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.

This is Chris Young, co author of Modernist Cuisine, I'd like to invite you to check out chefsteps.com It's a free website we've created as a place to learn new cooking techniques and collaborate with curious cooks from around the world. Sign up now it chefsteps.com

You're listening to heritage radio network.org a nonprofit member supported radio station where million strong with folks tuning in from over 200 countries. We are education we are entertainment, we are the future of food. May is our membership Dr. Become a member and support us while receiving the newsletters, advanced invites special discounts and a membership card. We need your support. Visit our website and click the donate button to become a member today. Thank you for believing in us and enjoy the show. Courses

Hello and welcome to cooking issues. This is Dan Merle, your host of cooking issues coming to you live from a Virtus pizzeria in Bushwick Brooklyn on the heritage Radio Network every Tuesday from roughly 12 to roughly 1245 One joined in the studio again, normal or normal style today. Witness Dasha. Mr. Lopez, how you doing stuff? Okay, yeah, yeah, Jack decided not to join us today. I don't know what that's all about. But we have Joe. Hey, Joe Hayden. Doing great. How are you guys doing right? I was listening to the little blurb we have at the beginning there. And you know, they have a word for something. It's both entertainment and information. It's edutainment, isn't it? Right. Yeah. edutainment. Yeah. Sounds great. So we educate entertain, what would you say that as you tangible edutainment annually, whatever. Anyway, call your questions to someone at 4972128. That's 718-497-2128 hope to be joined us soon on the telephone with the one of the sponsors from today's show, Chris Young from ChefSteps and Modernist Cuisine. And in fact, he's a bit of a coffee nut. So I have some coffee questions that I put off from last time and some also I think once from this time, I'm gonna hold off on those until Chris calls him so I can get him to weigh in on it as well. By the way it starts How did Marx barbecue his Italian barbecue go? Really well? Yeah, lots of people raised a lot of money, I think. Yeah. Like, what how was the How was the food? Are you okay? stars with her with her? Ray Ray Ray reviews. Okay. Hey, we have a caller. Oh, all right. Caller caller you're on the air.

Hey, Dave, this is Chris from Seattle. How are you?

Hey, doing all right doing all right. So Joe, this is Chris Young, our sponsor for today. Oh, yes. Do we have the opportunity to take other calls in as well or no. We have one lineup and still so Alright, so for those of you that want to pester Chris, with any of your modernist and or non modernist and or when he was working at Fat Duck and or gliding, because he's a glider pilot. Have you have any real way to do that? No. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So if you have any questions relating to any of those things, call on and how you doing, Chris?

I'm doing well, man. How are you? It's been a while. Yeah,

I know when you when you're in New York next.

Ah,

I don't know when you when you can invite me out for drinks.

You are always welcome with the bar for drinks.

Well, I'm just about recovered from my last trip to New York. So when I when I lose any sort of judgment, I'll be back out. But

are you still spending all your time in Seattle are now chefs? At ChefSteps? It's based in several locations, or how's it working?

No, we are in we're a we have a 4000 square foot space in Seattle's Pike Place Market overlooking the water. And we've built out our own experimental kitchen and tooled it up. We have our software developers and entire production team here. We do have a bit of a hardware engineering lab just south of Seattle in Georgetown, and a couple employees in Chicago in LA. But other than that, we're here. Nice. Well, I

have to come and visit you guys sometime.

You absolutely should. I was thinking we maybe need like an East Coast west coast. Cocktail challenge we we've got we've got our own fairly talented bar bar staff here as well. Oh, yeah.

Well, I'm down for a challenge. What would the challenge me?

I know you, it's your show. Well, what do you think it should be?

I don't know. I mean, I you know, that my particular my particular bent is towards things that look somewhat normal. Hmm. Like stars, what you think a good challenge would be I'm actually I need a good challenge. I was just saying the other day, like, I need a new cocktail problem to solve not just a new ingredient or taste, but a whole new problem to solve. Can you think of any Chris? Or should we leave this open to our readers? Like, what are listeners? I'd actually

like to hear from you, from your viewers, I've always found, I certainly find in our forum that the best the biggest challenges tend to come from unexpected places. The barbecue season, you know, I'm certainly done much with with smoke and cocktail

in drinks. No, I'll tell you why. There's been a bunch of people who have done a lot of work with it already. And so, you know, I, I tend to do the hardest work in places where I think there's a lot, a lot, a lot more work to do. But there is a lot, you know, a lot of problems I think I have with people when they've smoked the cocktails is they tend to use, they tend to use kind of those, those small format, smoke generators. When they when you over smoke a drink with that it tends to take on more of kind of the over phenolic he burnt flavors from it. And it can be hard for those. It can be hard for people to dose. I mean, I think the best results I've seen are actually from more of the smoky flavor off of charred chips and whatnot. I've seen good results off of that and had good results off that. I mean, obviously smoking alcohol go together. Have you done any good experiments with it?

Well, yeah, we just, we just did a cocktail. We did a couple things. We did a, we did one where we take charred oak chips, and we pressured fuse that with an ISI site to basically get a rapid aging of the bourbon and that sort of smoky flavor. And that that's been asked, and we have another cocktail where we will use charged cinnamon sticks. It's a cocktail we call Churchill's breakfast.

Yeah. And how's that one? Come on?

No, that one's delicious. I will happily drink that just about anything.

I've had good luck with the ISI and an oak doing like a semi char semi oak at the same time. But my favorite way to add wood is of course to take an age spirit that I like roto vapid so that I have the have the oak leftover and then add it back to my other unnamed stuff. When that stuff that's fantastic. It's a little bit pricey and out of the range of most people working but Hey, Chris, Dave, we have a caller for both of you. Oh, yeah. Yeah. All right. Caller you're on the air. What's up?

Hey, calling, Maryland. I had a couple of questions for you. First, I'd like to say just that's really impressive. It's amazing resource, I have my home. It's always fantastic the videos, the breakdown, that everything is done on there really, really great work. So thanks for that. Thank you. So, friend and I are throwing kind of like an iced tea party tomorrow. And we didn't have time to do a lot of side by side tests with one of the recipes that we were doing. But one of the things we were doing was the recipe from the Humphrey locum restaurants in like an ice book, and it's strawberries and candied jalapeno. So the candied jalapeno we made by just picking out the seeds in the ribs and just cooking it with simple syrup. So we were kind of expecting that it would, it would still be some heat leftover in the jalapeno, but there really wasn't anything that we could discern both in the jalapeno itself. And then in the syrup, you know, that had kind of like the infusion afterwards. So we were wondering if that was because the the recipe was kind of imprecise, it was just like one jalapeno, but didn't say how big how much. And you know, they can vary in terms of their heat. But you know, if there's some issue that the cap space and it gets kind of neutralized when you go to that process will make a difference. If we or I I'd

like to, I want your purification here is the how is the jalapeno going in a dairy base? Is that when you lose the heat? Or is it after you approach it in the sugar syrup that the heat seems to be diminished?

It seems to be after the syrup, one in the syrup. And there was there was nothing there was no trace of anything in the syrup users. Besides kind of the the floral notes of the jalapeno itself.

Did you eat the jalapeno? Did you eat a portion of the jalapeno beforehand? To verify that it wasn't deemed spicy?

No, no, we didn't. But you know that's that's a that's a fair point. Because

with milk kind of takes away the heat, right? Well, Capsaicin is fairly soluble in fat. So when you when you put when you put the chilies in ice cream, absolutely, it's going to diminish the fat I've made I've made habanero ice cream, that would be an anabolic if it wasn't dissolved in that much fat. But if you're losing the heat or in the syrup, there's really only two things that come to my mind and jump in here, if you see it differently. But one, my best bet would be like my first customer who had just wasn't very hot to me. And I don't know how much you're going to dilute some of the capsaicin down in syrup and, and if you take a small amount of caffeine can be diluted down in a large amount of syrup. Results not going to be very hot. So if you want a little bit more heat, I might look to use something other than a holiday opinion.

But that said, if you take a jalapeno and slice it sin, even in a relatively like if it's a if it's a you know, a good you know a good one with some strength and you slice it relatively thinly and do a boil out with it in the sugar syrup, you should be able to pick up a good bit the green The good thing about you know sugar syrup is you can continue to heat it for a while. So you know what I typically do with heat, I tend not to use green when I add heat to things most of the time, in drinks. And in ice creams, things like this, I want to add more of a red flavored heat. So I tend to use red things. So but you just keep tasting it. And what'll happen is is is it'll it'll be the right amount of space. And then eventually, it'll over it'll over extract and get too spicy. So I just keep tasting, tasting, tasting, and then throw it through a coarse sheen want to strain it out as soon as it's at the place where I like it. And that tends to be what I what I do, it's almost impossible to measure. Peppers because they are so variable with regard to their heat levels, even from pepper to pepper unless you're dealing with something preposterously hot, like a habanero where you know that it's going to hit you with a wild fat but even then you can be mistaken, we can get an Aki d'Orsay, which looks for all the world like a habanero and smells like it but doesn't taste like it very much and isn't hot, hardly at all. You know, so like peppers can be extremely, extremely variable. And so you know, I would always get a couple of extra chop chop and throw him in while you while you do the heat and be aware that what Chris says is right when you then mix it down with your with your milk and cream bass, it's going to reduce the heat even further. So you might want to just have some spicy crap sitting around that you can dose back into spice with but you have to be careful because usually then when you're dosing something back, you're dosing if you're dosing a dry spice, let's say those things get radically hotter when you infuse them. So the red pepper flakes you get at a pizza parlor, you can eat them on their own without too much trouble. You infuse them for a long time in a liquid and then they can start blowing your top off. Correct right Chris? I mean you're

Ya know, these are basic issues when they're dry, you tend to swallow them before they have time to rehydrate in and start diffusing out the capsaicin. But if you rehydrate them first so that the capsaicin can easily hit the soft tissue in your mouth, you're gonna you're gonna be a very unhappy person.

Yeah. And that's a classic mistake people do when they're making sauces is they'll throw in a bunch of dry chili flakes. And they're like, oh, it's not hot enough. And then they'll throw in some more giant, dry chili flakes, while still not hot enough, and not throw some morning and then 15 minutes later, they're done. You know?

You gotta you gotta you gotta wait. You gotta give it time.

That's not as much of a problem to freshmen.

Thank you. I had I had a drink question. Also, maybe you know, you're up your challenge. I was wondering if we wanted to kind of share some of these things with alcoholic drinks. And then I was thinking, did you have you ever tried to do like an alcoholic version of an ice cream float? Oh, yeah. Oh, yes. So So you made kind of like an alcoholic? Like a fizzy and frothy drink and then you know, just sometimes came in there. Yep. Delicious. Anything in particular, any any good combinations that you'd recommend?

I mean, there's the obvious ones root beer. There's some a couple of good root beer liquors out there. You can make your own root beer flavor and you can do a classic root beer float. That's probably the first one I ever did. You can mean I mean, I would imagine that you know, a read carbonated rum and coke would make a good float. If you want traditional flavors. I've done you know if you like vinegar cocktails, fit like a really nice fresh fig ice cream with with like a slightly vinegar carbonated soda cocktail is nice. And works as a non dessert kind of a thing. But there's I mean, Chris, have you ever done what flavors you try with that?

I haven't done I haven't done a an alcoholic ice cream float. But I'm immediately thinking of how to how to do something like a boozy creamsicle.

Oh yeah, well, we have we have a drink now. I mean, like like carbonated well gin and hajima go with ice cream. You might have to switch to a different spirit but orange. We have a drink on the in the bar menu. Now that's clarified orange orange juice, where we add a citric and malic blend to it to give it the acidic characteristics of lime juice. And we use we use that in a daiquiri variant where we milk wash the Daiquiri to give it a nice heavy so it takes like an Orange Julius we call it Dr. J. But that orange base, we don't clarify for the Daiquiri because we want it to be foamy, but it clarified you can use I've made a kind of gin like a gin eight, so I would make like a celery, celery ice cream or sorbet. And then do like clarified orange with malloc and citric and like liquor of your choice, carbonated carbonated and poured over could be quite nice.

You know what I would try I've been playing we've been playing with this a bit lately is old school phosphates and using phosphoric acid is as our seasoning with various citrus, citrus juices and then carbonating them and I've kind of got a hankering to sort of make an alcoholic Mandarin. Mandarin soda. Getting an extra city Natalie from the citric phosphor. Have you ever worked with phosphoric acid? Dave?

Yeah, yeah. But the problem is, is it Natasha hates it. And so like whenever I want them to go towards,

in that case, we're done.

Well, I mean, the issue is, is that you Oh, Chris, you know, this, like you, if someone asked you to work on something, you work on something, but then if the people around you are constantly saying how they hate things, it's like makes it kind of a pain in the butt to work with the same way that like we don't do a lot with cherries, because I'm allergic to it, you know.

So that's a that's a horrible thing to be allergic to.

I know. I know. It is because cherry cherries are God's best fruit. I think

they're certainly my favorite. And have you not had therapy for that?

I think you know what it is? It's it what happened was is that, you know, I've I've been punished and being punished for all of those years of making fun of people with allergies. And so they're like, oh, World's Greatest fruit now. Now you're allergic to it and joy. I think that's what happened pretty much. So this is karma? Yeah, yeah, that bad, bad karma. When you are carbonating things be aware when your carbonating is that you can probably go a little bit higher alcohol and a little bit higher sugar than you would for a drink drink. But the more alcohol you have, the harder it's going to be to carbonate probably properly when we're making carbonated drinks. At the bar for consumption. You're straight drinking consumption. We use ratios of between 1.75 to up to two ounces. That's 60 mils of high proof spirit and a total cocktail base of five ounces just for your general edification anything stiffer than that and it's going to be more difficult to to be more difficult to carbonate properly and also when something stiffer than that is balanced. out with acids and sugars, it's going to tend to taste syrupy and the first couple of bites might be good, but they mean drinks might be good. But as it goes down, it's going to be more cloying. So just just so you know, now if you're working on a float, you could probably go a little, a little harder than that, but also realize an alcoholic base soda will foam even more than a regular soda when poured on an ice cream bass. Just really, yeah, well, because alcohol tends to foam anyway, like when you're carbonating cocktails, it foams so much, you know. So my, like, there's already a foaming issue with it. And then obviously floats or foaming issue. So it's just can become a big foam. It's delicious, though, but it can be a big kind of a foamy mess. All right, Chris, while you're on the air here, let's I have some coffee questions in. So first of all, we had a question last week, someone was asking about frothing frothing milk without getting expensive frother. And I'm actually you know, in Modernist Cuisine, you guys have a recipe where you stabilize a foam with with whey protein isolate and pseudo Ester sucrose esters, well, that actually make Latte Art foam with an arrow latte is a dense enough to the sucrose Ester make it fine enough.

Whey Protein helps you probably more than the sucrose esters, you could probably leave the sucrose esters out of that and still make it work. It's possible to make a latte foam that you can pour latte art with using interlockings. There's a fair amount of technique, what I found as you generally sort of, we need to be warming it as you go. And you want to be working though the the arrow lock, they want really sort of more at the bottom, you're going to try to drag a little bit of air in. But then mostly what you're trying to do is just have the airlock a sort of very deeper and constantly sort of breaking up the bubble so that you're getting a smaller and smaller microphone, so I tend to be moving the arrow latte around the bottom of the pot of the pot, slowly bringing it towards the surface that I've sort of brought the arrow latte to the surface at about the same time that the milk is the right temperature. The real thing that most people make a mistake with in my experience if you want to get a really wet foam that velvety and silky and you can't really see any individual bubbles, and that's going to give you sort of have that viscous pour to it is don't overheat the melt the melt really shouldn't be much hotter than about 4550 Celsius at the most if you really want to have a Have some milk that really easy to pour, pour laterra with if you start getting the milk up to like 60 Celsius 140 Fahrenheit, it's going to be really dry and when you go to pour it all the phones are going to slide back to the pitcher and hot milk is just going to come out beneath it. And so I found that that's really almost more important than anything else you add to the milk latte,

you can't get it to the temperatures that you would get if you were actually pulling it from a steam wand.

When I'm pulled from a steam one I very rarely go much hotter than that myself but I don't tend to drink huge milky beverages so like if I drink a traditional cappuccino or or a five ounce latte. I generally won't heat my Moodle much higher than about 45 Celsius and that gives me just this really nice smell texture. Almost every coffee shop I go into I tend to have the opinion that they they overseen the milk so that it piping hot when you're carrying around this sort of bladder busting size coffee. But for me that's not a very pleasant drinking experience.

Well my wife for instance, she likes the taste of the foamed on kind of lower temp but she prefers the coffee to be hotter. There's no really no way around. I mean like like can you do like a quick nuke and like not run out, you're just automatically ruined as soon as it's heated up?

Well, the thing to do there is your espresso is going to come out plenty hot, nearly boiling

the milk. Yes, a hot cup.

And then don't if you're gonna drown it in a huge amount of milk your host you can probably get there with a steam wand, you could get to 5055 comfortably and still get a wet foam. But my experience is you go much hotter than that the foam starts to get really unstable, it starts to get dry and it just isn't as pleasant to drink.

I mean, I always pull I always pull like a hefty amount of hot water out of the hot water tap on my espresso machine before into my cup to preheat it. But is that not standard practice?

Well, so I suppose standard practices is have the cups on the top of the espresso machine so that they're they're nice and hot. They you know, they designed the machine so that the boiler heats the top surface but if you want it really hot yeah, just, you know, do some of the boiling water out of the boiler into it. But more than anything else, I just like it when it served in a warm cup. There's something really nice about how that feels when you're when you're drinking.

That's also you know, cups in general, which is why you know, paper cups are the devil.

Yeah, but paper cups have the advantage that they go in your car real nice. And I know that that's, you know More of a West Coast thing to drive around through your drive through Starbucks and get your what is it? 30 some odd out Starbucks latte now.

So that's with one double in how we as one double have coffee in it.

I have no idea. I've never ordered that beast of a drink. It's like the Trento or something at some rate. It's like the big goal of the latte world. I think it's like two shots. Yeah. So I'm sure somebody can call it and correct this because I've never

had it so that you never that doesn't happen in New York because here what you would have to do is walk past five Starbucks to get to your car, then drive to the Starbucks, double park, go into the Starbucks, get the thing come back out, put it in your car, and then you could drink it for the next hour and a half while you look for your parking space again.

It just reminded me of why I'm glad I don't live in New York.

But on the other hand, we walk everywhere. Okay, anyway, so that back back on the coffee. Oh, by the way. So Scott from Guelph wrote in commenting on a question from last week, and Scott says I wanted to write in firstly on making decent milk foam without a steam one on high end espresso machine, I found a fairly good and cheap technique, you can buy a small French press style coffee maker some specifically designed for milk, you had to cold milk to the bottom of the presser comes up over the mesh a mesh screen, and you rapidly pump the screen up and down in the milk and make it fairly dense and stable foam you can then heat the milk inside the glass container in the nuke, the foam doesn't overheat and pop since the air mixture doesn't absorb microwaves as well as the still liquid milk at the bottom. With my setup, it takes about 45 seconds to get to the proper temperature for a cappuccino. And the foam seems to work best if you use very cold skim milk. Although you can get a richer but less impressive foam with higher fat most I do not like skim milk foams. What do you think about that technique, Chris?

I think the biggest challenge I would be concerned about is sort of nuke it. Essentially, you're going to have the dry foam right at the top and it's going to drain out. So I suspect with a lot of care and attention, you can sort of swirl it and keep the foam wet and together. But to me, I've seen the technique, I've never been able to get it to work where I can get a nice, evenly wet dense foam from top to bottom of the picture that I can just free pour to get a nice rosette. But you know what, it totally works. You don't even if you just want an okay melt foam. And you don't want to spend a lot of money you can use any French press to do that. Skim milk does work best but it doesn't in my in my opinion. I use 2%

skim milk is a bad product. Let me just say this right now skim milk should not exist. Why? It's horrible. It's just a nightmare. I mean, like like if you want to like dehydrate it and get the milk powder for use and something else maybe. But why would you ever want me it's horrible. You know my 90? How old is he now? 94. Almost a year old grandpa is is only drinks full fat milk. Like this. Like you're not saving that much. It's just wretched. It's just a wretched thin gray awful thing. I gotta say I'm sure it has some culinary applications but as an actual product to consume. It's wretched. Do you disagree with me? I don't drink skim milk. Yeah, no, it's horrible. So now Scott writes in also a separate issue we had Chris last week was someone wanted to serve a non alcoholic drinks to their wife who was pregnant and so you know ideas of drinks that you could sit for a while, you know and sort of instead of having an alcoholic drink Scott writes in there or the alcohol is wines that aren't appalling but I want I wanted to share was making your own drink out of the spice Summa sumac. This is an old idea and as usually referred to as sumac lemonade you basically steeped the sumac in hot or cold water, add sugar to taste sumac is high in malic acid and so as a wine like bite to it, the flavor someone woodsy and floral it makes it very refreshing summertime drink sumac grows wild around here he's from Guelph Canada I wonder whether he's involved with the university they have a great dairy department there. Yeah, they do. Yeah, the flavor is somewhat woodsy floral and makes it very refreshing summertime drink sumac grows wild around here and many people harvest it themselves. sumac trees grow on the sides of the road and they spread out as clones with the parent. The spice comes from the red cone shaped spears that adorn the tree and you're supposed to harvest them when the weather is dry, or the malic acid gets washed off during the rain I did not know that. I did not I did not know that. I had been tended to ferment and sumac lemonade but of course that won't help you if you're up the spout, which I learned last week means pregnant as well as broken or upon. Keep up the awesome show Scott. Actually I love sumac. When in fact one of the flavors of I shouldn't say this, um, where we have we do a lot of sumac work which is not for the public yet. I happen to love sumac a lot, but you work with a lot Chris.

I haven't used sumac in a while I enjoy it but I you know I think the last time I was using it was when I was working for this classic French restaurant. We were using it with lamb and I think I made that dish of food 100 times too many to want to keep working with sumac. Yeah, what do you I mean, it's kind of a really distinctive flavor that it's interesting, I guess I just never really had a reason to play with it.

Yeah, it's not only Malik. I think there's probably some Oxalic in there as well. It's got that kind of like sorley kind of hit to it too. But, but I don't know that that's just coming off the top of my head but you know, it makes sense. As you know, as Scott points out, it makes fantastic. It makes fantastic still, but it makes really fantastic sparkling drinks really good.

So something I've made in the past what I think is a great non alcoholic alternative is is I'm a huge fan of elderflower blossoms, and maybe that's from my time in England because it's a pretty popular drink over there but you can get sort of elderflower cordial, the syrup or you can make your own a blend of that of lemon juice and then I'll make a simple syrup infused with Douglas fir and a blend of the lemon juice, the elderflower cordial and the Douglas fir a syrup and then diluted down with water and I think that's that's a fantastic combination that has a lot of sort of, you almost could think of it as sort of the the Riesling of the faux wine world because it's got that really aromatic Okay, a nice bit of acidity and a slight the slight resinous pine flavors a little bit unexpected but quite pleasant. Yeah,

I've never done pine and elderflower it sounds good though.

I was really into lemon juice I think to bring the two together

but is there is there anything in high wet did someone do some research and make sure there's nothing in pine tea that pregnant people can't have. But that sounds delicious. I'd like to I'd like to try that. Another good thing for sumac we used to we used to grind sumac finer along with the salt and use it as a french fry spice it's really good on French fries you know it brings some of that acidity to it and it's almost like you know if you're not going to you're not going to douse your french fries and ketchup su Max nice mean if you're gonna Dousman ketchup it's there's really no point but

who do jack Hey Jack Hey, so I see here women who are pregnant or could become pregnant are advised not to drink pine needle tea in general for fear it could cause abortion.

Wow And Jack welcome I didn't know you were in the studio here. Hey, what's up? Hey Jack. Well, you know, there you have it, but so good. If you don't want to have alcohol maybe not good if you're pregnant. Don't know or leaves or leaves a pineapple. Yeah, leave the pine out leave the planet because I've never done lemon and elderflower. But usually with an older flower I know is delicious. With pear pear juice would use an older flower Very good. carbonate that sucker too. But here's something that you're going to know more about again, Chris Kohler, okay, call it we'll take the call and then we'll go back to coffee. Caller you're on the air.

Hey, guys, it's Chris Kohler from North Carolina. How you doing? Good. First, I wanted to thank Chris for ChefSteps he's always answering my questions on the forum. And it's a great resource that everybody that listens to this, you know, radio and likes your blog would absolutely love.

To hear your voice. Yeah.

It's great. You know, getting to ask you guys a question. I just got a bunch of ramps and I want to know what to do with them. I've always kind of avoided them because, you know, I feel like they might be overhyped or that they're like, you know, a little too, you know, whatever. But what do I do with these things?

Well, it's a styes hates the Stasha hates ramps just because other people like them. Just just a caveat, right? Yes,

that's right. That's why I've always avoided them.

All right, Chris, give me some ramp. Give me some ramp drops.

There's obviously the pickled ramps, charred ramps, right. I would, you know, one of the things I would do is I'd like to make a nice sauce from them. So I would I would charge them slightly. puree them and turn them into a fluid shell. So do you have any agar or gelatin gum?

Yep, got agar, would you turn just on the grill or so this is a blowtorch.

You could do with a you could do with a blowtorch. If you check out the charred repine video on chefsteps.com you'll sort of see a nice technique that we use and so I just give them a light charring then then puree them, I would let them down with a little bit of water rather than a stock just because I think the flavors fantastic adjust the seasoning. And then if you wanted sort of a thicker puree that that that you could drag that would stand up and have some body to it. With agar, I'd probably set it with about 1% and then puree it and civet. If you had jelly and gum, you might be able to go down to about point seven 5% for for a fairly thick puree. But what's nice about the fluid gel is it's not going to be gloopy, or clothing in the mouth, it's going to be very clean and really let the charge the ramp flavor come through. One thing though, is definitely don't add the salt or any acid to the puree until right before serving or you're going to end up this color in this sort of vibrant green, green appearance. Cool.

And one other thing in general when you're using ingredients like that is since since you're going to send you're going to charge extra for them and people want I know what they taste like, and they're expensive and they only come around once in a while. Usually you should use them and things that highlight them. I mean, that's, you know, just common practice when you say, Yeah,

you know, it's, it's, you know? Yes, that's true. And I agree with that. The other thing though, is people can get a little bit overly precious that Turkey sorted that followed to its logical conclusion, you get the sort of farce of of a cooked ramp on a plate with nothing else. Because it's so special that we have to highlight it like yeah, you can do a little bit more to it and still really show up the ramp, what you might end up doing is composing a couple of different textures. So the pickled ramp, the ramp, puree, you know, some some very thinly sliced ramp. All of those can be can be really nice. And when

you call that ramp it up.

I'll leave the puns to you. Yeah, well,

again, we we advocate, or the world expert on this. Yeah.

All right. What do you like, what do you like to ramp? What do you like? Pairing ramps with?

Well, I don't, I don't, I've never I never used them at the French culinary. Because I just never did, I would only ever cook them at home. And so then I usually just, I just do them as a as a side I do like a, like a quick saute. And then a little bit of sugar down like I would with asparagus salt and like a little bit of correction with acidity at the very end as it comes out. And just serve them kind of glazed and wilted like that. But because I'm doing it at home, you know,

two things just came to my mind, Chris, actually, somebody on our forum mentioned that if you have a lot of RAM, do you want like a 10 pound case? Ram kimchi, and that sounds fantastic. So that would be very cool. That

sounds really good. Another idea that

comes to mind is it's gonna definitely ship the flavor of it. But if you do end up making that ramp puree, enrich it with a little small, a little, a little roast chicken fat. And that's just going to make it incredibly delicious.

You just wanted to say schmaltz. Chris,

I did. I actually I have I have a notepad here with verdens that I want to get into our conversation. It's sort of a subliminal programming going on. Well, schmaltz

is a good one, you know, people don't have their smiles on the table anymore. That's like so old school. I think Samys Romanian is the last restaurant in New York where you can go have like, the big thing of smiles on the table.

And it's really easy to do if you pressure if you if you take like your roast chicken carcass and then pressure cook the heck out of it. You're gonna have all this fat on the top. And most people throw that out which that's kind of a crime. I mean, you should you should skip that off and save it because roast chicken. That's awesome.

Oh, yes. Yes, it is. It's delicious product. Alright, so I hope that answers the ramp question. Yeah. Thank you. Thanks for the great work. All right. Thank you. All right. So

there's a small Brewing Company.

That can't that can't be good. I don't watch them all from my beer. I do not watch them all. I mean, I like I will go places other people will not but smelted my beer is not one. Although I will taste if someone ever hears this who can get a hand, their hand on a cash malt beer, send it our way, and we'll definitely I'll eat I'll get bread and schmaltz and drink the schmaltz beer with it. Okay. All right, here we go. Chris coffee, right. So remember, for those of you that don't know, I think, because I think people don't really know. And this is actually interesting question, although we shouldn't spend too much time on it, because we have a bunch of actual questions to get through. But

we can take a quick break too, unless you want to sort this out. So we just

have to say so like the, in the Modernist Cuisine, there are certain sections that different ones of you in the big one had more of a hand in because it's kind of more of your thing. You got a giant hand in the coffee section, right? Because why I'm pestering you with the coffee questions.

Yeah, no, I am a big fan of coffee. I would like to say that I stood on the shoulder of some giant people like Jim Hoffman, World Barista Champion and run square mile coffee in London and Tim wendelboe. Had some, some really wonderful people help out extensively with that chapter. But it's at least something I'm passionate about. So we tried to make it a great chapter.

Right. So now there's two questions we have from last week that didn't answer one on Moka pots and one on Arrow presses. But before I get into it, let me just say that my my, you know, expertise, if you can call it that in coffee is almost exclusively related to espresso shots, because that's what I drink. And that's all I drink. I drink a lot of it, but that's what I make. And that's what I think about a lot. But before we even get into this, I think everyone should probably go check out if you don't mean Modernist Cuisine. I read it the section on coffee actually today, but also go to look at VST mojo to go and what they have done with like linking refractometers and initial coffee weights, to kind of targeting where your brew is, and probably read Scott rail's book on everything. But espresso if you're interested in kind of the mechanics of non espresso brewing is would you agree with that factor? No,

I would actually recommend both the Scott rails books, I think they're two of the best books written on the subject and certainly influenced our thinking on coffee. So but here's the book, I think, is the standard by which other books will be judged, I wish ours was good.

I mean, so the key is, and we're going to talk here about AeroPress and Moka pots. But the key is to is to understand that each one of these things has a lot of variables involved. And each type of coffee maker that people still use on a regular basis, can make a delicious cup of coffee. However, they're not interchangeable, and they won't make the same cup of coffee. And so the question is figuring out how to control the variables accurately to get a consistent and the best of that style of coffee that you can get. Would you agree with that, Chris? Or no?