[0:00] Hi, this is Marion Nessel. I'm the poet Goddard professor of Nutrition Food Studies and Public Health at New York University, and a longtime fan of Heritage Radio. Like Marion, you too can support Heritage Radio Network, a member based nonprofit radio station operating out of Bushwick, Brooklyn. I've been on it countless times. I love being interviewed. The interviewers are always really well prepared. And fun to talk to about the issues that mattered to me, the most, about how we can change our food system to one that's healthier for people

[0:35] and the environment. It's just invaluable to have an independent radio station that's dealing with these issues. I think it's a wonderful, wonderful asset. Support Heritage Radio Network by becoming a member today. Go to heritageradionetwork.org and click on the beating heart to donate. Today's program is brought to you by Origins, a speaker series about food, its

[1:04] source, and how we eat, available on heritageradionetwork.org. Hi, this is Joe Campanelli, the host of In the Drink. You're listening to Heritage Radio Network, Broadcasting Live from Bushwick, Brooklyn. If you like this program, visit heritageradionetwork.org for 1000s more.

[1:29] Hello and welcome to Cookie issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking YouTube coming to you live in the Heritage Radio Network from Roberta's Pizzeria in Bushwick, Brooklyn, every Tuesday from, you know, well, 1215

[1:40] today to, you know, like 1245, 1250, sometimes one, it depends. Nastasia the Hammer Lopez is joining us via telephone today because she's in the

[1:50] watch. Hey, you're in the wilds of Connecticut on the way back from 4th of July, yeah? Right. I'm on 95 right now going slow. That sounds awesome. 95 is 95. Like, if I could choose one place as hell. It would be 95 with traffic. The only the only thing that can make it worse is if you were driving that towards sunset with the shun shining directly in your eyes because it's actually basically where you are,

[2:18] it's it's actually 95 west. It's not 95 south where you are. It's like you face directly into the sun. It's my favorite. I love it. Right. Yeah, in your pickup, would make it would make it the best. Oh, so those who don't know, I have a pickup truck. It was gifted to me by my cousin, and the brakes failed, and I thought I had fixed them this weekend, but it turns out that I made it halfway down my intensely steep

[2:42] driveway only to have the brakes fail again. Thank God for parking brakes. Oh, yeah. Parking brakes. And then when you hit, have you out there ever had? Hey David, you ever had your brakes fail on you? Sure, yeah. Yeah? Like was it scary for you? Very scary, yeah. Yeah. The, um, then once uh, you know, like, so like what happened was the brakes had like started to get, uh, you know, spongy, right? So I'm like, yeah, you know, I don't know, man. It hasn't been serviced in a while. So I just dumped some brake fluid in, gave it a couple pumps into the master cylinder, and the cylinder, you know, the pedal comes back up. I'm like, wow, I have brakes again. I can get to a place and, you know, have them check the lines and stuff. And then, like I say, halfway down the driveway, all the way down to the floor. And then when I had the parking brake and I would start hitting it, it would go, it was like an asthmatic version of me when I was young and I could see like the mist of the brake fluid spraying out from underneath the freaking

[3:38] hood. So, yeah. Yeah, I sprung a leak like that once, it was terrifying. Yeah. How much did it cost you to fix it? I mean, I'm thinking I don't even remember. It was a junk car, though. Oh, man. I gotta fix it. I gotta fix it. I'm sure I can do it myself. It's just going to take me, you know, a whole day. Anyway, Nastasia is also a fan of broken cars. Are you in a rental car this week or are you in a car that's going to break down on the way home again? Well, I am in a rental car. It's not stick, which is why I can talk to you like this. And hopefully it doesn't break down. Nice. How was your 4th of July, Nastasia? It was good. Fireworks, beach, fan, things you hate. Me, me, I love fireworks. That's true. Did you cook anything interesting? Um, no, just the regular stuff? Hot dogs and hamburgers. What about you? Um, I, I've been modifying my uh, vertical grilling techniques, tandor

[4:38] techniques to work in horizontal environments in the extremely hot fired cowboy grill that I

[4:43] have such that uh, everyone can hang out outside, you know, instead of like, because they won't hang

[4:47] out, they won't hang around where the tandor is, they won't hang around. You know what I'm saying? So I had to modify the techniques and my cowboy grill has a secondary side thing where I can put things to

[4:56] rest, almost like hanging skewers. So I still did everything on skewers. I did chicken and lamb. I did the chicken from raw because you just do it, you know, you marinate it, tandor style, pound the hell out of it, and so it's not, it's

[5:07] going to cook quickly and it's going to be tender. And the lamb, I did, I low tempted 1st at like, you know, people actually don't like their lamb that that rare. You know what I'm saying, Stas? Yeah, right. They think they want it rare, but they don't really want it that rare. So like you're doing a steak down at like 55 degrees Celsius and people are like, yeah, that's good. That's where I one mistake. But they think they want their lamb there, but really, they want it like 56. 57. So that's where I cooked it up there, cooled it all the way down, and then just, you know, incinerated the outside tandor style like 3 times off and on. Good. Good. Nice. Yeah. Did that one. I used herbs from my garden, herbs. Yeah, nice. Did you do fireworks? So, like, I didn't think anyone was going to be over. And so I didn't. buy fireworks, but I had leftovers from last year, some like small mortars, you know, and some rockets that are, so I had some New Hampshire fireworks, some Connecticut, read bull

[6:06] crap fireworks, and some Pennsylvania fireworks I had left over. The Pennsylvania fireworks are interesting because you're allowed to, so the rule in New Hampshire is, as you know, Nastasia, that they only sell fireworks

[6:18] that you light walk away from. And then as soon as they go off, they're no longer powered, right? Which means no bottle rockets, no bottle rockets, no rockets, right? in New Hampshire. And no fire crackers, strangely. Where in Pennsylvania, everything's allowed, but New Hampshire, the store I go is a lot cheaper. So I like shopping there. Anyway, I had some leftovers. So we had a nice little show, but it only lasted the length of Ray

[6:43] Charles America, the beautiful song.

[6:47] You know what I mean? It's like, uh, that was that, you know, normally,

[6:52] like I have to go from that into like, I have to do like American woman. I have to do like, you know, like 3 or 4 songs to get through my firework arrangement, but it's just this one was just all Ray Charles. I had the 1000 want, you know, remember my 1000 watt amplifier? I had that crank that had the Ray Charles going and then back and forth. Nice, that's nice. Yeah, but I'm going to do, I think I'm going to do it. try to make a trip up to New Hampshire at some point before the summer's over and then just have like a, you know, maybe you can come and end of the summer, like fireworks. Bonanza. All right, cool. We'll have a, you know, a fireworks bananza. Look, the fact of the matter is, everybody likes illegal fireworks. absolutely everybody. even except for like, you know, certain dogs and certain small children. Uh, you know, you just got to be you got to be careful. Did you hear that some poor kid stepped on someone else's improvised firework over the weekend and got his foot blown off in Central

[7:43] Park? Oh, yeah. So yeah, I saw on the news last night, yeah. Terrible. Terrible. Yeah. Yeah, well, that's not really a cooking related issue, but there you go. Oh, on a cooking related issue. Someone wanted to me to talk about it. I'm training my dog, my my lab, my black lab major. I'm training him, sent training him to be a truffle dog now. So. I saw that photo, yeah, wait, so what do you do? He was having smell fake trouble? Well, that's the thing. I was like, does fake truffle work because literally it's just like one chemical that they that they put into oil to make it seem like it's truffle oil, right? So I just, I just, you know, and but the guy, my guy, Charles, his name is

[8:22] Lefevre, but I call him the fever. I call him Charles the fever. He's like the Oregon truffle expert. And he says, yeah, you can use truffle oil, and dogs somehow generalize. So here's the long and the short of it. Truffles, you know, like all variety of truffles grow underground, right? We know this. We all know this. They grow underground. But the way that they reproduce is they create a smell that animals, like a lot of

[8:48] times smaller animals like you chipmunks, your voles, things like this. They smell that from up top side, dig down to get at it, eat it, and you

[8:56] ready, Styles, poop out the spools. They poop out the spools. So all truffles, when they're ripe, have some sort of aroma that's at least enticing to

[9:06] mammals in the woods, right? I mean, that's how that's how they've evolved to be to reproduce. So, uh, you know, Dr. the Fever tells me that, uh, that, uh, there are definitely truffle species. In fact, I know I looked it up. There's a one called the pecan truffle, which is harvested commercially in down in Georgia and down south, which grows all the way up to Quebec in conjunction with hickories, pecans, and like sometimes oak trees.

[9:36] But he says that there's definitely truffle varieties. It's just, you know, he doesn't know if they taste good and a lot of them haven't been characterized yet. And he says, like part of the problem with truffles is, for instance, so I'm going to the, I'm going to Oregon during truffle

[9:48] season in, I guess, January or whatnot to, you know, see firsthand, like searching for good truffles. But one of the problems is, is they call the truffles that are harvested over there, Oregon white and Oregon black

[9:58] truffles, when in fact they smell nothing like European white or black truffles. So it's kind of one of those things where people are like, um, it doesn't smell like a truck full, so it's no good. Well, no, it's just different. You know what I mean? It's a different product. I mean, it doesn't command the prices, obviously, of like, you know, the Milanos forum or the magnetum, you know, truffles from Italy and France,

[10:17] but, you know, they're good, valid culinary things. Apparently, I haven't had one, you know, that, you know, recently to tell you, but he says one of the main problems with quality is that people harvest them with rakes, like chumpy people go out there with

[10:32] rakes and rake them up. And so you get these unripe ones. And he says, unripe ones are culinarily useless because they only develop their characteristic aromas once they want to be dug up by a woodland creature and eaten and pooped out.

[10:46] So he says the only way to really harvest a good truffle,

[10:50] or again, or otherwise is to use animals like dogs. And so he trains his dog to look for. And he says his dog can find all manner, all manner of truffles. And he says, truffles that are hunted that way. Obviously, they cost more because, you know, you're not just raking them up by the bushel. You getting the ones that are ripe, but he says those are the ones that have culinary values. So who knows? Who knows? So I'm trying to train major to see whether he can ever find a truffle over in our neck of the

[11:14] woods. And then later on, we'll figure out whether, you know, they're any good or not. But, yeah, you got to be careful of when he finds them, you know, last night and all that crap. Yeah, well, there's no, there are no toxic truffles, right? Because remember, they're all meant to be eaten. However, underground, things can look like truffles that are actually early stage mushroom, you know, in

[11:38] quotes because they're not eggs, obviously, eggs, and those can be deadly poisonous ammonitas. And so you have to cut them in half and kind of know what's going on. Those typically don't have a smell, but don't worry, I'm not going to eat them until I know what's, I'm not

[11:50] going to eat anything until I know what's going on. Speaking of which, for those of you that tuned into last week's show, we had a caller who may or may not have poisoned himself, his

[12:02] girlfriend, and her friends, but I'm glad I'm here to report. So the issue was they had foraged for wild carrots, which is incredibly dangerous. Don't do it, unless you know what you're doing. I mean, if you know what you're doing, it's fine, but if you don't know what you're doing, it's not like a,

[12:16] it's not an amateur foraging sitch there, the wild carrots. And then at the same time, they had drunk questionable, smelly well water. So these are 2 these are 2 mistakes. But I am extremely happy to report that it was the well water people and that, you know, they all went to the hospital and everyone's

[12:36] okay. And, you know, nobody, nobody died, a little bit of dehydration because, you know, the well water. It goes in, but it also comes out along with the rest of the water in you. Boom. So the, uh, so yeah, so, you know, it had to be on IV fluids there for a little while, but apparently everyone's okay, and we're super glad to hear it. I had some people asking me, actually, in person and also on Twitter, like, hey, are those guys okay? Yes, they're okay. But be careful if you're going to forage for um, for wild carrots. Oh, similarly, though, seriously, with mushrooms, like, uh, you got to know what you're doing, or only hunt for mushrooms that have no poisonous

[13:14] look-alikes, because once you eat a, uh, an emanita, you know, like a destroying angel or something like that, like the, you know, the only way out to get a liver transplant, which is kind of

[13:23] unpleasant. So there you have it. Oh, geez, live a transplant. So, listen, we have some questions from, um, so yeah, you know what the only truffle oil they had? White truffle oil. The stuff. You know, and I had to buy a whole bottle, Nastasia, for 15 freaking dollars. Do you know, like, how the heck am I going to go through a whole bottle? I'm dipping a little bit in a Q-tip? You know, it's like a waste. Does anyone out there want, like, you know, when I'm done, like the rest of it, you know what we should do? We should just keep mailing this bottle around from person to person training dogs

[13:54] and tell, like, you know, the entire the entire country is trained off this one bottle of white truffle oil. Yeah, it was a good idea. You know what I mean? You know what I mean? Or else like to punk someone, just pour it over someone and run. You know what I mean? It's like I told a story like, I have a really bad history in my house of flavored oils, obviously.

[14:15] I told the wasabi oil one, right? Where Dax, so my pantry, right, has all these bottles that are lined up in Dax, who's, you know, he was maybe 9 or 10 at the time. He, uh, you know, the kids are careless. Kids are freaking careless. They, uh, you know, they they say everything's an accident, but really it's that they're careless. You know what I mean? So he knocks a, he knocks a bottle over. And I hear the, I'm like, what's going on? What's, you know, and then I hear, my eyes. Because he like, you can see gone down to look at this wasabi oil, and the wasabi oil just goes,

[14:47] and like, you know, almost like, you know, like a wave of death smell just like goes into his eyes and nose.

[14:53] Oh man. So anyway, so I have a really bad history with that kind of stuff. Or like, you know, spilling some nasty, like, you know, like super green parsley oil or like super green.

[15:04] I told the story on air, I think, where, like, my Miley, my sister-in-law, uh, when she, her 1st date with Wiley Dufrayne was over at my house and I dumped an entire

[15:13] banya cauda, like anchovy oil on her. So, like, just if you come to my house and there are some sort of extremely pungent or extremely colorful oil nearby run, just

[15:26] run, because, like, it's going to end up on your on your new dress, it's going to end up in your eyes,

[15:33] uh, you know, up your nose, anywhere other than where it's supposed to be, where it's going to end up anyway. Yep. I was like, my phone decided that I didn't want to actually read the questions that people

[15:45] asked. I said, here we go. Okay. So, uh, we had a couple questions from last week I need to get to. Alex wrote in, I don't think I got to this. Hey, Dave, Nastasia. and it says Jack, no more Jack. It's David now. It's David. How are we going to get Sorry, guys. Are we going to keep you separate from me because you're with the A and I'm the A? Yeah, I'll be the id. You'd be in. you be the ego. remember that? Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Uh, anyway, um, the question was, uh, let's see. I've been wondering if you guys still have a link to the plexophonic cover of vicious vicious vodka from episode 99. Do we have that, David? Did Jack stash that somewhere on the... What is it? It's the vicious, vicious vodka cover that, you know, that we open the show with sometimes. Plexifying. We opened with this time. Yeah, but he wants a link to download it, I think. Oh okay. see what I can find. Yeah. I think maybe we put it up once on episode 99 and then I don't know if it's, I don't know if it came back. Anyway, now to a more cooking related question. I'm trying to figure out a good way to steam items quickly. I'm not sure how restaurants usually steam. Is there some sort of turbo steaming device? Yes, yes, there is. Um, but I have a flat bottom walk that I tend to steam things in such as fish. Would it be better if I use a large cast iron pot of sorts that has a heavy lid? Thanks, Alex. So here's here's any wishes, Jack, good luck on the tour, which is nice. Jack is not there yet, right? He's leaving him pretty soon. Maybe he's there. I don't know. Not yet. I'm sure he'll tell us what's going on. He probably won't. The, I'm just kidding. Here's the good news about a walk. One of the good reasons to use a walk when you're steaming. One of the bad reasons to use a walk when you're steaming is if you leave the water in there, it

[17:27] can, you can have some rust issues if it's not really, really well seasoned. And even if it is, it can be a little bit of a pain in the butt because you should have. I hope you have a carbon steel or cast iron walk and not a stainless walk. But anyway, but the good news about what makes a walk a good steamer and what makes a walk also for that matter, you know, a passable

[17:49] fryer is that it expands as it goes out. So when you're frying, you want that expanding lip because when you add stuff to oil, it tends to bubble violently.

[18:00] And if you have a straight walled pan. It's very easy for the stuff to overflow, which is terrible. Now, the bad side about a walk for frying is that unless you have a very good ring, you have to make sure it's 100%

[18:13] stable, a 100% stable because an unstable walk with oil in it is very, very dangerous. This is one of the reasons that I prefer to use the Cantonese style walk with the 2 little handles on it rather than the walk with the big handle that you can pick up and flip and to do stir fry with because what a freaking nightmare, if you have a wok full of oil that's hot, and some

[18:34] nin cow poop comes up and like elbows the freaking handle sticking out of the side of your walk and dumps oil all over a lit burner and you talk about like running around

[18:43] going, Imagine like burning oil like everywhere, right? So I don't recommend using a walk with a long handle on it for that kind of work, but I do use, um, the rather large, relatively, and I have a very stable walk ring, uh, those things uh, for frying,

[19:00] and I, you know, and I feel, I feel good about it because they're not going to overflow on you, which is one of the main dangers because people always tend to over, overfill their frying stuff.

[19:09] Now, the flip side of that is that the worst thing that can happen when you're steaming is, well, you don't have enough power or

[19:16] puny. But the other 2 things that suck about steaming are, one, your steaming implement, whether it be

[19:22] baskets. By the way, commercially, they just have large cabinet steamers, and they either work on a drawer, they have drawer steamers, and they also have steamers that you open like a combi oven, and it's just rack after rack, and you put it in,

[19:35] they take fantastic amounts of power, and they're freaking awesome. Some of them can do under pressure. You can pressure seam stuff like lobsters. Some of them have they have dedicated boilers, some of them. They're freaking sick. They're amazing. They steam like a mamma jama. You're not gonna get one. So, um, the problem then, if you're doing steaming at home, on, you know, on top of, and they make little, you know, kind of electric steamers, but I think they're kind of like, you know, whatever, they're like, whatever, you know,

[19:59] whatevs. But if you, um, if you're steaming at home, one of the problems is trying to get a good seal between the vessel that you're using and

[20:07] um, the steaming thing. So I have the bamboo steamers, I have a whole bunch of them. The problem with the bamboo steamers, by the way, is that if you don't let them dry, right, they mold, which sucks. You know, a mildew and mold, which sucks. But they make stainless steel ones. They make a bunch. But the problem with those is, is they have to fit fairly well in your in your

[20:26] thing or you have steam shooting out of the sides, which sucks. So the great thing about a wok is that you have

[20:35] those sloping sides and with the sloping sides, it can fit various sizes of steamer basket

[20:41] relatively easily. The other cool thing is that as the water boils in a

[20:47] wok, right? You know, it takes a lot of time to boil the upper layers

[20:52] because in order it keeps concentrating down. So it's harder to boil a wok dry without noticing because of the way it slopes down. It always has that little kind of bit of water at the end. You have time to fill it up. And when you do fill it up, it fills up out. And so you have a big surface area and you have, you can, anyway, you kind of get that drift of what I'm saying. One thing I will say about wok steaming and steaming in general in tiered basket systems as opposed to in a big machine with doors or drawers is that there is a very large difference in the steaming time and the characteristics between the bottom basket and the top basket.

[21:28] So I don't really like to steam more than 3 baskets. And even when I do, sometimes I'll swap them around. You know what I'm saying? Is that what do you think, Styles? Good job. I never know. Am I talking too much? Too little. Your reasoning is sound. Yeah, yeah. But anyway, all right. Oh, and don't worry about the lid. The lid's not a big deal. Steam has to escape anyway. What are you trying to build a bomb? You know what I mean? Like it has to be tight enough that like you're getting good circulation and that you're not like, you know, having a place where the steam isn't isn't traveling to, but I wouldn't worry about like getting some super

[21:59] tight fitting lid. I think that's just mumbo jumbo. But you know, whatever. someone can get back to me and tell me that I'm wrong. I'm a bad person, et cetera, et cetera. Um, uh, John Vermont Island wrote in a long time ago about fruit trimmings. I'm afraid I don't have a good answer. I'm going to toss this out to the community and I'm sure that someone will tweet her in a thing here. I will read the question. I find that I'm generating a lot of trimmings while preparing summer fruits, particularly in trying to make things clean in quotes for my kids. Think stone fruit pits, melon rinds, mango pits, and skins. Same things for apples and pears in the fall. I'm all for gnawing on a pit or skin to get that last bit of fruit, but there's only so much one man can handle. Last summer I threw a bunch of cherry pits, each with a bit of fruit attached into a mason jar, covered it with red wine

[22:40] vinegar, and forgot about it in the back of my fridge for a year. I finally cracked the jar open last week. It was delicious on its own and became even better when reduced with sugar into a syrup and drizzled over some good cheese. What do you think about the word drizzled, Nastasia? Fine, I don't mind it. Yeah, David, you got any problem with the word drizzle? No, no problem. You know why you don't, I think I haven't, I think I'm okay with it because it reminds me of everything Snoop Dogg says. Oh, wow. I just think of a spring rain. Yes. Oh, you think of spring rain? I think of Snoop Dogg smoking a giant, like, giant blunt. Yeah. Um, drizzle over some good cheese. Any other ideas for good culinary uses, any risk of extracting too much amygdalin slash

[23:21] cyanide, and that's poison my family. I doubt it unless you're using exclusively, you know, like, I mean, people make peach pit,

[23:28] uh, uh, um, cherry pit, uh, liqueurs and stuff like this. But if you were to crack them and boil them, you probably could, but I wouldn't worry about it. Non-alcoholic ideas are especially what someone, you know, we did a whole thing on that. We've got to search because I had to do some research on it. I think I asked McGee about it. Um, I would get the, to get the book on shrubs and look at, uh, uh, you know, I think

[23:52] Deach is, uh, the author of that, right? Is that how you pronounce it? and because you can make a lot of really good shrubs or flavor fruit vinegars or make your own fruit vinegars with it. Something where you're like, you're going to soak it for a long time. And there are a lot of, like I say, non-alcoholics. So syrups, vinegars, uh, and, you know, shrubs, which are basically syrup vinegars, which you can then use in sodas or to drizzle on cheeses as you desire, but that's

[24:16] going to be, that's the only thing I can um, that's the only thing I can reliably, um, think of. I once made an apple. I once made try to make an applesauce out of just peels, but it was kind of nasty because it was all just like chopped up peel. You know, I'm talking about Stas? I chopped up peel texture. I was like, I'm gonna make a sauce from this. And then I ate it. I was like, you know what, I don't want to do. I want to eat this. Like the texture wasn't right. So I just didn't want to, I didn't want to deal with it. But anyway, I would, I would try that. I think it'll work. Lost peel sessions. Lost peel sessions. But anyone else has a good, Oh, nice. I liked it a lot. If anyone has a good, you know, something for John to do, you know,

[24:55] tweet it on in or do it on the chat rooms. Hey, David, is it true that those chat rooms are only available live when the show is running? No, it's 24-7. But, I mean, nice. All right. People tune in only when the show is. Yeah, all right. Well, but if someone could leave an idea now, and then the next time the show is running, someone could come in and look at it and be like, oh. Yeah, absolutely. Hey, we got a caller? You want to take it? Yeah, sure, call her. on the air. Now he is. Hello? Yeah, hi. I have a question for cooking issues. Nice. Here you are. Mind the air? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, went directly onto the air. Yeah, see? We're slick like that nowadays. No, this is Patrick calling from Brooklyn. I'm falling up about the hands upstate from a few months back. Oh, what happened with them? Well, so at eat hams, they were equalizing. Um, one got attacked by, um, by, uh, Skippers, which I guess is just a euphemism for maggots. Well, yeah, but they're fast. You know what I mean? Like they, they, they, they invade. I mean, like, look, any fly larva as a maggot, right? Yeah, I guess, because it only affected one half . And I'm not sure if because that one didn't cure properly to begin with. Was that one less salty? It was, it was always squishier and it didn't seem to be taking the cure. So I was, I'm wondering if that one somehow, you know, you know, was just rotting flesh that attracted it to begin with.

[26:27] Was it a different color? Was it like PSE or anything? What's that? Was it a, was did you, was the color of it fine? Was it a PSE raw hand to be like pale soft, exudative? Yeah, everything looked okay. You know, this is all new to me. Right. Just sort of did it en masse to try it. I'm not really sure. Okay, so did you consider that one a full loss or were you able to trim it? I tried trimming it, but then I separated it from the other one, and then it seemed to be completely subsumed, and I just, I kind of, at that

[27:02] point, seemed, seemed a full line, so, unfortunately. But I have the other 7 ones intact, and I'm have delayed hanging them to age. They're actually just sort of in in holding, you know, in a fridge for a couple weeks before I get a chance to actually hang them.

[27:22] And I was wondering at this stage, am I, would it make sense to envelop the whole painting

[27:29] place in a mosquito net or something to stop fly? So I don't think that that's going to stop mites, but I just, deserve. I'm now concerned. I'm going to have future losses due to skippers. Well, how old are, like, aren't you, like, uh... It's been a while. You should look at Dr. Norman Marriott's. I've already directed you to that. Dr. Norman Marriott, who used to work at, uh, he's now Emeritus at, um, I think it's Virginia Tech or something. Yeah, yeah, the bag, the bag method. Yeah. So there's, but, you know, aside from that, I think he has relative stuff on the, on the pests, I think, like, I can't remember. My memory doesn't work like it used to, but aren't you past? are you past the skipper, like era and aren't you into kind of Beatles now? Isn't that your big problem? Yeah, yeah. Well, so there seems to be, I have, so I have that. I have the, um, the Fedale Boldra, or however you say his name. Yeah, Fidel Child's book, yeah. And there's very little on skippers, but they all seem to say it affects it in the early stage. So my guess is that this one, with some botch and a tier, in it, it effectively was rotten meat while the other

[28:38] ones, the cure, took effectively and are sort of on the stage where the other pet doesn't are the concern. Right, I think, right, yeah, right now, my guess, right? You're way past equalization, you're into, you know, early summer, and you should

[28:52] be, you should be getting like a decent amount of water loss already. Like, I don't know how much of your green weight you've lost, but, um,

[28:59] I, I think it's probably around 30%. Unfortunately, I wrote the weights on the bags and elsewhere, but then I heard they got so saturated that I lost track of which ham was

[29:11] a witch. So it's not completely accurate. But I think it's around 30. I don't like a high at 20%. Actually, I don't think it's a high 30%. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but it's fairly significant. Yeah, if you've lost that much weight, right? again, like, you know, I would just look it up or have someone chime in here. If you lost that much weight already, like that's almost, uh, you know,

[29:33] I, I, it's, again, it's been a long time in the regs, but I think, you know, like most, you know, folks are just aiming around like even 25 for

[29:40] like for moisture content, not for aging, for for saleability. And so I would guess that, you know, you're not going to have like a skipper blowfly problem at this point, but you will have mites and you will have

[29:52] Beatles. Have you smoked them? Are you going to smoke them at all? Not smoke, yeah. I mean, because, like, you know, a lot of times, like just putting like a low, like a low bit of smudge down for a long period, like when they're 1st out in the

[30:05] open like that can get any of that last hackiness off and the bugs won't grow in that. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, I'm thinking that for the long term aging, it's just going to be in the, because this is loosely

[30:15] the, uh, Paul Patrolley, um, methods. Oh, cooking by hand, old school. by hand. Yeah, books. I mean, it's loosely. So this would be just smearing with a lard rice flour mixture, and maybe adding black pepper, and then having a stock in that. So that's still the plan. I'm just, you know, it's obviously you lose, you're going to lose some of these when you're trying this out, but it's still... sucks to lose one. Right. I mean, look, like I say, like I've hung, uh, not my own. I've never done my own, but I've hung a bunch of people's hands for long, long periods of

[30:53] time and, you know, the only, I've never run into, uh, maggots of any kind in a, in a ham that, you know, that's already lost its weight. I've run into, I've run into uh, having it not cure all the way down to the bone and getting taint along the bone, which is

[31:09] nasty, but the ham is still salvageable. I've had many, many problems with mites. and I've had many problems with Beatles, but, um, never with, um, never with maggots. But you don't want those freaking Beatles, boring holes in your ham at the, at the, at the line between the fat and the, it's just nasty. You just don't want that, you know? before, before sealing it, for the aging, want to just use a blow dryer or something to dry the surface, so the stuff that's been evaporating. I don't know, man. I wouldn't hit it with a blow dryer because you might, you don't want to case harden it any more than it already is. I would. Or even if it's a little, that it's okay to seal because

[31:47] it's, that's, you're creating a permeable coating in that permit. Right. Right. Once you've, once you've lost the amount of weight you want to lose, right, then ceiling, it's going to prevent, like going to at least slow further, um, further moisture

[32:02] loss, and presumably, right, presumably, uh, you know,

[32:07] the moisture level over long periods of time will equilibrate throughout the, throughout the ham, assuming

[32:13] that assuming that, you know, there's not a face section that's open. Once you have an open face section of meat, you're just going to have moisture is constantly going to leave there preferentially to the other areas of

[32:26] the of the ham over by the, you know, where the skin and the fat cap are. And so you're always going to have. And if you've cut into any, you know, American hams that aren't aged or even the Italian ones that are covered, you'll notice that the face section of the ham is like much darker than the rest and

[32:42] drier. Uh, and sometimes can have that back of your mouth, like, like over kind of cured taste, just because it's been dehydrated so much. And so, you know, I think, you know, once you get it down to the moisture loss that you want. And, you know, you can also press up on top on that kind of cushion

[32:59] area and you can see if it's still spongy up there, you know you need to get more moisture

[33:04] loss there, but if it's hard enough on the face section, I would still code it and let it kind of equilibrate over

[33:08] time. That's what I would do. I'm not, like I say, I'm not an expert in the actual functional, I'm an expert in eating hams, right? But in the actual functional making of it, I'm not, but that's my guess from my kind of my reading and dealing with other people's hams over the years, you

[33:23] know? Okay. That's I, you know, like I said, this is going, we should have, didn't want to, wanted to try more than one. So have, have a lot of, a lot of them still to experiment. Do you have a, do you have a quoring device? It's actually going to be in a garage. No, I mean, do you have like a tester, like a coring tester? A what sorry? So like, so like, or you know what, people do is they take like a, like an ice pick, right? And you shove an ice pick. Now you got to, I would sterilize it and whatnot. you know, obviously like, you know, take this, whatever, but like old timers would take an ice pick and shove the ice pick into the ham and then pull it out and smell it.

[34:02] And then they could get an idea of what was going on on the inside of the ham. Yeah, so I mean, I think that that's the plan once they're hanging for a few, you know, legitimately aging for a few more months because

[34:12] it sort of, this process is end up being slightly more prolonged than I thought, of just

[34:17] getting, getting the aging going. So I think that is there any point in doing that till they hang for a few more months? No, unless you're worried that they're spoiling. If you're worried that they're spoiling or that you have taint or that they're not dehydrated enough,

[34:29] you'll get an idea pretty dang quick, you know, based on whether that thing comes out smelling sweet. Now, on the other hand, you are providing an entry for other bad things by doing it. So, you know. Yeah, that's sort of a tradeoff. So I think that the other ones, they seem, they, you know, they, they have the right, they seem to feel okay. You know, that's the sort of, you know, they're not the best clues, but they don't seem to have the problems, the one that got affected did in 1st place. So I think I might want to wait a few months on those. All right. And I, am I, am I permitted to ask a 2nd question or are we on a one? Well, Nastasia... not really, but go ahead. Yeah, yeah. Am I gonna get kicked off the air then? No, I just, it's a super quick question, is that cast iron an induction. I'm been fooling around just with a fairly cheap induction burner in my apartment because my stove

[35:28] is horrible. And I pretty much get how it works on thin gauge material. But I'm just thinking how to approach cast iron, it sort of was a, with a, with a gas burner, you crank the heat up, but you can wait for minutes for it to get really hot once it had

[35:46] well, you know, you stored heat capacity. How is this different or the same on? when you're cooking with induction with a thick cast iron or any other sort of implement with high heat

[36:00] capacity? That's a good question. So what I would do is this. Induction burners, like, uh, you know, like, uh, I was going to talk last week. I didn't really get a chance to talk about too much about the new the new Breville one, but I've used the inexpensive ones for, you know, a long time. And I would put your cast iron on it, put a dusting of flour on the bottom of the pan and turn it on and then see where the burn marks are.

[36:23] So even if you're cranking a full 1,800 watts into your induction burner out of the wall, you're still only looking at something that's like 12

[36:32] to so. I forget, it's somewhere around 12,000 to 13,000, something like this BTU's equivalent of gas, right? So you're not going to melt your cast iron down, right? Now, some of the cheaper induction burners don't have enough cooling on their electronics, and if you overheat the surface, they'll eventually crap out on you, but I don't think anything dangerous is going to happen. But the truth of the matter, I mean, the fact of the matter is that because it's heating the metal directly, cast iron is not a very fast conductor of

[37:01] heat, the way that aluminum is, right? It just doesn't, so you're going to get a lot of localized hotspots. So with an induction thing, you're probably better

[37:12] off, like kind of, you could wait a long time and then it will equalize, right? Or you can crank it up, like you can crank it up in kind of increments up and then try to get

[37:22] it even. But you'll notice that you can, I've done it. You can kind of very clearly see where the actual induction element is in a cast iron

[37:31] thing just by sprinkling flour down and letting it come up. And I kind of recommend doing that. And then as a 2nd thing, just to get a feel for what's going on, especially because, you know, it's going to depend on the thickness of your cast iron and how wide it is, et cetera, et

[37:44] cetera. Put the cast iron on, put it on like, let's say, medium high for like, I don't know, like 4 or 5 minutes, 5 minutes, let it kind of equalize, and then dust the

[37:54] flour directly on top and see whether you get an even scorching pattern, do it under a hood, or whether or not it,

[37:59] you still get like really black marks around where the element is. And you can get a feel for kind of how, but it heats, the answer is, is that the metal that is actually being heated directly by the induction unit heats very

[38:13] quickly, and then you still have to wait for that heat to transfer out to the other sections.

[38:18] And then once the entire thing is hot, uh, you know, you have to, there's a certain maximum rate at which you can dump heat from the part where the uh, induction units are

[38:29] out, and that's going to determine how hot you can evenly get it. But I'm assuming that once it's really hot, even when it's cranked, eventually

[38:37] it'll even out. But I've never actually run the full test of a full cranked cast iron for long periods. Interesting And you think that, that, with induction, that seems the difference between the saute pan shape and the sauce pan shape. Is that relevant on your with induction since you're not actually the heat isn't going up the sides? Um, well, I mean, those kinds of things are relevant in certain kinds of applications, right?

[39:03] So you're not worried about capturing gas flames that come up out of the sides, but the evaporation patterns will be different. So if you have a lot of liquid in one pan and it goes down, right? You'll, you know, it's like they used to make pan specifically for reducing sauces that they get smaller and smaller as they go down so that you don't get in a situation where when you're trying to reduce something down to a small volume, you all of a sudden have something that's like, you know, like half of a millimeter thick and then it scorches instantly, right?

[39:34] So also the size, the shape of a side of a pan in anything that you're going to move, i.e. hand flip or toss, is obviously crucial. So the sides of your pan still make a difference in kind of what kind of techniques you're using and why

[39:49] you're using what you're using, but they don't make any difference as to kind of heat

[39:54] channeling. Interesting. Well, actually, that's a lie. So like certain, uh, so for instance, uh, heat will transmit differently in a

[40:02] smooth and a smooth uh, wall thing that curves up, then it will if there's a sharp break, right? That's also true. But these are things, but it's not going to be because of uh, because of convective currents of gas going up the sides. It'll be through conduction of metal through, you know, through the metal itself, which will also change with an abrupt bend, I

[40:22] think. you know, you have to test it. Okay. Well, this is, this is, this is, this is super helpful, and thanks for taking 2 questions at all. monopolize any more time. All right, well, you know, come call back in later and let us know how the hams turn out when you test the 1st one. Okay, thanks. All right, cool. Kieran wrote in. I recently bought a pasture raised pig and opted into keeping all the scraps in addition to the meat. As part of this, I was wondering if it's possible to approximate tankatsu broth with just the bones and skin. In my head, I feel like the bones would provide a good amount of flavor while the skin

[40:55] could provide body, but it's all theoretical at this point. Additionally, a while back, you mentioned that there's a good porky and bad porky with regards to the skin. So do you think this would contribute adversely to flavor? Hey, Nastasia. Let them know what, let them, let them know what that giant vat of boiling pork skin smells like. Well, how about beaver tail? Oh my god, beaver tail. A boiling stock pot of beaver tail is like, but a boiling stock pot of

[41:23] like just, just pigskin is like, you're just like, wow, that's a boiling stock pot of pigskin, right? And so like, you know, what we what we would do with all the pigskin was, um, we would take the pigskin, we would boil the crap out of it in

[41:39] in salty water, then pull it out, let it, uh, let it cool because otherwise you can't hold it. It just breaks apart. Then we'd scrape all the fat off, which is also disgusting. Then we would cut it and dehydrate it, uh, and then you deep fry it, that's how you make pork rinds. And the pork rinds were delicious. But anyone that had actually been involved with the boiling and the scraping would have to wait like a week before they wanted to eat the pork rinds because of the stank of

[42:06] the, uh, of the boiling, uh, the boiling, what's

[42:10] it called? The boiling pigskin. And I have to say, a similar thing like with tripe. If you've ever done like a lot of preparing of tripe. And then you have to, at least I have to wait a little bit after I deal with it, then, you know, before I

[42:23] like really want to like tuck into a giant thing of tripe. But similarly to tripe, a really good use for pigskin is the, uh, I'm going to say it like, you know, I guess in Italian. It would be bracciole. But like, you know, as they say, you know, up in Boston, a Brazole. So like when you're making like the tomato sauce, uh, you know, the sundae, the sundae sauce or gravy, as they call it up in uh, up in uh, Boston. Uh, you know, they would typically, they would use actually the meat perch, but, you know, classically, you would add rolled pork skin. So the same way that you do with the meat ones. You lay it out, you put in the herbs and the cheese, uh, and, you know, the salt and the pepper, and you roll it, tie the pork skin up, and then you brown it, and then you throw it into the tomato sauce, and you cook it for hours and hours and hours, and

[43:13] that stuff renders out in the tomato sauce. And something about tomato sauce. It's the same thing with tripe, like tripe and tomato sauce, like, doesn't bother, you know, me, and, um, you know, the pig skin and the tomato sauce. Like maybe it's the acidity. I don't know what it is, but like, I should know, but I don't. But you cook it there. It adds that unctuous character to the sauce, and then you can pull that out, and, you know, after you take the strings off, obviously, you can, you can eat

[43:39] it, along with the other meats that you cook in the, in the Sunday, in the Sunday sauce. So that's one thing to do with it. So you can do your pork rinds with it. You can do that. Your question of whether or not you can do the tonkatsu broth. They're going to pull me off. We should talk a whole thing. Would a pressure cooker. Okay, additionally, this is more of Kieran's port question. Additionally, a while back, you mentioned that there's good porky and bad porky with regards to skin, so do you think it would

[44:03] be contribute adversely to flavor? And then would a pressure cooker be a good option for making a

[44:09] tonkatsu broth? And he points to Kenji's Sirius Eats ramen broth, which is what he hopes to put the pigskin into. I don't know, man. I mean, you could add a little bit because it's there for gelatin, but you kind of want the bones and like other kind of meaty things in

[44:26] there that aren't just straight there. And I want to go actually later into a discussion of bone broths, uh, this,

[44:35] like tonkatsu stuff, which is basically a variation of uh, Chinese kind of emulsified cream

[44:40] stocks, uh, and whatnot. And whether or not it's possible to make it in a pressure cooker because, obviously, Kenji doesn't believe that it is possible to make it an a pressure cooker, but for various reasons, I think that might not be the case, but I don't have time to get into it. I don't have time to get into it today because they're about to pull us off. So I still have not gotten to the chimichurri question, which

[45:02] I'll get to next week, but I have a question from weeks ago that I want to get to really quickly because

[45:07] we got a sad face. We got a sad face on it. hold on second. Yeah, I don't want this. I want a sad face. Oh, yeah. Nice. So Shy wrote in about Burmese tofu and cheese molds. Hello, I sent you this question about 3 weeks ago, but you haven't got to answer it. It's a show ended. It seems like it got lost, sad face. I hope you have the time for it next time. You've spoke in the past about making tofu from peanuts. I've wondered if you've tried using other pulses. From what I've read, most don't have sufficient protein content to form a good curd. Is this correct? That has been my experience. I, you know, on the other hand, people make things that are tofu like, right? I think modernist cuisine, I have to go and look at it again, has a whole section on it, but, you know, someone will tell me whether they do or they don't. But most of these kind of things are more tofu in quotes. So you're making a puree of something or a milk of something. Maybe you add a coagulant, maybe you don't, but then you fundamentally cheat and just

[46:04] set it with Agar. Another thing you can do with these things is supplement the protein strength with

[46:10] transglutaminates, you know, meat glue. But again, I think those are not done traditionally like you would with tofu where you're actually ladling and straining out. The problem with the peanut was that when I strained, it wasn't coherent. It just gummed up my cloth. It was a nightmare. So I don't know whether it's going to be easy for you to make traditional,

[46:31] like you, you, you make the tofu clouds. You, uh, you know, you get some of the water out by pushing the clouds down, and then you ladle the rest through and let it coagulate. You might need to add an adjunct, such as setting with agar in terms of a very soft, you know, kind of custard set, fake tofu or partial fake tofu,

[46:48] uh, or use something like transgutaminates, but hopefully someone will write into me, who listens to this and say that they have done it and give us a procedure that we can uh, do. Also, you say, have you had an experience with Tofu,

[47:03] aka Burmese tofu, not really tofu, since it's made with chickpeas and contains salads, but it seems easier to prepare, and I've wondered how does it compare? I've never made it, but there's also the, it's basically chickpea polenta, not a tofu. And so you cook the heck out of it like a polenta, and then when it cools down, it sets and you can cut it, you can do various things. They also do that. They do a chickpea polenta in southern Italy, which have you ever had that in Stasi? I never had it. No, I don't think I have. I mean, it sounds good, but I don't have a lot. I tried to get in touch with Francis Land, but he's in Malaysia. He wrote an article on it. He says it's good. I've never messed with, though. And finally, I wondered, uh, what might be the result of introducing cheese molds to tofu, like penicillin Rocca 4 deer or whatnot. Will they be able to grow properly and with similar flavors or maybe tofu just won't keep well in the time it takes mold to grow? The answer is it can be done. someone did it in the 70s. They did a blue cheese, but they had to dope the tofu before it was made with

[47:58] non-fat milk solids and milk fat to get the right kind of flavor textures.

[48:04] I think you need to, you could probably do it non-dairy, but I think you need to dope a little

[48:08] more, uh, and maybe different kinds of protein, maybe even cross-linking it might help, and, uh, a little fat needs to go in there. But we could think, think more about that. We got a question on Gravel Axe, we'll get to next time, including Nils's thing on Gravel Ax. Brandenburg wrote in about black garlic, and since this people have been asked a couple times, can

[48:24] I can I do this, David, before we leave, take 20 seconds. Yeah, go for it. I've been trying to track down the details on Johnny Hunter's technique for making black garlic in 3

[48:31] days, but hadn't had any luck searching through the archives. I know we presented it at MoFad's PH delicious event, and that the existence has been of this technique has been acknowledged, but I haven't been able to find it. So Johnny's in and out of cell service, but he sent me this. Put the garlic, not peeled, either single clothes or full heads. Wrap the garlic and foil, then put a damp towel on the bottom of a crock pot, and then a damp towel on top. Put the lid on top of the crock pot, and then wrap the whole thing in a cellophane to keep everything sealed, and put the crock pot on high, around 180 degrees, and go for at least 24

[49:06] hours and maybe more, and what, and you can test it periodically, see what comes out, and what comes out will be black garlic. That's his techniques. We get to the other questions next time on cooking issues.

[49:22] 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. HeritageRadio Network is a nonprofit organization. To donate and become a member, visit our website today. Thanks for listening.