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[0:39] cure all of raw apple cider vinegar and honey. For more information, visit firesider.com. I'm Damon Bolty, host of the Speakeasy. You're listening to Heritage Radio Network, broadcasting live from Bushwood, Brooklyn. If you like this program, visit heritageradionetwork.org for 1000s more.

[1:03] Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of cooking issues coming to you live on the Heritage Radio

[1:12] Network every Tuesday at roughly what, roughly like what, like 12? Like 12 to 1245, one o'clock, Roberta Pizzeria in Bushwick, Brooklyn. calling all of your questions today, by the way. Mead related questions. We have a special mead presentation and dump meal related presentation. Call in all of your questions to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. Uh, joined, uh, as usual with Nastasia the Hammer. Lopez. How you doing? Good. Yeah, how's your week been? Good. Fine. So a little later on, your sister, you wanted to tell your sister... My sister's calling in at 1230. She says, and but so Nastasia, for those of you that are regular listeners to the program, I bought her for her birthday, a

[1:58] crock pot, and a copy of dump meals.

[2:03] That's right. Dump, dump meals. And, uh, and so Nastasia can't, she's like, she, after she's like, you know what, Dave, I just can't be bothered. No, my sister has a normal size, a nice, normal size kitchen. I only have one. I bought you a miniature crock pot. But my coffee machine. only have one surface for anything. So anyway. You can make coffee in a crock pot, but I wouldn't recommend it. Oh, weird. And I wouldn't recommend it. So anyway, so go ahead. Anyway, so she's been making dumb meals for the past 4 days. So she, like, like... Breakfast and dinner. She'll talk about it. Natalina, right? She'll say natty. Natty. Lopez is the cooking issues dump meal correspondent. So she's going to be calling now. Now, Nastasi, you said that your sister doesn't necessarily have any sort

[2:48] of, she's not in the food business. No, and she's 22. Yeah, but on my point, my point. She's been eating cafeteria. By the way, she got a boyfriend, you freak shows out there. Got a boyfriend. But if you see any cafeteria food. say your age. It's like, you know, what? No, I'm saying she's so young. Like, she's only been she's only been out of college for a month. Anyways, point being, she has no knowledge. Right. But I'm not going to, like, hopefully she's not listening to this and, like, good, good. Even though she's going to call in. She's at work Where is she working? Hearst. So we're going to get her fired from her 1st job out of college by having her call in and talk about

[3:23] dump meals. Sweet, sweet. Joined in the booth with, remember, we're going with Dave Id, as opposed to me, Dave, how you doing? Good, how you doing? Doing all right. You have a good week? Very good week. excited for some me talk. Oh, yeah, me talk. So our special guest for today. What? What? Who is that? What? Oh, yeah. right there. Oh, yeah, the engineer. Yeah, Dave's over there, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So our special guest today is Raphael from Enlightenment wines. Now Enlightenment wines, say hello. Hi. Hey. So Enlightenment wines. Why don't you tell a little bit about it? actually, you have a tasting room here in Bushwick, but that's not where the actual production happens, right? Well, it will. I've been making the Meads upstate for the last almost 10 years. And now we just opened a production space out off the Jefferson L. So we have a tasting room and we have a beautiful facility for making wine. I did not know this because I'm stupid. The technical term for a, like, a mead maker is... maser. So you are a maser. Right. It's helpful that we don't have to tell people. You make wine because when you say that, I think of grape wine and that's not really what I do.

[4:34] And also it's, you know, when you're a meat maker, you're also an herbalist, you're also a forager. There's a lot to it that's not just in the production space. in the same way like a winemaker often grows the grapes, but, you know, they're not necessarily thought of as farmers. So a meat maker has a similar kind of broader activity. You ever have this happen to you? I mean, you make meat, so you are a maser. So therefore, uh, by the way, uh, Twitter handle is uh, NYMazer at NYMazer, right? Which by the way, I've used about once, and I think it was to contact you. Oh, no. Well, start using it, buddy, you know, especially now that you have to teach me how to use it. seems very popular. Well, I don't know. I'm not necessarily the best at it. We got to find, like, who's a Twitter maniac, Nastasia? You're not. Yeah, we're like social media dunces. Anyway, the point being that this is what happened to me for the past month, right? So you read all these articles from roughly, correct me if I'm wrong, roughly like

[5:29] four, 3 to 4 years ago. So you're looking at like, uh, between 2012 and 2014, everyone says, the meads

[5:37] coming, the meads coming. You have an occasional bottle of meat, usually buy one of the larger producers in some of the wine stores. And then when I finally get around to saying, okay, now the me that I had when I was, you know, young in my 20s was, hmm, garbage, garbage, bad. You know what I mean? Like, in my opinion, I mean, maybe it's the way they wanted it. Maybe they wanted it to taste like it had all sorts of other weird fermentations going on in

[6:02] it and oxidized and messed up and like does not write and like not ferment it out. And I think people were going for too much alcohol. But anyway, my meat experiences have not been the best. Like, a couple of months ago, I was like, this is ridiculous. It's one of the oldest beverages. known, right? People drank it and drink it for since time, literally, since time immemorial, right? And also by pretty much every human culture on earth, right? Yeah, anyone that had access to honey. Yeah, they figured out some way to make meat. So the short answer is just got to be good. That's the, it has to, like, there's literally, there's no way that it can't be good. Something with that kind of a history to it. It's just the ones that I've had recently are bad. And then, you know, I ran into the problem over the past couple of months that now I think a lot of wine stores that maybe started

[6:49] carrying, because I went to some of the places that were on some of those articles from the meat explosion a couple years ago, and a lot of them just aren't carrying anymore. So you want to talk about the current state of meat and like trying to get it carried in wine stores and price points and

[7:01] problems. Yeah, there's, I mean, there's a lot to talk about. I think, uh, well, I mean, part of part of the Enlightenment

[7:11] Wines project is that it's largely self-taught, meaning that, um, you know, I wasn't, uh, I didn't apprentice a winery or I didn't grow up as a craft brewer or anything like

[7:22] that, and then decide to make meat. And that's partly because I wanted to start from scratch and really with very few tools, right? So I did it without electricity, practically, for 5 or 6 years, partially to get back to understanding how it was really made initially.

[7:37] And now, you know, whatever, I started making this stuff in 2000, right? So I've been doing it for a while. Now that I look back and I see the growth of

[7:47] meat and who's making it and why, it's not always been made properly, I think it's pretty obvious. Part of the problem is, 1st of all, you got to think

[7:57] about people with the resources to make it, right? So they're typically brewers, right? So, when you make mead, there's, um, you know, the equipment involved, right? If you come at it with a brewing mentality, there's a bad side to it, which is that it's sterile, you're heating things, you're filtering them, you're doing all this very, you know, brewing is basically pretty high

[8:17] tech compared to winemaking. That's bad. It's good because brewers are used to sort of mixing things together, making alcohol out of it, but that 1st part of the process, especially brewers who are used

[8:29] to, from the last 10 years of trying to make increasingly alcoholic beers, increasingly hopped beers, right?

[8:35] That's the American. Right? So you end up with a very high alcohol wine, which is typically sweet, pretty undrinkable. On the other hand, the people with the real resources, and the knowledge base to make good mead, which are natural winemakers, right? Which are people who are used to barrels, this stuff isn't sterile, it's very low tech, it's very takes a long time, all that kind of stuff. Um, and are used to the fact that every year is going to be different, that there's

[9:02] vintages, they're not trying to produce a Campbell soup can, right? That in that world, in the mentality of the natural winemakers. A lot of the things that are fundamental to making mead, which is adding herbs, adding fruits, mixing things together, specifically adjusting the sugar at the beginning,

[9:22] right? You know, you can decide how much honey you want to start with. at the end of the day. You mix water and you can dilute it, right? Those things are an anathema natural winemakers. So for them, and I'm speaking very generally here, it's a big leap to get into winemaking.

[9:35] So what that's done is left a real hole for, uh,

[9:38] for for the meat industry to have someone sort of step in, who's using natural winemaking practices, but applying it to honey wine and kind of fruit wines, you

[9:49] know. And you could say the same thing about fruit wines also. I mean, if you go upstate, there's lots of wineries that'll sell you, you know, like a dandelion wine, which is like a sugar wine where they waved anilines over it, I think, or

[10:00] something, and you can't taste anything or like a really sweet like cranberry wine. There's nothing actually fermentable in dandelions anyway, really. It just a flavor, a color thing, right? I mean, you have to add a sugar from something else anyhow, right? Right, exactly. So here's a here's our day of the water. Oh, I've always wanted to have a good dandelion wine. I told the story, I think, a couple weeks, I don't know, months ago. My grandpa made a dandelion wine. He was really proud of it, and I was really young and such a dick that I was like, doing a line wine is like, it's some sort of like weird hick Pennsylvania thing you're making me. And you'd be right, actually, because

[10:30] Dandelion wine is what's actually considered like a country wine, right? A farmer's wine. So the history of the dandelion wine is really amazing. And if you look into it, it's really, you're going to find this in herbalism books, right? So like most alcohol made for the, you know, 1st half of humanity, it wasn't really to get you

[10:50] drunk. It was to preserve plants. It was preserve medicinal qualities of plants. So New England farmers, for example, when they come to New England, right? And they're trying to grow stuff. And, you know, they're, for the most part, don't know what they're doing and they don't have any citrus and they all have

[11:05] scurvy. Everyone in New England has scurvy for like 100 years between, you know, January and June pretty much, right? Is that true? Is that actually true? Yeah, because if you're, if you, if you do subsistence agriculture, what, and you don't have access to, and you're not making sauerkraut, right? Which many of them, like if they weren't German, if they're English or something, they're not making sauerkraut, they're just so little vitamin C in the system that, you know, they're eating like grass and stuff in the spring.

[11:30] And so if you have a dandelion wine, which dandelions are incredibly packed with iron and vitamin C and all these kind of

[11:38] things, and it's preserved, the tradition of dandelion wine is that in the early spring, kind

[11:43] of right when you start seeing the dandelions, you take a shot of it after lunch or something.

[11:48] It's a tonic. It's not something you'd like sit around with a snifter. It's a tonic. really medicine. So, uh, and had all these cure all qualities for it, but, you know, really, if you look at it, it's probably just simply that it's like, you know, when you have low levels of scurvy, you start having like, you know, it's vitamin C deficiency.

[12:07] You have like, you get sick, you get colds and stuff. Scurvy, like, but like advanced scurvy styles, you would like it because it's

[12:12] like, it destroys the connected tissues to your body, so your teeth fall out, your old wounds. You get yellow? Yeah, yeah, you know, it's like a tan, but it's wrong color. Sweet. Yeah, so anyway, it's good business. You can try some of it. I would love to. By the way, what's what's the what now, is this a meat base with dandelion in it? or this, you know, I usually end with this, but because it's the most bitter. It's the most complicated... Lake Nastasia. Um, but, uh, there's, um, we can, we can start. you can start with this. This is an aportif. Now, to make this, you have to actually pick up shitload of flowers, right? You can't cheat. So, um, you know, and you have about a week to do it in, right? So the bloom for dandelions is tiny. Like they kind of grow all year, but they're really only around for like a week in a big amount. That makes it efficient. So is the acidity from it strictly because you let a little acetic stuff happen to it or is it? Yeah, I mean, you know, honey wine, you

[13:10] have, like, people think that mead is going to be like a single honey meat, right? I like it. Oh, thank you. It makes it's a great spritz. They use it at PDT for one or 2 of their drinks. Oh, those weasels, they're always on top of everything. What's the bottle price on this? Weasels. Weasels. Who do you distribute? I don't. have to get it from us. Also, they're doing it illegally. No, no, no, we have a license. Oh, we have a license to distribute? Yeah, I'm for winery. So I can sell you a bottle right here. Oh, really? Yeah. strength. Actually, one of the brilliant things about our tasting room is that because we're the

[13:41] 1st people in New York really to really, I think, take advantage of this. So we've got a farm winery license. So in exchange for the restriction of using New York

[13:50] State ingredients, we are allowed the privilege of opening a bar next

[13:55] door, a full, full liquor bar. You know, we can have whatever we want. We can serve whatever we want. But you can go there, you can have a drink, and if you want, you can buy our bottles right out, right to go. So you can like have glass of mead, you can go out, you can have a glass of beer for that matter, or any number of the cocktails that we make with his stuff. But the nice thing is you can buy the bottles right there and go home with them. So now what's the, what's the, the, the liquid base? What's the sugar? It's honey. Okay. So I can feel some of that, that floral hit. smell the honey more than you're going to taste it. How did you get the, how did you get the the acid? Is it just from letting it like a multi-floral thing happen? Right. Well, so for so in typically in a in a dandelion one, you'd actually use a lemon juice. Um, so, you know, in in general, the honey wines,

[14:39] uh, what I was going to say was that like, it's actually very hard to make a meat just from the honey in the water. It doesn't have the tannins, it doesn't have the acids, right? It doesn't have the structure. Also, it doesn't ferment very well, right? Doesn't it stick? Well, if you start with a really heavy ABV and you're trying to make 20%, yeah, you're

[14:54] going to have hard time, but I don't typically have that, but it's, if you, again, if you're using processed honey, which I don't, there's almost no nutrients in it.

[15:00] So, you know, I'm using unfiltered, like, raw honey, it's got pollen in it. It's got B parts in it. You don't like dump urea in like beer makers do, right? No, no, but sometimes what that stuff is? East food? Yeah, I mean, you know, there's all kinds of, I mean, that's a whole other, like yeast nutrients is a whole nother thing. But, um, you know, typically you either need to bring a fruit into it, to bring the acid into the tannins, or you're going to bring some kind of herbs in it, to bring the tannins up. The traditional recipe for dandelion wine requires lemon, lemon juice, which I'm not allowed to use until we can start figuring out how to get the lemons out

[15:36] of the greenhouse. You need an orangery, my friend. Right, exactly. So there is, I discovered in uh, the park in the cemetery, there is a New England, like, uh, orange that will go through the winter. It's this tiny little, it's called a trifolate orange. Oh, yeah. Those grow here? They do. They're used as root stock for other things. Sometimes they grow out and you can see them. nasty, full thorns. It's like full thorns in these old tiny golf ball sized oranges that have no juice. But there's that, there's acid in there. We're working with that. I can use sumac. Sumac's delicious but very highly colored. Yeah, I don't take away the dandelion. I mean, I love Sumac. I use sumac all the time. And it's easy as hell to forish in New York. Yeah, so this has 2 Mac in it. We can try that one next. I love Sumac. Something about Sumac that's just so pleasing. Have you had to pick it and take all the hairs off? Yes. Oh, well, I don't take the hair. I'm typically making like, uh, like, uh, sodas and cocktails, so I don't ever, it doesn't sit a long time, so I just, I just do basically a quick boil, steep

[16:36] strain, spinoff and get really clear. How do you avoid? I had a lot of trouble sumac enough that like we had a fight this summer and we're not work. not hanging out this year because it was just, I was like killing myself because

[16:46] it, I couldn't get the, okay, so I would like multiple wash, rewash the same thing over and over again. And then, but if I cooked it, I would get this sort of green vegetal flavor, which I didn't like. Yeah you have to rip out the centers. Yeah, yeah. like unbelievably touchable. First of all, yeah, people, have you ever never picked? 1st of all, the reason Sumac's not popular, it's incredibly delicious is because people are dumb and they're

[17:09] not, you're not dumb. I'm not calling you dumb, but like people associate Sumac with Poison Sumac. Staghorn Sumac, which is the one that I have growing near me, and there's a couple other different kinds of varieties. Also, it's super variable, right? Flavor-wise, yeah. So when I forge for it, I have to go bush to bush and taste them, and sometimes

[17:27] it don't taste like anything. I found some stuff out in Montauk that had so much acid on it. They were wet from the humidity and white, like white, like cream on them, but hairy. No, it was like, they were literally citric acid crystals on the outside. I mean, it was like kind of like a marijuana, like wet dream, but it wasn't a sumac. sumac. yeah. Susumac, when you harvest it, there's some smoother ones, some harrier ones, but when you, the thing is, it looks nice and friendly and pretty, but when you start picking apart, you get this weird greasy feeling on your

[17:57] hands that I don't know what that's from. And then inside is all this like nasty business. Right, which could have, like, if bugs, whatever. And then the little seedy thing. Not could have does have. Yeah, definitely. No, I mean, it's, it's, it's great if you want to make a cocktail. you want to make a punch. For me, the, you know, when you talk about foraging something, you're talking

[18:16] about like, can I get 50 gallons of it or not, you know? And so part of... It's very strong. very strong acid. In other words, you can make a good amount with, let's say you were to get like a laundry bag full of stuff, which is a pain in the ass. I'm not going to say it's not. did the laundry. But that's a that's a quite a bit of Sumac as an adjunct. Not as a... So this is what I used it for this year. I'm going to go back to hibiscus for it, because I like, it's a little richer of an

[18:41] acid, and... I did a 3 flavor soda once that was all red. It was rose hip, all you call them, New York, rose hip, hibiscus, and sumac bias can't give up sumac. I love it so much. Ooh, listen to that. That's Nastasia's favorite noise in the whole world. This is called, well, this is the Night Eyes. We blew when we opened about a week ago. Oh, congratulations. Oh yeah, thank you. Thank you. And we just blew through this stuff because we started selling it by the bottle and people just hang out with

[19:15] it and it's just getting all crunked out with it. So what's the ABV on this sucker? Uh, like 12. So you're starting with see if I can do my calculation somewhere around 20 breaks or something like that. I don't know. I have a funny story. So I don't use bricks. I use I use a hydrometer. And I probably should use a bricks, but it's kind of like when I was a kid, like my dad went out and bought us all like hockey sticks for, because we had a frozen pond and I didn't know anything about hockey, so we just all got

[19:46] really sticks. What he didn't know is he bought the whole family left-handed sticks. So I learned left-handed and that's just how I play hockey down if I play hockey. So I use a hydrometer for this. If you don't know what a hydrometer is, you should. It's kind of this miracle tool. So like, It measures the density of liquid. I mean, it looks like a thermometer, and as a as a liquid is more thin, it sort of sinks, and then as it becomes more thick because of the sugar, it goes up. It costs about $7. The next best tool you can use to measure like the alcohol or sugar content in your liquid costs like $5000,

[20:22] right? There's like really, literally nothing in between that is useful at all. So I'm a huge fan of these kind of these very simple tools that are very low tech. You can make a hydrometer. And actually, I learned recently that in the old days. Do you know this? What? The old, I don't know about it. you know what the old hygeometer was? Not what? An egg. Well, I know I measure salt brines with eggs. Yeah, so they would use an egg. I've never heard of B people using it for liquor, though. Yeah, no, well, I mean, it's not good for alcohol, but it's good for one thing, which is measuring the sugar content of the initial thing. And they would talk about the circle that the egg made, like whether it was like a half dollar. I mean, it's English, right? So they use pence or whatever, but... Yeah. Yeah. But see, I'm old school refractometer guy. 100%. I just discovered that thing. It's amazing. What's nice about it is it just takes like a drop and you can walk around with juices. One freaking drop. Yeah, it's really good. You know what I used to hate filling tubes up with stuff and it floating. No, no, you're right. No, no, you're totally right. Refact Amor is really cool. The problem is when you're switching back and forth, people who buy refractometers, especially if they don't think about it, they don't think about what it's actually measuring. See, everyone is using a hydrometer. They know they're really, they're just measuring the density. And so when, but what if there's like stuff in there? That's what I understand. That's the thing, right? So, like, you know, what you know, right? like any kind of any brew or wine calculator, you can know your

[21:43] initial, your initial gravity, and you assume that almost all of that initial extra gravity is due to sugars, right?

[21:50] And then, and then when it ferments out, you do the calculation, you do bank. But refractometers don't work that way. You know what I mean? Now, there are people that have calculated final gravity. So by the way, there's, there's, you know, your initial or, you know, original gravity, and then your, what do they call the finished one,

[22:07] the F, I don't know, whatever. And so you take these 2 numbers, and the 2nd gravity is really a bull crap number, right? Because let's say it comes out at, you know, one, which 0000, which is theoretically the density of water. What that really means is you have some alcohol and some sugar, because sugar's... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because you want more. Yeah, you want more alcohol than obviously. But my point being is that people have tables where they know what your initial amount of sugar is, and then by reading the final gravity of it, you can figure it out.

[22:36] The problems with fractometers aren't measured that way. So refractometer is literally looking and the responses for sugar versus alcohol. I don't know how linear they are over the range you're checking. So literally, you have to have someone who just takes a bricks, which is a particular scale, right, measuring, you know,

[22:55] refraction, because all it's measuring is light bending. And then you have to have someone calibrate the, the, uh, the final alcohol reading based on a particular, uh, um,

[23:06] OG, and that just, you just have to pray it's linear in that range. And if it is, you can use it. You know what I mean? And then there's there's also some weird relationship between the 2 that's not linear. No, you just have to tabulate. I just, you know, I kind of stick with my thing and I kind of know. I mean, to be honest, it's always good advice to stick with your thing. And also your tongue is also your best weapon, right? I mean, that's the, you can taste the sugar at unbelievably tiny amounts. And so at the end of the ferment, I, I, the hydrometer just like gets less and less useful. And then you start tasting it. You just want to make sure it's not stuck before you take it. Right. So like this guy, right? So this is a sparkling line. It's not carbonated. This is made like a pet nap. You know, there's still yeast in the bottom. It's, uh, you know, you basically ferment out dry, then you you add a little bit of honey or sugar back in, and you continue the fermentation in the

[23:55] bottle. If I was really smart or I was like some old French guy had been doing this for 500 years. Like, I would just bottle it when I knew it had the right amount of sugar in it, but because I don't have access to either that like historical tradition

[24:10] of like really knowing that very, you know, when you make the same line every year, you can kind of just taste it. But for me, I have to go dry and then go back for the secondary. All right, let's, we're going to talk about this particular wine a second. We got a call around the arrow. Is it a mead related color? What do we got? What kind of questions we got? Call her, you're on the air. Hi, Dave. Hey. Is this my sister? Hello? Hi. Oh, hi now. Yeah, I thought you got it. Yeah, no, hey, you're on the air. So this is going to be a dump meal. We're taking a meat break. Could you tell me what a dump and your listeners, I guess, what your dump meal is? And I hope it's something, not what I'm thinking it is. Well, as I like to say, all meals end up as dump meals. But the, uh, so uh, so Nastasi, you want to describe the dump meal? want Natty to describe the dump meal? It's well, Natty, describe what you've been making. Okay, so I did 4 different meals with a crockpot, and I basically just threw a bunch of stuff

[25:07] in, but the recipe told me too. It's basically go to the local circle K, buy some stuff, and dump it into a crock pot, walk away from it, come back and eat. That's what dump... This sounds like the winemaking class I want to teach where we go to the dollar store and we come back and we make alcohol out of that stuff.

[25:24] You just dump. I want dump it in a thing, come back in 2 months. Can I say stay away from dollar store bacon? Just stay away from dollar store bacon, especially in your wines. But yeah, dollar dollar store mead making. I think I would pay for that. I mean, a dollar. I'm kidding, that's an idea. So, Natty, what have you been working on? What dump meals have you tried? Um, so I did an oatmeal, which I left an overnight, and that turned out great in the morning. I did ginger teriyaki chicken. Okay, how okay. 1st of all, oatmeal in a crock pot mean, okay, that's going to work. I mean, that's just going to work. That's oatmeal in a crock pot. Now talk to me about the chicken. What cut of chicken did they recommend? Um, they did chicken thighs and chicken legs? Okay, okay, okay. So some props. wasn't some jerk with boneless, skinless breasts. All right, so it wasn't inherent chicken dust you were making. Then what? And then I had to do like a full can of ginger ale and a full bottle of teriyaki sauce and some other

[26:18] things. Wow, this person likes some sugar there, the full can of ginger oil. Let me ask you a question. Did you have to brown that chicken beforehand? Sorry? Did you brown the chicken beforehand? No, I just put it in there. just washed it off. Washed it off? That's our mother's favorite trick. You washed off the chicken? Before I put it in the crock pot. With, what do you mean you washed it off? You wash your chicken? Well, I just wanted to make sure it was clean. Anyways, then I also did its spare rib. Wait, aren't you supposed to wash a chicken? No, you don't wash a chicken. But it's kind of like slimy stuff on it. Well, but then that means you purchased a crab chicken. The, uh, the, uh, the whole thing. Like, sometimes you can wash off if there's like bits of blood and you want to get them up, it's not a freaking fish. You know what I'm saying? with like or you're ripping the bones out of it. It's a freaking chicken. It's already been dredged through like the hell and gone. They've already beaten the crap out of that thing. They put it into a fundamentally a giant, like washing machine made of rubber to rip every dang feather off of it. It's been completely eviscerated and sprayed down. Anyway, okay, hold a second. So wait, so you, this, these thighs and stuff, they had the skin on. But you in no way treated the skin in any shape, form, kind. You literally threw this thing in with ginger ale and teriyaki sauce. So the dump meal lady's idea of browning the skin was to dump teriyaki sauce into it. Am I am I on track here? Matty? What? Like, this lady's idea of browning the skin, the lady who wrote dump meals was to add teriyaki sauce. That was in lieu of browning the skin, right? One sec. hold on. What, referring to the recipe? This sounds like it's a nightmare waiting to happen. I mean, I don't know. Is there any sort of, are you back? Is there any sort of sautéed onion or garlic? anything? What? Is there any sort of sautéed onion or garlic in with this dump chicken? Um, well, there were 2 different chicken instances, and one of them had onions in it. One. What about this 1st one with the ginger ale? Um, the no. So let me get this straight. It's just ginger ale, teriyaki, washed chicken in a

[28:30] crock pot for like 8 hours and nothing else? That's all, oh, and rice at the bottom. Rice at the bottom. And did you add the rice at the very get go? Um, yeah. So that wasn't overcooked at all then. How was it? Tell me how it was, was it delicious? Did you enjoy it? Yes, I did. You did? What was the texture of the rice like? It was really fluffy and nice. It was almost like a risotto. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Nastasia, are you gonna let your sister say that it was almost like a risotto? An unstirred crock pot? You need to try it, Dave. Listen, listen, listen, listen. in the teriyaki and the ginger ale, right? What, the chicken? No, the rice. The rice is floating. No, the rice is gonna sink to the bottom, right? Well, it's okay. And it's in a crock pot. It's like everything that you, you know, okay. What about the other chicken that you made, Natty? The shredded chicken, that was just with bell pepper and... Uncooked bell pepper? That one in the crock pot. You throw uncooked bell pepper into with a skin on into a crock pot, okay? Next? And then I think it was just the chicken breast, boneless. Breast, boneless breast for 8 hours. Okay, what liquid did you pour into this? Water? Water? And what else? Nothing else. Wow, how was that? It was good. Oh, and I guess like taco seasoning. Taco seasoning. Let me ask you this. Like, when you picked up the chicken, if you allowed it to cool, when you hit it against a table, would it actually, like, friably shatter? Was it, was it like a chicken leather or did it, like, was the chicken in any sense still juicy at all in any way, shape, kind

[30:07] format or did you, you had to, did you shred it? Yeah, it was easily shreddable. Yeah, she sent me photos. It looked really good. It looked juicy. And then you put in a taco or what? Then you put in a taco, right? A tortilla? Yeah. Yeah. Can't go wrong. Well, why would you ever use breast meat for that? Basically what you're saying, it's just like... The only thing that didn't work were the spare ribs that I had to do. Oh my god. Tell me how to spare ribs. Tell me about the spare ribs. You wanted me to bring a whole can of beer in? Wait, wait, wait, say what? normal can of what? A whole can of beer. Whole can of beer. What beer did you choose? What? What beer did you choose? I did like an IPA, but it's not bad, so I didn't want to do it. And then, um, I think it was like a whole, whole bottle of barbecue sauce too, and it just looked really gross. So I didn't want to do it. But you did it anyway or you didn't taste it? I mean, like I didn't even cook it. It just smells nauseating. Wait, how old is your sister? 22. See, this is the problem with Instagram. They want food to look good. It doesn't always look good. Soups sometimes don't look good. Not bad. Well, you know, but the thing is, is that you didn't give the alcohol time to cook off maybe. Beer-based, beer-based braises, like, for instance, the famous, like, Guinness uh, beef that they uh, that the Irish folk make is good, but not at the get go. You have to. Yeah, that actually does have to cook quite a long time, but the lack, the lack of browning disturbs me. Like in these recipes. It's like, I don't know. Anyway, so listen, are you going to you're going to make some more dump meal. You're going to make some more dump meal for us. you're going to continue to be our dump meal correspondent? Yes. All right. Look at that enthusiast. People call in your questions for like, you know, eventually you're writing your questions for Natty and her and her dump meals. Anything else to add about these dump meals? It really says, don't brown these freaking things before you throw them into the freaking crock pot for real? What about the onions you threw into this other thing? Did it brown the freaking onions beforehand? She's gone. Oh, she's gone. She's gone. She couldn't take the abuse. She couldn't take the abuse. She's not used to it like you are, nostalgia. This browning question 3 times. I can't believe it. Done. Done. Who does? Chat room says no browning and dumb meals. No browning in dump meals. cheating, right? I think there's a joke in there somewhere. All right, so let's talk about, okay, name this wine that we just drank that you're almost sold out of anyway. Can I have a little more of that stuff? Yeah, yeah. I mean, we've got 3 more to go through. So Nastasia, I'm sure you can do like this, right? You can keep this. Really? And Nastasia hates almost everything, and I guarantee you know, I know where you like it because it's got some of the same notes that orange wine has in it, right? Well, let me tell you something else. You originally asked the question. I actually did a lecture about this called why you don't drink meat, right? And, you know, the initial question is like, uh, Mead is the fastest

[32:53] growing uh, uh, segment of the alcohol market, right? So that's great for our investors and us. you know, we're like, here we go, let's do it, right? But when we look for allies, and it's very different than the craft beer movement, which I think, you know, kind of came up together because

[33:09] there's so much good craft beer that people want to make. And there's definitely good meat makers out there, and I can recommend some. But part of it is the branding. You know, my, I operated like a kind of a club for about 5 or 6 years. That was most of my mead went to people signed up on an email list. So I got to meet them. I knew who them. You know, they were. One of the nice things about this product is that it's got a really nice gender

[33:33] balance. Men and women tend to like it equally, which is triggers and makers or just drinkers?

[33:37] triggers, triggers. It's got a broad age range. It's got a good gender balance, which isn't necessarily true for beer and hard liquor, right? And one of the problems is that the branding for a lot of mead

[33:52] is, like, based on this, like, really inaccurate mythical Viking axes, the super macho stuff, super hetero, super

[34:00] macho. And I think it really turns off a lot of women who would normally actually like the product. So I think that would be the 3rd, the 3rd kind of leg of the stool of like how not to make mead. What are your thoughts on the upper east side of Manhattan? I've been there. Have you, have you, like, have you ever like, so, like, no offense upright. Oh wait, yeah, we both went to school up there, actually. Oh, no, no, I upper I was on the upper West. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. like, the thing about the upper, I, like, no offense. It's like a generalization, but a lot of people in the Upper East Side is like, honey, so sweet. Honey, so sweet. Right, so, right? I don't want anything with honey. it's sweet How many times in events have you heard people say stuff like that to you, Nastasia? Sugar, but not honey. Sugar and honey. No, you're right. No, you're right. Look, grape wine is made from sweet grapes. Rice wine is made from sweet rice. Honey wine is made. L alcohol starts out sweet. And so the, you know, our biggest challenge is just education. You know, we just have to, that's why we make dry wines. We tell people, listen, this isn't going to be sweet. It's one of the 1st things we talk about. It's why we name the tasting room honeys, because we want to like bring, we didn't want to hide that. We want to be forward about that. It's like, this is a honey-based alcohol, but honey has a lot going for that's not sugar. You know, it's got this great bouquet. It has all this different variability. Um, so try this one. This is like what you know, for lack of a better word, the straight white meat, right? You know, like we're trying to work out, talk about, you know, part of what's exciting about this

[35:30] is we get to create the vocabulary for this product class, right?

[35:35] You know, we're trying to position ourselves as making the best meat in the country. So that gives us a position to say, like, what is it? How do we talk about it? What does it look like? What kind of glasses do you put it in? All that stuff. It's really exciting. Big space, big, big open space. What I have not been able to do is figure out how to talk about the mead that we make that's just the honey wine. Because I don't want to say it's straight, because that's got issues. And I don't want, definitely don't want to call it white, right? Because it's, you know, compared to what? So, but this is, and I don't want to say it's plain, because it's not. Be like, look, is this the Chardonnay of meats? This is the Chardonnay. I think that's all I got to say to people, listen. Who is Anastasia? What are you going to drink? Chotty ups. Remember that? Like, just like, that is the short thing. Okay, so this isn't the bottle. We haven't bought, this is on draft right now at the, at Honey's. So we haven't bottled it yet. I'm going to go upstate and bottle it like in about a week. But this is basically what we're serving on draft. All right, before we taste this. We didn't talk, what's the one with the bubbles called? Okay, so the bubble is, the bubble one is basically, it's a sparkling honey wine with

[36:38] apple cranberry cherry. These are tart cherries from upstate. Little bit, though, right? Only a little, I hope? Yeah, okay. A little bit, and then sumac and rose hips. Rose hips, rose hips are the bomb. Yeah, rose hips are great. So, and then sometimes I alternate the sumac with the hibiscus, which, uh, depending on what's in season and whether or not I'm having issues with sumac. What do you call that one? That's called night eyes. So it's got a, it's got, like, it's almost got a little bit of that, like, not over,

[37:04] it's got a little bit of that kind of orange winey flavor, even though it's not like that. Yeah, because look, this is these are wild yeast. I make this stuff in barrels. It funky. It quite nice. Yeah. So this you're going to taste it more. And what's the ABV on this sucker, roughly? Oh, pretty much across the board. I shoot for about 12, 12 minutes. Good, I like that. Why would why do people want to make these things that require turbos? It's a macho thing. I really think it's like how it's like let's increase the alcohol. I mean, I don't know. Aroma is intensely honey on this, right? Well, that's, that's, you know, it's honey's delicate, right? So you start mixing fruits and stuff, you're going to lose a lot of that, um, a lot of the more subtle features. What I like about this is we ferment this in used oak, which has like a little bit of a red

[37:47] wine, like leftover in the wood. So that comes out, gives it a little body and a little color. No, I like that. What do you think? Sounds good. And you're calling this one straight white? Get that embezzleated. No, no, we call that knot. We call that knot. It's not really like the zero? N-O-U-G-HT. Yeah, exactly. That's our like zero. Have you seen this advertising campaign for, it's called like white. I think it's like the most offensive thing and because like they're printing the F bombs on the street on paper, but it's called white girl roses. It's like everything's offensive about that. What is it? It's offensive marking, is it not? It's by that guy. A terrible man. What terrible man? Bat Jewish. You mean my dad? Wait, who is it? That's the guy's name? He calls himself. what he's called. What about you? Yeah, the fat Jew. Sorry. And he has a, he makes a product called White Girl. I sure he's going to make a billion dollars. Yeah, no, I mean, look, it did. Well, I'm going to plug our spot again because we just opened. We need some folks to come down there and check this stuff out. It's at 93 Scott Avenue. You can go to enlightenmentwines.com. There's addresses on there, and we're open every day, but Monday. What stop is it? Off Jefferson L. You can walk. It's like, you got to cross flushing. And it's nice. You know, it's a great after you go to that hospital. No offense if you're a doctor in that hospital, but 0 my god. You got that hospital on Flushing? Yeah, yeah, we're not that close to that. Oh, yeah. No, no, that's the other direction. No, we're right down here. You could walk from you could walk from Roberta. had an interesting ER visit there once. I've heard crazy stories. The doctor actually was good, but the ER itself was like, yeah, well, welcome to America. So, okay, so I want to make sure you try this because it's just a little bit left. This is a floraleot. just to give you the sense of a progression. So that's basically like our natural honey wine. What's your bottle price in this, by the way, will be. Rough. We do 25 on a pretty much across the board unless it's sparkling or we're just trying to have like a

[39:45] commemorative bottle. So, you know, if it's expensive, I put it in a smaller bottle. That's the deal. But I'd make sure they're all the same height. So, all right, so this one is called Floralia. Now, this is what you do. Now, this is actually, a lot of people think the thing you just had is a classic meat. Like, I want a real meat. I heard you wanted a real meat, right? That's all I know. I never listened to your show. I just... I mean, I don't know. I would. I did know about it, right? Fair fair. Plus, we're usually very technical. Yeah, so the internet, right? But a guy came into the bar and he's like, oh, yeah, I was just listening to Dave Arnold's show and he's like, he just wants a real meat. And I was like, oh, well, you should tell them we're doing this down the street. I mean, it's really close. And I think that people would expect that a real meeting quotes would be this kind of like

[40:31] a single variety honey, right? Because that's a sort of grape wine mentality, right? Like the whole thing about grapevine is, uh, a single grape from a specific location in time who's like carried through to its sort of

[40:42] essence. Um, that doesn't really line up with honey wine making exactly because I would, I really feel like there is a big difference between, say, a wildflower honey and like

[40:54] a apple blossom honey, right? They're different. And when you ferment them out, they'll be they will be different. What about nasty honeys, like buckwheat? Yeah, sure, it'll be subtle. But I didn't want to, but in the real world, in the history of mead making, let's say, and I don't really believe in any kind of real authenticity around any of this, because

[41:10] it's the whole thing's very sort of abstract and vague, but one thing is for sure, it's that the idea that someone would make a

[41:17] mead and it would just be honey is probably unlikely. It doesn't have enough tannin. Uh, even the one that you just had is, um, It's made an oak, right? That's where you get that food. I'm cheating. You gotta cheat. There's somewhere you gotta cheat. What's more likely is they would have made something like this, which is a meat with herbs in it. So there's all kinds of horrible Latin names, which I'm not going to even mention, and I can't pronounce. Yeah, exactly. Like, I'm taking them out of the book. That's all sounds like society for creative anachronism stuff. Right, exactly. Again, it's another one of those things that hurts. Do you do that? Do you have like a harlequin outfit or a cod piece somewhere? No, it's gone. Like it's... I mean, like I burned that last week. I mean, the real the real issue... I like cod pieces, though. is like, you know, the people who, you know, there's a public perception around me that it's

[42:06] it's white and it's European and it comes from Vikings and all this kind of stuff. But the truth is, is like the people who drink meat are Africans and Indians and Chinese people. Currently. Yeah, and have done for, you know, the... Have you gone to Ethiopia to actually drink their stuff? I haven't. We're trying to grow a guest show right now, which is the herb that is required for test, and I can't get it to start. Is there a decent Ethiopian one here in the U.S. or not that I've had? They serve... I know the guy, for example, there's an Ethiopian restaurant in Bushwick that's fantastic. They have a honey wine. I don't love it. It doesn't have Geso in it. So you have to, if you're going to have an Ethiopian honey wine. It needs to have this urban hit or else you're just getting like a kind of another processed meat that says it's made in a traditional Ethiopian style, but it needs the

[42:51] herb. And if the herbs in there, it's got to be on the label. Are there a bunch of strange, like, more southern African meeds as well or no? There are a zillion kinds of meats out there. And there are a zillion other things that people do with it. They distill it. I mean, Jamaica has a whole distilled honey wine culture is super interesting. China. I mean, it's a, uh, in China, you know, also there's a huge, a lot of my influence right now is I'm reading a lot of kind of, uh,

[43:15] Asian, uh, books because there they use wine, uh, like to preserve the herbs in a way that we don't do in the European culture so much.

[43:24] So, like chrysanthemum wine or chamomile chrysanthemum wine. Right. Our wines are mainly they've been taken out of the wine category, like vermouth. So going back into sipping situations. Well, this thing this thing happened when they invented the FDA, which is that they they made it basically illegal to have any medical claims on any kind of alcohol,

[43:43] right? So, ironically, the the, like the Los Angeles winery that survived through prohibition, did so by making medicinal products, and then people just drink them to get drunk.

[43:54] But like, I make an elderberry wine. Elderberry is like incredible immune supporting, antiviral thing, and it will work if you drink the wine, but I'm not allowed to say that. I can't put it on the label. I can't even talk about it. But so, for example, this one, just to get back. This is, I think, something more like a meat that you would have had in the old days. So this is... And just call it what? Floralia. And it's just an herbal mead. you could pick different herbs. This is forged juniper, lavender, and marjoram. Oh, it's lavender's coming out, huh? Hey, Mark, we had someone on Twitter who was like marjoram. And they were like, it's useless. marjam's delicious. Fresh marjam. Can't use it, try it. Why would you dry it? I don't know. People dry oregano. Uh, so this is, you can drink this straight, uh, but it's a great cocktail base. So, you know, this, instead of, like, instead of a, so you would use this in place of like a Dolan Blanc or in place of like a cookie Americano or something like this.

[44:50] Well, I, I, this is where I should probably introduce my partner, Arly Mark, so I think he's met you. He said he did a stage with you at some point, but he's running the cocktail program in the front of the house. So he takes some of these things and then we'll make these kind of wonderful cocktails. This, uh, I forget what he's doing like a flip with this right now, which I had to teach me what that was. But it drinks, it drinks like, um, it's like a honey vermouth. Yeah, exactly. It's a fair like place to place it. Vermouth tends to be a little bit more alcoholic. Um, I'm starting to make things more specifically for cocktails because there's so much opportunity to like do all this weird stuff, right? And so typically we'll take something like this or the black currant wine, which is, I think, the last one here, which you can try. Uh, and we'll serve them straight, like in a, you know, small poor. or over the ice or something, or you can like, this one makes a really beautiful Negroni. If you want to, like, do a named kind of classic. And that's what we've been making down there. And then we also have this really nice herb program for the roof. that's, like, a lot of the exotic herbs that I'm experimenting with for the meads, because we really have to broaden our

[45:57] appeal. We use in the cocktails too. So since they're around. So, like, there's a lemon mint marjoram that I'm really, not marigold, sorry. lemon mint marigold that they'll use for a... What are your thoughts on herbs that are like now considered toxic in large quantities, but like people still

[46:15] used them in the day like rue or what's tansies and all these other things? Yeah, elderberry. Uh, you know, it's the, the, toxic is such a like, difficult, unspecific word. You know, like our relationship, right? You know, you know what's, you know what's toxic? Alcohol is toxic, you know, and you drink that all the time. I, I think a lot of these herbs, um, you know, you'd have to use huge amounts of them before you got

[46:41] ill, in many cases, if you heat them, toxins go away, it's a little tricky with the

[46:48] alcohol because I have to get federal, uh, permission basically for everything that I use. So there's a list of generally recognized as safe, right? But that list itself includes, was created in the 40s and is horrible. Like, it's, like, you can put Penny Royal. Penny Royal is an abortive and really, like, very toxic, right? You know, used by herbalists very carefully. Fantastic name. Penny Royal. Yeah, you can pour that in there. So, like, that's considered generally recognized safe. is not on the list. Spice Bush, you can't. Lindera Benzolin, not grass. I don't use it at the bar. Right. So I'm pretty suspicious of that list in general. It's not an accurate list. It was made a long time ago. And for example, something like Elderberry, which is on the list in some

[47:29] cases. It's like, it really depends on how you use it if you're using the stems, the berries or whatever. There's a really great article in the Nordic food labs about elderberry, where they really try and tease apart the chemistry of that. Yeah, I know this guy, so good. They have a really good actual science person, Ariel doing a lot of their, a lot of their stuff. Okay, while we're opening this last one, let me give you some shout outs. Brian Kestenbaum. I was like, I'm going to read this. I'm gonna read. You're gonna read what I'm gonna read here. Okay. All right. Uh, where is it? This is from Allison for Brian, right? Unusual request. My husband Brian is a fan of cooking issues and listens all the time, turning 40 on July the

[48:14] 14th, and I'm Bastille Day, huh? Well, you got to share it with the French. Why do you got to share your birthday with the French? Makes no sense. And it's not like in his birthday shifts every year to coincide with the French stuff. No good. No, I mean, that's not saying saying it's no good, whatever. I'm collecting video slash sound recordings, photos from his favorite places and people around the world. Any chance they be able to give him a shout out on the show or send some sound recording that I can add to the collection? Just do it. What should I say? It's turning 40. Happy 40th birthday, Brad. From Cooking Issues Crew. And Jackie Molecules would say hi if he was here, but he's off on tour in Europe thinking about your 40th birthday. What do you say, Nastasia? Happy birthday. There you go. Happy birthday, Brian. Wait, how many people listen to this show? I don't know. A lot. Are they all over the place? Everyone. That's so exciting. Hi, everyone. Hello, the world. All right, so let's get back to this. The rest of the questions that I would have asked, I'll have to do... You can just do

[49:17] them, like, really fast. No, I wish I can't, I can't, I can't, never. But let's taste this last one. This last one. So this is the St. Crimson, which is

[49:27] just a this is a kind of a classic black currant meat, which has been made for a long time. That is a kind of classic. But I don't know how much... Does he drink like a... So that is also drier than I thought was going to do. They're all dry. Yeah, there's no sugar. I don't like using sulfites and filtering and all that stuff. So, really the only way to bottle something and not use them is to just get rid of all the sugar.

[49:52] I could dope this with some gain and carbonate the hell out of it. Yeah, be very good. There's a lot that you can do with this. It's a great thing. Although, Jim from PDT was telling me, because when I made this for him a few years ago, I was like, he's

[50:04] going to love this. is going to be great for a cocktail, but I think you can get a black currant flavor out of the distilled version at a cheaper

[50:09] price. If you just want that. But this looks nicer. Also, this has that, um, you know, everyone's into that change in color sweet pea thing these days, but this? Butterfly pea? Yeah, this in the blue one people. Hey, man, we've been on that, we've been on that pregame train. Woo-hoo. So those, those, uh, who's using that? I don't know, there's an article of paper again. Which article? Which paper? I don't know. I didn't read. Do they still make papers? The big one. Times? Probably. Well, anyway, what's fun about this in the elderberries? You know what? You know what the butterfly pee is actually called? You know, butterfly is the euphemism for female parts. Yeah, the scientific name for that plant is a lady body part. It's not... Yeah, that's not a bad word. Not a bad word. I know. But why then why call it butterfly? Why call it butterfly? why can't you say it? Because I don't know exactly how it's spelled in Latin. Methiglium. Yeah, anyway, you can change the color of this too. It's also super acid-based sensitive. So it'll go blue or red. Yeah, the problem is I'm always going to keep an acid in a cocktail. Like someone who serves you a basic cocktail should get beaten about the head. I'll tell you this. If you want to stabilize blue or colors in cocktails, do a pre-shake before you add the acid with egg white, which is basic.

[51:29] And I found that for some reason, even when you shift the cocktail acidic afterwards, you'll maintain more of the bluer side of

[51:37] anthocyanins than you would. What about like a gelatin? Is that also basic enough? No, no. No. Because I want to get this in one of those frosty machines. But you want it to be on the bluer side, not less on the red side? You know, I just like them. I just like that it changes colors. You know, it just, I just, it's just cute, you know? I mean, the classic thing to do that it doesn't taste so so bueno. So I used to do this, uh, with the butterfly tea, we were going to do an absinthe service where we were going to

[52:04] do like, uh, um, a pandan water. And then we were going to keep that one neutral. So be on the blue side and then drop it into acidulated

[52:15] alcohol and then it would go red as it hits the alcohol, right? In a drip, in an absinthe trip. Turns out that A, it didn't have any flavor. So at least the one I had. So I was like, I can't just do a visual gimmick. This is crap. what I'm about. And two, bars are dark. And so, like, this is more of a cafe, brunch timey, outside thing. You know what I mean? So I've done the color change. You know what's really stable with those colors is whipped cream. So, like, I've done really, really, with a lot of the flour, dark, dark blue whipped creams that

[52:52] are, like, those things I heavily stabilize them with, um, actually, the flour itself will stabilize it because it's got,

[52:58] like, if you just blend the flour and don't get rid of all the solids, It's got enough kind of solidity there, but you could also do like an agar fluid gel or something to get it to get it to go. Um, huh. So I didn't get to any of my normal tech related questions, but I feel I had one. I had someone ask me some interesting questions about spoilage in sous vide bags. There's also a question on flavors melding together, which would have been good, but I'm going to try to get Harold McGee to write

[53:22] in, call in on that. He's still in Spain being Harold McGee in Spain because he's the master. He's been working on that for, you know. Oh, well, I have a question for him. All right, what's your question? I don't know why, but every winemaker will guarantee tell you this, that when you take the wine out of the barrel, and you put it in the bottle, it tastes like shit for like however long it feels like doing that for like at least 2 or 3 weeks, even if it tasted good in the

[53:45] barrel, and then it'll come back. Huh. And it's like it's getting used to the new container. absorbing whatever oxygen got hit in the eulage. I don't know. makes no sense to me. By the way, before I go, questions for people. So like, so what's your average fermentation time? It's temperature dependent. Yeah, sure, but like, what's the show? Everything you're drinking here is about a year. If I wanted to be a jerk about it, I could probably push it to 6 months. That's for, like, but like, is there, do you, is it like, is it like a primary secondary situation? Do you have to rack off the at least? Iraq, yeah. I mean it's just like making wine. You just, it does its thing. You rack it if you feel like racking it. So closer to wine than to beer. It's almost 100%. You know what's ferments really freaking quickly, like beer speeds? Orange juice. Yeah, but doesn't I can make this ferment quickly. I mean, it tastes good. No, yeah, no, yeah, yeah, yeah. Orange juice, like on a fat. I don't know why, but it's just like, I don't pitch. I don't do a hard pitch. I'm keeping it at like 55. putting sugar in it? I take it to, well, I want the alcohol. I take so sugar. No, but I mean, do you add additional sugar in the beginning? Yeah, yeah. So, like, actually, the 1st batch, I'm on my 2nd batch. The 1st batch, I did white sugar to get it to about 15.5 bricks because I wanted about 8% alcohol. And so like orange juice by itself would be... Yeah, because it's like 11.8% sugar and it just wasn't going to be stable enough for me. And so anyway, so I wanted it closer to 8%. So I added enough to get it up to 15 bricks, and this next batch I did, and it fermented out. It did its primary in like a week. But what temperature? In a wine cooler, 55. Oh, cold. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like, I started it at set at 70 on the counter until it started going. And I, yeah, and it was oxygen starved. I put an airlock on it from the get go, like not even open. Like, and then I threw it in the in a wine cooler and it still finished. It was monster fast. I don't know why. And I was pitching at the normal pitch rates. You know what I mean? Do you know what kind of used you were using? I mean, you would hate it. Yeah, yeah, same. I used I don't always use natural yeast. But it's relatively neutral. The yeast I was using is relatively neutral. Yeah, no, I mean, I did honey this time to take it up to 15, though. That's better. Yeah, woman is better. What? One minute. Oh, right. Okay, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna invite everybody to come by. If you come by and I'm there, I'll give you guys a tour. And I'd love to see you down there sometime. Really nice. All right. Well, Raphael from Enlightenment. wines and given the address again. Our tasting room is called Honeys, and it's at 93 Scott Avenue. on the other side of Flushing from the L Train. Opens at five, right? Yeah, 5 tonight and until nighttime. We open late. All right, well, now I can say that and I, we have pictures. Can I wait? Oh, and I would like a few more Instagram followers, Frank, frankly, I think I have a very nice Instagram. All right. Also, NY Maser? No, no, Enlightenment wines. Enlightened wines. All right, enlightenment wines. I can now say that I've had mead that I enjoy Nastasia. Oh, thank you. All right, very good. Thanks for coming on. Cooking issues.

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