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.

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Hello and welcome to cooking issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host coming to you live in the back of Roberta's pizzeria in Brooklyn. Join with is Joe still on tour. Yeah. How's it going? The tour?

Pretty good. We just checked in with him he's he was on the road driving to Austin doing a million shows in between screaming his brains out

nice scream his brains out. Good call. Okay, so not with Joe but with Jack and of course always miss Tasha the hammer Lopez. How you doing this? Good thing? Yeah, to get closer to 74 and 71 to eat at 70 497 to one to eight gonna get right into today. Morton Matson from Denmark writes in. Hi, David all question on quail eggs. I've been making a quail egg recipe based on the Noma cookbook called Hey, smoked quail eggs. I'm not gonna pretend like he writes it in Danish like I can pronounce that thing. Whoever geared it veg to leg we think that's pretty good. Yeah. All right. Okay. In the recipe, the eggs although you know what I was in Denmark for a day and like, it's so weird. It's doesn't sound like I whatever anyway, okay. In the recipe. The eggs are blanch for one minute 30 seconds, then cooled, then blanche for 50 seconds and then cooled again to set the white. So the idea being to double Blanche I would presume I don't own the cookbook. I haven't read the recipe but the double Blanche, I assume is to hit the whites as hard as possible without overcooking the yolk. I mean, it seems to me that's why that's why that's the guest Okay, after this step the eggs are peeled. The recipe then goes on to smoke the eggs for 20 minutes with hay and then pickle the eggs before they're served with smoke from a smoking gun. From my recipe I skip the Hey smoking step and instead put the eggs in a water bath and 64 C for 45 minutes to slightly San Diego by the way. 645 minutes way more than you need for quail eggs quail eggs threw in like under 15 There's there's so fast remember The the speed at which like you double the size of something and the amount of time it takes to cook through to the Center for a given set of variables is multiplied by four not by two and the same thing goes in the other direction. You reduce something by one half and it's a quarter of the time it takes to cook so quail eggs cook incredibly quickly anyway, which is why presumably they're only blanch for 30 seconds and then 50 seconds. Okay, okay. My question is the following. Is there any easy way to peel the eggs? You stumbled upon? One of our favorite things to make other people do which is peel quail eggs? Right, so I used to love doing that to interns. Peel these quail eggs and they would sit there and yell at them when they ruin them all. Is there an easy way to peel the eggs? As of now it is a pain. I've used a pair of tweezers and carefully peel them that sucks. The time spent per egg is long and even still they end up destroying half the eggs true. I do seem to struggle with the fact that the membrane of the quail egg seems to be extremely tough, you're correct. I do pick a small holder puncture the air cell and the bottom of the egg without this the egg white above the air cell does not set as much presumably due to the insulating effect of the air cell. So far I've tried to use older eggs. As at least for chicken eggs. Older eggs are easier to peel and you're wondering why this is the case which I'll explain in a minute. I've tried monitors because the intricate blowtorch to the eggs to make them easier to peel however this result resulted in either exploding eggs because of excess heating or too little to no effect on the peeling. Do you know what the desired effect of the blow torches Yeah I'm pretty sure it's too dried expand the shell at that one point to help it pull away from the membrane. The whole point well, we'll get we'll get into it by the way. Paul Adams are our buddy and popular science writer who is testing our blowtorch thingamajiggy right now he says that the torch thing is good for peeling the eggs because you don't get the scorch marks on it nice to get this resolved unexplored eggs are Baba, do you know what these artifacts the blowtorch is? Is it a question of generating steam beneath the membrane to detach it or is it to dry out the shell or something that leaves some combination of analysis. I've read the pressure cooking is sometimes employed on commercial scale to cook eggs. Since this could make peeling easier. I have ever seen no way of doing this on the on the small quail eggs I do however, make sure to have a rolling boil when I blanch the eggs. Maybe I can see my eggs from the vent on a pressure cooker. I've also seen examples of people removing the show with an acid but expect the egg to become inedible after this treatment. Another consideration we're using the technique seen on this video. And I'll tell you what the video is. The video is this guy and you can get there's this one there's also a crazier crazier one of the guy with like a like a hardcore Scottish accent no teeth. I think it was Scottish. Anyway, so you hard boil the egg you break the egg on the on like a little bit on two sides. And then you put your mouth over it. Here's what mustache starts cringing and you literally blow the egg out of the shell you keep that you keep the shell intact on the sides, you create air pressure behind it and blow the egg out. I've seen it on the YouTube a couple of times I'm going to say this is not recommended procedure if you're going to serve people food. No, no mean Mustachio would do it and serve it to you but you wouldn't want you to do it and serve it to her. You wouldn't fit your own egg you do it. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. But that technique brings an interesting question if you are going to do soft, so I'm gonna start with something you didn't ask because it's my nature, it's in my nature to do that. We used to have a thing where we would try to circulate soft quail eggs at 62 and 63 Celsius right so the egg whites still kind of really gloopy. And then the question is how do you crack them out of the shell the same way that you crack chicken eggs out of the shell that are at 62 and 63 because it's almost impossible to do it. You know normally by just cracking it opening because as you rightly point out the membrane of the quail eggs is incredibly tough. So here's the way to do that we have the little quail egg toppers, a little quail egg cutters, they look like cigar cutters, you you take the egg and you clip both the fat and the thin end of the egg so you have air hitting both sides and then you can shake out the egg gently onto you know whatever you want toast wherever and I found that we get almost zero breakage when you're getting when you're taking quail eggs out that way. So we went from almost entire breakage where we have to you know, get twice as many quail eggs as we needed to almost no breakage when we're doing quail eggs that way so it's just clipped both sides and shake it out and what reminded me that is that is a freak show blowing the egg out with his hard boiled egg out with his mouth. Okay.

The the the article you should first of all the article you should read in general and it's available on the Internet for free is the effects of cooking methods on peel ability and pure and appearance of eggs by Kenneth and Hall and hungwen Li out of 1997 in good old Storrs, Connecticut up there at UConn where they did the study, right. If you have a copy of I think it's Edelman's egg science and technology that's an okay reference to but really just for a succinct, you know, description of what's going on that that 77 article is great. So here's the deal. Old eggs are better for two reasons and depending on who you go to Even on the egg of Dairy Council Egg Board wherever it is Incredible Edible egg, they they will always talk about one or the other the reasons why older eggs are good but not both at the same time. Here's what happens. As eggs age co2 leaves as co2 leaves the egg whites become more alkaline, right. And simultaneously, the air sac between the two membranes in the fat part of the egg becomes larger. As that membrane becomes larger, there's more air in there and air between those two membranes facilitates peeling, and so that facilitates peelings. However, the increased alkaline nature of the egg white also deep bonds the protein or makes the protein bond less strongly from the white to the membrane and therefore also facilitates peeling. So it's a dual effect of increased air in that egg in the in the thing and have and have increased alkalinity over storage, which is why very fresh eggs can be difficult to peel. In the 1977 study, they they found that piercing the fat end of the egg with the air SAC is does not necessarily help in appealability. The bad news is is that the the actual data for all this stuff is all over the map pressure cooking, right? It turns out that the majority of the benefit first of all, also, you're going to get better appealability If the eggs go into hot water all the studies show that putting in cold water and bringing it up, it causes the eggs to be less peelable. Although there will be more cracking of the eggs if you put them into hot water initially, but the eggs that don't crack and get destroyed that way will be easier to peel if they go into simmering or boiling water as opposed to being brought slowly up from cold. Alright, so that those are two things that affects also the way you crack it affects it. So the way that they, they if you if you go on the internet, and you want a fascinating thing, look up egg peeling machines, and you can sit there and watch these machines, various ways peeling eggs, but they all do some variant of the crack and roll to break the shell up into a bunch of pieces but leave the membrane and tax of the then can peel it off without it shattered without it without it ripping the egg. So there's that. But this the pressure cooking is very interesting. And I've never done this technique, but I looked into it. It's mentioned in the article from 1977. And a lot of stuff was done on it, I think by hit pressure cook who you know, we've spoken to on the on the Twitter a couple of times, and she might have written in here once I don't know. But she was doing pressure cooking appealing eggs. And here's the deal. It turns out that it's not and it's written in the 77 article, it's not the high temperature of the pressure cooker. That is in fact making the eggs easier to peel. What it is is, is you do a quick release of the pressure after they're cooked. And the quick release of the pressure causes the shells to like puff out a little bit from the egg and rupture and therefore make it easier to get the eggs off to get the shell off of the egg. So the question is, how can you do that in a quail egg because quail egg cook so fast? Well, you have to be quick on your toes, which means you have to be able to get your pressure cooker up to pressure extremely quickly, like extremely quickly. And by that I mean very fast. So, you know like you want as much water as you can in there, like a small load of eggs closed. Or if you have an autoclave or like a Frankie commercial pressure cooker that can get up and down. Like in a matter of seconds, you might be able to get the eggs out fast enough to not overcook them. I don't know. But it's definitely the pressure going. You could also probably literally just put the eggs under pressure in like an ISI or something like that. And then just vent the pressure real quick and have the eggs pop open. But I'm just thinking of that. As we're saying. I haven't really thought of it. I haven't I mean, I've thought of it because I just told you about it, but I haven't tested it because I just thought about it. One I had one last thing to say on a appealability but it's out of my head. I guess it doesn't exist anymore. It couldn't have been that important. I feel like it was very important. But you know, who knows? I'll never remember because they don't remember what I've already said what I haven't said anyway, I hope that's somewhat helpful. On eggs, and a relative appealability Okay, Ivan writes in on vermouth, Hey Natasha, Dave, Jack and Joe although Joe no shouts to you because you're shouting your head off out there and Austin right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, we if you're not here, no. Shouts if you're not here. I mean, no love unless you're in the studio. That's how that's how it works.

There isn't Aaron Fairbanks in the studio. Oh, Aaron.

Aaron, Aaron from Heritage radio network. You want to come in and make a pitch for the radio for the radio network. All right. All right. We're gonna take a short break from talking about Ivan's vermouth question to do a pitch for the for the heritage radio network and all the good things that they do. Welcome Aaron. How you doing?

I'm doing great. Thanks for having me.

Nice. Nice. I like I like a little pop and anyway, feel free to pop in as you know guests so so what's going on what's going on at the Heritage radio these days and what's

not going on? Things are blowing up. We've had tons of great people come in through the studio to do interviews. We're reaching out to college campuses, across the nation trying to get the most radical progressive thinkers and food coming to the network sharing what's going on in their communities and just building on the existing stuff like the great work you guys do. I'm cooking,

he gets some, some crazy reactionaries as well as the progressives.

Yeah, man, we want to we want to be given space for all voices. Yeah,

that's why that's why we have Mr. Mustache and I are together because you know, we never agree almost, right? I mean, she won't talk about it on the air. But you all know how she feels because I'll go off on it. That's what you need. Speaking of people disagreeing on air, how are we doing with the Museum of food and drink series? We're gonna, it's gonna happen, right?

It's totally gonna happen. I'm super excited to get some amazing people in here. What we want to do is have strong conversations where people are maybe yelling but not yelling, necessarily over each other or particularly at each other. But I think yeah, moving forward, looking to hear from your guy, Peter, and then we're gonna rock and roll.

Yeah, sounds good. Yeah, we are. We're already talking about some topics that we're going to bring up. And I think the format is going to be probably that I'm just going to ask questions of people moderate them, and hopefully, you know, at the end of it, we'll have to break out the Crisco for the big wrestling match, right.

You know, I'm more of a fan of Jello pudding. But if Chris goes away to go, you are the expert. Well,

we can go either way. I mean, I was thinking more of like, kind of, you know, trying to pick up a greased pig. I'm more of a I never went to a jello wrestling thing but I have seen people try to pick up greased pigs and it's hilarious.

I think he more again at the college campus outreach, you know, it's just the thing that students relate to

the jello thing Yeah, I see I'm too old I don't know You know, it's to me I'm like you're wasting all that jello all that knocks could have been used for something good. Anyway.

Anyway, I do want to I do want to make a little pitch for membership. I mean, the cooking issues, Team cooking issues, listeners are definitely one of our primary sources for membership and that's really the one of the main funding streams that keeps the station going allows us to build out new program to bring you more Dave to bring in more Natasha, and more.

These visors pizza isn't kidding. It's not what it goes for. Roberta's donates the pizza. I'm only kidding. And by the way, thank you people for donating Yeah,

thank you to Roberta's thank you to everyone who sponsors and everyone who supports and we hope that you know you out there listening will want to be part of that too.

Nice. All right. I don't know what else to do in those situations. So well after that you want to go to our first commercial break. Oh yeah. Give me a second here. Hold on. All right. Hold on first commercial break cooking issues.

Earth grants grass fed beef pasture raised on 150,000 acres in central California. Hearst ranch grass fed beef free range sustainably produced humane. First ranch grass fed beef the authentic flavor of the American was

Damn skippy. Damn skippy. grass fed beef. My favorite. My favorite network? Song. I

love that. Okay. New competition. Submit your cover version of the Hearst ranch grass fed beef song?

Oh, yeah, right. Oh, yeah. Yeah. What did they get Hearst ranch. That's fair. That's what they get. That's fair. That's fair business. Right.

Make that happen.

All right. I like that. All righty. Okay, speaking of which, Jack, we have a question later. I'm gonna give you some heads up right now. They want recommendations in Brooklyn. I

have a cold we connected with John. Yeah, yeah.

You know that I have, like an aversion to crossing water unless I have to. Not really I mean, I'm not afraid of water bridges, but I'm just joking about it. But you know, Natasha and I don't never eat out and star she eats out all the time because I got the kids a mom home with the kids but the star she eats out quite a bit but prefers to eat out in Manhattan. But we have some recommendations that were broken. But think about it. Think about it for I

was thinking the Stasi would handle that one because she's Miss Brooklyn, you know? I heard she was opening a restaurant in Brooklyn, actually.

Yeah, right. A craft beer bar. Actually.

We could really use a craft beer bar out here.

I know there's nothing out here. You can't you know, anyway, there's no there's no Brooklyn pride or love beer out. None. None cocktails Forget it. No, it's nothing. Nothing nothing. It's all McDonald's out here. Okay. Ivan writes in Hi Anastasia Dave, Jack and Joe first love the show discovered a few months ago I've been making my way through the back catalogue. I'm around episode number 60 out you got a long way to go. Right just skip it is all useless now. You've made my commute much more fun and helped quite a bit in my cooking knowledge. I recently got my hands on some warm wood and I'm thinking about making my own vermouth. I live in Toronto and the Iron Fist of the provincial alcohol monopoly only gives us a very limited number of choices martini and Rossi, Chin's on annoy praten stuck and not only not only that, they charge you way too much to tax in Canada. I was shocked shocked I went to Vancouver a year and a half ago with Don Lee the master of all like kind of back to the like the Donnelly master anyway. So it turns out that the bottles of Hendrix there are like little gold nuggets and we were able to carry them around and trade them for large amounts of delicious sandwiches from the street trucks because your alcohol laws are so nutty in terms of the taxes anyway, I digress. More to the point they're all sold in largest bottles, which sit for months, months in my fridge, eventually going flat, flat meaning I guess oxidized not flat because they're not carbonated. Anyway, I'm a home consumer and my wife is not particularly fond of Vermouth cocktails. You got to work on that. You got to work on your wife there Ivan gotta get you know what if you got the higher quality? If she likes cocktails at all right? Unless she's only a citrus cocktail person. If you get the right removes, you can probably get her on the on the removed from booth cocktails. Okay, first of all, before we even go any further with the rest of the question. Like I'm gonna say this, what you should do is get a bunch of smaller bottles, get your vermouth bottle in the smaller bottles with almost zero headspace cap them and keep them in the fridge. And the last almost indefinitely that way because they won't further oxidize, right once once that once you've gotten all of the air out of them. Alright, but so I would say that, and then you have a question in a second about like how to make your own. I'm gonna get to that. But first caller, you're on the air. Hey, Dave, it's

Mike from Fort Collins, Colorado. How you doing? Good. How are you? All right. I got a question about using a circulator for making cheese. I'm wondering if you've ever done that. And you know how I go about doing that?

No, I mean, so presumably the for those of you that never made cheese before, one of the critical, one of the critical aspects of the production is exactly the temperature to which the curd is heated during the running thing, because it determines a lot of things about the final pay structure, presumably that's why you want to do it, right.

Yeah, exactly. Because it's easy to scorch and stuff. Sure.

So the problem with I mean, the main problem with it is, is that when you can't directly circulate it, or you'll completely gum up the works and you know, you don't want to have that much movement in the thing. So you know, you could do bath in bath in Bath, you know what I mean? Where you where you stick like a stainless steel like half hotel pan into a like Alexa and Phil you know, put it up with what clamp the clamp the hotel pan down to the lexan with with spring clamp, so that doesn't pop around, because I'll tell you what that's irritating, having have it happened to me many times. And then circulate it, the problem is, is that your heat transfer is going to be quite limited. So if you're not limited, but I mean, when you're heating with a flame or something like that, right, you know, you're using a large delta t and a huge and a large thermal input in there to get the temperature up relatively quickly. Now you'll get a relatively large thermal input, but your your delta t between what you want in the curd, and what you're heating with is going to be you know, minuscule. Now you can set the waterbath like 10 degrees Celsius higher than you want to go. And then just monitor very carefully and you won't scorch, but you still have the problem that you might overheat it and then at the end, you can turn it turn it down so that it gets up. But that's an easy way to do it. Now if you for some reason wanted massive circulation. Once you once this stuff breaks and you and you have way in reasonable sized particles, you can wrap a you can wrap a circulator in cheesecloth. I don't know that I'd recommend it though, because I've never seen a recipe that requires that much agitation like a circulator would provide, you know what I'm saying? I don't know what it would do to the, to the structure of it to have it like literally pumping through like that, you know what I'm saying? Yeah, I feel like all recipes wanted to be pretty stagnant. Yeah, I mean, or like, you know, such stirring to the extent that they want to, you know, accomplish certain things or if you're cutting the, or if you're cutting the curd apart, like in a chattering process, or any one of those things where you're breaking it, but not like constant pumping around. I've never seen a recipe that advocates constant pumping around, you know what I mean? Yeah, I haven't either. Yeah. But try the bath in Bath and give yourself like a like a like a delta t of like maybe 10 C, and then when it starts getting close, you can turn it down and then you can like soak it at whatever temperature you want. Want for however long you want me to circulator is fantastic for that. Cool. I'll give it a try when he goes no good now yeah. Good luck. Tweet us over and tell us what happened. Well, thanks. All right, cool. Back to Ivan. Okay, so now where we last left you, Ivan, I was trying to help you keep your vermouth lasting longer. And by the way, when you come to the United States by yourself some because we have an amazing selection of fermeuse Nowadays down here that are made delicious, and buy some bring them home and then you know, trade them on the street for sandwiches. But you you continue, I've looked at recipes online, and they also just boiling the botanicals in a bit of the wine for about 10 minutes and then mixing it with the rest of the wine sugar and fortifying with brandy. The problem is this would also yield a full bottle size which would end up going equally stale. Although I told you you could solve that problem by putting them in like micro bottles and then only using what you need. Also, a vacuum van on the top of the bottle in between uses in the fridge is is is also helpful with that. Okay, I thought a possible solution would be to infuse the botanicals in the brandy at room temperature filtered them and then have the vermouth base that would last much longer. In this way. If I have a glass of white wine leftover I could just mix in an adequate proportion of Vermouth, bass and sugar and have a truly small batch of homemade vermouth. As a side benefit. I could use the same base for sweet or dry vermouth just by altering the amount of sugar and whether it gets caramelized or not. Do you think this procedure makes sense? Are there any issues I should take into consideration? And as a side note, the spice herb ingredients change a lot from recipe the recipe but other than Wormwood, which you know, you don't actually technically need Wormwood, but Wormwood is the source of the word. Their mood, Wormwood, you know, they are mute anyway. I don't even know what language I'm imitating some sort of dramatic thing. Okay. Do you think there are any can't miss botanicals in vermouth, looking forward to having to move forward cocktail with my own product. Because you are partial to the Martinez. Well, I mean, I like I like Vermouths. And you know that kind of aperti thing with I liked with quinine in it, you know, like kinako with quinine, and you can get the bark, can Shona bark or you can buy I mean, I would do that that's probably easier to do work with but you know, the classic things, people put things like oregano and rosemary and stuff, but the stache is making a vegan face over there. But you can also put in sweeter things like vanilla or citrus peels are very popular. I like classic other things like gente, and I like Boris, but I don't think that's classic, I don't think people would normally put orison but I like Boris but you got to be careful with it. I like things like fenugreek, but you can add almost anything. The you know, the issue is you don't if you add like a million different things, you get that kind of spice store smell. Also bear in mind that when you are using these botanicals, the quality of the botanical varies widely depending on the source and therefore the strength of it. So it's very difficult to follow a recipe written in grams, that's made with a dried spice because the actual potency of that dried spice can vary over you know, I wouldn't say an order of magnitude but at least a factor of two or three times right. And they can be very different. So like I like coriander a lot. And so me with their various different kinds of coriander, some have more of a citrusy note and some some don't. So you just got to be careful that now back to your regular questions. Can you steep it in the high proof. So the reason that they asked you to do it in the low proof and then for the fortification is to make it last longer, okay, and to bolster it. The reason they have you infuse it in the in the wine first and then the other stuff is so that you don't boil away too much alcohol, right? That's the reason sugar is also going to have to preserve it. So you could, you know, you could seal it, seal a bag or seal a flameproof bottle with a cork don't seal it so that they can go pressure and explode because that would be dumb. And you can heat it there without evaporating alcohol. And that's the way I do hot and fusion of liquors all the time, just very be very careful that you're not hard sealing a container that can explode when you put because the liquor is going to boil at a much lower temperature than the water. And you can infuse things that way. And you could have an herb base, you know, so there are like very bitter herbs, drinks like Swedish basket dropper, which is like this incredibly bitter like Wormwood thing, and presumably you could add it to wine, I don't think the result is going to be exactly the same because infusing a lower proof is going to provide a different result from using a higher proof. However, it might be delicious. You never know. I would, you know, I would I would assume that the results are going to be different every time you change how you're infusing something, what the alcohol level is the temperature level, the length of infusion, all things change. So you might be able to get a delicious product but I don't know that you'd get the same product as a classic classic made vermouth and also these were moose are going to want to sit together and marry a little bit before they get totally integrated. So I'm going to think that you're not going to get 100% the same result but you might get a delicious ones. I mean, it sounds what you're doing is more akin to making more akin to making a bitters and then adding the bitters to the to the wine although a dilute bitters because you're going to be adding more than you would for a bitters of a couple shakes. It makes It says anyway I hope that helps. I don't think that's very helpful but there you have it. That's what I got. What I got Ryan bone I'm gonna you know what Ryan Bowen wants a questions about QuickBooks but I'm gonna do that last because I'm probably going to spool off into into never Neverland. Right, right? That's because that's what I do. Yeah. Okay, so let's Ryan we're gonna get you last. Bob writes in thinks that we should name the torch thing torch trap tertia but sounds like I'm being trapped though. Right? Sounds like it also thing, right? Although it is descriptive. But like, you know, people are like, why would I want to be trapped? I don't want to be trapped. I want to be free. Right? This is like, Bob This is what happens when you're dealing with people like you'll think you have something really good. And they'll be like then like 180 is like no, no, this is why any of you out there are in like think you're gonna have kids in the near future. Don't tell anyone outside of your partner what the heck names you're thinking of? Because you know what? You don't want to hear it and by the time you name the kid, no one's gonna be like that name sucks because they can't they can't so like like we have the classic problem here of too many outside people. You know what I mean? And then like so I'll give you a classic example of that remember the African there were they Ernst and Young they used to be whatever they used to be no no Anderson or whatever it was the accounting like firm that consulting firm right. They're now called Accenture. And that's what happens when you have a name by committee Accenture. I don't like that name. You like that names does Accenture? That's me. No offense, if any listeners I'm not saying the company is bad. And the person who won that won a huge amount of money I think for getting the name right. So they're laughing all the way to the bank. But it you know, I just I just don't think it's you know, Accenture, Accenture. Century. So it's so it's so named by committee. Am I right? Yeah. Name by committee. I was like maybe it could be a car. Maybe although I know the clamp that we're making. So the torch thing ain't no one gonna change the name of that. That thing's a Jed clamp. It's a Jed clamp so that I can say to someone go Jed Clampett you know what I'm saying and I don't care I don't care people like but I don't get that joke. I don't care if you get it or not. It doesn't matter to me. It's a dead clamp. You see how easy it is when you have a conviction about something? Yeah makes life so much easier.

Sam writes in about Sam KB in fact writes in about cheetah this one got stars a little queasy because she'd never thought about it. But here we go cooking issues crew I'm five months into a year long research project in the Ecuadorian Amazon that kicked some serious butt right yeah the Amazon I've never never been to the Amazon I gotta go I'm fascinated by that you I've been to Colombia a bunch of times but never down to the Amazon reason or to the choco although apparently if I go to the choco I won't come back alive like I might come shipped back as a food product but I'm not gonna like Choco is like completely, you know, unlike is like, everyone, everyone from Colombia. And I know you're talking Ecuador, not Colombia. But everyone in Colombia is like, what do you think about truck? Oh, amazingly beautiful. Can I go? No. You know what I mean? It's like not controlled by anyone. It's crazy. Because anyone would ever not gonna get to Okay. I've had the opportunity to eat some pretty amazing foods including fried grubs, smoked cured monkey you know, that's the one thing I can't cosign although you explain later but I can't cosign them with them. I can't do it. I can't do my crocodile are a pyjama, which is the largest freshwater fish in the world and damned ugly. So ugly. Yeah, Google that thinks does like you know, good for AR a PA. I am a big ugly freshwater fish. And a number of four legged animals I cannot identify. I liked it you stay away from the two legged animals just in case. Okay, can identify. While some of these animals are threatened with extinction extinction, I'm only consuming them while living in indigenous communities whose hunting practices may actually support conservation efforts. In addition to these animals, I've been consuming copious amounts of cheetah, not corn cheetah, but boiled yuca, cassava root, which women and only the women to spit into clay pots, add water to it and let ferment for up to four days. The teacher is slightly sour, mildly alcoholic and as a thick way like texture. Not way like, you know the like kind of you know, Mexican word for like, you know, unbraid like way like whey and milk and whey. Fish. Yeah, the fish is ugly. With a noticeable saliva undertone. It's actually quite good. My question is how would you mimic this and reproduce the saliva undertone in the United States? As my assumption is serving human saliva would neither be well received nor legal? Not sure the legality of using animal saliva either probably not going to be okay. But if we can eat tongue or blood sausage or horse tar tar well, it will remember the horse tar tar thing was a mistake people weren't supposed to be eating that that was a you know what's called fraud in the Europe. I don't really see why other legal you could you could have it anyway. I don't really see why we couldn't eat fermented llama saliva. I'm interested in experimenting with cheetah and other cooking applications besides I'm just using it as a drink. Let me know what you think. Love the show Sam KB. Okay, first of all, before we get into your question, a lot of letter who has recently over the lion, someone's trying to outlaw eating a lion. And so we got a bunch of calls yesterday because I wrote a post a long time ago where one of the things we ate was lion. And so everyone called me to expect me to be some rabid defender of eating lion meat. And in fact, we no longer buy meat from the butcher that we got that from Zoomers, because it turns out that, you know, went to jail for unsavory kind of sourcing and breakfast so we don't use it anymore. But it's an interesting, everything's coming in. Everything's like weird. Everything's coming up weird, like lion meat and weird meats these last couple of days, right? It's very strange. Very strange. Okay, back to cheetah, the book that you want to look at is unfortunately, extraordinarily expensive. It's like $375 on Amazon. And not that I advocate you downloading illegal pdf copies, I was not able to find an illegal pdf copy. However, you can get all the relevant information by going between Google Books and Amazon and they both preview different pages so you can paste together the and that's by the way, that's the classic trick is you look it up on the Google Books and their previews are different from the ones on Amazon. And then I've also looked in international Amazon sites to get previews in between those two to try and piece together like pieces of information I need. But here's what you need. The Handbook of indigenous fermented foods, Second Edition, revised and expanded by Stein Krauss alright. And Stan Kraus devoted a career to like really, like this is a really kind of amazing book. So they have a section on on cheetah, and it's mainly about maze cheetah, but it goes into the whole production now here's the thing. So with maze cheetah, there's two ways to do this. So the reason the saliva is working here is that you Your mouth has amylase enzymes. amylase enzymes are enzymes that break down starch, or they break down starch into sugar, and your mouth has them. So what they do is they chew on starch containing items that usually have been ground and cooked right so that your mouth can act on them right not dry. Or sometimes just I guess, with the flour I think is cooked before and I have to go read it again. You chew on it, and then you let it dry while the amylase stuff is working, you then grind that and mash it like you would typical mash thing that at the end the enzymes from your mouth will, you know degrade the starch. During that process to sugar, the product is boiled to concentrate the sugars and then fermented Okay, the other way to do it with that will work with corn but not with cassava is to actually germinate the corn the same way that you would germinate barley malt, when you germinate, you activate the amylase enzymes in the corn itself. And you can then make cheater that way. So what you're going to have to do is you're not I don't think you're going to get to use the saliva. And this is by the way, not just in South America. This is traditional in all places that had starches and wanted to convert them to alcoholic beverages, especially places that did not have grains that would germinate and provide other forms of amylase enzyme. So this is traditional in many cultures to true on starched things, and somebody's it's usually the women. Isn't that weird? Yeah. Is it because of women normally cooking or is it just because men are gross? I don't know. It's weird. It's usually women. In South America, apparently it's usually the older women in some cultures. It's the younger woman. We're weird anyway. So here's the bad news for you and I this guy Escobar in 1977 did his PhD thesis at Cornell University on cheetah fermentation. Alright, and this is on page 405 of that book I was telling you about on indigenous fermented foods, and he produced both germinated This is now remember, this is maize, but so it's not directly related to cassava but produced both germinated teacher and salivated teacher up there in at Cornell. Both products were sun dried and ground in a Powder Mill. The flowers produced were then extracted with water and the proportion of one kilo water to 250 grams of flour and 75 Celsius with constant stirring. The extracts were then filtered through a muslin cloth and they were duplicated bubble blah, and they were then fermented for six days. And here's the bad news for you cheat sheet prepared by the salivation procedure was clear yellow in color, and an alcoholic flavor resembling apple cider Cheechoo prepare from germinating maize was darker in color more turbid and slightly acid taste. Both the teachers were suitable for consumption after only two days of fermentation. This salivated Cheeto was judged superior in flavor. So I don't know what to do about that. We could probably find look, you can just buy the enzymes now. So maybe germination does other things to the flavor, but you can just go by the enzymes now. So you could probably get some of the amylase enzymes that are used by people like vodka makers who are taking potato Tito's and turning them into into vodka and use one of those amylase enzymes. And we tried to order one once, but we never got one in. They're not the same as the Brewers diastatic amylase things because they have kind of a more broad spectrum functionality and they work better. There's two there's two main amylases there's beta amylase and alpha amylase and you can't be sure which one you're getting when you get at a homebrew shop. So we're trying to source a really good deal maybe that would make a good spit like Kesha. I don't know. Good question. Love those kind of questions. Speaking of last week, we had a question on avocados about circulating them to get rid of the poly phenol oxidase is and jam writes in and said just want to share that in my restaurant we routinely circulate avocados and their skins for 50 Celsius for an hour and they're then indefinitely free of all Browning problems regards jam it's good to know I would have thought you had to go much higher because in some other things probably phenol oxidase is not degraded for until much higher temperatures are reached. So it's good to hear that that works. Someone else give a test give me a call back. Blake writes in why is my stock so sweet? He says Why does my think man maybe one like