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[0:33] Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of cooking issues coming to you live from Roberta's Pizzeria and Bushwick, Brooklyn, on the Heritage Radio Network, every Tuesday from roughly

[0:42] 12, I don't know, like 1245. Uh, well, Nastasia the Hammer Lopez is uh, later than me today, which is unusual, unusual. She's on the L train. I'm sure you guys all know the fabulous website, is the

[0:55] L-Train effed, but, you know, spelled out, right? And apparently, if you go on that right now, it would probably say... They spell it LATE trade. Really? They spell it out. Yeah, L, I think it's just is the L train, you know, not French Connection UK,

[1:11] but properly spelled. Anyways. But while we're waiting for nastasia, we have a new person in the engineering booth today. Liz, right? Yes. Hello. Hello, how you doing? How are you enjoying the engineering stuff while Jack's away? Oh, you know what they say? Well, the cat's way, the mice will play, right? I guess, I guess. I guess. And, uh, um, before we get tuned. We have 2 special guests with us today. We might actually, a 3rd person might be coming. Uh, we got Don Lee, the fabulous Don Lee of

[1:42] uh, what's the new bar called? Boilermaker. But you don't drop the shot glasses into the, you don't actually drop the boilermaker shot glass into the, into the pint glass. You can if you want. no right or wrong way to do it. You can just, you know, be in a shot next to each other. You can pour it in. You can drop the shot. But you don't encourage this, though. You know, we encourage fun. So if you're having fun, do what you want. Do you leave enough volume in the pint glass to do a drop a proper or do you have to take a sip first? You got to take a sip first. You don't want to stiff you if you want to, you know, a good beer. Actually, doing British style pores has to be exactly on the freaking line. Not an exact line, but you know, it should be to the top. British people. You know? Like, don't get me stuck. I love you. I love you, Brits, but you and your obsession over your pore lines and your beers is a little bananas because like the, the, the price, and we're also

[2:27] joined, by the way, Paul Adams, the, uh, head honcho

[2:31] of, uh, uh, popular sciences, uh, web presence, is that true? Was it your title, head honcho? Senior editor, is that the same thing? I prefer honcho. Okay, yeah, head honcho. And, and, and, uh, Stinky Fish enthusiast. Yes. Yes. Which we're going to get to in a minute. because it's it's it's stinky fish Tuesday on cooking issues. As you might know, we are actually going to get to my backlog of questions. We're going to record a special ketchup show, and maybe I can even do a ketchup tasting for that,

[3:00] for, you know, because Nastasia, who, for years, had said that the brand of ketchup that you use doesn't matter until, yeah, until recently she went away and someone gave her some off brand ketchup, but she's like, oh, I thought it didn't matter because I had just been eating, you know, eating

[3:13] heights this whole time. So we could do a comparative ketchup tasty. Maybe some fancy ketchups. And some crappier supermarket ketchups. I mean, it's kind of like everything's rated against Heinz, wouldn't you say? Right, but are you going to do these Steingarten, you know, McDonald's French fries, the medium, or what are you going to do? Okay, look, I love Jeffrey. In fact, I saw him recently for the 1st time in a long time. For those of you that don't know, Jeffrey is like, in, you know, for me, one of the most influential food writers

[3:35] ever ate, but I'm like, you know what? I can never get the name of this book, right? Because I confuse his book name with, I said this in the air before with Oliver Saxe's book name, so it's like the man who ate his wife with everything or something. mistook his wife or something that you. Yeah, exactly. Something like this. But it's actually the man who ate everything, is his 1st book. Um, and it was just, you know, I think it's one of the, it's like, of its style, like the seminal book. Anyway, amazing. Uh, amazing book. Anyways, he's dead wrong. McDonald's French fries suck. In fact, that style of French fries sucks. It's like right in between, like a shoestring fry, cook to the point where it's basically a potato chip. I mean, I can kind of appreciate this. Um, uh, even a soggy, crappy, thinner fry, but the fries that taste good for 13.5 seconds when they come out of the fryer and then turn to like

[4:24] a hollow pieces of cardboard, which is kind of like how McDonald's French fries work. They suck. hate them. So what would be your medium for testing different kinds of ketchup then? Okay, look. But what do you think about McDonald's fries? I mean, McDonald's fries and McDonald's fries. You're on a road trip? you know, it's something you can, you know, count on. I mean, look, I can get, 1st of all, on a road trip, they get cold so fast because you're driving and you can't just like pound them. You have to sit there and like, the person in the passenger seat is holding the fries over and you're missing and you're dipping.

[4:53] I would say you have to taste them straight and then taste them on, hmm. I don't know, nastachia. What is the, you're looking well today. I'm gonna go see platelet bread. Oh, she's dressed up to see Fleetwood Mac. Nastasia. One of the largest Fleetwood Mac fans hates Stevie Nicks. don't hate it. I prefer the other one. Can you make more crinkly noises? You pass the mic, please, because... Yeah. Yeah, we're doing an event for the low line tomorrow, and I, we need dry ice. There's a low line now. Well, yes. It's some abandoned, like, tunnel area in the lower east side, and they're having a fundraiser tomorrow, and we're one of the drink makers for it. And so I'm going to do, um, our version, Don has his own version of the, uh, Harvey Waldbanger. We're going to do our frozen version to the Italiano Esteliano, uh, name tip of the hat to Piper. That was one of his final puns for us before he moved on to, you know. Yeah, yeah. Anyway. So we were about to eat some sneaky fish and I got sidetracked. We have a caller on the air and we were talking about boiler makers. Why don't I take the collar first? He's not sitting there all the whole time. Caller. you still there? Yeah. Hey, how you doing? I'm doing good. How are you? Doing well, doing well. What is your question? Um, okay, so I actually have asked this already on American

[6:11] Pest Kitchen radio, but um, Chris and Bridget were not able to speak questions. Oh, like you're cutting in and out a little bit. Try to try to rearrange your head in relation to the phone and start again. I couldn't hear that lesson. Um, I've actually already asked Chris and Bridget of America's Pest Kitchen about this question and they actually weren't able to answer it. So I'm hoping you could help me out. Oh, well, we got, we got 4 heads here, plus, plus Liz, a separate head in the engineering room. So maybe we got maybe we got your answer here. All right. Um, so, um, about 2 years ago, I was in a lab, um, for biology, and uh, one of the experiments is where we took salivary

[6:50] analyst, and um, tested its effect on a dish of agar jelly, and the idea is that the enzyme can actually break down the starch into sugars.

[6:59] And um, I was wondering if you can have that same effect with like an egg yolk on

[7:03] fruit because I know egg yolks contain amylase. So I'm wondering, can you buy like a really crappy piece of supermarket through

[7:09] the totally unripe and put the egg yolk on it and have it like magically

[7:14] ripen artificially? My understanding of it is that while there are some enzymes in egg yolk, and I guess those are the ones that make custards turn to

[7:24] crap if you don't cook them through enough, right? Um, it's my memory. It's been a long time. Yeah, that they're relatively low in activity compared to, um, compared to commercial

[7:37] preparations, or for instance, saliva, um, which is better off spitting on it.

[7:44] aside from the fact that you'd have egg yolk on it, but the more interesting thing that you bring up is that ripeness isn't just a function of sugar.

[7:53] So ripeness is oft times an increase in sugar, but concommittent with lots of other changes. For instance, sometimes a reduction in acid, sometimes acid is stable, depends. Like apples, the acid and apples will slowly decrease over time as it ripens. Um, they're all, you know, the, the creation of volatiles, especially kind of like higher uh, flowery nestry notes, things like

[8:16] this are created during the ripening uh, process. So it's not all starch to sugar conversion. However, liquor companies make a very good business out of taking things like potatoes and converting the starch in them into sugar without having to go through

[8:30] any, you know, time-consuming step like fermentation. So they just dump amylases into it. Remember, amylase is not a single type of enzyme. There's alpha amylases, and there's beta amylases, and there's different ones that are meant to operate at various different points. But if you have, like, for instance, a puree of unripe product. I would recommend at, and we just wanted to sugar it up. Lets say we're doing potatoes or something, right? If you have a lot of pectin, I would add a pectin, pectinase enzyme to thin it out so that your other enzymes can work more effectively. And then usually they do a two-step process, 2 different enzymes when they're doing conversions for

[9:06] thing, or more, like shotgun enzyme approaches. I call them when they're doing things like fermentation for potatoes. I forget the names of the enzymes that they use, but uh, uh, Novo signs makes a bunch of Guzmer as the place, but I don't think any, I've tried using just straight amylase from a brew shop, and I think

[9:22] they're, they're, I was very underwhelmed. Very underwhelmed by it. I also remember that for your amylases to work properly. They have to have access to the starch in the in granules. So unless you, like, let's say you take an underripe apple. So when you taste an underripe apple, one of the characteristic notes of an underripe apple, a starchy flavor, and you can

[9:45] see, almost feel it. When you cut it with a knife, you go shunk, and it cleaves, and it's starchy. The only starch is really, if you lick that apple, instead of eating it, you can actually get that kind of starchy taste from it, and

[9:55] the, that starch can be is available to be converted by anamelase. However, the starch intact starch is typically not. So you would need to functionalize the starch, a.k.a. cook it, and which is what they do when they're doing when they're mashing out or something like this. Usually you'll bring the ward up so that you can hydrate the starch and then it's more available. Back me up on this. Don Paul. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, so I would recommend you got to do all those, but chewing and spitting out is a time honored way of increasing the sugar content of

[10:28] uh, starchy products, although it's people find it gross. But if you're doing it for yourself or if you're doing... I don't really want to spit on my fruit, so I don't think I'm going to do that. We're gonna just spin on it. just gonna chew it and spit it out. And then ferment one. But even if you just keep it in your mouth, you keep chewing it. You feel it change over time on your tongue. I've never done it to a potato. I've definitely done it with rice. So, like, even just like the plainest of white rice is. you just, you know, keep it in your mouth, keep chewing on it. like, you know, 30 seconds to a minute, it'll become sweeter. Hey, Stas, you ever seen me choose for a full minute, Stas? I like full like millisecond, more like. I'm like, I'm like, I almost, I almost got kicked out of a Michelin starred restaurant in Spain because the guys couldn't come to the table fast enough to explain what the hell they were

[11:10] doing and it was already gone. And like the actual, the chef came out and was angry with me.

[11:14] I'm like, well, you know, don't talk so goddamn much. So, excuse me, don't talk so much. Family show. and let me have my food and need it, right? Or serve everyone else and then wait or like put a closure over mine or something, you know? Something. Because I eat very quickly. Hey, real quick, I know this is your ketchup show, but if you have time, I've got 2 more quick questions asked. All right, go quick. while Don is setting up our fish products. Okay. Um, so I've got 2 uh, all-plied Tefon pans, and the finish has been totally ruined on them from like use and abuse and scratching them on

[11:47] accident, stuff like that. Um, I don't want to ditch to really nice cans. I feel like the metal underneath is fine. So, um, I actually have access to a lot of like stainless working equipment, like polishing and

[12:00] stuff. Is there any way to Teslon finish off the pan and functionalize the pan into a standard stainless

[12:07] non regular sticking pan, like normal? Yeah, sure. I mean, yeah, usually it's Teflon over aluminum, though. You sure it's the undersurface of it is stainless right below the Teflon? Usually it's like the old school like D3 pan, so I think it's a sandwich of stainless aluminum stainless. That's a good point. I didn't think about the fact that it might just be aluminum and then Teflon. Yeah, but Teflon, as abrasion resistant as it is, is no match for a very quickly spinning wire brush attached to a 4.5 inch angle grinder.

[12:41] But, uh, you know, then you're going to have to polish and and buff out and you want to make sure you get all the Teflon particles off because uh, it's going to be more apt to uh, you keeping those things straight done, which ones? You're more apt to, you know, have, you know, a little Teflon

[12:57] particles and people are more and more worried about like burned little Teflon particles every every 5 minutes. I see. I hear more people upset about, uh, PFO,

[13:07] what is it, PFOAs? perflurinated something or other. Anyway, okay, what's your next one? Um, what is the deal you on the spheres all? How can I get one? Are you going to offer them to go on Amazon? We are. There's not that many left. In fact, I'm glad you asked, this will be the update for the Sears offer right now. The international ones are... going out tomorrow. Tomorrow, they're shipping tomorrow, and all we're doing is waiting on the handoff from our importer into

[13:37] Amazon and then they'll ship out. So literally, in order to give something to Amazon, you need to have an appointment, believe it or

[13:44] not. And so they're making that appointment, but we hope it happens this week. As soon as I get confirmation that everyone from ShopStarter and Kickstarter has

[13:52] been, uh, had their product sent to them. I will then mail the residual sears alls in which there are going to be, how many styles, like 300? 350, probably? 300? I'll mail them to Amazon and they'll just go up on Amazon Prime ready to go. Awesome. Awesome. Good deal. Okay. If I move out, I'm probably going to have to, like, hack my own or something out of Boston Shaker or whatever, but, yeah, yeah. Obviously, I can't recommend infringing our patent or doing things that are unsafe,

[14:21] but, you know, but it is a fun project. fair enough. Alrighty. Thanks so much. All right, Don, back to you for a 2nd with the boiler maker. Yes sir. I forget we were talking about boilermakers. And the drop, and the drop, and the sip. Oh, and the freaking, yeah, the British with their pores. Here's the thing. The price is arbitrary. So why does the poor have to be exact? Same with the Germans, with the little wine glass with the line etch in it? You ever seen those? Well, so, you know, historically, there's the fact that it was something that was mandated so that you that it was trying to protect the customer. So the government would say that you have to have this line so people know that this is what it is. And in England, they take the weights and measures very seriously. So even jiggers, if you're producing a 25, 50 milliliter jigger, you can't, 1st of all, you can't make a 30, 60, has to be 25,

[15:10] 50 because that's what is recognized by the weights and measures. And then it has to be certified by them. So they just are obsessive about making sure that everything is right for the folks. And then after that, it's really just perception. At this point, people have an expectation of what it's going to be. And if you, you know, it's like even if you order a cocktail today, if you go to like a hotel and they give you an absurdly large V

[15:29] stem glass and they give you a martini to the top, like no one wants to drink that all the way to the bottom. It'll just be warm by the time it's the bottom. But if you give them the right amount of drink, you know, that, uh, in a large glass, people feel like they're, they've been gypped. familiar with this problem. That's why you use smaller glass. But the fact that matter is, it's all it's all perception and not actual kind of mandates in these weird... All right. Okay, at least after this, we got to we got to eat some we got to eat some fish. Call her, you're on the air. Okay, that's good afternoon. I really enjoy the show and also I'm really looking forward to your book coming out. Give me a copy of that. Pretty soon, pretty soon, very soon. Yeah, terrific. Oh, I had a couple of recipe questions. I hope you can help me with. Um, I've heard you talk about um, making onion ice cream. Sure. Um, and I was wondering um, how you did that. Uh, do you, do you caramelized onions? you pressure pecum or how do you how do you do that? Well, and you could, I guess, we never caramelized them first, I guess, or afterwards, but

[16:29] we pressure cooked them in milk and then blend it for like 20 minutes. Uh, and then uh, blend and then use strain, and then use that as the uh, milk base with the with the cream. So, um, and that works. If you want more of a, frankly, I would actually just, if you wanted to get more of a brown note, I would just add brown sugar rather than caramelized, because the only issue you might have is that you might develop some stable, Usually when I pressure cook, I pressure cooked uncooked onions, and I don't know whether you'll develop some more stable sulfree

[17:03] stuff, if you pre-sauté and kind of set the flavor of the onion before you pressure cook it. Usually I slice it into rings very quickly, throw it in milk and pressure cook it right away. So I don't let it sit around all the time and develop that kind of stale onion

[17:14] flavor or any of that kind of any of that kind of jazz. But yeah, it's a legit, it's a legit ice cream. I mean, it's on the savory side, but it's legitimately an ice cream. You guys have you guys ever been to the demos when we've done that? No, I've never tried your version of it, but have you ever tried it with the Maui onions? I've heard they're like much sweeter to begin with. Really? I still got pressure cooked those suckers. No, Stas, you've had the onion ice cream, right? Yeah. Did you like it? Wow. And then Vistasia likes it. You know that it has to be a legit product because she, there's nothing. Booker and Nastasia are the 2 people that love to hate the stuff that I do the most. And that's kind of why I like keeping them around. I mean, Booker, because he's my son, but Nastasia, because, you know, she's a

[17:49] good, she's a good... Yeah, what? It's a vital role. It is a vital role. The hater. Yes. Yeah. We got to write a Is there a song called The Hater? There's a Joker. Can we do a new version called The Hater and You're the Star? Sure. Sweet. All right, cool. All right, well, thanks. All right. On to finish. Yeah, oh, yeah. If you don't mind, I was also trying to make your 1st aid cocktail at home. Will that work with Agar clarification? No, I mean, look, you can clarify with Agar, but I found that drinks that are traditionally meant to be kind of

[18:22] hostinos or really thin when they're Agar, especially because remember you have to add water when you're doing an Agar base thing anyway. And so it just it never becomes kind of awesome. Here's what I recommend you do because 1st date lasts forever. So here's what you should do. You should get to dates. You should get whichever spirit you're going to make the 1st date into because we've made it with various different ones. Blend it, a high speed with SPL, and then just put it in a cabinet for like a month. And then rack it off. And, you know, you might not get like 100%, but you're going to get a lot of settling and you're going to get, excuse me, a significant amount of clear stuff on the top of it. Oh, not. No, that's what I would recommend. But it takes a while, but it's fine because 1st date doesn't go bad. It's the method known as God centrifuge. Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I guess that's true. Yeah, thank you very much. Appreciate your help. All right, cool, thanks. Hey, Paul, you have these kind of contacts. Can we get into one of those NASA astronaut centerfuges and just hold the bottle of, it's only a couple G's, though. not enough to do much. I think they go up to 7 G's. Yeah. I don't mean, we're doing a couple 1000 G's, but I wonder whether you can visibly see settling in a bottle of Justino if you're holding it in your

[19:34] hand. Probably. in an astronaut centrifuge. In so far as you can see, anything at 7 G's. Well, because your eyes are peeled back. Yeah. Well, you know, Paul has been on the vomit comet. Did you know that? I think we might be on the vomit comet about 20 minutes here when we're eating the hot girl. So why don't we talk about the fish that we have first, but we have some non-stinky fish that was mailed to us by

[19:53] a longtime listener, John Riper, right? Yep. Thank you, John. So he, he fish, he fished these, right? I think he fished these. these fish these? All right. So where are they from? What river do you know? Yeah, I can tell you a second. All right. So for those of you that, I don't know, I don't know. I don't know. what your background is because I'm not talking to you. You're listening to a podcast. But um, so salmon, right? Uh, there's a bunch of different variables with a salmon. We're not talking about the latter variables like harvesting or any of this other nonsense, but aside from your standard kind of

[20:26] farmed or wild, right? You have which run they're from. And then which species they're from. But the species obviously affects what species it is and the waters that come from are going to affect things like fat content based on how cold the waters are, et cetera, et

[20:42] central. This is what he said. He has 2 different wild Pacific salmon. The Lewis and Clark Expedition A, a ton of salmon when they ventured out to my corner of the globe. Most of it was dried and they came to hate it, but Meriwether Lewis later wrote that the Fresh King salmon he ate here was the finest fish he ever tasted. I wouldn't argue with that, although some people think co-host salmon is just as good as Chinook. I'm sending you some of both, so you can compare for yourself. But I'm not sending them as fresh fish. I've smoked them instead, but they're not the hard, dry chunks that commercially smoked salmon tend to be. They are dried, cured, and cherry wood smoked, but both the curing and smoking are a lot lighter than you typically find. So these filets are still perishable, but they are a lot less delicate than raw fish. I'm not going to say I'm anti-coho, but, you know, I don't fly around in coho helicopters,

[21:25] right? Like it's Chinook, it's the freaking helicopter. true. I saw 2 Chinook helicopters out my window in Manhattan yesterday. Yeah. I don't know why there were military troop transport helicopters in Chelsea. Is it Fleet is it Fleet Week? No. No, well, you know, they're a lot of... Oh, damn, strength. Strength ball, strength. This is why, you know, Paul just can't be beep. All right, so let's taste this before we get to our crazy craziness. So okay, which one's which? So the one on the right is the co-ho. What's all taste this? Why are you sitting here not eating? You guys were making me angry. Um, I think salmon's a delicious product. Do you like salmon? Are you literally eating bubble gum right before you taste the salmon? No. Yes. Do a quick shot of Brenabin. I was like, why don't you just why don't you describe what we're going to be drinking here? We have some Icelandic synopsis here. It's like Aquavit from Iceland. Paul was kind enough to hook us up with the US importer of Brennan. Who contacted me on Twitter when he heard we were going to be eating fermented shark today? I'm by the way. By the way, John, who's a stickler for details, which I

[22:33] appreciate, took pictures of the actual fish they came from and took both filet pieces from the same section of fish and labeled them with marks. Yeah, which is strong. fantastic. It's fantastic, right? This is also really delicious fish. I think I prefer the one on the left, but I'm a fattier dude. Like, what do you what do you do? What do you do? What do you prefer? Which one's the one in the line? wasn't paying attention. The left was the chinook. There you go. It's called the King for a reason, people. I think the other one's also delicious But it's a different product. I mean, like, you know, I've come to expect delicious kind of, I mean,

[23:09] I've come to expect, like, fatty being positive, whereas now a lot of people like the leaner salmons because they still haven't gotten over this stupid hatred of

[23:18] fat. Let's save that for another show. Okay, so what, so we're drinking, uh, what's the, how do you say skull in, uh, in, uh, do they have a special pronunciation of skull there? Donovan? Blendo idea. So we're going to go Scandinavian style. You know, old Iceland, Icelandic, the most conservative Norse language, and therefore people in Iceland can actually read the sagas, because it's the closest language to

[23:41] old Norse. And so respecting that I will not clink classes. We will just look at each other in school properly. It's cool. It's cool. That's good. That's good. They don't pussy out. They don't pussy out on the caraway flavor. Caraway forward. Yeah, which I appreciate. I don't like sissy, sissy, Akavites with no, uh... Speaking of sissies. What are glass levels? Oh, I know. The bartender and the man of experimental eating prowess are the ones who haven't pounded

[24:13] their... Now, Don, Don just came back from Iceland and was not involved in any sort of eruption. Why don't you tell us what you brought back? Brought back some fermented shark. Well, so you and I did. We went on a trip to Sweden together and you made the poor decision to try to bring back

[24:30] sastrami in your luggage. Managed to bring it back. Yeah. So, Surstrami, why explain what Surstrami is? is intentionally miscanned. Is it herring? I believe. Yeah. So the you know how you're not supposed to eat a bulging can if you buy can fruit, it's a bulging can of fish that's gone bad. And it was quite horrendous. Paul joined us for tasting that. And I figured, you know, I'm at another Scandinavian place with something that's supposedly terrible. I figured I should share the terrible with you. So for those of you, we talked about it on the air and Paul blogged it, right? For popular signs. I did. There was a video of Dave and McGee enjoying it. Yeah, so it was, for those of you that, I don't know, just were born today, don't know Harold McGee. Harold McGee had possibly the greatest quote of all time as we were eating the

[25:19] surf drumming. So surf roaming, what they do is, is they don't add enough salt to it. So ferments in the can. And for some reason, it always ferments in a way that doesn't produce any sort of botulism, but it does make

[25:29] some for some stinky stuff. And when you open it, on a day when you see nothing, instantly everything's coated and flies. Everything's coded and flies, like your face, the surfstrum, everything, coded and flies, and the smell radiates out from, you know, far and

[25:41] wide, and McGee, uh, who had had it maybe 2 or 3 times prior, was like, this one is missing

[25:49] uh, the vomit note. I miss the vomit note. And I was like, wow, Harold, that's strong, strength, strength. Remember that? That was crazy. And then Paul, Paul was the only guy standing next to McGee and just like pounding chunk after trunk. Like, I had like 3 or 4 because I wanted to see if I could acquire a taste over this, like, you know, small amount of time. But Paul, I don't even remember this, Stas. Yeah, took a cab. took a cab home with it. But then what happened, Paul? The window wouldn't go down. I took a cab home with the leftover sir struggling because we couldn't finish the can and I was in a cab with where the windows wouldn't

[26:24] open. What did the cabby say? He didn't say anything, but he looked very unhappy. I love that the cabby had seen so much worse that he doesn't mention sirstraming in the cab. Anyway, totally illegal to bring back. Is this stuff also illegal to bring back? Not to my knowledge. It's sold everywhere. I saw some vacuum pack, some, but they're all kind of frozen. There were no warnings in the airport like in Sweden where it said specifically not to put this in your in your luggage. Right. All right. Well, okay, so hackerl, as it's called. Icelandic delicacy, turns out that they have a boatload of these Greenland sharks off the coast of their waters, right? And they catch them from time to time, but the level of trimethalamian, I believe. I wasn't able to look up my scholarly stuff today, but TMA, I think it's TMA, trimithlamine. I don't think it's straight ammonia. is so high that the flesh is actually toxic to eat. Yes. And, uh, so... It's always fresh Greenland shark flesh. Oh, I like that. You know, but there's also a lot of squids that are high in, well, I guess that's more iodine, huh? Anyway, but like dogs apparently don't aren't offended by the

[27:25] smell and they can get some sort of like TMA narcosis from eating too much of this. Yes. Red. Yeah, which is kind of awesome. Humans can be. Well, I believe they also have Brenabin with it. Oh, yeah, the dogs? Yeah. Well, the thing is like, we're still repulsed by the smell that we can't eat enough of it to actually have it be toxic. That's one of the few things that's, you know, kind of like that, you know, where... But we're going to try. Well, no, so then what they do is they bury it. They bury bury the sucker in the ground and some portion of, you know, I love how people figure things out. This is why people are so resourceful or dumb or both. A combination of resource dumb. So they bury the shark for however long. It freezes in thaws because, you know, because it does. They pull it out of the ground and someone's like, this stinks, but differently than before. Yes. I'm gonna eat this thing. And then they actually hang it up for a couple more weeks to dry it out. Yeah, they got to dry it out. Well, the guy like probably tasted a piece, didn't die. It's like, well, I'm going to hang it up for later and see what happened. This is how all this kind of crap happens. You know what I'm saying? Because you're starving and it's either eat your eat your dead brother or eat this rotting shark and you go for the rotting shark 1st and the brother's kind of like a 2nd call. I mean, that's usually how this thing works, right? Yeah, okay. The line between fermented and rotten is sort of a hazy one.

[28:39] a matter of opinion. Yeah, that's true. I mean, like in a fine a plus and they're, you know, you know, we've kind of lost it, but like when you travel to other

[28:48] places and you see cultures that still have a complete continuum from fresh to fermented in everything they eat, including grains

[28:55] and and, you know, main starches and stuff. We very rarely eat, you know, anyway, whatever. So, uh, it's uh, hung up to dry. They smoke it as well. They smoke it, right? Isn't there fire in there? I don't think there's a smoking. Just a dry hanger from at least what Wikipedia tells me. So the guy didn't use his brother to smoke the fish instead of eating the brother, use it as a smoking fuel. Well, yeah, unfortunately, there aren't very many trees in Iceland. So apparently the primarily they use sheep dung. So there is, in fact, a sheepdung beer that you can get in Iceland. How was it? It was smoky. Don Lee, if you ever visit Don Lee as a very, very, you have to be a very special guest, but if you visit him at the cocktail kingdom, he will serve

[29:38] you, uh, horse pizzle, uh, horse pizzle booze. Yeah, that was a courtesy of a tinho who brought it back from Vietnam for me. Sweet. The label was amazing. Yeah, it was a, we will, we've been conquering awards for the past 20 years and we will continue to conquer more. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, any 24 hour hotline if you have any questions. Yeah, I mean, horse, you know, horse is, uh, you know, uh, you know,

[30:01] a, uh, a well endowed creature. Yeah, yeah. I don't know, what's that called? What's that thing called? It's a it's a classic thing. I have flew out of my head right now where you think you become something by eating something of like that. Like ginseng looks like a dude with a thing, so you're going to become a dude with a thing if you eat it

[30:18] or like, you know, what's that called? It's a, it's like, yeah. There's Daniel Gritzer. Oh, Daniel Gritzer has come back. Tim Justin. Why don't you cut him some wine you cut him some non-stink first? I could use some more too. We're going to need to... Yeah, I lost track of which salmon was which. Well, the one in the package, the Chinook, is the Chinook and the other one's a coach. No, I mean, I think he means on the plate. On the plate, you were eating. one was the one that was a little bit more briny. And I think the fatty might have been whether it was the top or the bottom. The belly side was a little bit fattier than the in the top. I think you're a little more briny. Okay. Daniel, you're just in time my brother. Pull up this weird white chair. You don't get a cushy seat because you're late. How about that? Okay. Daniel Gritzer from Sirius Eats. So we have now, uh, the, like, uh, brains

[31:09] here, oh, by the way, uh, cocktail kingdom, popular science, serious eats, and then, like, the 2 Jokers from cooking issues, here to tail, we have a 5 heads, are clearly better

[31:19] than uh, none for uh, tasting this uh, stuff. You want to taste of this stuff before we crack open the hot girl? Yeah, this looks like salmon, is that? Yeah. Looks are not deceiving. This is... So this is the Chinook. And this is the co-ho. Chinook and Koho. Wow, that looks tasty. Same same river, same smoking process. And take from the same piece. Take the same piece as you go down. like belly versus belly. So you have to test versus that piece. Oh, he needs a shot. All right. No, I still like, I mean, actually... Yes. I'm sorry, I'm eating on the air. Okay, here we go. Drum roll. Open the hack roll. Oh, it's a, I'm going to immortalize this. You want to open this right under Dave's name, so... It's already hot. Hector, ha girl. It's only 100 grams of net. We could pound this. Oh, oh, it gets got on me. Oh, jeez. I hate these plastic containers. That's nothing. That smells like, that's nothing. People out there, Gordon Ramsay, Gordon Ramsay, I'm calling you out. You are a sissy. Isn't this what he this is what he ate and he puked? You were pretty mild. You are a freaking sissy. Yeah, I figured, you know, if anyone can take it, it would be us. You know, the number of times we clean down stuff at the end of the night using just the Windex. It's like ammonia city. Yeah, it's just ammonia. It's not it's not death. Like, serstraming is the smell. You're smelling your own decay and rot. You're smelling like liquefied version of that dude on the subway who clears out the subway. You know what I'm talking about? You're, like this, this stuff that's kind of dripping like from him, like that is what you get from surfstorming with an additional

[33:10] note, some other nastiness, plus ammonia, plus ammonia, right? This. This, This just smells like you spilled a little ammonia on your on your fish. You're passing around. our impressions. It's also supposed to have plenty of urea. Yeah, yeah, yes. Oh, okay, so let's, well, we can't do a break, we're about to taste it. We'll do a break in a minute. What we'll do is we'll do a tasting and then we'll go do a break and we'll come back. But I am... I'm telling you that anyone who's at the set, a bunch of people said this is the worst thing they've ever eaten, right? Anthony Bourdain said it was the worst thing he's had. Listen, I've met that guy. It didn't seem like a sis. Did his sister try it? Maybe that's who tried it. Anthony Bourdain or what is it called? Like Tony Reichl? What's his like mashup? Don knows. Yeah, it's Ruth Reichl Anthony Bourdain. I can't remember it's Twitter. Yeah, yeah. I mean, look, I'm not saying 1st of all, obviously men don't have a stronger constitution than women do, but I just like calling people sissies, right? That's okay. That's fair, right? Totally right, take a piece, everyone. And then we're going to sears all it to see what that does to the ammonia because ammonia is volatile. And then we also have some lemon here to see whether we can cut some of the stuff with the lemon, but I don't even think it's gonna need it. Oh, I mean, this... I ate stinkier stuff than this on a regular basis. Eat. That tastes good. That tastes good. It's kind of salty. Totally. Very chewy. Oh, you're all, you're all, you're all complete wusses. Good as good as stretching it. It's got a good, it tastes good. Yeah, it's got a good texture. It's got a little man wired the taste. Here, give me a give me a fork and let's put the sears all together. Here, hand me the sears all. We should take a break now. All right, well, let's take a break and we'll come back with some more hackerrel issues here on cooking issues.

[35:20] The following program was brought to you by S. Wallace Edwards and Sons. Edward Suriano hams are aged to perfection for no less than 400 days, and hickory smoked to achieve a deep mahogany color.

[35:32] The Edwards name is well known for its world-class aged and cured meats. Their exclusive curing and aging recipe produces a unique flavor profile that enhances the quality characteristics of Berkshire Port. Optimum amounts of pure white fat marble and contribute to a flavor that's a delicate, perfect balance between sweet and salty. For more information, visit edwardsvam.com. Hi, how are you? My name is Andrew W.K. They say when things are very delicious. It must be Heritage Radio. Wait, we have Andrew W.K. on as are one of our people saying stuff? For some reason, he really likes food. Come on, really? Or does that mean he's going to allow us to say he's going to allow us to play party hard? Oh my god. awesome. You know him, right? You know who he is. Yeah, awesome. I appreciate that. My son loves Dax. loves the show that he had on Cartoon Network called Destroy, Bill, Destroy, where like teams have like usually a parent versus like it's usually

[36:32] like it can be jocks versus cheerleaders or parents versus sons or whatever, parents versus kids. And they they blow up a bunch of crap and then they recombine it and do challenges with the recombined stuff. But, like, everyone hated it because they're like, it's not a cartoon, and I can't wrap my head around cartoon

[36:48] network doing something that's not. People are weird. People are weird. Okay, look, so I got some hot girl here and I got, what's this called? seers all, and here we go. I'm gonna try to... There's a technical difficulty. So it's toasting up nice. Alright. Shark is not a fatty fish. No, not at all. Well, that looks lovely. Well, taste it, didn't it? Whoa. You don't want the 1st bite? No, I mean, I look, you know, host, host. Host, host. Yeah, all right. So what do you think? Better or worse, same? Maybe better. Better? I like it better. You get a little more texture on water? Well, the, the, you know, like I say, ammonia is quite volatile. So I should be able to drive off at least a lot of the ammonia that's on the surface just

[37:40] by drifting up a little bit. Just done the triangle. Well, just to give the listeners what I'm looking at here. It is slightly bubbling on the outside. So some of the oil has come to the surface, a little light charring on the sides. It looks delicious. So we'll give it a try. Yeah, no noticeable ammonia on the outside. It has the smell of cooked fish. It looks sort of like a chunk of pork belly from here. Yeah. Yeah, the ammonia is a little more tame. And you have, yeah, you don't have that also that sort of that cured. It's not quite a raw fish texture, but it's somewhere between raw cooked when you don't, when it wasn't sears

[38:16] old and here it's got a full uncooked texture. And by the way, the sear is all living up to its name and searing all.

[38:29] Stas, what do you think of the first case you had? Do you like it or no? No, I didn't like it. Did you hate it or just not like it? I just didn't like it. All right, so you try this one. Wait, no, and that Paul do it. Paul loves it. Paul and I have to use the floor glass because we're a little bit sick. Really? There's more forks? Yeah. No, you use my fork. This is my. Here, Paul, you talk while I see her. Ha Carl is chewy enough that you can't take a bite off a

[38:59] piece. You have to put the whole piece in your mouth so I'm letting it cool a little bit. Now are both these identical ones? Smells toasted? Yes, they're both 2 containers. I want to take one home. Okay, Mr. Wrap it up. What? They're telling us to wrap it up. Oh, wait. All right, hold a sec. We got to cheer one more piece for Mistachio, one for meat. You want to sell what else we're eating here? Yeah, what's the bread, Don? You have some finished rice crisps and some just some German rye bread. I could find locally. You cut the lemon, see what the lemon does, and Paul, do we'll have to do simultaneous testing because they're cutting us off? And the ketchup show, when does the ketchup show starts? The ketchup show, we can we can pre-record on. Yeah, but when is it going to be? So people know when they expect it. Next week? Are we going to do it next week? Okay. So, uh, here, let me have one of those, uh, what are those, what are they, what are they call these? Oh, it's not like a specialized landing crisp. It's like the standard kind of rye crisp? It's a thin crisp from Finland. fins. The fins. All right, listen, this has been stinky fish. We're here to report from Sninky Fishland that, uh, it's, it's not that, it's not that stinky as advertising. Not as stinky as advertised. So if anyone there is from Iceland, if anyone can hear our voices and you're from Iceland, I'm calling you out.

[40:12] Like, this stuff is completely tolerable. I don't know what the heck you guys are, you know, complaining about or thinking that you have some sort of like, you know, like a hardcore applause is as ammoniated as this if it's gone over the hill and I'll eat that anyway because I've already spent the

[40:28] money, even though I know it's not supposed to necessarily be that way. And, uh, that's what I'm going to say about that. What's the, what country is it? Is it is it Greenland or Iceland that has the seal stuffed with puffins? I didn't see any steel, seal stuff with puffing. I saw seal and puffin. I did eat, I think, 12 animals in one day while driving around Iceland. I like that. How was the puffin? Puffin was had great puffin, it had terrible puffin. But Puffin was a lot better than whale. The smoked puffin was delicious. I wish they sold a puffin jerky. Thatd be great. Really? Yeah, I wish they did. Tell me, what's puffin taste like? It again, it was just like almost like a duck jerky. had that kind of that gaminess that duck has. Not quite like a like a white meat chicken, but it was it was delicious. You know, it tasted like puffin. It doesn't taste fishy. It did not taste fishy at all. What about the bad puffin? The bad puffin was just, it wasn't smoked long enough, so it was just kind of squishy in the center. didn't have that smoke flavor all the way through. It just looked like a bad smoking chicken. It is poorly prepared. It wasn't the puffin that was bad. It was to cook. I blame the chef. Yeah, as usual, it's usually, usually that's the, that's the way. Okay, so listen, thank you. Let's give it a shout out to John Raper. I was about to say that. You made me look like I was going to forget. Thanks to John Riper for the delicious Chinook and

[41:46] co-host salmon. It delicious. We will eat more of that at the lunchtime here. Thanks to Don for bringing this hakrel to us and showing that it's not as difficult to consume as people make it out to

[41:59] be. Although if you're from Iceland and you think that the Ecta brand is somehow less

[42:04] hardcore than some brand that you have in, you know, buried in your in your backyard somewhere, then fine. We'll try your backyard very hot, girl, if you can get it to us. And I'm sure we'll get the same crew back to taste it. Thanks to Paul coming in, thanks to Daniel Gritzer, and this has been 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 at heritageradionetwork.org. Heritage radio network is a 501 C3 nonprofit. To donate and become a member, visit our website today. Thanks for listening.