[0:00] This episode is brought to you by Jule, the immersion circulator for Sous vide by Chef Steps. Order now at chefsteps.com slash J-O-U-L-E. I'm Damon Bolty, host of the Speakeasy. You're listening to Heritage Radio Network, broadcasting live from Bushwick, Brooklyn. If you like this program, visit heritageradionetwork.org for 1000s more.

[0:27] Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of cooking, and she's coming to you live on the Heritage Radio Network every Tuesday from, I don't know, like sometime, like kind of around 12 to like 1245,

[0:42] 1255 sometimes one, Eastern time on the Heritage Radio Network, and Brooklyn, and the specific area in Brooklyn is...

[0:51] So, uh, we are here today. Dave's in the booth of David's in the booth. How you doing? Hey, hey, good. Yeah, we do not have Nastasia, the Hammer Lopez. She is in Naples, not Florida. Naples, like the actual city. Oh she didn't retire to Florida? Can you imagine Nastasia retiring to Naples, Florida? Um, no. She's in the actual, you know, Naples, like Napoli. When I was a kid, you got, like, we have some guests here to take

[1:22] Nastasio's place, but before I get to that, David, where did you grow up again? Outside of Philadelphia. Yeah. Did you get the Nopoli car advertisements when you were a kid? No, never saw them. See, when I was a kid, the word, Napoli, to me, was a used car salesman who literally called his used car lot,

[1:40] Napoli, like, new cars, used cars, come to Napoli. You never heard this commercial? Anyone? No? No. I think it was a New York City environs area. So, like, to me, like, when I think of Naples, I think of used cars. I don't think of, you know, I mean, that's kind of sad, right? The local commercials here are pretty amazing. They got a leg up on Philly for sure. Yeah, as I said before on the air, nothing on New Orleans. New Orleans has like some like sweet local commercials. So taking Nastasia the Hammer Lopez place. We actually, we have 2 people here. One officially says she's not here, but because she's here, she actually is here. We have, this is not who I'm talking. Nick Wong and Nick. Hi. Hi. Yeah. You might have remembered him from the last time he was on the show and he purposely made faces at me, which you can't see. through the internet, but wasn't saying anything, but today he's going to say stuff, right? Stuff. stuff. Yeah, right. So Nick came to work with me at the French culinary, when were you there? 2008? 2008. And then after that went to Sambar for what, like a 1000000000 years? Plus two. 10000000002 years at Momofuku Sambar, and then decided he needed to, uh, sow his non-Momofuku Oates, and where'd he go? You went to Gramercy, and then you went out back to California for a while. worked with Chris Costantino, right? Where else did you work anywhere else there? Nice to dodge a few places. And then, and you hightailed it back to the, to the good old east coast. Even though you're from California. I say you're from Milpitas, but you're not. Yeah you just made that up. I made it up. Wow, you just pulled that out of your ass. It's close though, right? Yeah, kind of. I mean, it's a, you know that Booker doesn't allow me to say the word Milpitis. I think you told me this. Yeah, Booker, because, like, I think it's a hilarious word, and obviously it sounds like, you know, like, you know, like, like, junk, like, man junk, kind of like,

[3:37] like, a meal, Pete, like, it sounds weird. It sounds weird. It's like the town. my other favorite one, the booker won't allow me allow me to say over here in Connecticut is the Mayenus. He won't let me say the town name Myenus. Is Tony Myenus? There is. Well, he says it's pronounced meenus. and I'm like, prove it. And I've never had anyone call in who lives there and be like, is it Manis? Is it Mayanis? phone lines are open Yeah, yeah. Call in your questions or your correct pronunciation of my anus to 718-497-2128. That 718-497-2128. So anyway, where are you actually from then if you're not from Milpitas? Samateo. All right. So then after that, he comes back to Momofuku Sambar. What your current title there? Chef duisine. Chef de cuisine. That's one of those weird titles. Chef de cuisine can mean like almost anything, right? Pretty much. Yeah. So like, you know, but you're actually coming up with recipes, right? You got anything new you're working on? Not really. Come on. What do you got new that you're working on? What did you put on in the menu last month that you that you think is fun? Uh, we just did a new scallop crudo dish what's going on on this menu tomorrow. What kind of scallouchy game? Good ones. Pretty good. Like, like you're getting like C Bay. What are you getting? C Scalps 1020. Yeah, 1020. You know, you know, my favorite scallops ever? Are the freshest scallops ever? You ever, like, hang out, like, where they bring the Nantucket scallops right in and just get them, like, right there? Is it over by my anus? Well, pretty close to my anus. Everything. wherever I'm there, my anus is always pretty close. But the, uh... No, but like, uh, Nantucket scallops, like dayboat, like right off the

[5:11] thing or like... I've actually never shook the livestock. I've always wanted to. Yeah, well, the other thing is, I think even when they are like live, like on the shell, like how long they've been in transit is a huge impact on kind of their kind of flavor profile, but I don't know, it's also like when you're hanging out up there, I don't know,

[5:31] every, all the seafood like has, you know, it tastes like you're eating it in New England. You know why? Because you are. You know what I mean? Food really tastes different depending on where you're eating it, I think. Like your mental association with the food. Like if you hate the people cooking it, it never tastes as good. Yeah. What if you're eating it in my anus? Well, again, I won't go back into it. You're not going to draw me back into this, Nick. And we also have, oh my god, that was a good one. David, was that you or is that Nick? I wasn't looking. That was me. Sweet. That's sweet. We also have with us Estra Wester, what's your last name? Huh, cool. And you're a cook at which one of the Daniel Belut establishments? Cafe. Cafe Ballout. How's it going over there? Yeah? What are you making anything fun? You got anything fun? fun dishes? fun dishes. Yeah. Something that's like, I have to go try it. I like I need to like run. I mean, it's a great place. What do I need to go there and eat like right now? She put Korean food on a French restaurant's menu. Really? We're like, what kind of like hook me up? Because also cafe balloon is, like, of all of them is the more traditional, I mean, like actual, like, Danielle, I haven't been in years and years, but when I did go, like, it was like hardcore, like,

[6:49] Garadon service, like, like, the waiter knows how to, like, get the fish out of the pastry and then, like, debone it and put the

[6:56] fillets without touching it, like, hardcore, awesome, like, like, tears to your eyes, old school

[7:01] French. But, I mean, to tell you how long ago the last time I was there was Dominic Anstell was still the pastry chef there, so it was like a long time ago. But, uh, you know, they all, they also had their share of like kind of like, um, you know, kind of cutting edge and weird stuff to go with the old school French, but I've always pictured like kind of

[7:17] cafe balloons being like, like, you know, like a bashing of kind of like a lot of the old school cool Frenchy stuff, right?

[7:24] So how do you Koreanify? Koreanify? Koreate? Koreate? To create a dish? Yeah. At at Cafe Balloon. How do you do that? What did you do? Like, what are we talking? Did you add some pepper paste to it? Like, what do you mean? What are you talking about? Did you throw some like wild mountain pickled vegetables onto it? Did you like, what did you do? Uh, we have we have a voyage section of our menu, and it changes every season. So the next one is Korea. So I was trying to pitch a dish for fish. That's good. You have good alliteration there. It's rhyming more, but like more rhyming. We have a good dish for fish. So, like, what else what are they doing in Korea? Like, how big is the voyage section of the menu? It's a quarter of our menu. That's a big voyage So how long have you been doing voyages? They didn't used to have that years ago, did they? They've had it since Gavin. So, like, so, again, a long time. But like, so give me, give me a, what are you doing to the fish? What are you doing? So I'm doing, the special for this past week was a take on Aguchin, which is a braised monkfish dish in Korea. Good or bad? Visually, pretty shitty. Like, it's a pile of red fish, and then soy bean sprouts. So once you overcook a monkfish and then you keep going, like what happens?

[8:50] No, right? Because, like, monkfish, it's interesting about it is it's got that, like, kind of, like, shellfishy kind of texture to it, right? So really, it's okay. So, like, you know how, like, okay, you know, Nick, we used to have this discussion, so it's been a long, you know, been having it for years and years. Back, I would say, like in the mid 2000s, right? When everyone was interested in these hyper low fish preparations, and like the, the thing that people were most worried about, like in life was overcooking your fish, right? That was what everyone was like, you know, and, and when you're cooking that style, that prep style, which I think, you know, a lot of it came to us via, like, um, like the Rokas in Elkalar Conroca over there, because they were doing a lot of that really low, really low temperature fish. Or, you know, and then later on you had, I

[9:36] guess when modernist cuisine came out a couple years ago, like that super low temperature gooey duct, this stuff that is like not really cooked in the classic sense of cook.

[9:44] And so for a number of years, like cooked, when I say cooked, I mean, like traditionally cooked fish dishes were like not served, like you wouldn't get them. You know what I mean? At a lot of restaurants. Um, but monkfish is one of those fish that I think you want. Like, I don't really particularly, and people are going to get mad at me, like the low cooked shellfish, except for the gooey duck, actually, that Mirabel and Chris Young and those guys did. I thought that was excellent texture was. But in general, I mean, I don't like my shrimp hammered. I am not a barbarian. I mean I like it cooked, but I don't like it. But I don't like it when it's low, especially something like a shrimp. You know how when shrimp is a little bit too under, and it's still got a little bit of that paste, that little bit. Hate. don't like that either. Hate, hate. Hey, we got a color on the line. All right. hold on a second. So yeah, so we're gonna take a call in a second. But here's my question. So when you're doing monkfish, you actually want it to be a little bit springy. So it seems like it would work for a dish like that and you shouldn't be a phrase to do a longer, afraid to do a longer cooked version. agree or disagree. Agree. Is it just raised? No. Oh, so yours is not braised. The traditional one is braised. We kind of revamped everything so that... Because you thought the traditional one was too hammered and you didn't want to serve people like... Also, it looks it's a pile of red. Pile of red. you know, if you're going to have a pile of something, I guess green would be your 1st choice. Red would be your 2nd choice. Brown is last. Brown is blue is last. I'll take blue over brown. All right, call her, you're on the air. Oh, hey, it's Judy from Malden gun. Hey, how you doing? Nastasia is has your cookies in the freezer. I know. We had our wires crossed a couple of times. I think the cookies are where box is good in her building. No, no. They're apparently they're in the freezer, but we won't be eating them next week on the air. It'll be the week. No, no, no. There's another cookie. I've designed like 10 signatures for buying out, which is crazy. But uh, yeah. So what do you got going on? What do you got going on? You got a question for us? Yeah, there's one specific question. You wanted me to tell you about, like, what I had come up with in terms of pricing, but there's a

[12:03] cookie with Cheetos in a stew cookie? So, how do you get the cheeto to stay crispy? Oh, well... I mean, you need to use a... Cookie, Cheetos are, 1st of all, you have to, if you want a Cheeto to remain crispy, you can't use the puffy ones.

[12:23] You have to use the hard ones, the ones that are less expanded. I am using the hard ones. Alright. So that's your 1st step. The 2nd step is that you're going to need to choose a low water cookie. You know what I mean? A low a low moisture cookie. You're gonna have to go hard bake. Like you're not going to get a soft baked texture because it contains moisture and also have your

[12:43] Cheeto remain hard unless you did some like real fancy

[12:48] footwork. And I have to think about it. Uh, but, you know, because there is a classic cookie that I didn't know existed. Maybe you guys know this existed. Maybe it's a California thing or maybe it's a Massachusetts thing. don't know. King Arthur Flower has a recipe for it because the Chester County Fair where I was last week. They had a contest for it. Potato chip cookies. Potato chip cookies. Oh, I like the 2 chips and Tozzy's combos cookie much better than I like pretzels. I think pretzels are just kind of gross. My favorite to cookie is corn. Yours, Nick? Compost. Compost, my favorite corn. I don't like the coffee in it, like kind of, there's coffee in it, right? I like the coffee. Yeah, I mean, I'm not a fan of coffee flavored cookies. I mean, they're good. My favorite court. Anyway, that's not here to there. Yeah. Do you like coffee flavored ice cream? No. mean, I can appreciate that it's done well or done poorly, but I don't like it. You know what I mean? We know Nastasia doesn't like it. Yeah, I mean, I will eat it. Unlike Nastasia, I will eat something and I can appreciate if it's well made. Dunkin' Donuts. What? Oh, no, she is Dunkin' Donuts coffee is way too high rent for Nastasia. If it doesn't come from, like, a guy that made it the day before, like, like, on literally being sold on the street. She doesn't actually enjoy it. If the taste of the paper cup doesn't like... I told Staws an email that you have to get like a Mr. Coffee and a can of

[14:17] shock full of nuts just for her, really. Yeah, chock full of nuts. That brings back some pleasant memories of getting, no, they're not pleasant. What am I talking about? No. Yeah, chocolate nuts does not bring back pleasant memories. I mean, it's fine, whatever. My mom used to, my mom went to med school when I was a

[14:33] kid and the only source of nutrients for the med students without leaving the hospital at

[14:38] Columbia uptown was a truck full of nuts. And so like I spent a good chunk of my childhood only eating crappy, overwrapped, and sometimes rancid cream donut pastries

[14:50] from, I never forget, I didn't, I used to hate cream donuts for like, like 10, 10, 12 years because I got one that was moldy, and it knocked me off of cream donuts at, at a chock full of nuts in the

[15:02] 70s, in, you know, uptown in New York, and it knocking off a cream donuts for like well over a decade. I don't, I still don't like them. Ill eat them. Do you like a cream donut? Like moldy cream donuts, only moldy. Only moldy? Only mold? I like Boston Korean Jetta. Of course, because you're from up there. So the, uh, uh, uh, but, and so, so can donuts, like, people order extra, extra, even though regular taste like almost ice cream anyway. Look, look, you know, I got to get to the pricey thing in a sec because I got a bunch of stuff I got to get to. But here, but before I do that, let me just say this. Dunkin' Donuts, and there's this argument on the internet's a while ago and it keeps coming back up. Dunkin' Donut has ruined the world in terms of the way they spelled donut. It's just ruined. It's just ruined. And they've also ruined, you know, that they've trademarked. They can trademark Boston Cream because they spell it C-R-E-M-E. C-R-E-M-E. What the heck is C-R-E-M-E? Boston Cream. It's a Boston... Do nut. It's a they sell do nuts. They do not sell donuts. And I happen to like Dunkin' Donuts, by the way. The flavor of Dunkin' Donuts. I happen to enjoy them because I grew up eating them. I'm just very mad at what they've done to our language. Yeah. Oh, okay, one more thing. There's a cookie with sumac in it. Oh, that's good. I like Sumac. There are, uh, uh, quote unquote, slim

[16:28] gems and the cookie and red and hot. Well, whenever I think of Slim James, I have to, I have to, if I was wearing a hat, I would take it off from my man, Macho

[16:36] man, Randy Savage, the face. You got to pour one out. Yeah, I've got to pull it, snap it. snap into it. There's not really a solution or you're going to think about it. Yeah, I'll think I'll think about it. But remember, I would look I would look at the classic potato chip cookie recipe and see what they're

[16:53] doing. But I looked at the classic potato chip cookies that were the winners in this contest they had at the Chester County Fair, which by the way, we should all

[17:00] enter. Everyone at cooking issues who listens should go and we should just crush all the locals. Not that they can't cook. But she does, imagine if, imagine if all these like cooking nerds descended on Chester, the Chester Fair every year and was just like, boom. And just like dropped like a huge, like, splat of stuff on everyone's, like, baked good, it would be crazy. It would be awesome. It would be intense. You know what I mean? Also, here's something obsessed me about the Chester County Fair. Chester County Fair's vegetable, the vegetable judging. is all shape. It's all shape. Shape. So like, no flavor, no flavor, and not even like a size. So like we're growing like a huge pumpkin. Huge. It's already it already weighs more than the kids. It's huge. You know what I mean? Like both of the kids put together. But it's like, it's like shape. I mean, that's like, that's what's, that's what's so wrong with American fruit and veg today is the

[17:56] shape based, because who cares? Shape and color. Who cares? That's not, I mean, color sometimes is indicator of quality. But rarely, you know what I mean? It's like, I mean, you know, more red, whatever. Is this is this social commentary on body image in the media? It could be if you want it to be, or it could just be, we need to change the way that people judge fruit and veg in county fairs. People, yeah, sure. you could change it. like, I don't really judge people. I just judge fruit and veg. Anyway, so so you're going to send more cookies and we'll talk about the pricing when they when they get here? Oh, I think she dropped the line. drop line? All right, cool. All right. I like how like Nick tries to make it into a deep inner, inner meaning kind of a thing. I know you're not a deep inner mean sort of person though. No, no, no. as we used to call it dim. No, none of that. All right. So since we're gonna run out of time, remind me at the, oh, next week we're gonna be, I'm gonna be at Harvard, I don't know if Nastasia is coming up or not, but I'm doing the talk with Harold McGee, so I won't be able

[18:53] to be here. I'm giving a public lecture with Harold McGee on Monday. I don't, you know, I don't know how you get into it or whatever up in at Harvard. And the subject that I will be discussing is how, um, kind of modern ideas of cooking and kind of uh, observational and analytic cooking has led to a change in kitchen equipment design, both from my own perspective,

[19:15] like Sears all, centrifuge, cube, stuff like that, and other people's perspective, like the baking steel, uh, and maybe what the future of that means as opposed to the past

[19:24] in kitchen designs. That's one of the things I'm going or implement design. one of the things I don't know what Harold's going to be talking about. He may or may not talk about impossible foods and like food engineering from that side, which is kind of a whole new category of things that's going on. But anyway, that's what we'll be talking about. Um, So what else? Do you know Nick? You ever grow tomatoes? Nope. My tomatoes are growing so beautifully this year, and I've not eaten one because some evil, freaking, either climbing or small mammal has eaten. I see the teeth marks in the tomatoes. I have not had one freaking tomato. My tomato plants are like 6.5 feet

[20:03] tall, all up on like things like all beautiful, like healthy as all get out, not one.

[20:08] Thank goodness, whatever this thing is, doesn't like cucumbers or pumpkins, or I'd have nothing. Rippety-doo da. Zip. If you plant Perla leaves around, they'll stay away. Really? But tooth's weird. Like, because tomatoes are also a stinky leaf. You'd think that they would. Can you, so you're a planter? You plant things? No my dad used to. Yeah? Can I, can I just put like a, like a, like a, some sort of evil, like, like fence of death? Can I just obliterate everything that lives, that walks near the tomatoes? Is there some sort of like something that does that? I mean, I bear this thing ill will. Ill will. You gotta make yourself a Tesla coil to protect your tomatoes. If I look, you know, remember Nathan Mirville was working on that like Star Wars defense system for mosquitoes? was going to wipe out malaria. I need that to protect my tomato plants. I don't think that ever happened anyway. All right. Uh, okay. By the way, my son Dax, lazy, lazy, lazy. I was cooking for all these people this weekend, cooking so much. You know what I mean? Uh, because, you know, last week I was on vacation. So like family was coming out. I was cooking cooking. I'm like, Dax, I need to, I need to cook. I need to cook. Can you roast a coffee? All he has to do is sit there and turn a crank for like 10 minutes roast coffee. The entire 10 minutes complaining about how much work it was. And why can't I go buy? a automatic coffee roasting machine? Lazy. I love them. Lazy. Anyway. He did help me build a hovercraft. We built a hovercraft together. I saw that video. That was fun. Hovercraft fun. Next step, propulsion. Anyway, leaf blower. I bought a really good leap blower. anyway, this has nothing to do with cooking. Let's get into cooking. Um, Shy wrote in a long time ago about plums. So here's the question. I've recently made a nice plum tart, but it had a somewhat bitter tart taste to it. It's a flavor I've noticed before to an extent, in uncooked nectarines and peaches. All the plums I've used were very ripe and not bitter at all. I've mixed them with some brown sugar, then baked them for quite a long time until the crust got crisp and brown. Anytime say, see, brown is bad in a big dish that you serve out, but like anything that's crisp and brown, people like. You know what I mean? Crisp and brown? Good. Golden brown. Golden brown. Golden brown. Right? It's inherently good. Anyway. Um, can you suggest a reason for this flavor to develop during baking and hopefully a method to prevent it, thanks, shy. Yes. Well, at 1st I thought I think you have multiple problems. First of all, what you're noticing is not just you. A quick internet search shows that this is a problem a lot of people have had with plum

[22:48] tarts, and I think also sometimes with apricots and cooked plums in general. So the short answer is, uh, no one's written the answer, and like what people have said is pretty

[23:00] much, like the stuff, the answers I have seen are pretty much wrong. I did do some research in the, um, and here are the 3 articles that I read, the physical pre-treatment

[23:10] of Plums, Prunis Domestica, part two, the effect on quality characteristics of different prune

[23:16] cultivars by Luciano Cinquanta. And I read bitterness and astringency of Flavin 3 All Monomers, Dimers, and Trimers by Hannah Peleg in 1999, along with a couple of other things. And here's what I think is going on. Very interesting, very interesting. There are, so, there's a lot of like polyphenols and like tans and stuff in in plums, both in the skins where you taste them more in terms of stringency and in the plum fruit itself.

[23:42] Now, one thing I was thinking is, is that you ever notice, you guys have noticed this, when you eat a plum, if you chew on the skin for a long time, you get a lot more of that astringency versus if you just, and

[23:53] like suck it down, and also like a lot of the acidity is in the plum skin area in a plum. And so like I've noticed a lot when I'm doing, um, plum juices, um, or infusions with plums, that if you let them sit a long time on the skin, the same way that you do with a grape, you're pulling a lot more of the astringency out, uh, and a lot more of the sourness.

[24:13] So like a short, you know, a quick juicing where you don't let the plums. So typically when I want to extract a lot of those flavors, before I do any juicing or clarification, I'll just smash the plums, the plums in the skins, maybe

[24:26] even, and then depending on how much you want, you can blend it. If you blend it, it really does get very astringent and bitter once you then spin it out or clarify whatever else you're going to do with it, right? So at 1st I thought that was the only thing that was going on. But then when I did some research, it turns out that this is a known issue. Uh, when you dry plums, um, the, the amount of the uh, catachins in, which is the same kind of polyphenols that you get in teas, they provide a lot of

[24:54] the, like kind of those bitter, astringent notes and teas, they're like somewhat bitter, somewhat astringent, but they're um, polymerized to a certain extent.

[25:01] This is what I've gathered. I could be totally wrong, but chemists will write in. They're polymerized to a certain extent in a native plum, but the more those polymers are built up, the more they taste astringent,

[25:12] right? The more they're broken down into smaller molecules, the less astringent they are, the more bitter they are. So perhaps, and this is shown like the data in these articles show that during the drying of

[25:24] plums, from plums to prunes, prunes are so delicious that they actually changed the name. you know what I mean? of the thing from plum to prune. You know, dried apples, which I love are still just dried apples. Right. People like a raisin, right? They deserve their own name. I personally think dried apricots deserve their own name. I personally think that the best dried apricot, to me, I would rather eat it than a fresh apricot. Fair. Yeah. Yeah. I think it deserves its own name. I don't know. Nick, you'll come up with it. I don't think people would buy a lot of the a lot of those. I like how you're pronouncing with the alternate pronunciation, though. Anyway. So my point being, uh, that as these things dry, the uh, level of their, um,

[26:08] um, the polyphenols in them by dry weight, uh, as composed of of unpolymerized catechin, goes up by a good chunk. So you can have something that doesn't appear bitter that then appears more bitter.

[26:21] Now, as to what's going on with tartness, getting more tart, I don't know, but the interesting thing is here that there is chemistry going on here that is beyond my kind of knowledge, but someone else can find out.

[26:31] Now, as to how you fix it, I don't know. I would try to maybe do a test where you cook down

[26:38] some that you've blanched and peeled. Can you blanch and peel a plum? Probably could. I mean, I would guess I would guess you could. I'm just saying that, though, because I've never tried it. I've never peeled a plum. on purpose. I mean, I've sat there with my teeth and peeled the skin areas off. I tell you what, I'm not. I tell you what I'm not doing. I'm not sitting there with a knife and trying to cut the skin off of a right plum. That's what's not going to happen. No, would you try to do that, Nick? Did I ever tell a story on here where we tried to make you peel fennel seeds? I, yo, you never made me. Yes. Remember, I pressure cooked the fennel seeds, and they had those little white insides in them, and I tried to convince you as a joke to peel a quart container of fennel seeds down to the little white things. That's some other stupid person, that's not me. I think that was you, man. pretty sure it wasn't me. don't know. One of the other stupid interns. Did we have another Nick Wong? Yes. All right. Anyway, so, like, I would try taking the skin off. And then the other thing I would try is maybe doing, um, like, uh, some sort

[27:37] of, like, either I mean, this sounds kind of gross, but like an egg white soak or like a milk soak to see whether you can

[27:43] complex, more do a more of a hard complexing with the caseine of some of these things to suck them out of the plum before you cook it. Uh, alternatively, you could use something else that, like some other charged uh, proteinaceous thing that might complex with um, the precursors to this bitterness and knock them out. That's my, and another thing you can do is you could try to actually dip this stuff in milk and see whether that

[28:10] reduces the bitterness after the fact. you know, as a test to see what what's happening. Although my guess is, is that the more condensed, the more polymerized the, uh, these things are, the better they will complex with milk. But again, you're beyond my actual level of knowledge and you're into my realm of extreme speculation. Anyway, which is where I live most of my life. By the way, speaking of bitterness, do you know that, you know, bolites, you know, bolites, the mushrooms, like, you know, like porcinis, bolites, they're the ones that have the poor structure instead of the gills. Good news about bullies is that they taste good and that they're not poisonous. Like, there's very few, there's no bowl leaves that are going to kill you. You know what I mean? It's like if you go for guild mushrooms and you get the wrong guild mushroom, like you're toast. You know what I mean? Like unless you get a liver transplant, you're host. You know what I mean? Uh, you know, like destroying angel, you know, amanitas, things like this. Bull eats, like some of them are like toxic-ish, but like they're not going to kill you. Anyway, but there's there's one that looks fairly similar to an actual porcino. It's called a bitter bully, bitter bully. Bitter bully. You are a bitter bully, Nick. Nick was sick and say I was a bitter bully. Turns out these up in Connecticut. But here's the interesting thing that I'm going to maybe cook some up and bring it. Whatever is bitter in a bitter bully is only bitter to people who have the genetic ability to taste that particular bitter compound and like prop, you know, the bitter tasting strips that people test to see if you're a super taster, not everyone can taste it.

[29:40] So if you don't have the genes to taste it, apparently it's delicious

[29:43] mushroom, as delicious as a porcini. But then if you have that gene, it's as disgusting as chewing on prop

[29:49] strips, like hardcore bitter. So I could try to find some and then bring them back and we'll have a bitter bowly cookoff, and then we'll sit there and like, like, hopefully I can't taste it just so that I can serve it to other people. So I can sit there and be pounding it. And then someone else eats. It's like, ah, ah, right? What do you think? Are you super tasty? either of you ever done prop? I'm pretty sure I'm not a super taster. I think I did it once. I'm not. I'm definitely not. And I don't feel and I don't feel bad about it, to quote Macy Gray. Hey, David, you ever done that prop strip? You know what I'm talking about, though? Never heard of it. So what the classic thing you do. So here's the thing. If you want to pretend to be a super taster, and really, I don't see why you would, because a lot of, like, it's a really crappy, like, because it makes it seem like it's an awesome thing to

[30:31] be, super taster. Me, it may or may not be, but it's like, whatever. might just ruin your life. I don't know. Well, apparently, you know, super tasters are the ones that go for the white zen. just saying. Uh, the same. Make with that or you want, but, you know, there you have it. Ooh, the white fan. hater of the white Zen. By the way, people out there and maybe get some in the chat room, why has no one made a delicious,

[30:55] well crafted white zen? I mean, I'm sure they had. Let me take that back. Why have I never tasted a delicious, well crafted white Zen? Because we all grew up like, well, grew up. You know, we all grew up in drinking life, especially like, you know, at my age, like a lot of people were pounding that

[31:12] sweet white rock gut white zen. You know what I mean? And so like it took a long time for even real good Zinfandel to kind of overcome that hump of like the white Zin, the, like the kind of, uh, you know, bad connotations of the whites in. But then why hasn't there been more of like a white

[31:28] Zin comeback? Like good whites in. Like, what can it not be made? I'm sure someone makes a delicious one. I haven't had it. I had a, you know, whatever. I like, whatever. It's not the, it's neither here or there. You want to take another color? Sure, call her. You on the air. Hello? Hello? Hey, hey. Um, I'm a baker, and I make a pair of pumpkin bread every year. Um, had a question about that. Sure. How do you cure the pumpkin? All right, so it's just a roasted, roasted squash, whatever, whatever you can find, kabocha, blue Hubbard. Um, and then most of the hydration for the bread, it's a rye bread. Most the hydration comes from carrot juice. Um, so, I basically, I, the bread's delicious. I just wanted to reduce some of the labor of it, especially since I don't have an outlet for the runoff from the juicing process.

[32:21] and uh, you mean the carrot? looks like carrots are mostly are pretty high pectin. So I was wondering if anyone had experienced just kind of breaking down carrots into a mush with pectin

[32:35] enzymes. Uh, maybe for you've done something like that for a cocktail or uh, wanted to know how that would work out. I have, but it's been many, many years. I mean, carrot's one of those things that like, you know, auto clarifies to a very high extent as opposed to like a lot of other juices on separation. Like, so it's one of those things that I haven't focused a lot on

[32:59] in, like, trying to clarify it and it's been, I used to do, uh, like back in the

[33:04] day, We run for that one, Nick. We did apples and carrots. We did a bunch of cocktails like that, um, gin, apple, carrot, but it's been a long, long time. Uh, look, the original uh, purpose of a lot of

[33:16] these um, pectinase things. There was one that I used to use on apples called Pectinex Smash XXL, which was what we started using before we were using SPL back in the day.

[33:25] And its stated goal is to increase the yield of juice out

[33:30] of, um, increase the yield of juice out of, uh, apples. And I'm sure it would also work on carrots. Now, I would use SPL because my guess is that there's probably beyond pectin that there's a good bit of like

[33:44] hemicellulose and stuff in a carrot. So I would, um, Carrots are, like one of the reasons carrots are hardest, because aren't they high in calcium? Anyway, uh, like, uh, doesn't that reinforce the pectin structure? I haven't researched carrot in a 1000000 years. But I remember how the modern cuisine guys used to say that the internal, like the very tap root inside structure of the carrot is higher in calcium, that like lighter core, and that they did a differential tasting where they popped the core out and did a, like a triangle test

[34:13] of like the outside of the carrot versus the inside. And I think they were saying that they thought it was a higher calcium level that was increasing to a bitterness perception in the inside of the tap root, but I don't know if that's actually what was going

[34:25] on or if it's just the majority of the sugar storage is in the outside.

[34:29] I don't know how far they went into it. Anyway, been many years. But so my guess is that, yes, pre-treatment with Pectinex, ultra SPL will increase your yield. There's got to be some good use for that dry, nasty pulp. It's got to be. Like some sort of some sort of crappy health cookie. Some sort of crappy health cookie. Like, there's got to be some use. That's like, do you know how like when you make tofu, you have all the okara left over, like the things, and you're like, what am I going to do with this? And so you just add a little bit to like every muffin and pancake you make for the

[35:05] next like, you know, month to try to get rid of it until it starts going stale and stanky in

[35:10] your in your in your fridge. You guys know what I'm talking about, right? Yeah. Yeah, is carrot pulp the same way? Can you just kind of toss dry, worthless carrot pulp into as roughage for people who want like a cookie that helps them like

[35:22] go, go, go, you know, to the bathroom or no? Yeah, I mean, we found that the runoff from the juicing just isn't really flavorful to use for too much. Yeah, no, it's just a fiber. It's just fiber. Yeah, yeah. I mean, what I, so I guess what I was wondering is, is, uh, if,

[35:41] so say I'm using about, I think, uh, if I remember right, it's about like 50%

[35:46] carriage juice, 50% water in the, in the, uh, the, the formula.

[35:52] If I were to, to just take carrots and submerge them one to one by weight in water plus

[36:00] tech and X and kind of let it fit and then would that, uh, break down at all or? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. What you would have to do is you'd have to juice it. Take the pulp. Treat the pulp with pectinx and then try to do another juice extraction on that. Okay. Peginex will not penetrate at all. In fact, when we used to use the Pectonex Ultra SPL to do things like, you know, one of the old tricks is to get all of the white off of, like doing supremes of,

[36:32] like, Pomolos and something, things are very hard to do supremes of, and, you know, we would peel it 1st because it wouldn't penetrate through the peel, then we would break the

[36:42] into, like, halves and quarters, then soak it, then break it apart after it, it started

[36:48] dissolving, and then soak it again to get all the stuff off. This stuff just will not penetrate. Uh, it won't, like, even under vacuum conditions. In a carrot specifically, vacuum infusions into carrots tend not to go that deep. unless you're doing super multiple pulses. And so I highly doubt that you're going to get that much of an increase in yield, unless you could, if you, if you, if you put all of the carrots, if you didn't want to juice it twice, if you put all the carrots

[37:17] through, like, uh, like, um, a robo coup with a disk in it and, like, chip them into carrot chips and then soak them in Pectinex and then pull them out and throw them, throw them through your champion or whatever you're using, uh, that might increase your yield, but I would run some tests

[37:34] and make sure that it's worth the time, uh, and effort. Otherwise, I would just try to do a reduce of the stuff and see whether the stuff that comes out later is any good. Hey, here's a question. It's just off the top of my head. Any of you guys ever make rice bran pickles? You know what I'm talking about? Rice bran pickles? I wonder, because when you make rice bran pickles, you know, you have to, like, incubate the rice bran and all

[37:54] this and it has to have a certain moisture content, you're bearing your vegetables in, you have to

[37:57] replenish blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? I wonder whether you could cut a rice bran mixture with like really dry pressed carrot stuff. I wonder whether you could like add it, whether it would be bad, or would it add like a good thing to like an already going rice bran pickle? What do you think? I don't know, but it's just fiber, though. That's right. Well, what's rice brand? Fiber plus some fat and some other stuff. What's carrot, what's carrot waste? A little bit of sugar, not no fat. fiber. But it's not saying, like, go 100%. I'm saying like go partial. Do you think it would rot or do you think it's low enough moisture content and it'd be okay? I don't know. don't know. I mean, with all with all the sugar, it might get yeasty, though. That'd be the one concern. Right, but that's when when you taste, like, when you do a good job. Like if you like double, double juice or whatever, the pulp that comes out of a champion with the carrot stuff is pretty, it's fairly neutralized compared to a real

[38:51] carrot. You know what I mean? Like, I wonder how much actual sugar is left in there. I get what you're saying. Like, you wouldn't want a lot of yeast, you wouldn't want yeast stuff going. But it wouldn't be interesting. Anyway, I don't know. Someone's surest tried it. don't know. Well, I'll try that out and I'll let you guys know. Yeah, cool. Let us know what happens. Let us know whether you increase your yield. All right, thanks very much. Cool, thank you. All right. So, Matt, you and Olive, you guys Olive fans? You like olives? you have thoughts on olives? No? No thoughts on olives? You guys are in the, you guys, you guys are worse than Nastasia. Matt Hall wrote in. That's just hurtful. Yeah. I'm interested in getting your opinion on the selection of olives for cocktails. I have been using, I can't pronounce words that I read. Castle Vitrano Alas, for Dirty Martinis, 2 parts, dry gin, one part, uh,

[39:39] dry vermouth, uh, and a bar spoon of brine. It seems good, but am I missing a better option? What about other cocktails? Thanks, Matt Hall. So we use, uh, we use, um, frankly, we use olives that fit into the

[39:52] bottles because what we do is we throw, we push olives into our martini bottles. What do we use? Like pisholines or something like that? I don't know The little ones, little green guys. Yeah, I don't know. Um, so that's what we use, but I, you know, I would just do it based on uh, taste. Tony Cunigaro in, um, in 69 Colbrook Row and Zedder Townhouse, et cetera, et cetera, in um, London, he uses exclusively

[40:16] Nochalara Olives, and he, um, of course, he's Sicilian. But then, you know, what he does is that the least, the least, or should say, the, the, he had

[40:28] the lowest yield idea on earth, he takes nochalara olives, drains the brine from them, puts them in a centrifuge, spins them, and lets the, the increased weight of the centrifuge on whole

[40:42] olives, expel some brine, and then that's what he uses for his dirty martinis.

[40:48] And then the rest he sends back to the kitchen to make top a knot. I was like, Tony, how much top a knot do you sell? Like, who are you, who are you unloading all this tapenade on? That you can like, you know, I'm talking like, you know, he'll get, you know, those, the big, the big 10 cans of nochalaras, and he'll get out of that, like, I don't know, like, like a cup, like, less than a pint of, like, of,

[41:11] uh, of brine. And that's, think of how much Tapenada number 10 can has in it. Worth of olives. You know what I'm saying? Anyways, so I would just choose olives that you like. I would think most, I mean, what do most people do? I done Kalamata, but it's very specific and it's colored, so it's kind of like people generally want green olives, right? Yeah. I don't know. I would just say experiment. If you have access to a centrifuge, you can make really, really, really good olive brine just by blending it and spinning

[41:39] it, and you get really, really good paste, really, really good brine and a little bit of oil that olive connoisseurs hate because it's fusty.

[41:47] It has that, it has that oxidized kind of cured taste to it, which olive people hate. Um, okay. Richard wrote in about seasoning sticks. There's a Kickstarter. It's called Seasoning Sticks. And he said, well, watching the video, I got a few laughs and a couple of face bombs over their science behind the product, probably the worst thing, uh, worst thing being that they feel that all the water

[42:10] has gone from the inside of the meat at 110 degrees. There's notice there's some science problems. There's some science problems. What this is, Nick, Esther, you tell me, is that these people make sticks out of some sort of seasoning, and then they shove these sticks

[42:24] into like a meat product, and then they cook it to try and season it from the inside out. Now, I'm sure that Richard is expecting that I'm going to go completely like ape on this. And I would if I had more time. You know what I mean? But I'm going to say something here. And this goes back to, like, Greg, Greg Blonder. supposed to be talking about Greg Blonder and vacuum pressure marination, but I haven't had time to run a lot of the experiments

[42:51] yet. whatever. We'll get to it next week. In fact, I would love to meet him at the Harvard next week. He believes that vacuum marination and pressure marination don't work, but I think that he is not

[43:02] necessarily correct based on the experiments he's run. Like, for instance, have you guys noticed? Do you guys, you guys vacuum bag for with flavor, right? Right. So and again, remember, and I'll get back to the seasoning sticks. But like, remember, in general, like, it's clear that under vacuum salt penetration is higher, right? And nitrate penetration is higher. I know this because you can run the test. You can infuse a pork belly with pink salt and then not do it. I mean, not vacuum it and vacuum it. He's doing it under a lower, under a less high vacuum than we would be doing it. But and then when you cook it the next day, the pink is deeper in the pork belly that you did under

[43:42] vacuum. He's also not getting a lot of the effects. He's doing whole muscle meat, so he's not getting effective, like penetration along bone lines and crevices in muscles. Also, he's not doing it to the point where, you know how when you do a bad vacuum

[43:56] job, and like you can see the meat inflate like a marshmallow, like it puffs up. Clearly you're separating the fibers and by doing that, you're allowing the meat to penetrate, but I think it's bad practice. Although it might not actually be bad practice on meat that you are trying to quote untenderize. So we sit there and we beat chickens and beef with mallets to tenderize

[44:16] them. And yet I'm worried about inflating them with a vacuum, right? So who's the idiot? It's me. But, you know, obviously fish is destroyed by that technique. So, like, you know, you don't want to deal with fish, but going back to my point, what do you guys think? You

[44:28] two, here in the studio with me, think. And Dave, if you do this as well, is the thing that you cook most often that absorbs marinade the fastest in a

[44:37] vacuum? I'll give you 5 seconds to think. Five, four, three, two, one. Shrimp. Shrimp, and crustaceans because they have open circulatory systems. So I think, you know, you're dealing with something like, uh, uh, a, everybody knows that when you vacuum bag shrimp, You don't do it to cook it because that's gross, right? You do it because shrimp absorbs flavor like a mofo in a

[45:04] bag as opposed to something like a chicken, right? Have you noticed that? Like shrimp picks up stuff in a bag. And I think it's because it's just a big straw. It's a big open circulatory system. And she goes right through. Yeah, and that's my theory. I want to run some test though with larger molecules. So he uses green food coloring as a stand in for larger molecules because most of the flavor molecules that we have are very large compared to something like salt.

[45:29] And so like the mistake people make in marinades is they think that these larger molecules are actually going to make their way into the

[45:37] meat and they're simply not under most, unless you beat them with mallets, whether it being marinated, in which

[45:42] case, but anyway, we'll get into that later. As for the sticks. So marinades tend not to work, but anyone that's, have you ever roasted a chicken? I know you have at Freaking Cafe Ballout. know you've roasted a chicken in your life, right? Nick, you roasted a chicken. If you stuff crap into a chicken's cavity, Is there anyone on earth who doesn't think that the flavors from the herbs and the citrus and the onions and the aliens that you shove into the cavity of

[46:04] the chicken when you roast it, don't permeate the freaking meat? Because they're stupid. They have no smell or taste. You know what I mean? It's like, it's obvious that those flavors during cooking permeate, right? Yeah. And so, like, that's a that's a temperature effect happens, well, it's cooking. And so if that happens by shoving a chicken, by

[46:25] shoving like, you know, chopped up lemon, coriander, parsley, onions, and rosemary into a chicken cavity, pepper, salt,

[46:35] duh, you know what I mean? Like, I mean, maybe these sticks, as horrifying as they are to have, what horrifies me about the idea of a stick of spice through something is that you have this like

[46:47] hyperconcentrated like spice hit right where the stick was. point of contact. Right. So, you know, we always used to call that spice burn, right? So like you'd have like someone, some idiot was like spicing a bag, let's say, for low temperature cooking. And they just throw the freaking spice into the bag and then they walk away and then you get that super concentration. A lot of spices go hard bitter when they're cooked for a long time in high concentrations in one thing. And so you get spice burns or some idiot would throw, like, rosemary right

[47:16] against, like, like a fragile thing in a bag, hard vac it down without any liquids. And then you get that like imprint, that like bitter over rosemary imprint of green all over the

[47:28] meat right where it hit. First of all, those jerks would make an actual literal cooked imprint of a rosemary stick into the food, which is enough that you

[47:36] should like, you should go to a corner of the room and cry. But, uh, beyond that, uh, it creates spice burn. So that would be my only thing, right? What do you think? Is a rosemary stick, the original seasoning stick? Rosemary stick is the original seasoning stick. Because, you know, you shove that thing into, you know, shove that. That's what Chez was born on a

[47:59] rosemary skewer, I think. Look, I'm not sure. You're turning it into something gross, but I'm not sure exactly how that went. did that. I didn't do that. All right, so listen, we're running out of time here. Next week we'll get 2 weeks from now. We'll get to Mark Bledsoe's question from we have a we have a month. He has an event a month away, but I'll get into it next week, hopefully with time for you to work on it. Devin Krebs had a question about how did you get into this whole line of business, which is kind of a longer discussion. We'll get to it. We'll eat some cookies. Uh, and uh, that's it. Oh, I will say this, one thing on the way out. Do you know in New York City and Washington and Philadelphia, like all the buildings are, this is not a cooking thing. They're like brownstone. you familiar with brownstones? So all that brownstone came from a quarry in Connecticut called

[48:47] brownstone and they, it flooded in 1936. It's now a water park, dude. It's sick It's sick, man. You gotta go, gotta go to Brownstone water park. And last thing, this is cooking related. So everybody who listens to me knows that I'm very pro tandor, right? You know this? anybody anti-Tandor? Well, no, but I'm very pro. Trump. Trump. Trump hates tandors. Yes. But I'm very, very pro tandor, uh, but what it's done, and this is, it's totally changed my entire outlook on cook cooking in

[49:21] general, because, yeah, because what, if you cook in a tandor, other than bread, which is one and done, right, on the side pops off, everything in a tandor is, uh, most everything

[49:33] is is multi-cook, right? In out, in out, in out. And I've said before, like David Cinch, David Cinchino, from Monresa, when he decided that he wasn't going to do low temperature anymore because it wasn't

[49:44] enough, it wasn't enough work for him to do just low temperature work. So he would take his like old school. I think I forget whether he's Bonet or Multaney, one of those things, right? He would he would just take his meats in and out of the old traditional oven to try to get that high average, a

[49:59] high instantaneous heat, low average heat, which is why rotisserie is so good. And Tandor is the same way. Super high instantaneous in out, in out, in out. Oil-based in between so that it starts cooking as soon as it gets into the fire,

[50:10] right? And so you get these like, that's how you get the really nice crust and the really, and so, but I've just been cooking everything that way. So like on my grills now and like, you know, Meathead, when he was here, would hate this, but like everything I do is like, is done tandor style now because I don't have to think ahead. You know what I mean? It's just like, make it thin enough so that it's gonna work. And then just off on, off, on, off, on, off, on. So I do, I've been doing the vertical grilling, but now I've been doing it now horizontal grilling. I told you, I bought one of those big cowboy grills at the Home Depot for $150 that has, you know, basically the grilling area of a dining room table. And

[50:44] like, I have so much wood that like, I don't have to like, I don't have to worry about like

[50:49] sustainability. It's like I live in the 1800s and like, I'm just destroying the earth, you know, one person at a time. You know, it's like, but again, like the wood would otherwise go to waste. It would rot into the ground. No one's coming to buy it or use it or build houses out of it. So I'd build a, I do one, uh, I do one chimney of charcoal, and then I layered, like logs over it. Literally, if you go back and you read camp cookbooks from like the late 1800s, early 1900s. There was a huge woodcraft movement that went along, not woodcraft, meaning like woodwork, woodcraft, meaning like how to survive in the woods, movement that happened in the

[51:22] US as part of the kind of return to nature, naturalism movement, right? It happened right around the time when all of our forests were already kind of destroyed. So people were trying to like hook it up. But the culture at the time was still, you know, you get a big hunting party, you go out into the woods, you chop down a bunch of

[51:37] full-size freaking trees, and you build a camp, you know, including like, you know,

[51:42] like big fireplaces, and they were burning huge amounts of wood. And so like I can kind of act that way now, at least for a little while. So I'm building these giant wood fires, and man, having a giant, like, dining room sized, like, super hot flame that you can just off

[51:57] on, off on. I can crank. And I really love cooking that way. I just love it. And I did shrimp on it the other day, and chicken, because it's like trip, shrimp's a master of the off on, off on. Shrimp is like, boom, boom, boom, boom, done. You know what I mean? Off, on, off, on, off on. Do you hate people that cook their shrimp at too low a heat and then the whole thing is ruined and the outside still doesn't have any nice crust on it? I hate that. I hate. One last question because I know we need to leave. Are you guys bigger fans of getting a shrimp and cooking it nicely so that you can eat the shell and get all the

[52:28] flavor, or do you like people to cook it with the shell on, and then the idiots peel off the shell and lose all the flavor, or do you like to shell the sucker and then put the flavor on it, but then also not shield the meat as much from the high heat? I like the worst option on that. Which is you cook it with the shell on and the idiot's peeling. Yeah. I would rather just eat the shell. I like eating the shell. I'm very pro in the show. I'm more, I'm just lazy. Well, do you does that mean you also like the double stir fry technique? The 2nd one is the one that makes the shell crispy enough to eat? Like salt and pepper shrimp, where you hit it once, then you pull it, and then you hit it again, and then, yeah. And that actually, to be honest in this, they're going to have to kick me off here, but they, they, that's the one advantage to kind of the low quality, really thin shelled, like, farm raised,

[53:14] like, BS shrimp that we get is that if you cook it like that, those shells are super, super easy just to

[53:20] eat. You know what I mean? I don't mind it. I don't mind it. Americans need to get over it, eat the shell anyway. Just see the shell. good calcium. Yeah, is that true? Is there calcium in it? It's chitin. I know it's chitinous. So it's good for like whatever chitin's good for. Maybe there's calcium in it. I'm sure there is, because I know lobster shells make that terrible flavor if you cook. you ever make a lobster broth. You ever accidentally cook the shell too long? Nasty, nasty. Lobster shell only want to be in the broth for a certain amount of time. And if you overcook it, it gets that shell taste. And I think that shell taste is calcium, but I don't know because I never researched it. All I know is, is that if I see someone boiling their lobster shell and then I come back

[54:04] in in like an hour and they're still boiling that lobster shell. I'm like, 0 my god. Why? You know what I mean? You know what I'm talking about. Anyway, cooking issues.

[54:21] 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 as a nonprofit organization. To donate and become a member, visit our website today. Thanks for listening.