[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. I'm Damon Bolte, 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 Issues coming to you live on the Heritage Radio Network every Tuesday from, you know, when it was

[0:38] to like about one o'clock, broadcasting from Roberta's Pizzeria in Bushwick. Call in all your questions too, 718-497-2128 at 718-497-2128. Uh, join as usual, witness Dasia, the Hammer Lopez. How you doing? Good. Yeah? Got Dave in the booth. Yo. And we have Paul Adams formerly of popular science. Hello. No longer at popular science. No longer. So is it the science is the science is not popular or science is still popular. I am however unpopular. So, up until very recently, Paul was the editor of uh, popular scientist web content in general, uh, but he most especially was their drone

[1:30] editor and their food editor. Yeah, not drones and food. Although I was discussing yesterday, Nomad, the restaurant nomad might be the 1st, I mean, I haven't spoken to them about this, but it makes sense that they would be the 1st like drone operated pepper grinder.

[1:45] What you think? Why does that make sense? Because, like, they're always at the cutting edge of that kind of thing. And like, you know, you want like pepper to just kind of appear. You don't necessarily want a waiter with a giant pepper grinder. Drones kick up a big downdraft. Well, this something has to be worked on. guess. What about an overhead pepper gantry, like an X, Y, pepper gantry, and like an X,

[2:09] Y, truffle shaving gantry, and an X, Y, like fresh Parmigano gantry. It just goes overhead and just... What do you think? Dial in the coordinates of the plate. Yeah, and just hit that. We love that. wouldn't you love that Yeah. I think drones are optimal for slicing meat. Well, you mean fast rotors. Well, you know that the people have worked on the butcher robot, but the butcher robot is actually one of the most difficult robot problems that exists because, in fact, one of the interesting, if you read mechanization takes command

[2:41] by, what's his name, Siegfried Gideon, which is kind of the classic work

[2:45] on, um, the rise of mechanization. Like, one of the interesting things about assembly lines is they were

[2:54] all, like, 1st really apply to food preparation problems, like baking, but also, uh, things like butchering pigs. But the problem is, is that unlike things like guns and cars, they can't be fully, fully automated because pigs themselves aren't widgets. You know what I mean? Well, we've tried to widgetize the pig as much as we can, and the chicken and whatnot, but still requires some human intervention because just like a lot of stuff. So people have been working on the butcher robots, something they could actually robotically take a non-widget and break it down.

[3:27] So it's a it's a tough problem. There's ways to go. Yeah. But I think, like, hanging a prosciutto above the table and manually flying a drone into it. So shreds of it go everywhere. That's pretty hardcore, pretty hardcore drone. No. What do you mean? Like, prosciutto is tough and you don't want, like, hacked to bits. You don't want pulled pork. I could see you doing pulled pork. Like you throw a pork shoulder up in the air and fly a drone through it. You might jam the rotor into the pork, though. And not into a prosciutto? No, because it's more stiff. You could really just kind of have a grating effect. Stas, would you, would you burn a restaurant down there tending to do that with prosciutto? Would you just walk up to the restaurant and just like light your drink on fire and throw it in? Yes. Yeah, probably. Speaking of drinks Yesterday, I had my 1st of the 4 Mondays, I'm going to work at Oto slinging drinks. Anastasia hated the drink that I made for her. So I will say a little about it. Sounds great. I liked it a lot. I think other people liked it a lot. You know the Amaro Chicharo? It's like, you know, the central of Italy thing. So it turns out that if you add water to it, uh, and

[4:42] then, uh, the problem with the straight carbonating like Amaro spritzers is that they tend to lose body as they're diluted down, like the whole point of a carbonated

[4:49] Amaro spritz thing is to have kind of a low alcohol drink, right? So you're not clocking in at like 13%, 13, 14%, you're clocking in closer

[4:59] like nine, 10%, eight, nine, 10%. So when you're down there, in fact, this is exactly, yeah, it's right around there. So like the problem is, is that you start losing body, like viscosity. Now, you don't want to dope that up by adding sugar because the whole point isn't to be pounding a sweet soda is to be pounding something kind of refreshing and bitter and whatnot. The answer is, of course, you add glycerin. So... yeah, yes. you add gly, of course the answer. The answer is always glycerin. So you add it doesn't take a lot, by the way. So, like, you know, like a whole liter bottle of product, you know, would have like 15

[5:34] mills or so of glycerin or less. It might actually, it's way less than a percent. I put in like way less than a percent. So maybe it was 15 per bottle of chicharro. Anyway, so it's like not a lot. But it makes a noticeable difference. Salt, right? And then carbonated it. And then I served it with a squeeze with a lime wedge that you could squeeze in, and it tastes remarkably like a

[5:58] Coca-Cola strangely, even though the acid's not there, but the overnotes of it. So, so we called it Roman Coke. Get it? Get it? get it. It sounds tasty, dude. It's good. But for the 1st time in my life, ever, I served a carbonated drink over ice, kind of like Spanish style. So I put the ice into a Collins glass, stirred the Collins glass down, dumped out the extra water, poured in the drink, and

[6:23] Stassi's like, I don't like it. I just realized Nastasia hates ice. in her carbonated drinks. That's why she didn't like to drink. If I had just poured her the freaking drink in a wine glass, she would have enjoyed

[6:35] it and you know what? Like, crap on me for not remembering what Nastasia likes after all these freaking

[6:43] years. I was so caught up in like the fact that I was doing something I hadn't done before, that I stopped thinking about what Nastasia liked. Like, so, like, whenever, like, it's so crap on me, my fault, my bad. Last night, I was blaming her. I was calling her bad person. in front of people. which also true. But in this case, it's like it was totally, totally my fault. A lot of people don't like rocks. Yeah. Yeah, well, they shouldn't order a drink on the rock then. I mean, if it says on the rock. didn't even see it. No, no, but I know. Why would Nastasia think I'm going to serve a carbonated drink on ice when I've never done it in my life? So, uh, but on the other hand, like, because what's pathetic about

[7:24] it is that, well, you know why it is? is because I remember very unusual things that come up a lot. Like, so for instance, Cesare, Casella, friend, chef, salami maker, extraordinaire, uh, only enjoys sparkling wine. Really, he'll drink anything you hand him, but really what he wants is sparkling wine. And he wants that with ice in it. That's what he wants. So I get it for him because I don't want him to have to walk up and deal with some bartender person who's

[7:52] like, you want what? So I always, as soon as I see him, if I'm working by, just get it for him. That way there's no sort of any sort of interaction, right? Because you don't want to have to have that interaction. But I feel, I think I've said this on the show before. I think Cesare has earned the right. Really anyone has earned the right to have a drink exactly the way that they want it. As long as you know what you're getting into. Yes. Within reason. Like within reason. Like, you know, if someone wants to do something that's literally violent revolting, you know, at

[8:23] a public place, well, they shouldn't do that. Huh. You know, like your ability to have your drink the way you want, like stops when I retch. You know what I mean? And certain things hurt me, but if I'm not a customer, It's not a problem. You know what I mean? Like it doesn't hurt you if you see someone having ice in their in their champagne, does it? Doesn't hurt me. They hurt you, Stas? To see someone do something horrible to it. You don't care, right? They're drinking it. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's still. What do you think about like when someone takes like a fine wine and dumps like Pepsi-Cola into

[8:59] it? Would you be like, would you just get up and walk out? It hurts me when people drink a fine wine quickly. Does it hurt you when I eat good food? intensely quickly? Yeah. Jiro dreams of fast. Fast food. That's basically fast, it's fast, casual restaurant. Would you really back? What? So the, I mean, I was dressed casually. Yeah, you know, Mark had to be dressed casually because he was still on the, he was

[9:30] still, yeah, he was his behind was still set on spray from his trip that he'd taken right

[9:36] beforehand. So, you know. Fast casual. Those, yeah, those formal... So they let us sit at that table forever to eat the cantaloupe? Was that what it was? Whatever it was. Yeah. But you know, like men's men's formal pants? Do you know they have a 2nd button on the inside that you can't see? Did you know that? Yeah. So like formal men's pants like have a little button over on the left side, like right where the thigh is, and I don't know why it's there, to be, to be honest, I don't know

[10:03] why why they have that. To even out the tension, I guess, from the button that's on the right side above? I don't know. So anyway, so you can't wear that kind of pants if what you need to do is rip those suckers down because you're set on spray. You know what I mean? That's a short situation. I'm anti-shorts. I detest shorts, but in that kind of situation or some sort of baggy thing. You had a lot of people there last night. I did. You were in your funeral suit. Oh, yeah, so, well, I was bartending in a 3 piece suit and everyone was like, oh, you look so nice. I'm like, well, I was at a funeral and they're like, oh my God, I'm sorry. I feel bad for saying anything about it. which was kind of the best. Uh, well, and from Nastasia's, you know, there's a Peter Kim who couldn't be here today because he's a tool. from the Museum of Food and Drake. I was gonna say, it wasn't his funeral, right? Yeah, yeah, no. no, not yet. But the, uh, I saw him last night. Yeah? His voice was very froggy. Yes, yeah, Froggy as in Little Rascals Froggy. Remember Little Rascals Froggy? Um, I forgot what I was going to say about Peter, but he was something about, what were we talking about? It'll come to us. funerals. funerals. So, but Peter wasn't involved. Wait, so you never did the cherry thing that you were going to do with the 3 generations. You missed out. Oh my god. That's totally right. Well, let me describe what happened. That cherry probably still exists. I got to text Gerard. He can't eat that cherry now. We were gonna just, so my stepfather's father, uh, like, uh, died uh, on Friday, he's 96, 96 years

[11:31] old. Uh, kind of an amazing guy up until uh, he was sick for about 2 weeks, maybe. Uh, so, you know, prior to that, 96 years old, born in 1920, ate like a horse, lived in his own house,

[11:47] uh, you know, loved, loved life 100% of the time. Loved life, was the last in a long line of butchers. So, like, for generations, basically there was an alternation in names. It was, he was Archangelo, Archangelo Carmen Adonisio. And then it went back, then his father was Carmine. His father was Arcangelo. The next father up, can you guess? Carmine. And they're all butchers from like these tiny towns, uh, you know, in uh, Avalino area in uh, in Italy and they came over, uh, the, you know, the grand, the, the grand, you know, my, what would be my great-grandfather, uh, Carmine,

[12:33] whose name went by Nanu, that was his name, Nanu. That was the name that they called him to his face. Everyone also had nicknames that they were called, not to behind their, but everyone. Everyone in the family has it. Like, and they're all mean, like, horses had 3 curls, like, all sorts of, some of them. No, I'm too young. Not worth not worth an epithet. So I wasn't part of the politics so much, you know, I'm sure I did, but of course, they never told me to my face. You know what? I should ask someone, like, what was what was I called? You know what I mean? If indeed I deserved a name. So, um, came over in 1908, saved up, bought

[13:08] a, a butcher, you know, a shop, it had his own shop in the, uh, in the north end of Boston in the 20s called Adonisio Brothers,

[13:15] because, and they would go. And so Gerard's father, you know, the, you know, um, Addy, Archangelo, Papa, who just died, he was the last generation that was running this kind of old style of butcher shop where they would drive a truck up, canvas colored truck, pick up live lambs

[13:31] in from farms in New Hampshire, come down to Boston, slaughter them, and then hang them up in the shop in the old days.

[13:39] So there's a picture from the 30s, which I, you know, if I get a good copy, I'll put it on

[13:43] Instagram of like sheep with the fur on hanging in the shop in Boston with a live sheep in the back that they were like, you know, not really talking about. Gerard, my stepfather remembers, like him bringing live goats in and the goats, like smashing, you know, one goat butted him, uh, and they had

[14:01] live, live, all this live, live, they're doing their own slaughtering. They would slaughter their own cows. Although I don't think they would go by necessarily their own cows. So they were like real old school butchers in the north end of Boston. And just

[14:13] crazy, insane stories about getting ripped off, like preventing getting, getting back, even if people that ripped you off. Like these guys would rip them off on the price of live lambs. So they would drive the truck in, and then they would put, they would have canvas in the back of their truck too. They would put all these rocks in like a hold in the truck that couldn't be seen. Then they would weigh the truck. Then as the lambs were coming off, they would like dump the rocks onto the back onto the

[14:40] ground. And then when they weighed it, they would have the difference in that because this farmer had ripped them off for something else on like a land that they had sold them

[14:47] before. There's all sorts of crazy. There's such crazy stories. I don't even know if I should get into some of the crazy stories. Like one of the crazy stories they would tell is that, you know, they no one wanted to lose any money. everything, everything was, you know, down to the tea. You bought a live animal and you sold every scrap. So like with cows, they would take the skins over and sell them to a tanner who would make

[15:11] leather. But with, uh, they, they sold a lot of meat to, uh, actually the Chinese community and

[15:17] the uh, Jewish community in, uh, in Boston. And so they'd hire a rabbi to come and do the koshering thing, right? So one of the things he would tell me is that, and this is going to horrify people. So prepare to be horrified. So like, what would happen is, is they would, like, they had to pay the rabbi to do the certification on the animal one way or the other. So in other words, like animal passes, animal doesn't pass, rabbi still gets paid, right? And this is good. from a rabbi point of view because you don't want the rabbi to think that it's like, you know, that their paycheck is dependent upon how many animals they pass, right?

[15:53] So one of the things they used to, uh, search for inside the cavity was that the, that I guess that the lung, the plural was not attached, right? Or something like this. So they used to know this, so they would make a small incision in the upper part that wasn't where they were checking and they would stick their fingers in and just verify that and separate out the plural lining from the thing so that it was all kosher. They

[16:15] would they would kosher the animal. So it's like, not cool, right? But in the same way, I kind of, I don't respect. I would never do it, but it's kind of an interesting story, right? The other thing is, is that Gerard's grandfather, so the

[16:29] great grandfather in the in the 20s, uh, 20s or 30s, made a bunch of brandied cherries, and I had one when I was a kid. They were still good in the in the like 80s, which is when I had one. And there's still, I think, 3 left. And now I have the regret. I wanted to have... you waited so long. You made the same thing. I wanted 3 generations of adanesios to get together and have the last 3 cherries, and

[16:55] now it's too late. We'll have to wait for another generation to have 3 generations for the last 3 cherries. Maybe we'll wait for the cherries to be a 100 years old. I'm not sure whether he still has the cherries. anyway. Hey, you got a caller in line if you want to take that? Yeah, call her. You on the air. Hi, this is Jeff from Las Vegas. Thanks for taking my call. Hey, how you doing? I'm great. I have a question about Canning. I'd like to do some canning for the holidays for friends and family, and I was looking at some recipes to do that. And they were really pretty simple recipes, things like strawberry, sugar, lemon

[17:33] juice, but they say that you can't double the recipe. And so I've been having a hard time figuring out, when can I double these recipes or not double the recipes? And I was wondering if you had an answer. Huh. Well, so, Do you have the recipe in front of you? I don't. Unfortunately, I don't have the recipe in front of me, but... Does it involve boiling? Yeah, so it's, it's, uh, water bath canning and, uh, you know, straight

[18:02] up breakdown, say like the strawberries add sugar, add lemon juice, cooked down, and then, and then process through water bath canning.

[18:09] Right. But in other words, there's 2 things that are going to go. There's 2 things that can go wrong with recipes that say you can't, well, three, I guess. There could be actually something that is like changes when volumes get scaled up and scaled down. But usually what happens is in a recipe that says, for instance, boil for

[18:29] 5 minutes. You're going to evaporate a different amount of liquid out of that recipe in 5 minutes than you would if you were doubling or tripling the batch, right? So one place a recipe can go wrong is at that stage where you're doing the initial boil with the sugar and the acid and the strawberries.

[18:46] In that case, you know, I think, obviously, with a larger batch, you're going to need to boil for the same surface area of pot, you're going to need to boil a little bit longer because what you're worried about there, and this is not a safety issue.

[19:00] Like what you're worried about there is that the texture of the product is going to be right.

[19:04] So I typically don't ever listen to what a recipe says in terms of minutes

[19:10] anyway on a boil for something like a jelly or preserve. I always just pull some out and test it and take a look at it and see whether it feels right. Better recipe. The problem is also you're not typically boiling those kinds of things until they're a very high temperature because you're not relying on the sugar, you're only relying on the high solids to help set the pectin.

[19:31] it's the pectin that's doing the setting, right? So it's hard to test from a temperature standpoint usually. So, uh, that's one reason why people can say that recipes can't double, but you can kind of get a feeling and I always just, if you boil longer,

[19:46] like unless you boil a long time, in which case you're going to hydrolize the pectin because of the extra acid

[19:51] it's in there, uh, you know, boil, like having it simmer for a little bit longer to evaporate off more water is not going to really hurt you.

[19:59] It's probably going to give you a little bit of a harder set, the same way that if you're doing like a cranberry sauce, and you, and you don't, you know, boil it long enough, you don't get rid of some of that water, then, uh, you know, you get a looser set on your cranberry than if you evaporate more water

[20:12] off or use a wider pan is another thing. Now, the 2nd thing is more of a, and by the way, let's be honest, like jams, it's going to be mold. It not going to be something that kills you. It's going to be that you didn't pasteurize and get rid of all of the mold. So there's no reason not, as far as I can tell, and please, someone in the chat room, chime in here, if I'm wrong, but there's no reason not to double treble,

[20:36] quinjibble out, whatever you're going to do to it, a recipe, as long as the individual containers in which you can are all the same size, they should react the same way, as long as the vessel you're canning in, so if you have a pressure canner, can actually bring all of that product up to the right

[20:55] temperature. right? So as long as long as your stovetop has enough thermal output to get a larger canner up to canning temperatures, right, then everything should be okey-dokey, as long as the size of the cans themselves.

[21:11] Now, if all of a sudden you're going to be like, well, I have a jar the size of a number 10

[21:14] can, well, then, you know, that's going to take a long time to heat up in the middle, and that's not, that's not so, so good. Um, but you're dealing with what I like to call a non-deadly product, right?

[21:27] Strawberry with sugar and lemon juice is not going to be deadly. At worst will, you know, you won't kill all the yeast and you'll get some sort of nasty, yeasty, moldy thing in it.

[21:40] But, you know, your chances of death are very low. Well, because of that, I mean, our chances are 100%, right? But, you know what I mean? But in terms of that, I'd think you're okay. So it should be more of a textual thing then because you're just not getting the evaporation in the larger quantity. That's my guess. What do you think, Paul? Yeah, I agree. I'd say it's not just texture, but the more water you cook off, the better you're preserving will be if you

[22:07] have. Yeah, I mean, sometimes, though, like preserves can be too hard. I mean, like, you know, it depends on the kind of level of pectin, and then also the other problem is like, sometimes you don't

[22:18] want, I mean, also like the tech, like the more the strawberry breaks down, but you need the strawberry to break down or you won't release the pectin.

[22:26] I mean, there's no wind there, right? I mean, it's like, you just don't want a canned, uh, super unreduced jam because it will not

[22:36] keep a lot of water. And nobody. Yeah, nobody wants also, nobody wants a really watery jam. Nastasi, what happens when someone hands you a jam and it's so watery that it like rolls off the side of your toast? the worst, right? You're like, who's this person? Why did they make the jam? Why didn't they just go buy smucker? Smuckers, does it run off my toast? Is that what you say yourself? But if you're gonna make a small batch, you can make a batch and see how your strawberries work, because you can always add pectin if you need to, you know? Um, And you can even cheat. You can even cheat. Even though you're not supposed to reset, you can always just dump more reboil it and do it, but I mean, not ideal or add more sugar. Um, is this helping or no? I think so, yeah. It's the best explanation I've gotten so far, so, and it gives me a good place to start. Alright, cool. Hey, Dave, is anyone in the chat room chiming in on jams

[23:27] and doubling? Let me check and get back to you. All right, we'll check and get back. At the top of the call, Dave, you said there are 3 times when you can't scale. Will you... Oh, the 3rd one, well, the 3rd one is that there might actually be some reaction,

[23:43] right? So like if you, you know, if you're like uh, trebling the amount of uh, baking soda in

[23:49] a in a Myard reaction thing, it might not scale right because, you know, you're probably added a little more than you needed that 1st time around, but doing that 3 times in a row might not scale

[23:59] outright, you might not break down the extra. there might be more residual. I mean, I don't know. I'm just, there might, there is, there's a possibility, I haven't run into a lot of things that don't scale, but the, another thing that's interesting, like in cocktail batching. Um, the other problem is, is that when you're scaling, you're usually saving a product longer than you would otherwise.

[24:18] And so when that happens, things can change. And so sometimes people think it's the scaling that went wrong. It's like, well, no, it's the whole time that went wrong. You know what I mean? So there's, there's, whenever you're messing with a recipe, it's just you have to analyze, well, what is different now from when the 1st time that person made this recipe,

[24:37] right? So is it is it the fact that you're using different equipment when you scale it up? Probably. Is it that you're using it in a different way, i.e. for a different length of time, maybe. Uh, you know, and those are the main things. It's like what actual process variables are changing when I'm scaling it up or down. Typically, most molecules don't know how large their environment is beyond a very small

[25:00] scale. And so, you know, they can't know what's going on. Yeah, chat room is also saying scaling up without scaling the pan size will change the water loss. Yeah. And I think that's pretty clearly what's going on here. But I don't know why recipe people aren't clear on that. See, this is the problem. If you're ever in a position where you're going to write a recipe, right? Your editors will beg you to make it as simple and stupid as possible. And I think in a way that they're right, there's a whole bunch of people out there in Amazon

[25:30] Review land who don't want any actual information. But then I feel like that's not us, right? The people that are listening to this show or me, like, we would just prefer to be told quickly,

[25:44] right? Like, this is why this is like this. Like, you could do it in the introduction to the book. You can do it, you know, a short thing at each individual recipe. Um, you know, C-section on scaling recipes, right? Just on and friends, C-section on scaling recipes, but no one ever does this. And so then they're like, they, they, they, you know, they propagate these, um, they propagate these weird, like,

[26:08] myths and and especially people who are technically minded. If someone says something specifically, like, you may not double this recipe. right? It's more like, well, why? You know what I mean? And then if they don't write the, the, the, you know, the section to go with it, this is why, you know? And then you put a big thing at the top of it that says, you make, if you're not gonna ever think about recipes, ignore this section. Yes. But if you are not an enemy of quality. Read this section. You know what I mean? Nastasia, I think. Yep, go ahead. I'm sorry, I guess the last part of the question for me then would be, is there any particular instance you can think of where it would be dangerous to try

[26:45] and and double. Like, I understand what you're saying about the evaporation and surface area and whatnot, but is there anything I should be looking

[26:54] for, particular types of ingredients or something where I'm actually creating a dangerous situation by kind of doubling or something beyond what the recipe calls for?

[27:03] Well, the only time you're going to get dangerous situation. I'll give you an example Like, let's say you were to take a cube of mushrooms that is like 5 feet on a side and pack it solid.

[27:20] And then all you are going to do is pasteurize those mushrooms. So you're not going to kill the botulism in it. not going to wipe out the spores. So you heat that very, you know, slowly over time, and it's

[27:35] a 5 foot block, it's going to take a long time for those mushrooms in the center to get up, you have a very good chance of developing some botulism toxin on the inside of that 5 foot block of mushrooms that you're cooking at a low temperature, because you've made the recipe too big and you can't heat it

[27:52] adequately, and the recipe, if the recipe then said, okay, well, I'm going to take those mushrooms up to, you know,

[27:59] boiling and hold them there for a day, you would actually wipe out the botulism

[28:04] toxin. So that wouldn't be a problem. You still wouldn't wipe out the spores necessarily, right? But it would probably be safe to eat at that point, but just taking it, whereas taking mushrooms in a thin pack, bringing them up to pasteurization, temperature, or whatever you want, and dropping them

[28:17] down, is 100% safe in that situation, as long as you're not trying to hold them, you know, as long as you realize you haven't wiped out the botulism. You like, you know, they're safe to eat at that point, right? Not to keep forever. So, you know, that's the situation. Or, like, for instance, when people cook, uh, too many uh, pieces of meat together in a bath and they get bag bloat because they have local bacteria growth because the product doesn't heat up fast enough because they've overloaded their equipment,

[28:43] right? That's where the thing, that's where it usually starts getting unsafe. It starts getting unsafe when there's equipment overload. Um, uh, and so that you're not adequately heating in the times or with the profiles that the recipe,

[28:56] uh, you know, the recipe asked for. Most of the time, that is also still just a quality issue, but sometimes that can be a safety issue. Give another one. Let's say you're using, um, you know, a curing salt or something like this. If you scale up your recipe to the point where you can no longer efficiently coat all the pieces of meat with your

[29:17] salt if you're doing a dry salting, Well, now you've got a problem. You know what I mean? Or if you increase, or let's say you're making a sausage and you have to do your primary bind, but all of a sudden, you know, you've been making recipes in a KitchenAid,

[29:31] uh, you know, uh, and now you have to scale it up and you're doing it in trash trash cans, you know, like 50 gallon trash cans and you no longer can move

[29:40] the, the, uh, the product around it. Well, you might get big chunks of meat at the bottom of that thing that don't have adequate salt. Don't have adequate whatever. So it's like, when I'm scaling up, usually I'm asking myself, am I introducing a problem based on the, and scaling down

[29:56] too, goes the same way. Like there's some minimum amount of water, you can evaporate. So, like scaling down is actually, to me, the hardest, like, especially with sauces, trying to make a very small amount of something is almost impossible because, you know, you heat up your

[30:09] pan and by the time you get around adding the next ingredient, the other thing has turned

[30:13] to, like, caramel burnt caramel at the bottom of your pan. So it's like, to me, scaling down is a bigger problem, but you're always thinking

[30:19] about, um, how the shift is changing what's going on with the product. And I think as long as you're thinking that way, you'll be okay. Well, thank you very much for your time. All right, thank you. Have a good day. You too. So, uh, you want to do the announcement or some questions? Announcement, this announcement. And now, okay. So, so here it is. So, Nastasi and I are planning

[30:44] on, uh, hopefully on Black Friday because we just can't stand not ruining Thanksgiving for ourselves,

[30:50] right? It's just like we can't stand it. Like, anytime that Nastasi and I have what might be a decent Thanksgiving, We're like, you know what? Uh, let's ruin that. You know what I mean? One way or the other, like, you know, maybe Nastasio will have a fight with her family or

[31:05] maybe like she'll... You'll serve Thanksgiving at 7 p.m. which by the way is fine. And then like the, you know, it's like, you know, whatever, I'm going to get into this later. So the uh, so here's the thing. So, uh, we are planning on. So in other words, get ready for a Booker and Dax centrifuge pre-sale to happen on the Black Friday.

[31:30] Now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And the reason why is that we uh, we are almost uh, done approving uh, the tooling. So, uh, we need to pay for the tooling. It turns out that you need money to pay for the tooling and a bunch of other things, but we are going to, we have the prototype that

[31:54] is fundamentally a production, a production prototype, pre-production prototype from the factory. So we're going to show you a video that it does 500 milliliters at a time. It's a little bit bigger than a cuisinart food processor. It also has the ability to do continuous centrifugation.

[32:13] So we'll have a video out about that. And I have tested all of the relevant, some of the relevant recipes, so I can talk about that, a little bit in advance. But for chefs, it's going to be really great for herb oils. It's fantastic for herb oils. You can do it in large quantities for bar. Obviously, you have, you know, all kinds of citrus juices, like strawberry juice. It can do gustinos, um, you know, it's, uh, I mean, it's, it's, it's going to be a lot cheaper

[32:43] where, where the retail price, we think, we think, we think, don't hold us to this. We think the retail price is going to be $7.999. But then we want the pre-sale price. Don't hold us to it. $6.99. Yeah. So, and what we're going to do is, is we're going to have a, um, because we're going to do a pre-sale, probably not a Kickstarter, I won't want to say who we're going to partner with, but you know who they

[33:09] are and you probably like them. Uh, but the, uh, because Nastasia and I are going to talk to them, in fact, like later this week, to iron it all out. So hopefully more news next week. But the, um, what we're going to do is is, is that unless we have a certain amount of interest, we're just not going to do it at all. So we're doing, we're basically saying you sign up for the pre-sale, if we get our go number,

[33:32] um, you know, of sales of pre-sales, and we need to sell quite a few,

[33:37] like, I forget what it is for our go number, but it's not a small number because it's expensive, really expensive to make one of these things. Um, then, uh, then you're charged your pre-sale, and then we hope to deliver, uh, sometime in like June next year in

[33:53] that in that area, but more details to come as the Black Friday approaches. And good news, it will work in Europe with a Transformer. You like that? So it will work on 50 or 60 cycles, but it is a 120 machine, but all you need is the

[34:09] transformer and we'll figure out which one you need to buy, so I don't want to hear. It's not like the sears all, where it's a free international nightmare. It's going to be much easier to work with. Is there anything else I should mention about that, Stas? No, that would be, did you say that it's only going to run at that price for a certain amount of time? Yeah, until we make the number we need to go. And then you'll never be able to get it at that discount price again. Never again. No, and also to revive something else on the on the Booker index. Oh, it's very, more of a cooking issue stitch. Nastasia started work again on the enemy of quality shirts. Yes. Yes, look for them at the end of the month. Now you have 1st of the month going through my head. United Song? Yeah, I saw, right, Paul? Sing it. I will not sing 1st in a month, then I cannot get it. Is it a Broadway? It is. No, it's no, it's the 1st of the month. Okay, let's get some questions. You want to take another call or? Yes, call her, call her. Call her, you're on the air. Hey, y'all. How you doing? Um, here's my question. I'm doing great. Thank you. How are you guys doing? All right. After Thanksgiving, I've got to do some huge format cooking, and I would prefer not to have to buy a gigantic

[35:24] pop, and buy gigantic, I mean, like four or five feet across. Ooh. So I'm wondering if I was just just by, great, thick gauge sheet of steel from Metal Shop. Is there anything I have to do to it before I could lift? To go in contact with it for cooking, and the same question kind of goes to, like, rebar and stuff like that. Is there anything I could do to it? Well, it's possible, even. Why does the rebar need to touch the food? Well, I asked that partly because I don't really have a menu in place yet.

[36:00] I was gonna kind of figure out what my cooking tools are gonna be 1st and then build a menu around that. So, really, it's like either or is one better, one easier to prep for food. Got it. Well, you can get used food grade barrels, right? And the problem is most of them are coated with, with paints, you can burn them off. I don't know if cheap source of like, you might be easier just to get like a giant, cheap, used pot somewhere. But the answer is, is that cold roll steel is fine. You have to rub it, scrub it, and then, um, you're

[36:37] gonna have to probably season it, or it'll, or it'll, uh, rust out. You can season it with, uh, uh, if you get spray grease, like, like

[36:45] Pam and a weed torch, then you can, um, you can

[36:50] season, uh, anything you want. It just takes time to season the stuff out. Rebar, I haven't studied rebar in a long time. Rebar is often coated with stuff. Um, you know, to have it bond better with the concrete. So you're definitely not going to want to use the green rebar. But I don't know whether or not regular rebar. By the way, for those of you, rebar is the is the steel pieces that are meant to reinforce concrete and they have that weird kind of pattern on it. And rebar has this one advantage. It is so cheap. Rebar is so cheap, and you can weld to rebar, but I just don't know whether anything's in it.

[37:31] Um, you know, that is going to cause you problem. Cold roll steel. Fine. So really quickly. So you think if I bought a food grade, like 50 gallon drum barrel that I could have somebody just cut that thing in half and use it like a pot? Oh, yes. Yes. I mean, where would I get one of those in New York City? I mean, I'd have to look, like, these are expensive, but people sell them stainless, but you can get them used.

[38:01] Like, I don't know. I've never I haven't bought, like, I used to, I mean, back when I was younger. I used to just get ones and just burn them out, but

[38:11] like that was, it's disgusting. Have you ever burnt out a 55 gallon drum before? It's disgusting. It's like really bad. And like the paint fumes were just going and going and

[38:24] going. So we like, we were doing grills. We were doing the old 55 gallon drum grills, and so we just, uh, torch cut in half, and that was a paint, that was a paint nightmare to begin

[38:34] with, just burning the paint off when it was torch cutting, because we were, we didn't have a plasma. We were using old school like oxyacetylene. No one had plasmas back then. And, uh, I mean, someone did. I didn't. And then we just put them up on cinder blocks and just filled them full of stuff and just burnt them for hours and

[38:49] hours and hours. Nasty, nasty. And we were in our greats for it. We were just using like that expanded mesh stuff. Actually, stuff works okay. I have no regrets on that. But, um, like, that's the kind of place if you're going to do something like that, you put rebar underneath it to, like, support the great, and that's where you want to worry about, um, worry about that. But I don't, I'm pretty sure that those drums will still hold water once they're cut open.

[39:18] You want to do it the long way? I mean, that's what I would do if I got one, just because it would give me a little bit more option. I don't know how the top seals work on. I mean, there's some that have removable tops on them and those things have elastrimer steel, so I would stay away from those, but the old, like the ones that are actually just crimp shut, those things should work. At the very least, if you're boiling, you could just put some silicone ceiling on the inside of that

[39:45] thing and they'll stay, they'll stay good to go, especially if you don't need to use it forever.

[39:48] You know what I mean? Um, and in fact, I want to say that I saw someone doing nixtimilization and cutting half 55 gallon drums. I think I saw someone doing like large scale nixtamal, underfired, horizontal, half cut 55 gallon drums. Gotcha. Yeah. And you know what? You know what the good thing about boiling in that shape is a lot like a wok? you get a reduced surface area as it goes down. So because you get reduced surface area as it goes down, it's easier to kind of control kind of what's going on.

[40:21] So if you're flat all the way down, then, uh, you know, once you get low, you can go from like, I'm okay to, I'm hosed really quickly because it doesn't kind of taper down. And also for expansion, you have more expansion

[40:36] space, if you're boiling in something that has sloped sides, because the higher up you go, the more volume you get per unit height.

[40:47] And so it kinds of help on helps for self-boilover problems. And the insides of those things are relatively easy to clean out.

[40:55] The, the, the, the line of gunk around the rims is a little can be a little bit tricky to clean out, but the actual slope part of it is relatively easy to clean

[41:05] out. But you're going to want to weld probably something like angle or something on the cut edges for 2 reasons,

[41:13] one, to provide stiffness to something that's no longer supported around itself, and

[41:18] 2 so no one cuts themselves on the cut edges. Do you have a plasma cutter? Gotcha. So just really quickly, like I have no idea where to start. Where would I find one of those? I mean, I'm going to find it like a Jetro or like restaurant Depot or am I going to find it at a pickle shop? I've gone on, well, pickle shops tend to use, um, HDP or, uh, you know, um, I think they use those plastic ones, which aren't going to be good for you. Um, I once looked on Craigslist for this time. And like on Craigslist, people have this problem where they have like boatloads of these suckers like sitting around or

[41:52] eBay, uh, or one of the, before I go to McMaster and pay full price, there's tons of people around who, and if food was shipped in it, you know it's food grade. You know what I mean? It's like, you don't want to buy one that someone was shipping hazardous waste in.

[42:06] Yeah, you know. Yeah, but I would check, check Craigslist. I looked on there once because I thought the museum was going to need a bunch of these things. We didn't end up buying them, but, um, and did anyone in a chat room have any suggestions? I mean, New York is such a pain in the butt to do anything. And, I mean, I love it here, but it's a pain in the butt to do physically do or make anything. Yeah. Anyway, thank you very much. All right, good luck. Let us know whether you found anything. All right, have a good one. All right. Let me see. We should get to the ones we had before, right? Jeremy wrote in, hey, cooking issues, thanks for all your work, researching and teaching methods to make food. Delicious food. I took out the delicious because, you know, if you haven't had my food, I didn't know whether it's delicious or not. And by the way, speaking of delicious, next week I'm teaching a class at the International Colony Center on Cocktails, your time is running out to sign up running out. We're doing liquid intelligence. Should be fun. I managed to stop into your last night at Booker and Dax, and I have fabulous plate of country hams. Had to leave early, so I hear we miss the after party. Oh my god, now I have that song going through my head, reignition, best song ever. Best song ever. You even like that song, Stassi. Yeah, she said yes. She grudgingly said, yes, I do like that song. Looking forward to hearing about your next incarnation when it's ready. We didn't talk about this, did we last week? Yeah you did. I did? I already talked about measuring alcohol? Yeah. You did. Oh, well, so I don't need to get into it, Jeremy, I answered your question. Jeremy, if I didn't answer your question, then get back to me. If Nastasia is just being like, I can't stand listening to Dave anymore. So, you know, I don't, you know, wanna hear it. Uh, hey, uh, Dave and cooking issues team. This is Quinn from LA. I heard you briefly talking about triple extraction chicken stock in one of your back episodes that I'm intrigued enough to try to want to make my own using a coon recon pressure cooker. I've made pressure cooker chicken stock many times, but only extracting flavor in collagen from the bones once. With double or triple extraction, do you pressure cook with a chicken bone slash carcasses, then strain the stock, then add a fresh batch of chicken bones, maripois, and other

[44:00] romatics at a fresh stock, then pressure cook again. If you could please elaborate more on the procedure. It'll be grazily appreciated if they can't seem to find recipes online. Thanks for your help, Quinn. Yes, that's how you do it. So here's what you do. You, you, well, if you're making, if you're browning it, which I almost always do. I don't really make white chicken stock very often. You make white chicken stock, Paul, almost always brown, always brown. Me. Thats me. Uh, so you don't, you, Yeah, you put it in, you smash as many bones in, and you just fill up to cover the bones. So you're trying to make the richest stock possible, so you don't want to add too much water. The classic mistake everyone makes with stock is they try to make too much of it and they add too much water and then they end up reducing it down, which they think not what you want to do. So you pack as much in there with some mirepoix, more onions, obviously, although it's going to increase the sweet. The problem with pressure cooked stocks is that onion flavor drops

[44:49] off, and then to counteract that, you increase the onion amount, but what that really doing is increasing the sweetness. So you have to be careful on that. Don't triple mirepoix, right? You're mainly looking to meet it up. So what I would do is... Sounds like a scaling problem, Dave. Well, this is a repetition problem, right? Every time like what you're trying to, you're not trying to add that much more veg, right? So after the 1st extraction of veg and the pressure cooker, and then we're talking short stocks. So not like, like you're trying to do like very fresh tasting stocks, so you're not doing like a 45 manufaction, you're doing shorter extractions on the

[45:21] bones. So maybe you're not pulling everything out, but everything tastes like really good and nice. So you're doing like 25 minutes. Like 20, 25 minutes, 2nd ring, let it come down, naturally. Otherwise, you don't want to emulsify the fats in, so don't do the fast release on it, right? And then you strain it out, fresh carcass, uh, maybe not mirepoix, hit it again, then taste it to see whether you

[45:43] not you want to add any more fresh veg to it, and then you can, like, you know, tune the stuff out there. Maybe throw in a little pepper at the last one, bring it up, and then you'll have like a very, very extracted, uh, like

[45:56] very, like rich uh, stock and you can do it all in like an hour and a half . And it tastes good. Is it efficient? No, but usually what happens is I end up not I'm not cooking at a restaurant. I don't need that much stock in my house. And I tend to accumulate a lot more chicken carcasses than I have need for stocks or soups.

[46:15] And so a lot of times, I'll just do like a double or a triple, I I'll get a much more flavorful, I

[46:22] think, in my opinion, flavorful, like fresh, bright stock. Uh, because I just don't need that much of it. Does that make sense? Yep. All right, let me see. Oh, no, I stopped Wrapbox. Do we have more time for more or are we hosting? No, no, Nastasia says we're done, but Dave says that we can go. All right. Greetings from the UK. First things first, thanks for your great show. Wife bought me a copy of Liquid Intelligence. And he enjoys it, which is good. But since we don't have time, I won't read the rest of it, but I'll answer the... Oh, by the way, I answered a tweeted question regarding dried peaches and hustino yields. So, you know, dried peaches, lower Justino yield quite a bit. So he tried pre-blending the dried peaches with 75% of their weight in water and the yield went up dramatically, so which is good. Good to know that worked. So here's the question. He's opening a new, he or she, he or she, he or she. Nick. He's opening a new bar. Uh, and he says, we're uh, we're doing a new bar. considering adopting a prediluted pre-chilled batching approach for the stir drinks on the menu. These are likely to be about 60% of the menu. The A is a speed up service and insure consistency. I like both of those things. The restaurant is located in a small rural town where the finding and keeping of skilled and capable staff is likely to be a permanent challenge.

[47:33] That actually, therefore, seems to make a lot of sense, is this will also, uh, simple,

[47:37] uh, make it more simple to uh, do staff training, et cetera. The restaurant bar would have a total of 50 seats and one to 2 bartenders. The issue we have is that suitable refrigeration kit is expensive, so like the Randell that we use at the bar. Conventional fridges don't appear to be cold enough, and conventional freezers are too cold. So my question is this. It would appear that I can use like a PID refrigerator, like a brew

[47:58] controller, to adopt a set point of, let's say, -4 to -6 Celsius with a conventional freezer, whose highest temp would normally be about -15 Celsius. The unit has a default 3 minute setting for compressor delay protection. Do you have any experience with these type of plug and play controllers? And is there anything we need to be aware of? Do you think they'll have an impact on the compressor lifespan that makes the whole batching approach a nightmare waiting to happen?

[48:20] So, It has a protection issue. So the problem with compressors in generals, you don't want to do what's called short cycling, where you turn them off and turn them right back on right away because the compressor has

[48:30] to like push against, uh, it's just a nightmare. It's just like really shortens the lifespan, which is why they have a 3 minute cycle on it. Um, I think 3 minutes might be a little extreme for, for, for, uh, kick in. You could probably deal with a couple minutes more. I think if you're using a conventional chest freezer, the nice thing about a conventional chest freezer is when you open it, the cold air tends to stay in it.

[48:53] And so I think that should work fine. And those conventional home freezers have the advantage that they're super cheap.

[49:01] So, like, if one dies on you, you can just go buy another one and your PID stuff should be almost plug

[49:07] and play to get to go in. So I think you shouldn't have a problem there. What do you think, Paul? Sounds correct. What is the Randall cost? I don't know. The problem with the Randell is just we never got it. What's the word? Uh, service properly, so the gasket went bad. What's nice about the Rendell is like, the ones that we had weren't designed to drop the FX freezers, they're very

[49:27] accurate. They go up and down, but they're not designed to drop the temperature or something, they're maintained to, they're designed to kind of maintain it. They're, in fact, our big drawer igloo coolers. So you would open them and the temperature would stay very constant because the cold air would move in and out with the

[49:41] drawer and it's very well insulated, so you get very minimal temperature drops, which is good.

[49:46] So the more insulated your freezer is, which a lot of home chest freezers are very well insulated because they're meant

[49:52] for like, you know, hunters and whatnot who don't want to have a lot of energy input into it, and so they're fairly well insulated. Um, so they should work. You know what I mean? I think it should work. But the problem with reach and chess is that it's hard to get a 1st in 1st out system because the stuff lower is hard to get to.

[50:10] So you have a stock rotation issue, but whatever. can move right to left. Up, down, right left. No, it's hard to literally put stuff into one of those things and to have like 5 bottles

[50:21] tall. You know what I mean? lower in a rack full of your bottles. Yeah, and then go rack by racks. Yeah. There's ways around everything. it takes a little work. An alternative or for possible use in conjunction to reduce the opening of the freezer. What are your thoughts on the insert inserted insert refrigerated bottle well. So it's basically a bottle well that's refrigerated. The one that you showed me doesn't really go that low enough. I am looking into a similar problem, but I'm going to definitely move to a glycol, a

[50:47] glycol based refrigerant system that allows me to keep bottles exactly where I want them.

[50:53] So, uh, the wave of the future in terms of this and something I'm working on, like I say, right now is refrigerated glycol.

[51:01] Then you have to, like, obviously wipe the glycol off the outside. That's what those, if you go into a wine store and they have those little vortex chillers. That's all that stuff is, is refrigerator. I'm pretty sure that's all it is, refrigerator glycol. Not using salt, right? You ever looked into those things, Paul? I assumed it was water. Water? How's water? Well, you think they're actually going at that high of a temperature? For wine? I guess. I don't know. Well, I'm going to do glycol. You know, properly. Food great. I guess I could do salt, but salt's so corrosive. And then, yeah, I don't know. Anyway. All right. So then next week we will get to, we add some questions, or maybe we don't. We talked about melon pan last week, too. No. Melon Pan was the one I missed? On butter? Son of a gun. All right, next time, if I haven't talked about the melon pan from Portugal, give me a call back and we'll talk about it next week. Go vote. Cooking issues.

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