[0:00] This program has been brought to you by Ciderweek, New York City, happening November 6th through 15, 2015. For more information, check out ciderweeknyc.com. Hey, hey, hey, I'm Jimmy Carboni from Beer Sessions Radio. You're listening to Heritage Radio Network broadcasting live from Bushwick, Brooklyn. If you like this program, visit HeritageRaternetwork.org for 1000s more.

[0:28] Hello and welcome to Cooking issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of cooking issues coming to you live from Aberta's Pizzeria in Bushwick,

[0:35] Brooklyn, on the Heritage Radio Network every Tuesday from roughly 12, a little late as usual. 1245. Thereabouts 1250. We are super pleased. Oh, we got, as usual, we have, we have Nastasia, the Hammer Lopez. Hello. Hello. And actually, we're going to be talking about something that she's a fan of for a freaking change. What? Yeah. Yeah. Jack in the engineering booth. How you doing, Jack? I'm good. I just got a free bowl of chicken noodle soup from Jackie at the Roberta's kitchen. really nice of her. Yeah, how is it? really good. What kind of noodles? Flat noodles? No, I like some kind of handmade pastas in there. Have they fallen apart? They gotten mushy yet? They're getting there. Yeah, that's the problem, right? Yeah. We have also Rebecca Live tweeting out there. Rebecca, how are you? Hi. But, uh, we can talk about Mushy Noodles in a minute because we have with us today, this week is Cider Week here

[1:27] in uh, in, in the Big Apple. And, uh, presumably. do you guys do, Well, I'll introduce them. ask them whether they also do parries or all these other things, which are getting hugely popular in the UK,

[1:37] right? Perrys are just going nuts. Well, in France. Yeah, yeah. The fresh bone cares. No kidding. Just messing with me. Well, France is, like France, if France were Belgium, they would be the France of Paris, whatever. going to get into it. Okay, we have John Reynolds here, from the Finger Lakes, from Black Duck Cider, and he's here to, you know, let us taste

[1:56] out and talk about some ciders. And we also have, uh, uh, Leif uh, Soundstrom. pronounce that right? Yeah, close enough. Sound from Stiders, and they're in Hudson, New York. And we're here to talk about, well, hopefully we'll get to some actual questions later. If not, I'm sure I'll just rip through some at the end or whatever, but you call in your questions. Hopefully, cider related questions, too, 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. Now, listen, it is my feeling that anyone who has the time, interest, inclination and takes the care to make a cider will also have something interesting to say about most cooking questions. So you don't have to have necessarily a site a related question, but it might be helpful. So let's To that end, I have a caller who called like right at the top of the show who's been waiting, so let's see if it's cider or not. I'll rather see if it's cited with the caller, you're on the air. Hey, Dave, this is Jonathan from Tempe, Arizona. How you doing? Not a good Apple place, by the way. Tempe, Arizona. good for many things. I love the smell of Arizona actually, frankly, when you get off the airplane, that Arizona smell. I like it, but it's not Apple country. Go ahead, pins on which airport. Ooh. It is not Apple Country. right. This isn't a cider question? but I will definitely be interested in buying some cider. There you go. But it's a question. I ran into it because I just bought a nova circulator, and I started doing some steaks, and I ran into the problem, well, the exact problem that you made the

[3:17] Sears also, where I just can't get a good enough crust in a cast iron pan. on like a on a regular residential burner. Yes. But I do have a baking steel, so I was curious if I should try to maybe put the baking steel on the

[3:34] stove or maybe just heat it in the oven for an hour, just anything. Um, Is there any reason to use the baking steel over the cast iron? And granted, um, it'll be a while before I can make another kitchen, uh, kitchen

[3:49] purchase such as a searsal. So this is just an interim solution. So I'm just wondering if you had any thoughts about baking steel versus cast

[3:57] iron, anything like that. How hot does your how hot does your oven get? 550. Just a regular residential oven? Yeah. So, uh, what I would do in this situation, I would, 1st of all,

[4:09] uh, test this on yourself before you, like, invite a 1000000000 people over for steak. But the thing, I would, I would try the baking steal. I think that's probably a good thing to try. Crank your oven, heat the hell out of it for a while. And then what I would do is keep the oven super cranked, and I would throw the steaks on one side of the, of the thing, and then, um, flip it and hit a different section of your baking. By the way, is your baking steel? How many burners will your baking steel hit if you put it directly on your burners? I mean, I think like 2 total. Okay. Well, you could put it in $550 oven, right? Get some good mitts, heat it, weigh the hell up to 550 so it's nice and even. Then crank your burners, throw it on your burner, put the steak on, and then flip it and put it over on the other side. The one problem with the baking steel as opposed to a cast iron pan is you're not going to be able to get a lot of oil on it, and so it's going to run off and cause fires and flames and smoking, and it's very difficult to

[5:02] get. Yeah, it's very difficult to get a good sear on a pre-cooked piece of meat. Um, because the surface of the, the surface of the meat is all, you know, moundy and bumpy. So you're going to get big blonde areas where there's a concavity at the meat surface. Unless you have a significant quantity of oil. And if you put a significant quantity of oil onto a baking steel that's 550, that's a recipe for huge, huge, as Trump would say, huge problems. So, um, you know, I would work with that. You can paint the oil on. Another thing is, are you pre-searing your meat? I'm not no. Pre-seer, look, I know I know that like our good friend, Kenji, Kenji Lopez Alt, he doesn't believe that

[5:47] pre-seeering is necessary. Here's here's here's where I think he's incorrect about this. Pre-sering reduces the amount of searing time you have to do at the end to get X amount of crust.

[5:58] So, if you do a pre-seer on cast iron before you do your low temp cooking and chill

[6:03] down, before you do your low temp cooking, instead of taking 2.5 minutes to reach a certain crust level on

[6:08] the outside of the steak, it will only take like a minute and a half . So you can greatly increase like how good your crust is, even with your current technologies, without lighting fire to your house and pissing off whoever else lives in your house, you can greatly increase the crust you can produce by simply

[6:23] pre-searing the meat before you do it. Put it, put it start it. My art likes my art, crust likes crust. So you'll get a good flavor development, and while it's true that if you put the same crust on it by doing poster only, you won't be able to probably tell the difference flavor wise between the

[6:39] 2 steaks, and there will be more moisture loss, which again is something we can argue about, but I don't care.

[6:44] I don't mean, I don't I care that you care about it. But I don't care. In other words, I'm not anti-moisture loss and a piece of meat necessarily. So anyway, so I would go that route. I would try to see if a pre-seer can help you without burning your house down. Yeah, I mean, I'd say next time I would just do one pre-seered, one not pre-seered? See the results and then go from there. Yeah, remember, the whole thing about a pre-seer is it's saving you searing time at the end, that's the main thing about a pre-seer. Another thing, another thing you can do is you can, like, let the meat rest longer out of the bag or even put it in a little bit of water to chill it down before you sear it, and then you can do a radically longer sear time on it without overcooking the

[7:25] center. Yeah, I did hear that somebody, I read somewhere where someone will put it bag directly from the circulator into an ice bath for 15 minutes. Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm in general anti-that because I run a bunch of tests based on the initial knowledge that I poo-pooed of a guy named Bruno Gouseau, who's kind of the godfather of low temperature cooking, even if he is

[7:45] French. And, um, the, uh, I like the French, by the way, I'm just messing. The, uh, the, uh, so the, if you put a bag directly in ice water, you tend to get less

[7:55] uh, kind of reabsorption of, um, the kind of juices, which again, I said I don't really care about, but most people, when we do the

[8:02] side by side taste test, they prefer the meat that is allowed to gradually reduce uh, in temperature.

[8:08] So I also, anyway, so I'm a fan of just like pull it out of the circulator. Like, I pull, if you, if you're going to do a hard, hard sear, I'd pull it out of the circulator, like, like, a good 45 minutes, maybe 30 to 45 minutes before you're going to eat it, and then for at least like the 1st 15 or

[8:24] so, 20, like leave it on the counter, and then if you want to chill it even further, you can put it into

[8:29] regular, uh, room temp water, uh, you know, you know, regular cold tap water, I wouldn't use ice.

[8:34] And then, and then you can put a monstrously hard sear on the outside of it and still not overcook the

[8:39] inside. But you have to be careful that you don't render the inside so cold that people are like, this steak is not hot in the middle. People don't like that. You know what I mean? Especially because beef fat, the texture of beef fat, it's, you know, unless you're like a cold beef. There are cold beef fat people. I'm not one. No, no. Me neither. No. All right. Anyway, let us know. tweet, tweet back on uh, onto cooking issues and tell us how uh, how, how it went. All right, well, I'm turning this into the cider hotline. So we're only taking cider and Apple calls. And we actually have 2 calls. So one is an Apple question. One is a cider question. Okay, listen, Jack, give me, give me, give these, let's give these guys at least 30 seconds each to give us like who they are and what's going

[9:20] on so that we know and then we'll take the call. Cider call, stay in the line. All right, stay in the line. Dont leave us cider calls because we want them. So, John, go. So I'm black duck cider-y. We're up in the Finger Lakes, basically in wine country. We took really good grape land and planted trees starting about 15 years ago, mainly pear and apple trees. So we've made all our neighbors in the finger lakes hate us. Um, you know, because they think it's great bland. And basically 3 years ago, we got a commercial license. These are all natural fermentations, our siters. There's no finding, no filtering. We don't take anything away. We don't add anything. And, uh, yeah, we make we make 4 kinds. And when you were talking about Perry, one of them is a Perry. I did not bring it today because we are sold out. We sell out quick. Um, but it is a still perry. So it's quite different than most of the English or French perries, because there's no carbonation. Cool. And how close are you to Geneva? I'm halfway between Geneva and Ithaca, so I'm like 25 minutes from Geneva. So, and I actually worked at Diagg station at Geneva, so I worked where sort of the Noah's Ark of

[10:26] Apple's. With like when Phil Force Line was still there? were you there? I was. Nice. So you know Phil. Oh, well I've met him. Yeah. Yeah. Phil Forson, for those, you have no idea what we're talking about. Geneva, New York is the is like, is like the mothership of apples in this country. I mean, straight up. It's like it's ridiculous. And this guy, Phil Force line. I guess best known for going to Kazakhstan and bringing a whole bunch of wild types back. And so they have 1000s of kinds of wild type apples, many of which could be market

[10:55] apples because they're delicious. And anyway, so you want to go ahead and talk a little more about that for a sec before. Yeah, well, I mean, and it's, you know, it's basically the USDA's germ plasma repository, so they're holding these apples, essentially, their varieties. Um, basically, uh, so they don't get lost uh, in in history. And it's true that they went not only to Kazakhstan and Tajikistan, but they went to China for collection

[11:22] trips. And basically the theory is that the Apple sort of originates in Central Asia. And that's sort of the center point of the, you know, silk trade route, and you have trade from China, you know, to the Middle East and so forth. And it, you know, eventually these apples, uh, sort of go, uh, you know, well,

[11:38] to where they grow now in Europe and places like that, it spreads to the US, obviously people bring them over as settlers. But it is an amazing place. It is your tax dollars at work. So the public work. Hard at work. Hard at work. No, no doubt. So the public actually can go there certain times of the year and you can go toward these orchards

[11:55] and, you know, see, you know, 2000 Apple varieties, different ones all in the same orchard. If we have time later, I can, we can talk about visiting, because Nastasi and I, we haven't been there. We went to the Brogdale. We've been to a couple other tasties, but you know, I've been to Geneva with Harold McGee. We could talk about fruit tastings in Apple, Mecca and pilgrimages. Hopefully we'll have time. Before we get the callers, Leif, why don't you give us some story. Give us some lathe. So I'm based in the Hudson Valley. I produce cider in a small barn in Southern Socrates. I had lived in New York City, Brooklyn, for a number of years, spent roughly 10 years working in the wine industry. Various capacities, importing, distribution, restaurants, spent more than a dozen years of my life in restaurants also, but also worked with winemakers in Oregon and

[12:42] Germany doing harvest and so forth like that. That really informed a lot of the kind of transition and focus of cider making for me after I left kind of the wine world to focus on something that was a little bit more indigenous, so to speak, to where I'm living, trying to stay rooted in

[12:59] Hudson Valley and New York State and exploring cider a lot because it has so much in touch

[13:05] and in line with what drove me to be passionate about wine, but also because there's just a lot of unexplored territory at this point. Both been recovering a past and history that siters involved with here in the United States, but also in exploring new frontiers informed by everything from new understandings of flavors and farming and that kind of thing.

[13:25] So yeah, I'm working up there now where this year actually tonight, officially, is the 1st commercial release of the cider. I've been producing for several years. The directive is generally focused on a want of exploring terroir in various areas through

[13:42] cider. That is proved to be a little bit of a naive exploratory element in my

[13:49] case because just the access to certain apples with not being your own farmer, growing your own

[13:53] fruit is incredibly difficult if you're keeping a focus on specific varieties and a specific level of quality. So we're exploring it as much as we can, but right now, producing a couple bottlings of last year. One we have here is all from Columbia County fruit, and there's another bottling for a single orchard fruit. And this coming year from 2015, it's going to be a different program altogether. But with the focus on heirloom varieties that are from North America or some side

[14:18] varieties as well, but hopefully with a focus on limited number of Apple varieties per bottling as opposed to large

[14:24] blends. Try and kind of, you know, focus on what these individual characteristics are for the specific

[14:31] variety. A lot to talk about, but caller, let's get some cider collar, cider collar one. are on the air. So we're going to go with the cider question first, Apple questions, stay patient. Hi, Dave, how are you? Doing all right. Hey, this is a nice coincidence. So I'm trying to track down the elusive

[14:50] Ashmead's colonel, Apple. And so I was wondering if you have any tips for finding that in New York City and or if you have

[14:58] any um substitutions you'd recommend for your liquid intelligence recipes. Yeah, so for those of you who don't know, I really like Ash Means Colonel, because it's a high sugar, high acid, extremely rich kind of

[15:13] apple, there are people who make hard cider with it, but it's actually, I think, probably a very challenging apple to make a hard cider with just because of its high acid content.

[15:22] So I think you probably need to, I mean, cider people, you tell me, but I think it would need a lot of mellowing before you could do it. Except

[15:29] the personal preference, I would say. Right, right. No, and we grow quite a lot of that and it goes into blends. Now, as a straight varietal. Yeah, you would almost have to put it through maloactic fermentation to reduce the acidity of it. And I think that's what people do when they generally make it as a straight varietal. But it's an amazing blend in there. And, uh, there's probably some in this. Well, I know there's some Ashmeads in this cider. Had I known you want them, I would have brought them down to the city for you. Yeah, the collar. Ashmes are fantastic. The 1st ash means I ever tasted was actually from Geneva from the ag station. In New Hampshire, Poverty Lanes Orchards, grows Ashmeads for commercial sale. They ship via Baldur, the distributor here in New York City, and

[16:15] they'll work. I mean, they're probably working overtime now because it's like, you know, I mean, I don't know

[16:20] how whether they'll take calls now. But they, uh, they, they can, they can provide it and uh, Stas, you ever seen it at our green market? I've never seen an argument market. And the problem with, yeah, for the recipes that I, that, so

[16:34] like, you guys don't, I have a book, and in the book is a chapter on apples, specifically apples and cocktail, but they're not fermented apples, they're apples that we use kind of fresh, and I think there's nothing beats ash meats

[16:44] for like cocktail work, like ash meats is like kind of like par excellence, like cocktail apple to work with, even though it is hard to

[16:50] source. Um, I will say this, um, if you're using it in cocktail

[16:55] work and you want to preserve that, uh, kind of like rich acid note of Ashmead's kernel,

[17:01] like, uh, process them right away. I mean, like, um, you know, I've had people, we've ordered the, we've ordered the cases from uh, Poverty Lanes, and uh, they come in and some knucklehead will put the case down in, you know,

[17:14] in a hot basement next to a dishwasher, and then they're toasted. Inside of a day. They're, they're, they're a shadow of their former self. They've lost their richness. They've lost their punch. You know, they've started going to some essence. counter that by saying, like, those apples, though, if left to cure in a good environment can really increase a lot of that richness and complexity of flavor quite a bit, you

[17:36] know. And also on that note too, a variety that may work as a decent substitute that's sometimes easier to find is golden russet. While different, has a lot of similar kind of profiles. I would throw out Cox Orange Pippin, which I don't know in the city, but it probably is slightly easier, but it's another, you know, famous English apple high in acid and very aromatic,

[17:56] but it may also be slightly difficult. You don't really see a lot of cocks here because as educated as you'd hope New York City market is, like we demand crunchy and like a good

[18:07] cox is not is not crunchy. It's more of a crumbly apple, and Americans, I'm very sad to say, can't appreciate the crumbly texture of like an

[18:16] old-fashioned, um, And there's very few places in this country where you can really grow them. Well, I mean, finger lakes is one. affection. Yeah, yeah, they do well, although there's still issues. I mean, it's probably the most difficult tree that we have to grow into orchard. It's also, I mean, I don't know how sensitive all apples are to it, but I was in the Brogdale,

[18:35] we Nastasi and I broke into a section where they were testing cocks on a bunch of different root stocks.

[18:40] wildly different. Same piece of dirt, different root stocks on cocks. And I don't know, like I said, socks on cocks. socks on cocks. Yeah, so, you know, I don't know whether it is more sensitive than most to root stock in terms of flavor, but it was definitely it. I know it was sensitive. It's the only one I've ever done a comparative tasting on. Yeah, well, and it's a very low vigor tree. So that's part of the problem, too. You can't crop them early or the tree never gets beyond a certain height. Yeah, and they just have a lot of issues. They're just susceptible to everything and disease wise insect. And, uh, you know, and that's sort of why even in England, they're ripping them out and replacing them with sort of more modern varieties.

[19:20] Just for that reason. They, you know, it's not economically viable even for them in the motherland. Do you do growing for eating market as well? do. Yeah. So do you find it disheartening that you have to do? Like, for instance, like, it's impossible to get good early season apples because they're always harvested too early because they go soft almost instantly.

[19:40] And so that, they're not, it's not even a point buying like load eyes or transparent here because they're like, there's not good. Yeah, those are. I mean, for me, that's too early. I mean, our sort of earliest ones are like for eating or St. Edmonds Russet, which is another, it's a full rust. It's another English apple, and that one has like a pear drop sort of flavor. It's not very high in acids, but we also use it in a cider blend and that's really for us right at the beginning of September. So I don't mess with any apples generally that are August ripening because I do. They're very short season, very short-lived. And I think the flavor is eh on most of those. Yeah, well, no, also like the people that had no offense to the people I buy them from occasionally, but like they harvest them when they're like baseballs. They're still like starchy, nasty. Wait, we have another caller still on the air? We do. Yeah. Caller, you are you are on the air. Hey. Yes, yes. Your question, sir. Is he still there? Did we lose him? Maybe he dropped his phone. He'll come back. He'll be back. He'll be back. Whenever you get back, get back, because in the meantime, we're going to start opening some cider to taste it. What are we going to taste here first, gents? And by the way, Stas like cider. The one thing in the world maybe that she likes. She likes cider. Nice. Well, I mean, if I can find something to actually open,

[21:02] you have a bottle of dinner? of course we didn't cider makers don't actually carry bottle openers. Oh, look at that, Jack. All right, intrepid engineer Jack Ainsley. So since I came over on the subway and my bottle's sort of a little fool, I'm a little worried that I... Nice. Yeah, sure. Why don't you two? Okay, why don't you describe the ciders that these suckers on the air? don't get to don't get to this. So, so, uh, ours is a, why is this not? uh, I'm having a

[21:34] little technical difficulty with the... I

[21:39] will let the beverage director actually use that. Restaurant man, yeah. Exactly. That's why I shouldn't be involved. So the black duck one is actually our hop cider. Um, and this is mainly sort of heirloom uh, American heirloom fruit, which is different than most of our other ones. We generally use more true cider fruit, English and French bittersweets and bitter sharps, but these are also our hops. So it's Fuggles, Ken Golding, Cascade, um, and a unknown noble hop. Um, in a sense, let me grab a glass. What is hot, huh? Oh, it's hot. Unfortunately, Stas, she loves cider, not a hops person. Oh, I'm so... We need to. jackets. jackets. for you guys. Yeah, how the cops. Jack loves hops. Just smell it. Maybe you won't get hops. Maybe we'll get the other plant in the hop family. Yes, now we're dealing with We're dealing with an unfiltered product here. An unfiltered unfined... Yeah, I mean, this was ambient yeast, you know, natural use fermentation. And essentially with the hops, we pick them. We dry them, we freeze the hops because they're ready in August. Um, or early September. We ferment the gray or, yeah, grapes. We ferment the apples when they're completely done fermenting. At some point, I make a blend of the citers. And I put the hops whole cone in the cider. This was about 5.5 days. I pull it back out and then actually this got bottle conditioned. So it sat another few months in the bottle and basically this is the product. Stas, you might like it because it's dry hopped. not, it's not, obviously, my brain is on fried. It not bitter hot. not bittered. It's not boiled with hops. Right. Well, that's the big difference that when you put heat to hops, that's when you extract out most of the

[23:25] bidders. And, um, you know, essentially when you dry hop, you're getting more of the

[23:30] aromatics of the hops out. And any bitter that's in this is probably more from the apples and less to do with the hops themselves.

[23:37] John, you probably said this, but my mind space for a second. Did you co-ferment the hops with the apples or was it all infused after the fact? No, no. So it's completely fermented. And then I put a blend together from some different tanks and get the base where I want it, and then I add the

[23:52] hop cone after fermentation is complete. This particular one, it's just by taste. These were in for just about 5.5 days. I pull it back out and, you know, then we bottle conditions. So basically, you know, you know, and this is what you get. This is the only product other than I do make a black currant one sometimes that we sort of put something else in other than apples or pears. And I will say the reason we made this is, you know, everyone needs a gateway, and this is our gateway cider for beer drinkers. Nice. I like that. I like that Yeah, Gateway. I just want to make sure the caller got on. Are you on caller? Oh, yeah. Okay, hey, ask your question while we're drinking this. By the way, you should know, because you can't taste it, that there's very good I think there's very good acid control on this. Maybe it's because you're adding also some, um, you know, a little bit of a tannin bitterness or a hop aroma. Maybe that's what bounces out, but very good. Don't you think so? Yeah, yeah, I agree. I mean, back to that note earlier, you're talking about ash means maybe too acidic. You have to blend it. Again, it's all personal. And I think I'm a lover of higher acid beverages, when I was in the wine world, it was champagne and

[25:02] racing, and Grunner built in, and that was my world. And so the cider definitely leans that way. So I think there's a broad range of what's acceptable, but I think this has a great balance, especially for that bitter

[25:12] note too. Yeah. You have to have some acidity to keep that. To me, it's all about energy in the beverage, which acidity gives everything, which is nice. All right, call her. sorry to cut you off yet again, call her. your question? My question is about keeping. Keeping cider. What's specifically the question? Oh, specifically, specifically, the question is, I've been, you know, doing my own keeping experiments over the years or the last couple years, and I can't seem to get it

[25:39] down like to a science, essentially. Obviously it is, but I can't seem to get it to come out like evenly every single

[25:46] time. And I know that there are a lot of places that do it on a regular basis, you know, like industrially, I think.

[25:52] I figured someone's got to know something about this, you know, that I'm missing. And I was wondering because I know it's involved, similar, you know, hydrocholy type stuff. I was wondering if there's like a synergistic effect with another hydrocolloid, you know, because it's low with oxyl pectin. If there's anything we can do to like, you know, get it, get it evened out. I will say where they do that in France. describe the process for people who have no idea what's going what Keating is or what's going on. So Keving basically is a process where you sort of, we get to what they call the brown cap, which is packed in and things like that come up and you have some of the nitrogen and vitamins and things like that that are in the juice settled down and you essentially take out the liquid in

[26:39] between. So you're basically taking cider and starving it of the things that yeast need to ferment quickly and

[26:49] maybe finish the fermentation. So, you know, then basically you get a very slow fermentation if it's done right, and you can actually get it to stop and have, you know, residual sugar in it,

[27:01] and not have to use other processes, sort of do it. It's a natural way to do it. But even in France and parts of England where they do it, it isn't a science and they don't make it happen all the time. And I will say varieties usually play a big role in it, the bitter

[27:18] sweets generally make it easier to do, and also temperature is a huge factor. It has to be cold enough to make it happen. But not too cold, true. True. And then there's just some amount of luck. It truly is a little bit of luck. And, uh, I mean, I know the biggest producer, uh, in the

[27:39] U.S. that I know that's doing uh, keeping on a commercial level is uh, uh, Kevin from uh, Easy Orchard, which is out in the west

[27:46] coast, and he, it's a hit or miss thing for him. He sometimes get partial keeps. Sometimes it gets bull keeps and sometimes it just doesn't happen and he has to ferment it sort of in a natural way. They do make, I don't know what they are exactly, but they do make some additives, which I would never involve myself with, you know,

[28:02] to, like, help the key along because, I mean, what you're, the beauty of the key is the idea of lassoing the whole situation into kind of this great balance between failing and not failing.

[28:14] And it's also important, I think, to mention that, you know, you can't have residual sugar in a cider from various methods. And one of the other keying methods is this oxidative quality, which is also something you have to kind of monitor and keep

[28:25] in balance with both temperature and air exposure after the fact and so forth.

[28:29] Because, you know, I don't personally don't do keeps because I enjoy some

[28:34] keepsiders a hell of a lot. Like that's not my goal to make any kind of oxidative style of cider. But I think most people, especially on the still side, produce a fairly highly oxidized

[28:43] product now. It does happen. There's many reasons we can discuss why that's the case, but can and should. But yeah, the key, I don't I can't speak to like how to help you be successful. What about the solids content of the juice before it's fermented? That does have something to do it, too. Because, I mean, depending on if you're if you are straining it in some way when you're juicing it or not at all and what's your press and like, what was the texture of the apples and did they squirt through the press and put more sediment in your juice than necessary for that

[29:11] cave? Because the weight of those things, as I understand, it can cause like a difficulty in the true separation of pect into the top and other sediment to the bottom of a cave. Yeah, and I also don't make any kiev citers, although in the past, uh, when I was experimenting. I did make, you know, small 5 and 10 gallon lots of Keith cider and right, I added nothing. Um, and I would get, I'm, I'm, is a rough estimate, probably half of them to work, and the other half didn't. Um, and, you know, I was using true bittersweets and things like that, um, which I'm at least told helps. If you're using straight up dessert fruit. It's, uh, yeah, it's sometimes harder to make it work. As I understand too, like you mentioned bittersweets and so forth, often work a little better because they do tend, some of them at least tend to have a lower nutrient level to begin

[30:01] with. And they also have a higher pH. So that's the other thing that can be considered. Like, that's why a lot of keepsiders that are successful aren't necessarily that high in

[30:09] acidity, or they don't have that sense of acidity in the palate, because they generally start with a higher page to begin with, which also create in a whole new danger zone in that

[30:17] situation, because you have an oxidized juice, that you're leaving a little bit open to the elements, has a high pH, so it's a little bit more likely to be inviting to certain bacteria that you may not want later on.

[30:28] So it's a tricky, but it's also one of these beautiful things that was discovered by

[30:33] accident by people just putting juice outside because they needed a place to store it and it happened to be cold and the

[30:38] chapeau brune developed and they had to salvage what was there and figured this whole method out over a number of years.

[30:44] So delicious mistakes. Yeah. Yeah. Caller, did that, did that help at all? Yeah, it does. I was actually hoping more for like a food science perspective. I appreciate, you know, the natural, you know, amazingness of the apples. But like, I would be probably adding like pectin methylesterase or something like a novo

[31:04] shape or something like that. And I was thinking from, you know, hydrocholic perspective. I know there are a lot of synergistic hydrocoloid interactions. I was wondering if there's something I could just like, you know, see if I can, you know, get it. Have you done a successful key without that yet? Yeah, I have. It's just, it does seem to be, without the pective methyl estrays, you're saying? Or what happened? Yeah, with just basic. Oh, no. No. no. Yeah, me too. Not without the fact of Metal S ray. I mean, okay, so like here's here's here's an example that I don't know what's going to happen. So I'll let I'll let you know. And unfortunately for me, there's too many variables to actually separate the stuff out, but I can't afford a cider press yet. I only have one tree. I'm going to plant more. By the way, what do you guys think about fall planting? You profile planting or anti? No, no. I think it can work as long as you mulch it and, you know, get it watered in and we don't have severe, severe winners. I'll talk to you. to you after the show because I want to plant some apple trees, but I don't, you know, whatever. I'm not gonna get into it. But the, I mean, I will if you want, but the, um, so I juice with, with like, uh, regular, you know, human, like home juicers. So my 1st cider that I did this year, I did in a champion juicer, which provides a fairly low solids juice. I did not treat it at all with any sort of um, when I sort of pectinase because it was already low

[32:25] enough. And when you, when you treat a juice early with um, pectinase, you strip a lot of flavor out of the

[32:32] juice. And so that's why a lot of times for cocktails where I need a clear juice for carbonation,

[32:36] like, I have to use extremely high flavored varieties, like in ash meats, because if you're hitting it with a pectinase

[32:43] enzyme and then stripping the solids out, that early, like, you know, it's

[32:47] just, they get too thin. Like a lot of apples can't survive it from a flavor standpoint. Okay. I, this time, I juiced because Mark from Del Posto gave Nastasia an extra

[32:59] juicer. Nastasia is like, this is the size of my freaking kitchen. What the how am I gonna do with this? Dave, you want this juicer. So I got this Brevel juicer, which is a centrifugal basket juicer, radically higher

[33:09] solids content in this juice. So I have no idea, so much though. this is why the variable is too much, that I hit it with a little bit of pectinex because it was just so, it was like a slurry, like, you know, much more higher solids than you would get in a press.

[33:20] And so, unfortunately for you, caller. I treated it with some Pectinace,

[33:27] but I, you know, I'm keeping it fairly cool, so I don't know like how much of a breakdown where it's going to be complete. I mean, only time will tell as journey, wasn't that journey? Journey, I think, right? No. Only time will tell. No, that's... It was one of them. Yeah, yeah. Anyway. Anyway, uh, no, I have the lyrics of the song. Oh. Yeah. So the, uh, point being that, uh, you know, maybe if you were to take some juice and hit it with, if you didn't want to use a science perspective, but you were able to do it successfully with

[33:58] pectum methyl estrays. You still there even? What? You were able to successfully do, to do it by, you pre-treated the

[34:07] apples, or you treated that you crushed it, then treated the crush with pectin methylesterase and then, and then pressed it? Yeah. So you're only treating when you're just treating the crush with pectin methylesterase, especially if your transit time is not too high, you're only really affecting like a percentage of

[34:23] the of the juice before of the product. And so you could probably, maybe, you know, if, I mean, if, if you like that method, continue to use that method, the only problem being the

[34:33] pectin methylestrase, nolo shape is increasingly difficult to source. So like modernist pantry is not selling it anymore. Guzman from Nova Zymes will only sell it in 25 liter pails, which is like, you know, 5 orchards worth of freaking enzyme.

[34:47] Uh, and so you might want to, uh, you might want to try just, uh, adding some slurry to it, like some extra, or like using a different juicing technique for some of it, just to boost your solid content on

[34:59] it because I don't think that the pectin methylestrace is doing much besides that. As you mentioned is also, it does strip a little bit of flavor, right? So when you're doing that, you're losing a little bit of solids instead of having them infuse at a slower rate. So it's expediting the whole keating process to a certain extent, which I think you kind of run the risk of maybe losing a little bit of your final flavor

[35:20] product. Yeah, aromatics. Like everything. There is no, there is no effect, one thing, don't affect the rest in any sort of cooking, really. You know what I mean? Like everything that you do. For instance, on this 2nd batch. I, I, you know, I, I cured the apples for a couple weeks and also I froze a portion of them because I needed to because they were, they, I damaged them when I was harvesting them because I don't want to

[35:46] get it. My tree is a standard apple tree. It's the tallest freaking apple tree I've ever had. So I literally had to beat the fruit off of the top of the tree. I don't have a ladder that can get up to the top of this dang tree. And so a lot of the stuff was damaged. I couldn't juice it right away, so I froze it. And then when it thaws, it thaws like a brown bag, which is kind of cool. It kind of tastes good, actually. But, um, anyways, too many variables for me to actually describe to the color, like what's going on because it's now it's partially frozen. The juicer was like making this slurry. Who the hell knows? You know, you can have good results of that sometimes too. If you're juicing frozen fruit. A lot of those ice crystals from the water will stay frozen while the juice and the nectar

[36:23] releases, and you can end up with a higher concentration of flavor and sugar in the end. I've done a bunch of years ago. I did a bunch of side by sides on purposely freezing apples to simulate like

[36:34] like post-thaw, like post-initial freeze harvest of like certain varieties, like, you know, certain late season varieties, and it has some good luck actually developing some interesting flavors with apples that

[36:46] are, that were just simply like artificially frozen and then allowed to thaw before they

[36:52] were, before they were juiced. Yeah. Well, I think I'm going to add, I think I'm going to try adding some like low methoxyl pectin, hopefully, maybe to help, you know, get things going. at, you know, amp up my my pectin amounts. Maybe that'll help, you know, stabilize some of the ones that aren't quite, you

[37:11] know, coming together. Well, let us know. Let us know what happens, like, in however many weeks or whatever it takes. Let us know, let us know what happens, because I'm always curious about these things. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. By the way, speaking of apple trees, I don't know what the heck I'm going to do with this dang

[37:29] tree, all the lower branches are basically, it's weird. They produce fruit. This year was an unbelievable, I think, for a lot of people, like fruit year in our area. Like the tree just went bananas. I don't know whether it's because we had a hard winter or what, but the tree just went totally ape, like made so many freaking apples. No, this was the perfect year. I mean, last year in New York State was a short crop year for a lot of a lot of regions. So, you know, when the apple trees have all that kind of energy. And the pollination season this year was perfect. I mean, we had no rain and warm days when the blossoms around. And, and, you know, honeybees are lazy and uh, prima donnas, and they won't work, you know, if it's below 55, if it's raining and things like that, and some of the other

[38:15] pollinators. So I think it was just, you know, a confluence of all these things, you know, light crop last

[38:21] year for most people. So, you know, you're pretty much guaranteed a big crop and just the pollination was just perfect, the weather. So, I mean, for us we had the biggest crop we've ever had. Late, before we get done, we got to taste your cider. We got a tasty cider. Oh, sure. Let's taste it. Yeah. Let's race to these glasses since that... The hot... this one's a clean guy. Okay. Oh, because host steals the clean glen Stas just rolled her eyes at me. By the way, Nastasia, are we doing are we doing the show from Bass Pro next week? We are. They just got back to me. Bass Pro people is opening up in Bridgeport and we're going to do the show, but it's not going to be Tuesday. It's going to be Wednesday, right? It'll be Wednesday. Oh, it's going to be so awesome. Also, we won't be able to take call in, so it'll be like a catch up show, you know? Yeah, by the way, once... And it'll be all questions on hunting, cooking foods that you hunt. I'll get to the questions I had today. I had some really interesting questions today that I'm clearly not going to get to, like how to blanch, i.e. remove bitterness and chlorophyll, like, you know, of cartoons,

[39:24] post-harvest, which is interesting to me, and I have some thoughts on it, but I don't have time necessarily to get into it

[39:28] today. Let's taste this cider. So describe the cider that we're looking at here. So this is all this is all Columbia County up in Hudson Valley. This is all from 2014 harvest, just 2 varieties. 60% northern spy, 40% Newtown Pippin, both native North American heirlooms. Yeah, Northern. Yeah, you said Northern? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, North American heirlooms. But like, like, don't let the Virginians tell you that, like, we own... Newtown comes from Queens. Yeah, by the way, do you know that that's the most polluted area in all, like was for a while. Newtown Creek was like the most polluted waterway in the country. It's all the actual land where the tree, the 1st Newton Pippin is documented from is now a children's park. So that's a good combination there, a really polluted area and children's playground. But this is, um, this was fermented very slowly. There's this is a combination, actually, of binocular and spontaneous fermentation. This year, everything so far is kicking off spontaneous, just fine. But I've been kind of a migratory gypsy of a hider maker for a while. So, you know, a lot of people talk about all the yeasts come in on the fruit, and there's a whole other element of the environment that you're producing

[40:38] in could be a contributing factor to those kinds of fermentations. So until there was a little bit more of a settled homestead for the sideery, so to speak. I was kind of using a mix of the two. Um, this aged invat, um, from a day for about six, 6 or 7 weeks total. And then Asian vat for another 5.5 months, it's method

[40:59] champagnoise or bottle conditioned and bit and bottleneck for about 5.5 , 6 months. Now, I see what you mean by you like acid, but here's the thing. Like, there's a very characteristic brightness in the finish from that, but it's not like overly acidic. It's not like, it's not like an acid bomb. No. You know what I mean? It balance is always should be the goal, I think. Not just in making cider, but in all aspects of life. Well, let me ask you guys this, but before they, you know, before we run out of time. So I find that like, how many years would you guys say we're into the cider kind of resurgence here in

[41:33] the US 56? Seven? Yeah, I don't even know if it's that, really. I mean, are we here 0 yet? That's really the question. Well, I mean, but it's been a few. Yeah. maybe five. Yeah, I mean, when I say that, I mean, there is, you know, I remember a time when, you know, all you would read in books

[41:51] is we lost it. We were a cider country, and we lost it, and there was nothing. You know what I mean? There was a couple of people producing some stuff, but they were really chasing like a slightly higher price point. They were chasing the same folks that were buying woodchuck. And I think it's bit no offense to the woodchuck corporation. Yeah. But they've done great things for us. Yeah, but I've noticed, like, you know, maybe 8 years, like as you start seeing people who would go out and do the rounds, like you guys are doing, talking to people,

[42:19] like talking about their products, and trying to take serious

[42:23] drinkers and hook serious, when I mean, I don't mean alcoholic. I mean, like people who take their drinks seriously, like hook them into into cider. So that, that, I've only sensed maybe a little over half a decade or something like

[42:38] this. Maybe year zero, ironically, was when Anheuser-Busch and Instell Artois and all them started bottling a cider because it was clearly money to be made, which is kind of laughable from people like John and I

[42:51] think. But what which product did they do? Well, what was the Johnny Apple scene? Yeah, these are 6 pack, 12 ounce bottle cider is marketed in that kind of, you know, convenient start. Yeah, with some amount of concentrate in other sort of flavorings and things like that. I mean, Which is weird. dope them with Malik, which is so strange because why would you need to... Well, if you had very, very high pH weak apples. You might have to like, yeah. So my question is this. I feel like early on in this kind of scenario, early on in this kind of greater appreciation understanding of what, by the way, is like our birthright, good cider, you know, especially here in this part of

[43:33] the country, right? We weren't born with it, but it belongs to us, right? And we should have it. It's like super important. Um, to me anyway. But I feel that like early on, like a lot of people who are trying to do a good job were producing kind of, you know, like, unbalanced ciders,

[43:55] like, like too much, not balanced out, but I feel like we're getting so much better. I feel like every year we're getting better and better. Well, that's an interesting kind of thing because people talk about, This is an interesting point to me. Like when I told some friends of mine from the wine industry that I was going to start making cider, they say, oh, what are you going to do?

[44:09] You gonna make like Spanish style cider or like more like Normandy style cider? And I know that if I said to them, I'm going to move to the finger legs to start making wine. They wouldn't ask me, oh, well, are you going to make like French style wine? Are you going to, you know? But there was this understanding, even people understood that terroir, that they were attaching the idea of cider to these very specific locales is how they aesthetically

[44:28] identified their cider. And I think there's an interesting element going on, especially in New York State. Maybe I know it better because I'm intimately involved with this state because I'm here, but of trying to not necessarily pinpoint an identity of what North American

[44:40] cider or New York state cider is, but having the opportunity to explore these kinds of elements of balance. Because traditionally speaking, you know, a lot of the Normandy and Britney

[44:50] siders are off dry, most of them keep, not all, but, you know, definitely that and use varieties that are a little bit lower in acidity. Then the English style aside are traditionally speaking, is definitely more on the bitter, sweeter, lower acid style of things. In fact, there's even some writing in the British reviewers of quality cider that require a low level of a city to be a good cider. So, you know, I think finding the balance. Yeah, so maybe it's a cultural difference. Maybe it's because we're in a world where we're used to wines that have acidity or getting into worlds of cocktails that have a greater balance of acidities and bitter notes and those kinds of things.

[45:24] So I think it's awesome that we're in a realm where we can explore it a little bit more freely than being beholden to like a

[45:30] longer, deeper history of certain traditions. Right. You know what's interesting on what you're saying with... All right, well, listen, 30 seconds, 30 seconds. So like, I think it's interesting. It takes more than 30 seconds. Like early on in this, you get a lot of things I thought were well crafted products out of places like

[45:46] Virginia where it's low acid inherently because of the hotter kind of climate they have. So it's easier for them to translate what in their head is a cider into a product in a bottle. I mean, we need to talk more about this, but they're about to rip us off the air. But let's take this time. like, gentlemen, punch your products again, say where we can get them, say the names of your of your places, and then unfortunately, we'll have to continue

[46:06] this, like, in the Twitter chat, chat rumor online. But thanks so much for coming and just give the give the give the pitch. Well, no, no. And thanks for having us. Black duck cidery. You know, basically we're pair and cider, and we do lean more to a Spanish style. Um, I believe uh, the late great uh, James Brown did approve our sighters for their funk and um, you can pretty much get them uh, at some select places in uh, uh, Manhattan and Brooklyn, uh, Wassail, of course, the Great Wassail in Orchard Street and the Lower East

[46:38] Side, has it, and I just want to uh, give a shout out to all the cider drinkers on uh, uh, Staten Island because uh, no one ever gives them props.

[46:46] All 2 of them out there. I love you guys. That's half the population. So you got here you go, Fern. what do you got? So suns from cider. Tonight at Wasale is the 1st launch party release of a cider that we're tasting right now, so come on out after 8 PM if you want to buy it by the glass and enjoy it there. The cider is pretty limited right now. It'll be available at West Sale, and then at the new Rouge when it opens, it'll be by the glass there. And Wasail, by the way, is a cider, a cider focused bar in

[47:12] Lower Manhattan in Orchard Orchard, right? Orchard Street. It a mecca. Yeah, I mean, they do a good job. the 1st place and still, I think, the only place in New York City focused solely on site. I could be wrong, but... Well, can I give them props for quick for their chef, the food? Don't overlook it. phenomenal. I've been there several times. I endorse. And the pastries, Rebecca, amazing. All right, listen, that's been cooking issues. Thanks so much. Cheers. 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.

[48:09] Thanks for listening.