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.

So to be the first to hear our episodes when they launched this fall, go to wherever podcasts are streaming, and hit subscribe and make sure to give us a follow at the Culinary call sheet on Instagram.

When you open the bottle and you drink the wine it speaks for itself. Is it you know a wine that's made for food? Yes, those types of wines are tend to be more rustic or have a little bit more body or their wines that are just sheer out hedonistic pleasure. Sure there's wines like that, that maybe from California that are more cocktail wines are ones that are just big jammy fruit bombs, and those I think appeal to a certain group of people as well. I think the ones that bought our house specializes in is more of these food friendly. You know, rustic style, biodynamic, organic wines that tend to be a bit more earthy, come from someplace so you can always taste the terroir. You can almost feel this guy, the sense era was grown. And this lady rocky soil. And so to me, that's the exciting part that the wine feels like it comes from someplace.

Hello, and welcome to cooking issues on the heritage Radio Network coming to you live from approximately 1245 Every Tuesday. It's another rainy slushy day here in Brooklyn. I'm in the studio at Roberta's pizzeria with Natasha hammer, Lopez. We're here to answer all of your cooking related questions, technical and not. So if you can, please give us a holler at 718-497-2128. That's 71849721 a two eight. Okay, so we really we had a question that I forgot to answer last time. So I might as well might as well get into it. It's about gelatin. And the question is, basically, well, what the heck, what's what's what's the difference between all the different gelatins there are? What's the difference between fish gelatin, and you know, animal based regular, you know, like red meat making or meat based animal gelatin. What's the difference between the different grades, the bronze, the gold, the silver and the platinum? Well, here's the deal. So gelatins in the industry are rated on something called Bloom strength. And blue strength has nothing to do with, you know, a flower blooming or even the fact that gelatin, you know, swells up when you put it in water. It has to do with a dude named bloom, who in the early 20th centuries came up with a technique for measuring the strength of gels and gelatin gels. And it's it's a really dumb simple technique. You just take a you know, a plunger of a particular size, and you push it into the surface of gelatin that's been cured very accurately. I'll give you the exact numbers in case you want to run your own balloon test. It's 6.67% gelatin solution that is temperature 17 to 18 hours at 10 degrees Celsius and they measure how much weight in grams it takes to push a half inch diameter plunger four millimeters into The surface of the of the gelatin, why would they specify part of it an interesting part of it millimeters nose makes no damn sense. No sense. And it's really, you know, a simple little thing. And most most industrial by the way, all school industrial measurements like this are quite, quite simple like they used to they and they still measure viscosity of a lot of things by literally like building a trough with a ruler in it, dumping some crap into it and seeing how far that stuff runs along the trough before it stops. I mean, this is the kind of is the kind of like bonehead test, but it makes everything standardized because they need to be able to standardize gelatin for various different applications. So gelatin has come in a wide range, then in sheet gelatin, bronze gelatin, the bronze grade is going to be about 125 255 bloom. So it's fairly soft, right where silver is this is from an eagle thread, by the way. So you know, I shouldn't take without saying it's from an eagle thread. Silver gelatin is about 160 Gold is like 190 to 220 and platinum is 235 to 265. So that's the highest bloom strength, I would bet most of us use something in the in the gold in the gold range right now. Blue strength, interestingly, has nothing necessarily to do with how the gel is going to perform in a particular application. Like for instance, gelatin clarification, it's just a measure of how strong a particular gel concentration is, as a gel, it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to make better marshmallows. Because gelatin isn't just used as a gelling agent. It's used as a whipping agent. It's used as an emulsifier because it's made of protein. So a gelatin is made. If you take any any form of of collagen and connective tissue, all of our connective tissue, most of it is collagen, right? And collagen is a triple helix. And each one of those have proteins. And each one of those helixes when it's denature properly turns into gelatin. That's how braised products work right? You know, you braise until the college and breaks down and turns into gelatin, which makes it texture delicious and whatnot, whatnot. So animal based gelatins come well, you'd guess from animals, a lot of it is from skin, like pig skin, or from bones when they're doing bones they they take they wash the bones and acid for a long time to leach out all the calcium, it leaves a spongy nasty bone mass, which they then wash, dry will neutralize dry grind up and then they then are the skins or anything else they take them that raw material. And they usually treat it either with an acid or with with a base and they get the tube and kinds of gelatin depending on whether they do that. And that further kind of breaks the cross links between these triple helix proteins right makes it easier for them to extract the gelatin. And then they take in they they heat it in hot water and they extract like three four or five times different gels have different qualities. The first water is the highest strength, highest quality gel. And the farther down the extraction line you are the kind of the crappier you're jealous, that's how they get all the gel out and how they get gels of various different strings. Part of the question was what's the between the powder gel and a sheet gel? And the answer is nothing going into it right a sheet gel is you take the gelatin solution that you get out of your process product and you dehydrate it and you spread it into a sheet let it dry and cut it and put it in a box whereas powdered gelatin they extrude into noodles, those noodles are dried out and then pulverized in a mill and then that's the subsequent shell powder but there's no inherent difference between powder gel powder gelatin and and and sheet John now there is a major difference between fish gelatins and like you know pig or or or cow gelatin there's you're probably not going to run into poultry gelatin unless you you know, process your own or you're doing like some sort of, you know, chicken skin soup and you get the gelatin out of it. But, but pig and mammal skin gelatins are pagan sorry cow gelatins are fairly you know, high strength this is the one we're normally used to using fish Shelton's can come from one of two sources. coldwater fish make a really crappy gelatin it barely gels at all. It's really just it's crap. I mean, it really is horrible. Other they're working on it. And stashes you know that no, they're working on it because there are people who would like to have a a fish based gelatin that works now and it has to do with the amino acid makeup of the of the proteins are the connective tissue in in coldwater fish, it's just they suck. What do you want? Warm water fish, on the other hand, can make a gel strength that is okay. But the problem is, is that fish gelatin tends to melt at a lower temperature. So you know, it's a lot harder to work with a fish based gelatin. And to get a good result I've you know, I tend to not use it, I kind of stay away from it. We tend to use sheet gelatin for some applications and powdered gelatin for other applications. And it's just a matter of which box comes into my hand first, frankly, but you shouldn't switch bloom strengths. You know, or basically the strength of your gels between different recipes because your results may differ. How's that? I was good. There's too much of the right amount, the right amount, the right amount. Thank you. It's always nice to have it At least one booster in your corner. So now loyal readers of the blog, if we have any left because we've only put like we put up like one post every eight years at this point we get we're gonna get better we have some cool stuff coming in like the centrifuge video I promised you and a bunch of other stuff. But I'll give you an idea of stuff we've been working on. About a year ago,

I think you know less than that. You're talking about the first thing there. Yeah, no, eight months.

Alright, so Cornell University has this project called fab at home. And basically it's a three dimensional printer. And they gave us one a while back and it's basically they want us to print food with with this 3d printer. Now. You know, what does it really it's a syringe. So that basically is a syringe that you fill with paste any kind of paste like mono gel paste goop meat paste goop means basically, the main criteria is that you get a pasty goop, right. But they have a new one. Apparently, we can now extrude pasta dose and masa, which we're going to work on today, which sounds interesting. Because of these cookies, they can do cookies. So here's the thing, right? It's basically a three dimensional, it's basically it just very accurately controls the XY and Z axis. It's hooked into a computer. And they accurately control how fast the goop is sprayed out of the syringe. And they have multiple syringes, so you can use different materials, yada, yada, yada. Fantastic right now. They want us to print food with it. Now, here's the here's the main deal. And CNN, by the way, some money showed you know what it's called CNN Money, but it's easy CNN Money. They're coming to the school today. And our buddy, you know, Senator Lipton from from Cornell is here, and we're going to shoot this thing with it with the television people today. But they have the classic kind of what I think that CNN does awful idea, a horrible, horrible idea that someday you are going to go home, push a button, and your meal is going to be printed for you. God, I hope not. You know what I mean? It's just it's just a terrible, terrible idea. And so, and when I say this to people, they're like, Yeah, but if that's just because the technology is not right, I'm like, No, this is a conceptually Horrible idea that we would, that we would like, grind all of our raw ingredients into a pablum like paste and extrude them into various different shapes and call that a meal goes against. Basically everything I think is is good about the world. What you know, yeah, yeah. But they didn't seem to. They weren't listening when I was saying that, right. They that kind of went over their head. Yeah, the whole like, I think it's evil. Yeah. So right. Now, there are some fantastic applications for the 3d printer. Not my applications, but you know, good applications, for instance, you have a kid's birthday, this thing is like the V wizard icing printing machine of all time, this thing can print a three dimensional El Santo wrestling, like, you know, a Martian on top of a cupcake like without breaking a sweat, right. So for things like kids birthday parties, where you want to print out, you know, one, you know, cake with the kid's face on it, and then or maybe the kid's face with a dog trying to bite his face off, something like that, anything like that. Anything, you've got a model of you can you can print out onto a cupcake because icing is a straight up awesome paced printing material, right? It's also great if you know, if you want to make things out of epoxy, or you kids want to make things out of silicone rubber, that's great. We're talking food only, right? Yeah, so I think is great. You can print cookies in the shape of, I don't know, like, specials, donkeys, whatever you want. I mean, you can put in whatever, great, great application, not my application. For me. The you know, I'm obviously not interested in the application that I think is, you know, one of the roots of all evil thinking in the future of food that we're all going to live like the Jetsons, you know, and have our food in pill form. That's, you know, God help us if that happens, but you know, I'm waiting for the killer application where we actually produce a new and delicious food with this printer that can't be made any other way. And that's basically why you haven't seen a lot of work from us out of it because we haven't come up with a killer application. But they you know, there's this new technique that we're hopefully going to try out today where you basically you can print what looks like a you know, those like how do you describe these especially like you know, the squeegee mats that you walk on that are made out of like plastic loopy doodles or those flip flops? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, the squeegee doodle flip flops. Flip Flops. Yeah, what's the name of the company send nuke sa N UK Yeah, you know Natasha knows everything about flip flops and I don't because I find them a horror like the idea of my heels slipping around. Me I cooking. I hate flip flops, if any of you no offense if you own a flip flop corporation but you know, you'd sooner see me dead than in a pair of flip flops. That's just it. You know what I mean? Like I hate them. I hate everything about them the noise when they're wet mean everything awful like something but to my toes horrible. Anyway, So, how did we get on? Oh yeah, so in materials like that, like squeegee material and flip flops, but you can print it out of any kind of food. So we're going to take masa dough, which is next embolized corn ground into a fine paste, we're going to try to print this basically spongy mat like surface out of the masa, and then fry it to get kind of a new snack chip texture. That's going to be cool, right? And we're also going to try to print out some extruded some snacks that, you know that can be the be puffed later. Another main problem with with this 3d printing is it's inherently a prototype application, right? So yes, I can make one space shuttle out of scallop paste, which is what we did last time we printed something out. But if I really wanted to make space shuttle shaped scallop paste nuggets, right, I would make a silicone mold that had like 20 or 30 Space Shuttles in it. And then I would just, you know, strike mold everything out with an offset spatula and call it call it a day, you know that I wouldn't, I wouldn't bother printing each one because that's, that's a nightmare. So these are the basic problems with a 3d printer. But if you have any ideas, please call them in ASAP, because we're going to talk to the CNN people today. And if nothing I'd like more than to say one of our listeners or readers just came up with the killer app. All right. All right, let's take a break come back call in all your questions to 718-497-2128 That's 718-497-2128 cooking issues so much if you're getting down but gonna have a punk gonna have. All right. Everybody,

welcome back to Cooking issues, calling all your questions to 718497 to 128. That's 718-497-2128 coming to you live from Brooklyn. All right. So I think we should talk about another project we're working on not strictly cooking, related, but generally food related. And that's the food Museum. As some of you might know, the project that I was involved in before I joined the French culinary team was to try and start a food museum. And this isn't necessarily a place where isn't a place where you just go look at shellacked pieces of bread and Muse over how awesome the food of the past was, I mean, I this is going to be a place where you go and you you eat you taste. You learn you see you touch because I really find that not that you shouldn't listen to food radio. But I find that like it'll really if you want to learn about food, you really you have to eat it, you have to see it, you have to touch it, you have to smell it. I mean, that's the that's what food is, you know, I mean, I love reading. You know, I love listening to ideas, but really, you know, you got to get out there and taste. That's what Geoffrey stone garden has that that's one of his big gripes about, you know, people you know, who are in the food business is they want to be in the food business, they want to write about it, but they simply haven't eaten enough. So here's whenever you if any of you out there ever going to approach Geoffrey Stein garden, the food writer at Vogue, you know, a friend of ours, if you're ever going to approach him and say that you're interested in getting started in the food business, or specifically in food writing, please, please have a long list of places you have gone, and things you have eaten. And avoid saying that x y or z is the best. Like avoid saying things like that's the best hamburger because he's like, well, so you've eaten every hamburger on Earth. I mean, I'm just telling you should you ever approached every stone garden to ask him for advice? That is my advice to you anyway. I think he's done with the with the Food Museum He's given us He's given us things in the past. So anyway, so this is a food museum. And the idea is to have it in New York when we first came up with the idea. There wasn't really there weren't any food museums of the time we were talking about me there was copia in in Napa, which is closed unfortunately, there's a New York Food Museum, which about history of New York food, but it's a museum that's not meant to have a location. There's now the Museum of southern food, which, you know, I haven't been down there, but you know, but anyway, so the idea is to start one in in New York, and Patrick, you know, the Hefei of heritage foods. And the the great leader of this radio network, like the idea and say, Well, let's start this project this project up again. And so that's why I'm here talking about today. We're going to have a fundraiser on March 27, which is a Sunday Yeah. And it's going to be held at Del Posto pretty badass. I can say that here right? Yeah, badass. Yeah, pretty badass. You know, our friend Mark Ladner graciously agreed to let us have the fundraiser there. He'll be cooking. We haven't confirmed all the other chefs yet, but it's gonna be big. Anyway. We're looking to other people, something like that to 10 is the limit to tends to limit. And if you have any questions about it, should you wish to go to this fundraiser. You can email our Natasha and Lopez at French culinary.com. That's n Lopez at French culinary.com. I'll tell you what, I'll be making some cocktails for you will not okay, well, maybe no starch doesn't want to do. I'm going to straw basically, here's what's going to happen. I'm going to strong arm and beat all of my friends and family into submission to work on this damn thing. So they don't even know about it yet. But I'm going to beat on Dave Chang until he says yes. I'm going to beat on Wiley until he says yes, I'm going to beat on Dave wonders till he says yes. To make cocktail. So if Audrey is in town, I'll beat on her. You know what I mean? It's like this, it's going to be like a full force beat down to try and get as much of the food world involved with at least our friends in the food world involved in. I'm gonna give Johnny a beat down. Johnny's gonna give him a beat down. Anyway. So anyway, so that's, that's going to be that's what we're working on. Something that's working on behind the scenes. Another thing we've been working on behind the scenes is our raw food challenge, which, Okay, listen, listen. Not a welcher I don't want anyone out there to call me a wheelchair, but I have to fly to Boca Raton. During the week I was supposed to do the raw food thing and that confidence that are the event that I'm going to involve cooking. And since I will not make anything ever that I don't taste before it goes out. I cannot eat raw food during that week. So Natasha is busy as we speak rescheduling for one of the first two weeks in February to do the raw food extravaganza but I'll give you some lowdown about what we've tested so far. bought myself an Excalibur dehydrator, right? Which was, you know, it's awesome dehydrator. Unfortunately in my house, there's no place to put it so it's like you know, up like, in the ceiling on top of my printer in a cabinet that can only be accessed on the tallest chair we have, right? That's life. I have a literally I use my iPhone in camera mode to look and see what the knob is set to so that I can set the knob. Even at home. I'm good old school. I'm ghetto at home. I'm good. It's always good. Anyway, so maybe it's not really I mean, it's an awesome dehydrator. It's just for some reason I have all this great equipment and I managed to make it look stupid by the way I set it up and the horrible conditions I set it up and that's the story of my life. Something really nice in a pile of filth. That's so basically that's my life in a nutshell, right? Yeah, something nice and a pile of filth anyway, so working on with stuff with the dehydrator. I hadn't started to make a series of sprouts because apparently raw vegan food involves a lot of sprouting for for various reasons. One, it helps grains and things be more easily broken down because as green sprouts, enzymes go to work and I guess roughly was all about enzymes anyway, start breaking down some of the starches making them more digestible so you can eat them raw. Now, no starch. How many different things did you spray? Eight, eight. So we did mung beans. They didn't look like any mung bean sprouts I've ever had. Like maybe we need to grow them better that you know, I like a mung bean sprout like that's the one sprout where I can. I will stand up in a hallway and say, hey, you know what, mung bean sprout you are a good sprout that's a good sprouted mung bean sprout Not these. No, no, but other people seem to enjoy them, right? Did oat oat groats, which Natasha for some reason thought was out grout I don't know what I don't know why you grout, your your tiles with oats but anyway, O'Groats. Apparently she didn't grow up singing the OTP beans and barley growth song No. Yeah, anyway. So adzuki beans we did what else we do we did lentils some of these by the way you shouldn't eat raw because it kind of poisonous Black Eyed Peas. What else? What else we do Ryan berries. No, we didn't get to do the right. Something. Berries, wheat berries, berries, the berries. Alright, wheat berries. We're not We're not awful. I think that was the only one we the Hmong barriers weren't Oh, and we made that stuff. Rejuvelac which for those of you that don't know or care Rejuvelac is you know, you take wheat berries, you let them sprout and then you let them sit in water to kind of ferment a little bit and they use that as a Kickstarter for different things. Let me just say that all the sprouts tasted like poisoned to me with the exception of the wheat and I'm not saying this look. This is this is good and bad, right one I'm not saying that they were bad because one chef was like, Hey, I tasted your sprouts. Those are pretty good. And I'm like really? Because to me they tasted like poison.

My wrong. Yeah, like you just sprayed your grass front lawn with with

poison. Yeah, yeah. Poison anyway. Now but but it was good that I had a chef who likes sprouts, taste them. and say that they were okay. Because now I know that I just would prefer not to use those things. The wheat sprouts are okay, you can use it. So that's something I'm going to strike off my list, there's not going to be any sort of like, like, you know, like the Rejuvelac. Yeah, the Rejuvelac was good. So the Rejuvelac that's like slightly fermented wheat stuff is good. That's good. I want to see if I can make a raw version of rye Rejuvelac that we can then almost make a class out of which is you know, classes like, you know, the, the Eastern European Russian fermented bread beverage, usually made with bread, which is cooked, which means you can't do it, but I want to see if you can do just something sprouted. I'm also interested I don't have time, but I'm interested in trying to work with Rob beer. That might be it might be interesting. But anyway, so the Sprouse tastes bad, which means I have to think of something else to do because I didn't like them. We tried another bunch of recipes, for I don't want anyone to get mad. I'm just tasting it. So this is like deciding what I'm going to eat for this week. We made a bunch of nut cheeses. I don't know why the heck they're called cheeses. They don't taste like cheese. I wasn't there. But you didn't taste any of those. It's like basically nuts mixed with Rejuvelac. And or, and or orange juice and or, you know, some other stuff and into like a musi paste. And they're used a guess as a kind of a cottage cheese replacement and vegan cheese. But you know what the problem with them is? Fundamentally is I really like cheese a lot. Cheese to me has a specific texture and taste. Which these don't have. I mean, like, could you make a delicious raw nut mousse? Yeah, yeah, not this was like no, we did do an interesting thing we mixed, we soaked a bunch of nuts because you have to soak some of these nuts when they're raw because they haven't been roasted and there's stuff in them you want to get out. So we so macadamias, pistachios, sunflower, we didn't have any raw cashews left in the house, we did so sunflower seeds, shelled thank God and almonds all raw, we we put them through a Champion juicer. And then after they're soaked, and then we took the paste and we squeezed it out. And that actually was really good had a really good texture the oil separated out. And we were able to make little balls had actually a really good texture. So that will be it's an expensive dish could add all those nuts and soaked and everything but you know that will probably seems

really expensive and a lot of work. unnecessary work? Well,

it's just eat it well, not, you know, it's not unnecessary if the goal is to eat raw meat. Now, the main problem so far is is that I can it does take a lot of pre work to do the raw food

thing and in our space, we need space. But I mean, I can

do it, I do it at home. It's not the issue. The issue is, is it takes a lot of work to do it right now I'm thinking now look, let's say you actually ate raw food, like this is what you did you ate raw food, right? Who has this level of time to devote to always been three days out. And I'm sure some of these things become staples, you always have sprouts in your fridge, you always have Rejuvelac a Bruin, you always have, you know, whatever, whatever cultures are going to get it to go, you know what I mean. But in the absence of that, I mean, you'd probably like, you know, like the everyone's image of what raw food people eat, which is sitting around eating carrots all day. I mean, I could see how you would devolve into that because it's, it's a heck of a lot easier. You know, I mean, like, these raw food restaurants have to jump through some serious, serious hoops to kind of do the things that they do. Now, the last great experiment I'm hoping this works really, really well is the marination of vegetable partial dehydration to simulate kind of a roasted flavor. Although I don't even know why you'd have to call it roasted, it's just can't leave to say it makes a nice texture out of it. So we'll play with some mushrooms. I will play with some other things. But barring that, I'm just going to have to do something radically. Ignore all of the raw food advice that I've gotten, like I said, when I ate at Simon's restaurants are milk is a pure food. You know, I liked a good deal of what was put out, you know, so it's not like it can't be done. But I mean, we have to think of our own way of doing it something that's good. So we're going to use a road map. I'm going to make some low temperature distillates make all of you raw food people out there totally jealous because I'm going to be drinking sweet, sweet booze that's never been heated, distilled illegally in my wrote of that, right? And when what else do you want, we can do reductions also low temperature, so we'll be able to do fruit reductions that are totally low temp, that's going to be awesome. We can use enzymes. We can use our pectinase enzymes to break things down to do clarifications, we're going to make some bang up sauces with that kind of stuff. I'm extremely interested in trying to get some trans contaminates that doesn't have maltodextrin because unfortunately, that's been cooked and doesn't have casein because that's not vegan, or gelatin because that's not obviously not vegan, to see whether or not we can strengthen nut nut pace, and other other you know suspensions with proteins in them in the absence of heat. I think that can be an interesting test. I'm gonna try and run that. And that shouldn't be. That shouldn't be a problem for vegans right now. We made an enzyme. For raw vegans. It's an enzyme. It's not animal based. It's microbial based fermentation. So it shouldn't be a problem. So that's our raw food progress. We welcome any sort of advice. You know, we've read Matthew Kenny's books, we've read SARMS books. We've read that guy that you really like, well, there's this guy. I don't know him, but he's got the craziest pictures in his cookbook. His name is where he is Giuliana or who Yano? Probably Who? Who? Jana? Yeah. So we have these. These we have a tratar Trotter, what's the name of the woman working with Trotter out her row? And his problem is that like, like, and these cookbooks are good, right? They're good. I mean, they really are. They're, they're well done. It's just like, you know, some of the raw ingredients. I have issues with like sprouts. I just detest them. I really do. I wish I could like them. I've never liked them growing up, especially alfalfa sprouts. I can't think of anything less rather have caught in my teeth and alfalfa sprouts. I think the problem is, is that even like people who like people, not raw food people, any people people like pea shoots, right. Most people like pea shoots. Guess who doesn't like pea shoots? Yeah, maybe I'll eat them. They're not vile, but that kind of raw, starchy taste, I'm averse to. And so since that is inherent in almost every sprout,

I like P sheets. I remember Brooks put them in a desert with strawberry ice cream.

Brooks is the pastry chef at Del Posto are one of our favorite pastry chef. I'm sure it's Look, everyone in the world likes except for me. So I'm not saying that. You know, I'm right here. I'm clearly wrong. Clearly pea shoots are delicious. And you know, I find them merely you know, not awful, you know, but it's that starchy, sweet taste that I'm not really down with anyway, let's go to our second commercial break and come back still time to call him 271849721287184972128 cooking so much getting down but gonna have a bomb gonna have gonna have oh my God God gonna read right. Welcome back. They're cooking issues. 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128 coming to you from Rainy slushy Brooklyn. Okay. So interesting little story. We were on your on, eat while you were in the studio audience. The Martha Stewart show. How long was that like maybe two months ago? Anyway, Natasha never lets me forget it. Because I was supposed to complete three cocktails overnight,

it was five, then it was cut down to Jesus, you know, look.

So and it's not just like you will be moved through three quarters of the cocktail. You're an idiot. You're more on why couldn't you make it through it? You're useless. Anyway, my point is, is that most of the time when you do demos, the person you're demoing in front of is basically just there kind of reacting. Whereas when Martha Stewart is there with the demo with you, Martha Stewart asks you questions that relate to how things work. And you don't just tell Martha Stewart she has you met your wife? Not on air.

I thought she asked

what and it's completely up to you. Well, that's easy. I met my wife in college. Mr. Would you like keep plowing through it crap one Martha Who does she think she is to ask you a question about cooking for real? Anyway. So So anyway, so I didn't make it through all of the steps that I was supposed to make it through on the program. I made it started right I made about three quarters of the way through a gin and tonic. I was able to show Martha the liquid nitrogen trick of pulverizing grapefruit pips and blood orange pips into their individual not really pips pits or seeds, you know, the fruit, the vesicles juice vesicles pulverize them into individual things that they float around and look pretty new. Martha would love that because, you know, if there's anyone in the world that likes a pastel color, it's Martha Stewart right? So here's what happens at the at the end of the show Martha's like Yeah, that's great. I'm figuring she's you know, blown. Sunshine up my you know what and that and she's like, that's great. I'm like, hey, well, you know if you're ever interested in any of this stuff, and I demonstrated a centrifuge clarifying lime juice in a centrifuge using a combination of ag or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, centrifuge. So that so and part of the segment was kind of what an eBay ninja I am and how I was able to get my centrifuge for $100 on eBay because they I forget that one was because they spelled it like no, no, that one was because oh, that that one was the dead fuse had blown fuse in it. The other one I got was because they spelled it like centrifuge. You know, I just by the way, eBay friends out there, I just bought 160 liter liquid nitrogen Deuter Dewar used, but retail value brand new $2,000 and eBay value 1000 to $1,200 in that range for like 300 bucks because they spelled nitrogen wrong. Hello. I feel a little bit guilty actually, frankly, taking advantage of people who spell nitrogen wrong. No, but it is. Wow. They didn't. That's why we call it the hammer folks. You don't get to see it very often. But that's why they call it a hammer anyway. So I'm like, you know, Martha, you know if you ever need anything with this tech stuff, figures, you're not going to ask me because Greg gets from a lineage right there when he is coming on the show, by the way in spring, but because he has a new book coming out, I actually have the galleys of it's kind of a more of a memoir, not a cookbook more of a memoir. But coming on the show, I guess marches on like that. So looking forward to that. If we can get Myhrvold on when he's out some time. Yeah. His books coming out soon. Yeah, maybe we can get lucky next week. Is he in town? On Tuesday, man? I don't know. We'll get we'll get you some good guests anyway, cuz we haven't gotten a guest in like 8 billion years. We'll get you some good guests. Anyway. Where are they? Oh, yeah, Martha. So Martha is sitting there. And I'm like, figuring she's not going to ask me for anything. And the next day her. The assistant calls her assistant calls and says, Hey, Martha wants a centrifuge. I'm like, really? Yeah, like for the show? She's like, No, for her house. Like, all right, what's your budget? And Martha is so kind of love the fact that I'm this kind of scrounging person who glues everything together with duct tape and bubble gum quality and filth, quality and filth. That she's like, I don't know. 300 bucks. Like what? This is something a swear that if you want to buy one that is in working condition. That's good that you trust with your with your family, let's say right? That's a $1,200. That's a 1200 to $1,500 problem, right? New we're talking a $7,000 to $10,000 problem wildly different just had his got his new centrifuges do some interesting stuff, actually, while he called me and says like he's at now I kicked myself. He's turning butternut. That's pretty cool. That's cool. That's cool. I shouldn't maybe have said that on the air turning potter with it. Anyway. So the so she's like 300 bucks, because she wants to get like the cools, bargain. She wants to be part of the eBay bargain thing. I was like, you realize for $300 I'm gonna have to buy a broken one. And pray I can fix it. And then it hasn't been you know, dipped in too much feces that I can't clean off. So because these are all have all sorts of nasty blood and blah, blah, blah. I mean, they're all They're hardcore. Right? So she's like, that's okay. I can wait. So eventually we did. Yeah, right. So we did find one thing was was dead Tony. Blocks, like a car. Yeah. But you know, look, again, like anything else with eBay. It's, it's, I was reading the description to see kind of what was wrong with it, like how it was broken, and then kind of praying that I could fix it. And I determined that because the motor could spin freely. And the tech ometer still works and everything powered up, that if I was lucky, right? It was a problem either with a wire leading to the motor, that would be the best, or it was a problem with the actual brushes. Because these are brushless motors, there's carbon brushes that are in it, that basically transfer the electricity from the winding out back to the thing and so these go bad after a while and if someone's a jerk and they haven't replaced them, then everything goes south and the machine stops working. Well, lo and behold, it was the brushes. So you know, you bought a centrifuge for under 300 bucks, I think we paid to do something is 350 Altogether, we're shipping and everything right. And refrigeration works great. Replaced the brushes. That was a $6.16 After I had to buy two sets of brushes, $16 problem. And boom, Martha's got a centrifuge. So as soon as she gets her stuff back in the country, Martha Stewart is going to be rockin with the cooking issues. She can do better what she loves. She's gonna turn some butter. She's gonna we're gonna give her a starter kit of enzymes. Really? Well, why not? She's Martha Stewart. And I mean, I guarantee you Martha Stewart's got some fancy fruit. Right that she can clarify in that center fuse. So that's our first celebrity hookup where we're hooking a celebrity up with some high tech equipment. And that's cooking issues for this week with Martha Stewart center fuse. Join us next week for cooking issues.