[0:00] Today's program has been brought to you by Heritage Foods USA, the nation's largest distributor of heritage breed pigs and turkeys. For more information, visit heritagefoodsusa.com. You are listening to Heritage Radio Network broadcasting live from Bushwood, Brooklyn. If you like this program, visit heritageradionetwork.org for 1000s more.

[0:27] Hello, welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live from Aberta's Pizzeria in Bushwick, Brooklyn on the Heritage Radio Network every Tuesday from roughly 12 to roughly 1245. Calling your questions to 718-497-2128. That 718-497-2128. Joined in the studio with Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. How you doing? Good, Jack, the headphones are really loud. Well, maybe just yours. Maybe not. Actually, I'm not. I think mine are too, but normally I don't complain. I just, I just, I just suck it up. on the other hand. I wonder who was here before you. Someone who's decent? Is that better, guys? Yeah. So listen, Jack, you, well, you know, not from Brooklyn anymore, but you still, you know the Bushwick news, right? So I'm I just want to... Yeah, so here's the thing. I want you guys to know Heritage Heritage Meats, whose offices are right here in Bushwick over on Siegel

[1:19] Street, not involved with the largest cockfighting ring in New York history that was just broken

[1:25] up. What was it yesterday, the day before you read what this does? They, uh, the biggest cockwriting thing. What do you know about it, Jack? I mean, I used to live near some of those places, so I'd seal the live poultry markets kind of walk by, but I didn't realize those live poultry markets were also, you know, underground

[1:40] cockfighting rings. Yeah, yeah. And they busted a farm in upstate. And you know, that was that was a component of the farm bill that passed, actually, included some

[1:51] some language and legislation on being tougher on animal fighting

[1:56] circuits. So maybe that has something to do with that. Really? I did not know that. Do we have any good references for people to go to on our website for our feelings as

[2:07] a network on the farm bill and what's going on? Absolutely. Yeah. Tomorrow, on our front page, we're going to run a piece that has opinions from Marion Nessel, Michelle Nishan,

[2:17] the folks over at just food and a few others. So we kind of sourced a whole bunch of opinions and broke down the farm bill. So check the homepage tomorrow. That would be Wednesday. February 12th. Nice. Good leading, am I right? All right? Yeah, nice. Nice, strong. Okay, uh, so we had a question in on the Twitter from uh, Matt

[2:37] Schuster saying, uh, at cooking issues. Hey, Dave, any suggestions for a food dehydrator with a timer for a small

[2:44] 50 seat restaurant, I want to demoist things. Well, okay, I don't really have any, like, the one I use, I use almost exclusively is the Excalibur,

[2:54] which, you know, most restaurant folks that I know also use the Excalibur. But the question is, how much stuff are you going to

[3:05] dehydrate and on what kind of a consistent basis? Now, the Excalibur doesn't have a timer on it. But like I say, I haven't used ones with a timer. My main experience comes from either using the Excalibur or the crappy round ones. Now, the Excalibur just beats the pants off of the crappy round ones. And the reason is, because it can hold a lot more than the crappy round ones can. And because the way the airflow works in it, it's not coming up through the center, it's kind of passed along all the racks from the back. It's a lot more even rack to rack. But, and the Excalibur is good because it's relatively small for the amount of stuff it can dehydrate.

[3:42] So, you know, you can dehydrate, you know, in the small excalibber, which is when I have, you can dehydrate like £2 of pasta, right?

[3:50] in one go, uh, or you know, things like that. Now, back, the kind of kings and queens of dehydration that I have met are the folks at pure, uh, at pure food, uh, and wine, Sarma

[4:04] Melongaius's joint. And back in the day, they used to run, did you visit that kitchen with these stars? They ran the entire kitchen was, it was like a library of

[4:15] Excalibur, like Excalibur, stocked on Excalibur, like whole walls of Excalibur. And I was joking with her when I visited years ago that it was the hottest kitchen I had ever been in in my life, even though it was like raw cooking and they didn't have anything because of all those freaking dehydrators running all the time.

[4:31] Excalibur, I believe, I haven't had time to check it because I just got the tweet in, but Excalibur makes a much larger version now.

[4:40] And I know some people that have used the Cabela's. the Cabella's dehydrator, you know, Cabella's the folks that, you know, they sell outdoor gear, although I

[4:48] hear I've never been to a Cabella store. I hear that they used to be like the life-changing sports store, but now Stas has a new one that we need to go to. What's it called? Big bass fishing or something. you say it's like in the most amazing story you've ever been in, right? The one in Foxborough. Where's Foxborough? In the stadium. Gillette stadium. Which state? Massachusetts. Massachusetts, yeah. And you said it was like the greatest story you've ever visited in your life, right? It is. It had like, what it had that you could get mauled by a bear or something if you wanted or something? They had shooting, fishing. They had shooting in the store. But one of those, like, where you hit the target with the, with the, not the crappy ones from the, from the carnival where they shoot all in different directions and you can't actually knock the star out. No, this was, yeah, really cool. I took Booker and Dax last summer to one of those things and they had to try. they wanted to try and shoot that pellet. You know, those horrible pellet guns at the carney things. And like there's one little bit of star left and they don't get the prize. kids, that's how it works. You're not supposed to win. This is like learn, like, kids don't learn. I still have a twins that I want to do those kinds of things. Did you used to play carnival games as a kid? Because your parents didn't let you because you just, like, even back then you're like, I hate the carnival games. I don't know. just never did. No? So anyway, so ask yourself why you need a timer on your dehydrator. Here's what I typically do when I'm dehydrating. And I'm sorry that my, my, uh, recommendations can't, I don't have any personal use of large ones. You know what I always want to do for really large stuff. Now, 50, 60 seats. you're only doing a couple garnishes, Excalibur is great. And then even up to the point of buying 2 Excaliburs, I would do it that way, and here's why. You can have 2 different Excaliburs set to 2 different drying

[6:28] regimens, uh, and you don't then need to, um, the brain just turned off. isn't that crazy? That happens sometimes, huh? Brain off. You don't need to worry about whether or not 2 things are different. You can have 2 things that want to go at different temperatures going at the same time if you just have 2 Excalibers. Um, I've always wanted someone to do large scale stuff, and I believe the

[6:49] guys, uh, at, uh, Pure Food, did this also feel food, uh, you know, Gaelen and Fernando's place down, uh, that we did that event

[6:55] that they had, uh, they have like a bunch of dehydrators. I think they had the larger Excaliburs, right? Did you notice back in the kitchen? So the, what I would do is get a couple of those. When you're using a dehydrator, I don't know that a timer, strictly speaking, so necessary. What I tend to do is I start my dehydrators fairly high because there's a huge temperature gradient that

[7:19] forms as you, because as you're evaporating liquid off of your foods at the get go and they're still fairly high water,

[7:24] you get a lot of evaporative cooling around the surface of your product. And so to speed dehydration, I always start the dehydrator at a higher temperature.

[7:34] And then I turn it down. So a lot of times when I'm doing puff snacks, the main problem is you don't want to overdehydrate because then you don't have enough moisture left in the stuff to puff properly.

[7:44] So what I'll do is, is I'll jack it to like 135,

[7:50] uh, which I don't know what that is in Celsius, but like 135 Fahrenheit, uh, for a couple of hours, and then I'll just turn it down to low, down to like a 100 or something like this, uh, and then let it ride overnight. Now, when the fans are going, it's not going to pick up a lot of moisture unless it's extremely humid in your kitchen, and it'll slowly equilibrate and come down. And then in the morning, if it's still a little bit too soft, it won't be too dry at this point, but if it's still a little bit too soft, then I can jack the temperature for another hour or

[8:17] so, but I just leave them running on low overnight is typically what I do. But you have to really low so you don't overdry your products. If you wanted a project, The Excalibur is a fairly good case, except the plastic on it tends to break is the only issue in it. You could put a PID on it. I've never done it, but you could get a, you could get some way of measuring humidity at those low temperatures and kind of measure the humidity in the box or maybe

[8:40] even, if possible. You could just do it on li and then drive it with a with a PID controller so that it would ramp itself down. I haven't done it. Uh, but it's technically feasible and I'd say you could probably do it for under 200 bucks, uh, even with the weird stuff you'd be measuring. Trivially, less if you just want to put it on a timer and ramp silk, you can go to Uber instruments or anything like that and buy a controller that you could put on a timer and ramp soak the

[9:06] temperature. if you didn't care about external measurements. And that would be a trivial problem, that would cost you, like on the order of like 45 bucks to do. And, you know, if you've never done one before, it would take you probably a couple hours to figure it out. But I always wanted to do that with a bread with a breadproof or. We were going to do that. Remember years ago we were going to do that. We never did it. We were going to convert a giant breadproofer into a dehydrator. I think someone probably does that commercially because it's a good idea and it makes sense. anyway. So much for dehydrators. I was doing a bunch of, what was I doing on my dehydrator? pasta recently I was doing. Hey, we got a caller. Color. on the air. Hi, Dave. Natasha, Jack, everyone. it's Brian. How you doing? doing well, yourself? Good. Um, so 2 things. One is, I have a question about bread, but, uh, 1st is that, uh, never

[9:52] heard heard the final answer about making my own coach you from the, uh, the other week. I know, dude, I have not gotten a hold of Ryan yet, is the reason why you haven't gotten the information yet. I need to get a hold of those guys. I've like, they've been kind, they haven't been MIA. I've been MIA, which is why you don't have the final answer yet. So we'll start with the other one and I still owe you that answer. Well thank you very much. I'll hold on for that. Um, but this one has to do with, with, with bread baking at home. So um, I don't have a deck oven. Uh, here, you know, so, um, I have no possibility of, um, you know, injecting steam

[10:28] into into, into my oven, you know, through the oven itself. And so my question is, you know, I've been doing a little bit of reading, and I'm looking at the, a couple different books, and one is, uh, the Tartine bread book, which says, um, uh, they, they use a, um, a combo cooker,

[10:46] uh, It's kind of like a Dutch oven, basically, um, in which the kind of the smaller part, um,

[10:52] they, they kind of bake essentially on the lid. Um, so it's basically like a Dutch oven, um, as a way of kind of capturing the steam, and then the other one... You mean, like, like, Lahey style? Like Lazy style. Exactly. All right. So, uh, except that if you use what's called a combo cooker, it makes it easier to, to, to not burn yourself.

[11:12] Um, And then the other other thing, and they're made by Loach, by the way. And then the other thing I'm looking at is the Bushon Bakery, um, uh, a cookbook from, um, Thomas Keller, and Sebastian Ruxell, and they're saying basically, um, take a ridiculous amount of, um, river stones and

[11:33] chain, and and put it in, in the, in the bottom of the, of the oven as a way of, of catching all the heat, and then take a super soaker, and inject a huge amount of water into the

[11:45] oven, so it all kind of, uh, turns to, turns to steam. And I'm kind of wondering what's the best way to get steam into the oven, which of these 2 methods would be

[11:55] most, most effective for bread baking. Okay, now your oven is underfired gas oven? Yeah, okay. It's a standard standard home, got seven. Right, but the heat comes from then from below. Correct. Yeah, because you can't pull that, like if you have like an electric oven with upper elements and stuff like that. You can't pull that lower chain. The reason that the chains and whatnot on the bottom of the oven is because that's where the heat is most intense. So that's like an old school, uh, you know, bread baker's way to kind of, um, you know, do, you know,

[12:26] clutch, uh, having, you know, real steam injection. And it works the way that it obviously sounds, it's going to work by, um,

[12:34] literally, you, you put a bunch of, you know, stuff in the bottom with thermal mass, let it heat up,

[12:41] right? And then, and they used, look, stones, I'd be a little bit wary of because everyone says like Riverstones aren't

[12:49] going to break. I've put stones that I thought were pretty smooth in fires and had them blow up before. Now the oven's probably maybe not be violent enough to blow a stone apart, but I don't know. You know what I'm saying? Uh, you know, I've I've put many stones on fires before for various reasons and had them

[13:08] explode, kind of spectacularly explode. Now, it's inside of an oven, but you wouldn't want to be lowering your oven and putting your face in there when you're loading

[13:18] something to, you know, just to have something explode on you. You know what I mean? Um, so I don't know. I think that's the super soaker, where you can do it from a distance. Yeah. Oh, yeah, good idea. Super soaker. I forgot super. when you said super soaker, you know, I was in my head, I was thinking spray bottle because that's what I'm used to. Uh, so it's super soaker. interesting. My kids would love it if I had to bring a super soaker home to cook with. absolutely love it. Um, but the, um, so, I mean, that works, right? Um, the, you know, I've never done a lot of the, like, Lahey style. By the way, that thing you call a combo cookers, that like their camp oven? Is that the Loge camp oven? Like their old school Dutch camp oven? Google Google combo cooker. And so basically it's, um, it's got

[14:02] a, like what the lid would have a handle and I think you can cook on it separately. It's kind of like the lid would be the skillet and then you put the, the pop kind of right over it

[14:12] is, is the, is the technique. Um, in, in, in this case. Oh, inverted. Inverted. yeah. you're not having to like try to jam the your dough into a hot Dutch oven. Yeah, I think that's like the old camp cookers that you could flip the lids on and do stuff like that. They're pretty cool. Do you like it? I don't have one. I'm trying to figure out whether or not I should get one or if, um,

[14:36] you know, I should go with the, with the, the Bushan method. Well, do you like the Lahey? Do you like that Lahey style? Like the no need, kind of very loose, like uh, large internal or regular bubble stuff cooked in a Dutch oven? Do you like it? Um, I've, I've tried it in a, in a Dutch oven at a friend's house and the

[14:57] dough, and it tasted fine, but the problem is, is you got to shape it into a bowl. Right? So you can't have other shapes of bread. Well, I mean, that dough is so loose anyway that you're going to have, it's going to be problematic, I think, to do. I mean, at least the recipes of it I've tried is very loose. I would try that... But it doesn't matter what, you know, what the, what the dough is necessarily. I guess my question has to do with the method. Right. And, and I guess the other problem with that is that, you know, does it, in addition to what it does in terms of capturing steam, how does it change the temperature? of the bread, because then you have this kind of radiating heat source, around, around the bread, in addition to the oven. Right. Well, I mean, I think of it mainly, I haven't thought about the 2nd aspect of it. I've really spent most of my kind of the mental energy on thinking about those things about the actual ability of

[15:50] the closed but still vented container to deliver steam to the crust over the initial portion of the bacon before the initial dehydration hits it, right?

[15:58] Right. And look, it's effective. Look, I tend to, you know, you know, when I was doing it. I use I didn't use Riverstones. I had a lot of masonry at the bottom of my oven, and I would throw water on it, uh, to cause kind of, you know, violent steam eruptions whenever, you know,

[16:17] when when I loaded and when I when I didn't. And I always had good luck with doing it that way. I never did the chains because I had a lot of masonry. The reason why a lot of people don't recommend, and this is, you know, the flip side, putting a lot of masonry,

[16:31] you know, or stones or chains or stuff in chains aren't going to affect the thermal massy oven as much because metal heats up fairly quickly. Uh, but, you know, in my, the, the 1st one I did, which had a boatload of fire break in it, it would

[16:46] take uh, like an hour and a half to heat up all the way. You know what I mean? And, you know, I solved that in the last oven. I haven't modified my current. Well, I did a little bit, but I haven't fully modified my current oven. In my last modified oven, I did that. I put secondary heating elements into my oven. And the secondary heating elements allowed me to heat up a

[17:09] massive masonry fairly, fairly quickly. Uh, which now I'm, you know, I'm using less masonry as well, more nimbly with, with the heating elements in it. Um, So, you know, if you could get away, if you like the results by doing the kind of

[17:25] chain uh, and steam method, the thing I like about that is, it leaves you a lot more open with loading your oven and futching around because you're not worried about having to fit inside of some sort of Dutch oven or skillet

[17:40] thing. You can just have your stone, or if you're a steel person, if

[17:43] you, you know, buy the modernist cooking story and switch to steel instead of stone for your bottom,

[17:51] it gives you much more ability to load things in different ways.

[17:55] Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's just, uh, it enables you to make different ships. I can make my guts and and things that doesn't have to be round and fit into the, into the Dutch, Dutch oven. But as far as steam injection, you're not sure which is going to be most effective. No. kind of stimulating that. Okay. No, but, you know, look, I've had some people say to me, hey, you know, the steam dissipates very quickly when you just put steam in the, you know, the other thing people used to do is they load ice cubes

[18:22] in uh, on sheet trays right on the bottom of the hot oven and then they would vaporize fairly quickly because a lot of people complain that

[18:30] the, a toss of water on, the steam dissipates so quickly that you're not getting the full effect that you would want.

[18:35] That's the argument for the Dutch oven being the better technology because it's going to contain more steam around the bread longer than throwing the thing in. And that's why some people used to do, like, kind of ice cubes on the bottom instead of, um, instead of water because it was guaranteeing like a longer delivery

[18:51] of, uh, moisture to the product. I don't necessarily know, I believe that. I'll tell you what I'm actually going to do. Uh, but I don't know how how, you know, much you're allowed to modify your oven. I'm, I'm planning on getting, um, like, uh, uh,

[19:08] there's a, most ovens on the side where the control stuff is have a place uh, where you can drill a small hole, and I'm, I was going to drill a small hole into it, and then uh, have a copper tube feeding up out of it with uh, uh, like a bottle that you could set like an IV drip and just have it drip uh, water in and

[19:27] I could change whatever rate you want and actually add water to the oven with the door closed.

[19:31] And that's what I'm going to do. Uh, you know, fairly soon. Like that, my, just handed my, my book manuscript. And again, the copywritten. So I have a little more time. So hopefully I'm going to do that in the next couple of weeks. The other thing, have you bought for loading? Have you bought a super peel yet? No, I haven't. You've seen it though? I've seen it. It's like, uh, you kind of pull it and then the canvas kind of rolls down. Yeah, it's freaking awesome. I haven't got a chance to use it that much, but it's freaking awesome. I bought it for my for my kid's birthday party when I was going to do a bunch of pizza and Dagnabbit. It's like, I used to, you ever do that kind of baking bread and that kind of stuff? I like detest loading stuff off and on peels. So much so that when I used to do pizza, I would make the pizzas on parchment paper and then cut the parchment paper out and then just load all of my racks with pizza loaded on parchment and then

[20:26] cook them on the parchment paper because it's so easy to load parchment off and on. But the super peel. I like it so far. Check it out. I mean, it sounds like it's probably really good for really flack does. Oh, yeah. I mean, because you're not touching. You're not moving around. If you look, if you've done it, done any breadloading on peels before. But the pros, that always make it look easy, but I don't bake bread that often, you know? And I hate having to shake it and then I hate over, over, you know, overflowering or over whatever you add, whatever you're, you know, proprieties are. On the bottom. I hate that. And then you get that little extra crap of like, you know, either floury or like burn on the butt. I hate it. You know what I mean? I hate it. And I hate the thought of it sticking. I hate sitting down there and and scudgying around with it near my oven. I hate it. I hate it all. But the super peel, uh, you know, that's a pretty cool little uh, piece of uh, kit, get her on Amazon now, by the way. Look into it. What do you think about those baking steels that modernist cuisine recommends? You think that just getting the river rocks and the, and the chain is, is just as good. Well, the, the, the river rocks in the chain is not to bake right on top of. That's for literally just for the steam aspect of it. Right? So it's not meant to replace, uh, it's not meant to replace the way in which uh, heat energy is delivered to the bottom of the crust uh, on, you know, on initial bake in um, in breads. And so the old school way of doing it, which was based literally on trying to convert your oven into, you know, an old masonry oven, you know, so if you go and you read like the breadbuilders by, um, oh my gosh,

[22:03] who's by, uh, Dove and Wings, God, I think, I forget the names of the authors, but the breadbuilders, which was one of the 1st, you know, you know, decades ago, whatever, a couple decades ago, like one of the 1st kind of really cool,

[22:12] like here's how to build a bread oven book for folks like us. And, you know, it's like mimicking a bread oven inside, and that's the baking stone, right? Now, the thing about a stone is, is that they store heat for a long time, but they're very slow kind of at

[22:28] releasing it. It's kind of retained heat kind of technology. Whereas the guys at modernist cuisine, and I've spoken at length with Chris Young about this, who's now running chef steps, and I, you know, I think this was, you know, in

[22:37] part like his doing, uh, well, at least at least 13rd in part, right? Because he was, you know, the 2nd author on that book, is you don't need to store up the energy for a long time. You just need to deliver it fairly quickly at the beginning. And so you need a thick enough piece of metal such that it can store enough heat to deliver that heat wall up to your crust. And that is the idea of the steel as opposed to the stone, right? And clearly it's more versatile, but I just haven't really had an opportunity to use it because by the time that had come

[23:08] out, I'd already invested in a bunch of stone and I cooked a bunch of them, but I have one now. I haven't really used it yet. I going to see whether or not I like it when I fire up my oven next time, but, you know, they

[23:18] they did a lot of testing and they have a lot of testimonials around it, and people are now selling those, uh, those metal uh, things at the, at the houseware store. So, you know, clearly, clearly it must have some efficacy. Yeah, um, sounds like it, but I'm wondering if it's too much for, it sounds good for pizza where you want, want it quick

[23:40] and, and, and ban to, to, to deliver all that heat, but I'm wondering if for bread, it might be too much, and it would, uh,

[23:47] would, which are the bottom, do you think? I don't know. You know, I don't think it'll char the bottom because it's never going to reheat up over the top of your initial of your oven temperature. So, you know, if you're, if you have, you know, depending on how you cook, how you bake, you know, if you,

[24:01] uh, you know, if you use a ramping temperature. So if you're one of those people that starts a little bit higher and then ramps down a little bit,

[24:08] the stone will never I mean, the metal will never heat above your oven temperature. Do you know what I'm saying? What it will do is deliver that initial oven temperature for

[24:19] longer to the bottom of your crust than any other technique will.

[24:25] A stone will deliver a more, will deliver heat for longer, but once it's depleted, will not heat back up to oven temperatures as quickly or at

[24:36] all. You know what I mean? Right, right. Okay, this has been really, really helpful. Um, I'll, I'll let you know what I end up going, going with and and see what happens. All right, cool. Let us know. All right. Thanks. Have a good week. bye Are you too. Bye. Thomas Voe wrote in at Cooking Issues. Clarifying with Agar. Agar, my favorite clarification seaweed. You ever notice Agar is like the one thing where like we say Agar, but like a lot of people technically say Agar, Agar, like they say it twice. The hydrocolloid's so nice. They named it twice. Agar, Agar. Stas hates working with Agar, don't you? I do. I do. Remember that time we had to do all that grapefruit and we did a freestyle on it and then it didn't work? And so then we had to do, we had to, we had to do like quick

[25:20] Agar on like gallons and gallons and gallons and gallons of grapefruit. And then we were spinning that sucker in the centrifuge and trying to pour it off. And then we kept on having to re-spin it to get yield because our yield wasn't good

[25:31] enough and we needed to get that crap out and we had that event. Yeah. And you remember, what do you say to me? I'm never doing this again. I believe that's what starts. It's like 3 years ago. Yeah, you're like, I'm never doing this again. Yeah. You're like, as for clarification, Dave. Not me. I won't do it. You don't mind SPL, though. You would do Justino. Yeah, I'm fine with that. Yeah. Okay. Clarifying with Agar, juice has a funny medicinal taste, post-clarify. Is this normal from Agar, any brand name recommendations? Thanks. Well, I only use telephone brand Agar. Actually, that's true. I do only use telephone brand Agar. But that's because you can buy telephone brand Agar from grocery

[26:13] stores, like Asian grocery stores. Now I have that. Oh my gosh, I have that Spotify, the news thing going on my head, Asian grocery store. Anyways, the, uh, but the thing is, uh, you know, you can use any

[26:24] Agar, as long as you get used to it, I wouldn't use the prehydrated ones or the ones that don't require boiling because although I haven't used them, I know friends of mine who've had bad luck with them.

[26:33] The, I've never had an off taste for Agar, to be honest. What I would do is taste your, literally taste the agar powder and see whether or not you're getting any sort of off taste. What I think is happening is this. The taste of juices changes sometimes quite

[26:51] radically when you clarify them. So what's most likely happening, because you don't specify what kind of juice that you're using, is that there are some flavor, that this medicinal flavor was present already in the juice, but was being masked by another flavor that was removed by clearly a better flavor,

[27:14] that was removed by the agar. So just to give you an idea, when you agar clarify orange juice, the remaining orange juice, tastes, the clarified stuff tastes like

[27:25] Sunny D, right? So if you like Sunny D, then I guess that's good, but, you know, most people want orange juice to taste like orange juice and not like, I actually haven't

[27:34] decided, I think it tastes more like Sunny D than like Tang. Have you tasted his dust? Did you drink tang growing up? No. What about Sunny D? Do you like Sunny D? Because you grew up with it. Yeah. So anyways, so that's my feeling. So when you clarify, grapefruit juice with Agar. Um, it appears to get much sweeter. It's not actually getting sweeter. It's just an orringian and some of the bitter components have been stripped from it by the agar. So my guess is that it's not the brand of Agar you're using. It's the fact that there's flavors getting stripped out of it. But I could be wrong. Taste, taste the agar. I'm a big believer in tasting a lot of these things at least once to see kind of what's going on. And some hydrocoloids definitely do add a flavor to it. But think about it. When you're clarifying with Agar, you're adding 2 grams per liter. That's two tenths of one% of Agar. Uh, and you could add, you know,

[28:27] 2 grams of straight acid, for instance, wouldn't change, uh, wouldn't make a liter of product that acidic.

[28:37] You know what I mean? Lime juice for reference is around 6% acidity. And this is too tenths of one% or 10 times 30 times less acid that's in lime juice.

[28:47] It's the equivalent of putting one ounce of lime juice into a liter of liquid. anyway. So I doubt that, and that's a very strong asset. So I'm doubting that you're getting the flavor transfer off it, but I could be wrong. Things like methocell. You stand tend to start tasting once the percentages get, you know, up into the one% range, things like this, you know, eight tenths of a percent or one%, things like

[29:11] guar, which can have a very beanie taste. If you don't get the good one, Uh, fracking guar. Uh, it, you know, that can have a beanie taste that you can taste when you get over about half a percent,

[29:22] but, um, not Agar. haven't had a problem with it. Oh, unless you're using those weird, like, unpurified, like,

[29:29] Agar flakelets, which might have, God knows what kind of, like, seaweed residue left in them. just make sure you're buying the powder, the powder. Uh, white powder. Should we take a break? We'll take a break, come back back with cooking issues.

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[31:27] healthy, liquid, fine yellow fat. Heritage Foods USA is the only place you can taste these special heritage birds. Order today at heritagefoodsusa.com. Fine yellow fat. Back with cooking issues. one excited you, huh? Yeah. Well, good. Anytime you got banjo music, banjo music's the best. I thought it was the chickens that excited. Well, it's chickens plus banjos. How do you beat chickens plus banjos, especially coming off of a cockfighting bust? Impossible. Hey, Dave, by the way, we were at the Eat Drink Bloody Mary competition again this year. Oh yeah? And I enjoyed the Booker Index kind of, was it, pineapple curry? This is a wacky Bloody Mary you guys had there. Did you like it? I liked it. Our bartender, our bartender, Austin, that that was his creation. The only thing I helped them with is they were having some problem in the mid-palates. I had him put a little tomato paste in to round out the mid palate. But, yeah, it did not win. I heard it did not win. Who won? Uh, the, the judge's choice went to Dover, and then the people's choice went to extra fancy, which was like, it's funny, the people's choice went to the the most classic kind of standard Bloody Mary. And I was like, of course, of course. Where does the line sit, you know, like when does what you're making cease to be a Bloody Mary? Or for that matter, any classic cocktail, right? Look, like, like, the thing is, is anything that you do, if you're going to do classic, you know, you're going to, you're going to do

[32:52] classic. when people want the crap that they're that they're used to. That's why like every year, like last year, you know, we did the, we did the tomato soup with the, with this grilled cheese sandwich, um,

[33:03] for, for the Bloody Mary. And people in general want, you know, they want what they want,

[33:10] but they, what they, what they're used to. It's kind of sad, but like unless they're specifically going someplace to have it reinvented, people in general just kind of

[33:18] want the one that won, the judge's choice, was it wildly different? It was pretty different. What was it? It had some kind of weird spices in it. I don't there were a lot to taste. I remember it being one of the funkier ones though. But I mean, it's like, is it even a Bloody Mary anymore at that point, you know? Well, I mean, these contests, right? Like, here's the thing. Look, let's say you were gonna make a contest. People in general, they like a good store. This is contest now. They like a good story and you have to reinvent it. Otherwise, what's the point? Like, it's not about, let's get let's get 5 people in the room will all make the same daiquiri

[33:56] specs, and you'll see who makes the best daiquiri. You know what I mean? Bloody Mary is a good one for people because everyone has their own. It's kind of like barbecue sauce. Everyone has like, they're like, well, my barbecue sauce, exactly how much brown sugar and

[34:09] and, you know, other stuff and do I put in, you know, whatever, molasses, whatever, vinegar. It's like because they're all roughly same, but people are like, you know, violently proud of their particular mix of the same ingredients that the next fella

[34:24] uses. Or they're like, I add this one special ingredient that makes mine radically

[34:28] different. It's not really radically different. They're all fairly similar. You know what I mean? And so when in contests like that, there's kind of different ways you can

[34:36] go in a Bloody Mary contest, there's the radical difference idea and then there's, you know, where you take, hey, I'm doing a spicy tomato-based

[34:43] cocktail. Now, where can I go with that? that totally different, you know? Or you could say, I'm going to go, you know, with a very similar concept, but then I'm going to add like my special pickle to it. I'm making little quotes fingers. And that's another way to, you know, that's another way to kind of handle these contests. In general, someone who does something that has a flavor profile fairly similar

[35:05] to what people are used to tends to win. Uh, you know, if you have like a little bit of, like, you know,

[35:14] flare added to it, like, great. But, um, at least that's been my been my experience. Yeah, funny to see, like, I don't like Bloody Mary. So all the ones that I was voting for were the ones that didn't taste like Bloody Mary's. Wow. You don't like Bloody Mary's? are you having as a Bloody Mary? I don't know. It's like a meal. Like to me. Like a meal. Yeah. Besides, you like bloody Mary's? Not really. Right? For real? Is it because you don't like, what don't you like about them? It's like a meal. Just heavy. Yeah. I mean, I hate most kind of gloopy, uh, gloopy drinks, but that's the one that gets a pass for me. I don't like, I'm part of this new thing that we're all starting where you don't have to eat them at night. I don't think you necessarily need to have the, the, the, I mean, sorry, in the morning. I think you can have one at night, even though we started the bar with uh, with a drink called um, Lady of the Night, which was a Bloody Mary that was clarified so that you could drink it at

[36:15] night. I think you could drink it during the day. Let's not forget, someone asked me this the other day. And, you know, I remember when I was a kid, you weren't supposed to have gin and tonics in the

[36:24] wintertime. It was summertime only. It was the equivalent of where, which is the, which is the uh, holiday that ends the uh, summer stars. Is it labor? Labor Day? You know how you're not supposed to wear white after Labor Day? Anyone remember this? Yeah. Yeah. So it was the same way with gin and tonics. You weren't supposed to order gin and tonic after Labor Day either. It's kind of when you can wear white is when you can also order gin and tonic, right? I mean, I never wear white, but the, the, that's the point. But that taboo is gone. I mean, no one has a stigma now walking into a bar and ordering a gin and tonic any time of year. People don't even think of it as a seasonal drink anymore. And so I think the Bloody Mary might be going that way where it's not only seen as, you know, kind of

[37:05] a morning thing. I mean, think when you think about it, people can order a corpse survivor whenever they want. A corpse survivor is meant to be a little hair of the dog that bit you for like heavily alcohol infused people in the morning.

[37:16] Anyway. Wait, Jack, we got a caller? Call her, you're on the air. Hey, Dave, it's me, Don Lee. Hey, Don Lee. I'm calling in to remind you that you are bar backing for us on Sunday at a

[37:28] MoFed fundraiser at the Golden Cadillac. That is true. That is true. From what time? 5 p.m. to. 5 p.m. until 7 p.m. We going to do $8 cocktails, courtesy of Perno Ricard, and all proceeds will be going to the Museum of Food and

[37:43] Drink. Are we getting, uh, are we getting Missy Elliott to recut, uh, get your freak on with get your drink on for that or is that later? I think that's going to be the next fundraiser. next fundraiser? Get your peek on. Get your drink on. That'd be great though, right? Yeah, this time you get to come harass me and John Deragon bartending together for the 1st time in 3 years, and he's going to make some Malibu drinks. I'm going to make some cluid drinks and we're going to, you know, we're going to apply molecules to make a bad cocktails taste good. Oh sweet, sweet. Well, you know, I hate molecules. I don't like them because I don't like matter. I don't like existence. So I detest all forms of molecules. But what was the last time, what was it 3 years ago? What did you guys do 3 years ago? We were at a PDP. We opened PDT together. That was only 3 years ago? That was, well, we opened PDP 5 years ago. That was only 5 years ago? Yeah. Can you believe that? That was only 5 years ago. It seems like 8 lifetimes ago. Yep. So yeah, Don Lee and John Daragon were the opening team at PDT and brought you such drinks as the Bentons, what was it,

[38:41] Bentons? What do you call that drink? Benton's old fashioned. Yeah, with the with the fat washed, uh, the fat washed, uh, With the fat washed bourbon. Benton's bacon into 4 roses yellow label. And for the record, you're allowed to totally do bacon infuse whatever you want. I'm not going to give you shit about that. No, but I'm not, I will never do it. I won't, like you guys own that. It's like, in fact, in the cocktail book, like the, the Maria made me put a fat washed, uh, that's my editor. made me put a fat wash drink in. And so I did a take on, Do you remember, you know, Tona Palomino, who was a WD 50 is now doing bar in Chicago? He had a drink on the menu at WD called Old School back in like

[39:19] 07. And old school was fat washed, what's it called? What's that stuff called? Peanut butter. But it was, uh, he did it enfourage style. He would like spread a thin layer of peanut butter on the bottom of a hotel pan and then pour the stuff on top and then they would let it sit in the fridge forever because he was going to carbonate it so he couldn't he couldn't mix it in because because peanut butter has a lot of stuff that dissolves into liquid and

[39:44] doesn't doesn't cap out the way bacon does, right? And so, uh, yeah, so he did that and then he would mix in uh, Welch's grape jelly and then carbonate it, which is awesome, right? So I did I did a take on that one because I figured, you know, PB and J. And so many other people have ripped on the, on the bacon thing that like, you know, I could, I couldn't add like another,

[40:04] there was, there was no places left on the page to tear. I couldn't rip on it anymore. You know what I mean? Uh, so anyway, but yeah, so for those of you, uh, you know, you should come and the reteemed original PDT team,

[40:17] OGPDT, right? Don Lee, for those of you that, uh, don't keep track of Don Lee's career, as I'm sure most of you do, uh, is now uh, doing the bar

[40:27] program, was, is it cocktail kingdom, uh, but is now doing the bar program. Is that temporary or is that permanent? It's permanent. And so I'm still a cocktail kingdom and then I'm also doing Golden Cadillac. No, I mean Golden Cadillac. permanent bar program or that's temporary? Permanent bar program. Okay. So Donnelly is now running the bar program at Golden Cadillac, which is a fine bar on 1st and 1st here

[40:45] in, it's the easiest address to remember in the world. 1st and first. I couldn't remember what the street was. First and first, Golden Cadillac, and you got the awesome menus with

[40:55] like the really poorly done 70s style cutouts of the drinks on the back. I like that. We're trying to keep it classy. It's totally, totally classy. You can go there and get an overproof daiquiri with telling the garnish down. A disco ball. the disco daiquiri. Yeah, I have I have a couple of those. They're a little, you shouldn't. can you, like, in the future, there, I think they're key rings, right? Can you get them instead with, um, with like those, uh, those cheap earrings settings on them so

[41:21] that, so that the people can wear them as earrings on the way out? Well, we're going to get the new, instead of being the regular key ring. We're getting the key ring that's more like a carabiner, so they'll just clip on the side, so you can clip it onto whatever you want. Oh, nice. All right. I'll have to come back and get some more get some more stuff. So come to the Golden Cadillac on 1st and 1st on Sunday, Sunday, Sunday, where I will be plying my

[41:42] bar back skills between 5 and 7 p.m. for the museum of food and drink,

[41:47] bar backing for the great John Daragon and Don Lee. Right? Sounds great. All right, dude. All right, brother. Anything else or just doing some business? Uh, I got I got one other thing to chime in on last week's uh, podcast or a show that you guys did. Uh, since you give away all your great secrets. I'll give you one of my secrets. For the person who wanted to know how to get to the different science resources and on the

[42:10] internets that are behind a paywall. Oh, yeah, okay, good. Yeah, okay, good. So if you are part of a major city library system like the New York public library or, you know, Los Angeles Public Library, any of these big city ones, they usually have a sharing system with

[42:23] the university library. So you can usually request a book from a university library and they'll just send it to your local library so you can borrow it for some fixed amount of time. However, if there is a reference book that the library that at the university does not lend out, they will give you a one

[42:38] time, one day pass to go into the university library to see the reference book. So most science, um, journals are considered a reference book, and so they're not lent out. But if you look up on any university library system, you know, let's say NYU or Columbia, for example, here in New York City, through the New York

[42:57] public library system, they will carry all the journals, probably not even physical form, probably in digital

[43:02] form. But if you get the one time pass, once you're in the library, now you're behind the paywall, now you can do whatever you want, you know, what I do is just go in for a day, scrape every article I can, follow all the links, all the different

[43:14] references, and then I'll just read them in my spare time later. Strong advice from Don Lee. Also, by the way, Don and, well, even John and his current life are kind of, like, computer data nerds. Am I right about this? Former life. pulling me back in. Pulling you back in. But that's why that's why you should, well, I'm, I'm, I'm giving that as reason why they should know the tip. And by the way, Don Lee, a tip from Don Lee is a

[43:41] guarantee, because the man always, like, whenever there's a question and, like, you need some sort of hookup, you just ask

[43:49] Don, because he's already figured the hookup. Am I right? You know, I'm prepared for the zombie apocalypse. Yeah, dude, this is one of the things that you guys have to know about Don Lee. If I could give you one piece of advice on this podcast, is make friends with Don Lee, seriously. All right, Don, I'll see you on Sunday, brother. See you soon All right. Okay, so we had a question in from Paris, France. Two or 3 weeks ago, you had 2 separate questions on one, vegetable can soup that has to be heated for a lot of pasteurization, which affects the flavor, and two, how beer and soda cans are better at keeping the carbonation than plastic bottles

[44:21] are. But doesn't soda canning require both cold temperatures to preserve carbonations and the same level of hygiene pasteurization as

[44:28] soup. I didn't do answer this question already? Okay. In that case, would it be possible to can vegetable soup at a low enough temperature so that we don't kill the flavors and respect appropriate food safety procedures? Do I miss some fundamental differences into 2 type of processes, best and keep up the good works, Stan B? Yeah, yes, very, very different. Here's the deal. So, um, when you are, when you have

[44:52] a, a beer, uh, and soda, right, and a can, there, anytime you have, uh, soda, uh, the carbonation in the soda is acting to do the vast majority of the work when it comes to, um, when it comes to killing off bacteria, because carbon dioxide is extremely

[45:16] bacteriostatic, right? So, in addition to that, a lot of times old school sodas that can't be pasteurized at all,

[45:23] have, bends a little bit of sodium benzoate added to it, sometimes potassium

[45:29] sorbet, and they're added as preservatives primarily not to stop dangerous things from growing because ain't nothing dangerous going to grow inside of

[45:36] that because of the carbon dioxide. But to prevent yeast from growing and converting the sugar to alcohol and causing the flavors of the thing to go off, right? That's the primary function. And that's why you pasteurize products, like sodas and whatnot. But you don't have to do a sterilization on

[45:55] soda, or on a beer, the same way you would have to, so you don't have to go to the same high pressures or

[46:02] temperatures, which are related to pressure. You don't have to go to the same high temperatures on a beer because it's enough to kill the yeast,

[46:10] right? Because you're not really worried about the bacteria, but to kill the yeast and any vegetative stuff because no spores are going to generate inside of the product. Now, spools, the spools. But on the other hand, if you have soup, right, you need to heat it to a high enough temperature, canning temperatures so that you can get everything in there dead because you're going to keep it

[46:33] at on shelf temperature for God knows how long and you can't have nasty anaerobic things growing inside of there, like botulism, which could cause the cans to blow up and whatnot and kill you. You know, the can blow it up. That's what I'm worried about first. The camp blowing up. No, kill you. Uh, so in general, so does our acidic, which is going to prevent things like that from happening

[46:53] and um, fill with carbon dioxide, which definitely is going to prevent things like that happening. So they're fundamentally, um, they're fundamentally uh, different for pasteurization problem from uh, the soup. Yeah? Yeah. All right. I was like, I got some more questions in on of the Twitter. Where is it? Where is it? Oh, so this from EC North America. By the way, they now go just by EC, not EC or ISI. They just launched the rapid infusion kit that, uh, they say, they say new EC rapid infusion kit just launched, inspired by the creator, brainchild of rapid infusion at cooking issues, and they

[47:34] send a Twitter feed out of it. Let's see what it looks like. You want to see what it looks like? I was like, nah, nah, don't really care. Nah. No. inspired. Oh, my gosh. you're gonna take the look of it. take a look at stats. You can't see it on the line, but we can post a picture of it. Does the little rubber thing freak you out a little bit? Yeah. I mean, you know, I love the I love the EC, but it's looking a little bit like a sex toy there. Jack, you got to look that up and throw that up on our thing. Last week, we had a question and for some reason, I can't find my old questions. But we had a question on parchment paper and talking about parchment paper and kind of what it is and what's the difference between all the different kinds of parchment paper.

[48:11] So I'll talk a little bit about that now. The thing about parchment papers is a lot of people, and no one probably who no one will know. Remember that? That was a no one will know that's a psychic friends network, but who did that? That was Jay Moore who did the Psychic Friends Network, pretending to be Christopher Walken. And Travis, my brother-in-law is shooting the, the, you know, the cocktail book. He, uh, he started saying that to me over and over again. So now, like, whenever anyone says that, we, we, I love, like, how many times in my life, do we imitate the fake imitation of somebody else, right? So I'm not even doing Christopher Walken. I'm doing Jay Moore doing Christopher Walken. Christopher Walken. Todd Bridges can be at your house, in your driveway, no one will know. Uh, the theory of that was that a bunch of whack jobs. Todd Ridges actually was a nice guy. I met him. Remember we did that show that time? They were having me doing about safety or something like this and low temp, meat glue and safety. Remember when that big thing was going around and everyone was worried about it? And we did some show. Fox or something like this and Todd Bridges was on. Sweet dude. Sweet dude. Todd Bridges, Willis, by the way, for those of you that don't remember the good, the different strokes. You watch different strokes? No. Really? Not at all? Nope. What about you, Jack? Sorry, no, I don't. What the hell? Like, like, I feel like, you guys had entirely different childhoods from the than the one I had. Anyway. So, uh, partially. So a lot of people mistake, uh, wax paper for parchment. You guys don't make that mistake. You would never make that mistake, right? If I ask you for parchment paper, you'd never show up with wax paper, right? Because coated with what? Wax, wax. Parsion paper is meant to cook with wax paper is great. I love wax paper. I can't tell you how many people confuse wax paper and parchment, which is ridiculous. The other one, you know what people do? People are like, tonic water doesn't have any sugar in it because it's like salsa, right? Wrong. tonic water has as much sugar in it as a regular soda does as much. around 10% sugar. You ever make that mistakes out? You never made that mistake. Jack, would you ever make that mistake? No. No. They're like, I'm not going to say it. they said, I don't want to deal with it. So, most parsion paper that you buy nowadays, and by that, I mean, I buy Reynolds brand, typically, is coated with silicone. And that's really where a lot of the non-stickness of it comes from. Now, what I don't know about parchment paper. I wasn't able to do anything kind of big on it is that I would use parchment paper on my pizzas all the time. The only issue is, is that my pizza oven would get well above the decomposition temperatures of

[50:45] silicone. And so I'm wondering whether or not it was actually kind of a bad idea to put the

[50:50] partial paper into a place where it's going to get, you know, fundamentally incinerated. It used to be if I didn't cut. I would have to cut the partial paper all around the pizza dough and load it in because the stuff around the sides would catch on

[51:01] fire otherwise. You know, the stuff right underneath the pizza had the pizza protected, so it's not going to get

[51:05] burnt and it separates great. But the separate separates great. What about I? I'm speaking, it separates well. But the, it's great. Uh, but the uh, uh, so it's the silicone, the silicone impregnated silicone that has at

[51:17] work. All the parsing papers that I use have that silicone. There's a new partion paper out there that has aluminum bonded to one side of it. So it's aluminum foil on one side and parsion on the other, and it's sold as baking pan liners, and theoretical advantage of it is it lays a lot flatter than parsion paper does. But I can't really tell you whether, whether, you know, how awesome it is. I used it and all I noted was that it was a lot more expensive than the other stuff. But in general, I'm a big fan of parchment paper, and I hope that helps a little a bit. Okay, I found my other questions from last week. William McGee wrote in. I't answer about French fry cutters, did I? William McGee wrote in and said, do you have any recommendations for French fry cutters for home use? I've seen models both horizontal and vertical. Also, on the Kickstarter for this year is all. You had a recipe book available to higher level backers. Will you have this recipe book available separately at a later date for purchase? Thanks, William McGee, Stas, will we? Yes. You've made that up? Yes. Yes. Okay. So French fry cutters. I here's the deal. Avoid any plastic French fry cutter. Just avoid them, because why? They're going to break. They are useless, right? Uh, the French fry cutter that I use. Uh, looks horror looks is the one that's kind of vertically mounted. I use it horizontally unmounted because I haven't had a place to mount my French fry cutter in years. Um, But I like that, I like that style, the vertical mounted style with

[52:48] the with the thing in the front that looks like, uh, what does it look like? It hard to describe. It's got like a swoopy handle. You've seen my French recorder, right? It's got a swoopy handle, and it's made, that's made of cast metal, and then the whole thing's bolted together with, I think, 38 inch screws, and holds the cutting plate in the front, and there's like a

[53:04] V-shaped, like kind of sliding chute, and then a plunger on

[53:10] it. The plunger actually engages the blades, right? And you need to replace the blades every once in a while because they get they get dull. But I use that thing and I can slam through... Now,

[53:22] see, I can slam through £10 of potatoes with it in like 2.5 , 3 minutes,

[53:28] like bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Now the best, the best, is to have it mounted on a wall, right? Here's what you do. You have it mounted on a wall, and then you have your peeled potatoes in one container, like a hotel pan full of

[53:42] water, and then you have a hotel pan of water directly underneath the French fry cutter. And this is why the wall mounted one is great. You have it directly underneath it, and then you load the potatoes and you cut them directly into the water. bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, and it stops you from getting a lot of discoloration, right? In between the cutting time, or if you're going to do a soap before you cook them, between the cutting time, and

[54:03] the and doing the initial water blanch, assuming you do a water blanch, I'm assuming you do. Uh, you know, also, as they make different size cutters, but I've never used a shoestring one. I use 38s or slightly larger half inch cutting rings for mine. I have 2 plates for mine. Anyways, so cutting into water like that is fantastic and it's so neat. It means there's so little mess, right? So typical my whole French fry production. for the cutting standpoint is, put them in the sink, fill the sink with water, throw the potatoes in, stir them around with my hands, knock off all of the loose dirt, you know, roll them around in there, pull, pull the, pull the plug, get a hotel pan, peel, you know, peel over a

[54:44] bowl with some, with some running water, rinse it off, throw them into water. Now they're peeled and you've made sure you've gotten all of the, the reason to peel your fries, by the way, 2 reasons. I know it's nutritionally a bad idea to peel fries. Do you peel your stuff before you make fries? You don't like fries. forget you. Do you like baked potatoes? Anyway. So I like the taste of the skin. right? But when you're doing French fries. The skin kind of never gets as crunchy as the rest of the stuff. I mean, I like I like them jacketed fries, but I like potato skins that have been cooked super crunchy. The other problem is, is that potatoes, I don't know what the potatoes you guys get, but potatoes I get potatoes. The potatoes that I get always have some, like some bad spots underneath, you can't see. And commercially, what they do is they spray potatoes with high pressure water and it eats away all the soft parts. But I hate getting those. So when you peel them, you can see them. Jack, what's your feeling? skin on or skin off the skin on. Ah, man. Jesus. Uh, but why? Because you like the taste of the skins. You know they're not as crunchy. You realize they're not as crunchy. And that's okay. okay with it. Yeah, I like the taste. Yeah? Prove me wrong. The taste, the taste. No, I understand why you did it. By the way, I'm doing today's show in chaps, chaps, chaps. I'm wearing cow chaps. I'm going to steal these suckers, Jack. Yeah, I think you should. Yeah. So anyway, so you take the potatoes and you now you have them in water in a hotel pan and they're not turning to crap. They're not turning anything because they're in water and it's getting the last, it's getting the starch off the outside and it's getting the last of the dirt off thing to the bottom. Then your next hotel pan, bap, bap, bap, bap, bap, cut them right into it and you get going that way. Otherwise, it gets messy and things get everywhere and it's a pain in the butt. That the best way to do it. So I would go with the one that's meant to be mounted vertically. If you cannot mount it for some reason, like you don't have the space, I still use that style, but you have to develop a certain, uh, there's a certain skill to using that thing, uh, when it's not

[56:38] mounted because it's a pain in the butt. It involves like holding the handle and then holding the base in such a way that you don't grip yourself and jerking forward and back at the same time and pounding the potatoes out.

[56:48] And I've gotten so used to it that it doesn't really slow me down to not have it mounted, but, you know, I'm hoping to mount it in my

[56:54] new, my new joint. I haven't mounted it yet. It's still in the drawer, but I love it. I love cutting french fries and I love french fries. You know what's nice? Of all the things, biscuits and whatnot, French fries might be the weirdest thing that you don't like, you know? I already answered Paul's question on which curious cook one to buy, right? Yep. All right. See that right? Well, actually I'm about to get kicked off the... Hey, before we close the show, I want to put an open call out for another theme song. I think it's that time. All right. It's been a while. Did I answer last week, Rodney's question on coconut flour or not? don't think so. I have time or not? Not really. Oh man. Unless you can go to it in 2 minutes. All right, I'm going to do in 2 minutes. Rodney, Rodney, here we go. This is Rodney from Amsterdam, the Netherlands. In a low-car period of my life. I purchased a bunch of coconut flour. It's not really flour, and I'm glad you're done with your low carb period. I've been trying for a while to make crepes with it, but I have not succeeded so far. Crape batter with 50% wheat flour and 50% coconut flour works, but anything over that fails. The coconut flour simply can't hold together, and I'm unable to even flip it without tearing the crepe. I'd like to make crapes with just a coconut flour. The composition of the coconut flour is as follows. then you give me the moisture 3.6, as 3.one, fat 10.9 protein, 12.one, and then balance carbs. So it contains almost no gluten, almost no starch, plus it absorbs very large amounts of water. My theory is that the carbohydrated protein network cannot be formed because there's 2 little starch and no gluten at all. I'm tribe adding, pure gluten, Xanthan gum, and more eggs, not all at the same time, but to no avail. Do you have any theories? Thanks a lot. Yeah, coconut flour doesn't work the same way a normal coconut flour does. coconut does. I would if you want to cook with coconut flowers. There's a bunch of books available specifically for coconut flour. I dont own them, but you can check out cooking with coconut flour, a delicious low-carb gluten-free alternative to wheat, a paperback by Bruce Fife that you can get on the Amazon. And he's like the, he's the head of like the coconut institute and he does everything with coconut. But I looked up a bunch of, and you look on Rob's, Bob's Red Mill? What it called? You know what I'm talking about? Bob's Red Mill. He has a bunch of coconut flour recipes, and a video on coconut flour recipe, but having looked up a bunch of them on the thing. stuff just doesn't hold together. So they recommend normally only subbing in about 20% to a normal recipe. If you want to go ahead and use only coconut flour. What they're fundamentally doing is making things that are eggs. It's just eggs. It's like set egg loaves, and the coconut flour is just there to make it not taste like eggs, and to give it the feeling that it's made like a normal baked good. So if you want to do crepes, or crepe style thing, what I would do is this. I would whip up egg whites into a meringue, fold the coconut flour into

[59:24] it, and then if you, or and then if you need to, or maybe do this. If you wanted a little bit denser, I would mix the egg yolks in with the coconut flour, whip the egg whites to soft peaks, stir them in quickly, and then pour them out, and bake them like that, and see if it

[59:38] works, because everything that I've read relies on ridiculous amounts of

[59:42] eggs. Cooking issues.

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