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.

Today's show is brought to you by Bob's Red Mill sharing nothing but the best in whole grain nutrition and committed to their mission of good food for all learn more at Bob's Red mill.com/podcast.

You're listening to heritage radio network. We're a member supported food Radio Network broadcasting over 35 weekly shows live from Bushwick, Brooklyn, join our hosts as they lead you through the world of craft brewing behind the scenes of the restaurant industry. Inside the battle over school food and beyond. Find us at Heritage radio network.org

Hello and welcome to cookies this is Dave Arnold your cookies just coming to you live on the radio network roughly from roughly 12 to roughly like 1245 Every Tuesday from Roberta's pizzeria in Bushwick. Brooklyn. joined as usual with Anastasia the hammer Lopez, how you doing stuff? We got Dave in the booth. Good and good like that. Like don't even ask this following suit. It's just good. It's good. You do anything interesting. Dave?

What in life?

It was that food not food related, some sort of issue that you had over the past week. Let me get back to you. All right. And we have with us today for the first time ever the entire Booker and DAX current Booker and DAX team. In the studio with us, we have Yeah, we have Matthew whose last name I'm gonna withhold because he's the customer service representative for Booker. And DAX. I don't want you to be able to Doc's Him and find Him in the real life. You know what I mean? Unless he so chooses to out himself Booker and Docs yo, Booker and doxing. What's up, Matthew, how you doing? How's it going? How's it how's that? spends all customer service training? God answer for him. How's it? How's it going? Are you rough? Yes. Yeah, yeah. Are you seeing the life melt out of him? Yeah. Nice. So how did you come to Booker? And DAX, what were you doing before? What was I doing before I was working in data science, data science. Wow, what's that friend for? Like, what does data explain to people with data? Because to me, data science can either be like what I used to do, which is designed databases for lawyers. Or it could be I'm going to troll data to try to make up some new epidemic that doesn't really exist. That could be either of those things, or it could be a good use of data science. wasn't the best use. It was credit cards, credit cards, were you mining it so that you could get more money out of the people or so that you can find people who weren't paying so you could get them to spend more money on those and fraud, fraud. Fraud. I was the only one that felt redeeming to do Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, so what do you do you have a word for people who will Leave the credit card fraud is a victimless crime. Probably right. Wow. You used to work in that business and you don't have like a good like, businesses I used to work in, I can still instantly spit out like all of the all of the rhetoric. You can't. There was no fun lingo. No, no, they didn't instill in you a hatred of credit card fraud.

Just working on it. Yeah.

I mean, from my years of working with, from my years of working with lawyers, I can tell you, I still hate asbestos companies to this day. I still hate them.

More than you hate asbestos.

Asbestos is just a rock my brother asbestos, just you know, didn't fill us up. asbestos. You know what asbestos used to be called, don't you Dave? I don't. It was called the magic mineral. You know why it was called the magic mineral give you wings? Oh, no, but who knows? Maybe Red Bull will also turn out to be as horrible as asbestos. No, it, it doesn't expand. It doesn't contract it last virtually forever. It's fairly cheap. It can be molded into you know, almost any variety. It's a mineral that comes in fiber form already. It says though, God made fabric out of rocks, you know, and it's heat proof. It's amazing stuff, except it kills you. Which is the problem. Okay, now. We also have the reason why any of you have spins all at all we have direct from Hong Kong. And Shenzhen, we have Chris winters who is the Booker and DAX representative in China and in Hong Kong. How're you doing, Chris? Fantastic. Yeah, and so Chris, I'll let him tell a little bit of his story. But Chris, you know is now like, I don't know what you describe what you do you beat people's heads together until they do what they need to do is kind of what you do. Well, you said you don't need it. You only need to pay back that guy because he's going to break your knees otherwise, I mean, like it's a Chris more like takes people who should be doing their job and aren't and then just sits there and like harangue them until they do it was that I mean? Like, what do you what does that even called? What's that job title? Like how would someone find someone like you if they needed to find you look up in a directory for an asshole. Family Show Chris family show a whole a whole a whole and but before that. Chris was a chef in line in New York at Walt Disney World. What do you do at Walt Disney World? Regional chef so how do you get from Chef into product his most of your product design on the kitchen side or or not product design but product, shepherding whatever we call this job that you do, mainly kitchen, mainly kitchen massaging, massage like like literally most massage parts. Sometimes it seems like it's a good you know that we're going to open the new bar is all massage parlors, but it's it's, it's a foot massage parlors. And so like, you're actually like, Matthew, you would be sitting next to Nastasia. Like, like in close proximity, both of you getting your feet massaged, and for me, that's unpleasant. I would not want to do that. Would you want to do that? Would you want to do that? And Stasi? It doesn't matter. I mean, you wouldn't you would want to sit next to what about if it's next to me? You know? Yeah, right. You don't get to choose and get pedicures. How's that different? A pedicure is like a more like a functional they also massage your feet? I would know. I would know you can add up the number of pedicures I've gotten in my life on zero hence, you know what I mean? And the number of manicures I've ever gotten you can add up on zero hands. But I do enjoy a head massage at the at the at the hair salon. What about that? People do foot massage over that like straight up regular foot massage over there in Hong Kong or no? Oh, yes. Quite a bit. Yeah. You can see massage parlors everywhere. Well, yeah, but I mean, like regular feet, massage just feet. Yes, more or less. All right. So calling all of your spins, all related questions, Booker and DAX related questions, equipment, manufacturing questions, or really any questions to 718-497-2128? That's 718-497-2128. We do have a caller on the line. Caller you're on the air.

We did have a caller. Hey,

sorry about that. No, I had a mute button on. First off great that the spindle guys are there because this is a spindle question. Yeah. First off big ups to Matthew because he helped me with spindle problems via email. So so well, well, well pick. But my My question regards, an old recipe from from the bar, which was the champion Justina who's you know, yes, I've done I've done you know, the various who's dinos from liquid intelligence, but obviously the mushrooms don't have pectin. So how do I how do I work with that? What's the technique?

That's an excellent question. As a true politician would say that's an extra Question I'm glad you asked that question. Next question no that that recipe was actually Nick Bennett's that wasn't my recipe and and because I made it a habit to only ever do demos of like my specs my personal specs like whenever we had to do a demo of it he always did it and I honestly I don't know how they did it I'm pretty sure they started with Dr. Shi talkies and I think honestly it was less of a who's Dino and more of an infusion so and then so what they would do I don't think we bought powdered Pataki I think we bought just regular shitai and maybe did like a pulse blend into it and infusion and then just spun out the solids because the trick with so as you rightly point out mushrooms are not made of pectin they're made of chitin and I don't believe they did a like a Kusile Saul chrysanthemum and plus also chitin is not charged in the same way that kind of San is because it hasn't been treated. So I my guess is is that it works much more just like a settling out the same way that if you were clarifying a bitters for instance, like or a spicy oil look by the way it's not something we push a lot but it's a good use like if you're making like a curry oil or something like this to get the spices out because you're not really solubilizing when you blend a banana you're putting banana juice into it or dates and you're putting solubilized pectin into it that you need to knock out and in this I think it's much more of a suspension slash infusion but that's just a guess. Next time I next time we have Jack SRAM on the show I'll try to remember to ask him to put out the or Nick Bennett we can call him Rick Bennett and have him give the straight spec for it. At some point I want to post all of the old book or index recipes up IO actually block pins who gave me some beer to spin the spins all a recipe I think he wants to Thunder nut which also is not one of my specs but I have to post that

thunder what was the stirred bird from one of the menus your your recipe are now

stir bird was not my recipe stirred bird was was was that there was either I can't remember whether it's Jack or Nick I mean remember Nick anytime something is stirred I want to say Nick Bennett worked on it because Nick Bennett's whole like mission in life was to take all drinks and unshaken them and so like he did stirred versions of everything but that might have been a bar wide thing as well because the entire bar was interested in kind of the you know as everyone was at that time to jungle bird and different takes on it but in general I mean it's not like like it's delicious drink but it's not my that's not my mental it's not my wouldn't be my go to mentality jump off point. Not that I mean I'd be proud if it was my spec. It's delicious. But in general, like you know, I'm not a I'm not a let's see if we can work with this to get that I'm more of a you know, a more of a I have this weird ingredient What am I going to do with it kind of a kind of a guy but I can also get you that spec I really,

really my roundabout way of asking you for the spec but yeah, yeah, it's not not your drink

during the good during the break. I have a

quick technical note for whoever runs the board. Everyone sounds fine on this phone interface. Except for Dave who sounds like he's running through cheap fuzz pedal.

Because he's really loud.

Yeah, here how about this? I'll tell you what, I love it. I love it. Cheap fuzz pedal is like who makes those PV? Remember Peasy

I would probably go with like the cheapest boss wants from the 90 that see Yeah, yeah terrible ones. Yeah. All right. Thanks, guys. I appreciate it.

You know it was a really not good. Bass. bass pedal is I used to have you know the wah wah pedal. You familiar with wah wah pedals. They feel good wah wah pedals. I had a bass Wah. And he's never like I never loved it. Like it took too much chunk out of the bottom of my base for me to actually enjoy it. Even though I wanted the Wawa in the bay you like Why Why don't you Matthew,

go forget. Who doesn't like Chris you

and Wawa fan. Not Huawei. Hot dogs not Wawa this store from Connecticut? Connecticut. That's not where it originated. I don't know where it originated. That's where I used to go to it. Anyway, cola Well, there's there's the caller Yeah. Caller you're on the air.

Dave. I don't it's Matt from mistake.

Oh Jesus. Matt from Mystic we all met for mystic a frickin spins off. Okay, Matt. Matt. Okay, so Matt from mystic. There are a couple of people in the United States where you got delivered, but then someone stole it, or it got delivered but the person was in another country at the time. We have one or two people like that. But Matt from Mystic Matt from mystic who I've personally met and spoken with enjoyed had a beer with I think I think we had a beer on the Fourth of July. That's right. For some reason, it is his spins all that is sitting in freakin Carson, not Carson City. I was incorrect. Carson, California. And we don't know why it hasn't been shipped from Carson. Now, what I'm going to do Chris witters. When are we going to get more units into the country? It should be October 3, right. But we're like, we should just we're just going to ship you one from the from the like, we have the first next group of ones that we can send. So we'll just send you one direct from Hong Kong on a separate thing, because I don't know what the hell happened. We I literally, quite literally, every day, I send an email to the shippers in China. And I say to them, what is up with this order? And then they somehow it conveniently never respond to that question. Chris, my right on this. That's right. And I'll personally ship that product for you. There you go. So we, we don't have like, it's like, it's, it's not even an issue of like it the frustrating thing about it is we like We literally don't have any more or didn't have any more units to to send other than like, you know, the produce that I have, you know, you know, that we have at the at the house and so we haven't been able to send like he's just so there's some people who also who need repairs, we haven't been able to you know, RMA is on units and things wrong. And so we literally in the past couple of days, Chris has been here in the US but his office in China has gotten a hold of a batch of like 10 from the factory that we're going to use for returns that people need. fixings on and for you because it's just freaking ridiculous, right? That's correct. Yeah. And I don't think it's helpful but I personally hate the people who are shipping and I wish them ill. And I hope that they don't have success in life. And I you know, I want bad things for them. I'm not going to go so far as to say I want bad things for their family because I don't believe that that's a good thing to do. And I don't think you should blame people's families for what people do. But close close to that. What do you think Chris? Rendon same path? Yeah, yeah. So we just want to make me feel bad. Matt from Mr. COVID. You had another question? I wasn't calling you. All right. But do you have a question or you just want to know where you're rightly want to know where your where your spins all this? Now, I

figured you'd let me know about that. No, I was. Are you familiar with the concept of like the Vitamix whole fruit juicing the Vitamix what? It's like they call it whole fruit juicing. Basically, I'm wondering if a Vitamix is good enough to do certain things for the spins off when it eventually shows up at my door.

Okay, so first of all, when you say good enough, I'm trying to crush it into that shit mentally. I'm trying to crush that sentence into the share song. I don't think I can maybe Dave in the booth can do it for me somehow get that share song into that wave what song are you know, are you strong enough? You know, that share? Like whenever anyone says the word strong now share pops into my head. You know, I shouldn't probably say this was for sure. You don't like share? I don't really have a strong opinion. And the Stasi, Hashem shares their stories, but said, uh, you know, I should probably shouldn't say this was correct. So I'm saying you probably shouldn't talk about Yeah, I shouldn't say so. I didn't I just let people know that there is a story there, which is, you know, good. Lee, you know, you're still the international woman of mystery there, this data. So the answer is both Yes. And no. I mean, when you're juicing citrus, you want to use a citrus press like period, right? You know what I mean? When you're juicing apples vitae preps are not the way to go. It's for some reason, apples are so high in pectin that when you just juice them, like they don't clarify as well, for some reason. I've just never had good luck with blending apples in a blender. I always use a champion for apples but almost everything else, right? I guess ginger? I use ginger. I use the champion. If you're doing straight horseradish juice, I use the champion but I actually recommend horseradish hoogsteen Oh in vodka over doing straight horseradish juice, it's much better and then you can just use the Vita prep. So I also don't recommend vitae prepping or really if you're going to clarify I don't really recommend juicing ginger ginger juice. Use doesn't clarify very well because of the starch starch that's in it. But for most fruits, right, with the exception of apples and citrus, yeah, I would say, you know, I mean, if you if you if you were thinking, Should I get a Vita prep? The answer is always yes. They're great to have you know, I've never as I've said, I think on the air several times, I've never met anyone who was like, You know what I should not have bought. I should not have bought that vitae prep. That was a bad that was a bad move. You know what? It turns out? I don't like blenders. That doesn't happen. I've never I've never I've never heard of that happening that maybe, you know, someone bought a vida prep, and they went bankrupt the next day, they would move maybe I should have waited before I bought the Vita prep. But let me give you another hint. Like when someone closes a restaurant, right? With very, very few exceptions, like they have Auctions is what happens when you have very, very few exceptions. You go in there, and there's no vital preps. So if you just go to a restaurant auctions, you might think well, maybe these restaurants didn't have I know that because nobody leaves the Vita prep behind because everybody wants one. You know what I mean? It's like Chris, what do you think the Vita prep? Everyone wants a Vita prep one wants a good blender, right? Of course you do. Yeah. It's why you also never find Paco jets. I literally once bought a vida prep at a restaurant auction because what happened is they they just, they didn't really close the restaurant so much as they took the entire team, pick them up and ship them to Vegas to open a restaurant on the double quick. And so like all the stuff was left in the kitchen. And I was like, Man, I'll buy the Vita prep. And that's how I got my very first fight of prep 60 bucks was a great deal. Bad bearing, but guess what, I know how to fix bearings. Anyway, so the answer is yes for many things via prep is a fantastic juicer. But the champions also a good thing to have around because champions really good for if you ever want to like grind cocoa nibs to start doing kind of chocolate, it's a very good pre grind. The champion is very good for for a pre grind on nut butters. Nut butters. Anastasia hates making nut. But remember when we used to just sit there for hours at the French culinary like first Robo queueing and first like champion, first picking out the bad now here's another secret for you, Matt from mistake. Here's what people do. They buy nuts, right? And then they just take the can of freaking nuts, and they dump the nuts into whatever processor they're going to use it. And if you ever take the time to look at a batch of nuts, every batch of nuts has a bunch of bad knots in it. And it only takes a couple bad nuts, bad nuts to ruin the whole batch. Especially pistachios. So if you're going to buy pistachios, literally, I spent the money on this because I wanted people to know I was like just take a take a can of nuts, dump it and make a make a you know, nut milk with with that. And then take a cannon nuts, pick out all the nasty shriveled yellow crappy tasting ones and make a batch with that and tell me that there's not a dramatic difference between the two. And of course there is so you should always pick over. You should always pick over your nuts before you're going to use them. Right sighs Exactly. Anyway. So I mean, I don't want to get you in trouble over there and mistake with buying a bunch of equipment, but I would definitely go for the vitae prep.

Yeah, I got a Vitamix. I was wondering if if the champion if you'd like to the champion would be necessary for spindle use?

Well, you're already in it for spins on Vita prep WHAT THE HELL champion is like, you know, the least of your problems, brother just like, you know, what is the champion class now? 100. It's $150. Right.

But I think it's closer to two, but it's more a space issue.

Right? The thing I'm, I'm a big believer in keeping as much equipment on the on the counter as you can because it's gonna you're gonna use it more if it's on the counter, which is true. However, for something like the Champion juicer, you never have like a refrigerator full of apples and you'd be like, You know what, I'm either going to choose this or not. So you know, all the juicers out I'm going to juice all those freakin apples, that doesn't happen. So what happens is, is you're like I'm gonna go make an apple cider today. And then you go and you juice it so what you do there is you go get you know, you're gonna pull it out of storage, so it's okay to have something that you know is only for certain tasks in storage because, you know, it's never like am I going to make pasta today? I don't know, I always have flour, but if my machine's not out, I'm not going to make it's not one of those kinds of situations. I will say this, I have used for Apple side by side the Breville juicer and the Champion juicer and the Breville juicer has it easier to use and the champion because the champion the champion is also like a good like forearm and like you know if you ever seen the movie over the top with Sylvester Stallone, it's a good it's a good kind of over the top workout because you're like shoving apples in like one afternoon in fact, like I've said it before on the air I want the Stasi and I Just for fun did so many apples in a row that remember Anastasia, it burned the unit out and you were just putting wet towels over the champion. And they were like, like boiling hot. And then when we finally turned it off, the magnet had been melted out, so it didn't have a safety on it anymore. And that sucker still kept on going. That's why I love the champion, I love anything that is willing to melt itself into oblivion just to produce juice for you. I mean, it's just like, it's like to me, like everything in the world should be like everything should be willing to just turn itself into a melted puddle of mass while it still is producing juice anyway. And I think all things should produce juice. Where it was I champions apples, oh, the Breville is easier physically to use. But it produces a juice with more pulp in it. So it has. So on the one hand, you might like that because it's a higher body of juice. The juice has like a like a more of a kind of a viscosity to it. But I found that when we were doing when I was making cider, so I've made a five gallon catches up Gach five gallon batch a batch of cider out of the Breville versus a five gallon batch out of out of a champion because I don't have a traditional press that I got a higher clear yield out of the champion than I did out of the Breville because I had a much higher manufacturing if that's helpful to you.

Interesting. Yeah. And also while we're on the subject of old book or index dot Dale specs. The struggler was one of my favorites, though, maybe I'll take that off the air.

Ooh, the struggler. Okay, so maybe during the break, if I have time, I have the specs on my phone. If I can find them on my phone, I can try to get the specs. So what do we have now? We have the sterber distributor and the champion Justino as requests. Yeah, you know why we should just get the old blue sheet we should get like a cross section of the old book or index bar team on the radio sometime and just go over it. Be fun. Get like Nick, get Jack, get like a bunch of people who are still in New York. And those guys anyway. So they're T who was supposed to come on this show and are supposed to come on his show. He's always working during this anyway, whatever. We'll work on it. Alright. So struggler. It's on the list of ones I've maybe I'll try to find it over the break. Hello, he got

on. He took it off here.

All right, cool. All right. So Dave, you want to take a break and come back with more cooking issues? Sure. All right, here we go.

Bob's Red Mill has been milling whole grains since 1978. What are the nice things about Bob's Red Mill is it's the only that I know of national supplier that's easily available for lots of interesting hard to get grains and other seed products. So you know, before Bob's Red Mill became widely available, you couldn't go get something like quinoa very easily, or you couldn't go get spelt easily in small quantities. But now you go to any one of the huge number of stores that carry Bob's Red Mill and you can get smaller amounts of these really interesting fun things to play with. Learn more at Bob's Red mill.com/podcast.

Alright, we're back. I'm not that good. Like, I was hoping I could be like, I could just go into my phone and type specs and then have this specs come up. But no, sir. No, such no such love. So you want to answer some actual questions in SAS? Yeah, yeah, you're gonna go back two weeks? At least two weeks? I mean, I don't know how to. I don't know, I have questions on my machine. And we'll we'll answer them. So Scott wrote in I own a smoke house with the ability to smoke at a wide range of temperatures. I've read a lot of marianske his home production, which is the home production of quality meats and sausages. I like that. I've never read that book to us. I can't comment on that book. But I have a love hate relationship with the word quality because quality can be low quality as in all of us low quality individuals, right, Anastasia? Yeah, that's the kind of quality we had. Yes. Yeah. Low quality individual. You know, we we saw someone in Boston with a low quality individual shirt and with an enemy of quality shirt. Like in Yeah, at Harvard at the Harvard Yeah. Dax actually wears the low quality individual shirt all the time. And you know that I got a I got an Instagram that there is a taco place in Milwaukee that has an enemy of quality taco which I it's basically it's just you choose a I don't know why the name of the winner in my head because I know the name when it just has like, it's like meat and cheese of your choice. You don't want what they chose because you don't like good things because you're an enemy of quality, which is fantastic. I need to go back to Milwaukee stars. We'd like to go back to Milwaukee sometime we shouldn't yeah, by the way. I'm gonna say this Arthur. Right right at the get go. For like meat carrying questions we should just have because we have so many of them. And I'm not like you know an expert in it. We should just have like, like, either like call in or in The studio, our meat carrying buddies in and just do a, you know, let everybody know like two weeks in advance, we're going to do a meat carrying episode call in all of your meat carrying stuff. And you'll see why as I as I talk about it because I think that even if I don't know the answer, I could probably elicit some good answers out of people who actually do it for a living. So we're talking now about marianske, his book called production of quality meats and sausages, but unless the book outlines an exact procedure that I want to follow, I have trouble using that book. It varies from densely technical to vague and often seems contradictory. Now, this is a problem, I think that all technical cookbooks have like, like having written a book that has like technical stuff in it, and dealing with technical issues all the time. Like, you're, if you're a real practitioner of something, right, you kind of know what you know, you know, what you do. And you're probably pretty good at it, if you know, if you're good enough at it, that someone's asking you to write a book about it, you're probably pretty good at it. But when you're writing a book, you feel the need to say a bunch of external stuff to what you do all the time. And a lot of times, you know so much about something that's even kind of difficult for you to write about it. And because there's so much nuanced information in your head, it's very difficult, very, very difficult. And thank God, I have my wife to help me do this, but like to draw a coherent through line, through your knowledge to help somebody else learn. So things can be contradictory. And if you had the dude or whoever, if you had them in front of you for half hour, they could explain to you why it's not a contradiction. But it's very, very, very, very, very, very hard to write a book where that's the case. And I think that in general, there's also, especially in meat, meat curing, especially, because there is a health safety aspect involved in it, where people are worried that they're going to kill you with botulism, or kill you with something else. Or that they're going to have you use too much of a curing agent, or whatever it is, they're worried about, from a not just a liability in terms of that they're gonna get sued, but a liability that they don't want anyone to misuse the information that they have and get hurt. I mean, I worry about that, you know. So, because those two things would meet during meet hearings, and especially difficult thing to write a book about, which is why I think it's probably would be nice to have, like, like a group of people on who do it professionally, and then just kind of pester them about okay, what can you know, what can you say, what can't you say, what do you do versus what you're allowed to, you know, talk about anyway. Because, as you say, I have no formal training in science or food. But I usually want to know, per meat type per pound, salt and cure content, like one or two, although honestly, you almost always using the short acting the nitrite. Unless you're doing like whole cured cuts of meat, you should pretty much always be using nitrite and not nitrate. I mean, I think and like you can usually tell us to nonprofessional older recipes that have nitrates instead of nitrates. So I would be a little leery of anyone that uses a nitrate recipe for anything other than like a ham or going into a very thick cut of meat. How much smoke can I safely apply at what temperature and then you say, for example, my favorite and we is always smokier than mine. My smoked turkeys vary tremendously in moisture and smokiness over the year. But not knowing how all these variables affect each other has prevented me from solving these problems. Brian and Kara would probably protect the turkey enough for me to put in the smokehouse instead of a grill, but I don't know how to make that safe. And by the way, like if so if you read the book, you remember we had meathead on the show, and he has a thing on amazing ribs. And he is vastly he's very worried about people doing low temperature smoke outs, because he's worried that you're going to encourage the growth of, of bacteria botulism specifically in the smoke. And the real issue with it is right, if you nitrate it's nitrite it's not gonna you're not gonna get botulism with nitrates because they can't grow up. But whatever. Let's not get into that right now, the real problem is, is that it's very difficult to maintain an actual temperature on a piece of meat because of evaporative cooling. So it's very hard to judge what the actual temperature on a piece of meat is, whether you're keeping it in the in the kind of a safe zone or not unless you keeping it high enough to ensure that there's no bacterial growth, even with evaporative cooling, so it can be somewhat difficult, which is why they have interesting new smokers that are controlling the whole atmosphere, including the humidity, they're kind of cool anyway, are there any good sources of rules of thumbs for controlling these variables to formulate my own cooking processes? I get overwhelmed. When I research these issues and find it hard to believe blogs. I'd like to control for these variables, like I do for daiquiris in a spreadsheet. Sorry for such a general question. I'm still enjoying the show and won't buy a sci fi book until yours is why you should buy anyone's book. It's going to be different. Don't worry about it. But I think we really we should get some people on the show. I think in general. It is true different cuts of meat with different fat contents are going to respond differently to salting, they're going to respond differently to the application of heat in terms of how long it takes to heat to go through them. But in general, there's a relatively small number of bugs that you're trying to kill. When I say bugs me micro organisms, relatively small amount, there's a, you know, relatively, you know, there's multiple hurdles, right? You have salt, you have nitrates, and you have salt, nitrites, and temperature, and like, those variables are like, you know, you're pretty much always trying to hit similar numbers on those things. And then the question is, like, what's the what's the, you know, what's the right right answer? So I think, you know, we can come we can say, okay, look at an oily fish and not oily fish. You know, chopped up meat not chopped up me, you know, lean like a beef versus like something fattier like pork. And we could try to hash those numbers out, but I'd rather do it with some experienced cure people see whether Dave, see whether anyone in the booth wants to have a show like that where we get, I don't know, like, Johnny, or like Olympia provisions back on and just do like a cure episode. See whether anyone's interested in that. Yeah, actually, somebody

is talking about there. No. All right, we'll try to set it up. We'd like to combine koji with my sausage and cured meats. No idea how to start. There you go.

Well, for that, we need to get rich back on our cook quest. Back to do Captain koji to do some cozy stuff. Captain Koji, Anastasia is like eg TAs or koji face on, which was our that is that's your code you face. It's a smile, though. It's a smile, smile, the coachee face. Tim writes in for my next equipment purchase, I'm looking at DIY, a vacuum chamber for infusions. Primarily possibly hacking my old crock pot as a low temperature cooking bad and building a carbonating rig for cocktails thought on thoughts on which project to tackle first, do the vacuum chamber. Actually, you know what? Well, carbonation is so easy, it's not really a project, you'd buy the stuff, wipe it together and it's done. The vacuum, I wouldn't do a crock pot into into a circulator, it's just I don't see the point, like you know, once you buy a crock pot, and you get the PID, and it's never going to be as you know, as as easy or as much fun as using a real circulator. And you can get a real circulator. Now for a couple 100 bucks, it's just, I don't see the return on an on time investment there unless you really, really want to. I mean, it's not like the average person is doing a DIY on an immersion circulator. It's not like they're learning how to how to, you're not even learning how to tune a PID looper, you know, like the the ultimate like if you want to, if you're like, Hey, listen, I'm interested in control, and control. And I want to write a PID Loop. I want to learn how PID works. I want to like learn the math behind it, and like actually a tuning a system. And then yeah, then it's worth doing, like, but you could also just do that, like, theoretically on the computer, like, you know, you can get a version of anyway, my point is, I would, I don't think at this point, that's as interesting a project as the DIY vacuum chamber is good, because if you're a DIY person, and you have a DIY vacuum rig, you can use it for food, you can use it for drink, hell, you can use it for plaster, you can use it for like degassing. Like, urethane, if you want to build things or like casting resins, I use my DIY vacuum stuff for all of those things. You know what I mean? Like, when I'm doing prototypes, you know, I now have actually a much fancier you guys know about the, you know, those, those epoxies that have the long tube with the static mixers in them so that you when you press it, it comes out of the tip mixed. It looks like a bunch of blades next to each other and I'm talking about inside of the Yeah, so I have a super fancy resin gun like that. That's like that. It's like, it's like, what size would you say that is? Big. It's like you it's like you're holding a big thing. It's like it's like, it's like if I was a two year old holding a cop gun. That's like that's the size of it right? If you can picture me as a two year old holding a full size call gun that's the thing and it hooks up to a pneumatic thing and it it Priebe it mixes without adding any air urethane resins and deposits them without air so you don't need to do a D gas on the resin and it's hooked up to an air compressor. So it doesn't even take any any any you're literally like just like and it's like and no nothing. You don't I mean, I still do pressure casting because you know, whatever. But yeah, yeah, cool. So I would do a vacuum chamber. The trick with a vacuum chamber is choosing something that won't crush. So round Bain Maries stainless steel round, Bain Maries typically do not crush square and rectangular Bain Maries and hotel pans crushed like mother's they just crushed it crumbled. They in Europe they make a special one that doesn't crush but guess what? It is expensive. So I would stick with Round. Here's some other things that don't crush. All clad pots don't crush. And so what you do is you just get like, you get like a refrigeration vacuum machine, they're oil in them. So they kind of stink and they're a little bit loud after they've been running for a while, put oil in it. And then you just stick a rubber tube, you get a piece of like a Lexan. And you drill a hole in it and you put a fitting on it with a BB, you put like a little piece of like you had here some adhesive silicone, or rubber to the to the lexan cut holes make make sure you could hold the silicone so you can see through it. And this is just the easiest way. There's nicer ways, much nicer ways, but then that can fit on any round thing that you can get a one foot square piece of lexan No, you know, like three eighths or half inch or something from McMaster car or on Amazon that's not hard. And then you put that on and it fits on any lid. I'm sorry, it acts as a lid you can fit on any pot or bain marie and I use that all the time. The one square thing that doesn't crush is six pans small six pans tend not to crush like this six inch tall, six pins. They're so small and chunky that they tend not to crush. And so you can do those but yeah, totally do that. You can have a lot of fun with that. I have a lot of fun with them. I still use it. Because you know what a vacuum machine I'm not going to stick resin in my in my actual you know, mini pack machine. And a mini pack machine is like 1000s of dollars and you can do this whole thing for like 100 125 bucks. Anyway, so that's what I would do. What do you think? Anyone? Anyone? Any thoughts? No, that sounds good. All right, Julian wrote in I'm sure Julian's already gone to Hawaii, but I'm flying to Hawaii with friends soon. It's like five months ago, Anastasia. So how this kids I'm getting shuffled around and detest detest I like anyone that doubles up on the test is a friend of mine. If you double up on how much you hate something that's a strong move to test the free my and freezing quotes here because it's so detestable that actually they should pay. They should pay him you know what I mean? So it's like free in the sense that they're not charging you money. But the aggravation is though you paid money, right? I feel that's what the why the word free here is in quotes, the free my ties that they give you during the flight. I've never been to Hawaii Did they give you a free Meitei on every flight to Hawaii? No idea if you're flying like Pentecostal air do you get a free Mai Tai on on that doesn't seem likely and doesn't seem likely. Although the Stasi once had to fly to Europe were both flying to Europe and she flew Emirates and I thought that was going to be a dry flight. But she came off that plane soaked in liquor. She was like pickled like a freakin cherry when she got off that plane, wasn't you that was flying emirates that time and you're like, oh, like I have to fly Emirates. And it was awesome. No, it wasn't. It was no, it was an Emirates. But you know, you remember what I'm talking about? Yeah. Anyway, I was hoping I could bring some stuff with me on the flight to assist in making a quality fun Tiki light cocktail during the flight. However, in order to keep the free world safe, as you know, the TSA has graced us with a few rules. So here's the TSA rules, right? Which I'm sure Chris You know, as being an international traveler that you are Hong Kong and US can't bring booze need to use what they have on the flight. Now that's just to be legal. I mean, everybody on freaking Earth knows that the actual rule is that you're allowed to bring as many of those little travel bottles that you can fit in a quart container court, ziplock bag, so my general what I do 100% of the time is I go and I buy travel size things I rinse them, which is hard. Have you ever tried to rinse out shampoo bottles, guys, it's very hard. Like the the what's it called the the aromas that they put into those things and you try to buy like a pack bottle so people can't see into it. Head and Shoulders is a classic because it's white bottle, and it seals pretty well. But they'd like to get that smell out of the bottle is a pain in the ass anyway, put but pain in the butt. So I'm going to say family show. So that's how I bring Kiesel saw with me chi to San SPL when I'm flying around, because I bring them in travel sized bottles because I don't like checking luggage. I don't like checking luggage because I once had a bunch of check luggage that I needed for demo get lost by the airline and they didn't get it to me in time for the demo. So now I only like to travel with stuff that I can carry in the carry on to make sure that I can do my you know, whatever I'm doing when I land. So you can the truth of the matter is is you can bring liquor on the freakin airplane. You're not supposed to bring liquor on the freakin airplane. That was a long way to say that. Yeah, so yeah, any single container is 3.4 ounces. One quart, well one quart bag. I don't know that you're allowed to bring an actual court but it has to all your bottles have to fit in a single quart bag, right, which is not the same thing. So with four people you get four quarts, okay. Don't want to annoy my airplane neighbors with a lot of stuff or loud noises I shaking you know what airplanes are so freaking loud that like airplanes so freaking loud that like, next time you're on an airplane. Do you remember Sam from CNN video his his handle and stuff here he would come to the FCI every once in a while he did a whole series where he was shaking on the airplane he was using ice and actually just two plastic airline cups and using them as a shaker. And he was saying that no one had a problem with it. No one had two babies rattle Yeah, I mean as it made him think what happens on an airplane people are blowing their nose on you basically like, you know, like, you can do all sorts of horrible things on an aeroplane. The sound of shaking a cocktail, I'll be like, Oh, thank God, you know what I mean? Thank God someone is doing something that I like on an airplane, you know what I mean? It's like, I don't think it's gonna bother anyone to have a shaking ice on the on the plane.