[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.

[0:15] Hello and welcome to Cookie Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of cooking. live on the Heritage Radio Network from Roberta's Pizzeria in Bushwick, Brooklyn, every Tuesday from Roughly 12. Roughly 1245 or, you know, one depends on how we feel. Uh, yeah, how you guys doing? I got, I got with me today. No, Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. Yeah. She's in Chicago. She got to fly out yesterday in that awesome, awesome. wind and rainstorm we had in New York. I think out of LaGuardia. I am amazed that they let her fly out. I mean, LaGuardia. planes fly out of there at all. Well, you know, it's like, for those of you that don't know, like, we have 3 major airports in New York. One of them is in New Jersey, so go figure. And it used to, actually, it's a lot easier now to come in and out of Newark, which is the one in New Jersey because now you can kind of like Uber back and forth, but it used to

[1:10] be you'd take a New York City cab to Newark. First of all, I mean, we also have in the studio replacing Nastasia Lopez for today only, the evil cocktail overlord of the universe, Don

[1:20] Lee. Don? brought the anger. I'm here to smash. Nice, nice. I hate everything. He's like, are you more, are you more Kylo Ren or more Darth Vader? Ooh, tough question. Defin more Darth Vader. angsty thing going. No, no dad killing thing. Just straight evil. I like that better. Skip to Anakin, too. Just straight Darth Vader. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, he was the worst. Anakin was the worst. Like that acting so unbelievable. Although, I just got an interesting tip. If you're going to rewatch the prequels. Watch it in a language you don't understand with subtitles, apparently a lot better. I mean, if you can't hear his acting? Yeah. So, you know, you just got subtitles, like watch it in Farsi. But in dubbed in Farsi with English? Dubbed in Farsi, English subtitles. Well, I mean, I don't know the guy. Christian, what's his name? the dude. Hayden Christensen. Hayden Christensen. I mean, has he acted in anything where he's good after that? It's horrific. I mean, Natalie Portman's a good actress and she's horrific in that. So I don't know, man. Has anyone ever watched the Phantom Menace all the way through? I mean, painfully the 1st time it came out, not since then. Exactly. I've tried. on several occasions to make it all the way through. Have you ever watched the 2 hour long review of the Phantom Menace on YouTube? This guy he reviews all 3 of the prequels, and he also, like, has the, there's this subplot of him being, like, uh, a Buffalo Bill-esque serial killer because truly only someone like that could review those movies, but it's really, really good.

[2:45] Yeah, does it start like the Phantom Menace with a bunch of weird trade rules? It's like it's almost like what's going on in politics right now. It just starts with a bunch of trade regulations that nobody understands. And then like muddles on, and then all of a sudden, Darth Maul comes out and gets killed in like 10 seconds, right? I mean, it's like at the end of the movie. I mean, the only good thing to come out of that movie is the Duel of the Fate song. That's a great song. John Williams. Oh, wait, John? I don't know that. That's the song when they're actually fighting at the very end. But is it better than like the actual like Darth Vader theme? Of course it can't be better than that. But it is in the pantheon of, you know, Star Wars songs, one of the greats. What about the plaintiff Rebel Alliance song? That's awesome too. The Hunt theme, the loop theme, Leothemia. That's good, right? Yeah, light motifs, all about that. Yeah, yeah. You know what? Is there anyone better than him? At what he does? Anyone? I don't know. Whoever just did a Rogue One did a pretty good job. Wasn't him? It wasn't him. yeah. He's still alive, though. He's still alive. Kind of true. didn't they get him? Because it's it's a Star Wars story, not the official Star Wars. But when Darth Vader was in it, they used the original, but then it changed very

[3:52] quickly, if you listen carefully. They just, well, I remember when it, I don't know why we're talking about this. Anyway, back to the quickly on our airport. So now you can take the Uber back from there, so it's not so bad. But we have 2 other main airports in here. We have John F. Kennedy International Airport, which is where a lot of the international flights come in. Also terrible airport. Worst. Here's the worst. Like when you fly internationally, they make you walk basically the length of an entire country to get from the airplane to

[4:20] the, uh, where they check you into the country at customs. Then they make you stand in 3 separate lines. In the name of efficiency. They make you stand in 3 separate lines. You have to go in the line to talk to the computer, to tell it what you brought in or didn't, then wait in the line, to hand that piece of paper to an agent who stamps your passport so that you can wait in line to go to a customs person who actually verifies that they're going to search you or

[4:44] not. Wait, how is it that you don't have global entry yet? Uh, okay, people. So you can pay $100 and go get this thing called global entry. The problem is you actually have to show up somewhere to do that. You can't just walk and be like, here's my $100. Yeah, but you don't even have to go to an airport in New York City. There's a TSA office in lower Manhattan. First of all, are you a citizen of the United States, Donnelly? Of course I am. Am I a citizen? Am I a citizen of the United States? Yeah. Yeah. Should I have to pay my government to not be inconvenienced? Should it be a rich person's freaking right only to not have to go through hell? Someone who scrapes their nickels together so they can finally take that international freaking trip, they should have to pay

[5:23] $100 so that their government doesn't ram a freaking ramrod of

[5:28] nasty, time waste, suck crap up your, you know what? When you come back into the country. Listen, clearly that shouldn't be the case, but, you know, this is the world we've got. So what are you going to do? And besides, most credit cards will pay for it for you, as will any frequent flyer service. What do you mean, frequent flyer service? If you got frequent flyer status, don't pay for it. Again, you have to be a frequent flyer, you have to be a special person. Listen, you're a frequent flyer, you fly all the time. But I don't sign up for anything because I can't do paperwork. All right. We're talking about this off the air. All right. So anyway, so here's the other thing about John F. Kennedy International Airport. It costs 60 to $80 to get there. I mean, that's just it, unless you take public transportation. And there's no convenient public transportation at John F. Kennedy Airport, because you have to take, at a minimum, at a minimum, a subway to another train and then walking in between. That's minimum. You can do the express bus to Midtown. To another. Oh, yeah, but then you have to get to Midtown. I don't live in midtown. So that's your problem. And by the way, you're going with bags. You bags. And do they do things like not have, like, lots of stairs? They have some convenient way to get around those subways and things? No. No they do not. It is not built for people to use, right? I believe they're all ADA accessible. They've got elevators. There is no... Also, there's traffic. Like, okay, there are maybe 15 to 20% of the time during the day when you can get to and from JFK without traffic, but

[6:50] your plane never lands or takes off during those times, right? So you spend like 40 minutes in a car, and then 40 minutes into your car ride, you pass

[6:59] LaGuardia on the way home, which is the airport is incredibly communicate to get into, but it's a freaking nightmare because planes never take off or land on time because the runways are too short.

[7:09] Correct. How are we a major city? Listen, this is what we got. We got a, you know, over a 100-year-old subway system, the floods, we're gonna, you know, close down tunnels. There's lots of problems here. But how are we like, how is this okay? Like, how are we like who we are? Listen, you know, if we had a major war that leveled the city and we rebuilt it from the ground up like Rotterdam, it'd be nicer, you know, or like Seoul or Tokyo. All right, all right. Listen, I'm going to need this later and I didn't write it down. So please remember this, please remember this name of this article, people. Later on, we are going to answer or talk about a question about soybean, uh, and pulse proteins, yuba skin, yuba, bean curd skin. And we're going to talk about this article. So if you are interested in protein of other legumes and pulses, just remember this article. It's a review, so you can just get a handle on what the proteins are by Joyce

[8:01] boy and its pulse proteins, colon, processing characterization, functional properties, and applications in food and feed, a review in food research international.

[8:11] And you can find that, you can find abstracts to it on the internets, or if you can steal access to

[8:16] a university, you can get it that way. I forget what year, let me see what year was from. Uh, 2010. So, you know, less than a decade old, relatively recent. Call in your questions, leguminous or not, to 718-497. Oh my god, I forgot the number. 7184972128. 718-497-2128. So I just got back from Oregon, from Portland, and I saw them, the dogs actually hunting

[8:44] truffle. So now I know how to do the truffle hunting. And I have to say that the fact that I've not been able to get my dog, one of my major, my large lab to successfully hunt troubles. It not his fault. I think I was looking in the wrong places here in Connecticut. My my truffle contact uh, Charles LaFever in

[9:01] in uh, in Charles Ruff, my other truffle contact in um, in Portland. They they tell me, they insist that I have truffles here in Connecticut, that we all have truffles everywhere, truffles everywhere, just you

[9:12] got to know how to look for them. But non-culinary truffles. Potentially. Unclear. Unclear. Unclear. I know a lot more, well, look, we talked a lot about truffles already, but I have a lot more experience with the Oregon truffle now, so if anyone cares to talk more about, uh, you know, non-European truffles, like

[9:28] non-Milanosporum, I, paragord, and non-magnetim, I, white alba truffles, you know, let me know. So what were you doing wrong with your dog? Is it like going too close to the base of the tree, like looking in the wrong place? Truffles don't like like a lot of like debris and wood and garbage on the ground? Like truffles like forests that are relatively recently planted? They like, uh, relatively, um, they

[9:53] live in conjunction with disturbance, right? Because they're on these truffles anyway. relatively young forests and they don't like, I think, a lot of competitive, like, shrubs and wood and all this kind of other garbage on the ground. Um, you know, like the land I have, I was looking in very rocky. I also don't like waterlogged ground, so you have to look in places that aren't completely waterlogged. Um, so anyways, I got, I just got an eye of where they were looking for this stuff in, in Oregon. So I feel like I have a better handle. I'm just envisioning you, like, you know, bribing your sons to go like rake the forest to like clear

[10:26] the debris now. Well, what you need, I don't know. In other words, I don't know if that'll help or it's just whether it's it needs to be kind of just like that naturally. Like the where we were was like the classic, uh, like Doug Fur, like needles on the ground, soft duff, you know, the ferns here and there, but not a lot

[10:42] of like, you know, crazy downed stuff. You know what I mean? But so the acidic soil is okay with them, then. Is that what Doug fur grows in? I don't know. Like, I think everything depends. I gotta, I gotta, I gotta, I gotta look it up. But so the dog that I was with, Dante, and they use some sort of precursor to the poodle, the, like, I forget what it's called. It's called like the lake Romanolo or something. It looks like a poodle, but it's apparently older, and I don't know anything about it. But so Dante finds a truffle, does the mark, puts his paw down, does the initial scrape. I was like, don't get, stop. And I got down on my hands and knees and put my nose to the dirt. I got the minty smell. Dude, it's not mint. This one has like everyone's different, right? It's like Rosemary's baby. Every truffle is different. But the, for those of you that have seen Rosemary's baby. But these ones have like kind of a sulfur, almost like horseradishy allium hit to them, along with some other aromas. It's like once you smell it. See, the thing with this is once you smell it, like fresh out of the, you know, ground, it's like, okay, I got a lock on what the Oregon white truffle smells

[11:42] like, but what I'm here to tell you is, is that a human being with their nose to the ground can smell it.

[11:46] And I'm sure if you were to, like, crawl on all 4s constantly or, like, you know, wheel yourself around, face down on a car dolly all the

[11:55] time, that you could find these things too. You know what I'm saying? Sounds like a challenge. Let me tell you something else. Smelling the ground in a dug fur patch is nice anyway. Like, there's no bad smells there. You know what I mean? It's not like putting your, you know, nose to the pavement in the lower east side. It's not just like a big giant pile of filth. Turn it into like some kind of like yoga meditation thing where you have to go into the forest and do

[12:19] this. Oh my god, we totally should. It's like you find X number of truffles and you've reached this certain level of daily enlightenment. Yeah. We can make a whole religion around this. Side business, selling truffles, you know, selling enlightenment on the other side. And let me tell you, you become much more doglike when you're on the ground. So, like, you know, you're sitting there and if you ever watch a dog outside? Yeah, they they do the, they do the, and they blow out. You do the same thing when you're doing it. You're like, okay, I feel like not. I feel like I'm saturated with whatever's right here. You do the blowout, and then you start again. You're like, okay, without even thinking about it, you're like, oh my God, I'm acting just like a dog. Right, but the nostrils themselves and the dogs are very different. So they've got that little like kind of curly cue. It looks like a comma almost, where the when they do blow out, it creates this interesting, like, vortex so that they're really directional smelling versus us. like kind of everywhere. Harold McGee, one of his favorite studies to bring up is this study, and I forget what it

[13:13] was. It was at some UC school, I don't know, like 15, 20 years ago, something like this,

[13:18] where, and so I've read studies that basically say, yes, dogs are better than humans, but it's not like, I don't

[13:24] think it's orders of orders of magnitudes better than humans. And I think there's some contentious kind of argument over this, but I mean, obviously they use dogs to smell things that we can't, right? So I mean, there you go. I don't know whether dogs can smell more compounds, strictly speaking, more numbers of compounds we can or their sensitivity to those compounds, but there was a study where this

[13:43] person in California, I forget who it was, drugs, some chocolate, aroma, or it could have been chocolate, but I doubt it's just chocolate because chocolate aroma through the ground, and then put flashlights on students' heads, and then overhead took a picture of them at night, trying to sniff their way, and they found

[14:02] it. And you could see them like, you could see them do that kind of like, like, um, like the hunt porpoise back and forth until they hit the right trail and then staying on, deviating

[14:10] off, coming back. So humans can do it. Yeah, we can do it. It's just, my understanding was from a pure anatomy standpoint. The dogs, the snouts are longer. So the way that they experience smell is more, uh, it's more, uh, was

[14:23] it uh, orthonasal, then retronasal? you know, for us, it's a lot of it is like, you know, associated with when we eat. And so it's that retro nasal smell. With a dog, it's primarily that orthonasal from the outside directly through the nostrils. And the shape of the nostrils make it more directional than us. Well, yeah, Lieberman, the human evolutionist, his theory,

[14:41] I don't know whether it still has any credit or not, is that we are the retro nasal, like, royalty of the animal world, whereas everyone else is, yeah, completely orthonasal.

[14:49] So like dogs, you know, like dogs, when you make dog food, you're not worried about how it smells when they're chewing it. It's all about, you know, getting it in the face getting it in the face. You know what I mean? Right. Yeah. Anyway. How the hell do we get into this? Airports? Uh, truffles. Truffles. Star Wars, truffles. Yeah. weird. Um, okay. So Quinn wrote in. This was last week. Back in November. I asked you a question on how to make a double extracted chicken stock. I didn't talk about this. Did I, Dave? The nuts from Star, a Star chest or did I, I mean, from Chef Steps? Don't think so, no. I had a different nut question. talked about, right? Yeah, yeah. So I recently tried making stock using the double pressure cooker technique you described and it worked out nicely. Great. The flavor was more concentrated than any stock I'd previously made. There was also a huge difference in the body of the stock. As I chilled it a nice bath. It solidified into a gel, whereas previous stocks I made there would be some gelatin, but it would still be mostly liquid. Thanks for the help. I have a question about a chef's steps recipe for deep fried, glassy nuts. What do you think about that title, Don? Deep fried, glassy nuts. Who doesn't like some glassy nuts? Glassy nuts. What about classy nuts? Well, what about classy glassy nuts? Damn. We have so many people ask, like, like, the I have a feeling like everybody

[16:08] knows is like they can in their heads just say these nuts at this point on this show with the number of times that we've had like these nuts

[16:14] references. I always think McGee's nuts now. Oh, because we did it on that show, McGee's nuts. Yep. Yeah. That's replaced Deez Nuts in my mind. So when you actually hear Snoop Dogg saying it to his like girlfriend on the phone, you hear him saying McGee's nuts? Yeah, my mind just pastes McGee's in over what he's saying. Wow. That's kind of cool. Yeah, it's a testament to the power of the show and radio. Can we get Martha Stewart to ask Snoop to say McGee's nuts? That would be amazing. In the Snoop Dogg, in the Snoop Dogg way? Yeah. That's going through my head. Here's another one that goes through my head all the time. Whenever I think of total eclipse of the heart, the song, in my mind, the word heart is replaced by Jean-Paul

[16:57] Sarte, and vice versa. Whenever anyone mentions Jean-Paulsart, I sing total eclipse of the Jean-Paulsart in my head. Sounds like an existential nightmare. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there you go. Boom. Anyway, so the recipe is Chef Steph's tips and tricks, deep fried, glassy nuts. Um, so briefly, what they do is they take the nuts, uh, whatever nut. I think they do pecan in their recipe. But I think it works theoretically on any nut. And they blanch it for a while in water. So there's there's for a couple minutes. There's 2 things, by the way, that that blanching step is doing. It's adding some moisture to the nut, which is gonna help in the next procedure, but it's also leeching out the tannons. So if I were you, you know, but it's not going to penetrate too far, so you're not going to leach out too much of the nuts flavor, but like basically all of the all of the stuff that you don't like when you're roasting, like those kind of burnt bitter notes, a lot of that stuff is coming from the skin, which is also kind of high in tennis, especially on something like a walnut or

[18:03] prechaun. Anyhoo. So you blanch it for more or less time, depending, I guess on how much crap you want to leach out. And then you instantly throw it into, um, uh, they do it in salted water too. So I guess they're salting it at the same time, which is always a good idea. And they throw it into powdered sugar, but confectioner sugar, I guess, which also has some

[18:20] cornstarch in. I think they use confectioner sugar. It's interesting. I doubt that the chef steps guys bother making their own powdered sugar and any non, any commercial confectioner sugar you have has cornstar chant because that's how they keep it from caking together. So, excuse me, after you pull it out, you drain it, then you shake it like a shake and bake in

[18:40] a in a Cambro of, um, of this powdered sugar, this confectioner sugar, and then, uh, you fry it, right? And so the purpose of frying there is, I guess, to keep them

[18:52] separate, frying at a rather low temperature. You're keeping them separate from each other, so not like on a baking rack, and you're also preventing stuff from dripping off because any watery stuff is going to adhere to the nut inside the

[19:04] oil because it has no reason to go off into the oil. And at the same time, you're evaporating the moisture off of the surface out of the nut entirely to dehydrate it again. And at the same time, you're taking this slurry of sugar that you've made on the outside with the water and the nut and anything that's coming

[19:22] out, and you're melting that into a glassy coating, when it's done, you pull it out, you dry it off.

[19:28] Uh, so, uh, that, oh, man, my phone decided that I was done, done reading. So it stopped. So anyway, so the point being that, uh, see what happened to him then. I followed their procedure, blancing the pecans in salted water for about a minute, then strained and immediately dumped them into a Cambro of powdered sugar, shaking

[19:44] the coat, coat well before frying in 325 degree hot oil. Several of the pecans had sugar that crystallized, resulting in a clumpy coating. Very few ended up looking glassy. Any ideas as to what went wrong, thanks Quinn from LA. Uh, so I looked at the chef steps, um, their website, and uh, there were like huge numbers of people who were like, worked like a charm, worked like a charm. And then occasionally people would have this problem. Typically, what's going on in this problem is, there's, I haven't tried the recipe, so I can't say, but typically what happens to me when you're cooking sugar is either, um, either you've never fully melted

[20:25] this stuff to begin with, and so a crystal stays there, and then it just crystallizes as it cools down, or two, um, you have something that does fully melt out, but a crystal then gets reintroduced back into it, and it

[20:40] just crystals and glasses over. So, you know, one would be, you know, something that never works right. So, like, you know how, you know how if you take, um, if you take sugar and you don't get all the crystals off of the side as it starts to boil, then, uh,

[20:54] if you, and if you stir it while it's doing, you can hit a crystal into it, you can crystal out your whole batch, once you make it to a certain temperature, because you're not hot enough to melt everything out, you're not hot enough to go 100% caramel, but you're not, uh, you know, you're cold enough that you can stay in that super saturated state.

[21:09] You're basically putting the, I'm not being clear. You're basically putting the sugar into a supersaturated state and then introducing a nucleation site. That's what's happening. So my guess is, um, maybe you're draining it too much and you need a little more water on it. Um, That's my guess. I don't know. what do you think? Are you a sugar cooking person, Don? Not so much of a sugar cooking person. But it's it sounds interesting. I wonder if it has to do with the kind of the powdered sugar that he's using as well. I mean, is the cornstarch really going to affect it that much? Is that going to make things better or worse? I mean, if I had to guess, I would say it would make it more

[21:47] crystalline because it's it's non-sugar that's in the in the thing. My guess is that it's not going to matter too much. Maybe someone on the chat room knows about this, Dave, and can, like, weigh in on this. Another thing is, I mean, your oil temperature, if your oil temperature was right, the oil temperature surely can affect it, but I don't

[22:09] know. I don't know. I don't know how. I specifically say it's powdered sugar. So, I mean, these guys are pretty specific. No one sells powder sugar, though. He's super fine. Super fine, not powder. Super fine, not powdered, Don. Super fine is not powdered sugar done. But if that is in fact the case, The best way to do it is to put super fine in like a

[22:32] Vita Prep and just blitz the hell out of it until it's a powder, but it's mean, you can try it. But I have to look really closely on the, what's it

[22:39] called, on their video, and you can tell by looking at the way it shakes, whether or not it's, yeah. But, you know, don't be don't be substituting super fine for powder, man, not the same. Listen, if you have to choose one or the other, I'd rather take the new cornstarch. In real life? you know, I don't know. I guess it's probably helpful for some things. What about for glazes? I'm sure it's helpful in glazes. I use nothing but confectioner's sugar and glazers. Yeah, but that's like, you know, if you want that specific thing. I always want that. don't like glazes on cakes? I just, I've had too many cocktails where someone reads the recipe, sees powdered

[23:11] sugar and then uses confectionery sugar and then now I've got... You should never use that in a cocktail. what I'm saying. What do they use it for? Wrong. just shouldn't use it. But what do they use it for? It's just they don't understand. What recipe calls for powdered sugar? Like old recipes that, you know, they're not looking at modern recipes. So they'll they'll read a Jerry Thomas style recipe. See powder trigger, and then... There's no place for cornstarch in a normal cocktail.

[23:34] Which is why, for me, if you have to choose, go super fun. because cornstarch, you're just going to make it cloudy. Exactly. And if, you know, I forget what it is. I think it's not low. I think it's something... It's not as high as 10%, I don't think, but it's not an insignificant amount of corn stars that's in

[23:52] it. So I would imagine also that it's going to leave a, this, I make a guy. Definitely texture. Once it's dissolved. Yeah. And it's this little, you know, slurry on the bottom as you drink the drink. It's a nightmare. Why would anyone do? enemies of quality. Enemy music quality. Hey, you can still go buy that shirt. Oh, by the way, next week, uh, when Nastasia is back, hopefully we have more information on uh, the spins all, how it's going, we still have the campaign going, uh, going well. might have some news next week about our plans. We're talking with our factories in China in advance of the

[24:28] Lunar New Year, which is this weekend. So basically, we're getting our last licks in before the lunar New Year, and hopefully have more on dates, timings, updates on how much money we've had pledged to

[24:42] date and how much money we're actually going to need going forward, and then we'll talk more about it. Yeah, for people that don't know on the manufacturing and China side of things, Lunar New Year is the largest voluntary migration of people that happens every

[24:55] year and everything shuts down in China for almost an entire month. Yeah, well, and the interesting thing is even though the celebrations are probably what, like a week or something like this, I was talking to the guys. And so like, what you have is, like, in a lot of factories in China, people are, they go to the factories from, they live a long, way,

[25:13] way, a long way away. And they go and they live in the factory dormitory style. We're talking like, you know, young people like 18, 19, 20 year old people. Yeah, you know, working in these factories. Not like young, like, you know, like child labor young, but like, you know, 1st job young. And those group of people, sometimes when they go home

[25:35] for, you know, for the Lunar New Year, it's a long way to get there and maybe they didn't like their

[25:41] job so much. So they just don't come back. And so, like, it takes a long, long time for the factory to get back up to speed because they don't know what percentage of their workers are

[25:50] going to get back. Um, and, you know, maybe that'll change. Uh, later in time uh, in China as as fewer and fewer workers uh, become migratory or come from other, you know,

[26:02] provinces. Um, I don't know. It's an interesting and strange phenomena, you know what I mean? interesting. Yeah. Are you guys manufacturing in China at Cocktail Kingdom, right? We do something there, yep. Yeah, not everything, but some, right? You see you hearing any rumblings yet about the whole Trump thing? Not anything that specifically affects us. Yeah. I'm interested because I'm working there. I'm interested to see what happens. I kind of, you know, I wish I could make I wish I could make the spins all in the US, but we just don't have the quantity. You know what I mean? Like, this is what I think people don't understand. Like a small manufacturer, like me or like, you know, you guys a cocktail kingdom, be virtually impossible for a lot of the stuff we do to get the numbers

[26:42] reasonable. Like the U.S. were really good at making a couple and we're really, really good at making a lot, but anything that is not in automation range is

[26:52] like... Yeah, you can't. Like, you have to make enough of something to have it be automated for it to be viable here in the US, but then how many jobs are you really providing if you're going to an automated, you know, I don't

[27:04] know. It's an interesting problem. I wish I could. If you want to take a call? Yeah, sure. Call her. on the air. Hi, Dave. My name's Nick. I'm calling from UK. Hey, how you doing? I have a I'm good. Thank you, you guys. Yeah good. I have a cocktail related question. I'm trying to make a tequila and rhubarb sour,

[27:28] where I'm using the, uh, the rhubarb juice, um, both

[27:34] as, uh, taking the rhubarb juice, uh, using that, uh, making a syrup from that and also using it

[27:40] to, for the acid. But it's got, I've got a problem with the astringency. It's kind of really, um, if you make one drink and it's great. It's balanced between the kind of acid and the sugar, but If you then go to have a 2nd drink. 2nd one of it, you get that real kind of tannic drying quality uh stringency in the mouth. And I just wonder if you had any ideas on how to deal with that. Sure. So, let me go through your procedure. First of all, this is a heated rhubarb. Yeah, so the uh, the rhubarb is uh, cooked in about in a water bar, 60 degrees for an hour, uh, blended with

[28:18] pectin X and then uh, spun in the centrifuge to take that off. Um, and then, uh, so I then split into 2 parts and make, um, from one half of that make a, uh, 50 brick

[28:31] syrup and then essentially then make it like a, uh, uh, as if you were making a daiquiri.

[28:38] So, well, a one. 5 ounce of tequila and 3 quarters of... juice and 3 quarters of syrup. One and a half . I got to go two. Yeah, gotta go too. Anyway, well, like, let me ask you this. Well, maybe not, it depends. Yeah, you should go. Yeah, anyway, what? Let me, uh, let me, let me work mentally backwards here. So I've never cooked rhubarb at 60. Is that enough to have it taste cooked or does it still taste raw? It tastes cooked. Okay. Yeah, because raw rhubarb, which I've also used is even more challenging to use in a cocktail than cooked rhubarb.

[29:13] Um, I would recommend, um, I mean, anytime I have a a problem of astringency, I move to some sort of stripping regimen, but I would do it like on the juice itself.

[29:27] So, uh, caseine, like milk is a relatively gentle stripping thing, so you could do like a milk washing to it, uh, before you add

[29:35] the sugar. Obviously, there's a sugar will stabilize it. So, you know, it'll kind of ruin it. unless you want to actually make a milk syrup out of it, but then the problem is then you have to add a lot of milk. But, um, yeah, so a milk would, uh, would do it, um, a lot of other stringency removers are relatively brutal.

[29:53] Like egg white is a relatively brutal stripping agent. It like will just really tear the hell out of the

[30:00] flavor, script the hell out of it. Um, as a 1st shot, I would just make the drink with an egg white and see whether the egg white, if you have 2 of the, uh, just with your current syrup that you have right now,

[30:14] if, if it's something that can be bound with a protein, just making it with an egg white twice, it's

[30:20] going to change the balance a lot of your cocktail, uh, but it'll let you know whether or not, um,

[30:26] a stripping agent would help, right? Um, not, yeah. Sorry to interrupt, but I did a, I try to milk quash on it, and I like the results, and that's reminded me what the next part of the question is. Is there a vegan alternative to uh, using uh, a milkwash? Okay, well let me think about it. Have you ever tried a milk wash with soy milk? Sorry Mel. I haven't. I don't know. My impression, Don, you tried it? I haven't tried it, but I can imagine that that would work. Here's the thing. I don't know. Maybe someone on the, um, on the what's it called, we'll know on

[31:08] the on the message things we'll know, but, um, usually with soy protein. So it is a protein, right? I've never fined with it, my guess is that soy is... To coagulate soy, you add positive ions, right?

[31:28] You add calcium typically, um, or magnesium, like double positive, which leads me to

[31:36] gas that the soy currently has a net negative,

[31:41] right? I have no idea. I have no idea. I shouldn't even speculate. Like, I would try it, like, and like, I, like, you know, it's definitely an interesting idea. I've done, um, like it's kesel saw, which you add is negative, right? Because then you add kaeda sand, which is positive. So, um, you could I've done, um, the, I've done, um, I forget what it was. I did a geland strip where I added a finding agent to do

[32:08] the, um, to do the attachment and then I added geland to precipitate it out, but that's very gentle.

[32:15] Gelatin is a good stripper, but it's not obviously not vegan. I guess I'm more curious as to why it's the 2nd drink and not from the very beginning, not from that 1st drink.

[32:30] So if you if you would try making, you know, like not rhubarb margarita, like a regular margarita, and then you have a rhubarb margarita as your 2nd drink, is that still feeling

[32:40] too stringent? Oh I don't know. Astringency can build up over time. I mean, astringency as of 5 or 6 years ago, which is the last time I actually looked it up, there was still some debate over the mechanism of astringency, but

[32:56] there are at least some people who believe it's a loss of lubricity on the tongue.

[33:01] Uh, and so you could definitely have an additive effect over time uh, with a stringency. Um, I guess what I would do is, I would try, you know, another sour drink 1st and then have this as 2nd drink, is it a specifically any 2nd drink, or if you had a double-sized drink, by

[33:19] this time you get to the end of that 1st drink, is it just because the accumulation over time, you

[33:24] know? Hey, uh, uh, David, is anyone on the anyone in the chat room around? Has anyone tried stripping with soy? Doesn't look like it now. No, no thoughts on this. Somebody wants to know what about Michael Faba? You know how I got them? Well, someone, someone wants, everyone wants Aqua Aquafaba and everything. No, like a chick, that's more of a hydrocalloid interaction. Like, it's more of a thickening kind of protein thing. I don't know the charge of chickpea juice, but, you know, in general, what, um, you're looking

[33:56] for like an, uh, like an aggregator. And so it's like something that like it's going to bind to polyphenols. And so typically you're looking at proteins like the complex with polyphenols. Other polyphenols like the complex with other polyphenols in

[34:11] the right environment. And certain charged, certain charged things will bond with

[34:19] polyphenols in the right environment. It's an interesting idea. I should look into soy, like soy protein isolates. I mean, just use soy protein isolates. I should try it. It'd be easy enough to look up. Here's the other thing, though. If you look up wine finding, right, which is how you get into this, in wine finding, you will see,

[34:38] and there's lots of scholarly work on it, right? You'll see blood. You'll see egg white. You'll see gelatin. You'll see kieselsol, kitasan, you know, the suspended silica, kitasan. You'll see all of that stuff. I haven't. you'll see, you know, PVPP. You'll see all these things. Um, you won't see, uh, you won't see so much,

[35:04] um, Uh, I've never seen soy, but uh, maybe they haven't, they haven't tried it, but, you know, that's an indicator. What you can do, there are keraginans that are made for finding out beers, and they require a certain amount of heating, probably a little bit above over what you're doing now, 60 C, but there are kappa

[35:22] keraginans that are made to add in small amounts to like bind protein haze

[35:29] in, um, in beers, other hazes and beers. Maybe they would help. I don't know. I don't know, an interesting thing to try. Subjalent. Something you're serving in like a bar or a restaurant or is this something you're just doing for yourself at home? Uh, it's, it will be for a bar restaurant. Yeah. By the way, I am looking into... I wanted to see if I can make it vegan because at home I'm, you know, that's fine. I already had the, or is you already using a bit of aquafaber in it and to give some head and I can't believe I just said that. And that, I'm not sure if that's just, I don't think that's doing any astringency stripping. Let me ask you a question on the Aquafaba. Here's my issue on a lot of texturizing agents and drinks. So I did some experimentation years ago with doping my lime juice with Xanthan gum. And the reason being that I wanted to, you know, if lime juice has 2 functions in a shaken cocktail, right? It's adding solids, proteins for texturizing, and it's adding acidity, which is why you never shake with clarified lime juice,

[36:42] right? Right. Okay. So I thought, well, if a little bit of bodying is good. More might be better. So I added Xanthan gum so it could hold the body better. And this is also in like, anyway. And my thing was, is that I couldn't find anyone who liked it that much better. I wasn't adding enough to make, 1st of all, remember Xanthan, not a whipping agent. So you're not going to, it doesn't make a foam. It just holds the foam you've got, right? To be very clear on what Xanthan does. But, um, I wasn't able to find anyone that liked it better, fresh, but I was able to find people

[37:17] who, at the end of the cocktail, once the cocktail had warmed up a little bit, could taste a different body in it at the end of the cocktail.

[37:27] Now, my question on Aquafaba in a cocktail is do you have the same problem at the end of a cocktail?

[37:33] I don't know, because I've been drinking them quite quickly. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I, I, I, because I really don't, I can really taste egg

[37:46] white, uh, in a drink, which is why I don't like it. You know what you should do on, you see what you do on egg white. Crack and just do this test for me since you're not a vegan. Crack your egg white in the morning, leave it in your

[38:00] fridge, and then use it in the evening and tell me if you can still smell it or taste it. A lot of that stuff is kind of transient, and it's hard to do in a bar because, you know, you don't want to crack out that many in advance, but it's one of the few cases where I think people who do do pre-crack on their egg white and put it in

[38:18] squeezes, it's problematic in some ways because it doesn't dose right, but you know the technique where you crack your egg whites into a squeeze bottle and then you put it and then you jigger your egg white. If you crack it like several hours in advance prior to service, all of that smell flashes away.

[38:33] And so it's actually superior. Okay. And another thing that I don't think I mentioned in the book, in liquid intelligence, I can't remember. I wrote it, you know, quite a while ago, but anytime we're doing testing for drinks, uh,

[38:50] like we have a very firm rule that, uh, you make one and you drink it right away because that's the way God wants you to do it, but then you make another one and you take a sip and then you let it sip for 15 minutes and then you take a sip and let it sit around because some drinks, some drinks which

[39:08] work like off flavors, for instance, egg white drinks on freshly cracked eggs, off flavors will develop after a couple of

[39:13] minutes. Or like in the case of the Xanthan stuff, like bad textures will come out as it warms up. So it's like super good practice, I think, because you can't like guarantee that all your customers are good people. You know what I mean? And that they're gonna drink in a timely fashion. I would also say that if you're doing this at a bar or a restaurant, you can also make this as

[39:32] like an interesting like point of service as well. So you serve them this drink and after they're done, then you follow it up with like, you know, like a tiny like bite that like kind of clears that

[39:40] away, so that if they have the next drink, you don't have that astringency. Yeah, rhubarb's interesting. is challenging. Yeah, that's brilliant. Also, there, guys. Is the is there astringency? There's exalic acid in rhubarb, right? Yeah, but that's what I was trying to, I'm trying to figure out if, I don't know how if, yeah. And I looked at whether there were ways of kind of preferential stripping out the octallic acid or

[40:11] bin, or trying to convert that into something else. Yeah, you know, I'll look into it a little more because there's other people worried about oxalic acid, obviously, for other reasons, and it can be precipitated

[40:22] out, and I believe, aside from being itself, it can add to that kind of astringency. So, I'll look into it. Are you appealing your rhubarb as well? No, so, uh, just um, chopping it. Does that make a difference, Don? Well, the Tinho, when I was working with him at Sambar, was all about the

[40:45] Super Soignier method of peeling the rhubarb, and then boiling the peel separate to extract a

[40:51] color and then using that water to then color the flesh.

[40:54] I don't know if they're, you know, if there's like a, maybe like

[40:58] a, a tannin thing coming out of the skin of it, could be worth a shot. I don't know. Oh, speaking of that. So we might be interested in this. Like, uh, the, uh, so I've been, I've been uh, experimenting with uh, cellulose, the enzymes that break down cellulose because my goal is to make the stringless celery.

[41:17] No luck, man. No luck. So what I did was I cut the celery into like, you know, sticks and then and then put the enzyme into water, vacuum

[41:28] infuse the water into the celery, which by the way, makes it look awesome. Like vacuum, just straight water infused. Celery looks amazing. It looks so awesome. The color. And now I let it sit for like a day and a half . And I think it made it somewhat softer, but my wife was like, not so special. Not so special. I was like, 0 man. But it did make the strings easier to peel off. So then if you if you take your petty or paring knife and you nick the string and pull it, you get a much better pull on

[41:59] that. So it's easier to make like actual cut peel celery, but I've had no luck making the miracle celery, which leads me to believe that those strings are probably also

[42:08] lignant, like lignified. And so I need some sort of enzyme or something that can break lignin down, which is, I think, another level of difficulty above cellulose. But I'm still working on the miracle. Because how nice would it be to have celery that just, it was still crunchy. The pectin wasn't destroyed, but, you know, it was no strings. Wouldn't that be awesome? Be pretty great. Well, you know. It's a species, you know, variety, because we sometimes get celery that isn't

[42:38] stringy, and then sometimes it's horrendously stringy. Wait, you sometimes get celery with no strings at all? Uh, yeah, I think so, but no, no, no, quizzing me. not entirely sure. I think you had a dream salary, my friend. I think you like, you fell asleep, and you're like dreaming of this miracle celery, and then you woke up. I mean, I don't know. Like, I mean, look, if someone developed a variety of stringless celery, I just want everyone to

[43:11] know, if someone developed a variety of stringless celery, I would pay 5 times the price for

[43:15] it. Right? So right now I pay like a dollar for a bunch of celery, I would easily pay $5 for a bunch of stringless celery. And it would be, what would you call it? You call it eating celery, right? Because most people, like, unless you're serving kids like cream cheese, peanut butter, and raisins or something like this. Like most people are not eating the celery. They're like, well, they're eating it chopped up into thin pieces in like a chicken salad or they're cooking stocks or something, but not

[43:42] a lot. I don't walk down the street and see people like shoving celery into their face at a ferocious rate unless they're on some sort of horrendous diet. And you think that the stringiness of celery is the only impediment to people walking down the street eating more celery? I think it's unpleasant to have that wad of strings in your mouth when you're kind of chewing. I don't know. I just think it's a, yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't think it's the only impediment, but I think if you had one that was like, like,

[44:06] like 8 levels higher than an ordinary piece of celery and it was stringless, that you could build a connoisseur ship. celery is a great flavor. Let's not like, let's not forget that celery, the, you know, often underappreciated celery is freaking delicious. And so, like, I feel that if you, if you had the stringless celery, uh,

[44:25] we could, we could have like a celery revolution. We could we could we could increase people's love of celery, like many fold, I think. What if you went the opposite direction? You made it like even stringier, and then like, you know, partner with the dental associations, and it's like a alternative to flossing. That's crazy talk. That's just crazy talk. Crazy talk, Don. Well, if I if I if I managed to find any stringless celery, I'll bring some to you in sales on

[44:51] tour. Nice. All right, cool. yeah We'll see you there. Bring your string of celery and we'll taste it. All right. Yeah, when is the thing? I'm actually, I'm going to Tales Edinburgh with Don Lee. So what's that? You want to tell him about that? Tales on tour, every year we take tales on the road to another city. We'll be doing 2 years in Edinburgh, so we'll be there this April. I believe it's April 3rd and fourth. the 1st Monday, Tuesday of April, and then we'll be back again next year as well. So, uh, check out TalesToCocktail.com, Tails on tour, Edinburgh for tickets and information. All right, Joe, Joe Ankowitz wrote in regarding cast iron. Hey, David Gang, you've talked before about vintage cast iron pans, having a smoother cooking surface than modern skillets like

[45:31] lodge do. I saw on the YouTube where a guy strips a cast iron pan with something called an Avante quick strip disk available at Home Depot attached to a power drill. Do you think this would make an effective way to smooth out the rough surfaces and lodge

[45:46] pans, like the vintage ones, thanks in advanced Joe? Okay, so I looked into what those are is non-woven, i.e. amorphous, i.e.

[45:54] Scotch bright pads that are impregnated with, um, and 3M makes them too. Impregnated with, like, grinding media, like silicon carbide. And they're hooked onto a power drill. And I looked at one of the YouTube things and it looks like it does work. The good thing about those wheels is they are very gentle because they kind of like move a little

[46:15] bit, so they're going to take off. make fewer deep marks in your pan than what I would use, which is a flexible sandpaper

[46:22] disk. Flexible sandpaper disk is gonna be super quick and get it done super quick. But you will leave marks in it, depending on kind of what grit you choose. I hate, by the way, I hate sanding with a power drill.

[46:36] There's a reason God invented the angle grinder, and it was because power drills suck for grinding, because if you look at the video I saw, When you push a power drill down. You have kind of a long stick coming out, and then the thing at the end. And so as you push it down, um, the movement of the

[46:55] disk as it spins tends to pull and process the drill away from you, uh, and it's hard and like it can be hard on your wrist sometimes if you don't have a good grip on it and it's hard to get

[47:04] nice accurate stuff, whereas an angle grinder is dead straight,

[47:09] like you can control the hell out of it. So I wouldn't go out and buy an angle grinder if this is your only application, but angle grinders, if you do work, where you have to sand things, angle grinders come in really, really

[47:21] handy. Just remember that when you take the guard off of your angle grinder, which I know you will do. Be careful. Uh, like wear gloves because you feed an angle grinder into your knuckle and it's goodbye

[47:33] knuckle. Ive seen it happen. It's freaking nasty. I think they're going to kick us off the air. So, I don't know. What do we got? What do we got left, Dave? You got time for one more? One more. All right. So, Ben, I'm going to answer your corn question on miximalization next time. And also, Mark, I'm going to answer your Yuba question, your pulse making, by the way, I want anyone who has information on this to tweet me in their information, but we have a listener who's interested in making Yuba

[48:01] bean curd skin with alternate sources like peas and other pulses and

[48:06] legumes and wants to know if something like transgutaminates might help. So if anyone has experience making Yuba being curd skins with alternate sources other than soybean, please tweet me at cooking issues and let me

[48:15] know so I have more information for next week when I answer. I have some information, but give me more. So we'll end with Ryan, who writes in about cool ranch. Love the show, listen to every episode, man, that's a lot of episodes. Pre-order the spins all. Thank you for that. The question is, uh, my sister ate in a modern disinflected joint. She was served a lot of foams. She was pretty mad on the experience, but said she'd eat the hell out of it. I am too, but said she'd eat the hell out of a cool ranch, Doritos flavored foam, since she loves the flavor, but hates the fatty fatness of eating a whole bag. I'm paraphrasing. eat the whole bag. look, get a smaller bag. If you get a smaller bag, then you eat the whole bag. not a problem. Right? Right? My motto is that every pizza is a personal pizza feud. hard enough. That's right. Do you like cool ranch Doritos? Who doesn't? Especially with caviar. Really? Oh, yeah. All right. That's try that, people. How would you go about making something like that? More generally, what goes into cool ranch flavor besides MSG? No hate here. I love MSG. Well, there was someone on the webs, and I forgot to write down who they are, but, you know, you search it. foodiemcfoodington.net or something like that. I forget the person's name, who did a knockoff recipe. And the good news is most, uh, like well-known recipes, someone has attempted a knockoff of it. And so their knockoff for chips now. This is not for foam, but we're going to deconstruct backwards. Their knockoff for chips was dry ranch dressing mix. I don't know why you would buy that since ranch is so freaking easy to make from non-mixed, whatever. Don't please people. Don't buy dry ranch mix. Do not buy it. More on that in a second. White cheddar cheese powder. Okay, so there's a cheese flavor in there, which if you're going to do it in a foam situation, you're probably going to have to do in the form of a broth or you could use a powder, I guess,

[49:54] cherry cheese powder, make some sort of cheese brothy thing. smoked paprika, easy enough. Granulated garlic. I wouldn't use that in a powder, I would, but garlic, granulated onion, dried tomato powder. So there's a little tomato and cool ranch. So cool ranch isn't white. a little tinged of red. Yeah, a little red flex in it. All right. and popcorn salt. That size of salt, important just in terms of making Doritos, not in terms of what you're doing. Okay, so what I'm hearing here is ranch plus cheese, plus paprika, extra garlic, onion, and a little bit of tomato. All right? So how do you make ranch? Ranch is, everyone does it differently. Some people use buttermilk. I don't. It's a mixture of the magic 3 salad ingredient things, which is sour cream, mayonnaise and yogurt. You can make basically any, you can use buttermilk, I guess, instead of the yogurt, but any sort of ratio of those that suits your taste.

[50:42] I'm heavy usually on sour cream and mayonnaise and light on yogurt, but that's me. Um, or they're saying light on buttermilk they would do, but anyway, then

[50:49] it's, uh, in that is garlic. Some form of herb. There's urban ranch. So I add always dill. No matter what, always dill, and then more or less partially, but you can add kind of any herb that you want, but

[51:01] the classic, so you must have dill. Did I say that already? You must have dill. And, um, a little bit of parsley. If you add a boat ton of herbs to it, it turns green goddess, which is also really nice. Um, and then, uh, oh, and chives, chives, chives, do not forget the chives. No chives, no ranch. When my son, Dax, who's the ranchmaster at the house, he eats salad because I have him make the ranch, he's like, do you have the

[51:23] Chaz dad? I'm like, no, just substitute onion. He's like, it's not the same dad. I know, but it's what I've got. And then some people, I guess, add Worcestershire sauce. I don't think we really bother. Pepper, a little bit of vinegar. And that's basically it. A little paprika. That's it. So you make a mixture of that, add the other stuff in, some form of cheese flavor, either

[51:41] powdered or not, a little bit of tomato. I would use what's the word I'm looking for, paste because it's got the heaviest flavor and you can add a small amount of it. Make it all up, then strain any solids out. Anything that can't, anything that goes through a very fine mesh strainer will not clog your EC. Anything that goes more will add your gelling agent of choice and foam away, right? What do you think, Don? Sounds good, but I don't see how that's any less fattening. Well, it's basically air. There's no corn chip. I guess. There's no corn chip. You could just use a spoon and just go straight into the ranch. More flavor. More flavor. Oh, yeah, remember, when you're making a foam, you're reducing the flavor by like a factor of a 1000000000 because you have to make a very, very

[52:25] overflavored ranch in order to have any sort of flavor in the foam because you're adding so much air.

[52:32] So you're going to have to up everything. You know what I mean? up everything. You might need to add extra acid, but then you're going to lose some of the creaminess from the buttermilk, but not from the buttermilk. I mean, the sour cream and mayonnaise, this should still work, man. It'll work. It's just seems sub- subpar. I don't know. You have to test it. Has anyone made the cool ranch? Anyway, whatever. Anyway, we'll talk about it next time on cooking issues.

[52:59] Thanks for listening to Heritage Radio Network. Food radio supported by you, for our freshest content, and to hear about exclusive events, subscribe to our newsletter. Enter your email at the bottom of our website, heritageradionetwork.org. Connect with us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at Heritage underscore radio. Heritage Radio Network is a nonprofit organization, driving conversations to make the world

[53:28] a better, fairer, more delicious place, and we couldn't do it without support from listeners like you.

[53:34] Want to be a part of the food world's most innovative community, rate the shows you like, tell your friends, and please join our community by becoming a member. Just click on the beating heart at the top right of our homepage. Thanks for listening.