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[0:46] Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of cooking. Ashley coming to you live from a Birth of 33 in Bushwick, Brooklyn, on the Heritage Radio Network, every Tuesday from roughly 12 to roughly 1245, Some of that, guess who we have in the engineering booth with us today, Stas? Joe. Joe. Joe, how you doing? I'm doing great So it's filling in for Jack today. Joe coming back for a guest slot in the engineering, but it turns

[1:13] out we thought that he just hated us and that's why he left, but turns out maybe that's not the case. Yeah, I'm here to say I'm sorry. That's what I'm here for. Oh, nice. How's the, you know, Joe's Joe's front man for a band. The big ups. How big ups doing? Good, good. That was part of the reason why I was gone. I was on tour for a whole month in Europe and it was great,

[1:31] but so now I'm now I'm here. tour's over and I'm back where I started. Hello, everyone. Where's the, where in Europe did you tour? It was UK for a week and then the Netherlands and Germany, Austria, Czech Republic, Belgium, yeah, all over

[1:48] the place. Oh, so a couple things. One, where the Dutchess tall is there, as everyone says they are? There were a few very tall, slender Dutch men that I met, yes. Yeah, nah, nah. That's what that's one of the things they're known for. That, the wooden shoes, the licorice. Yes. Actually, probably the best food also that I ate. Really? Yeah, surprisingly. They actually, most of the countries we went, they didn't really eat green things at all. So that was good to get some nice fresh vegetables. All right, now, when you played in Belgium, did you cover Bedlam in Belgium? No, unfortunately. Maybe next time. Yeah, next time. We're going back. Yeah, that's that, I think for all you ACDC fans, I believe Bedlam in Belgium might be, what is that?

[2:32] Is that on flick of the switch? What that on? Anyway, it's not one of the better loved or better known ACDC songs, but I love any, like anything where, you know, ACDC is like crap on the cops in

[2:44] Belgium, stopping me from playing a show. Yeah, they wrote a whole song about it. Yeah, yeah. Bedlam in Belgium, and they don't pronounce it Belgium. They were like, bed, lamb, and Belgium. Unfortunately, we're not allowed to play that for you since we don't play copywritten material anymore, but before you ACDC fans out there. You know, a lot of people give ACDC crap because, like, a lot of their music sounds the same. I mean, assuming, you know, all right, Bon Scott, the original singer died and then you got your, you know, your Brian Johnson afterwards, right? But aside from that, like, where it's like, well, all the music sounds the same, but then, you know, Angus, who's, you know, you know, uh, you know, their guitars

[3:19] there and, you know, one of the guys has been there the whole time. He's like, well, if it sounded different, it wouldn't be an ACDC song, would it? You know what I mean? Yeah, what do you, what do you want from ACDC besides ACDC? Yeah, I don't want, I mean I don't need ACDC to do a Neil Young song or a Neil

[3:34] Diamond song for that matter. Neither of those things needs to happen. ACDC can just be ACDC all the time. And I think that's, you know, that's kind of good enough, don't you think? I agree. Yeah. All right. So, uh, calling your questions to 718-497-2128. 718-497-2128. Oh hey, I didn't say how it does yet. How you doing? What's going on? Nothing. That's a lie. I was just doing our expenses and I saw the smoke detector expense. Oh, yeah, we had to, in order to get insured as a company, even though it's just

[4:05] Stas and I working there, and really no one cares if we go up and above the smoke or not, but in order for an insurance company

[4:11] to, uh, to, you know, rate us. We had to put smoke detectors in our space, right? And unfortunately, fortunately, our ceilings are like, what, like 12 feet tall? We're tall, you know, typical New York, like, you know, tall storefront kind of a situation. And uh, so I was like, oh, this is going to end poorly. So I install one downstairs, it has like a 3 foot ceiling and then upstairs where you have the 12 foot ceiling, I put one

[4:34] in. And like literally the very, I'm not 12 feet tall, by the way. a slant, tall, slender Dutchman. It's not how it works. But so, literally the very 1st thing we tried to cook, right? Like, I turned on the sear is all was like 10 seconds into putting a sear down on a steak. Weep, beep, beep, beep, beep. Thousand are like, yeah, yeah. Cooking detector, freaking cooking detector. So we smashed it off the ceiling in about 2 seconds. We put it back on. If an insurance company is listening, we put it back. Yeah, we did. ish, ish, ish. I'll tell you, what needs to happen is, there needs to be, we've had this discussion many times on the radio before, but I think one of the

[5:14] main, one of the things, Okay, here's why a lot of people don't cook. right? especially apartments here in the city, right? One, uh, they, no, they're busy or they don't know how to cook, right? That's one. Two, they don't know how to shop in a way that makes it effective or easy to cook, right? I guess maybe that's changing with the whole, you know, online delivery stuff. Do you use that stuff? No. Just for parties? No, I don't. I'm gonna use it at all. I thought you used fresh direct. I don't use it. It's like an 8 hour window. I buy what I need. I'm very efficient when I shop time wise. Like, I know exactly where all the stuff is and all the markets that I buy. I know like how to, you know, fish and shopping. Anyway, so they don't know how to shop efficiently cook fishly. But also, there's no ventilation, really, in most, in most, uh, most apartments here, and even most

[6:01] houses, ventilation is bad, and that leads to smoke, and that leads to the fact that smoke detectors go off, and people freak out about the smoke detectors. They freak out about it. Like that the smoke things are going to go off. They flip. There has to be some legal way that you can push

[6:16] like a duration button, right? Like a button that says, for the next 2 hours, I'm going to be awake and cooking. So shut up. You know what I mean? And then it automatically goes back into like full vigilance mode, you know, so that when you're sleeping, you know, burn up in, you know, in your sleep. You know what I mean? It's got to be away. But I was talking about for new things, Mark's Kickstarter, which you could talk about in a minute. Maybe we can get them on next week. Anyway, call her. you on the air. Hey, Dave. Hey, I'm Natasha, everybody. Got a question. This is Drew from Virginia. Um, I got a question about, um, you talk about adding calcium to, uh, like pickles and different things you want to keep crisp. What kind of calcium are you adding? I mean, just calcium chloride or are there other types? Right, so calcium chloride, as you know, tastes bad, but it's the cheapest form of calcium, and also the most available form of calcium. So I think a lot depends on what you're going to do. So if you're going to do like a calcium, like a calcium treatment. You can do calcium chloride for soak it along with, let's say, an enzyme like novo shape, which is the

[7:24] pectin methyl esterase, the strengthening enzyme. You could do a soak for, you know, like a day or 2 and then take it out of that, right? Or just add a small amount of chloride. If you want to add more, you can add the calcium lactate glucinate, but you're

[7:38] going to run into solubility issues, but it has no taste, taste. Whoops. Well, I'll answer the question. he'll call back. So you want to switch to, I mean, most of the time industria they're using chloride. It's, you know, very small, it penetrates quickly like salt. You can leach it back out, which is what they do when they, you know, when

[7:56] they're, when they're doing those things, they, they set things in a very high solution of calcium, where they strengthen things in a very high calcium chloride solution. And then they take it down to a much lower calcium solution for maintenance on things. So you can add a small amount of calcium that way in form of calcium chloride, but it does taste terrible. Um, You can also use pickling lime. The calcium and pickling lime is pickling is calcium hydroxide. Also, you want to do what they do with that one is they add a small amount of it. Uh, you know, well, actually you add excess because it's not very soluble. self-limiting. You soak the cucumbers in it for a while, and then you rinse it in, in, in, in fresh water, and then put it in fresh water, let it soak, then put it in fresh water, again, let it soak, and then put it again, probably in fresh water, and let it

[8:42] soak, to get rid of the excess calcium, uh, and calcium hydroxide, because they turn really, if you just soak cucumbers in excess calcium

[8:51] hydroxide solution, pickling lime solution for like a day or two. They're just, really gross, just really nasty. Remember, did you taste that that time we did that or did you refuse after the look on my face? Because the look on my face. See, I believe you should taste everything even if it's bad, just so you know how bad it is, but Stas doesn't play that game. She's like, nah, I don't care. Patrick don't care. I don't care. I don't need to know how bad it tastes. It tastes bad. So, uh, yeah, so anyway, so like, uh, in pickles, if you're going to use, um, they add, if you're going to cook something, you can add like a chloride, because then as you cook it, the, uh, the actual natural, um, enzymes, the, um, the, uh, pectin

[9:28] methylestrase enzymes that are natural in the, in the fruit will activate along with the chloride as it warms up. So that's what they do in, I don't believe they add extra enzymes to tomatoes. I think they just peel them and then can them with a little bit of calcium chloride. that's why tomatoes are so firm and canned tomatoes. That why they don't break down the way. Who are we talking to, stuff? Someone who didn't like canned tomatoes because they didn't like the fact that they didn't break down. I don't know. It was someone. I forget who it was. It was someone who got all bent, all bent, bent. Anyways. Oh, you're back? Hey. So did you hear that? Were you able to hear what I was saying when we were talking or no? Well, I'm going to, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not listening to live. I'm going to catch up with his, on the, on the archive. Which is cool? Yeah, what I said was, you know, chloride, I'd use chloride if you're going to use like an enzyme, you know,

[10:18] additive like a novo shape or something like that, or you could use pickling lime, calcium hydroxide, which you would soak

[10:25] it for a while. I think it's there's a bunch of procedures on the web for it, and then you soak it for a little while on that, but then you soak it for a couple of fresh changes of water to leach out the

[10:35] excess calcium, hydroxide, the excess calcium. The good thing about calcium hydroxide is that it's not very soluble. And so it releases calcium into the solution as it's being used by

[10:49] the, as it's being used by the pickles. So it kind of like self regulates that

[10:55] way. And then you just rinse out the rinse off the excess when you're done. So that's why I think, you know, pickling lime is fairly easy to work with. Um, but if you're going to switch to, uh, you know, a less crappy tasting

[11:06] calcium, like lactate or lactate glucinate, you're obviously you're going to have to use more of it. All right? All right, I have one more question if you got time. Sure. Um, I've got some, uh, I rendered my own lard in the fall, and this, this year was kind of screwy, and I, and I've got some leaf lard that's in the freezer, and

[11:24] it's not vacuum sealed. So I'm kind of wondering whether it might be rented or not. But I didn't know if the lard rendering process would, would

[11:32] DNA would, would just remove the rancidity or was it just done? I mean, it's just over. Yeah, no, it's if it's rancid, uh, it's over. Unless, but well, listen, it's only going to go rancid where it's in contact with oxygen, right? So like, I don't know how you packed it down. How'd you pack it down? Well, I just put it in Ziploc bags and I just tried to squeeze as much air out as possible. And as I say, it's been there since probably middle of December, so it's been there

[12:00] 1st probably 5 months. Yeah, in the freezer? Yeah, in the freezer, yeah. So, I mean, the good news is there's probably in the in the leaf lard, there's probably very little moisture. Uh, so, and and you got rid of most of the oxygen, so there's a good chance that, um, you know, that it's not ranch, but obviously,

[12:18] you, you'll know when you open the package and it comes up to temp, whether or not it's, it's rancid. And if you're lucky, it's only, you know, going to be, uh, have, you know, it won't have traveled, you know, a long distance and what I would do is just trim

[12:33] out. If you see that some of it's rancid or you smell that kind of, you know, because everyone, you know, if you cook with lard, you know what rancid lard smells like. If you if you have like some of it, I think you're going to probably be able to trim away. Because it was in a big frozen block and the air probably didn't get into, you know, you squished it down, the air is not going to get everywhere. You'll be able to trim out the places where the air got to it, and as long as it was fairly low moisture to begin with, and, you know, like there's not a lot

[12:56] of like, you know, trimming stuff on it, right? Because it's leaf. It's not like, you know, it's not trimmings, right? So, uh, right? So it's meat free, right? Yeah, well, I mean, it was the full pieces and then I, and then I kind of cut them down. I was going to process it in the middle of, and Christmas got in the way and it just kind of, everything got put off. So I just put it in the freezer. So it is chopped up. So it, but, but you're pretty much saying that if it's rancid, I will know it when I smell it. Oh, yeah, hell yeah. Yeah. And then you could trim on and like, if you're lucky, you can trim off the same way that, you know, I mean,

[13:27] it's a, in a liquid, the whole thing's going to go rancid, you know, but in a solid like that, you have a good chance that, uh, you have a good chance that it didn't, you know, travel all the way through it so that you can probably do some localized

[13:40] trimming. But you'll definitely know. You know, it's that cardboardy, have that cardboardy, rancid, you know, off spot. I don't know that I've ever smelled rancid, pork fat or, you know,

[13:53] so I mean, I'm just not sure, but the way I'm hearing it is I'll know when I smell it. All right, so you know how like, okay, so you know how like when you like cook bacon fat, right? And then you pour the bacon fat off and then you keep saving it, but you don't use it fast and it sits and it takes on that smell that's not just an overheated

[14:12] smell. that extra added smell, that like kind of off kind of cardboardy kind of smell. Like that's the rancidity in it. You know what I mean? And so if you, if you, you, you get that sort of, or like, you know how, you know, if you, uh, corn

[14:26] oil is a real good one to tell rancidity on. You know how when you get like corn oil and you, uh, and you use it once and then you pour it back in the bottle and then it sits there and it's only half, you know, full and then you open it a couple months later and you

[14:38] smell it, it's got that that smell, that kind of dusty cardboardy kind of thing.

[14:43] Like, that's the rancidity on that. And so, uh, you know, you're not going to get, you know, even if there were a bunch of meat stuff in there when it's frozen, it's not

[14:51] going to go bad on you. It's not going to go, you know, it's not going to be, and it's not going to get that funky. It's not going to get that funky age smell that you get off of like aged fat either. It's gonna, it's just gonna be, uh, you know, it's either gonna be fresh or it's gonna have that kind of rancid, uh, you know, kind of aroma and and taste. And, you know, what you could do also is just take a,

[15:13] because it's going to be a lot easier to tell on a, uh, because a little bit of acidity is good on like cured meat, you know what I mean? Like we're used to it. So I would, I would, you know, trim off anything that obviously looks kind of

[15:24] discolor or messed up and then cut off a small piece, render it out, and then the best

[15:30] way I can tell for measuring oil is get a piece of not flavorful, like white

[15:35] bread and soak up the oil with the white bread, liquid, you know, a little bit warm and taste it.

[15:41] And if it tastes fresh, it's good to go. Okay, good. All right? Next bunch. All right, good luck with it. All right, thanks. Bye. Bye. So, Stas, Mark, Mark Ladner just came out with his kickstarter. Kickstarter. How's he doing so far? Good. Yeah? Yeah. he asking for? He's asking for 85 and he has 35. Yeah, what does he really want though? Uh, 85. Oh, come on. It's not a little lie to me. I think he wants I think 85 is fine. What he really wants is, you know, a lot. Yeah, here's the thing. People don't know about the Kickstarter, is like when people when we so when you do a Kickstarter, you know, as we know, because we did it, and by the way, not for nothing, we're getting close to getting the stuff shipped in, it's going to be, we're very close to getting the

[16:24] seers alls on the water. We're going to give big updates on the seers when they actually are on the water. which should be very, very soon. But that's not what I was talking about. When you're doing a Kickstarter, you like the worst thing to happen is that you don't reach it. So you have to set your goals low enough so that you know you can reach it, right? And it's also, like, somehow, like, in terms of the mentality of it, people really like, uh, people really like it when you go way over. So you actually like, you know, we were trying to choose a number that we thought we could beat rather handily.

[16:57] You know what I mean? But then it's like this weird thing where you want to choose number solo. People are like, oh, they got it already. I don't need to go on. It's like a really weird psychology with Kickstarter. You know what I mean? So you want to tell, do you want to have him on? How long is a Kickstarter? It's till July 4th or fourth? Does he want to come on and do we talk about it? Maybe. But you can see it at pastaflier.com. Pastaflyer.com. Pasta flyer. This is the most difficult Kickstarter I've ever seen. What do you mean difficult? Well, it's like, because it's a concept. Ours was really good because it was a thing. you know, like an actual product. And this is so what's it? It's like concept. Well, the concept is gluten-free, pasta, quick served. Like the like almost truck style, right? Well, yeah, almost truck style. But are they going to be standalone locations again? He will be someday, but he's gonna do pop-ups 1st in colleges around the northeast. So gluten-free pasta for college kids that is of high quality. Because his argument is that pasta, most pasta sucks, right? Yes. Yeah, yeah. And but it's like it has like some old grandma, right? Is it the grandma of those of those kids from UCLA that we insulted? I hope not. If that's the grandma? Will, Dave, I will, Dave. That's my mark, Will, Dave, up. I found the grandma of those pie kids that you insulted. Yeah, nah. That's not that grandma. Is it his grandma? No, I think he based it off Cesare's mother. So who is a grandma? Who is a grandma, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, yes, America fair. fair, fair. My grandma? Not such a good pasta cooker. Okay. What? Okay. Yeah. I mean, yeah. Okay, Rob, Treypaz wrote in about fiddleheads for finally getting to it, from Portland, not Portland over in Beardland, Portland,

[18:44] Maine. Not that you can't grow a beard in Portland, Maine, but it's a different kind. probably it's more, although they're both kind of lumberjacky, right? Portland, Maine, and Portland, you know, in Oregon, both kind of lumberjacky. Oh, speaking of, before I get into this question, Rob, I'm getting to your question in a minute, but when I think of Portland, Oregon, I

[19:03] think by the way, Jeffrey Morgenthaler, bar out there just came out with a cocktail book. You got to check it out. you know, Portland. But, you know, Andy Ricker of Pockpock, who, you know, was before he became also a New York guy, Portland guy, I was just thinking to him because I was thinking of Thailand. Uh, and it came to my attention last week. If you go to the Guardian in UK, Guardian.uk, they did some research. came to my last attention that the largest farmed shrimp producer in Thailand, who ships all over the world, including to U.S. at like Walmarts and Costco's and, you know, all the big box joints like

[19:41] that and like, I think in the UK and like Tesco, all the big places in there, that they unbelievably use slave labor, literal slave

[19:50] labor. Now, they don't directly hire them so that they, you know, they can't get necessarily caught. But here's how it works. And I was completely shocked. You can go watch an 18 minute video online. And I didn't even, you know, you think about a lot of stuff when you buy food, you think about sustainability, like some people think about, you know, um, you know,

[20:08] like whether it's local or not, you know, I remember, uh, you know, Patrick came on saying, don't think about

[20:13] local, local's not important. That's what Patrick Martin was saying the other day here, Martin's. But the, you know, people think about that. I think we think about the health, we think about economics. We tend not to think that our food is made by slaves. You know what I mean? We just tend not to think about it. You tend not to think that, hey, maybe my food's made by slaves. So what happens is, is, uh, like human uh, smugglers, traffickers. Uh, they go to Burma and they convince people that they're going to get a job in Thailand because the unemployment in Thailand's very low, right?

[20:46] So, and, you know, in Burma, not so low. So they they go, they find people and they're like, hey, we're going to take you over to Thailand where you're going to get a good job, right? And they smuggle them into Thailand. And when they get to Thailand, instead of actually giving them a good job, they sell these people to

[21:02] ship captains, boat captains, fishing boat captains. And what they said in The Guardian was it's like £400 or £450, you know, British pounds because British. So I think I think it was pounds, not dollars, but something like that. So a ship captain. This is these are real. This is real, literal, 1000s and 1000s of people are literally being purchased for like

[21:23] £400 sterling, right? And then they're on these boats, and they theoretically have to work until it's paid back. But since they're not paid anything on the boat. They can't ever get it, they never gets paid back. And so they sit there and they are they are treated like slaves and that they are

[21:39] beaten. And if they try to escape, They are beaten and sometimes shot, beat to death, worked, you know, every

[21:46] day, 7 days, like, you know, sometimes up to, you know, 20 hours a day. If they, you know, it's horrible conditions. They're underfed because they, you know, they just work them until, until basically until they escape or they die. And they they catch trash fish on these boats. And the fish is then taken ashore and sold and converted to fish meal. And that fish meal is what's sold to the shrimp farms and fed to shrimp. So, you know, the entire industry, the shrimp farming industry is supported on the catch of these trash fish, and a lot of the boats that supply that are slave

[22:27] labor, and the big, the big folks, the, you know, the big producer there. I think it's CP, I think I forget, is it doesn't really care one way or the other where the fish meal comes from.

[22:39] So if it comes from, you know, the sweat of slaves, then so be it. So I encourage all of you to go online, the guardian.uk, and look at their expose on that. And I did some research. It's not anything completely new. In other words, it's not it's not horse crap. It's real. Like a couple other people have reported on the same thing. And I was just kind of shocked, you know? Kind of shocked, uh, that that kind of stuff still goes on. Anyway, Dave, we have a caller on the line right now. Okay. Put them on? Yeah, sure. Call her, you're on the air. Hi. Hey. Um, so hard to follow up on that conversation, but I have a more benign question about

[23:19] uh, kitchen ventilation. as you mentioned earlier. I was wondering, I have about a 90 square foot apartment kitchen. It's separated from the rescue department, and there's a window in it. So the natural ventilation, as these things go, isn't awful, but

[23:36] obviously, it exit air. It's still a problem. What is, is there a cheap solution just to just be getting a exhaust, you know, building an exhaust van and then opening the window to intake air when it's operational or is this sort of system? a lot more complicated than, you know, than just getting an exhaust fan. Okay, so I have some experience with this because in my new, in my old kitchen, I actually installed an illegal restaurant hood,

[24:03] right? Uh, and and piped it directly out of my window. And that worked great because the, then in my current kitchen, I

[24:12] have, uh, I have an extremely powerful window fan, extremely powerful, uh, like a huge blower that I have, uh, you know, attached with a register right at my window so that the window, in other words, it looks like a big block is coming out of the top of my

[24:27] window and the window's always a little bit open because the fan is permanently installed there, right? But you can't see it because it looks like louvers. But it's, it's easily twice as powerful as my old, as my old fan. Um, and quiet because when you're when you're buying a fan for ventilation. The mistake people make is they get little fans and little fans have to spin very, very quickly to get the exhaust flow

[24:50] out. And the faster that a fan spins, the more irritating and loud typically the motor is, right? So you want, if you can, to figure out a way to get a larger, like a larger fan with

[25:03] a slower moving blades. And also, they, like every decent fan is rated on the decibel level. So like they can do a lot of stuff with the geometry of the blades to get fans that have a lot lower noise rating. And believe me, it's worth spending twice as much on a fan with a lower noise rating because you're going to be running it for hours and hours and trying to hold normal conversations in the

[25:28] kitchen and, you know, like a bad fan is irritating, even like way outside of the kitchen. Then beyond that, you can insulate fans to try and get them. But that's a whole separate thing. So your question was specifically, can I just put a window fan in? Here's the issue. Where is your stove in relation to the window? Uh, still about uh, 6 feet, 6, 7 feet from the window. Right. So the issue is, is that in a, in a hood, you have a, it's a hood, over the stuff that's, that's creating the smoke, smoke tends to go up, right? And then because the suction is directly over that hood, it tends to gather, suck, and shoot it out the window. So you actually are only evacuating a fairly small amount of space,

[26:09] right? So when you're trying to, when you're trying to do a whole room, even if it's contained, you now have to contend with the fact that

[26:17] you have to evacuate that entire room. So the capacity, the airflow that you need to get is all of a sudden a lot bigger. So here's how you can help it, right? You can get a fan directly in a window, right? That's going to create some movement away. But the issue is, is that the smoke is going to go up, and then it's only going to evacuate at the rate that it can evacuate, and then it's going to roll over into the other areas of the

[26:40] house, just because the fan in the window is not sufficient to create an actual movement of air across out of your window.

[26:48] The other problem is that you're going to have is that houses have apartments have a natural kind of draw to them. So, for instance, you need to check to see whether it, like, an apartment can either

[27:00] naturally, uh, you know, be kind of uh, be sucking air out of the hallway or pushing air into the hallway, depending on how the airflow in the building works. Also, you know, if you have cross ventilation, depending on the layout of your apartment, you could have cross ventilation that naturally wants to go one way or naturally wants to go the other way.

[27:18] So you kind of need to figure out what wants to happen in your apartment naturally. But once you decide to install the window fan, then you need to get air moving out of that window, you need to figure out how to get the best breeze that's floating from the one side of your kitchen towards the window and out.

[27:35] So one way you can do that is install a secondary fan, like a ceiling

[27:40] fan pointed towards your vent fan, and that's going to help create movement, such that the entire massive error wants to move out of your window, or, you know, you might be lucky and have a natural draw out of your window, uh, your kitchen window anyway, in which case you go into

[27:56] into a different room, like the bathroom, and open a bunch of windows, anything that's going to get good cross ventilation

[28:02] out, and that's going to assist it out. But it's easy to tell, just make some smoke. Open that window, make some smoke and see where it goes, right? And then try to figure out a way to get it just moving out the window in an efficient

[28:14] fashion because it's harder when you're just putting something in the window versus installing a fake hood.

[28:19] Now you can install a fake hood. And the reason why it's illegal, though, is because, well, 1st of all, it's a big pain in the butt to do it, but it's illegal because, you know, in a hood, you get a lot of grease going into the hood and you can have a fire and they're worried about you ejecting a fire through a vent duct out

[28:38] into, you know, and that's going to catch fire, go up and catch the apartment above you on fire. With a window fan, that's not an issue because there's not a ducting system that they have to worry

[28:48] about. And so there's no rules when you have a window fan versus a hood. You see what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I thought one other, one other thing to consider, and this, you know, in favor of the Windows fan, it might so drop. It's one of the apartment really well output gas stove. So, thinking of getting an induction, you know, one induction burner, at least, but that's portable enough that you could plate it closer to the window, if not next to the window, and how much water

[29:15] passed to the exhaust. Does that make sense? Is that, you know, if you're a higher, higher, like, block, block, or steering on

[29:23] that closer to the X? Do you have 220 in your apartment? No, there's primitive wiring, actually. There's only a couple outlets in the whole kitchen. Yeah. So, you know, even like a decent induction burner that runs off of a standard 120 circuit puts out, you know, enough power to be better than

[29:41] most than a crappy home range, right? So yeah, you could win that way, having a burner under there. You know, but one thing you could do is, and you could even make it, you know, you know, non-permanent if you want, is just, uh, you know, put like a, you know, above your

[29:59] window because you don't want to get rid of light for, you know, for God's sakes, but you could have like a,

[30:03] like almost like a little hood thing over the window that's going to help suck up and out the window.

[30:08] In other words, yes, cooking right under the window is going to be helpful. And then if you have that fan going there, like, uh, having like, like a bonnet over the top that captures the, the, the smoke as it goes up and helps funnel the air out the

[30:20] window might also be helpful. You know, otherwise, otherwise, if it doesn't directly get sucked out by the fan, it'll hit your ceiling and then roll in both directions and then, you know, down and you're

[30:28] going to lose some. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. So you could try that and that'd be fairly, fairly easy. Um, you know, you're still gonna run into problems when you're using the oven as opposed to the, the, you know,

[30:40] the, the range. I mean, and these fan, this sort of fan, you're looking at something that's an industrial, and not a consumer, you know, what's, what's the best, you know, place to look for something like this for

[30:53] an apartment window? Well, also, a lot depends. I mean, if it's your only source of light in the kitchen, natural light, you have to always,

[31:01] uh, you know, it's a, it's a, you don't want to take up too much of the window because then you've taken up a lot of the window, but then if you have to do a lot of rigmarole, like install the fan every time you want to use it,

[31:13] well then you're never going to use it, right? So what I would say is that, you know, the best benefit ratio, benefit to losing window ratio might be,

[31:23] um, I don't know how wide your window is, but a lot of times you can fit something like two, 8 inch fans in, and then you just want to get the quietest 8 inch fans that you can. And sometimes they even make ones that are like double fans, and you'll see them in a lot of restaurants will get them, and they kind of fake use them as ventilation, you know, like, you know, especially

[31:43] like down in my neighborhood, like in Chinatown, they make fairly small ones. They're not quiet, but they're kind of industrial, they're on shock mount, so that they're not vibrating like lunatics, and they're just big enough that they're don't have that irritating jet jet engine noise that like the little hood fans

[32:00] do. You know what I'm talking about? Like, they have, like, they look like almost, like, the, one of those things

[32:05] called, those oscillating fans that you have on your desks, like, that size fan, but the, the 2 of them are mounted on, like, uh, on, like, a steel, on, like, a steel plate and you mount that steel plate in the top of your window and you kick those suckers

[32:18] on and they move some air. That seems like the best. I've dealt with, you know, I've had like plastic versions of those that are pretty glimpy. just getting a higher output. And frankly, it's sort of like, there's not, it's only with like hearing and walking where the smoke is actually a huge problem, so I feel like it's, you know, it's not like there's, you know, a fire on the whole time

[32:38] and just creating smoke constantly when cooking most things, so. But it's also that's good. Like, like in early, in like late spring, early summer, like when you just need to get some airflow in the house, you like open the, you know, it depends on your apartment, but you open the bathroom window and then you open this guy, turn this on, and whew, you suck the stuff

[32:56] through, and you can get a good breeze through the house. You can build up an airflow if it's getting stagnant. So I use my hood for that sometimes too. Yeah, and there's a smoke detector outside the kitchen on the other side of the wall, but it seems to be

[33:08] field enough that, you know, the smoke detector never goes off, even if the kitchen is, you know, completely full of smoke, even though the smoke

[33:14] detector's working. So it seems to be a pretty, you know, it has good cross ventilation through the bathroom,

[33:19] but it, you know, reasonably air tight, the rest of the apartment, they're just getting a model amount of exhaust. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If that's the case, then, yeah, I mean, I would just, you want, um, for a

[33:32] given, uh, number of CFMs, uh, the smaller the blades that you use to get that level of CFMs, the louder it's

[33:40] going to be. So it's, but the bigger the blade that you use, the more window space you take up. And so that's that's kind of the bargain you're going to have to drive with yourself. You know what I mean? Yeah. Well, this is super helpful. All right, all right. Good luck with this. And when you when you install it, give us a call back and let us know how it worked out. Okay, thanks. Okay, cool. Okay, Rob, I'm getting back to your question. So fiddleheads from Portland, Maine, right? And I'm not going to get lost in a tangent on Thailand and slave shrimp. You ever listen to a public enemy? No, you said you weren't going to get into it. Oh, yeah. They have a song about slave ships, and it's like, chick, chick, slave ships. And now all I can think of is slave shrimp. That song, the public enemy song is going in my head with, with, uh, slave shrimp. And then, you know, that song? Tangent. But you never listen to public games? Four weeks. Phil Lance, oh my God. Joe, you listen to Public Enemy? No, I do, but that's all I'm going to say. Thank you, Joe. Maybe later we can get into it. No, mole records. Okay I'm not gonna get into it. Great album, though. Okay, I was recently up in Portland, Maine, at one of my favorite restaurants and was presented with

[34:51] lightly pickled fiddleheads as a garnish to my sandwichboard of charcuterie. It was awesome. I was always under the impression that fiddleheads were to be cooked for 10 minutes. There was no way this little violin was cooked for more than 2 minutes before being shocked. The fern was bright green, crisp, and appeared to be an ostrich fern, was definitely not a bracken. Is it safe to eat ostrich fill heads lightly blanched? Does pickling or pH play a roll? I would love to be able to eat ostrich fiddleheads blanched or is crisp refrigerator pickle where the fresh flavor and texture predominates? It seems the bracken fern gave the whole lot of fiddleheads and bad press resulting in overcooked ferns across the board, but there's little information that I could find on the

[35:31] internet. PS can't wait for my pair of sears alls to arrive regards Rob Treypaz. Uh, who, by the way, Rob, always very good at providing the pronunciation for his name, which I

[35:41] would not be able to pronounce otherwise. you know, I appreciate it because everyone knows that I cannot pronunciate pronunciate. Did I just say pronunciate? Okay. So the issue is this. A lot of ferns, when they're coming, when, you know, a lot of ferns, when they're growing, when the

[35:57] Franz 1st come out of the ground in the springtime, they are curled up and they look like

[36:01] fiddleheads. you like fiddlehead stars? Okay. So, uh, So one, like the most common fern in the U, in the US, and maybe, I don't know, around the world, I have no idea, is a Bracken fern, right? Brackenferns have been eaten for since forever. Like Native Americans eat it. you know, it's eaten a lot in Asia. It's eaten all over the world, bracken ferns, right? But Bracken ferns contain a poison and there's, you know, several of them. And the one that they, you know, is most prominent, is called Tequila side, right? And so then there's a huge question of, you know, and different bracken fern populations, and maybe even plant to plant within a given population, have wildly different amounts of these poisons in them. They are somewhat water soluble, so they leech out, they can actually leech into groundwater. It's well known that animals that feed on bracken ferns. Um, can have problems, you know, you know, pretty bad problems. Um, you know, blood, anemia problems, things like this. I believe it's also carcinogenic, although I'm not sure. So, but, you know, a lot of people eat it all the time. And so there's a lot of question as to whether or not that's a problem. Now, ostrich ferns are different from bracken. So the way you can tell an ostrich fern is a fiddlehead, is that there's

[37:20] a U, there's a deep U shaped groove in an ostrich fern. So if you think about fiddlehead styles when you buy them in the store. Like if you imagine them in your head, the inside a curve of it has like a deep U channel in it, right? So you can obviously tell when you get an ostrich front because it's like that. Also, ostrich firm fiddleheads aren't hairy. And if you're picking them, there's like a little scaly thingamajig over the curly doodle part of the fiddlehead, right? So it's pretty easy to tell whether you have an ostrich, fern, or a bracken when you're getting it. Now, for many, many years, no one had problems with ostrich ferns. Uh, or at least not that anyone knew of. And then there was a case in, in, in, I think it was either upstate New York or in

[38:04] Canada, where in 1994, of an actual poisoning incident that happened, food poisoning incident that happened with ostrich

[38:12] ferns. So this is from the, I believe this is the CDC. Yeah, this is a CDC talking about this original 1994, which was the 1st time I was able to find any

[38:24] records, and everyone points back to 1994. as the 1st time there's any problem with fiddleheads. and it goes like this. Fiddleheads, cruisers of the ostrich fern are a seasonal delicacy. We know this already. harvested commercially in the northeastern United States and coastal provinces in Canada. Although some common firms may be poisonous or carcinogenic, this species has been considered to be

[38:43] non-toxic. However, in May 1994, outbreaks of food poisoning were associated with eating raw or lightly cooked fiddlehead ferns in New York and

[38:51] western Canada. This report summarizes the investigation. So what happened is, in 1994, a restaurant in Steuben County, New York,

[38:58] had an illness among 20 people who had eaten at the restaurant, and they determined that it was the people who had eaten these lightly cooked

[39:07] fiddleheads. They were, I think, steamed for a couple of minutes or sauteed and then sent down. And the vast majority of people that ate these fiddleheads got sick. And no one who hadn't eaten the fiddleheads really at the restaurant got sick at all. So it was pretty clear that it was this. And it wasn't a bacterial problem, right? And it was very, uh, like the, the, there's the good news. The onset of the illness was fast, very fast. I think within a day. And also it only lasted for a day and and no nobody died, right? Uh, then the same thing happened uh, in Quebec in 1999 and in Anchorage, Alaska in

[39:48] 2010, right? So what it appears, what everyone seems to say in the literature is there is some sort of, um, there is some sort of toxin that's being

[39:58] produced, uh, by some some fiddleheads, some ostrich ferns, right? Not all, but they don't know what it is yet. They know that if you cook the hell out of the ostrich fern, that you're not going to have a problem. If you cook it for 10 minutes, they know you're not going to have a problem. They have no other way, since they don't know what it is in the ostrich fern that causes this thing, they don't know how to get rid of it, right?

[40:25] Other than by cooking. They don't know how to test for it. They don't know any of this. All they know is, is that most of the time a raw ostrich fern is not going to hurt you. And then occasionally you'll get a batch of ostrich ferns that if you eat them

[40:37] undercooked, lead to a short-lived but nasty case of gastroenteritis, but not, you know, cancer or, you know, some sort of like, you know,

[40:47] uh, actual poisoning where, where, you know, you die or anything like that. So it looks like, you know, uh, you're kind of on your own there. Like if you want to eat them raw or lightly cooked or pickled, you probably won't have a problem, i.e. you didn't when you had it in Portland, Maine, but you just never know when you're going to get a batch that might cause this kind of an outbreak.

[41:10] And they, like I say, it's not, as far as they know, it's not bacterial in nature. So you can't like, you know, use some other technique to get rid of bacteria.

[41:19] Uh, so it's interesting problem. And if any of you, I looked at the most, that was the most current research I could find was from

[41:25] 2010, and still nobody seems to know what the hell's going on with it. So there you have it. All right. So they're going to kick us off pretty soon, right? So do you have a, do you have your email? I had the question from, all right, let me get let me get this up. We had a question in from longtime, a listener. Ellie Nasser, right? And saying, hello, Dave and Crew? I was hoping you might be able to save me some bucks. I would be and I spoke to him on the Twitter a little bit about this, but I figured I'd read it on here. I would be eternally grateful to you in the cooking issues crew, my polycience immersion circulator, the creative series. which ones create a series, you remember? Is that the original one? Stopped heating the water. It's only about a year and a half old. It only has one year warranty, of course. And polycience wants 80, of course. It's like saying your mom would say, one year, of course. And probably science once, she hasn't talked like that. Polyscience wants $85 to look at it plus shipping. The circulator powers up, the pump works perfectly, and the icon for heating, which

[42:21] look like wave, shows up as if it should be heat in the water, but the heater is definitely not actually coming on and heating the water.

[42:27] Any ideas what I could look for to make it work, maybe a burnt fuse or something, or should I go ahead and ship it and eat the cost? Well, since he did that. what I said to him was let's open it, look at it, and see whether or not you see anything loose or broken. he opened it. And what he saw was that there is the wire or that connects to the heater element was kind of fried and gross looking. And so what I said to him, which is true, is that a lot of circulators, I haven't seen this problem on a modern circulator, like, you know, when I say modern, like, you know, less

[42:55] than like eight, 9 years old, but a lot of the old circulators have a lot of mechanical connections in them between wires and things like heaters, right? Where the wire is crimped around the heater. Here's what happens in a high moisture environment. So if you store your circulator in a very moisture human environment, or if

[43:12] you, if your kitchen is extremely humid or you run your circulators in a closet, even though there are fans that try to keep moisture and air outside of the inside of the circulator when it's running, you can get a high moisture environment on the inside of the circulator.

[43:26] What happens then is that the metal contacts between, let's say, the heater and the and the heater wire, I've seen it happen in fuse

[43:35] connectors where the fuses pop in because that's a physical connection. It's not soldered. Those things can corrode. When they corrode, they become a resistor, right? And what resistors do when electricity passes through them, is they heat up. And so what you can get is very, very, very hot locally hot spots and they can be hot enough some places to, I've had them melt fuses. I've had them burn through wires eventually, melt melt, you know, the insulation around it. And so what you need to do in a situation like that is, 1st of all, like, take stock of what happened and try to figure out, like, why, how it got so human on the inside of a circulator, but you have to cut off the section of the wire where it

[44:15] is, uh, is is oxidized because that part's ruined. because it's hard to solder to it if it's completely ruined like that. Cut that part off, strip a new section, take the old end of the heater where it was all burnt and mangled, take a nail file, and

[44:29] now cover everything else up because the last thing you want to do is get a metal filing dust in the inside of your

[44:35] circulator. You need to completely cover everything so that filings cannot get into your circulator. And you want to take

[44:40] a, like a nail file and file or sandpaper, the end of the heater so it's bright and clean, then you can get soldering iron and solder because that part of the heater doesn't get that hot. And you can solder onto

[44:54] the spade terminal, which is on the end of the heater, you can solder the wire onto it and then wrap some electrical tape or a little heat shrink around it and put it down.

[45:02] And once you solder it, it will not corrode because you've now made an actual connection, the air cannot get

[45:08] into no matter what happens, and you're good to go. Um, so that is how I would solve uh, that problem. And on the way out. We had a question from at Clefs on the Twitter, and it was, let me find you, Clefs. Cooking issues. Have you tried pulling a vacuum on a vitamix? Well, it is blending. Is it worth it interested in reducing oxidation, oxidation, and cavitation? And also good because a lot of things that you blend, like hydrocoloids. This is why I originally did it. years ago, is that when you're blending a hydrocoloid, you whip air into it, and then you either have to suck a vacuum on it or do a lot of stuff to get rid of the air that you blended in, right?

[45:45] So, yes, I've tried to suck a vacuum on a Vitaprep, and here's why it doesn't work, Cliff. The bearings in a Vita Prep are not completely airtight under pressure. They're airtight under normal circumstances, but when you suck a vacuum on it, which is roughly 15 PSI. You suck air and also like whatever nasty crap is in your bearing, up through the bottom of the bearing and into the unit. So it's not possible to suck a good vacuum on the VitaPrep. If you wanted to, you'd have to install a special sealed bearing on the

[46:16] Vitaprep bottom or buy what's called a vacuum whip or vacuum mix. I forget vacuum, which is a dental tool that's used to mix and whip plaster for dental molds without introducing any air into

[46:27] it. But unfortunately, they're small now, but it's maybe something we can work on. It's something I've always wanted. And that's it for this week. Cooking your shoes.

[46:41] Thanks for listening to this program on heritageradionetwork.org. You can find all of our archived programs on our website or as podcasts in the iTunes store by searching Heritage Radio Network. You can like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at Heritage underscore radio. You can email us questions at any time at info at heritageradionetwork.org. Heritage Radio Network is a nonprofit organization. To donate and become a member, visit our website today. Thanks for listening.