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,

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This is Michael Harland Terkel host of the food scene. You're listening to heritage Radio Network broadcasting live from Bushwick, Brooklyn, if you liked this program, visit heritage radio network.org for 1000s more.

Hello, and welcome to cooking issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of cooking issues coming to you live Roberta's pizzeria in Bushwick, Brooklyn on the heritage Radio Network roughly noon to 1250 something like that. Call it new Nish. noonish. Noon ish ish. joined as usual with Anastasia the hammer Lopez Heydo. Good. Yeah, we got Jack in the engineering booth. Hello, thank goodness. I don't like to do the show without tracking engineering booth offerings. And we have a special guest with us. Today. We have Darrin from meld milk now. Meld although it sounds like a delicious grilled cheese Corporation is not Do you like grilled cheese sandwiches? I do. What's not to like? Exactly what I figure if you haven't a company named meld the you gotta like grilled cheese sandwiches. Otherwise, it's like, you know, it's gonna be problems. But anyway, they do not in fact, the manufacturer you went to bad name for no offense for a grilled cheese sandwich Corporation. Cheese boy. Yeah. Isn't that the one that's on on any? Cheese? Boy, first of all stop there. No, first of all, like, Why? Why are you making an agenda thing? Like why are you going gender on your grilled cheese sandwich? grilled cheese sandwich is a non gendered, delicious item. In my opinion. You know, and I have passed by not staffed only by boys. First of all, you want like an adult making your grilled cheese sandwiches anyway. I mean, like we do have labor laws. I'm just saying someone can call in and convince me that I'm wrong, but I think it's kind of not a good name. Whereas like, not a good cheese corporation but like Fuddruckers is too hilarious not to like the name of right. I can't believe that. Like there's millions of dollars invested in a corporation called Fuddruckers that makes food for people who ever been to a Fuddruckers I have what what's it like?

It's sort of burgers where you top them yourself and most people put way too many condiments and ruin the burgers

so it's like a free fixins bar Allah like Roy Rogers back in the 70s Exactly. Remember the way Rogers Roy Rogers prefixes bar baby so what I would do you know my Roy Rogers trick with the low quality salad bar ingredients they had for the free fixings without wood pilot high to ruin the burger like you say, but then I would move it aside and then I would have a salad with my burger. I would take the toppings. Back off of the burger,

and all kinds of kinds of good tricks. When I was in grad school, we used to eat lunch at this terrible cafeteria on campus. And it would come with a little side salad. But if you put the dressing in the bottom of the little bowl first and then piled everything up on that, it would stick together. And then you'd go to the table and flip it over. And you know, like, you know, five times the salad, anyone else would

add some smart business and that, that friends and listeners is the kind of thinking that is going to bring to your kitchen in near future melt now melt not being grilled cheese Corporation. What they do, and I'm actually like, frankly, excited to see it out. Because we have one here is that it's the knob that automatically turns your gas stove range rather, up can do stoves, too.

Yeah, it does electric, it's not quite as perfect as it is on gas. But anything that's got a knob, it can turn

rubber, you can do ranges and ovens gas or electric. Correct. Anyway, it turns the knob for you, so that you can have adequate temperature control. We had him on the phone, I don't know, a couple months ago. And some of the stuff I thought was interesting was, you know, as more and more users use it, they'll be able to write more and more interesting algorithms like a rice cooker algorithm or all sorts of fun stuff. Because once you once you have computers controlling everything, you know, not only will they take over the world and turn us into their slaves instead of the other way around, but you can do interesting things like turn your gas range into a rice cooker.

Exactly. Yeah. And so what we've got here is we've got one mounted on a little portable butane burner, no butane involved at this point,

there's no butane on it. No, Jack

kind of vetoed that, given the confines. How do

these are rated for indoor cooking you know, I just had to seem free to call them I have to do a freaking demo in London in like a week and a half right stars and I just got a text today we can't get I will read the Texas entirety just because of how irritating now I'm not gonna say who's involved because I'm not going to throw anyone under the bus specifically but I had the same problem when we weren't I was in London a couple of weeks ago where no one wants to get liquid nitrogen here's Okay. Our issue with is with supplier delivery of liquid nitrogen and storage and health and safety issues in a live show environment. It's not even the one that was I really need to know the details of what you'll be doing in order and ingredients you need in here's what it says liquid nitrogen is possible we need more details for risk assessment and method statement. If you could tell me more about your demo and had a video you could send me the answer such questions as how do we ensure liquid nitrogen has evaporated from the glass etc. You look at it we dump out the glass and we look at it. Furthermore, when you add a liquid to the glass it had liquid nitrogen in it. If there is liquid nitrogen present, it will continue to smoke

you know I've been to Booker index I've seen them manage the liquid nitrogen the glass problem pretty pretty well.

Yeah, the only person that I'm aware of that was injured by the customer that was injured by the use of liquid nitrogen. The liquid nitrogen was intentionally placed in the glass and handed to her Yeah, it was weird into intentionally placed in the glass and handed to her in all of the UK is like on flip doodles about using LLN right. It's a completely valid technique to use it. And they're all going freaking pretzel because some Jacquard intentionally poured liquid nitrogen into some ladies drink it's nuts.

Yeah, well, you know there's all kinds of things we use that have created a problem when misused but when used properly produce great results right?

Yeah, you know I gotta put a caller through has been patiently waiting. Let's put that thought on pause. All right, but I'm gonna make hammers and bricks illegal because people hate each other with them sometimes. Caller you're on the air. Caller you're on the air. Yeah, I can't hear you, man. Oh, hey, yeah. Can you hear me now?

I can hear you a little bit. Yeah.

All right, what's going on?

Hey, I'm a biodynamic CSA farmer down in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, which is in the eastern panhandle, just outside of Washington, DC. And the reason I'm calling you is I don't know if you're aware of this or not. But the old line CSA people the original grassroots CSA people are having a pretty hard time nowadays. In the DC area. Those of us who hold the original standards of CSA which is soil farm and a group of people gathered around the farm to get food of a quality that's not being produced by the open market system, right, are being beat out by outright commercial vegetable distributions CSAs that aren't even organic CSAs that don't Have a farm or a farmer aggregators, which are things put together by the USDA that scoop up a bunch of crops from just I guess commercially oriented farms, put them out in share bags like the CSA does, but that's kind of all beside the point. I've been doing CSA since I think 1990 was our first CSA. And it's hard to hold on to a community in the DC area, because it's such a there's so much turnover in the area and so much house flipping and so people and neighborhoods change rather rapidly. But I the reason I'm, I'm calling you, Dave is because I've been listening to your program for a really long time. And I realize you have a really great understanding of how the restaurant businesses work. And there's myself and several other farmers out here in West Virginia, they're probably going to go belly up this season that we don't find an outlet other than CSA for our produce, and being tied to the land try still trying to support a couple dozen CSA shares I've sold this year and our our CSA has been up to 350 shares some years. I think it's 24 this year. I wonder if there's some easy way for farmers who will like I said are tied to the land running around with irrigation hoses for six hours a day and whatnot to contact chefs who are interested in very flavorful local foods. Well, first of all, give me it would be the DC area but

give the give the give the name of your of your farm in case anyone in DC is looking to you know, contact what's the what's the name of your farm,

it's fresh and local CSA it is in local harvest it is on the web, especially local csa.com. And it's a 15 years on this soil with biodynamic techniques. All the produce is outrageously flavorful because of all of the minerals that are in the soil and available to the plants now

and how's the crop you're looking this year? Were you hit by the same like late, late kind of spring that we got up here? Are you guys doing all right for for crops?

Well, we're okay with crops. But everything was late this year, it was I don't know how it was for you. But for us, it went from freezing nights to 90 degree days. And the same week, I believe,

yes, ping pong like crazy. I didn't, it's never never seen anything quite like it. But well, let me say this, I think that, you know, New York has a fantastic model in our Green Market. And, you know, for a long time now, the advantage of the Green Market, right is that you get kind of what I like to call a critical mass of suppliers together. Now the average person on the street thinks with the green market as a place that they can go buy veg, but you know, all the chefs, I know, think of the green market as a place where they can interact directly with the farmer as supplier, right. And the advantage from the farmers standpoint is obviously they know in advance that they have to bring X, Y and Z because they know the chefs are going to are going to buy it because they have communication prior to them arriving at the at the farm. And believe it or not, I think it's fairly efficient for the farmer because they either they or you know someone that they're having doing their truck for them really only has to give up one day, you know what I mean? To go and interact with the chefs and the chefs, it's very easy for them because they know that let's say you grow fantastic. Peppers, right? And then they'll get the peppers from you. But let's say they know that they really liked the you know, the purple basil from some other farmer, they can go get that. And so you get a critical mass together, the chef can make the run to the Green Market here. The main ones are Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, we're huge market, but you know what I mean, but even one or two of those days would be enough to sustain it. But I think what you what you need is a critical mass of like minded farmers, do you? I mean, do you have a structure like that in DC, for for a green market the way that we operate? Because I think that's really the method that's allowed a lot of farmers here in New Jersey and the Hudson Valley really kind of stay connected with the chef community.

Yeah, well, there are several really good markets in DC but they've been closed to new farmers for a lot of years. And so that's, that's a problem.

It's really interesting. Probably, I'd love to hear kind of, you know, and I haven't heard that flip side of it either. Like I don't know whether there's a lot of farmers who would, you know, be itching to supply in New York chefs but can't because they're getting shut out of our green market system, specifically the Union Square Greenmarket is the big one we have here which is you know on 14th Street I mean, there's a bunch of others that chess also go to. But that's the kind of main one, but I, you know, it's a really interesting question. I think it's something that needs to be kind of needs to be kind of addressed. And I would encourage, you know, any chefs in the DC area to, you know, reach out to you anyone that's like listening, you know, what, you know, you have something.

I mean, I totally agree with that. And I think, you know, just giving a perspective from Seattle, which is where I'm from, you know, Pike Place Market, it's 100. And something years old, it's kind of the big, famous one that people know about, but, but there are a lot of other markets. And I think, you know, if you're looking for where the chefs are going in Seattle, at least it's not there, it's probably, you know, more like the Ballard market on Sundays, and there are a few others. But, you know, they've, they've expanded to the point that, even though Pike Place may be shut out to new vendors, you know, some of these other markets around town are, are available. And I think, you know, you're, you're more likely to see Seattle chefs probably walking around and sampling what's what's available in Ballard than you are at Pike Place these days.

Right. I mean, one thing I know for sure, is that chefs will, chefs will seek out and go through great pains and trouble to seek out to good ingredients. However, once they seek it out, the supply chain to them needs to be relatively convenient, because it needs to be, it needs to be able to be gotten to the restaurant, like on a kind of a regular semi regular base. Now they'll deal with, you know, they'll deal with it don't have any potatoes this week, you know, they are the whatever we got, if we had a failed crop field, they'll deal with this, you know what I mean? But it's more like, you know, they can't drive, you know, 50 miles to go to go get there to go get their stuff, because they're simultaneously getting from a bunch of different suppliers. So I mean, I think it's just a question of figuring out how you can, you know, gather like enough like, like minded farmers in, you know, in some sort of new venue. And it doesn't have to be like super organized, or even super nice, as long as the chef's know that it's going to be there and know that they can count on sending like one person over there, and they can, and they can pick up what they need from like four or five suppliers that they've developed a relationship with. But you know, one thing I know about chefs that at least the people that I deal with, and I know is that they are monsters for quality, and they love. Absolutely love having personal relationships with farmers love it.

Yeah, completely agree. Yeah.

Yeah. So let me throw in the I don't have any problem driving down to DC if we're talking about some sort of scale.

Right? Yeah, it's just a question of making of like, making it of hat of like, you know, germinating the idea planting the seed and like reaching that critical mass, I mean, there's going to be there, the real problem is, is that either way from the chef's side, and from the pharma side, there's going to be like a time period where everyone's sucking when trying to get enough, enough of a critical mass to make it worthwhile for everyone. And I mean, I hope someone in DC, you know, hears this or, you know, or if you're calling someone else and has like, some sort of any ear Jack, this is something that heritage radio could take on as a as a problem, too, because, you know, a lot of people on this network are interested in this kind of problem as well. Yeah. 100%. Yeah. Why don't you leave your information with Jack, and then we'll, we'll try to see if we have anyone that is more of a specific expert in this. But

absolutely. So info at Heritage radio network.org is going to be the best way because we're going to drop the call and go to another caller. But definitely shoot us an email and we will stay in touch

now. Thanks so much fun. Interesting, that we haven't addressed here on the

radio. Right. Thanks so much.

All right. Cool. Thanks, Jay. So, back to Mel to have one. We have another caller. Is the second caller on the line? Caller you're on the air. Hi,

my name is Rob. I'm calling because I'm looking to set up for a draft.

Right. I wanted to know what are the things you're cutting in and out? I heard you're setting up a draft soda system and you want to know certain things. And then when you actually said what the certain things was you cut out?

Sorry, I started doing

it. My goodness, when I say like it's literally like I hear the word specifically and then all of the actual specifics are trailing off.

Yeah, give us a ring back if

you're there. Yeah, can you hear me? Yeah, I can hear you now sell services is a wretched thing, is it not? Alright, so what are the specific problems you're worried about?

I'm looking to set up a premix system where I'll be running a root beer syrup that I'm All right. 20 ingredient, root beer syrup that has a lot of ice.

Right? We're so close. So close. So close premix system with root beer. All right, listen, I can't hear what your actual questions are. But you get like a, you can call back with the questions, or I'll tell you some of the problems with root beer Root Beer is known for the world over by anyone that's ever made it to be the absolute hardest thing to clean out of your lines, right. So like if you're doing if you're doing a corny keg with with root beer, like you need to throw all of the rubber in your tank needs to be thrown away. If you want to switch flavors, all of it, you know what I mean? So you got to throw away the ring gasket. Even I know some people replace the ceiling parts of the of the ball lock valves because they say that anything that is even mildly absorbent will absorb flavors from the root beer. This includes the polyethylene tubes that you use into into your cold plate. I know that you can wash the actual cold plate out but it takes kind of a lot to do. I'm assuming these are the kind of problems you might be having a phone now just another problem you might be having if you're using so the the answer there is just you know, dedicate a system to root beer. You know what I mean? Dedicated corny keg of root beer dedicate remember, I'm a huge advocate of too cold plates circuits for every flavor, not one, two. So I would always get a cold plate that has at least twice as many circuits as you have flavors. And the reason for that is twofold. One, the extra trip through the end, this is going to address the second problem that you might be having with root beer, the the second trip through the cold plate gives it a longer line and that longer line tends to slow it down a little bit and cause less foam out on the on the on the output. The other problem The other thing it solves it gets it colder and getting it colder by a good chunk by several degrees. also reduces your foam out on the output and plus makes it colder which duh, do you want your root beer warm stars? Do you like rubber? Oh, wow, good. I like it

too. What's not to like?

Exactly much like grilled cheese. In fact, root beer and grilled cheese might go well together anyway. So the other the other problem you're gonna have is with foaming. So anytime you're making your own root beer flavors, with, you know, tree and bark pieces, these things tend to foam like a looney tune, they're really foamy. And in fact, foam is one of the characteristics of root beer a foamy mug of root beer. But the problem is, is you have to keep it somewhat in line. And I would not suggest adding, you know, like silicone derivatives, anti foaming agent just because I haven't found them really to work at least an alcoholic beverages. I mean, they'll kill foam, maybe in a glass but they're not going to kill them. I don't think it's going to cause your phone out problems on the thing. I think what your main issues are with farming is realize you are going to have some foaming, then instead of you have to get a very good premix soda valve, I recommend the ones that cm Becker makes, but you know you can get and by the way, kudos to you for doing premix because I think most post makes soda sucks, but like anyways, I would get a very good valve by Becker, it's going to have a very long in the back torpedo shaped compensator that's going to gently take it from the pressure in the tube to atmospheric pressure and it's going to save you a lot of your foam out problems. Like I say cold is going to solve your full math problems but also clarity. So if you don't have a centrifuge, which I'm assuming you don't centrifuge is going to knock out a lot of your particulates and really help here but I would just take the trouble to really filter your bark stuff through like you know the finest strainer strainers that you have like coffee even if it takes a million years, and eventually I will get a centrifuge because it can spin all the particulate matter out and that's really going to solve a lot of your foaming problems. I'm assuming you had one of those two problems if you didn't call me back and and we'll talk about it and Jack should we come back right after the commercial break with our demonstration of now

let's squeeze one more call who's been waiting and then go to break?

All right caller you're on the air.

Hi, I've got a question about acids in drafts cocktails. Oh nice. Draft but I want to I want to carbonate and bottles and cocktails. But all the suggesting alternative to have liquid intelligence require fresh lime juice. And as we know storing fresh lime juice makes me the devil. So I'm curious about acid alternatives that will bottle well and keep.

I'll give you a couple. I'll give you a couple of suggestions. And this one, you know I hadn't really thought of by the time I wrote the book but you know, I like fresh lime juice. I also kind of like lime cordial, right in line cordial. You You know, so and literally at the bar, what I, what we do to make the line cordial is I take the leftover clarified lime juice that we have. And then I boil it with sugar and a couple of peels of lime. And right away, the cordial is good. And it actually ages after a couple of weeks, I think it's even like a little bit better. And so that's a stable acid source. Now, it doesn't taste like fresh lime, right? So it's not fresh lime flavor is good flavor, but it's still good flavor. It's different than any and it takes a little bit of an education because someone who's looking to have a fresh line flavor. If you give them a cordial flavor, they're like this tastes like cordial, you're like yes, but cordial tastes good. You know what I mean? It's the in between stuff that doesn't taste good. Another option is you can bolster, to I'm a huge fan of including actual citrus, in in the drinks because, as opposed to just acids, so you can do some cordial and then bolster it with some acids like a citric mallet blend. Some acid combinations, especially ones that are barely soluble. So like if you make the champagne acid from liquid intelligence, which is a mixture of it's a 3% a 3% lactic acid and 3% tartaric acid blend, like that actually blend at that acidity tends to throw crystals, you know, because it's kind of at the limit of of solubility of some of that stuff. And I don't know why, but maybe that's why when you carbonate which champagne acid you tend to get foamy drinks, something about that the lactic tartaric blend causes foamy drinks and also when you're bottling something carbonated like I've noticed certain certain drinks like Campari, the bitterness is not stable when bottled under acidic conditions. I don't know why I've never you know, I've never asked someone with a mass spec to look at it. So I don't know why. But it you know, it's definitely true. So you know, I would I would start with augmented citrus so you can use like clarified orange juice tastes terrible nothing terrible tastes like sunny deities like Tang right, it has all of its character stripped, but you can take that and bolster it with citric and malic and you can have a very nice citrus citrus flavor that will last for a while or if you do cordials and you can augment cordials like I say with acid to bolster the freshness level of it by increasing the boosting the acidity higher. So, you use less of the cordial and it is stable as far as I can tell for a long time.

Great, are there any non citric things I can look at like you know, just the things that aren't citrus at all.

Sure. So, I mean like any any sort of juice can be bolster, it can have its acidity bolstered right. So, to kind of greater or lesser effect the trick with it is is is is figuring out what acids are going to add and not adding adding so much that they turn kind of fake right but you can bolster grape juice, I mean I tend to like things that have characteristic have like a character because this way when you bolster the acidity of that like it helps to like if the fruitiness is there. The actual fruitiness from fruit is there, the acidity doesn't taste fake, whereas, it can taste more like a soda based acidity like an actual like a flight like it can taste more like an added acidity. If there isn't some sort of natural fruit there to back it up. If you want to go dry obviously, the cola acid the acid it's using Colas as phosphoric acid, I would say that you you know it's one of the few acids that doesn't kind of scale directly way for way you know you need to use a little bit less of the phosphoric acid and it's typically sold in very concentrated solution so I would take it down like you can buy it as like 85% phosphoric acid solution and I would take it down to like six or less and then start mixing with it at those lower levels because stars doesn't like the phosphoric acid right are you a cola head? Like do you like cola? Yeah, so you like my like a mild amount of phosphoric acid but like usually when bartenders try to add phosphoric acid to a drink, they hit it too hard. You know like that intense dry. It's an intensely dry non fruity acidity. But yeah, give those give those a give those a shot.

Great, thanks. That's very helpful.

All right. Good luck with it. Let us know tweet on if you get any good results. I will by now right back back from the break with Mel on cooking

Hello out there. It's Steve Jenkins I'm with fairway markets. White Leghorn red wattle, Bourbon red, Navajo churro. These aren't names you're likely to hear at a fairway butcher counter or any other counter today but before the rise of factory farming you would have and at Heritage Foods USA, you still do. Heritage Foods USA exists to promote genetic diversity, small family farms, and a fully traceable food supply. You see, we believe the best way to help a family farmers to buy from them and Heritage Foods is honored to represent a network of family farmers and artisanal producers whose work presents an immeasurable gift to our food system and to biodiversity. The meat we celebrate whether its heritage Turkey, Japanese steaks, Berkshire pork or Navajo children lamb chops is the righteous come from healthy animals of sound genetics that have been treated humanely and allowed to pursue their natural instincts. It's a simple fact, animals raised according to this philosophy taste better. And as we like to say, you have to eat them to save them. Visit us at Heritage Foods usa.com For more information,

I would love to get Steve Jenkins and Alec Baldwin in the same room and have them have like a voice off. When that'd be awesome. Like if you're out there,

get them right here on the show. That's right,

Alec, if you're out there. Let me see a dance. For those of you who our friends who liked the princess blackout. Did we ever listen to that? Oh, yeah. Bob George is an intensely weird song. If you're out there, let me see a dance. Okay, so, so let's look at the metal. I wish it had some frickin flame on it, Jack.

Well, it's anyway. It's Jack.

Why do you not let him have the butane in here, man?

Listen.

It's not my restaurant first place that has has not let me use butane.

Not my restaurant, you know? All right. So let's let's see it in our stars. Can you make a flame noises? No.

So so first of all, I've got the knob mounted here on this little butane LIS burner,

you can't see it. What we have here is a butane picnic burner which strangely enough, if you actually read the NFPA fire codes, this is rated as a fine piece of indoor cooking equipment because the butane canister is contained. And it says sits on a table in campeonato. I've gone through these codes million times and I was doing the series all work. But anyway, just saying

okay, so So what I'm going to do now is just the sort of first manual thing. So you can see the knob turned itself, all I'm doing is doing it the old fashioned way. And I'm actually just telling it to go to a certain percentage. But what I'm going to do now instead is I'm going to set it, I'm going to tell it, okay, I'd like to go to a temperature of 35 degrees C. And that's not very warm, but it's warmer than it is in here. It's 26 right now. So I'm going to touch the the end of this. And that. This is the temperature probe that goes into the pot or pan, and the temperature

is holding the priests holding the probe in his hand. And we're going to look at the knob and it's going to, it's going to turn

on, right so as the it's actually on Hi now because it's trying to raise the temperature. But as my body heat actually raises the temperature of this, it's gonna start turning it down. Because it's thinking, Oh, I've got the gas on. And it's making the temperature go up. So there it goes, you see it starting to turn itself down? As we approach the target

temperature auto tuning now what's it doing?

Exactly? So it's it is what it's trying to do is get to the temperature I want without overshooting because if it overshoots, it's much harder than even if it turns the gas essentially to zero to come down in temperature, it's much easier to go up. So it's its bias to not overshoot, and to make these very small adjustments,

but does it learn your range? Or is it constantly learning

it both? It's, it learns your range to some degree. But also if you put you know a big 12 quart stockpot on there, it's gonna behave a little differently than than a little, you know, half quart sauce. Yeah.

Now how long is it going to continue to theoretically dump gas into the air with no flame before it was like no,

well, at this point, it's my body heats not actually quite quite hot enough for it. So I've turned down the target temperature a little bit. And now it's actually has turned it all the way down. So for demo purposes, actually, these butane burners are are sort of the worst of all possible worlds but but it also stresses a system which I really liked because if we can handle this we can handle anything. The reason it's the worst case is because from zero to full blast on this is a rotation of only about 40 degrees, right whereas most ranges Here's 180, maybe even 270. And so the precision that we have to get is is much higher on this. So it's actually running it at now. 4% It thinks it's one degree shy of its target.

So I'm, like, well, this thing light or do you still need to manually go through the click lick, lick, lick, lick, lick, lick lick proof,

you still have to do that manually. So what happens is when you start up the app and choose the recipe, before any cooking step, what it's going to do is it's going to say, turn it on, and you turn your knob, click, click, click, like you said, it goes and then leave it at any temperature or any heat level you want. You then hit a button on the app that says, Okay, it's on, I'm handing you control, the app will then say, Oh, I see it's at 47%. But actually, at the moment, I'd like it to be at 92%. And it'll move it there. And then it will continue adjusting throughout the whole execution of that step of the recipe. And then for certain recipes, like, for example, we've got a caramel recipe, there's a video of it on our website, where you want to carmelize the sugar, but then you want to bring the temperature down, and the cream and butter. And so it knows that there are different target temperatures for different steps. And as you move through the recipe and do the various steps, it will adjust the temperature, it's sort of like you never have to touch the knob someone is there doing it for you. You're putting ingredients in taking things out and so on.

When are you shipping these guys? October? I'd love to mess with one.

Yeah, we will, we'll do our best to try and get you on a little sooner if we can. But yeah, some really cool techniques that that we are working on. So for example, you know, people I think a lot of times confused, precision temperature cooking with low temperature cooking, because you know, people are familiar with this, or people who listen to this show certainly are are familiar with circulators. And what they do circulators obviously don't work particularly well over 100 C because

let's use oil, but they're no longer they're no longer specked out to us

exactly. Whereas with meld where you can put a pot of oil on there. And you can do all kinds of things ranging from you know, relatively low temperature stuff. So we've been playing around a little bit with with poaching things in oil around like 120 C, and then you can go obviously, all the way up to you know, frying things at 353 75. For

the classic everyone's always wanted to put a circulator for years, can you put a circulator fries at will the metal ones, they'll handle the temperature but they're crap at frying because they they're there even if they had the power they're not designed to have the recovery rate that a fryer needs? Could you could you tell this guy like can you is it in other words could you go from for minimize recovery time but still not completely? blast out your oil? Like could you have like a middle? I mean two burner fryers are so freakin good because they have such a high surface area to heat out this is why everyone at home like I'm sorry you're just not going to have as good of fried stuff as someone who has to fryer you're just not you know what I mean? There's not going to happen you don't have a cold zone you don't have you can do good fried stuff but you're not going to have you're not going to have all night good fry the way that you can tune fryers that can

you have the key we can do a really good job the key is not overloading and that's the key and you know any frying application right? If you if you have a two quart pot of oil and you dump in I don't know 20 chicken wings you know it's going to be hard for you even your 15,000 BTUs burner on your stove at home to recover from that quickly.

Yeah, and even if you could even if you could you don't have the surface area of pan to oil to not locally so my burners at home and they're kind of stupid the high you know they're they're way higher than they're supposed to be because the knucklehead that installed the stove didn't put the regulator on it right so you know i can i It looks like a jet engine when I turn on my burners, which is actually great for a lot of things it is but like it's irritating because I get a lot of flame out on the low end. So it makes it hard to do kind of like the more delicate things. Not that I like to do delicate things don't worry, but like I'm saying you know I

have I have exactly the same thing on my oven at home which is which is great. It's I have this vintage sort of 1990 oven that it's a double wall oven. The top one is digital and the bottom one's analog I think because digital controls were too expensive than to actually put it on both ovens and the analog one on the bottom. The knob goes to 500 Like most home oven knobs do but the little catch that makes it stop there is gone and you can just keep on turning it and so I can actually crank it up to around 700 for pizza take that

safety. You know what I did that I shouldn't mention but I literally put a I literally put a thermostat bypass on my On my oven. So just like the thermostat thermostat, but here's the rule, right? I had to make it such that like any normal so my last oven in my last place when you went there, people like I don't want to cook in your oven. Your home is too complicated. I have to know how to program a Watlow PID controller to do and like so what learn how to program what we've learned, you know what I mean? Learn, you know, it's like, you know, you know how to drive a car can't can program my oven, you know what I mean? That was my attitude. But this one I'm one of my things was a, it had to look like a normal oven, so it couldn't have wires and stuff sticking out of it fine. And turns out, I really didn't need a lot of control on the super high end for pizza, because it just needs to be freakin hot. Right?

Exactly. So it's in its, well, is it in there for a minute or a minute and a half?

Yeah, yeah. So So the simplest method was to hell with it and just literally put a a ball valve bypass onto onto the thermostat. And then when it's, you know, when it's horizontal, I just tell people not to touch that. And it's a normal oven until I turn it into into, you know, you know, flame on mode. And then it's then it's just, you know, in real thermal runaway, not like the puny thermal runaway that you use on your 500 degree thermostat, thermal runaway, I'm talking like thermal run away, it doesn't actually run away doesn't melt itself into an ingot, but it gets close. It's like, you know, up, it's actually too hot, it gets up to 900, I have to throttle it. But anyway, back to the frying problem. So with my ridiculously high output range, right, I still can't get as good of frying in a normal pot situation, because I just can't get the surface area contact with the oil in the pan to have it not abused. Me I get slightly better results in a walk. Because I have a larger surface area for it to hit. Of course the oil degrades because it's against a non stainless locks. My wife's not stainless, so they will degrades quickly there, you can't win. You know what I mean? But it would be interesting, I'm sure you could win better if you had a control app that was taking it up to the brink of being destroyed. And then but not like over because in general 100% of the time when I watched cooks, tried to fry on a range. They over a jacket too high to get the recovery rate, which I understand, but they always goes too far over the line. And there's a kind of a porpoise effect with the temperature where it goes over and then under. And I think people underestimate how much physical abuse the oil is taking during each cycle of overheating along with like salt, flour and burnt particles that are in that it's just absolutely.

And going back to what I was saying before. That's why we we bias our algorithms to avoid overshooting. So we are talking about about frying things all night. So back in May sort of to thank a bunch of our Kickstarter supporters, we had a Cinco de Melde party and we were making tortilla chips on it on a burner very much like this, but with butane all night long. And we're able to, you know, to keep that level of control. And, you know, was Was there some degradation in the oil? You know, three hours later? Yeah, of course. But you know, but those chips were still good.