like in the ceiling on top of my printer in a cabinet that can only be accessed on the tallest chair we have, right? That's life, right? I have I literally, I use my iPhone in camera mode to look and see what the knob is set too, so that I can set the knob. Even at home, I'm ghetto. The school I'm ghetto, at home, I'm getting it's always ghetto. anyway. So, man, it's not really. I mean, it's an awesome dehydrator. It's just, for some reason, I have all this great equipment and I managed to make it look stupid by the way I set it up and the horrible conditions I set it up in. That's the story of my life. Something really nice in a pile of filth. That's that's my life in a nutshell, right? Yeah. Something nice in a pile of filth. Anyway, so working on stuff with a dehydrator. I had Nastasia make a series of sprouts because apparently raw vegan food involves a lot of sprouting for various reasons.

[20:53] One, it helps grains and things be more easily broken down because as a grain sprouts,

[20:58] enzymes go to work, and I guess raw food's all about enzymes. Anyway, start breaking down some of the starches, making them more digestible so that you can eat them raw. Now, Nastasia, how many different things did you sprout? Eight, eight. So we did mung beans. They didn't look like any mung bean sprouts I've ever had. Like maybe we need to grow them better. You know, I like among bean sprout. Like that's the one sprout where I can, I will stand up in a hallway and say, hey, you know what, mung beans sprout? You are a good sprout. That is a good sprout among beans sprout, not these. But other people seem to enjoy them, right? Did oat groats, which Nastasia, for some reason, thought was oat grout. I don't know why I don't know why you would grout your tiles with oats, but anyway, oat groats. Apparently she didn't grow up singing the OHP beans and barley growed song. No. Yeah. anyway. So, at Zookie Beans, we did, what else do we do? We did lentils. Some of these, by the way, you shouldn't eat raw because they're kind of poisonous. Black eyed peas. What else? What else do we do? Rye berries. No, we didn't get to do the rye. Something berries. Wheat berries. Wheat berries. Beat berries. All right. Wheat berries were not we're not awful. Right. No, I think that was the only one we... The mung barriers wanted... Oh, and we made that stuff rejuvalac, which for those of you that don't know or care, rejuvalac is, you know, you take wheat berries, you let them sprout, and then you let them sit in

[22:11] water to kind of ferment a little bit, and they use that as a Kickstarter for different things.

[22:16] Let me just say that all these sprouts tasted like poison to me. With the exception of the wheat. And I'm not saying this, look, this is good and bad, right? One, I'm not saying that they were bad because one chef was like, hey, I tasted your sprouts. Those are pretty good. I'm like, really? Because to me, they tasted like poison. I wrong about this? Yeah, like you just sprayed your grass front lawn with poison. Yeah. Yeah. Poison. Anyway. Now, but but it was good that I had a chef who likes sprouts, taste them, and say that they were okay because now I know that I just would prefer not to use those

[22:52] things. The weed sprouts were okay. You could use the Weese Pass. So that's something I'm going to strike off my list. There's not going to be any sort of like, like, you know... Yeah, the rejuvalac was good. So the rejuval act that's like slightly fermented weed stuff is good. That's good I want to see if I can make a raw version of a rye rejuvilac that we can then almost make a kvas out of, which is, you know, kvas is like, you know, the Eastern European Russian fermented bread beverage.

[23:18] It's usually made with bread which is cooked, which means you can't do it, but I want to see if you can do it with just something sprouted. I'm also interested. I don't have time, but I'm interested in trying to work with a raw beer. That might be it might be interesting. But anyway, so the sprouts tastes bad, which means I have to think of something else to do because I didn't like them. We tried another bunch of recipes for, I don't want anyone to get mad. I'm just tasting this and this is like deciding what I'm going to eat for this week. We made a bunch of nut cheeses. I don't know why the heck they're called cheeses. They don't taste like cheese. I wasn't there. You didn't taste any of those? It's like basically nuts mixed with rejuvilac and or, and or orange juice and or, you know, some other stuff. And into like a moosey paste, and they're used, I guess, as a kind of a cottage cheese replacement and vegan cheese.

[24:04] But you know what the problem with them is, fundamentally, is I really like cheese a lot. Cheese, to me, has a specific texture and taste, which these don't have. I mean, like, could you make a delicious raw nut mousse? Yeah. Yeah. Not this. I was like, no. We did do an interesting thing where we mixed. We soaked a bunch of nuts because you have to soak some of these nuts when they're raw because they haven't been roasted and there's stuff in

[24:26] them you want to get out. So we soaked macadamias, pistachios, sunflower. We didn't have any raw cashews left in the house. So... So sunflower seeds shelled, thank God. and almonds all raw. Uh, we, uh, I put them through a champion juicer. And then after they were soaked. And then we took the paste and we squeezed it out. And that actually was really good. It had a really good texture. The oil separated out, and we were able to make little balls that had actually a really good texture. So that will be, it's an expensive dish, uh, because it had all those nuts and soaked and everything. But, you know, that will probably... It just seems really expensive in a lot of work, unnecessary work. Well, you should just eat. Well, now, you know, it's not unnecessary if the goal is to eat raw.

[25:13] I mean, the my main problem so far is, is that, you know, I can, it's, it does take a lot of pre-work to do

[25:20] the raw, the raw food thing. And in our space, we need space. But I mean, I could do it. I do it at home. It not the issue. The issue is, is it takes a lot of work to do it right. Now I'm thinking, now, look, let's say you actually ate raw food. Like, this is what you did. You ate raw food, right? Who has this level of time to devote to always being

[25:41] 3 days out? Now I'm sure some of these things become staples. You always have sprouts in your fridge. You always have rejuvalac of brewing. You always have, you know, whatever, whatever cultures are going and you get it to go. You know what I mean? But in the absence of that, I mean, you'd probably like, you know, like

[25:56] everyone's image of what raw food people eat, which is that sitting around eating carrots all day. I mean, I could see how you would devolve into that because it's good. It's a heck of a lot easier. You know what I mean? These raw food restaurants have to jump through some serious, serious hoops to kind of do the things that they do. Now, the last great experiment. I'm hoping this works really, really well, is the marination of vegetable partial dehydration to simulate kind of a roasted flavor. Although I don't even know why you'd have to call it roasted. It just can't even say it makes a nice texture out of it. So we'll play with some mushrooms. I'll play with some other things. But barring that, I'm just going to have to do something like radically ignore all of the raw food advice that I've gotten. But like I said, when I ate at Sarma's restaurant, Sarma melon guy is a pure food, you know, I liked a good deal of what was put out, you know, so it's not like it can't be done, but I mean, we have to think of our own way of doing it, something that's good.

[26:51] So we're going to use a roto app. I'm going to make some low temperature distillates, make all of you raw food people out there totally jealous because I'm going to be drinking sweet, sweet booze that's never been heated. Uh, distilled illegally in my roto app, right? Um, and uh, when, when, what else do you want? We can do reductions also low temperature. So we'll be able to do fruit reductions that are totally low temp. That going to be awesome. We can use enzymes. We can use our pectinase enzymes to break things down to do clarifications. We're going to make some bang up sauces with that kind of stuff. I'm extremely interested in trying to get some transgutaminase that doesn't have maltodextrine because unfortunately that's been cooked and doesn't have caseine because that's not vegan or gelatin because that's not obviously not

[27:37] vegan. Uh, to see whether or not we can strengthen uh, nut paste um, and other, other, you know, suspensions with proteins in them in the absence of heat. I think that could be an interesting test. I'm gonna try and run that. And that shouldn't be a, you know, that shouldn't be a problem for vegans, right? No. I mean, it's an enzyme. I mean, for raw vegans. an enzyme, it's not animal-based. microbial-based fermentation. So it shouldn't be a problem. So that's our rough food progress. We welcome any sort of advice. Uh, you know, we've read uh, Matthew Kenny's books. We've read Sarma's books, we've read... Who's that guy that you really like? Well, there's this guy, I don't know him, but he's got the craziest pictures in his cookbook. His name is, well, do you think it's Juliano or Juliano? Probably Juliana. Juliano? Yeah. So we have these, these books. We have Trotter, Trotter. What the name of the woman working with Trotter? And the problem is like, like, and and these cookbooks are good. Right? They're good. I mean, they really are. They're well done. It's just like, you know, some of the raw ingredients I have issues with, like sprouts. I just detest them. I really do. I wish I could like them. I've never liked them growing up, especially alfalfa sprouts. I can't think of anything I less rather have caught in my teeth than alfalfa sprouts. I think the problem is, is that even like people who like people who, not raw food people, people like pea shoots, right? Most people like pea shoots. guess who doesn't like pea shoots? Yeah. I mean, I'll eat them. They're not vile, but that kind of raw, starchy taste, I'm averse too. And so since that is inherent in almost every sprout. I like peach sheets. I remember Brooks put them in a dessert with strawberry ice cream. Brooks is the pastry chef Adel Posto, one of our favorite pastry chefs. I'm sure it's, look, everyone in the world likes it except for me. I'm not saying that, you know, I'm right here. I'm clearly wrong. Clearly pea shoots are delicious. And, you know, I find them merely, you know, not awful. you know. But it's that starchy, sweet taste that I'm not really down with. Anyway, let's go to our 2nd commercial break and come back. Still time to call in two, 718-497-2128, 718-497-2128, cooking issue. There you go, brother. You're feeling good. Be so much bone, brother. How you feel, man? Don't call your name. I don't want all people to know you're in here. How you feel, Bella? Hey, yeah. Sure, getting down. Look at him. We're gonna have a bump, good time. We're gonna have a fun, good time. We're gonna have a fun, good time. We're gonna have a bump, good time. Now take 'em up, Fred. We gotta take you high.

[30:27] All right. I want to do it again. You wanna do it again, huh? Yeah, let's go on, man. Gotta take you home.

[30:39] Brother! Yeah? Now, I want everybody, let bread blow in my two courses. And then I want to wave in, let's go and do that again now, all right? Welcome back to Cooking Issues. 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. Coming to you from rainy, slushy Brooklyn. Okay. Uh, so, uh, interesting little story. We were on, uh, you were on, well, yeah, you were in the studio audience. The Martha Stewart show. What was that? like maybe 2 months ago? Anyway, Nastasia never lets me forget it because I was supposed to complete 3 cocktails. 1st it was five. Then it was cut down to 12. You know, look. So, and it's not just like, you only made it through 3 quarters of the cocktail. You an idiot. You're a moron. Why couldn't you make it through it? You are useless. Anyway, my point is, is that most of the time when you do demos, the person you're demoing in front of is basically just there kind of

[31:37] reacting, whereas when Martha Stewart is there with the demo with you. Martha Stewart asks you questions that relate to how things

[31:45] work and you don't just tell Martha Stewart, she piss off. you met your wife. Not on air. I thought she asked. What? And it completely stopped you. Well, that's easy. I met my wife in college. making a cocktail. nostalgia, like, keep plowing through it. Crap on Martha. Who does she think she is to ask you a question about cooking? For real. Anyway, uh, so so anyway, so I didn't make it through all of the steps that I was supposed to make it through on the program. I made it... nostagi to ride. I made it about 3 quarters of the way through gin and tonic. I was able to show Martha the liquid nitrogen trick of pulverizing grapefruit pips and blood orange pips into their individual, not really pips, pips, or seeds. You know, the fruit, the vesicles, the juice vesicles. pulverize them into individual things, so they float around and look pretty. I knew Martha would love that because, you know, if there's anyone in the world that likes a pastel color, it's Martha Stewart, right? So here's what happens. At the end of the show, Martha's like, yeah, that's great. I'm figuring she's, you know, blowing sunshine up my, you know what? And she's like, that's great. Yeah, I'm like, hey, well, you know, if you're ever interested in any of this stuff. And I demonstrated a centrifuge, clarifying lime juice and a centrifuge, using a combination of agar, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Centrifuge. So, uh, blah, blah, blah. So, and part of the segment was kind of what an eBay ninja I am and how I was able to get my centrifuge for $100 on eBay because they, I

[33:12] forget, that one was because they spelled it like... No, no, that one was because... Oh, that one was the dead fuse. had a blown fuse in it. The other one I got was because they spelled it like centro fuge. you know, and I, by the way, eBay friends out there. I just bought a 160 liter liquid nitrogen duder, doer. Used, but retail value, brand new, $2,000, and eBay value $1000 to $1,200 in that range for like 300 bucks because they spelled nitrogen wrong.

[33:43] Hello? I feel a little bit guilty, actually, frankly, taking advantage of people who spell nitrogen wrong. survive over the fittest. Wow. And that's why we call her the hammer, folks. You don't get to see it very often, but that's why they call it the hammer. Anyway, so I'm like, you know, Martha, you know, if you ever need anything with this tech stuff, I figure she's not going to ask me because Grant Aiken's from Alinia is right there. Green Aiken's coming on the show, by the way, in spring, but because he has a new book coming out that I actually have the galleys of. kind of more of a memoir, not a cookbook, more of a memoir, but coming on the show, I

[34:15] guess March or something like that. So looking forward to that. Maybe we can get Mirville nominees out sometime. His book's coming out soon. Well, maybe we can get McGee next week. Is he in town? On Tuesday? I don't know. Anyway, we'll get you some good guests. Anyway, because we haven't gotten a guess in like 8000000000 years, but we'll get you some good guesss. Anyway, what the hell was we talking about? Oh yeah. Martha. So Martha is sitting there, and I'm like figuring she's not going to ask me for anything. And the next day,

[34:39] her, the assistant calls, her assistant calls and says, hey, Martha wants a centrifuge. I'm like really? Yeah, like for the show? She's like, no, for her house. I'm like, all right, what's your budget? And Martha is so kind of love the fact that I'm this kind of scrounging, you know, person who glues everything together with duct tape and bubble gum. Quality and filth. Quality and filth. That she's like, I don't know, 300 bucks. Like, what? This is something, I swear that if you want to buy one. that is in working condition that's good that you trust with your with your family, let's say, right? That's a $1,200 That's a $1,200- $1,500 problem, right? New? We're talking a $7000 to $10,000 problem. Wiley Dufrayne just had his got his new center futures, doing some interesting stuff, actually. Wiley called me and says that, like, he's, and now I kick myself. He's churning butter in it. That's pretty cool. That's cool. I shouldn't maybe have said that on the air. Anyway, so the, um, so she's like 300 bucks because she wants to get like the coolest bargain. She wants to be part of the eBay bargain thing. I was like, you realize for $300, I'm going to have to buy a broken one and pray I can fix it and

[35:48] then it hasn't been, you know, dipped in too much feces that I can't clean off.

[35:52] So, because these are all have all sorts of nasty blood and blah, blah, blah. I mean, they're all they're hardcore, right? So she's like, that's okay. I can wait. So eventually we did. Yeah, right. So we did find one thing was dead totally. Put it on blocks like a car. Yeah. But, you know, look, again, like anything else with eBay, it's the, it's, I was reading the description to see kind of what was wrong with it, like how it was broken and then kind of praying that I

[36:17] could fix it. And I determined that because the motor could spin freely and the tachometer still worked and everything powered up, that if I was lucky, right? It was a problem either with a wire leading to the motor, that would be the best. Or it was a problem with the actual brushes because these are brushing motors. So there's carbon brushes that are in it that basically transfer the, you know, electricity from the winding out, you know, back to the thing. And so these go bad after a while. And if someone's a jerk and they haven't replaced them, then everything goes south and the machine stops working. Well, lo and behold, it was the brushes. So, you know, you bought a centerfuge for under 300 bucks. I think we paid two. Do something. It was 350 altogether. With shipping and everything, right? And refrigeration works great. Replace the brushes. That was a $6, no, 16 after I had to buy 2 sets of brushes. $16 problem, and boom, Martha's got a centrifuge. So as soon as she gets herself back in the country. Martha Stewart's going to be rocking with the cooking issues. Centering better. What? She's going to churn some butter. We're going to give her a starter kid of enzymes. Really? Well, why not? She's Martha Stewart. You know what I mean? I guarantee you Martha Stewart's got some fancy fruit, right? And she can clarify in that centrifuge. So that's our 1st celebrity hookup where we're hooking a celebrity up with some

[37:34] high-tech equipment and that's cooking issues for this week with Martha Stewart Centrifuge. Join us next week for cooking issues.