Hello, everybody, and welcome to a brand new series on heritage radio network called the culinary call sheet where we give a peek into the back kitchen of culinary media. I'm your host, April Jones,

and I'm your co host, Darren bresnitz. Part of why we started the show was to offer an unofficial mentorship for anyone who's interested in learning about all aspects of food and video, whether that's TV, social media online, or just something you want to do for fun.

Absolutely what was once niche or a little silly, as I'm sure you remember, Darren, when we started out, this man has now become such a massive playing field for so many creatives using food as the medium.

It's something that has driven us professionally and personally, for so many years. What excites me the most about this show is that we're going to sit down with some of the industry leaders to hear how they made it and what drew them into this industry.

With 20 years in the culinary production game ourselves, we're hoping we can give through these conversations an insider's view into personal stories from the field, as well as an in depth behind the scenes look into some of the most popular food programming. In today's evolving culinary media landscape.

We'll be covering everything from how to style your food, to how to license IP, to developing your own ideas, and some tips from the masters of how to host your own show.

Yeah, it's a little bit of conversation, how to and how do you do the things that you do in color media, which I'm so excited about? I love so many of the guests that are coming on this season. We have talent from Food Network from Vice media eater refinery 29,

we've met some of the best people in the world both in front of and behind the camera. And we're bringing them all together to share their stories, their delicious adventure and their unique journey into this crazy world.

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you are listening to cooking issues coming to you live every tuesday from noon to 1245 on the heritage Radio Network. I am Dave Arnold, the host of cooking issues. I'm here with Natasha Lopez. We're from the French Culinary Institute and we're here to answer all of your cooking questions. Call in at 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. For those of you that don't know us, we specialize in technical kinds of cooking questions, pieces of equipment, new techniques, new ingredients. But we were interested in basically any food related question you have. Today's show is brought to you by the fairway markets. No matter where you live in New York City, you're probably pretty close to a fairway market. I believe that we're actually being sponsored by Steve Jenkins from fairway, who's one of the great cheese mongers in all of the country probably that fairway has and has had for many, many years. An amazing selection of cheeses, great selection of meats and other produce fairway like no other market. Alright, and Stacia, so you want to start off before we answer any questions with kind of what we've been doing over the past week or so. You've been gone for a while, right? Well, I just got back from New Orleans. New Orleans every year has this event called Tales of the cocktail where a good chunk of the bar industry in the United States heads down in New Orleans in the middle of summer when it's this hot and humid, and get horribly horribly drunk over the course of a couple of days. All in the interest of theoretically learning more about you know how to prepare, find drinks, and learn about the history find drinks. I was down there doing a seminar called The Science of stirring which was a follow up to our smash hit last year the science of shaking. Basically, I was there with Evan Clem, who is the the head of beverage for ber guest you know they do those commands restaurants here in the city. He served something like 1000 margaritas on Cinco Demayo. And Thomas Wah from death unco, which was you know, just I guess this year just one like best bar in the universe that tails the cocktail or something like that best cocktail this in the universe, something like that, like a bunch of best in the universe kinds of things. Anyway, this year, we were investigating how stirring, you know, what is the basic science behind staring a cocktail. And the interesting things about it, I'll talk about it for a minute, is last year when we we did shaking. The fundamental thing we learned about shaking was that it really your shaking style doesn't make that much of a difference in terms of the temperature and the dilution of the drink when you're done. Also, the ice doesn't make that much of a difference, assuming there's not a lot of water. Around the ice doesn't make that much of a difference within reason. And that's good news for people, especially at home, because it means that they can make a decent quality drink without without being basically the Yoda of the shake. You know, as long as they, you know, do a relatively decent job, and they shake, you know, for about, you know, 12 to 15 seconds, they're going to, you know, get fundamentally similar dilution, every time they do it. Stirring unfortunately, is a lot more, more complicated, because stirring is not as efficient as shaking in chilling. So that the first rule of all cocktails, by the way, especially in bars, where the ice that they're using in the bar is almost always right at the melting point. It's not from the freezer. And by the way, even if you use ice, it's in a freezer, you think you're winning a lot, because it's a lot colder than ice, that's, you know, been sitting out, you don't actually win that much, because ice doesn't have that much extra energy in it stored in the form of temperature, most of it is given when it melts, it's the melting of ice, it really does most of the chilling and dilution. So the fundamental rule of cocktails is there is no dilution without chilling, and there is no chilling without dilution, they're related. And so because stirring is less effective than shaking and chilling it, you actually can alter the drink greatly by how much you you stir it. So while a cocktail, when you shake, it only takes about 1215 seconds to reach equilibrium, a stirred cocktail can take up to a minute, or or longer. Okay, so with that, that's what I was doing for the past week. And if you want to call in with any more questions about steering, we're going to put a blog post up pretty soon on, you know, with all kinds of nice pretty charts and graphs on staring fast during slow starting with big eyes, starting with crappy is yada yada yada. Anyway. So, you know, that's what we've been up to. Now, I'm going to take some of the questions that we had emailed to us over the past week, Michael not getting the author of herb, a voracious.com, which is a vegetarian recipe blog asks a very interesting question. He says, Why do some things taste better the next day, for instance, tomato sauces, lentil soup and stews. And he says the conventional wisdom is that the flavors marry when it's left overnight, but it doesn't really seem very well defined. So first of all, is this true? He asks. And if it is true, then why can we pinpoint anything specific on it from a chemical standpoint of why that's the case? Well, this is an extremely interesting question. The short answer is yes, some foods do taste better after they've been sitting for a while. And but some tastes noticeably worse. In the vegetable world, for instance, potatoes can be when they're stored take on an off flavor that's, you know, perceived as kind of cardboard. And same with meats can take on or that you don't care because you're a vegetarian recipe blog. But certain meats can take on a flavor called warmed over flavor when they've been chilled and reheated. And what's happening in those cases, when things taste bad is that there's an oxidation of fat oxidation going on. So you know, there's certain polyunsaturated fats in there that are being oxidized to create kind of his off cardboard he rancid, warmed over flavors in certain potatoes and in certain meats, when they're reheated and stored in the presence of oxygen. And a vacuum bag can kind of ameliorate those problems. Now, the problem of things actually tasting better and changing is a lot more complicated than that. So certain people, certain foods that people think tastes better when they're reheated Like for instance, pizza, if you reheat it properly, is because let's say the person who made it didn't have their dough balanced quite right and water migrated to the crust, right. So now your crust is floppy. If you reheat it properly, you can recreate the crust and it's actually crisper than it used to be because there's less water in the crust and so you can get a crisper crust. So certain in certain pizzas, you can actually get a better product when you reheat it versus when you when you had it the first time. Lasagna is another thing pointed to often people say, well, lasagna taste better lasagna as it's cooling the pasta presumably can reabsorb more water than it then then it could absorbs water out of the sauce, the sauce becomes more concentrated. That's one effect. So it's going to taste good upon reheating. A secondary effect with strong flavored sauces, like tomato like stews like soups

is that the sauces have lots of high notes in the volatiles that kind of can stick out. Now. These volatiles can flash off when it's cooling and flash, you know flash off again when it's when it's rewarming. And this can basically create an evening out effect of the flavor. But even more so as it's being stored in the in the fridge. The actual, the actual levels of the different volatiles can change as they're degraded, or, you know, broken up or hydrolyze in the food as it's being stored. And what's interesting is is that the breakdown of these vortices, these volatile compounds, a lot of them are created when when the food is cooked, right? And they react a different way when they're on the heat than they do when they're in the fridge. So you get a different kind of breakdown of these compounds. And then when you reheat it, you break your breaking more down again and basically you can go was a leveling off of these volatiles. So there's an I was I was hard pressed this morning, I was looking to try and find some specific papers on it so I can cite some for you, but I couldn't. But this is my feeling my memory I should say, of of what's going on and the situation, as you know that and that's aside from any actual kind of effect they have where, you know, maybe the spice didn't penetrate to the center of a bean, let's say. And when you let it sit overnight, it does. So there's many, many multiple effects going on. It's actually quite a complicated process. But yes, certain foods can taste better, and certain foods can taste worse. Okay, so hopefully that answers that question. I have another one. Someone says My mom wants to anonymous by the way, my mom wants to know if she can put a frozen piece of meat into a crock pot. Yes, yes, you can. So here's what happens. And I believe we have another question on freezing that I'm going to deal with later. But freezing is fundamentally a dehydration technique. So what happens is, when water freezes, it freezes into into ice, it's pure water. So you have water that's bound in cells, that water basically crystallizes out and freezes it as crystals. Okay, so the the ice that forms is basically removed from either between the cells or in the cells of your meat, it's fundamentally or whatever product you're freezing. It's fundamentally a dehydration process. Now, Super Rapid thyme, in certain cases, can prevent certain foods like meats that might reabsorb that liquid from reabsorbing them also, improperly frozen things that have a lot of damage cells in them will not reabsorb the liquid. And you'll you can tell a good quality frozen product from a bad quality frozen product. Because you'll see a lot more with called drip loss, you'll see a lot of liquid flowing out of the out of the product as its thing, right? That's the hallmark of an improperly frozen thing. Now certain things you just can't help it like berries are gone, that's going to happen unless you have some very good freezing technology like liquid nitrogen. Because the faster you freeze it, the less damage there is to within reason. I mean, if you freeze it too fast, it turns brittle and shatters. But that's you know, that's another story. So now, when you're cooking something in a crock pot, right a crock pot is a fairly, it's fairly gentle and that it doesn't scorch foods, but it's also a fairly high heat, you're going to basically cook the heck out of that meat and you're going to cook it so long, that you're going to cook all that water out anyway. And you're you're getting the juiciness out of the saucer that's cooking in and you're getting the juiciness out of the gelatin that's cooking. And so there's, there's absolutely no reason why you can't see your your meat from Frozen. If you want to do that, and then throw it in the crock pot and go from there, you're gonna cook it for a long time, it's not going to throw off your cooking times that much unless the meat is very, very thick. And so I think I think that's that's fine practice and it's definitely going to save you save you some time. Another anonymous question came in, I want to know, if it's true that putting your face in front of a microwave is going to damage you. Well, this is an interesting question. I've had this question asked many times. And as someone that has done many unauthorized things to microwave ovens, I'm somewhat qualified to answer this question, you'll notice that the inside of your microwave is, is all metal, okay, and that there's a shield a grate over the front door of the microwave, that's also made out of metal, it's perforated with little holes. Now, those little holes are specifically designed to not allow microwaves through. So the even though you can see the light, the light is a very much shorter wavelength than microwaves. So light can make it through without a problem. But the microwaves cannot at all. In fact, even if those holes were a good bit larger, like the size of a pencil, you still wouldn't get appreciable radiation through that. Now, if you have a microwave, microwaves have that that metal, that metal perforated sheet, and then they also have usually a plastic or glass sheet in front of that perforated sheet. And what that's doing is that stops you from putting your eyes directly against that metal grate. If you put your eyes directly against that metal great, you will have some microwave energy that can make it through those little holes for very, very short distances. I'm talking very short distances. So I do not recommend removing the metal grate and then putting your eyeballs against the against the the perforated, you know, perforated sheet. Now, it is true that certain microwaves that the latch fails, or they have problems with their gas getting under door material, such that you know, basically the microwaves can leak leak out and there's not a good grounding between all the different parts, then yes, you can get some leakage of microwaves, they make basically microwave detectors which are just meters that sense whether there's microwave radiation, you can walk around your your microwave and see whether or not it's leaking. You know, if you're paranoid about these things, you know, they're not that expensive. You can get one and you know, I used one once when I did a lot of modifications to a microwave and wanted to make sure I wasn't gonna turn anyone's eyeballs into, you know, poached eggs because, you know, once once the protein in your eyes goes white from being denatured it's, it's you know, End of story. This actually used to happen, you know, microwaves very similar to radar technology. In fact, the old story, my grandfather, you know, before he retired was a radar technician and not technician engineer built radars and including radars for Air Force jets back in the day. And the old story was that an engineer at Raytheon figured out and it's probably apocryphal, but figured out the microwave oven because he was working on a radar unit and the and the candy bar in his pocket melted. And he was, it was like, That's interesting candy bar and pocket melted and then kind of all went from there. But I believe that there's also been cases and I don't know whether it's just to scare the crap out of me that you know, people have stared down, they know an old school radar, continuous wave radar thing and you know, been blinded and all this other stuff. So, anyway, I hope that answers hope that answers your question. Okay. Let's take one what we have two more minutes, we have two more minutes. I will maybe I maybe I shouldn't take a complicated complicated question. And before I before I go to break I will say that I hope you call in our number is 718-497-2128 that's 718-497-2128 or you can email anastasia@lopez.na

s t a s s ia@gmail.com.

Right we're going to try to handle all of your cooking related questions when we get back we'll answer some more questions and I will talk about the weird variety meats that we've been cooking

so much phone call your name I don't want people to know if you're getting down but gonna have we're gonna have we're gonna have we're gonna have God All right. God everybody

this is Dave Arnold and you were listening to cooking issues on the heritage Radio Network calling with your cooking related questions or you know, at this point, any questions 718497 to 128 That's 718-497-2128 Okay, so we have a question in from Greg crackle Berg. And he asked actually some very complicated technical questions he wants to know. The first question actually is a little easier to deal with. He says What can a home cook do to freeze foods or sauces that will break when you freeze them he wants to know shut out gelatin, Aguilar, starches, fats, blah, blah, blah. And liquid nitrogen is one of them. I like I like Greg, that you're saying a home friendly technique for doing this is to use liquid nitrogen, I really appreciate that. And it shows how far we've come in in the past couple of years now. Liquid nitrogen probably actually, it doesn't help free stabilize some things. But I know that it does prevent other things from getting damaged by by freezing, I haven't done a lot of testing with liquid nitrogen freestyle, liquid nitrogen, liquid nitrogen will preserve the quality, you're gonna get a lot less drip loss out of foods that are frozen with liquid nitrogen. If you're going to freeze something with liquid nitrogen, and you think it's going to become too brittle. One way to do it best and I learned this from someone who basically works in a calcium and calcium in operation. You want to suspend the food above the liquid nitrogen just above the liquid nitrogen for a number of minutes to pre freeze it before it becomes hyper brittle. And then you can immerse in the liquid nitrogen and you're gonna get a very nicely frozen product. But I assume that this is not what you mean things like so the question is saying should he add things to his his sauces, like gelatin ag are starches and fats to to make them more free. So stable? Gelatin is not free, slow, stable, and neither is ag are in fact we use both of those things. We use the fact that they're not free, so stable. When we're clarifying juicers we basically freeze them and then when they thaw, they weep. They weep fluid quite readily. Then we use that fact to to clarify things so those don't work and in general, what you want to add to to increase restore stability Are thickeners thickeners like locust bean gum thickeners like xanthan gum. So something that basically holds together but is you know has a tendency to weep a little bit or break a little bit. You know, a little bit like under a percent of locusts being locust been has to be heated of course guar guar tastes kind of bad unless you have the really nice guar made by THC gums a flavor free guar little bit of xanthan also acts as a stabilizer is going to stop things from from weeping out. There are starches that will help I don't I don't happen to know what they are, I didn't have a chance to research them before I before I came over. But in general, you move towards some sort of a thickener to help stabilize a situation especially a gel if you want to make a gel more freestyle stable. You're going to use some sort of thickener. Like I say like like like locusts been like, like war legs Xanthan. Now let me think I'm trying to see the other questions. I'm not exactly sure he's saying sauces like whole whole vegetables roasted but I'm not exactly sure what the freestyle problem with that is. If it's weeping because of texture being broken down, then the best way to make sure that you freeze and thaw those nicely is to use very, very rapid freezing. And the best way to do that, of course, liquid nitrogen barring that, you can make an ice slush with about 25%. Salt by weight with ice, make a slush with that, put your foods in a bag and then immerse them in slush is going to freeze them very quickly with very small ice crystals. And it's going to preserve the flavor in those in those kinds of things. Now, he says on the flip side, what's a good way to thaw these ingredients? Thawing is actually a really interesting problem. When you it's easier believe this, it's easier to free something quickly than it is to thought and here's why. Ice is actually a much better heat conductor than water much better. The only reason you think water is a much better conductor of heat, right is that you can move around inside your food the water can't move around. So it's not as good a conductor as as, as ice is. So once something starts freezing in the freezer, the outside becomes ice, it now becomes a very good conductor. Now it's easier for the inside to freeze. When you're thawing, the outside thaws first. Now it's water now it's harder to conduct the heating, it also takes more energy to heat ice than it does to heat water. And so it actually takes longer to to thaw something than it does to freeze it. If you want to speed on obviously, the best way to do it is to if you want to be fast is to put it in a bag and then put it in running water inside a bag and running water ideal it's going to thaw it out. It's not going to it's going to be fairly gentle, assuming you're going to use it right away. And it's going to be fairly quick. I mean that's the fastest way you know that we know of I haven't experimented a lot. People used to sell thawing trays that were basically big blocks of aluminum and that aluminum would just you know draw the heat away from the food but I don't know whether they're any better or worse than just putting something probably worse than just putting something in running water in inside of a bag because that way you're we can heat away from all sides not just from the side with the with the metal block. Another question he has is he really loves having arrows, as do we are having our peppers were until very recently the hottest peppers kind of known. They've since been superseded by a couple other peppers called the ghost peppers, but those peppers to my I've never I've never had a fresh ghost pepper. But to me, nothing beats the flavor and the amazing floral aroma of habanero peppers. And Greg apparently agrees with us. He says I do not like the heat they bring because most people are overwhelmed, but but he loves the floral, delicious floral aspects of the pepper. Now he says he's developed basically a surgical method for lowering the heat presumably by removing the the interior portion of the veins and seeds and the very interior portion of the of the skin on the inside. But he says it's moderately labor intensive, and no one would do it in bulk. And I agree that sounds like a huge pain in the butt. And I know from a lot of experience with him in the kitchen that when you deal with him a lot. Everything gets contaminated and people get pissed and they start hacking and wheezing all over the kitchen because it's just just horrible. Could there be some low or mid temperature way to dissolve and move the conversation out? capsulation is what makes things hot out of the picture while preserving the enchanting floral nature of the pepper. No vodka no wrote of app. Okay maybe vodka but still no wrote of that. Well, Greg, you're killing me here because the roadmap is the primo way to do this. I I don't know. You might be able to do regular distillation without a roto that means you could try just masturbating or grinding the the peppers in vodka and then doing a simple stovetop distillation with The you know, just with a bowl of ice, you know, you look up anything on the any on the internet, any site on simple stovetop distillation, you just need a pot, some ice and a bowl. Now the downside is is that this is going to happen upwards of, you know, 80 degrees or so Celsius, whereas I can do it down at like 40 Celsius. Now, I don't know for a fact how much those amazing floral aromas are going to be affected by that higher heat. But but you know, I would love it if you would try it and then and then tell us I don't it just soaking in vodka, like that the vodka sucks that heat up now. Perhaps the perhaps the alcohol preferentially soaks up the crustacean, in which case, you might be able to use the peppers slightly D heated after you do it. But I don't think you're going to preferentially take the capsaicin as opposed to those floral aromas, I think you're going to lose a little bit of both. He suggests maybe using peels, iron, which is an enzyme that we use to break down the tissue, unfortunately, peels on breaks down the actual flesh tissue of peppers and turns them to mush. And so I don't think that that's going to help.

I don't any says possibly that in, in conjunction with an oleophilic, something that's going to bind to fats, that's a possibility. But I just, I haven't tested it. So I can't say whether whether it's going to work or not. But it is something that I will look into more. And if you have any ideas, Greg, I encourage you to please write or call us and give us some good ideas. Right. And that's something we're interested in. Okay, sorry, I couldn't be more help on that. Here's another one. I can't be more help on. Someone says, Do we have any comments on the AeroPress type coffee filtration, the AeroPress type coffeemaker? And the question is like, how does it how What does it taste like? The, you know, how does it play? You know, the flavor? What's the acid balance in this bubble? Blah. Unfortunately, Paul wrote in that, unfortunately, Paul, I have not used the Aeropress. I have good friends who had done a lot of work with them. Some calls into Jeffrey Epstein garden, but he's even harder to get in touch with than I am. He's like the only person in the world harder to get in touch with the answers his phone less than I do. And I couldn't. He's a big advocate. So I wanted to ask what he thought, for those of you that don't know, the AeroPress it was designed, I think by the same what's the name of that frisbee, Stasha with a hole in the middle that that flies for like a million yards. The Arabic is edit Arabic, you know, talking about anyway, I think it was designed by the same same fellow that did the Arabic I believe, and it's basically a cylinder with a filter in it and a piston, you put the coffee in the hot water, you push the piston down, it provides some amount of pressure and then forces it out. And the main thing is it's supposed to make delicious coffee. And it's supposed to, it's cheap. And you can carry it wherever, wherever you want to go. The reason I haven't experimented with it is that although it is a pressurized coffee system, it doesn't generate 135 or so psi, like you know, eight nine bar, which is what you need to make espresso. And it's just not because I'm a snob at all, but basically I only drink espresso and I drink like a billion. I drink a billion cups of it a day. And for years I've had just because I'm like this I went on eBay and actually to a restaurant auction, went to a restaurant auction once I bought a first espresso machine I owned was a two group red chili, a restaurant machine from the restaurant auction, where the restaurant has been shut down by the Drug Enforcement Agency because they were also dealing drugs out of the restaurant. When the Drug Enforcement Agency shuts down your restaurant, what they do is they walk up and they put a padlock on the door and the and then they unplug all the lights, right? Well actually, they just flip the circuit breaker and then all the food just sits there and rots in your fridge until they get around to figuring out what the hell they're going to do. Well, this place was in somewhere, you know, in the in the 150s 160, somewhere in near Broadway, and they just let it rot for like a year, or, you know, eight months a year. And then they had a restaurant auction. And so, you know, I showed up at the restaurant auction, and when they opened the door the aroma was so over the aroma the miasma stench was so overwhelming that you know literally like like seasoned veterans of restaurants we're running out of there. And to me, I was like hey, this is great news. This is awesome because what it means is, is that no one is going to bid on this crap I mean, no one is going to bid on this crap because no one can even stand in the room with this you know like like all the Cuban sandwich rolls were still there all desiccated and half eaten like you would have like a bun and then a mouse that was eating the bomb that had died and then the mouse had in turn been eaten by whatever else was in me those horrible horrible but tell me you got it home. Well, another guy was being there another guy who like you know, he actually like literally was a crack dealer at one point and decided he was going to you know, go legit and had started a was starting a downtown restaurant, like a food cart and he was buying stuff and you know, at paid him $20 to drive me home. And then I left the espresso pump in his car and I had to go out and find him. And he was like, Who the hell's calling me anyway, whatever I got this machine for almost for nothing, but I had to disassemble it and boil it every single port part of it and reconstruct it, I learned a lot about espresso machines. But that's a long way of saying that I've had a commercial espresso machine for a long time. And so I haven't necessarily investigated other techniques for making coffee and I apologize that I have a very small amount of knowledge on the AeroPress coffee system, but from what I hear, it's a it's it's pretty good. That's what I hear. And so if I'm sure that you've now made me feel bad that I haven't experimented with it, and I don't know what it cost some like minimal amount of money, I think so not, maybe I'll just go buy one and play with it. Or at least maybe get a stone garden to call me back and have him tell me why it's why it's so great. A next next segment, I promise I will talk about the weird meats that we ate. You're listening to cooking issues on a heritage radio network call in your questions at 718-497-2128 that's 718-497-2128 and this is cooking issues and I am David Arnold

was good was good lose my home when I live on a promise to stay real speed and drink was me at the boss slip before I started

you're listening to cooking issues on the heritage Radio Network. I am Dave Arnold and we are here to answer your cooking issues whether they come in via email or via telephone 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. So we ran an interesting experiment last week, where we ordered a whole bunch of odd meats from a butcher in Chicago, I'm going to I'm going to ruin the name what does it mustache, it's like design zymurgy six CZ, I M E. R, okay. And so these guys for generations, I think since you know, the the teens, since like 1919 99 to 2014, some of these guys have been dealing in kind of odd, odd meets. Now, one of the strange things and a strange thing, America used to be known as kind of the game, the game food capital of the world, we just had so much of it, you know, early on, and all of it was legal to sell. So if you go back and you look in on the web at something called the markets assistant, and it was basically a guide to the New York markets that was written both before and after and around the Civil War. You'll see it's available on Google Books. And the guy at the front looks like build a butcher pool from from gangs in New York. It's kind of cool. But the list of foods that was available to purchase and markets even in New York City was shattering amazing. I mean, just the different types of meats. And the reason was, is that anything that you killed, shot, you know, caught whatever was fair game, there were no rules, there were no regulations, a combination of things has caused that to not be the case anymore. One is sanitary regulations. So things have to be slaughtered in basically in approved slaughterhouses now, so that cuts down the amount of things that you can do. And you're also not allowed to sell foods that you hunt game that you hunt, and that's due to, you know, the fact that we were just killing too damn much and to keep the animals you know, to keep a good stock of animals. There was conservation laws put on them. Also, specifically things like birds that you use to be able to shoot any damn thing. It's like the birds that you're allowed to kill now are very, very highly regulated and like one of the ones I really want to actually eat is this thing called the bobble link. This is off topic I don't care. The bobble link is this is this tiny bird Okay listen. Many of the viewers out there viewers may listeners or listeners out there familiar with the Orville on the order line is the famous French bird that you eat bones and all they roasted hole and you're supposed to put a napkin over it. Some people say to preserve the aroma some People say to hide from God. And these Ortolani are basically little birds. And they go on a long migration. And somewhere in, you know, near the beginning of the middle of that migration, they stopped by in the Mediterranean area of France. And they gorge because they need to get a lot of energy and they get very fat so that they can fly all the way south. Right? It's a passerine type of birds bird migration. So what these what they done for centuries is, is catch these birds and then fatten them specifically so they're little plump, fat, little juicy morsels, they then Okay, sounds awful. This part is awful, then they, they, they usually suffocate them in liquor, and then roast them whole. So this is the famous order line that's now now illegal. And by the way, fattening things like this has a long, long, long history. It goes back into the Romans and probably before the Romans were they used to fatten animals like fig packers and dormice, and things like that fatten them specifically for the Kitchen Kitchen and fed them Okay, now, the Ortolani is not the only bird like this there are two other well known to the cultures that do the migration birds like that, that get super fat and get caught and get eaten ones in China. And I forget the name of it's like the yellow breasted Patty swallow or something like that in English, I forget the name of it, but the other one is the bobble link which used to be known as the rice bird. And when we used to grow a lot of rice in South Carolina, all the way up until the early part of last century, the migration of these birds would go down, they'd see all the rice and these flocks these like you could like basically this huge huge migrating flocks would go down and they would eat a crapload of rice get amazingly fat and bits because they were hurting the rice crop and because apparently they were incredibly delicious. You basically just fire these like small shot shot guns into the air and the birds would just you know fall like rain around you and you'd pick them up and they're supposedly the best thing in the world they were called rice birds. Anyway you used to be able to get those and I called every single country there they're the Commission's involved in every single country in the migration from here all the way down to South America to see whether any of them allowed me to eat that bird. And they didn't. Anyways, it's just a rant on the on the bubbling. Okay, back to the weird meat. So sorry, back to the weird meats that we were we were eating so this place gets all these weird meats that are typically now unavailable but maybe would have been available before all of these. These these laws. Which by the way, the laws are good. I'm not saying the laws are bad. Now, the meats we got where we got a lion meat and the lion is obtained. I think I said last week the lion has obtained because lions that aren't wanted anymore by morons who have them as pets or breeding programs. They're not wanting any more they give them up and typically they can't be placed again. They're slaughtered for their fur and then the meat becomes a byproduct. We had beaver I don't really know. Like what I don't know what happened with the beaver. I don't know what the deal is with that. But the we had black bear, probably a similar situation with the lion. We had Yak, which I believe was actually farmed for this purpose. What else do we have whole raccoon? We had a whole raccoon. We had one other didn't we? Or is that that's it. Okay, so I'm here to tell you what this stuff tasted like. Lion was quite interesting lion tastes like pork. Right? Pork Chop tastes like pork chop. A little bit more savory. It's interesting. It's got kind of a it's a pork based flavor with kind of a unique savory thing probably due to the fact that it's a carnivore it eats only meat we very rarely eat carnivores. So it was I liked the line a lot. It was an older animal. We cooked it at 50 Snow. Yeah, I want to cook it at 60 I cooked it in 60 degrees Celsius for only felt really tender so I only cooked it for an hour or two. And it was quite tough. I think we needed to cook it a lot longer to kind of because it didn't have a lot of like visible connective tissue but since it was so old, it was kind of tough. So next time I cook Lyon I think I'm going to cook it for a good maybe 10 hours at 60 Celsius or there abouts. It was it was good. It was very good. We did 157 I wish we could and we gotta go look at my numbers bear was extremely dark black almost and also felt very very tender before it was cooked it felt very soft. We cooked it at 57 I believe because it looked like a steak so I want to give you like a steak level also for about an hour and it was also tough but I had a really kind of blue right after tastes like really kind of to me bloody mineral aftertaste that I didn't really enjoy you didn't like the bear or you can try it started tricking also is going to be killed by that Katie procedure we looked it up we know the like the thermal death curves are tricky Gnosis I told you we killed our trig analysis and that thing. I was still I had food poisoning that week nacho cheese. She Okay, so she reads tricking Gnosis about it and she thinks she has tricked Gnosis I'm like you don't your body's not full of worms. I mean it's a whole different ball of wax and whatever. I'm not gonna get into it. I didn't enjoy the bear that much.

Yeah, some people say it tastes greasy, didn't taste greasy. Just had kind of a weird metallic aftertaste. For me. The raccoon was a big disappointment I cook that raccoon, probably I need to cook it a lot longer and at a higher temperature I cooked it only for four or five hours at 60 line by the way, I remember now I cooked it at 57 The raccoon cooked at 60 for like four and a half hours because I thought it was you know, but it just got a small doesn't mean it was. It's young though, so it was tough. It doesn't have that much meat on it. In the future I will cook it to a much higher temperature for a much longer time. Like probably 6360 to 63 degrees for like 24 hours and then shred it like for a stew. But I had a lot of fat on it really freaked people out anyway, you know, it's not wasn't nearly as delicious as the guinea pigs that I've cooked from South America, which you know, I think are delicious. But I'm willing to give right through another chance but the raccoon I had very high hopes for and I was disappointed. Now on the positive side. That beaver was delicious. So there's beaver tail, which isn't actually the flapper. And then there's the flapper. The beaver tail, we cooked for 24 hours at 60 Celsius. And it was just delicious. It had a really interesting woody aroma that you know, I've never really had before in a piece of meat we've soaked it in a little bit of vinegar water before we cooked it because every recipe basically tells you to do that so we did that. And then we salted it a little bit let sit and then put it in a bag cooked it at in butter at 60 for 24 hours and then shredded it to tell me and just just fantastic I love that'd be that'd be That was delicious, right? Hey come on now Staci should know it was out of the gutter it was like a woody pulled pork Yes Very good. Very very good. They flapper which is the actual tail part that was mainly fat and skin and we cook that at a very we we've skinned one first and then we cooked another one whole after we've scrubbed it we cooked those at a high temperature like 80 Celsius or so for a couple of hours and they rendered out and but they were just kind of like fried them afterwards and they got kind of puffy and crispy on the outside but there's just kind of too much fat on the inside and we ate them last really what needs to happen we got to run some more experiments is to cook them then take the fat out use it for another preparation and then use the skin dehydrate it and puff it like a teacher on so you know in the future you will be having from us from cooking issues team probably beaver flapper teacher own because I think it's going to be good. It will start he's having a tough time keeping it together here in the in the in the room. And they the last one also really, really delicious. Was the Yak. Now the Yak we did cook for overnight at the same time as it was saving lives. We actually shoot I keep on getting my stuff wrong. I cook the Yak at 57 for a whole day for 24 hours. And or for overnight rather. And the beaver actually cooked for two days. 48 hours of 60 I cooked it just like I cook a short rib. Okay, excuse me, people. Sorry about that. So, but the Yak we cooked overnight, my my theory was that it was kind of, you know, maybe not quite as tough as a short rib was going to be. And so a short rib if you cook it for a full day at 60 for 24 hours and 60 degrees Celsius comes out with the texture of like a skirt steak. And so that's what I was shooting for. So we did that with a YAG and the Yak was just really savory and delicious. The odd thing was is that a lot of us detected a little bit of a duck, kind of a no Hoonah duck into but it was just I thought it was really good. And, and the the really interesting thing about these is that these animals are all old animals. And so you know, a bunch of friends of mine like Stein garden, who won't call me back, and Harold McGee have gone over to Europe where they have a culture of eating older, older animals for the flavor, and you notice the flavor is really, really good. So I really I want to do a lot more experimenting with cooking. older animals, we just got to figure out, figure out a way to get them. So if you want, I believe there is probably time for one more call or if you if you're near phone call in at seven one. We have one we have a caller in. Alright, so there's probably no more time for other callers. Hello. Hello. Hi.