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.

broadcasting live from Roberta's in Bushwick, Brooklyn, you're listening to heritage Radio network.com.

Hello, and welcome to cooking issues. This is Dave on your host of cookies coming to you live every tuesday from the back of Roberta's pizzeria in Bushwick, Brooklyn on the heritage Radio Network answering all of your cooking related questions technical or not. Call your questions in 27184972128. That's 718-497-2128 As usual, joined in the studio here with Natasha hammer. Lopez, how are you? Let's just because she beat you here. Yeah,

it's like Mark, we do have time to shave the back of your neck.

Oh, that's what's happening. Now. You all know something about Mark, lad. No. All right now. Also, how to Jack and the rest you like that? We got a quote like that last week. But I want everyone to know. That was two days ago on Sunday. Miss Dasha, the hammer had dinner with none other than Dr. Ruth. Right.

I found out that she is an excellent sniper. I

mean like like eBay sniping or killing people killing people. Yeah, so it's like all about the good sex and if the sex isn't good take you out from long range without you

know and and the orphanage in Switzerland. Wait, what? Yeah.

But you got to talk more about this. First of all, she's 90 years old folks. Right?

Yeah. And then her parents were you know, died in the concentration camp. She was taken to an orphanage in Switzerland and then for some reason she learned how to be a sniper after the war or during the during the war.

Wow. Yeah. So like that little smile means she will she will shoot you straight between the damn dice. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. I had no is this not is this commonly known Doctor No information. No, I

don't know. I came up

with Mr. Shea in the house, you know, murder and sniping is gonna come up eventually. That's crazy stuff. Yeah. Wow. That's impressive. And that certainly overshadows what I did this weekend. I went to the Sean Casey animal shelter in Brooklyn. We're looking to get a pet. Oh, wow. Finally, well, Booker wanted a cat of course we can't have cats because, you know, my sister in law is deadly allergic to them. And Jen doesn't want a dog knows you're getting a GLONASS now, but the snakes mean what are you gonna do with a snake? I was like, Hey, kids, you got to feed the snake hole, defrosted mice, you may have to purchase packages of like frozen whole mice that are they're frozen in kind of a suppository shape so that they A snakeskin just swallow those suckers without choking and you thaw them out you throw out this dead mouse you throw it in the cage just to give a live one I guess you could but it's probably safer for the snake and kind of less traumatic for the kids if you throw in a frozen anyway whatever I want to bird now Now things I want to bird you know they have 20 pound turtles, they're 20 pound turtle tortoise, they won't they won't give you the tortoise the toy because they don't want encourage people to work on own tortoises. So this is a rescue only anyway. Okay. questions coming in? Hi, thanks for the brilliant show. Well, I don't know about that. But thank you for enjoying it. It's informative and Larry's in the absolute high point of my week. I recently become chef of a medium sized fine dining restaurant in Bergen. And I can't pronounce it was sitting in salt. But this isn't Bergen County, New Jersey. This is Bergen Norway. Cool. Yeah, very cool. Nothing wrong with Bergen County. Well, he's got her Jersey face on now. Actually, I'm gonna go to Jersey next week and rock and mineral show. The young one wants to go to a rock and mineral show in Jersey to know that New Jersey is one of the mineral capitals of the world. Yeah, I went there as a kid too. It's awesome. Yeah, right. It's cool, right? That's really cool. Yeah, see, see minerals. Okay. Where was I? Oh, yes. Somehow I got somehow I got drawn our tracking we that Natasha. And I started my iPad. Okay. We normally cook our fish wrapped in clingfilm. That's plastic read for all you guys out there in the rationale combi oven with a fairly high delta t, meaning if you don't know we're talking about it means that he's trying to cook it to a particular temperature, let's say in the in the, like 50, or somewhere Celsius in the middle or below. And then using a much higher temperature like 60, or something Celsius, to cook it in, which is actually a standard way of cooking. But in low temperature, we talk about delta t's we're talking about very specific differences in temperature between the cooking medium and what we're cooking anyway. Okay, with a fairly high delta t, usually 65 degrees centigrade for a core temperature of 39 to 42, which is I don't know what that is. It's something like 100. And C 42 is something like 103 or something like that. It's Fahrenheit, it's very low, very low. This is on the very, very low scale of cooking. In fact, most a lot of people wouldn't call it cooking, we call it warming. There's like a lot of debate and contention about whether or not this is I like it, but like this hybrid low temperature. Anyway, let me get finished with with the question. This yields a delicious fish in about five to seven minutes, but also a grossly overcooked and ugly exterior. And what I'm assuming is happening as the outside is over cook is 65 degrees is is high. And secondly, when you're cooking, low temp in these temperature ranges right where you're not getting any seared or any sort of browning on the outside. You get white proteins that come out of basically solution are drawn out and coagulate and look like little specks of almost egg white on the surface of the fish and they look gross anyway. Okay, so last night during service we tried steaming the fish but not really steaming steam is a misnomer. He had it in the combi oven with 100% humidity at 45 degrees centigrade to a core temperature of 42 centigrade and it was awesome. Stunning. The taste was almost raw, and the texture was almost flaky and completely transparent. It took we cooked it almost 45 minutes. So my problem is, is this safe. I always say to my customers that all the efficiency food we serve are unpasteurized and or raw, but is the additional 45 minutes in the danger zone. Okay, we use very fresh fish usually in rigor. We dry salted for 20 minutes beforehand. And thanks and please say hi to the guys out and blue Hillstone barn so hello Blue Hill stone barns from Eric in Bergen, Norway. Okay, so my feet also he sent a follow up email he said 45 minutes was not the time needed to get the fish to the core temperature. It was an experiment to see if we could drop the fish in the Combi. As soon as we got the ordering from a customer presumably it's a tasting plate so it comes in early. Right and if it would still be good after that amount of time. I now think it'd be better to drop the fish when we have sent all the moves to the to the table that would probably bring the cooking time down to 20 or 30 minutes. We have a vacuum machine vacuum Packer circulators and so that's an option instead of putting heat in the combi oven is heat transfer much quicker and vacuum back there to Combi we feel cooking fish in a bag is good but to look and texture suffers ever so slightly because their machine is small and they use an analog pressure meter etc etc. So they can never be very accurate with how much vacuum. It was also additional work. Okay look. Let's knock these out in reverse order one. I don't feel you have a need to vacuum the fish in a vacuum bag. Unless you are. I mean most of us don't have a combi oven right. And so vacuum fish in a bag is the only way or zip locking efficient bag really is the only way we can do low temperature work with fish. Right? If you have a combi oven or if you have a man the word just went right out of my head if you have a combi oven or if you have a CPAP you can do low temperature without it and in many ways it's superior because a bag does a couple things. One it tends to deform the portion slightly right unless you're very good at backing it or you put a lot of oil into it. And two, if you suck a vacuum on fish and cook under a vacuum, I find that a texture is affected. One of the things we do in the low temperature Soviet class that I teach is we serve a variety of the same fish in a variety of different vacuum levels cooked. And everyone, everyone can tell the difference in the higher fat fish. And also, no one really likes usually the Super hydrovac fish. And also even some of the medium vac ones are weird. ziplocks are usually pretty damn good because they don't have any sort of vacuum effect, but they allow you to cook low temperature and go on cooking issues which Yes, yes, I know I haven't written for a long time. And you'll see step by step instructions on how to put fish in a Ziploc bag. But it is more work to the advantage of vacuum as you can infuse flavors if you do it, but you're not going to hold these fish for a long time. Secondly, if you're telling people this stuff is raw and unpasteurized, yeah, that's good. That's a good first step, I would not cook these things at that temperature for 45 minutes, because you're incubating bacteria at that temperature. I think your 20 minute window is a lot safer, a lot lot safer. Also 45 minutes, it might not be a problem with LNG. I don't have a lot of experience with LNG. But some of your Fatty Fatty or fishes will have enzymes in that continue to break the fish down over time. And so a 45 minute fish will get mushy. Even if it doesn't get microbially spoiled, it will get mushy. I don't know specifically that when you when you put back when you put a piece of fish into the danger zone, the bacteria doesn't start growing immediately. There's a lag time before the bacteria start growing. And then it goes into a log rate where it's growing, you know, ferocious rates. But the problem is, I don't know exactly how long it's going to take to get into the log rate of cooking. But your zone is right in the log area of growth where it's going to grow at a fee Roche's rate, then you have the problem if it goes out and you don't know how fast it was, it was being served, I would feel completely comfortable with a fish that you tell people is basically raw, uncooked, unpasteurized, etc. With a 20 minute with a 10 to 20 minute cook time and out if they were going to eat it right away. And you never had the opportunity of trying to refill it again and serve it if anything happened, that I feel comfortable with 45 minutes, I start to feel a little bit uncomfortable mean, you know, again, you're probably not going to do anything but who knows. Also certain fish can develop at these low temperatures. histamines. I don't know which ones they are. But this is what BrewDog also tells me I've never done the research because I kind of was looking at him cross eyed when he was telling me because he just hates this texture of fish. I mean, the real problem is, is it also is at the super low temperatures, people if you've never had these things, right, like this super, super low temperature fish that we're talking about was one of the reasons why a lot of chefs in America like why are they afraid my brother in law got into cvwd and low temperature in the first place was to get these hyper low textures of fish. They look amazing. They look like like almost like, like candy like jelly, like Like sometimes like almost like a like a vacuum infused watermelon like, like if it's like something like a like a salmon. So they look amazing, like, and the texture is we usually described as kind of fudgy and dense. There's a particular temperature window right around there where the intense fishiness of raw fish goes away. And yeah, it doesn't have the texture of cooked fish. And it's awesome. I really like it. A good 50% of the customers here in New York don't like that texture. And so a lot of people have kind of moved away from that kind of cooking here in the States. But yet, it is a virtuoso thing to do to actually answer the question I can remember.

And we just got an email from Matthew leave that says hey, necess Yeah, the way I remember it is that Dr. Ruth became a sniper for Israel after the war

after the war. Nice. I'm still trying to imagine this like what I've always known as kind of a sweet older woman sniping people. Yes. You know, like a little gun to the head sniping issue thing anyway. Alright, so you want to go to the first commercial break and come back? Sure. All right, let's go to our first commercial break. Call your questions Do send 184972128 That's 184972128 took in new shoes.

Welcome back to Cooking issue Jack. What was that?

That is filicudi Zombie zombie?

Are you gonna like are you gonna like put that in with like cranberries zombie like like opposite zombie? Zombie opposites. So speaking of zombie, my son is obsessed with this game zombie highway. Have you played that game?

That sounds awesome though. Yeah, yeah,

he was he was. Yeah, anyway, I won't get into it. Okay. Jake show is sponsored by modernist pantry supplying innovative ingredients for the modern cook Do you love to experiment with new cooking techniques and ingredients but hate to overspend for pounds of supplies and only a few grams are needed per application. Do you hate that Natasha? Thank you. Yeah, miners pantry has a solution. They offer a wide range of modern ingredients and packages that makes sense for the home cook and enthusiast and most costs only around five bucks saving you time, money and storage space. Whether you're looking for hydrocolloids pH buffers or even meat glue, you'll find it at monitors pantry and if you need something that they don't carry, just as Chris Anderson and his team will be happy to source it for you. With inexpensive shipping to any country in the world. Modernist pantry is your one stop shop for innovative cooking ingredients. Modernist pantry carries propylene glycol alginate PGA for short, which is derived from brown algae was basically is derived from alginate. Anyway, from brown algae and can be used to stabilize emulsions and thicken liquids is particularly useful in creating what the heck are you opening over there? It's like it's like a sound effects thing she like holds her zipper pocket right next to the microphone and goes as crazy Anyway, where was stabilized emulsions and thickened liquids. It is particularly useful in creating a clean and creamy mouthfeel and beverages van. That's a gross thing to say, right? Yes, yeah. The stash is giving her clean and creamy look, fans are cooking issues that place an order of $25 or more before next week's show, we get a free package of PGA to play with simply use the promo code ci 75 and place your order online at modernist pantry.com Visit modernist pantry.com today for all of your modernist cooking needs. Alright, so PGA is one of the only PGA is one of the only ingredients that we use along with metal sale methylcellulose. That is not natural that we personally I mean use. And it's derived from alginate. And it's used as a thickener and especially in beverages. It's been phased out recently because of label declaration problems because people want to say all natural and it's not. And the second reason is is expensive, but it is a fantastic and unlike alginate it does not have a problem with acidity. Caller you're on the air.

Hey, Dave, this is Mark calling from Toronto, Canada. How you doing? Great. I'm a big fan of your show. We listen to it all the time. And two good friends of mine are on their honeymoon. They're at your show right now. So big ups and Adam. Wait, do you have a question for you?

What do they look like?

They're you know, average height. Adams got a bit of a potbelly.

Wow. I wonder whether I wonder whether there is a full head of hair. Right? You got a full head. there waving? Yeah. That's awesome. No one ever questions. Any Jesus here? Jack, can we get into Jesus?

I haven't seen him.

He might have today off.

It's awful. He's mysteriously missing.

Oh my gosh. All right. We'll look for him. All right, so your question.

My question is, so I'm interested in trying to do some freeze drying at home in my freezer. And I built a couple of Soviet machines. So I understand about the temperature controllers and wondering if I can use a pressure controller to sort of put a pressure vessel in my freezer with whatever food I want to freeze dry, and then sort of decrease the pressure as the temperature goes down trying to follow that, you know, the triple point line of the water phase.

Okay, so your, your main problem me first of all, do you have access to liquid nitrogen and or dry ice? Dry ice? Okay. Yeah, you're gonna need to, I mean, in general, in a freeze dryer, they're gonna, they'll actually sometimes heat the sample, right? I mean, what you're gonna need to do is get first, do you have a really good vacuum source?

Yeah, I've got a pretty good vacuum pump. Yeah, like a commercial, I can get a commercial vacuum pump. Like what

but you know, I haven't looked it up recently. But you know, it's, it's basically the, the vacuum pumps that I use are commercial refrigeration vacuum pumps, and they only get down to about I'd say for you know, three or four millibar in that range. And you're going to need to get substantially better, you're gonna need to get better than that to get a really good result out of it. You need to get quite low and you're going to have to ensure that your cold trap right that can you know, basically what you know for those you don't know freeze drying what you do is you freeze something typically then you place it in a vessel, you suck a vacuum on it and in between that in the vacuum you put a cold trap and the liquids that are frozen solid surface A solids frozen in the thing sublimate turned to a gas, migrate to the cold trap where they're frozen in the cold trap, and you maintain a vacuum until As the majority of the liquid that's in the product, or what would be liquid in the product has sublimated and migrated over to the cold trap. That's the theory of operation of it. But typically, you need to get a fairly cold, cold trap. So Dry ice is fine. Anything I think below about minus 60 Celsius, I think is okay. But colder is typically better, but you're gonna need to keep it cold the whole time. I would, if you can, if you can, I would use your vacuum pump to also vacuum insulate the cold trap on the outside, it's going to stop your heat loss and prolong the life of your coolant of your dry ice. The other thing is, yeah, the temperature control and I guess a freezer would work your main problem is going to be getting the vacuum right and making sure your cold trap stays cold. I've never had luck let's put it that way. And the I tried it in the role of AP basically using the role of AP as a kind of a cheap way to freeze dry with my refrigeration vacuum pump. But again, that only got down even I tweaked it all the way out and only got it got down to maybe like two three millibar and it's still I did not get any luck. But I encourage you to try and tell me what happens.

Okay, we'll do I'll keep experimenting and post something on the blog. If anything works.

Please do. Please do. Thanks. Thanks for Thanks for calling in. My pleasure. All right. Okay. We have a follow up. I just Oh wait, wait so we have a question other order from Erin call Hey, Cookie, she's doing great show. I started listening a couple of months ago I'm getting caught up with all the back shows I recently decided to do a DIY that's Do It Yourself circulator and just got to finish last weekend I started with the Seattle Food geek and oh my putting plans which I don't know those particular ones but I'm sure they're well known plans on the on the internet's but they made a few changes what I think are improvements. So at least my question first, the fish tank pump I started with died around 55 degrees Celsius. I am now using a $15 high temperature pump that only moves one liter per minute, roughly 16 gallons per hour using several probes it seems to be acceptable in a small bath with one bag. Do you think this is enough movement? Or can you recommend a faster high temperature pump that won't break the bank? Okay, that I do not think that's enough. Let's look any minor circulation is going to be enough for one bag and a pop because you just need to get the thing moving. The problem is if you put the heater into a bigger unit, and then you have a lot of bags in it, you're gonna have an you're going to have issues with dead spots. So a high pump height, you know a higher flow pump is going to be better typically, the one the last time I did one I used a pump that was recommended on the Brewers forums, I forget what it is, but it wasn't that expensive for recirculated mash pumps, rims method. And those pumps handle water quite well and I believe can go up into the mid 60s Or better Celsius. So you might want to check out the Brewers forums for recirculated mash pump setups and they all have cheap ones I just can't remember off the top of my head's also readily available. The pump I remember from sources like Granger or eBay. Okay, second. Bubblegum second about safety. I know this is a topic you've addressed before, but I wonder if you could quickly run through some safety tips. I'm using Ziploc bags under what circumstances and how critical is getting every last bit of air out. This is tough with ground meat. Is there an absolute minimum temperature to which you'd cook grocery store beef chicken holder ground? Can I add anything to the bag to adjust pH or oxygen to help anything else? Thanks, Aaron call Okay look, and I'll hit the follow up whatever. Okay. I'll do the follow up afterwards. So the deal is, is with safety you don't need to get all of the air out of the bag. You know the reason you get out you're not trying to do preservation for a long time you're trying to cook right so getting the air out isn't as big a deal that said you can get some oxidation if there's an excess amount of air especially on something like a criminal glaze and your cooking your criminal glaze you want to get the air out because I've noticed you get more of kind of an ag soul free taste if you don't. That's why even though I cook a lot of meats in ziplock bags at home, I really do prefer vacuuming for something like a criminal glaze when you're cooking at ground meat you don't want to get all the air out if you did it would be you know, like a puck would be like a sausage you wouldn't want that. So you want to keep keep you know you want to keep it not not dense and crushed down. So the minimum temperature I would cook depends what you mean by minimum. The minimum temperature that I typically recommend for people to cook at is about 54.4 Celsius because that's the minimum temperature for beef on the on the food you know the FSA is USDA website. So that's the lowest temperature that I usually recommend. There are people that recommend lower I typically will cook at 50 like steak I will typically and even ground meat if you cook it long enough. You have to cook it long enough because you put a lot of bacteria into the inside of the meat when you grind it but 55 for steak and usually for hamburger I'll do like 50s Six, if I want like rare ish, medium reddish kind of thing, cook it through And then if you want it to maintain rare all the way through, drop the temperature to 50 degrees Celsius for about 30 minutes to cool that cool it down, then sear the hell out of it to get a crust on it. If you want the burger to have more of a standard taste and don't kill it before you cook it and you will be fine. But that's typically what I do. And as a follow up, I took copious copious notes and decent photos through the process of making the circulator, you mentioned you have a close relationship to the poly science guys. So I don't know whether you'd be interested. But I'm happy to write it up and send it to you to use as a blog post. Another resource or even just for your amusement or a critique is surely no thing of beauty. But I think an improvement over the other plans that already exists on the internet with greater detail and the construction steps. Let me know if it's worth my time to draft and I'll send it your way. Why don't you send some of the photos to stars? She'll look at it. She's a rough critic. You're the roughest critic in the world. She she hates 90% of the stuff I do. And she hangs out on the weekend with snipers. Right? Okay. Paul writes in with a comment on last week's show, where I forget who it was called in and said he had problems with his chickens being tough. Every like fifth chicken breast has been tough from the Costco and he says virtually all broilers, nine all 9 billion of them that are slaughtered in the US 9 billion. Jesus in the US are slaughtered at essentially the same age 40 to 45 days. So tough chicken is likely not an age effect. I agree. But the question is, what is the effect? And has anyone else noticed? The one in five tough breast problem at Costco? Have you noticed that?

No. And then there is a Costco in the Bronx in Harlem.

Really? How do you know this?

I passed it. How do you train? Oh, go on the Metro North you can see target. And Costco.

The funny thing is, it's actually easier for me to fly to Europe than it is for me to go to. Yeah, it's crazy. It's for those of you that don't know New York, like we think we're hot snots here. But I mean, I don't mean that in a bad way. I mean, but I mean, yeah, you know what I'm talking about? And but the thing is, is that we're so provincial, we hardly ever leave within like 10 blocks, or 20 blocks of where we live. We're like, Oh, my God, Uptown. I have to go up to you know, coming out to Brooklyn here. Basically, I feel like I'm an adventurer and explore because I live in Manhattan. And people in Brooklyn, I guess sometimes feel the same way. They're like, Oh, man, I gotta go into the city. You gotta go to Manhattan. Jesus anyway. Weird. What do you think Jack? Yeah,

that's exactly how I feel when I have to go to the city. Yeah,

see, but notice they call the city. Yeah, boo. Yeah. Okay. And a question from Paul. Over the last month, Dave has mentioned two preferred knife sharpening tools duo sharp and edge Pro, can you comment on the need to have both or is one preferred and which one the Okay, so the edge Pro is a sharpening system. And it's one of the sharpening systems, it's based on fixing the angle between the knife blade and the sharpening tool. So basically, you have on the edge pro, you hold a knife by the handle with the blade facing towards you, and there's a stick on it that you rub back and forth over the surface of the knife and that sticks maintained at a very precise angle. So you can get both sides the knife and you don't have to think you don't have to look, you can sharpen a billion knives in like 13 seconds. Once you set it up, it takes like five to six minutes to set it up. Once you set it up, you can sharpen all your knives very quickly to the same edge angle. It's extremely repeatable. So if you want to if you know you want a particular edge angle on something, you can just rip them all through right now. It's not very effective if you only need to do one or two knives, or if you need to constantly change your angles or if all of your knives are at different edge angles, because then you know you're having to reset it each time and all this other stuff. I do like it for multiple, multiple things and it gets things on believably sharp. Okay, and it has a wide range of grids on it and you can replace the grids and this you know that things stay true and they don't gouge out the the duo sharp is basically just a hand a large the one that I use is a large hand diamond Whetstone, right. And what you know, it requires you to have you know, like traditionally sharpening your knives it requires you to use your senses your hands, your eyes, and your your finger when you're when you're feeling for the burr edge to determine whether you've gotten the angle correct on the sharpening and you know when you're done, etc, etc. They have a grip on both sides. What I like about the duo sharp is it's extremely thin, it's fairly light and it will never warp and you'll never gouge it out because it's diamond so like a lot of the Japanese Waterstones have problems where they get gouged and they have to be retrieved over time. That said like I like I say most like high end chefs. They still adhere to their, you know, their Japanese Waterstones and they would probably scoff at you know, my Duo sharp that I have around. But when I use it, my knives are freaking sharp and I get the people who are like, alright, that's freaking sharp. And Neil's who is waterstone man for many years. Tried mine when I was away once it was like, Alright, I'm getting one of these suckers because you know what? It's easy to fit in my bag. I don't have to freaking soak it in water. It doesn't make a mess all over my knives the way that the Waterstones do and I don't have to retrieve it ever done, done, done, done and done. All right. Hey look, if you don't like it, call up and blame me and tell me I'm a jerk wad but make sure you get the really, really the green and red one. Don't get one of the coarser ones. It's not going to be it's not going to be happy for you. Okay. So I have a Should we do one more quick commercial break there Jacqui thing. Yes, commercial break cooking issues

don't bring dashing to me bring bullshit to Africa

don't blame Dashi and gushee to Africa. Exactly.

What are you saying?

This is a Japanese food hater from Africa. Yeah, man. What was that? Well, I

had to just you know, as a quick commercial break call by use, I did just click on something. But what the heck was that? It was Shawn Cooney. I'm guessing filicudi son.

And the whole premise is, is I do not want to see a Japanese store in Africa. And furthermore, furthermore, I do not want to see any sort of crappy Japanese African fusion cuisine with your dashi bass stuff in my in my in my food basically. That's crazy. Crazy stuff. Crazy stuff. Stars, you'd like that stars does not like combo. You'd like to ask you though. Yeah, as long as it's got the katsuobushi in it. Yeah, but don't bring bougie that guy. Don't do it. Don't do it. He'd like you know what? He's not pleased with it. Okay. Wow. I can't even think of anything else. My whole life's outlook is like changed. I did not realize there was such a katsuobushi hating crowd out there. With you know, we're okay. Hey, Natasha, this is you. I love what you do. I love what you and Dave do. Mostly you the stuff that you do I read the No, you read the emails? Oh, I see. I mean, she can also read she has that capability. Anyway, I have two questions. Okay, listen, I'm going to answer the first question or really, I'm going to postpone because I really don't know the answer the first question. And the second one, I'm going to do your question along with someone else's question, because it's one of those rare instances where I've gotten very similar questions when the same week. Okay, one, where does the term 86 come from? So those of you that don't know what we're talking about, usually there's there's a number of things you can say someone has 86, which means they're no longer welcome, right? In a restaurant or a place. Or you could say an item is 86. And that means we're out of it and stop serving it right. So you know, when last night when we ran out of the peach, by the way, listen to this at the bar Booker and DAX we have a peach dish on the menu. A peach drink. I don't want to hear about it about how it's not peach season. Let me tell you something. It's never freakin peach season in New York, right? I mean, like we grow peaches here. Remember, we had those really good ones were they from New York. Now they were from this remember they were we bought them in Harlem, but they were trucked up from like, down south somewhere like like Maryland or some crap. And he's known for that, right? New York is not like, look, I have the book peaches in New York. So I'm fully aware of the history of peach growing in New York State. Okay. But it's, you know, look, we just it's not our finest point. But the fact of the matter is, right, that peaches when they are in season don't last very long. And so you have a boatload of peaches lying around. So the question is, you can either make a traditional peach brandy with it, which is delicious, right? Or you can make peach jam or you can make canned peaches, which Natasha happens to find incredibly delicious. Do you not love them so much? You like a canned peach, right? Favorite thing? Yeah. In fact, Estancia likes a canned peach, not as a substitute for a fresh peach but rather as its own thing. Correct, right. So Natasha said, hey, look, you know, it's it's wintertime out. Why don't we make canned peaches a drink and put it on the menu. So we made canned peach juice, right? And then Karen Jarman, one of our bartenders made a delicious tequila mezcal, Illuma bushy vinegar can peach drink with you know, it's clarified the beneficials. But people are like, Oh my God, it's not seasonal, but it totally is seasonal. It's absolutely seasonal. Well, no canned peaches are not in season in the height of summer. You should be saving them for other times.

Okay. Well, they're always in season for me.

Yes. Anyway, my point is, it's okay to use it as long as you use it for the right reasons. Neither of us were Oh, that reminds me, but I know I'm not gonna have time but I have to go through anyway, as I was walking here to the radio show. I looked on the street and there was an empty kind of crushed by a box of hot pockets on the street. Hot Pockets. You familiar with hot pockets? Yeah. Now my kids, I don't know what the hell it is my kids, like go to the store, they look in the thing and they want the freakin hot pockets. And the thing is that the only television they ever watch is streamed through Netflix or Hulu so they've never seen the commercial weather like Hot Pockets now I know that like Hot Pockets is like a you know that that tune? And like I almost want to buy it, you know, and the word hot pack it like has that awesome like alliteration hot pocket? You know what I mean? It's like, and if they hired like Snoop Dogg to just get on the air to go like hot pockets. Pockets I would buy it like if he just said it like five times in a row. I would do nothing but buy hot pockets. You know what I mean? But how the hell did my kids know this? What kind of evil marketing genius do I have? That can make a kid look at a box of freaking hot pockets and say daddy buy me those damn things. What was the sound effect? I liked that. What was that? Actually

for those who don't know the Hot Pocket song do it do it

when you do Hot Pockets what you got hot pockets filled with delicious pepperoni pizza chicken and cheddar cheese in a crispy pocket.

Crispy usually

a hot meal and I'm gonna do I'm gonna go out and buy me some hot pockets. I don't do that. And I'm not but I've been telling my kids know that they've never seen that mean that commercials a sale check. Come on now. It's pretty good. It's pretty damn good. Anyway, Hot Pockets. Okay,

maybe we need to make a modernist pantry commercial like that.

Oh, man. All right. So the second Oh, so 86 I don't know how to help you guys. Okay, so 86 Anyway, the point is, is that when you 86 something, it's gone or you have to get rid of the person etc, etc. Now, it's like many terms of this nature. There's no accepted. There's no accepted derivation of it. The etymologies are kind of all Bs, and they're all based on like a very tenuous reasoning. Some people say that, you know, Delmonico's, the restaurant had an item number 86. It was always out. Some people have said that it comes from a street car where the 86th Street was the last stop. Some people have said it comes from, you know, the crew on a ship, they only had 85. And so the 86 person wasn't there, etc, etc. Supposedly, there was a law about alcohol service that was, you know, article 86 that no one's ever seen the article or printed it, etc. There's a table that only had 85 seats and 86, etc, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, these all seem to be pretty much to be a horse hockey. The other good one is chumley's, which is a famous speakeasy in New York was speakeasy is number 86. On its street, and so they would throw people out and then see the 86 sign. Go to snopes.com for you know, basically a good rundown of all this but all this stuff seems kind of nonsense. This Snopes writer, I believe it's a woman I forget who it is. I couldn't copy it because they have an anti like copy right? They want to be right click and paste, but her her main thesis is probably it's a rhyming slang 86 for nicks. You know what I mean? Nix, Nix something Nix it 86 Anyway, but there's also a whole host of I didn't have a chance to find my copy but Darcy O'Neill's fix the pumps, has a lot of old soda slang jargon in it, and that you know, and also probably old diner slang. And that's one of those old terms. So he might go into the etymology and he's good with that kind of thing. The book fix the pumps, by the way, is an old slang term for check out the woman with the large breasts, basically fix the pumps. That's what the slang is for. Anyway, so what do you think that answer that question? Basically, I don't think there is an answer. The second question is quite interesting is to when it comes to soaking livers, may it be monkfish, duck, chicken, or even beef? What's it? What difference does it make to soak it in water? Carbonated water or milk? What works best? The carbonated water actually, this is from Philly, carbonated water I'd never heard of. But it's interesting. I didn't notice in the 1890s There was reference if a bird was gamey or if parts of things were gay me to wipe it with soda water. But my presumption would they say soda water isn't carbonated water but water with baking soda in it. Or, you know, and so cooking soda in it. And that seems to me to make more sense because then they say to pack it with charcoal to get rid of the bad odors, right? Because you're going to cook that damn thing you're not going to throw it away back in the 1890s bought Boston cooking school book. So I'm wondering whether that carbonated water is actually a modern thing that has some sort of scientific merit or whether it's a misread of soda water from a much older technique of deodorising a, you know, gave me bird. The other thing whether it's going to be water or milk and what works best, I'm gonna only to combine in with a question we have on sweetbreads from Adam Lazar ik I was hoping you could give your opinion on soaking sweetbreads, livers and other awful mainly touching on using milk or not. If milk what's exactly why exactly is it used? And are there other alternatives? Is there a time maybe you could touch on your preferred cooking technique for cooking sweet breads I incorporate young cvwd are not to press or not peel before or after and so on. I've always soaked in milk poached and then press but never really questioned why to press and soak in milk. Okay, so I'm going to handle those two things at once. Here's the deal. Most of the cooking techniques for awful involves getting to horrible word, right they, but even like all of the alternatives they use for awful are also awful, like variety, meats, variety. Sounds terrible, right? Anyway, a lot of these techniques are made to either get rid of residual blood in them. Because there's, you know, they're usually typically they're not, they're not muscle. And so a lot of times you want to get rid of the blood like in sweetbreads so that the color is good. So soaking helps with that, or to get rid of the off flavors that develop because these things spoil relatively quickly compared to muscle meats, and tend to have a higher bacterial contamination at the beginning, right. And they also tend to have a lot of fat that tends to break down more than the fat in regular whole muscle cuts. And so you have, you know, fat oxidation, you have microbial spoilage, and you have a lot of other things that cause these things to kind of be stinky, and need a little special, tender loving care before they're cooked. And that's a lot of times what the soak is doing. Also, if you're going to poach something, you know, they'll typically say put it in cold and bring it up when you're poaching it. And that's also to draw stuff out. And McGee mentioned this that that you know, you start cold and bring it up so that you can so that basically you're drawing soluble proteins out and then once they're drawn out cold, then they coagulate on the surface and you can skim off that undesirable scum that floats on the top of the of the blanching pot when you're doing poaching of awful sweet breads and things like this. Now, milk is very interesting because a lot of these a lot of these cuts can develop off flavors due to fat breakdown, rancidity, and basically just the breakdown free fatty acids, things like this. And they have a lot of lipid based off flavors in them. If you soak in milk milk is going to be better. This is by the way, just off the top my head, but I believe it to be true. But this is not based on like scientific research. This is what I'm telling you. And someone can come back and tell me I'm a jerk or an idiot, which I'm sure they will. What like milk is good because it's water but it has fat in it. So I'm thinking skim milk probably wouldn't be as good for this right? And it would suck out the it would suck out some of the fat based off flavors, right? Better than water alone would. That's my guess. What do you think about that guests and Stasha good guests. Yeah, good guests. Good guests anyway, so the soaking is good is to draw out things that are soluble that are not bound, that can be taken off. Salt is going to flavor it, it's also going to probably help it out texturally if you saltwater, salted milk might be a good alternative. And I think that's what's going on and then you never keep the milk you discarded because it apparently is sucking up all the evil, all evil humor, right? And so that is my guess for that. As for Are there any other like partially fatty things that you could use like that? I mean, I bet you could make a smoking thing that wasn't milk. If you were allergic to milk, you could like emulsify some fat into something with an emulsifier and then add it to it. And then that might work. Like take a look at 310 s use that to make like a an olive oil water emulsion or using ultrasonic homogenizer to make a milk out of like, you know, we could do it. I mean, you could make a non milk based alternative if the question is that you can't use milk. I tend to do and I don't know why but I tend to do the the old school with sweetbreads i I will I will soak them in saltwater pokes him in milk press them and then fry them up but I don't know why I like a crispy sweet bread by the way I don't do cvwd or any of that stuff on it. I should I have the instructions for it are the temperatures for IT on the blog in the in the cooking charge. But typically I do it the old school way because I like a crunchy sweet bread. Right? And not a mushy. Would you like a mushy? Sweet, better crunchy, crunchy, crunchy? Yeah. And I press it so it stays together. I put salt water in the soap so that it tastes good and draws out the extra blood and whatnot. And I use milk because I don't know why. I just do it. You know what I mean? Right? I mean, no better. Oh, by the way, if you like sweetbreads, but you don't like Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, aka mad cow or if you're worried about I don't know if people still worried about that nowadays. Or if you're worried about any sort of TSE trance transfer missable transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, which is degenerative brain disorder, a brain disorder related to your question Over similar 100% Fatal takes a long time anyway, if you're worried about that, you can make something a very passable fake sweetbread using chicken skins you just roll up. You sprinkle chicken skins or salt and meat glue, roll them into a rulide let them set poach them off, cut them into pinwheels and deep fry them and they are very similar to sweet breads and delicious I might add