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Hello and welcome. Your host coming to you live in the heritage radio network from Roberta's pizzeria in Bushwick. We plan every Tuesday from you know, well 1215 today to you know, like 1245 to 50 Sometimes one It depends. Anastasia hammer Lopez is joining us via telephone today, because she's in the white hair. You're in the wilds of Connecticut on the way back from Fourth of July. Yeah. Right. I'm on 95 right now. Well, that sounds awesome. 95 is 95. Like if I could choose one place as hell, it would be 95 with traffic the only the only thing that can make it worse is if you're driving that towards sunset with the sun shining directly in your eyes because it's actually basically where you are. It's it's actually 95 West. It's not 95 south where you are. It's like you face directly into the sun. It's my favorite. I love it. Right? Yeah. And your pickup would make it would make it the best. Oh, so those who don't know, I have a pickup truck. It was gifted to me by my cousin and the brakes failed and I thought I'd fix them this weekend. But it turns out that I made it halfway down my intensely steep driveway only to have the brakes fail again. Thank God for parking brakes. Oh yeah. parking brakes. And then when you get out there ever Hey, David, you ever had your brakes fail on you? Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like was it scary for you? Very scary. Yeah. Yeah. The then once, you know, like so like what happened was the brakes had like started to get, you know, spongy, right? So I'm like, you know, I don't know, man, it hasn't been serviced in a while. So I just dumped some brake fluid in gave it a couple of pump pump pumps into the master cylinder and the cylinder, you know, the pedal comes back up, I'm like, Ma, I have brakes again, I can get to a place and you know, have them check the lines and stuff. And then like I say, halfway down the driveway, all the way down to the floor. And then I want to hit the parking brake and I would start hitting it, it would go. It was like, like an asthmatic version of me when I was young, and I could see like the mist of the brake fluid spraying out from underneath the freaking hood. So yeah, I sprung a leak like that once was terrifying. Yeah. How much did it cost you to fix it? I mean, I'm thinking I remember was a junk car though. Man. I gotta fix it. I gotta fix him. I'm sure I can do it myself. It's just gonna take me you know, a whole day anyway. Anastasia is also a fan of broken cars. Are you in a rental car this this week? Are you in a car that's going to break down on the way home again? Well, I am in a rental car. It's not stick which is why I can talk to you like this. And hopefully it doesn't break. How was your Fourth of July? Anastasia? It was good. Fireworks beach sand. Things you hate? Me mean? I love fireworks. That's true. Did you cook anything interesting? No, just the regular stuff hotdogs and hamburgers. What about you? I I've been modifying my vertical grilling techniques Tandoor techniques to work in horizontal environments in the extremely hot fired cowboy grill that I have such that everyone can hang out outside, you know, instead of like because they won't hang up, they won't hang around with a tandoors they won't hang around, you know what I'm saying? So I had to modify the techniques and my cowboy grill has a secondary side thing where I can put things to rest almost like hanging skewer. So I still do everything on skewers. I did chicken and lamb. I did the chicken from raw because you just do it you know you marinate it Tandoor style and pound the hell out of it and it's so it's not it's going to cook quickly and it's going to be tender. And the lamb I did load tempted first at like you know people actually don't like their lamb that that rare. You know what I'm saying? Stars. Yeah, right. They think they want it rare but they don't really want it that rare. So like you're doing a steak down at like 55 degrees Celsius. And people are like yeah, that's good. That's where a woman's steak but you they think they want their lamb there but really, they want it like 5657 So that's where I cooked it up they're cooled it all the way down and then just you know incinerated the outside tender style like three times off and on. Good night. Yeah, did that one I used herbs from my garden herbs. Nice did you do fireworks? So like I didn't think anyone was gonna be over and so I didn't like buy fireworks but I had leftovers from last year some like small mortars you know and some rockets that are so I had some New Hampshire fireworks or some Connecticut read big bullcrap fireworks and some Pennsylvania fireworks I had leftover the Pennsylvania fireworks are interesting because you're allowed to so the rule in New Hampshire is as you notice dasya that they only sell fireworks that that you light walk away from and then as soon as they go off there they're no longer power great, which means no bottle rockets. No, no bottle rockets no rockets right in New Hampshire. And no fire crackers. Strangely we're in Pennsylvania everything's a lab in New Hampshire The story goes a lot cheaper so I like shopping there anyway, I had some leftovers. So we had a nice little show but it only lasted the length of Ray Charles America Beautiful song you know what I mean? It's like the that was that you know normally like I have to go from that into like I have to do like American woman I have to do like you know like three or four songs to get through my my firework arrangement but just this one was just all Ray Charles I had the 1001 I even remember my 1000 watt amplifier I had that crank that had the Ray Charles going and then to back and forth yeah but I'm going to do I think I'm going to do I'm going to try to make a trip up to New Hampshire at some point before the summer's over and then just have like a you know maybe you can come in and enjoy the summer like fireworks Bonanza Yeah cool. Well have a you know have a fireworks but look, the fact of the matter is, everybody likes illegal fireworks. Absolutely. Everybody even except for like, you know certain dogs and certain small children. You know, you've got to be you got to be careful. Did you hear that some poor kid stepped on someone else's improvised firework over the weekend and got his foot blown off in Central Park. Oh, yeah. So yeah, I saw on the news last night. Yeah, terrible. terrible. Yeah, well, that's not really a cooking related issue. But there you go, Oh, on a cooking related issue someone wanted to me to talk about it. I'm training my dog, my lab, my black lab major. I'm training him sent training him to be a truffle dog now. So I saw that photo. Yeah. Wait, so what do you do? You haven't smelled fake truffle? Well, that's the thing. I was like this fake truffle word because literally, it's just like one chemical that they that they put into oil to make it seem like it's truffle oil. Right. So I just I just, you know, and but the guy my guy, Charles. His name is Lafave, but I call them look the fever I call them Charles the fever. He is like the Oregon truffle expert. He says yeah, you can use truffle oil. And dogs somehow generalize a bit. So here's the long and short of it truffles. You know, like all variety of truffles grow underground, right? We know this. We all know this. They grow underground. But the way that they reproduce is they create a smell that animals like a lot of times smaller animals like you chipmunks involves things like this. They smell that from up top side, dig down to get at it, eat it, and you read the stars poop out the spores, they poop out the spools. So all truffles when they're ripe, have some sort of aroma that's at least enticing to mammals in the woods, right? I mean, that's how that's how they've evolved to be to reproduce. So, you know, a doc doctor, the fever tells me that that there are definitely truffle species. In fact, I know I looked it up, there's a one called the pecan truffle, which is harvested commercially in down in Georgia and down south, which grows all the way up to Quebec in conjunction with hickories pecans, and like sometimes oak trees, but he says that there's definitely truffle varieties. It's just you know, he doesn't know if they taste good. And a lot of them haven't been characterized yet. And he says that part of the problem with truffles is for instance, so I'm going to the I'm going to Oregon during truffle season, and I guess January or whatnot to you know, see firsthand like searching for good truffles, but one of the problems is they call the truffles that are harvested over there. Oregon white in Oregon black truffles, when in fact they smell nothing like European white or black truffles. So it's kind of one of those things where people like, it doesn't smell like the truffle so it's no good. Well, no, it's different. You know what I mean? She's different product doesn't command the prices, obviously of like, you know, the Melanosporum or the magnatum, you know, truffles from from Italy and France. But you know, they're good, valid culinary things. Apparently, I haven't had one you know that you know, recently to tell you, but he says one of the main problems with quality is that people harvest them with rakes, like Trumpy people go out there with rakes, and rake them up. And so you get these unripe ones and he says unripe ones are culinarily useless because they only develop their characteristic aromas, once they want to be dug up by a woodland creature, and eaten and pooped out. So he says the only way to really harvest a good truffle, or again or otherwise, is to use animals like dogs. And so he trained his dog to look for and he says his dog can find all manner all manner of truffles and he says truffles that are hunted that way. Obviously, they cost more because you know you're not just raking them up by the bushel you're getting the ones that are right, but he says those are the ones that have culinary value. So who knows? Who knows. So I'm trying to train major to see whether he can ever find a truffle over in our neck of the woods. And then later on, we'll figure out whether whether you know they're any good or not. But you gotta be careful when he finds

out and all that crap. Yeah, well, there's no there are no toxic truffles, right? Because remember, they're all meant to be eaten. However, underground, things can look like truffles that are actually early stage, mushroom, you know, in quotes, because they're not eggs, obviously eggs. And those can be deadly poisonous. eMoney does. And so you have to cut them in half and kind of know know what's going on. Those typically don't have a smell. But don't worry, I'm not going to eat them until I know what's not gonna eat anything until I know what's going on. Speaking of which, for those of you that tuned into last week's show, we had a caller who may or may not have poisoned himself, his girlfriend and her friends but I'm glad I'm here to report. So the issue was they had forage for wild carrots, which is incredibly dangerous. Don't do it unless you know what you're doing. And if you know what you're doing is fine. But if you don't know what you're doing, it's not like a It's not an amp that's not an amateur foraging switch. They're the wild carrots and then at the same time they had drunk questionable smelly well water. So these are two these are two mistakes, but I am extremely happy to report that it was the well water people and that you know they all went to the hospital and everyone's okay. And you know, nobody nobody died. A little bit of dehydration because you know the well water it goes in but it also comes out along with the rest of the water in your boom So the CES so you know I had to be on IV fluids there for a little while but apparently everyone's okay and we're super glad to hear it I had some people people asking me actually in person and also on Twitter like a those guys okay yes they're okay. But be careful if you're going to forage for for wild carrots all similarly those Sirsi with mushrooms like you got to know what you're doing or only hunt for mushrooms that have no poisonous lookalikes because once you eat a, an m&m, you know like destroying angel or something like that, like the you know, the only way out is to get a liver transplant, which is kind of unpleasant. So, so there you have it. Oh, cheese liver transplant. So listen, we have some questions from so you know what the only truffle oil they had white truffle oil stuff. You know, and I had to buy a whole bottle Anastasia for 15 freakin dollars. Do you know like, wow, how the heck am I gonna go through a whole bottle? I'm dipping a little bit in a Q tip. Mate, you know, it's like a waste. Does anyone out there want like, you know, when I'm done like the rest of that meeting what we should do? We should just keep mailing this bottle around from person to person training dogs until like, you know, the entire entire country is trained off this one bottle of white truffle oil. Yeah, that's a good idea. You know what I mean? I mean, or else like to punk someone just pour it over someone and run. You know what I mean? It's like I told the story. Like I have a really bad history in my house of flavored oils. Obviously. I told the wasabi oil one right where DAX. So my pantry right has all these bottles that are lined up in taxes, you know that he was maybe nine or 10 at the time. He he you know, the kids are careless kids are freaking careless. They, you know, they say everything's an accident. But really it's that they're careless you know what I mean? So he knocks up he knocks a bottle over and I hear that I'm like, what's going on what's you know, and then I hear my guy down to look at this wasabi oil. And it was soluble just like you know, almost like you know, like a wave of, of death smell just like goes into his eyes and nose. Oh, man. So anyways, I have a really bad history with that kind of stuff. Or like, you know, spilling some nasty like, you know, like super green parsley oil or like super green. I told the story on air I think were like my Miley, my sister in law. When she her first date with Wiley defraying was over at my house and I dumped an entire banya Kouta like, anchovy oil on her. So like just if you come to my house, and there's some sort of extremely pungent, or extremely colorful oil nearby, run, just run because like it's going to end up on your on your new dress. It's going to end up in your eyes. You know, up your nose anywhere other than where it's supposed to be is where it's going to end up. Anyway. I was like my phone decided that I didn't want to actually read the questions that people asked us. Here we go. Okay, so we had a couple questions from last week. I need to get to Alex wrote in I don't think I got to this. Hey, Dave, Anastasia. It says Jack no more Jack. It's David. Now. It's David. How are we going to get sorry? goes? Are we going to keep you separate from me? Because you're with the eighth and I'm the eighth. Yeah, I'll be the ID you'd be able to remember. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Anyway, the question was, see, I've been wondering if you guys still have a link to the plexiform that cover a vicious vicious vodka from Episode 99. Do we have that David to Jack stash that somewhere on the what is it? It's the vicious vicious vicious vodka cover that that you know, that we open the show with? Sometimes? plexiform spend this time? Yeah, but he he wants a link to download it, I think. Okay, I'll see what I can find. Yeah, I think we put it up once on episode 99. And then I don't know if it's, I don't know if it came back anyway. Now two more cooking related question. I'm trying to figure out a good way to steam items quickly. I'm not sure how restaurants usually steam. Is there some sort of turbo steaming device? Well, yes. Yes, there is. But I have a flat bottom wok that I tend to steam things in such as fish. Would it be better if I use a large cast iron part? Part of source that has a heavy lid? Thanks, Alex.

So here's here's any wishes Jack Good luck on the tour which is nice. Jack is not there yet. Right? He's leaving pretty soon. Maybe he's there? I don't know yet. I'm sure he'll tell us what's going on. He probably won't. The I'm just kidding. The here's the good news about a walk the one of the good reasons to use a walk when you're steaming. One of the bad reasons to use a walk when you're steaming is if you leave the water in there it can. You can have some rust issues if it's not really really well seasoned and even if it is it can be a little bit of a pain in the butt because you should have I hope you have a carbon steel or cast iron walk and not a stainless walk but anyway, but the good news about what makes a walk a good steamer and what makes a walk also for that matter. A you know, a passable fryer is that it expands as it goes out. So when you're frying you want the that expanding lip, because when you add stuff to oil, it tends to bubble violently. And if you have a straight walled pan, it's very easy for the other stuff to overflow, which is terrible. Now they the bad side about a walk for frying is that unless you have a very good ring, you have to make sure it's 100% stable 100% stable because an unstable walk with oil in it is very, very dangerous. This is one of the reasons that I prefer to use the Cantonese style walk with the two little handles on it, rather than the walk with the big handle that you can pick up and flipping to do stir fry with because what a freaking nightmare if you have a wok full of oil that's hot, and some Nin cow poop comes up and like elbows, the frickin handle sticking out of the side of your walk and dumps oil all over a lit burner and you talk about like running around going. Nice. Imagine like burning oil like everywhere, right. So I don't recommend using a walk with a long handle on it for that kind of work. But I do use the rather large relatively and have a very stable walk ring. Those things for frying. And I feel I feel good about it, because they're not going to overflow on you, which is one of the main dangers because people always tend to over over overfill their frying stuff. Now, the flip side of that is that the worst thing that can happen when you're steaming is well you don't have enough power. You're puny. But the other two things that suck about steaming are one you're steaming implement, whether it be baskets, I mean by the way, commercially, they just have large cabinet Steamers. And they either work on a drawer, they have drawer steamers, and they also have steamers that you open like a combi oven, and it's just rack after rack and you put it in they take fantastic amounts of power and they're freaking awesome. Some of them can do under pressure, you can pressure steam stuff like lobsters. Some of them have they have dedicated boilers, some of them, they're freakin sick, they're amazing, they steam like a mammoth JAMA, you're not going to get one. So the problem then if you're doing steaming at home on you know, on top of and they make little, you know, kind of electric steamers, but I think they're kind of like you know, whatever they're like, whatever, you know what's what is, but if you if you're steaming at home, one of the problems is trying to get a good seal between your vessel that you're using and the steaming thing. So I have the bamboo steamers I have a whole bunch of them. The problem with the bamboo steamers, by the way, is that if you don't let them dry, right, they mold which sucks, you know, and mildew and mold, which sucks, but they make stainless steel ones that make a punch. But the problem with those is, is they have to fit fairly well in your in your thing, or you have steam shooting out of the sides, which sucks. So the great thing about a walk is that you have those sloping sides and with the sloping sides, it can fit various sizes of steamer basket relatively easily. The other cool thing is that as the water boils in a walk, right, you know, it takes a lot of time to boil the upper layers and because he knows it keeps concentrating down so it's harder to boil a wok dry without noticing. Because of the way it's it slopes down it always has that little kind of bit of water at the end you have time to fill it up. And when you do fill it up, it fills up out and so you have a big surface area and you have you can anyway you kind of get the drift what I'm saying one thing I will say about wok steaming and steaming in general in tiered basket systems as opposed to in a big machine with doors or drawers is that there is a very large difference in the steaming time and the characteristics between the bottom basket and the top basket so I don't really like to steal more than three baskets and even when I do sometimes I'll swap them around you know I'm saying that what do you think's does have that good job I never know my talking too much too little your reasoning is sound Yeah, yeah, but oh and don't worry about the lid the lids not a big deal steam has to escape anyway What are you trying to build a bomb? You don't I mean like it has to be tight enough that like you're getting good circulation and that you're not like you know having a place where the steam isn't isn't traveling too. But I wouldn't worry about like getting some super tight fitting lid. I think that's just mumbo jumbo but you know whatever someone can get back to me and tell me that I'm wrong. I'm a bad person and etc, etc. John from Ireland wrote in a long time ago about fruit trimmings. I'm afraid I don't have a good answer. I'm going to toss this out to the community and I'm sure that someone will tweet or anything here I'll read the question. I find that I'm generating a lot of trimmings while preparing summer fruits particularly in trying to make things clean in quotes for my kids. Think stone fruit pits, melon rinds, Mango pads and skins, same things for apples and pears in the fall. I'm all for gnawing on a pit or skin to get that last bit of fruit but there's only so much one man can handle. Last summer I threw a bunch of cherry pits, each with a bit of fruit attached into a mason jar covered it with red wine vinegar, and forgot about it in the back of my fridge for a year. I finally cracked the jar open last week. It was delicious on its own and became even better when reduced sugar into a syrup and drizzled over some good cheese. What do you think? What the word grizzled Anastasia? I don't mind it. David, you got a problem with the word drizzle. No, no, bro. You know why you don't I think I haven't. I think I'm okay with it because it reminds me of everything. Snoop Dogg says, Oh, well, I just think of a spring rain as well. You think it's spring rain? I think of Snoop Dogg smoking a giant like giant blunt. Anyone cigarette Yeah. Drizzle over some good cheese. Any other ideas for good culinary uses any risk of extracting too much and miglin slash cyanide? And that's poison my family. I doubt it unless you're using exclusively you know, like, mean that people make peach pit. Sorry. cherry pit, like cures and stuff like this. But if you were to crack them and boil them, you probably could wouldn't worry about it. non alcoholic ideas are especially when someone you know we did a whole thing on that we've got a search because I had to do some research on it and the guy asked me about it. I would get the get the book on shrubs and look at you know, dig ditches the author of that right and so he prints it and because you could make a lot of really good shrubs or a flavor, fruit vinegars or make your own fruit vinegars with it's something where you're like you're going to soak it for a long time. There are a lot of like I say non alcoholic so syrup's vinegars, and you know shrubs, which are basically syrup vinegars, which you can then use in sodas, or to drizzle on cheeses as you desire, but that's going to be that's the only thing I can. That's the only thing I can reliably think of I once made an apple I once made try to make an apple sauce out of just peels, but it was kind of nasty, because it was all just like chopped up peel. You know, I'm talking about styles, you know, chopped up peel texture. I was like, I'm gonna make a sauce from this. And then I ate it. I was like, You know what I don't want to do I don't want to eat this. Like the, the texture wasn't right. So I just didn't want to. I didn't want to deal with it. But anyway, I would try that. I think it'll work last peel sessions, last peel sessions, but anyone else has a good Oh, nice. Like, if anyone has a good, you know, something for John to do, you know, tweeted on it or do it on the on the chat rooms. Hey, David, is it true that those chat rooms are only available live when the show is running? No, it's a 24/7. But I mean, nice. All right. Well tune in only when the show is running. Yeah. All right. Well, if someone can leave an idea now and then the next time the show is running, someone could come in and look at it and be like, oh, yeah, absolutely. Hey, we got a caller you want to take? Yeah, sure. Caller you're on the air.

Now he is. Hello. Yeah. Hi. I have a question for cooking issues.

Nice. Here we are.

Mine the air. Yeah. went directly under the air.

Yeah, see, or were slick like that nowadays.

This is Patrick calling from Brooklyn. I'm following up about the hands upstate from a few months back.

What happened with him? Well, so

I paid him. They were equalizing one got attacked by by skippers which I guess is just a euphemism for maggots.

Oh, well, the Yeah, but they're fast. You know what I mean? Like they they invade the knuckle if any fly larva is a maggot. Right?

Yeah, I guess. It only affected one hand. And I'm not sure. Because that one didn't hear properly to begin with.

Was that one less salty.

It was it was always squishier. And it didn't seem to be taking a cure. So I was I'm wondering if that one somehow, you know, was just rotting flesh that attracted it to begin with?

Was it a different color? Was it like PSE or anything? Was that was it? It was did you it was the color of it fine? Was it a PSE? Raw hand? Biggie, like pale, soft to exit? dative?

Yeah, everything looked okay. You know, this is all new to me. Just sort of did it on math to try it? So I'm not really sure.

Okay, so, did you consider that one a full loss or were you able to trim it?

I tried trimming it, but then I separated it from the other one. And then it seemed to be completely subsumed. And I just, I kind of, at that point, being a full life so unfortunately, the other seven ones intact and have delayed hanging them to a they're actually just sort of in in holding in a fridge for a couple of weeks before I get a chance to actually hang them. And I was wondering at this stage, am I would it make sense to envelop the whole painting place in a mosquito net or something to stop flies? I don't think that that's going to stop might but I just desert I'm now concerned that I'm gonna have future losses due just skippers.

Well, how old am I like, aren't you like it's been a while you should look at it. Dr. Norman Marriott I've already directed you to that Dr. Norman Marriott who used to work at. He's now emeritus at. I think it's Virginia Tech or something and was Yeah, yeah. The bag the bag method. Yeah. So but you know, aside from that, I think he has relative stuff on the on the PES. I think I can't remember my memory doesn't work like it used to. But aren't you past? Are you past a skipper? Like era? And aren't you into kind of Beatles now? Isn't that your big?

Yeah. Well, it seems to be I have. So I have that I have the female

soldier, or however you say his name. Yeah. If you don't tell him his book. Yeah. And

there's very little on skippers. But they all seem to say that it affects that in the early stage. So my guess is that this one was some botch and a tear in it. It effectively was rotten meat, while the other ones the cure took effectively, and are sort of off the stage where the other pets

are the concern, right? Yeah, right now, my guess, right? You're way past equalization, you're into, you know, early summer. And you should be you should be getting like a decent amount of water loss already. Like, I don't know, how much of your Greenway you've lost. But

I think it's probably around 30%. Unfortunately, I wrote the, the, the weights on the bags, and elsewhere, but then they got so saturated, that I lost track of which Ham was which, so it's not completely accurate. Around 3020. Actually, I don't think it's as high as 30% head on. I have the numbers in front of me, but it's it's fairly significant. Yeah,

if you've lost that much weight, right, I look again, like, you know, I would just look it up, or have someone chime in here. If you lost that much weight already. Like that's almost, you know, I it's again, it's been a long time in the regs, but I think you know, like most folks are aiming around like even 25 for like for moisture content, not for aging for saleability. And so I would guess that you know, you're not going to have like a skipper blow fly problem at this point. But you will have mites and you will have beetles. Have you smoked them? Are you going to smoke them at all?

Not so yeah,

I mean, because like you know, a lot of times like just putting like a low like a low bit of smudge down for a long period like when they're first out in the open like that can get any of that last tackiness off in the bugs won't grow in that, you know what I'm saying? Yeah, I'm

thinking that for the long term aging is just going to be in because this is loosely the Paul Bertolli method

Oh, cooking by hand old school by hand.

It loose loose, loosely. So this would be just smear it with a large rice flour mixture and maybe adding black pepper in then haven't stopped. So that's still the plan. I'm just you know, obviously you lose, you're gonna lose some of these when you're trying this out, but it still sucks to lose one

right? I mean, the look like I say, like I've hung not my own. I've never done my own but I've hung a bunch of people's hands for long, long periods of time. And you know, the the only I've never run into maggots of any kind in a ham that hat you know, that's already lost its weight I've run into I've run into having a knock cure all the way down to the bone and getting taint along the bone which is nasty, but the hammer is still salvageable. I've had many many problems with mites and I've had many problems with beetles but never with never with maggots, but you don't want those those freaking beetles boring holes in your in your ham at the at the at the line between the fat and the it's just nasty. You just don't want that you know.

But before before stealing it for the aging wanted to use a blow dryer or something to dry the surface of the evaporating

mailman I wouldn't hit it with a blow dryer because you might you don't want a case hardened it any more than it already is. I would

even if it's a little it's okay to feel because it's you're creating a permeable

coating right once you've once you've lost the amount of weight you want to lose right then sealing it's going to prevent like going to at least slow further further moisture loss and presumably right presumably you know the moisture level over long periods of time will Aquila braid throughout the throughout the ham assuming that assuming that you know there's not a face section that's open once you have an open face section of meat you're just going to have moisture is constantly going to leave there preferentially to the other areas of the of the ham over by the you know where the skin and the fat cap are. And so you're always going to have and if you've cut into any you know, American hams that aren't age or even the Italian ones that are covered you'll notice that the face section of the hammer is like much darker than the rest and drier and sometimes can have that back of your mouth like like over kind of curatorship, because it's been dehydrated so much. Yeah. And so, you know, I think, you know, once you get it down to the moisture loss that you want, and you know, you can also press up on top on that kind of cushion area. And you can see if it's still spongy up there, you know, you need to get more moisture loss there. But if it's hard enough on the face section, I would still code it and let it kind of Aquila braid over time. That's what I would do. I'm not, like I say, I'm not an expert in the actual functional, I'm an expert in eating hands. Right. But in the actual functional making of it, I'm not, but that's my guess from my kind of my reading and dealing with other people's hands over the years, you know?

Okay, that's, you know, like I said, this is going should didn't want to wanted to try more than one. So have have a lot of a lot of them sort of experimental, do you

have a, do you have a coring device?

actually going to be in a garage? No,

I mean, do you have like a tester, like a coring tester? A what? Sorry. So like, so like, or, you know, what people do is they take like, a, like a, an ice pick. Right? And you shove an ice pick. Now you got to, I would sterilize it and whatnot. And you know, obviously, like, you know, take this, whatever, but like old timers would take an ice pick, and shove the ice pick into the ham, and then pull it out and smell it. And then they could get an idea of what was going on on the inside of the ham. Yeah. So

I mean, I think that's the plan was once there hang for a few legitimately aging for a few more months, because it's sort of this processes end up being slightly more prolonged than I thought, but just getting the aging going so thick that is there any point in doing that till they hang for a few more months?

No, unless you're worried that they're spoiling if you're worried that they're spoiling or that you have taint or that they're not dehydrated enough, you'll get an idea pretty dang quick, you know, based on whether the thing comes out smelling sweet. Now, on the other hand, you are providing an entry for other bad things by doing it. So, you know,

yeah, that's sort of a trade off. I think that the other ones they seem they've you know, they they have the right, they seem to feel okay, you know, that's the sort of, you know, they're they're not the best clues, but they don't seem to have the problems, the one that got affected did in first place. So I might want to wait a few months on those. All right. And it might, am I permitted? A second question? Are we on a one?

The Stasi really bad? Go ahead. Yeah.

Gonna get kicked off the air, then I just super quick question is that cast iron and induction, and fooling around just with a fairly cheap induction burger in my apartment, because Pipestone is horrible. And I pretty much get how it works on thin gauge material. But I'm just thinking how to approach CalFire it's sort of with a with a with a gas burner, you crank the heat up, but you're gonna wait for minutes for it to get really hot. Once it has all this, you know, the store he capacity? How is this different are the same on when you're cooking with induction with with a sick cast iron or any other sort of supplement with high heat capacity? That's

a good question. So what I would do is this induction burners, like, you know, like, we I was going to talk last week, I didn't really get chance to talk about too much about the new the new Breville one, but I've used the inexpensive ones for a long time. And I would put your cast iron on it, put a dusting of flour on the bottom of the pan and turn it on and then see where the burn marks are. So even if you're cranking a full 1800 Watts into your induction burner out of the wall, you're still only looking at something that's like 12 to forget, it's somewhere around 12,000 13,000 Something like this BTUs equivalent of gas, right. So you're not going to melt your your cast iron down right now some of the cheaper induction burners don't have enough cooling on their electronics. And if you overheat this surface, they'll eventually crap out on you. But I don't think anything dangerous is going to happen. But the truth of the matter is, I mean, the fact of matter is that because it's heating the metal directly cast iron is not a very fast conductor of heat the way that aluminum is right, it's just doesn't. So you're gonna get a lot of localized hotspots. So with an induction thing, you're probably better off like kind of, you can wait a long time and then it will equalize right or you can crank it up. Like you can crank it up in kind of increments up and then try to get it even but you'll notice that you can I've done it you can kind of very clearly see where the actual induction element is in a cast iron thing just by sprinkling flour down and letting it come up. And I kind of recommend doing that and then as a second thing just to get a feel for what's going on especially because you know it's going to depend on the thickness of your cast iron and how wide it is etc, etc. Put the cast iron on, put it on like let's say medium aim high for like, I don't know, like four or five minutes, five minutes, let it kind of equalize and then dust the flower directly on top and see whether you get an even scorching pattern, do it under a hood, or whether or not it you still get like, really black marks around where the element is. And you can get a feel for kind of how but it heats, the answer is it the metal that is actually being heated directly by the induction unit keeps very quickly. And then you still have to wait for that heat to transfer out to the other sections. And then once the entire thing is hot, you know, you have to the certain maximum rate at which you can dump heat from the part where the induction units are out. And that's going to determine how hot you can evenly get it. But I'm assuming that once it's really hot, even when it's cranked eventually it'll it'll even out but I've never actually run the full test of a full crank cast iron for long periods.