[0:00] Today's program has been brought to you by Fairway Market, like no other market, a New York City institution that sells the best local, national, and international artisan foods for prices that can't be beat. For more information, visit fairwaymarket.com. I'm Damon Bolte, host of the speakeasy. You're listening to Heritage Radio Network, broadcasting live from Bushwick, Brooklyn. If you like this program, visit Heritage Radio Network.org for 1000s more.

[0:30] Cooking issues.

[0:56] Call in your questions, too. Cooking issues. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of cooking issues. Whoa, coming to you, funky. Coming to you, funky. What was that, Jack? That's funny. We should play that. What is that? It's like 2 seconds long. Oh, yeah. It says cheese. Oh, cheese, cooking issues. Is that like a new theme song for us? For cutting the curd. Let me hear that one more time, though. bring up the come on. Come on. Sounds like it could have been a Pluto song, maybe. Jeez. Yeah, that's old style Pluto stuff. Yeah, maybe. Sweet. Join as usual, Jack, and Nastasia the Hammer. However, do we still have a call around the air? Yeah, I do have a caller. Why don't we do a show with a collar? Yeah, when we do that and then we'll get back to our little niceties and pleasantries and what that. Call her, you are on the air. Hi, Dave, how are you? All right, how you doing? Good, thanks, Ray. I was wondering, um, how well something like a champion juicer would do for

[2:00] making, uh, like pistachio paste and kind of nut butters and, uh, if it works for kind of making desserts 1st or something like that. Well, as it so happens, Nastasia and I have a lot of experience using the champion juicer for exactly that

[2:17] task. So the 1st thing you did, do you own one already? Sorry? Do you already own a champion juicer? No, I'm thinking about getting one, and that would kind of be the, the, uh, kind of taking point that would make me go out and get one. Yeah, it works well. Here's the deal. It heats it up. So if you're one of these believers that everything has to say hyper cold as you're doing it, that ain't

[2:40] going to happen because there's a lot of friction generated inside of the champion. But, uh, but it's not as how many, how many like, how many zillion pounds of nuts have we put through champion juicers before? So many. I think we had an event, right? For one? like a huge amount of people. We went through that that kick where I was doing all nut milks in the centrifuge and I was making nut butters and spinning and making nut oils. Remember that? And we were just making like, we would have to make like, like a gallon of, of, uh, of like, uh, uh, what was it,

[3:10] cashew, no, pecan whale that we would go, then we would go through all those tins of pecans from uh, those nuts. Oh my god. The short story as it works. You might need to add, like, you might need to grind it a couple of times. What we used to do is we used to, we used to put it through the champion for the 1st

[3:29] pass, and then we would put it into a, uh, into a stone grinder to get it down like hyperfine, like commercial peanut

[3:35] butterfine. Um, but yeah, sucker works. It also grinds cocoa nibs quite well for the for the initial grind, you're going to need to put it into like a stone mill to get it down to actual chocolate grind stuff.

[3:47] The one thing that you got to watch out for is after you grind the 2nd £5 in a row without

[3:53] stopping. The, um, it heats up rather severely, and a champion juicer will heat itself up to the point where it melts the, uh, it melts the safety

[4:07] interlocks and that the motor is hot enough to boil water. So, I mean, yeah, you should give at least the ones that I've used. So you should give it a rest before it asks for it because it's not going to ask for a rest. It's just going to keep on going until until, I don't know, until a fire starts. You ever have one of those things actually kick out on you? I don't know that it has a thermal styles. Remember that time that we put all the towels in the water and put it on the back and it was like a sauna because it was like boiling the water off of the towels? Another thing is, is that every professional chef who buys a champion juicer and there are many, instantly loses the blind plate. So the bottom of the champion juicer either has a mesh screen that you use for juices or a blind plate that you're supposed to use for things like frozen

[4:46] bananas if you're a believer in that sort of thing or nuts. And so you don't want to, you don't want to lose that. But yeah, it works. Oh, I think we might have lost, and I heard a click clack. Anyways, he heard most of what was important anyway, right? He got it. He got it. He's got that. anyway. So now for the intro and pleasantry. So later than normal, had a flat tire today. Flat tire on the Williamsburg Bridge, which I love, going up, but

[5:12] it was kind of a miracle, like that my bike wanted me to be late, but he didn't want me to be too

[5:16] late, because I no longer carry with me, the stuff to fix flat tires. I should have started carrying that. The patch is so small. It's just, I don't know, somehow, like, I started swatching bags back and forth, and so then I, I just don't have the bike repair kit with me anymore, but I do have a pump on me, thank Christ.

[5:29] Thank God. I mean, thank goodness. Bleep, bleep, bleep, bleep. So, I'm going up to Williamsburg, right? But still too late to turn back, because you know you can't get a taxi in my neighborhood, like anywhere near as noon. So I hear, You know that noise? And so I'm like, oh, crap. So I look down, sure enough, my front tire is going. And but some miracle, it stopped deflating before I was down on the

[5:59] rim. So I was like, what am I gonna do? So I just pumped it up to like 2 thirds of its rated pressure and I slowly leaked all the way here. I made it all the way here with a slow leak. I even passed some dingleberry on a freaking, like mini moped thing. Styles wants to beat. So for those of you that live in New York City. Like there's these dudes riding around these. It's almost always dudes, right? It's only delivery people. Which are mostly. Mostly dudes, yeah. And they're on these damned electric bikes and it's like... They're not electric, though. There's just like an attachment, right? Well, they, they, like someone somewhere designed. They took a normal bike that a crappy normal bike and they bolted a battery pack and like a little motor to it. So yeah, they like their, they're designed to be that way. Okay. But every delivery, you've seen these jack, right? have, yeah. What are your thoughts on? I don't really I don't know. They're like cars. He's like, Jack's like, I only want. But no, we all know that Jack doesn't drive bikes because he drives cars. as we all know, they were mutually exclusive. Captain Sustainability, Jack Insley over there. That's me. By the way, when we come out of commercial break, we should hear the cheese song again. You like that, huh? Did you write the cheese song? I didn't, no. Who wrote the Chase song? I'll find out, but Diane Stemple is the host who brought us that song. I think it was a friend of hers. I do have a caller whenever... Oh yeah, call her. on the air. Hey, how's it going? Hey, Nastasia and Jack. Love you guys' music, the best always, man. Especially now that we have a cheese song. cheese. I didn't get to hear that one today, but... Anyways, it's Antoine from Boker, just calling back. Oh, hey, hang on. We were talking about, we were talking about health and bartending. Exactly. Yeah. and how they made it, related or mutual exclusive. Exactly. Yeah, I had a few questions this week. Um, one of them was your thoughts and comments about this uh, potential ban on raw milk cheeses. What do you mean? I mean, oh, are they trying to ban even older than 60 days? Yeah. Oh, that's... Yeah, I got it through the pipeline. My girlfriend works at Whole Foods for the specialty department, and they were saying recently that they want to ban all Rommel cheeses even over 60 days. Yeah, I saw some, like, uh, blips and bleeps about that a couple of months ago on one of the cheese blogs.

[8:33] Like it was like pushed to my Twitter account. Somebody was like, oh, Mike Geez. And I haven't heard anything about it since. Jack, have you guys talked about this at all on any of the cheese programs that we have? I will shoot them a line and ask. I mean, what if anyone were to actually push something through like that? I mean, I think that's absolutely preposterous. I mean, it's just ridiculous. It's an absurdity. I mean, do you know what the proposed reason for it is? I mean, as far as I've heard, I mean, it's been a huge game of telephone for me because one person heard from another person, but as far as I know, they want to ban any cheeses that are raw milk

[9:06] cheeses. So, your Gruyers, Robert Ford. Parmesan stuff. Parmesan Reggiano. Parmigiano Reggiano's name is raw milk, is it not? It is, right? Exactly, yeah. I mean, it's preposterous. I mean, the current regulation, I think, is even too obviously too stringent. Um, I did hear some rumblings about it, but I don't know. I mean, if someone's proposing it, it's an absolute absurdity. I mean, my feeling was from the get go. And you know, I spoke years ago to some food safety people about it. I mean, you got to remember, the way food safety, I don't know, I don't think this is a food safety concern. I mean, I don't know when the last time somebody got poisoned from Parmigiano Reggiano is. Oh wait, I know when it was. It was never because it's never happened. But the, um, the issue is, is that uh, food safety people, right laws, because, um, for instance, you're allowed to have sushi, even though it goes through procedures, you're allowed to have steak tartare or rare

[10:02] steak, because the assumption is, is that when you order that, you know the risks that you're taking on. And the raw milk stuff with cheeses is because they, they, you know,

[10:10] they, they figure that the average consumer wants everything to be as safe as like a

[10:15] hyper pasteurized, like American cheese product is, right? And that, and that the customers don't know that they might be assuming a,

[10:22] a, a risk of pathogens, that they don't, they're not aware of if they consume a raw milk cheese. It's young. That's their theory anyway. And so my feeling was, like, put a label on it. I'm allowed to smoke, you know, so like, why can't I have a raw milk, cheese, as long as it says on it, like,

[10:38] like, raw milk may kill you, the same way that, like, you know, when you serve someone a raw egg at a restaurant, you say, this is a raw egg, this might kill you, and if that scares you, please order something else, you

[10:48] know? Uh, I mean, I always thought that was a better kind of a, I mean, like, I think people would buy it more if it had a big parental advisory, do not eat, we'll kill you, label on it. I mean, think how much more of that they'd sell, you know? Like, you know? So, yeah, so I'll look into it because I remember I heard some rumblings and then

[11:05] I totally felt. But Jack, are you going to write a note to yourself to follow up with this? I'm writing a note to myself to come up with a parental advisory food line, because I think that'll really work out. Good fruit cheese. This cheese may kill your children. I mean, it works for music, right? Yeah. I mean, like sells a lot of music, right? I mean, I mean, look. I mean, a lot of that early stuff would have sold without the label because it was like so, so over the top, you know, like NWA and stuff. I mean, that stuff was so over the top that, you know, it didn't really require a label for kids to know. Tipper Gore didn't need to come out and tell me that that stuff was kind of like a little bit over the

[11:39] top. But, you know, some of this stuff, the milder stuff with the parental guidance. You know, you go through the store and you're like, which one of these things is going to piss my parents off the

[11:48] most and you just search out for the labels? Could be the same thing with cheese, you know? Same thing with like the hot peppers. You heard about this Trinidad Scorpion pepper that's like one. 5 times hotter than the Nagridge Loki pepper. the point in that? Does anyone know what the point is? Are you a hot pepper eater? I love all anything that makes me hurt? I love the most. Have you tried the Trinidad Scorpion? No, no I haven't. Yeah, so like, there's a whole, like, you know what, you know what I'm talking about, though. It's like a vicious, evil looking little pepper. Paul Adams from Papa Science has some, but he had some dry, but like have you tried the ghost pepper? As far as I can discern, the ghost pepper has no good taste to it. It's not like a habanero. Well, if you use it like, like a little bit of it in a big pot of something. I think that's how it works best. Because I love Sri Lankan food and apparently they use ghost peppers. Yeah, but why not just use more of a pepper with more flavor? By the way, 2 dudes sitting at the table outside of the studio here pounding shots. Just like shots away, dude. Like, well, it's, you know, it's 5 p.m. somewhere. These guys are, you know, banging these things back like they're in Europe. It's like they got transported from Europe. Maybe they are. European. It is August. Yeah, and they probably like, we're being overrun with Europeans with excess money in their pockets. Please come here and burn your money in New York City and add to our tourism business. We need it. Am I right, Jack? Yes. Yeah. Any other things? Because I got to look that one up. Yeah, I also, I sent you a tweet last week that I have issues with drinking coffee. I love the taste of it, but I didn't know what it was. I isolated by having just caffeine by itself. Yeah, I told you that. I told you to have the no dos, right? Yeah, I can handle that, so I don't know. I can usually handle high acid things. I don't know what it is in coffee that might be getting at me. And you tried decaf coffee and decaf coffee does it to you as well, right? I haven't tried deep coffee because I never saw the point. Well, no, but you try it just as a test, the same way that there's not that much of a point in no dose, because, I mean, that gives me a spinning headache, but

[13:43] like, here's what you do. You try the you try the decaffeinated coffee. So then, so if decaffeinated coffee is fine and caffeinated coffee is not, then it, you know, it could, it has to

[13:53] be, It's not the caffeine because you've tested that. So it's something else that's washed away in the process. And so then you would have to test to see whether or not super critical CO2 decaffeinated coffee works, but the water decaffeinated coffee

[14:04] doesn't, you have to do some tests. Now, if decaf, my suspicion is, is it decaf coffee, I'll do it to you the same way that caffeinated coffee will. You say it's a stomach ache, right? And this is regular, this is a regular coffee, not espresso, right? Uh, I've done both. Right. So when you say stomach ache, do you mean you need to go to the bathroom really quickly, like it gets your motor running or do you mean just like a stomach ache? No, no, no. I mean, it does both. The going to the bathroom is fine. That's a desired effect. That's why, yeah, that's one of the reasons why I drink the coffee in the morning. Yes but go ahead. But no, I get an actual like stomach aching afterwards. Usually 3 or 4 years afterwards. Three or four what? Like 3 to 4 hours afterwards. Okay, they said years, I was like, what? Uh, the, uh, I mean, that's that's a long memory. Like, I had a cup of coffee 3 years ago. And man, my stomach hurts now. That's some serious post-hoc ergo proper hawk right there. But the, uh, well, so the thing is, is there's a lot of stuff in coffee and maybe one of the, maybe it's not the actual

[15:03] pH, maybe it's one of the, um, you know, maybe one of the particular organic acids in the

[15:10] coffee like, like upsets you somehow. you know, could be something other than just, because your stomach's acid enough as it is, you know? So I don't know. I'll look into, um, I look into, um, Jack, write this down. Jack, can you keep a list and then send me like the day before? I can look up some of that. I'm actually going to do this. All right, cool. I'll try to look up because I have like a bunch of books on this subject on coffee about things in it that might cause stomach

[15:37] aches. You know, I'll look up Andrea Illy's book, the espresso, the chemistry equality, and look up the list and see whether there's anything I can find and produce the scientific literature. But you've done the 1st step, which is, uh, you've tested, uh,

[15:49] no dos. And I hate that stuff. Did you used to take the, did you ever take that stuff in college to us, the Nodos? I, you know, I... Is that like 5 hour energy shot, same kind of thing? Well, it gets around the middle, middle man. It's just straight caffeine at a pill. know what I mean? It's like, you know, it doesn't have any of this, like, fake, like, you know, oh, it's gonna blah, blah, blah. It's just like, here's caffeine to freaking like slam your system open. But I used to just pound, pound, pound, mountain dews. That's what I would do. Diet do. I would just pound, you know, diet mountain, because I used to pull all nighters like one, at least once a week. You know what I mean? At least because I didn't do any work until it was too late. You know what I mean? Uh, anyways, uh, so yeah, so I'm gonna try, I'll look into it and next week, uh, we'll try to get back. Jack's going to send me this stuff, but try that decaf thing and see whether or not that hooks you up, all right? Yeah, for sure. And then next week, I'm sorry, not next week. Next month. I'm gonna try to go to WD 50 because I just heard the recent bad news that they're closing,

[16:44] so... So something ends, something new will begin. Although I don't think he's planned it yet exactly what he's going to do, but I mean, I wouldn't expect, I wouldn't expect him to be down to one restaurant for too long. You know what I mean? Yeah, for sure. But I'm definitely going to try to head there. I don't know how hard it is to get a reservation. I don't know. haven't looked but I bet hard. I'm going to go once again before it closes, but I bet you it ain't so easy. Yeah. I'm going to try to do that pretty hard and then I'm definitely going to check out the newest, coolest, grape bar, booker and bags. Yeah, sweet. Well, let us know. before you go and if I'm not around, hopefully I'm around. If not, tell us how it was. Sure will. Thank very much. All right, have a good one. Jack, you want to take our quick commercial and come back and blast through the rest of cooking issues? That sounds like a plan. All right, brother.

[17:42] Hi, I'm Steve Jenkins from Fairway Markets. I've devoted my idiot career to the old ways, the old recipes, the old tools, the old geography of where serious foods come

[17:57] from for centuries. And I've strived to make these wonderful things available to New Yorkers for 37 years, so it's a

[18:03] fete accompli for us to support heritage radio network. And I hope you will too, and I hope you'll keep tuning in. For more information, please visit Fairwaymarket.com. Wow. You like that meditation music? Little cheese. See, I'm much more on the, give me another cheese song and contrastinction to Steve Jenkins's cheese song. Yeah, I hear you. Hey, Nastasia, this will bother you. You know the guy's name that made that song on the break? No. Jerome LOL. Like, like laughing out loud? Correct. Oh, you also got a gift. I did? Yeah, they've got a gift. Got a love gift. All right, well, look at it in a minute. Let me blast you some questions because we never got any questions. Stas is going to unpack this, which he didn't already do, so I don't know what it is. Oh, because you have so much problem opening my packages normally. Stas opens letters much like my, much like my son does by just like flapping it open to see whether money falls out. how she... You taught me that. Yeah, I learned it from watching you. Okay. Seriously, let's get some questions. So, uh, I had a question in that says, hello. I think Dave missed my question. Apparently, like I got it in this in a Twitter format. This is from Rodney Goodman, and he's like, he started, he's like, he started, like, off on a tangent and forgot my question. So we're not going to do any tangents. So don't talk to me about this this gift until I finish this. Anyway, the question we read last week was, is it possible to buy cream and then dump water into it to make milk at home so as to save on weight and stuff like

[19:36] this. Answer, no, for 2 reasons. Here are the 2 reasons why. And also, did I answer the, I won't go off on this tangent, but did I answer the beer ice cream question a while ago or did I also tangent fly off on that? We'll do that real quick too. Okay, so here's why. So, uh, when you have yourself some uh, some whole milk. When I say whole milk, I don't mean whole milk like in a store. I mean, like, you get your milk out of a cow, right? What you have is, is you have a water phase with fat droplets in it, right? When you let it sit, the fat droplets rise to the top and you have your cream enrich stuff at the top and you have your milk at the bottom. However, The water phase is relatively similar throughout, right? You with me here, stars? Water phase relatively similar throughout? She's not paying attention. She's looking at the gift, which is good because she has to describe it to me in a minute. Uh, Sonyhoo, the here's what happens. When you're taking cream and then you water it down with water, you're watering it down with water and you're not watering it down with milk proteins and all of that other good stuff, whey proteins, all this other great nonsense, right? Uh, and everything else that's in the, in the water phase of the milk, like you could water, cream down with skim milk, but then that, that, that misses the point because you haven't gotten, I mean, then you have to still carry the, uh, the, the skim milk home with

[20:54] you. So you're not saving anything. You could water it down with powdered skim milk, and that would save you some weight, but you're going to have that like off-flavor that comes from powdered skin milk. Powdered skin milk, believe it or not, tastes, even if you ever tasted it, tastes even worse. I thought you were the one that like, we didn't have a TV. We had to glue together 2 automobiles. What? No. Anyway, skin milk is powdered skin milk. is good as an ingredient in things like English muffins, but not so much to drink. Jack, you ever had the powdered skin milk? No way. It's nasty. Sounds horrible. Yeah, I mean, look, it's something you drink because you can't necessarily afford to have like real milk around or like, you know, before Parmalot came out and you have it in your cupboard for

[21:33] 8000 years or whatever. Anyhoo, uh, so you could do something like that. But again, that stuff's nasty. Here's the 2nd reason why you shouldn't do it. 99.9% of the cream that you purchase in a supermarket has been ultra high temperature pasteurized. And the reason for this is, is cream doesn't sell nearly as quickly as milk cells and cream doesn't get used nearly as quickly as milk does even once it gets

[21:55] home. And so they assume they, meaning the dairy weasels, assume that the cream is going to be on the shelf for a long, long

[22:03] time, and so it has a much longer window of shelf life that's required for it. And so they pasteurize it to a much higher temperature for a higher time, so that they can assure that they kill enough of the stuff in there such that it lasts a lot longer, but that makes more of a cook taste. And if you can ever go find yourself. So, I mean, raw, forget it. But if you can ever go find yourself some regular pasteurized even cream as it posed and do a side by side of that with ultra high pasteurized cream. Like it is a world of freaking difference, like almost as much difference as there is between, let's say, regular milk and

[22:37] Parmalot. Although, you know, a bunch of Europeans like that box milk. You ever hang out with the Swiss weasels that you hang out with? But they like it over there, right? Some people actually enjoy that crap. What's with the weasels today? I don't know. Weasels. They're like ferrets, you know, like, you know, remember Giuliani? We ever talk about that in the show, how Giuliani hated ferrets, and so he made them illegal because he's like, and then he got in arguments with people on his radio

[22:57] show. I was like, you're, why do you hate the ferret lovers? You ever heard this? Like, like, do, yeah, do a search for the radio episode where Giuliani literally berates a constituent, by the way, a New York City resident who says, you know, why do you, what do you have against ferrets? Because Giuliani, towards the end of his career here,

[23:15] like really kind of went off of his nut in terms of like arresting homeless people, doing all sorts. I mean, I was forward a lot of the quality of life stuff here, but like, then he's like, you know

[23:23] what, one of the big problems in New York is people keeping ferrets, ferrets. They should be illegal. And so he made it, he like made him push through like ferrets are illegal. He's like, sir, you raise weasels. They're weasels. And he starts screaming at this guy about how his ferrets are weasels. But like, why does Giuliani care whether some other dude has a weasel or a ferret?

[23:40] It's weird. Anyway, cheese weasels, dairy weasels. So that was my answer on that. Now on the beer ice cream, because Jack, I didn't talk about the beer ice cream, right? Sorry no. Yeah, so somebody a couple weeks ago asked about making beer, ice cream, and I do have any thoughts on it. Yeah, I like beer and dairy things. Here's the daily deal. Beer doesn't have a lot of alcohol in it anyway, so you're probably going to be okay on the alcohol level, but beer has a lot of water in it. So if you want to get rid of some of the alcohol and you want to get rid, because, you know, alcohol will soften your recipe, you know, versus what it normally was. So if you want a little software, then leave the alcohol if you don't. But what you need to do is get rid of some of that water. So what you want, I would boil, I would boil the beer off a little bit. I would also make sure that you choose a fairly non-hoppy beer. And this is the same thing like when we do, um, when I do cocktails like the, with beer, most often I'm choosing very low hop beers, uh, so that they don't interfere too much with

[24:37] uh, the flavors. So I would choose like a low hop, uh, low hop, like beer. Like, don't go get like dogfish heads like, you know, 120 minute IPA to do this stuff. Uh, you know, we do like, uh, like Abby's and and Caesons and stuff like this. Like, low, mellow stuff, and boil off some of the water, and then add enough milk powder to it, back to milk powder, add enough milk powder to it, or boil some

[25:00] milk and add it to it such that your level of milk stays the same in your recipe. So typically I would add like liter cream or 500 mils cream, 500

[25:09] mils milk, uh, 170 grams of sugar and uh, 10 egg yolks

[25:14] and uh, salt, right? Plus flavoring. So, you know, if you wanted to take that entire half liter and have it be beer, that's a lot of

[25:23] beer. But, you know, I would I would boil some of the water out of the beer, take it down and then milk powder it up to the same level as it would be if you used half a liter of milk, stir it into your cream,

[25:33] pasteurize, and go. Yeah? Yep. Yeah. Okay. Uh, so, uh, what's the what's the presence now? This is from Dorothy from HealthGlenn.com. Oh, yeah, I remember she wrote a question in a while back. been a while, though. Nice. She was a farmer from Minnesota and she gave you some syrups. Oh nice. What do we got here? We got some razuberry tarragon shrub. And what else? Smoked cherry shrub stas. You have to drink this one. Unless it's cooked. Is it cooked? I'm sure it's cooked. Okay, I'll try it. I'll try it if I fall down. going to booker index tonight. Oh, tonight? All right. This isn't poison, so you can... Well, not poison for normal people, but as you know, I'm going to the cherries. But if it's cooked, it should be all right. Then we got some ginger lime cordial and what's the jelly? It's a lime and green tea marmalade. Marmalade. do you think about people who say marmalade? You like that or no? You ever watch Chee Chong movies? No. No? Jack, you ever watch Chee Chong movies? but I don't remember. Eggs and bacon marmalade. You ever see the one where they, they, whatever. No, you would think that people would still watch, you know, Cheech, very smart guy. You know, Chong sent to jail for no apparent reason because someone used his name to sell drug

[26:43] paraphing. He had to go to jail for it. Ridiculous. which one I witness in this country. Okay. Some more questions. I know you guys like to focus on what makes food delicious, but my question is more at the opposite end of the spectrum. It's this. Why are the pizza crust from all the major pizza delivery chains so relentlessly disgusting? I know that sounds harsh, but if you know how to make pizza dough and have an even basic oven. It's actually kind of hard to make pizza disgusting. And yet, in my opinion, the big change managed to make a pizza that's mostly pretty inedible. Certainly to anyone that knows what pizza should taste like. Do the big chains face some special challenges in making our cooking pizza that are not

[27:17] obvious. Thanks for your advice on this, Simon from Cambridge. Well, um, I worked at Domino's when I was in college, and everyone knows that Domino's Pizza is, as you say, relentlessly disgusting, except for, you know, and like, like, no offense to the Papa John's

[27:34] Corporation. I love Papa John. No, I detest Papa John's. My kids love it. Like, my kids think that, well, Dax doesn't, but Booker thinks that Papa John's is like the highest quality pizza in the world.

[27:43] In fact, he he likes it better than any other pizza that you can get. I don't know why. I don't know why. I think it's to make me angry, to make me like very, very angry. But I can tell you why Domino's Pizza was bad. Domino's pizza was bad. First of all, the sauce was bad because it contained a lot of sugar. It was low quality stuff and the ingredients were crappy and had been sliced up in a factory like 18 years before they were put on the pizza. Beside that, the crust, the way the crust was made in this, and I'm sure it's the same in all these chain situations

[28:12] is the dough is not made in house. It's made somewhere else, uh, and then retarded and then um, put on pallets and left to proof. And so, even had they used a good dough. Um, they, you know, like trying to get it when it was at the autumn level of proof. like you just never, you never would. And then I'm pretty sure that they weren't using very good, uh, flour, right? And also, I just think they're cheap. I just think they're cheap. They don't want to like go through the time. I mean, you would think that they could go through the time to do like an actual long leavening process. Like, you know, when I make pizza dough. It's like a 24 hour kind of a thing, right? You know, at least 24 hours before start and I let it go a long time and make it. And then a lot of the people I know who make good pizza. This is the way they do the crust. But, uh, and you would think that Domino's knows 24 hours in advance, like how long it's going to take for them to, you know, how many pizzas they're going to make tomorrow, roughly.

[29:06] And so that they could they could do a long rise, though, if they wanted to. I don't know. But the other thing is, is their ovens really do suck. Domino's, uh, Domino's uses a conveyor oven and their conveyor ovens don't run at an extremely, um, they don't run at a

[29:22] temperature, conducive to making good pizza. And the way that the heat delivery in them is provided is not conducive to making a good pizza. And so consequently, they do not make a good pizza. And I think the average thing in most chains, uh, is, is that they like uh, kind of a breadier style and then I think that's also difficult to do. I actually misread your question this morning. I thought you say, why, frozen pizza is so crappy. So I was going to get into that, but maybe if someone else cares about frozen pizza being crap, we can get into that because I got to get some more questions before we get kicked off of the air. Am I right, Stus? By the way, did we hear anything from... Okay. So, um, here we go. We got a question or not a question so much as a as a statement based on last week. I asked for vegetarian uses for the emergency circulator. So Eddie Shepard, you know, who wrote the vegetarian cookbook and his, uh, his, uh, a vegetarian cookbook. Uh, it's uh, www.veggie chef.co.uk is his website. So he wrote in. Um, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. Uh, Eddie Shepard writing from the UK. Enjoy the show, uh, and heard uh, Martin from Sweden's Question at the end of last week's episode regarding sous vide, low temperature vegetarian cooking. Um, I know you prompted the excellent Michael Natkin to write in, which will be great. I'm a big fan of his blog and chef steps, of course. As another vegetarian chef myself working a lot with sous vide. I thought I might be able to add some helpful suggestions as well. Firstly, the application of poached eggs and ice cream, et cetera, are, of course, well documented, fantastic vegetarian uses of sous vide, and for making lemon lime curd, or any other flavor curd you fancy. It's also very handy. Fancy sounds like a very English word, right? Fans, but cat fancy, even though that's not English. You like that magazine, cat fancy? Yeah, I knew you would. And Dave already went through a lot of the benefits of cooking a range of fruits and

[31:03] vegetables sous vide for flavor precision texture, as well as the benefits of making dashi in the water of ass. What do you think about vegetables instead of vegetables? Why would you say? Vegetables. I don't know. Ellis like the word vegetable. What are you about you, Jack? Nah. Then I also use CV for a number of other applications covered below. Low temp halloumi. We talked about halloumi on the show before, right? Hanumi, the cheese from Cyprus that can be grilled. hallumi good cheese. They actually, literally, that was their advertisement. They're like, it's halloumi good cheese. I'm like, really? That's what you got, that's what you got. So, hulumi cheese, similar to queso, par Frier, similar to a bunch of things, it's a, it's a, it's a cheese that's

[31:42] made, uh, without acidifying the curd. So it's a directly ren coagulated and apparently having the relatively neutral pH of a non-acid, uh, non-acidified cheese, uh,

[31:54] prevents, uh, it from melting, uh, substantially. I know it does because I've used it, and then also they cook, they make like a ricotta style thing out of the way when they're done by acidifying it, and then they cook the cheese, curds, pressed cheese curds in the way, which solidifies them even more, and then you get your

[32:11] hallumi cheese or your frying cheese, which you can slice, and then you can grill, and it doesn't melt, but then, and it gets, it's squeaky, but then when it cools off, it's nasty squeak.

[32:19] Anyways, I like halloumi. I like all I like queso parfia. like all that stuff. Anyway, so, uh, Eddie Shepherd writes in, it says, halloumi cooked at 64 Celsius for one. 5 hours with butter, fresh mint and lemon zest is delicious and benefits from infused flavor as well as having a lovely sauce texture. I haven't been able to achieve by any other cooking method. It can also be pre-seier to get the lovely brown flavors. Um, And he also wrote uh, for transglutaminates use for uh, the vegetables. I use sous vide for some vegetarian applications or transcript camenades, including a pressed mushroom technique, which Michael and Chef Step took inspiration

[32:53] from as well for their own technique for these like mushroom burgers and or like kind of mushroom

[32:57] blocks instead of meat. And so I'll just tell you what they do. They, uh, he, Eddie slices and dehydrates the vegetable, which mushrooms, which is porous. And then, uh, makes a slurry of soy protein, isolate, uh, and, um,

[33:11] flavor and then mixes in transgutaminates and presses it flat in a block and then, and then cooks it off later. lets it sit for 4 hours and books off later. Now, the interesting thing is, is that he uses an extraordinarily high percentage of

[33:22] transcontaminating this 5%. So it's an typical typical meat style thing. It's like one%. Uh, and this is like five. So it must need a lot to bind it together to, you know, his satisfaction. Chef steps uses instead of soy protein, uses sodium caseinate, and then uses 33 and a

[33:39] quarter percent transcontaminator thereabouts in their prep. They also use ground mushrooms instead of mushroom slices and make more of a burger. But those look good. They look good. And Eddie also says he uses sous vide making his halloumi at home because that's how you're not supposed to boil the way that you put it in,

[33:57] supposed to keep it like, he keeps it 90 C, which is about right. I think it's 195 Fahrenheit is how much they cook it. So he says it takes a lot less diligence than the normal thing it doesn't get scorching. He also uses it for putting white chocolate in a vacuum bag and cooking it at 90 C for like 24 hours and it gets like a dulce de

[34:15] leche brown. You know, you've seen those things, like the, like the white chocolate that I actually make taste good by cooking it for a long time. No, no, I hadn't seen it. Plus I don't want to talk about it. Um, anyway, um, oh, and also he says that uh, he ordered a TS 8000 Burns

[34:29] mag TS 8000, which is the one we use on the Sears all in the UK through the eBay. Costs them $60 total, which is more or less what it would cost to get a Rothenberg. But the question is, and I'd love to hear back from you, Eddie, is, do the propane tanks in the UK fit, or do you have to make a special adapter? Anyway, I hope that's some help. And if you do get across to the U okay, when your book launches, try to get up north as well, there's lots of great food and cocktails happening in the

[34:49] Manchester, and if you've not visited before, it's a great city. I have not. Have you, stars? No. Uh, okay. And so, uh, they're gonna kick, they're gonna kick us off. So I have like, well, no, I have like I have like 4 minutes, right? 4 minutes. I have like 4 minutes. And I just want to give a shout out to Co Miles for supporting the network. Oh, I love Com Miles. Yeah, he's the man. Com Miles is a good man. Thank you for supporting Coma. He supported us with the Marnes cuisine book, which I really enjoy. He's a great guy. And some interesting stories, which I will not share. But, well, he shared with me when he took the sous vide class. I think it was sous vide. Uh, some like some funky stories. Anyways, um, okay, so we're ripping through. This is Sam from Guysville. Where's Guysville? Anyway, for a chamber vacuum sealer, just getting water oil on the inside of a vacuum bag where the ceiling element presses affect its ceiling ability,

[35:34] thanks, Sam, from Guysville. Yes and no. A small amount of liquid is not going to hurt too much because the temperature is such that it'll boil it off and then

[35:42] seal fine. However, large amounts of liquid can cause problems. Also, if your liquid has any crap in it, like spices or whatnot, this can inhibit the seal because it's physically a particle and

[35:52] it prevents the bags from touching it together. So I've had many things go wrong. Where am I from? Wrong. I've had many things go wrong when you have stuff like pepper or stuff get in spices. I've also had a problem with lots and lots of liquid there because I don't know why. I guess as it's boiling out, it creates little channels and stuff, but a small amount of liquid's not

[36:10] going to be too much of a problem. So don't worry about it. Um, and then finally, although I think I know I missed one. I missed one. I'll tell you who I missed. I'll tell you who I missed because I'll get you next week. And we'll get to the Twitter questions next week. Next week, we're starting a section. What's it called, Jack? What, the section of things you haven't answered? No, the, well, we have that, but we're going to have no, and I'm going to be on time next week. Oh, yeah, next week because I'm not around the week after that. No, was it Nastasia reading the tweets? What you say I was going to? Oh, yeah, we got to I got to come up with a name for that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We got a, we got a new, I'm not going to be able to answer Brandon Johnson's questions on carbonation, but I'll get that next

[36:45] time, and we have another question on, on, um, well, I'll do the bag

[36:51] in box, because I can do that in 2 minutes. So there's also a carbonation question, why it burns from Bushwick, Brooklyn, writes in about bag and box syrup. Hey, Dave, Jack and Nastasio. I was wondering if you've had experimented with making your own bag and box, soda concentrates for use in a commercial beverage system. I'm really interested in experimenting with a frozen carbonated beverage machine for

[37:07] cocktails, and since these machines are under pressure, i.e. they don't have a hopper, you can pour a mix into. I think the only way to get my ingredients as I would be through the concentrate line. I've never used a bag in box system before to the syrup pumps, just pull the liquid out, or is there some sort of magic going on with the

[37:20] bags? I could theoretically just cut off the BIB container and stick it into a container of my drink ingredients, what sort of ingredient ratios

[37:26] would be looking forward to do a carved alcoholic slushy concentrate. Okay, that's a good question. Yeah, bag in box, they just have a, usually a pump, the pumps that are manufactured typically by sure flow here. They're run off of carbon dioxide, and they pull the liquid from the bag. You need to make sure you get rid of the air in the bag because that can mess with the bricks. And then they push it through an orifice. set for a certain pressure and that's how they meter out the syrup into a typical Wunderbar bargun. And then you adjust with a little screw exactly what the bricks is. So I'm assuming that there's a similar sort of mechanism going on in one of these machines, although I've never used it. Now, here's the here's the story. Here's what you need to look at. When you're looking to make a carbon, when you're looking to make an alcoholic slushy, right, the 1st thing you need to shoot for is the right alcohol level. The right alcohol level is between about 14 and 14.4% alcohol by volume.

[38:12] Don't go any higher than that, or you're not going to get it very slushy, and if you go too much lower than that, it's going to get pretty hard in the machine, right? You're gonna look for roughly 8 bricks. So around 8% sugar. So do your calculations based on that. Now, to go any other way, you're going to have to cap, 8 brakes means 8% sugar by weight. So in a, you know, if you weigh uh, a liter uh, a

[38:34] weigh a kilogram of uh, product, then, you know, roughly 8 uh, 80 grams

[38:40] of it should be sugar. anyway. Um, Here's what, I'll give you, here's a, uh, typical. Typical soda, like is a roughly a 5 to one ratio. So 5 parts water, one part syrup, which is a total of 6 parts, okay? So 6 parts, let's say we're going to do 6 ounces out of 30 mil ounce because I use 30 mil metric ounces, right? That's 180 milliliters. I'm just doing this calculation for you. You gonna have to go back and do your own. So one ounce of that syrup, right? It's about 30 milliliters. And if you were going to use a simple syrup, like a bar syrup, which is about 50 bricks. That's one. 23 grams per milliliter, which is the density of a 50 brick syrup, one ounce of that's going to weigh 36.9 grams. Uh, and then, so, remember, it's 50 bricks, so half of that weight, half of that 36.9 grams is going to be sugar, that's

[39:25] 18.5, uh, 45 grams. So soda made with a 50 with a 50 brick syrup, which is one to one simple syrup. will have a bricks of, and if parts, five parts soda, one part syrup. We'll have a brakes of 10.25 or slightly less sweet than the Coca-Cola, and use those rough things to make your own bricks

[39:43] calculations, and we'll get back next week with cooking issues. Thanks for listening to this program on heritageradionetwork.org. You can find all of our archive 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 anytime at info@heritageradionetwork.org. HeritageRadio Network is a 501 C3 nonprofit. To donate and become a member, visit our website today. Thanks for listening.