[0:00] This episode is brought to you by Jule, the emerging circulator for sous vide by Chef Steps. Order now at chefsteps.com slash J-O-U-L-E. Hey, hey, hey, I'm Jimmy Carbone from Beer Sessions Radio. You're listening to Heritage Radio Network broadcasting live from Bushwick, Brooklyn. If you like this program, visit heritageraternetwork.org for 1000s more.

[0:27] Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of cooking issues coming to you live on the Heritage Radio Network every Tuesday

[0:36] from, like, you know, 12-ish to, like, around one o'clock. you know, from Roberta's Pizzeria. Where is it, Nastasia? Bushwick. Beswick. Beswick. Bushwick. Join, as usual, with Nastasia, the Hammer Lopez in the studio. How you doing, Nastasia? Yeah, got David in the booth, right? Also good. Yeah. We weren't here last week because I was in Barcelona. In fact, I just gave, by the way, like if you have like a coworker. It's a good idea to bring them some crap back. So I went to Barcelona. 1st of all, I had for the 1st time, that Spanish style gin and tonic. Although they're like, Catalan style. Catalan. I'm like, okay, okay, okay, whatever. Catalan style, Chan tonic. Uh, so we can talk about that later if we have time. But I went to one of these old and very well-known bakeries in

[1:31] Barcelona. It's called Colmina, Colomina. It means honey, like beehive in Spanish, and it's these hard candies they've been making since 1849. What do you think? They weird flavors. Or not good. What flavor is it? It tastes like a cough job, but it's called... I'll have to look it up. Some of them are herbal. Some of them are fruity. they're all different Anyway. Call in your questions. 2 718-497-2128. 718-497-2128. Also in the cooking issues style of news. This weekend, Sunday, is the 1st day of the chow exhibit, the general one, the tomorrow we have our Kickstarter benefit, I guess, or VIP benefit or whatever.

[2:11] And then on Sunday is the opening. So if you want to head down to 72, 62, rather, 62, Bayard Street, uh, right off McCarran Park in Brooklyn, they say it's Williamsburg, but in real life, it's Greenpoint.

[2:22] all know it's Greenpoint. Right, so I mean, if you have to, so for those of you that have never been to New York,

[2:27] like, there's this like horrible road called the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, the BQE, and it basically cuts a whole section of Brooklyn and Queens off from the rest of the universe, like towards the waterline, and

[2:40] generally, like, once you cross under that, you're not in Williamsburg no more. You know what I mean? What do you think, David? You agree with me on this? Yeah. Yeah. So anyway. I mean, McCaren Park, that's like Greenpoint, yeah? Anyway. Yeah, sure. He's like, I don't really care. I live really far away from there so I kind of don't. That, you know, the thing is, is that, like, the individual neighborhoods in New York have become so hip that, so when I was, like, you know, 20 something years ago, like, uh, when I worked in a metal fabricating shop in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, called SFW, as in so blanking what metals, that was literally the name of the shop where I

[3:20] worked, inhaling, like, black metal dust all day long. But so what? But so what? But there was no one there. I mean, like, it was like, like, the idea of a hipster, like, when you told someone you were moving to Greenpoint, they're like, where? what? Now, it's so hip in Greenpoint, that the people in Greenpoint never leave Greenpoint. So they're like, in other words, the point being that they're so insulated there in Greenpoint

[3:45] Land that like, why be so close to Manhattan? Like, what's the point? Like you might could be anywhere, anywhere. Anywhere. Columbus. Columbus, yes. Exactly. Right? Because it's not like it's not like hipster hubs in those places. Sure. And like, you know, I guess there is a theoretical G-train connection from Greenpoint to the rest of New York City. No, it's kind of just theoretical, right? Yeah, I mean, I live in Didmus Park, so that is definitely theoretical. It's like 20 stops on the G or something to get from Williamsburg to Titmus. How close is that to the Ditmas Avenue stop on the F? Um, I'm about a 10, 15 minute walk from that. I'm closer to the B and the Q. Do you go to Train World ever? That's like an awesome, huge model train shop right on Gitmas. Nope. Missing out. If you're a model trained person as my, you know, my

[4:39] son, Booker, is a... Would you imagine like the idea of Nastasia sitting in her work? You'll hear me talk about trains and then go home and hear Booker. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because all Booker likes his trains, but like subway trains only, but like now I have this image of Nastasia going home, putting on one of those blue and white engineer hats, you know, those like

[4:58] cats playing with your model trains all day. Maybe it's her secret obsession. And when I call, it's like, you hear the, you hear the, whee, clack, clack, clack, clack. I'm like, what is that, Anastasia? Nothing, shut up. Just running her model trains all day? That would be the ultimate secret. It would be amazing. It's just not in your character at all. Like, you have, like, 5 levels, like, going all over. I would, though, have one, like a Christmas train. Oh, around the tree? would, yeah. Do you want one? I would, yeah. I can bring some I can bring some tracks home. I don't have any room. If I have a big... I can give you the menu. I know, I know, I know, I

[5:33] know. For the tree. The minimum oval is 31. But then I want all the little Christmas houses too. Now you're talking a lot. The minimum oval on an O gauge train is 27 inches. Call 027. That's small. I'm telling you, you can get a small track, you know,

[5:50] but you have to only certain engines run on the 027. Maybe. The restaurant on the 031. Booker would loan you one of his Santa Fes because he does not care. He only cares about a Santa Fe. I have plenty of track. Do they have Metro North one? Now you're talking money. What's your licensing stuff? Like, so like this one company, MTH, used to have the license

[6:09] for uh, the subway, the New York City subway, until they put out a graffitied model, MTA was like, crap on you. Crap on you. So they gave it back to Lionel, but because it's an official license, Lionel like totally rakes you over the coals for the money. So what MTH did is they started selling non-licensed things that look exactly like the MTA things. They just don't have the MTA stickers, and then other jokers are something the MTA stickers stick on it. Of course you would. You're just like me that way. You're like, yeah, I don't really care whether it's real nuts. A couple of scam artists for the Christmas tree, you know. Anyway. Well, it's a couple of scam. Please. Oh, my God, Dave, if I did the MTA train, then you'd have to build, I mean, the Metro North, you'd have to build a

[6:52] little leather man. Oh, my God. Did we talk about Leatherman on the air? Yeah. Dave, we talked about Leather Man, right? The guy who walked around Connecticut, guy who I would be, were it not for the fact that I have a wife and kids? Maybe Leatherman? I don't recall that. You don't call it Leatherman? Is that like a dungeon kind of thing? Leather daddy? No, it's not. It's not really cooking related either, but there's this guy, there's this

[7:15] guy, and nobody knows his real name. People say they know his real name, but they don't. All that crap was made up. They know he was like French-ish, like he could speak some French kind of. And in the 1800s from, like, I guess, just after the Civil War until he died in, I think, 83 or 89, 1889, he would just walk a 300 and something mile trail looping from Westchester, right over by the Hudson by Ossening, up over, through into Connecticut, down

[7:46] the Connecticut River, down the Connecticut River, and then along the shoreline and just loop it. And he would walk about 10 miles a day. Every day of the year, rain, wind, snow. The biggest blizzard of the century they had in the 1800s, stopped him for, I think, 3 days, put him 3 days behind schedule, and he would just sleep outside under these rock overhangs, which they call

[8:04] leather man caves, even though they're not actual caves, because Connecticut doesn't have real caves. And like occasionally people give them stuff to eat. And he sewed all of his clothing. There are pictures of them. You can look them up. They sewed all of his clothing out of discarded boots that he cut the tops off of and laced them all together into this

[8:19] like big like outfit. So there are there are Photoshopped images of my face over the leatherman's body. Because I would, if it wasn't for the fact that I had kids and a wife, you know, those

[8:31] are your only anchors to prevent you from spinning out of control into that world. Pre pretty much. We wouldn't do civil war reenactment. I would do leather man. Leatherman reenactment. Someone already did it. Someone I did let him in. But, well, the other reason, look, like, I have a place in Chester, Connecticut, and

[8:45] you used to walk through Chester, and, like, I spent a good portion of my childhood in

[8:50] Chapqua slash Mount Kisco, New York, and he used to walk through Mount Kisco. In fact, he died on the Westchester side. So basically, I'm already living the Leatherman life anyway. I already, I'm already so cheap that I'll walk anywhere for no reason, like without having, you know,

[9:04] uh, So, you know, I feel... What's the point of anything? He's just walking. So existential. You know, I know, but what would the point be for you? Point for me? Yeah, what else am I gonna do? I've already lost my house because I haven't paid my bills. I've already like... I'm saying, if I didn't have a family to attack me down, You know what I mean? I'd be, I'd be a nightmare. Anyway, so back to cooking related things. By the way, we had a question a couple weeks ago on hickory syrup, and I report back that I made some. So hickory syrup is not like maple syrup and that you don't make it from the sap of hickory, you make it from the bark. And, um, you know what? Okay, so for those of you that don't know, the most famous kind of hickory

[9:51] tree in terms of the nuts anyway, is called the Shagbar hickory. And there are some other ones. Many of them have awful flavored nuts like the pig nut hickory taste, and the bitter nut hickory clearly are terrible tasting hickories. There's also the mocker nut, which doesn't, I don't think, taste bad, but it's just very difficult to crack. And the shell bark, which has a variant on the shag bark. But anyway I digress. So the nuts are delicious. And then, you know, we've talked about it a couple years ago. We went on a hickory nutcake. We love hickory nuts. Hickory nuts are awesome. I love them. They're delicious. They are like, you know, pecan is a good nut, which is closely related to hickory nut, but the hickory nut is actually, in my opinion,

[10:27] a superior, not just much harder to get to. So, and smaller than a pecan. So the pecan wins from a commercial standpoint, whatever. Whatever. And Nastasia, that's another thing you don't like, right? Pecan pie? No, not really. Oh my god. I do like your pecan sours. Yeah, those are good Yeah. Well, Nastasia, we won't get into it because not family friendly. What Nastasia did at the event where we were making those things. No, that was. Oh, yeah. No, that was you. You got so angry they wouldn't let you behind the bar at the YMCA. It's not safe for work, what happened in that situation. That's, you know, for the next time we have an unexpurgated, uh, cooking issues, then, uh, you know,

[11:09] someone can call in and request that they get the Nastasia Lopez YMCA Pecan story. Let's do that. We'll get Johnny Walker sponsor. Yeah, all right. We can say that we made it with Johnny Walker. Who knows? I mean, I don't even remember what we made with you. No. I have no idea. Anyway, I just remember the story, the anger, and well, whatever. got to get it. It involves, it involves dietary laws. It's a nightmare. So yeah, it's religion, dietary laws, Nastasius, you know, lack of respect for either. Anyway. Uh, so back to Hickory. So Shagbar Hickory, one of the interesting things about it is that it is one of the most aptly named trees that exist, the bark looks shaggy, almost like

[11:54] a 60s rocker, feathered out hair. You know what I mean? Like it just comes off in big kind of strips and it's layered as it comes down the tree and it peels off.

[12:03] What that means is you can harvest the bark rather easily without damaging the tree because you can just rip off the pieces. In fact, I have some pictures of the bar. post it later. Uh, you know, after I post my obligatory post for, uh, you know, who Nastasius is getting mad at me. Uh, because it turns out if someone, this is separate, but if someone pays you money, you have to do a certain number of posts and they don't pay you the money until you've

[12:24] done said certain number of posts and I'm terrible at that. And so Nastasia has been riding me like a trick pony for like a week and a half . Just put up the last post. Whatever, please. Okay. I'm a bad man and stipulated. So the, um, so anyway, so someone asked me about making it and he takes trips or, they're not tips or tricks that I had. So I went out into the woods because I know where I have a Shagbar Hickory. It's actually on the neighbor's property, but whatever, what the hell do they know? They're not using it. So I went up and I ripped some of the bark off without damaging the tree. And by the way, so I didn't measure anything, but I harvested enough for about 3 liters of

[12:58] syrup and I harvested it in like under 2 minutes because it's just like snap, snap, snap, snap,

[13:03] walk out. Now, here's the techniques I used in case you know, I thought it came out very well, so you follow these techniques, again, with no measurements. I took them back inside. I scrubbed them to get any sort of moss, lichen, or like, you know, buggy, like, you know, you know, caterpillary, tenty crabs off of them because that's gross. I snapped. I then snapped it into pieces that would fit into my oven. I toasted them in the oven. Well, I baked them in the oven at 350 to 375 for like 10, 15 minutes until I started to get the aroma out, opened

[13:37] it, the oven, let them flash off and get, you know, dry, snapped them into small pieces. Um, you know, fairly small pieces, like, I don't know, like an inch, inch and a half . It wasn't too anal about it. Here's the one kind of tech trick I did. I then put them in a vacuum machine and sucked a vacuum on them in water, like two, 3 times to infuse them rapidly so that they'd be rapidly infused with water,

[14:00] wouldn't float at the top. I thought that was a good idea. Then I put them into a big pot with water. I covered it and added a little more, but I wanted to keep it a fair. I wanted to have a very high. See, people have problems with this becoming bitter, and so I didn't want it to become bitter, and usually the way you do that is you do relatively quick steeps with relatively large amounts of product

[14:20] into not as much water. So I did that. And then I brought it up to a boil. Uh, turned it off, covered it, let it steep for a while, kept checking it when it was brown, but not too bitter. I strained it, discarded the bark back outside. Then, uh, I reduced the um, product down by a factor of two. So I started with about 4 liters of

[14:44] stuff, liquid, four, 4.5 . I reduce it down actually more than twice, reduced it down. Then after it had been reduced down to little less than half. I added equal weight in of sugar, stirred it into a

[14:59] syrup, and that was it. And it was good. So the things I recommend, I recommend if you have a vacuum, you do a vacuum infusion so that you have the water on the inside really quickly. I recommend, like, bring it up to a simmer, then letting it steep and keep testing it while it's

[15:12] going so it doesn't get too, too bitter. And then I recommend draining and then reducing it substantially to increase the flavor profile before adding the sugar.

[15:19] And I've used it so far in, I made it old-fashioned with

[15:23] it that was delicious, in my opinion. Uh, and now it's just, you know, 3 eighths of that hickory syrup and 2 of uh, whiskey and uh,

[15:32] a dash or 2 of Ango and orange twist. I also, um, because it does have some uh, tannins in

[15:40] it, is it slightly has some slight bitterness in the back. I did a I used it in a shaken sour, which was actually interesting, but not with bourbon. I did a daiquiri. I did an aged. I did an aged rum, egg white, hickory syrup daiquiri, and it was really good and some of the, yeah, the egg, yeah, the egg white. Interesting. I also tested that recipe, Nastasia, just for the, just for, you know, giggles. I tested it in an ISI whipper and EC whipper to see what would happen. I was like, you know what? I hate doing cocktail foams, right? I always hated doing cocktail foams, so I don't do it. Uh, so, but since I'm not, I don't have a bar anymore. I can kind of do whatever I want. So I was like, uh, well, what if I would have put this cocktail into like a FOMA with the egg white? So I did a dry shake in the thing, then I added the ice, shook it, added that nitrous, shook it, and then pumped the cocktail

[16:28] out, and Nastasia, the cocktail filled like 3 glasses. One cocktail filled like 3 glasses, 100% foam, 100% foam, no liquid. I was like, what the hell am I gonna do with this? But it was good, but like, do you want to drink a foam? You can put it on pie. Right? Oh, that's a good idea, like a cocktail pot. Eventually it settles out, but you have like minutes. You have on the order of, like, minutes. Yeah, if you put it on like a pumpkin. That's a good idea. A daiquiri on top of a pumpkin pie? That be good. be really good. Yeah, nice. I mean, it needs to be contained a little bit. So maybe you'd have like some pie in the bottom of a cup, like

[17:03] a parfait cup and then some of that stuff on top. That's that's not. That's not. I like pumpkin pie. You know what I know? A little bit tipsy on the film? Are you? A little bit? yeah, a little bit. yeah In fact, I could probably dope it back with cream too, and make it, like, really? Now you have Lil Jaquan going through my head. Everybody in the club, everybody in the club get tipsy. Anyway, so that was what that's my results with hickory syrup, and thanks for whoever brought it up, so that I could test it. I recommend going out and foraging for that crud. Here's a question on fryers from 80 in Russia. You have spoken about this before, but I can't find your answer. Like espresso machines, traditional deep fryers and British fish and chip shops. What do you think about the fish and chips? as opposed to like French fries, chips? What do you think about calling them chips? I guess they called it first, right? Who says that? don't know. They're not called British fries. I don't know. Traditional deep fryers in British fish and chip shops worked by the thermal mass

[18:05] or the huge fryer warming up, fired by gas, and recovering after the addition of bucket loads of cold potatoes to make chips. I see, excuse me. I see commercial line fryers, meaning continuous fryers, I guess, that make potato

[18:19] chips like lays or tortilla chips that have PID controllers and internal conveyor belts to move the product through the oil.

[18:27] If I want to increase consistency and temperature recovery, is it worth adding a PID over the thermostatic control on a

[18:33] bench top, electric deep fryer, best 80, a cold Englishman in Moscow, Russia. And PS, before I answer this question, PS, Nastasia. Is there any chance you could get Mark Ladner on to talk about the Del

[18:43] Posta Kopuk on the air? I for one, am interested. You said you'd do it next Tuesday? Really? All right, there you have it. Next Tuesday, people. Tune in. be ready for it If they're still talking to me. Next week on Monday is the 1st installment where I go to Oto. You know, the Mario Bitali's pizza restaurant. And I have to go all the time, right? Every time you're there? If you don't I'll murder you. And so I have to prep. I'm going to Oto and we're and I'm going to be making cocktails behind the bar at Oto. So I'm doing a, uh, I think I'm using some, I'm doing a carbonated tomorrow, uh, like, you know,

[19:19] spritzer with, uh, probably with lime, uh, and I'm doing a, uh, apricot into bourbon, uh, hostino, and I'm

[19:28] gonna do a Italian basil, nitro model, uh, gin sour. What do you think? I think I'm going to add a little bit of string into that son of a gun. How long are you there for? How many hours? Like, I don't know. I think from like something till close. What time do they close? Four? In the morning? Pizza joint? Four, right? Really? I don't think I'm going to be there till four. It doesn't really matter. As soon as soon as my kids are asleep and my wife's asleep, it doesn't matter what time I come home. Straight leather man, yeah. Yeah, go leather man to start walking. They're like, where are you going? Go straight leather man. It's like, well, I got to get up out of the city so I can get back on my loop. He didn't like traveling in cities because people in the cities used to pick on

[20:09] them. So he would avoid the, he would avoid the main, the main routes. And for those of you that don't know, who've never been to the Northeast here. Like, a lot of that kind of land where he used to walk around is forested now, but back in the day,

[20:21] wasn't it? It was all cleared. There weren't a lot of like, you know, forested trees around. That stuff is all 2nd growth. So yeah, so he would just like, there'd just be these rock outcroppings where he'd go hang out and like, you know, cook whatever and heck he was eating because he also had, I

[20:34] think, like a tin pot. Apparently he, a lot like me. He would carry like 60, £70 of gear around for no

[20:40] reason, just for no reason. like all the time. He's only walking 10 miles a day. So you say the encroachment of civilization is hurting Leatherman? Well, he did. He died. He had cancer. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. He died in the 1880s. Yeah, yeah. He was doing this in the 1880s. I think I may have come back and said, like, he had some sort of horrible mouth cancer that was eating away at his lips for the last year,

[21:02] year and a half of his life. And someone tried to take him to the hospital. He's like, and then got back out and started walking again. Now that's commitment. You know what I mean? Never stop. Never stop. Don't stop till you drop, man. That's it. Boom. It's like, why are you, you know, why do you engineer, Dave? Like, why are you sitting there engineering? I just because they pay you, but why do you need the money? So you can eat Leatherman ate. He didn't have any money. And what I'm saying? It's like, what's the reason of doing anything? He's like, I'm walking. Anyway. So we should all just walk is what you're saying? No, I'm saying it's like, you know, he had a goal. I'm going to walk 10 miles a day. I'm going to carry my crap with me. I going to wear boots. Was that his goal to do 10 miles a day or that was just incidental? think it was incidental, right? He was pretty much, he was like a watch. People would be like, uh, it's time for the leather man to come around. He wasn't like a pro walker. He was just like a survivor. So, okay, so if he liked you, like, if he didn't really want to talk to you. So there's this one group that took a, like that, like, would give him soup or whatever and he'd stop by and you'd take it, he wouldn't talk to

[22:01] him or anything. But one time they set up like a camera with a sheet over it, and then as he was sitting, they dropped the sheet and took the picture and there's this picture of him where he has this kind of like... Look on his face? I thought this was in the 1800s, you said? That camera was the 1800s, man, get with it. Yeah, but didn't it take like hours for it to take a photo? This is like the 1870s. I think they've, it's a little bit better than like in the 1860s where they're like, I'm not up on my history of photography. I mean, it wasn't like instant. But anyway, so anyway, they surprised me. They weren't Polaroids. Right. He never went back to that house again. So like what happened is like if you were nice to him and he like liked you, he would come back to your house every or your

[22:37] whatever, every 34 days. Did he talk? Not much. It's about a holes in the story, don't you think, Nastasia? I mean, look, I've read all of the relevant literature. has read everything. So the point is, is that he would show up and then, but if you were mean to him or like,

[22:55] we're like trying to force him, he'd be like, you'd never show up again at your place. He's like, you're, I'm done with you. Give you wide berth. Kind of a good thing, right? If it doesn't show up. And everyone kind of wanted him to show up. At that time in the US, there were a lot of what's called anti-tramp laws because a lot of people were roaming

[23:08] around. A lot of people were displaced from like traditional farmland traditional jobs. So there was a lot of wandering, a lot of tramps, like hobo style, but like earlier. And, um, they were widely hated, and a lot of people like passed anti-tramp laws, and in fact, there was lots of beatings, murdering of tramps, people like

[23:26] had, doing all sorts of terrible things to vagrants. So this is not just a modern phenomenon. Uh, and, um, he was the one exception. People were like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, anti-trampla, but don't mess with the letterman. He's dumb. No. You know what I mean? In fact, like these one group of people basically got the snot beat out of them for messing with the leathermen. Can you post a photo of the letterman? Yeah, actually, chat room just linked me to the Wikipedia page and there's some photos. Nastasia's talking about the one that's my face on the Leatherman's body. Oh, yeah. I didn't spend that much time Photoshopping it. I didn't, for instance, although it was a perfect look, it's in black and white. Yeah, I mean, what you really want to do fake the photo is obviously pose yourself in the same sort of pose that the person was in and try to match the angle of the

[24:09] camera. I just like found the fastest photo I could find on the internet, cut out my face and stuff it onto the letterman's body. And really, if you wanted to go full method, you would have to be like living like Leatherman for at least a week or so just to get into that mindset. I think it takes a couple of years. I'd have to learn French. First of all, and then not speak it to anyone. That would be like the 1st the 1st thing. I mean, I used to know some French, but not enough. Anyway, back to the question. But we were talking about here. Should I add a PID controller to my fryer so that I can approximate what happens in continuous frying, 80? And the answer is no, you should not. And here is why. Uh, or as Mirvol would say, here is why. should not. That's a mix between Mirvold and my professor, Raymond Goist, from college. Or as Leatherman would say, Porkwell. Yeah, or just... That's what he would say. You like Leatherman, how is the food? And then you would just walk away. Anyway, do you trying to get me back off, Dave? Trying to get me back off topic? I don't like the way you phrase that sentence. Oh, come on. This is one of the family shows. So anyway. So anyway, so you don't want to do that. Here's why. And a continuous, continuous frying is exactly what it says it is. It's continuous. That means you don't want any change one way or the other. They are extremely, they're typically very long, and they're very, very highly regulated. So, uh, you know, the 1st like two, three, 400 pounds. I don't know, depends on the size of a line, but the 1st whole bunch of stuff that comes out of the fryer is not

[25:34] going to be right. Uh, it'll be over, it'll be under, whatever, until everything comes into equilibrium. And so typically these things take a long time to calibrate, but then they run them for, you know, forever. So, like, they have a PID controller on their oil because they want to keep the oil at a certain place at exactly the same temperature.

[25:52] They know that they're adding X number of pounds of potatoes or tortilla chips every

[25:57] hour, and they eventually know what heat average heat input they need into the oil to keep it at

[26:02] the right point. And there's a gradation, probably definitely in the oil temperature from the beginning of the line to the end of the line, but everything stays constant because they have a relatively constant heat

[26:13] input. They have a really relatively constant potato input, and they're also adding fresh oil because the miracle of continuous frying.

[26:20] The miracle of it is that you can, you absorb oil, uh, you add oil at the rate that it is absorbed by your potato or your tortilla chip, and if you get everything just right, then the oil is always perfectly

[26:33] conditioned because brand new fry oil is not good and old fry oil is not good. The reason brand new fry oil is not good, is it actually is, um, too pure and it doesn't bond

[26:43] as it doesn't, uh, um, transmit heat as well to the, uh, chips. A little bit of breakdown makes it slightly more polar and transmits the energy much better to the chips. So you actually want it to slightly break down. But you don't want it too much. And so in a continuous fryer, you can keep everything perfect by adjusting the rate of product in,

[27:04] potatoes or tortillas, and the rate of oil in so that the oil in there is constantly right. So it's all about juggling these kind of, that's why you can't make just a few things in a continuous fryer. And for that, PID is perfect, perfect. Everything is perfect all the time. The oil is always the same. The potato chips or whatever are always the same. Everything takes exactly the same amount of time. awesome. By contrast, in batch frying, you are dumping a load in to a single

[27:35] batch. The temperature's gonna drop and you need to get that temperature back up. Now, here, you don't want a PID. Now, you could have a PID. that realizes, but it's just very aggressively tuned so that it rockets back up close to your finished temperature, but then nose to slow down a little bit as you're coming up so that you don't overshoot a lot. So there might be a situation where you don't where you can win over a standard like bang, bang, uh, thermostat, but depending on the amount of temperature rise you're going to get. Usually, let's say, let's say you dump a bunch of stuff into a deep fryer, and temperature drops real low, it turns heat way on, and you're rocketing up through to your set point. Now, if you have only a small amount of product in there, maybe it can overshoot a lot, but odds

[28:17] are, by the time if your fryer is really powerful, by the time it hits that hits back at its temperature, you're still boiling a lot of water off out of your product, so you shouldn't get that much of a rise out of it, theoretically, especially if you have good convection in it, which is why real tube fryers are awesome because they don't tend to locally overheat your oil because they have a much larger surface area to put heat into the oil.

[28:40] anyway. So, uh, if you have an actual commercial fryer with a

[28:45] bang bang thermostat on it, it doesn't tend to overheat your oil, um, and they're pretty awesome. And really, you don't need single degree control over the oil

[28:54] uh, temperature anyway. You just don't want it to get too, too low and you don't want it to go high and you want your

[28:59] recovered to be fast. So I would say, no, do not PID it. Although, um, The Converse, I'm going to go back, I want to say, if you're going to pot fry, uh, I think having a, um, using one of those controlled, like, induction units for frying can be very useful because it's very hard uh, at

[29:17] home uh, to pay attention to a fryer all the time when you're doing a bunch of other stuff, and it's very easy to overheat your fry oil on uh, on a

[29:26] stovetop. And so one of these inductions, like the Brevel one that I got sent or any of the other

[29:31] ones can be very useful in keeping your fry oil so it doesn't go up too high. And certain of those, like the Brevel, can have like an aggressive setting where it can get back up to a temperature aggressively.

[29:42] It's not as much as like on off, but it's much more aggressive than the more standard PIDs. And a lot of PID technology, by the way, in terms of cooking and a lot of what's different between different circulators is how aggressive their strategy

[29:56] is, a more aggressive strategy will get you to the temperature faster, but have some overshoot. Anyway, what do you think? Good job. Okay. Anthony from Nashville writes in about Booker Index. Hey, Dave, Hammer, David, and guests. I was wondering if you could talk a bit about closing down Booker and Dax in the process of finding a new location. Well, you'll be looking for in a new spot and what kind of changes will you include in the new bar and why? Maybe it's me, but it seems like he didn't talk about it too much on the show, which is why I had to get information from the internet. Sorry if I'm bringing up a store subject. Anyway, you guys are great. Love the show, Anthony, from Nashville. Uh, the problem, Anthony, is that, um, there's only so much that I can say, uh, because, um,

[30:38] Because I'm not allowed to say, like, exactly, like, who's going to be involved or what, uh, you know, what the arrangement is

[30:46] going to be, what the name of the bar is going to be, et cetera, et cetera, because we're, we're all in negotiations for these

[30:52] things uh, at the moment. I can say this. I'm looking for space. I've looked at several spaces. I haven't found a space yet that I think is right. Um, as for what's going to be different or the same, um, you know,

[31:06] what I want to be, this, I think the core of Booker and Dax was, um, the

[31:11] bar. The core was that we were going to work very hard to make the drinks as good as we can make them and present them in a non-pretentious style. We were, you know, using new techniques and trying to focus

[31:25] on uh, working on flavors. So it was very specific idea behind drink

[31:31] creation, and from a customer service standpoint, we really wanted it to be, like I say, friendly and non-pretentious,

[31:38] and, you know, a place that you'd be comfortable to go and hang out and have some fun.

[31:43] So that was the goal. I think there, you know, we hopefully, I think, succeeded on those 2 counts. I think in the future, I want to, I'm interested now in the fact of why people go to the bars and

[31:57] I think it's to feel awesome, right, stars? Like, I think you want to look awesome. Not necessarily that everything looks awesome, but that you feel like you look awesome. You feel like you are awesome. I think that's almost, it's not almost, it's more important than the drink, right? Like the fact that you feel kind of special or like that, you know,

[32:16] uh, that you just feel good. Like, why else would you go to a bar? If you want to feel crappy, you go home. You know what I mean? Not that going home makes you feel crappy stuff. I'm not saying that. But, uh, so I'm going to focus on those kinds of uh, things more in the in the next go around. Not that we didn't focus on them before, but I'm going to kind of put those in prime place. And also, I want to make our carbonation system a little better. You know, there's a bunch of like tweaks and things, uh, depending on the people I'm working with, new techniques might be available to us that weren't before because I was

[32:46] so, I might not be as, uh, uh, vehement about not using some techniques. I don't know, look, will we use garnishes? I don't know. I doubt we'll use a lot of garnishes. We're never going to be a garbage heavy cocktail bar with garnishes, but I don't know. it's yet to be seen So it's not that it's a sore subject. It's just there's certain things I can't say, and I found also that, like, until you have something concrete to say, it's usually, you know, best not to say much at all,

[33:13] right? It's true. Yeah. Jeff from Los Angeles writes, uh, hey, gang, I've recently gotten to brewing. I'm thinking about using a circulator to do a brewing bag all grain setup during MASH, running the circulator outside the bag and probably with a hop sock. do you think about that word, hop sock? What does that mean? It's like, you know, like a. like a dance you go to in high school? Now you have like at the hop. like going through my head, but no, it's like it's like a bag to hold the hop so that they could pull them back out again. Around the circulator as insurance in case anything escapes the bag. It looks like a nova tacitly approves this based on the 2015 interview they did on brewing beer with the

[33:50] Anova. But the owner's manuals, for each of my circulators, I have a poly-science professional, and in a Nova

[33:56] one, state that they shouldn't come into contact with food in quotes. I also contacted a nova customer service, and they said no to what was done in the article. So what's the deal? Is this safe to do with either of both my circulators? If so, is there any particular cleaning that you recommend before? or after to ensure long life for the circulators and that no off flavors are parted to the word? Thanks for your help. FYI, you, meaning me, Nastasia, yelling at you, Nastasia, and

[34:21] Peter during the carbonation segment a few weeks ago was some of the most best comedy I've heard on the podcast, Jeff from Los Angeles. Also, a stand corrected, the Blue Man episode, which was the not safe for work, was even funnier. So there you go. not a family show. So here's the thing. There's a bunch of reasons why people don't say things are food grade. I can tell you this as an equipment designer. One, they simply don't want to pay to get it certified as food grade.

[34:49] So, for instance, the original poly-science stainless steel circulators were not didn't have NSF approval, even though everything in contact with the food

[34:58] was, in fact, food grade. Now, there's 2 issues that you come across with well, there's a bunch of issues. A, is it gonna, is the food gonna harm the unit? The answer in most of these cases is no. You don't want to clog it, right? So you want to make sure nothing can clog the circulator part, but in general, no, the food's not going to hurt the thing. Two, although I forget which one it was, but one of the lower priced circulators would not circulate oil. You remember that, Stas? you at that with me? Yeah, it was Wisconsin. It was in Wisconsin. We were doing that demo with Johnny and Hunter and we couldn't get the one circulator to go in oil because we were doing that oil water test.

[35:33] anyway. I think that's either the viscosity was a problem or one of the sensors was like, this is weird and it didn't sense right, so it wouldn't work, but that was oil. So anyway, so there's is the food gonna hurt the unit? No. And then there is the unit gonna hurt the food, and this can be in one of a number of ways. One, the material itself could be unsafe for food contact, i.e. poisonous, or what most people worry

[35:55] about is oils, uh, from bearings, or, uh, plastics, leeching out, uh, nasty stuff into the food, right? So that's the primary concern. In the old circulators, there were no, like the stainless steel

[36:09] polyscience ones, there were, there was nothing in contact with the food. The bearings were all up top and it was all just a stainless steel impeller. There was literally nothing but stainless steel in contact. So I'm going to take that one as the base. And also, the newer polyscience ones. They're not rated for food, but the plastic, I believe, is food safe. I had this conversation with Philip Preston, but it was years ago. I can't speak about the plastics that are used in the Anova, but I will say this. In general, most of these designers would only ever specify food grade plastics simply because why wouldn't it

[36:41] cost a little more, but in general, they know that people are using it for food contact. And even if it's not, even if they're not going to go get the ratings for it, they would make it that way anyway, if they're good people, which most of them are.

[36:52] Okay, so back to what we were talking about. And the jewel, I don't know. Do we ask Chris Young on the jewel, whether or not, we'll find out, because, you know, he sponsored the show, in fact. So we'll find out whether or not that one is a food grade. But the materials in general are food grade. They're in contact with the material with the food. So that's not an issue. Even if it is a food grade material, you have to get special certifications. The factory charges you more for those certifications of food grade. And finally, you have to get NSF approval for it, which is, you know, an actual certification, which also costs 10s of 1000s of

[37:25] dollars, because we're going through it with the centrifuge, getting our NSF approval. Um, so there's that, but the difficulty in getting the NSF approval isn't solely based on

[37:34] the, um, um, materials it's made out of, but also how easy the material to is to clean.

[37:42] So any portion of the unit that can't be disassembled and cleaned in a way that the people who are certifying it are happy

[37:49] with means that it's not going to get NSF approval. So in fact, even the centrifuge is another example, certain design parts of the centrifuge are actually not ones that I like.

[37:58] I hate them, but I have to have them there because the factories tell me that I won't be able to get NF certification, for instance, unless certain parts can be broken

[38:06] down and washed separately. So a lot of whether or not something is rated for food contact might be whether or not

[38:12] the NSF people said that it could be washed out. Now, that said, that doesn't mean that you can't wash the stuff, even if it's got like crevices. It just means it's more difficult to clean out. So as long as you're willing to take the time to clean it out, I would feel safe serving that stuff to my family. What do you think? Yes. Okay. Andrew writes in about pork. Uh, I think I think, yeah, Andrew writes it about pork. I wanted to apologize for ripping on Dave the other week for disliking sweet tea. If I had known that he respected Eastern North Carolina barbecue so much, I would never have questioned his like of

[38:44] a dislike of sweet tea. And for the record, if you get sweet tea in one of those amber colored glasses, it's guaranteed to be too sweet.

[38:52] That's what we were talking about those now. In fact, I'm staring at some of those amber colored glasses. Thank goodness they did not serve sweet tea in this establishment. Although they do, basically, they serve that lemonade here as a concentrate and you have to add water too. What do you think about that concept? Do you like the fact that you get more lemonade for your money? No, no. It's expensive lemonade. Right, because you're supposed to mix it with water. They don't tell you to mix it with water. That's the thing. don't tell you mix with water. So, like, a friend of mine was over yesterday and someone was serving them coffee and they have this way they're like, they're serving the coffee and the coffee is too cold for his taste. And they're like, we want to serve it at that temperature. He's like, I just want my coffee hot. If you're going to serve coffee at some non-standard temperature. Standard temperature for coffee in the United States is piping hot, like crotch, scalding, McDonald's suing hot, right? So if you're gonna serve your coffee at any temperature other than that, you have to be like, the guy's like, but then you

[39:42] have this, you have this happen. Hey, I want a coffee, right? And then you're like, sir, I don't know. Are you sure you want a coffee because the coffee would serve as like kind of like lukewarm? And he's like, what do you mean? He's like, and then you have to go through the whole rigmarole. This is why it's hard to do anything that's outside the norm when you have something that already has like a fundamental, like everyone knows the way it's supposed to be served. There's going to be some mishigosh. But I don't think you want to have that happen after the person has a cup of coffee that they think is too

[40:06] cold. Because the guy that I was at dinner at dinner, he was like, he's like, I don't care. Where's where's the hot coffee? What can I do to get coffee that's hot? Do you like coffee that's not hot? No. You like it hot? Right. Back to Andrew's question. As I mentioned, I live in Boston. I'm unable to cook outdoors, and I have trouble smoking food indoors because of the poor circulation in my apartment. I miss Eastern North Carolina barbecue terribly. Uh, I miss going to a pig roast with one of those big oil drum grills and just pulling some meat off of a carcass.

[40:38] What do you think about pulling meat off a carcass? That sounds terrible. Yeah, but it's fun though. Any advice on replicating it here? It probably goes without saying that I can't cook a whole pig in my closet size kitchen, but I want the spicy, sweet, vinegary, smoky, meaty flavors of

[40:51] Eastern barbecue pork. I'm completely open to covering my cooking slash smoke detector if it could help, but I'm not sure what the best way to do this is without endangering myself or losing my security deposit.

[41:02] I have a baby sized oven. Ooh, cooking babies, terrible. Terrible. A circulator, a torch, an EC whip, a crappy coil, electric stove, and a toaster oven, if those would help at all. Speaking of my circulator, I was given an A nova precision cooker circulator. I want to use it with other fluids, such as oil and vinegar, but also don't want to ruin this wonderful gift. I know officially, I forgot this was even here. I shouldn't use anything with water, but I'm wondering if you know enough about this specific circulator. Let me know if I'm safe to use other fluids. So I can't remember whether it was the Anova or the sand stair that wouldn't pump oil. Uh, but it came back to life, so you're not going to hurt it. by doing the oil. It's not going to hurt the unit. I'm gonna put it that way. Um, I'm still catching up on the cooking issues podcast, but I've learned so much for you guys. Um, it means a lot to amateur cooks like me that, uh, someone like yourselves interested in our questions. Keep on being great. Andrew. very nice. Okay. So, what would I do? So here's the thing. So let's just get over what talk about traditional like North Carolina style pulled pork. So you're supposed to do in the real world. I mean, like old school, what you're supposed to do is chop wood, burn wood down to basically

[42:10] coles, put a whole hog on split, onto, you know, on there and cook it. And I think flipping once, I think, for many, many, many hours at a low temperature, uh, basically, uh, you know, breaking down the collagens, forming a nice, uh, what they call like

[42:29] a bark or crust of, of, uh, of dryness around the outside. Then after many, many hours, the inside is moist and tender, the outside. You hack it up and you put a mixture of vinegar,

[42:41] um, and, uh, cayenne pepper and regular pepper, uh, you know, over it and you eat it. Okay. So, The good news about replicating this at home, and a lot of people get really bent out of shape about how to do it, is

[42:54] basically almost any low cooking technique is going to get you the internal structure, internal taste of the meat to be relatively accurate.

[43:03] So you'll find online many people doing uh, um, slow cooker recipes or doing

[43:07] kalua style where you're wrapping the pork in uh, aluminum foil and throwing in an oven. And what that is doing is allowing you to get the high temperatures without drying it out too much. The problem is, you're not going to have, you're not going to have that crust on the outside. So people can get around at 2 ways. Now, if you're going to do it in a vacuum bag, which you can do, uh, you know, um, circulate it, the problem is, is you're never going to get a pulled pork

[43:33] texture doing low temperature. You're always going to need to do a higher temperature in order for it to break down. So if you, even if I cook, like, let's say, short ribs or pork, uh, or pork

[43:43] belly uh, for, you know, days and days and days. So it's very soft, but I do it at a low temperature, the structure of the meat is never the same. It doesn't render out in the same way. So the structure of the meat is never the same as kind of a traditional pulled pork. So what I would do is get the traditional cut that people do when they when they do a single

[43:59] cut and that's the Boston butt or the pork shoulder section. Now, you can eat, you can go wet all the way, but you're never going to dry out the outside of the

[44:09] meat and it's never going to have quite the same thing. So what you can do is you can either, you can do a, a, you know, rub it down with salt, you can use a liquid smoke. The good news, I mean, I don't, but you could use like a liquid smoke. The good news about North Carolina, specifically Eastern North Carolina barbecue, is it's smoke-esque, it's cooked in smoke, but it's not smoke-e. In other words, it doesn't taste overly smoked. So you're not going to require a lot of it. It's not like a heavy smoke cookery, even though it's in smoke for a long time. So you could, you could put it in a low, low oven, you know, look up, you know,

[44:44] Meathead Goldwyn's recipes on this. You could do a combination of wrapping in foil, and putting in an oven, letting it come up, then take the foil off, and then let it flash off. I would do some maybe some salt beforehand. And that's it. So you could definitely do it, do it inside. But I would look up. I haven't done that specific one, but I do it similar to the way they do a clue. What? I keep talking about pork or I'll say... One minute. Oh, man, Pedro called in from Lisbon about melon pan, you know, that kind of thing. And I actually have some let me see if I can get through this. I also had one more question, I guess I'm not going to get to on, uh, Jeremy on measuring alcohol. Jeremy, I'll get to you next week on measuring alcohol. Let's see if I can bust through this melon pan question. Good morning, Dave, Ms. Lopez, David, in the booth and fellow members of the chat room. I'm Pedro from Lisbon, Portugal. And last June, I visited Tokyo and Kyoto as part of my honeymoon around the world. There we tasted Japanese melon pan, and since, and I want to try, it's

[45:42] still good. I want try making it at home. And a melon pan, by the way, is like a bread dough, like a typical

[45:48] Japanese, like semi-sweet bread dough encased in a cookie dough and baked. That's what it is. You like that idea? No melon inside. Okay. Okay. if you saw it, you'd know it. However, I follow the recipe to the tea and already bake them twice with different results. I would like you to explain if possible why the difference in the outcome. On both times, the outer layer, so this is the cookie layer, was difficult to work with, being very sticky and brittle, and I couldn't make a uniform layer. Does this have to do with the butter quality as those fellow listeners from the bakery in Seattle had the problem? Does the butter with salt without salt of any difference and could that explain the issue? I don't think so. On the 1st time, the bread dough also contains dry milk powder, by the way. On the 1st time I didn't use dry milk powder in the bread dough and realized on the 2nd time with the dry milk, the dough is lighter and more fluffy, what's the role of dry milk in the

[46:34] bakery, and these are from this recipe, site called Japanese cooking 101, their Japanese basic bread

[46:40] recipe and their melon pan recipe. Once again, thanks for the show. Pedro Pivo. Okay. PS, you should visit Lisbon. Yes, I should. I would love to visit Lisbon. I love Portuguese wine. I love port, and I also love Portuguese cheese. Did you ever go to Portugal? No, I want to go to Portugal. I really do. So anyway, short answers to your question. Your problem with the cookie. I looked at the recipes and let's hit the cookie dough 1st because in case they rip us off the air. The video that they shot for the cookie dough. I don't know what they were doing in the video because the cookie dough they made looked fine, but the method they used for making it was terrible. They obviously didn't cream the butter and the sugar enough. You want to, 1st of all, take your butter out of the fridge, don't bother warming it up, and according to Stella Parks, you know, they, you know, Baker, who writes for

[47:30] serious heats and has their own blog and all this other stuff. In fact, you shouldn't ever let your butter get above 68 when you're creaming. I don't know, I haven't run these tests, but she swears on 10 sacks of Bibles if that's the case. But here's what I do. I take the butter out of the fridge, I hit it with a rolling pin, turn it 90 degrees, hit it with a rolling pin a bunch of times, turn it

[47:47] 90 degrees. I go all the way around until it's malleable but still cold. Throw that into your KitchenAid or equivalent, hopefully with a scraper blade on it with a silicone

[47:56] scraper. If not, you have to scrape down a bunch of times. Cream the heck out of that for minutes with the butter and the sugar to whip air into it. plasticize your dough. I think your main problem was that it was kind of too dense and wasn't uniform and

[48:10] structure, and so it was brittle. And also when it's when there's not enough air whipped into it. Once you chill it, because you had to chill the dough to roll it out, it's going to chill such that the outside's going to be too hard and the inside's still going to be too soft.

[48:23] So, in other words, uneven chilling might be an effect and the denser your dough is, the less nice it's going to act when you're rolling it out once it's chilled. So anyway, so cream the heck out of it. When you add the eggs, scrape down, and whip whip those in till they're fluffy before you're adding the flour. And I think, uh, along with not over chilling it, chilling it for a longer period of time, but not as hard. like don't freezer chill it. I think is gonna make a big difference on it because with more air, it's gonna be more plastic. It's gonna work better. It's not going to be brittle. I don't think it's your butter. I don't think it's the salt. I think it's strictly that if you follow the recipe the way they did it. They just didn't cream the butter for their cookies properly. As for the milk powder, um, the function can be different, um, milk, uh, depending on what's going on, whether it's a home powder or not, if it's

[49:08] a home powder, it has fat in it, uh, and the fat is going to tenderize, but in general, uh, as long as the enzymes have been deactivated in milk, which it usually

[49:16] is. I also don't know whether Japanese bread baking people 101 are using UHT milk, which has been completely deactivated from enzymes, which can reduce gluten, or whether or not they scald the milk beforehand.

[49:27] They call for lukewarm milk, but the milk powder in general, you get a browner version because of the sugars. you're adding extra lactose. Typically, you get a fluffier and softer product when you add milk powder.

[49:40] The actual mechanism, I'm not sure of. Anyway, so I hope that helps, and we'll get to the other questions next week on cooking issues.

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