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,

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Hello cooking issues this is Dave Arnold your host coming to you live on the heritage Radio Network every Tuesday from you know I don't know sometime after 12 till like about one especially the Stasi has to leave on the button today because joined as usual witnessed acid to him or Lopez. How're you doing? Good. She's flying off to her native land to La today. 24 hours sounds fun visiting process after pasta place in LA. Yeah. Nice. We got we got Cat today. How you doing? Good. How are you? You're gonna well, we'll give you a pitch in a second. We got to do this as our NPR version of a pitch for money. You got Matt in the booth a little low. And in a minute we're going to have I hope we had any call before but I guess he doesn't know how late we normally run. Dave David Zilber from who is the co author of the Noma guide to fermentation and we're going to talk fermentation in a minute. But while we're waiting cat, why don't you give your pitch.

So this Monday December 3 at 6pm is our annual fundraising gala.

gala cuddly meaning meaning meaning I've been in

Alabama for a week don't judge me. fundraising gala winter in the garden. It is at Brooklyn Botanic Garden, the poem house the really pretty glass house. We're going to have a great lineup of chefs, Dave's going to be making cocktails as well as southern.

I'm going to be make them king I know. Wait, what

do you mean? The Damon volti. So there Teague are also going to be slinging cocktails. We're super excited. tickets are still available, go to heritage radio network.org Gala. Tickets are 135. General Admission to 25 VIP VIP gets you in an hour early. You get an hour more cocktails, you get VIP bites that only VIP people are going to get. Can

I just say like I want people to spend money on the VIP thing. But I always find VIP things incredibly depressing because you're jaded. Remember that were you there for the Justin Timberlake VIP thing that we did when he launched his tequila brand or is that before he started working on me? No, I was there. Remember, if he wasn't there, he was really he wasn't in the VIP section because he didn't want to hang out because the VIPs at like an event like that aren't the real VIPs the real the real VIPs are on their own platform in the club. Looking down at the rest of the of the plebes. You know and I mean they don't want to be in a separate back room with like the with like the tier C and D VIPs. They want to be untouched by the wrongs and yet see the throngs, right.

Speaking of tear a VIP is Dave. Yeah, I've got a friend on the phone.

Oh, nice. Got David. You there. Hello. Hey, how you doing? Where are you? Are you in Copenhagen right now?

I am in Copenhagen. I'm in the greenhouse, which is my little, my little. My vegetal get away. Thank

you. No, I have not been in Copenhagen for more than an hour and a half in my life.

That's unfortunate, because there's more than an hour and a half worth of stuff to see here.

I'm sure I saw mainly the train station, like I went from the airplane to the train station. Now this comes to another part of my life where I only go on trips, basically for business. And Absolut Vodka was like, You know what you need to do. You don't need to go to Copenhagen. No one needs that. You need to go to Scotland. So you know,

you need to come to the south of Sweden and see nothing. Hey, open Absolut Vodka factory. We tell my girls my girlfriend's from scorner Yeah, so so I've been I've been to that town.

Yeah. Well, I mean, it's quaint. Mean scone is the kind of place people are from right. Yeah, exactly. It's not the kind of place people have moved to. It's the kind of place not like California where people go to. It's like where people are from. Now. You're actually from you're from Toronto, right? I am. Torontonian. Yeah, Toronto is a place people go to not necessarily a place people are from so is it in your in the in the your intro or somewhere? I read Oh, no, it was in some interview with you. You literally to go to Noma you sent out a bunch of resumes to like the three places you wanted to go. And your first bite was in Elma. And that's how you ended up in Copenhagen? Ah,

yeah, that is that is Grant Achatz wasn't so interested in me at the time.

I think you'll find that no one's interested in this thing. No one's interested in you until you know something. It's one of the kind of like crappy parts of life. You know what I mean? It's kind of depressing.

Yeah. Yeah, sure enough.

So I'm glad. So you just came out, by the way, because people are gonna want to call in I'm sure you just recently came out with the Noma guide to fermentation. Now, I know, Ariel's good friend of the show, Ariel Johnson. She did you know another guy to fermentation years ago. But this one is, it's very different. It's much more kind of, I mean, this in a good way mass market kind of, you know, bigger shot differently on kind of a different scale. But did you overlap with erielle? at all, or no?

Oh, yeah. She taught me lots of what I know. I love every Yeah, absolutely. It's funny, because I think of it as like big fists, even though I am older than her. But she taught me so much when I first got into the lab. And really, it really kind of helped me get my feet on the ground in that. Aaron Larkin. So we worked together for maybe about a year before she moved on. And same with large Williams. No, but it was amazing to work with them and to see what they did. And then to be handed the reins and kind of build a new lab and get to read the book. So it was a big torch to be passed.

Nice. So I, by the way, call in your fermentation or your Noma, whatever, you got your Nordic related questions, maybe I guess, your Toronto related questions, your fermentation related questions, you're writing a book related questions to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. But, Matt, I'm assuming you don't have anyone on the phone yet. Right? No. Okay. So I'm going to say some things first, because I did, as I say, read the book in its entirety. What I like about the book, and I this has to be a conscious choice that, you know, that you made is the kind of, you know, you can do it to channel Rob Schneider. But the you can do it kind of attitude you have in the in the book. It's you know, very, you know, it's very much with his tone that, you know, you can get her done, you know what I mean?

Yeah, but that was exactly the point. I mean, it wasn't, you know, when we first set out to write this book, and Renee was like, Okay, this is this is what we're striving for. You can't just write an esoteric, you know, tome of couldn't, we couldn't include recipes with centrifuges and roadmaps and ultrasonic homogenizers we just wouldn't. I mean, it's pretty to look at and it's but it's not about impressing people. It's about empowering people. So I really got a lot of the work was dumbing down what we did at Noma and not in a negative sense of being like okay, if you had nothing and you will you still wanted to make this butter emotion. What would you have to do? And then you just MacGyver it until you know that It makes sense. And the best part about this is that Martha Humbert, who's a really amazing cookbook, author herself, was the recipe tester for all this. So actually flew out to Portland quite early on in the books process to actually like, once as soon as the the rest of the paragraph, it's just do this with her. And then basically go through the entire process of what Noma did, you know, very early on as we were figuring this stuff out and going to the local hardware, sort of on the local Cookshop to actually like build go all these incubators and stuff in her apartment. So just to prove it could be done. That's

one of my favorite things you're like, is this speed rack is the plastic thing and you like, you know, build all this stuff, which is I think, you know, I think that's the kind of thing people even though look, you can get all that stuff on the here's what you can't get off the internet people like what you can't get when you can, I guess but the nice thing about a book is a book. When you're writing for the Internet, yes, it's a good place to put up a DIY How To Build A, you know, a fermenting chamber, etc, etc. But there's something about writing a book and trying to turn something into a coherent, large format document that just forces the writer into a mental space and a kind of, if they do a good job at a level of rigor, that you don't get writing on the internet, you know what I mean? So I think it's a useful thing. I think books it's one of the reasons I think books still have a place where do you think

Yeah, absolutely. It really forces you to you know, to let go through a fine tooth comb and blog posts like you said, they're one thing you know, it's and that's the thing is they're self published there's no I don't mean to say but there's like there's no stakes you can put something up if it doesn't work, oh, well, it gets buried in the history of your archives or whatever. But with a book you know, there is a pressure especially you know, coming from us it has to be it had to do what it needed to do extremely well. And and yeah, you just put yourself into that mindset and then from the ground up kind of you know, empathize with someone who's like got a team of three cooks in a bistro and I really want to do this but how and you just have to put yourself into their shoes and make it make sense to them. You know that you take it for granted that we have this like huge space and these amazing incubators and you know $1,000 Humidity systems and all this stuff, but at the end of the day, it's about doing it for for the little guy

and so for people who haven't seen the book, it's kind of organized by style of ferment so it goes like you know, lacto ferments, kombucha, vinegar, Koji, miso koji and general miso show you Gorham which, and black fruits and vegetables and which is you know, like black garlic, etc, etc. So, Intel people call I have some questions actually on the Dave,

I believe we have a caller on who has a black garlic question.

Well, all right, well, so I'm gonna call or you're on the air. But while we're doing this, I'm going to see in case this question overlaps. We'll we'll put them to you all at once one you in the book you do mainly kind of I know it's weird to say traditional because none of its traditional it's all relatively new process but kind of lower temperature much longer processes for you know, your your blackened you know, alliums and your black and fruit. And I was wondering whether you've tested and rejected or just haven't played with like a lot of the shorter term ones that like Johnny Hunter is doing and Madison where he's doing was first doing higher temperature and then beyond that pressure cooking black stuff. And I know that all the flavors are different, but I'm wondering whether you're testing it and while you're thinking about that color, you had a question about black black end products. What was it?

Oh, yeah. Hey. This is a Quinn theses.

Hey, doing AFL. Hello, Canadian. Nice. from Vancouver Island.

Yeah. Cool. So my setup right now is a old rice cooker. So again, it is actually running a little flutter. That's good recommend. But I had a different sort of question. How concerned would you be if eating got interrupted? Because that happened to me. And I just just in case, but I was wondering, like, who we relied on day isn't fooled? When can be received.

Could you hear that question? David. I know

that it was a bit choppy but I think I think how how concerned should I be if the rice cooker shuts off for a day you got it? And then you restart it? Yeah. Am I that's not a good thing. Okay, and it was actually erielle Who impresses impresses upon me. But you know, what, you're sitting in the prime range for pathogenic bacteria growth. So if something cools down to like 45 degrees, and it's sitting at that temperature for like eight hours. That's that's not there's, there's no way to ensure it stays. You know, that's why you ferment or you aged garlic and 60 degrees, because that's, that's hot enough to keep the bacteria from propagating. And again, garlic is something that grows on the ground anyway, if there are botulism spores, they could, they could very easily start to kick off. So. Yeah, yeah, I, I elaborate on that in the book. And I say, you know, you're tasked with making sure that it doesn't drop. So I would just start fresh for the brain now. It's never what you're

capable at. Like. I've already run out the old band, making sure that you know, everything happens again, I know what to do.

Your back when I used to work at the French Culinary Institute, constantly, like people who were cleaning would come this was an early, early days back when people weren't used to things cooking for 2448 72, you know, week, whatever, constantly, people would unplug my crap. Like, I would come in the next morning and be like, I can't live in the damn kitchen, people. You know what I mean? Like, don't unplug my stuff. And like, so it got to the point where I would duct tape over all of the sockets. You know what I mean? Because it still occasionally some moron would be like, I wonder what this tape is here for? Let me take the tape off and unplug this thing. I hated it. I hated it. So much like interrupted processes. This is why early no one does it anymore. It's not even a problem anymore. But early in the day, I used to tell Phillip press and I'd be like, Philip, man, can't you put because the worst would be like, I didn't trust anything. I didn't eat more because no one had the data logger yet there wasn't a data logging function in your kind of your standard thing. And so, like, I was always nervous, that some aihole unplugged my stuff for like six hours to plug in a vacuum machine or some crap, you know, or vacuum cleaner, and then just plugged it back in and didn't say anything. I didn't say no, I didn't do nothing. You know what I mean? So like, I used to be worried about this constantly. But I don't think it's a problem anymore. Because I think everyone knows now not to unplug the cooking equipment overnight. You know what I mean? Yeah, yes, definitely. Hate. One more quick question. Sure. Okay. Trickling good, do it, go for it?

Sure. So I've run some mixed responses about harvesting my own coaches for of wondering if David has any other tips for making sure that that is sterile or there's no contamination, or while they're playing? Or, you know?

So not just harvesting your own spores, like from the wild?

No, no, no drama.

Yeah. If it tastes, right, like if you if you grow, this was in the very next batch of Goji, and it tastes like Koji, you're probably on track. One of the really cool things that Japanese koji growers used to do or managed to do is that they would, they would select for for color variants. And the, you know, the the idea that koji is white is something that people had to do. So, it was domesticated, and they're like, Okay, well breed it white. And so if anything else pops up, we'll be able to see it, we'll have a very strong visual cue. And we'll know that somebody got infected, and we can either toss out the batch or start again. So if you ever see different colors pop up black, green, especially red or orange molds, you know, it's been infected. But if you're, if your spores stay pure and white and keep growing really, really fluffy doesn't look any other sort of

way or

what say again, you kind of

from white to green, when a

question was doesn't it shift there white to green during the growth?

There are some species that do that. So there are some species that when they go to spore they go green. But if you are concerned about that, find, find a strain that grows white and you'll have that added layer of protection that added to you. Okay,

and for those of you that don't mean for the few people I guess who are listening to this who don't know about Thanksgiving, but for those who You don't know the you know the basics of koji. You're inoculating a substrate with an Aspergillus species, you know, fungus, and that is growing, producing a lot of enzymes that then do many other awesome things care to elaborate David.

Yeah, so it's, it's how everyone in East Asia came across basically the process of altering soy. So liberating the starches and grains and being. So you, once you do that you liberate sugars, that can then be fermented by use of alcohol. So, in the pursuit of getting drunk, we have koji in the world. And it has a flavor of its own. It's delicious, it's fruity. And it's enzymes work not just on grains, and starches, but also on proteins. So you can break down meats and nisos and all sorts of tasty things

is a broad band breaker down of things, which by the way, funguses are in general, which is why they are so awesome, but also such a pain in the in the behind. If you for instance, own a house, or want anything to not get chewed up and eaten alive, mean fungus, they've developed a fungus that can break down anything. That's why a lot of your enzymes that you buy commercial enzymes are grown from some form of fungus that has been found in a laboratory to produce a very high, you know, quantity of a particular enzyme. All the enzymes I use or fungally produced. See, is that true? No. Aktiva meat glue is bacterially produced I think anyway. Anyway, fungus good at breaking things down. That's what they do. You know, they're one of the very, you know, anyway, whatever. So on Aspergillus, I'm very curious because something I've never tried using before and I didn't really know that much about is this this other Aspergillus species that you use? way how you pronounce it, Lou? Lou Lou twins this that makes

Lucci winces

how awesome is it? Is it two

brands after the island in the South of Japan where it comes from?

Do you love it?

I love it. It's my favorite thing on earth. My favorite, favorite thing to grow. It's my favorite. My favorite view. If you ever, if you ever get your hands on it, and you taste it, it's like Froot Loops on speed.

I like I've never tried methamphetamines. I'm told that if I had methamphetamine, it would be really, really bad. I'm told that me on speed would be employed. Yes. Don't do that. Yeah, it would be a terrible, terrible thing. But I do like Froot Loops. So you know when also I like anything that produces citric acid. You know what I mean? Like anything that can produce citric acid, like how much have you? Have you ever figured out kind of like equivalent percentages that you can get if you're doing if you're doing like, how acidic can you get?

Well, then you have to deal with actually extracting it. I mean, the grains, once they're fermented are packed with the DRE acid, you pop it in your mouth, it tastes like a sour patch kit. But if you want to, let's say translate that into a stock, you're all you're obviously going to be buffered a little bit, but you're only gonna be able to get out so much of that. But once you do it is still super delicious.

I totally want it I read that's the that's the thing I read I read that I was like, I want that I want to try that. I want to try so I want to try and koji that makes citric acid that sounds like something I want, you know what I mean? So on that other thing. I you know, the Garm I love Garm So, a couple of questions when people try your recipe so that you know we can give them kind of a mental note. Your squid guard. How I'm sure you've had the this squid. Leah Sherry from Ishikawa, right? Or no, have you? Have you ever tried that one that commercially produced? It is freaking awesome. Love it. It's my it's one of my two favorite commercially produced favorite commercially produced fish sauces. So I can't ask you how Dead Ringer yours is for that? Because you you know, okay, so fair. So that was one of my question is the other one was the grasshopper Garm. Now, I understand theoretically, that people want to eat bugs, protein, yada, yada, yada. I ain't never had a grasshopper, where I was like, You know what? That was better me with a grasshopper than with anything else. I have to say. Like if that have been made with anything other than a grasshopper, it would have been not as good and what you're telling me in the book now, here's the thing. And you know, I liked you know, the ant distillates and all that they're good, but what I'm asking you God's truth. Is the grasshopper garden just surprisingly good considering it's made with relatively flavorless grasshoppers, or is it an incredibly delicious product on its own right that deserves to exist aside from the fact that you happen to be making it from grasshopper. In other words, would you ever choose it? over a different substrate.

Yes, yes, it is, it is one of the most popular for men at Noma, and it has been for a very, very long time

is how much of that is because it's grasshoppers. And how much of that is because you would in a blind taste test be like, that's the one I want. I'm just asking. I'm just being a devil's advocate here.

The satisfaction of eating like shellfish without the fishy flavor. That's what grasshopper garments, except it's roasty. And it's more meaty, and it tastes, it tastes almost like moonlight. Honestly, it really does.

Maybe someday I'll get to try. Oh, by the way, people got you guys use gardam rather than the more kind of current fish sauce, is that kind of just an homage to tipping your hat to bringing it back to Europe to doing something on the European side? Or like a desire to not try to appropriate like, like wholesale, like a south southeast Asian kind of condiment or what?

Yeah, it's, it's tough to say. And a lot of a lot of the readings that I've found about GM and fish sauce is like the dates kind of don't match up. And there are there are people there are historians, which historians that postulate that it only showed up in Southeast Asia in the way it's made today. After communication between the Roman Empire and China was established on the Silk Road.

Yeah, I kind of doubt that there are links. I mean, don't you kind of doubt that a little bit? I almost all of these kind of they're very tenuous food histories, you know what I mean? And it's like, super, it's, you know, especially for someone who wants to universe, for instance, like you look at Rice culture, right. And so it's, you know, it's now obvious, decades, you know, hundreds of years later, that rice was domesticated in parallel in two separate at least, at least two separate, very different kind of places to separate domestication events, at least, right, in Africa, in Asia. And so, you know, there are some things that, you know, have one place where they come from, like, chickens, you know what I mean? But, don't you think it's much more likely that since everyone has salt, and everyone's got extra weird fish lying around that it kind of just kind of happened? You know? Do you really think someone in trouble? Yeah, I mean, do you really think someone in Asia needed some, like, you know, like a

Roman? Yeah, to instruct them on how to do this. But

because because think about it, think about it this way, not only well, not only do you need a Roman, right. But if I handed you an amphora of gardam, right, and say, Yo, here's this sauce, we put it on everything, you know what I mean? And you'd be like, because they did they put it on everything. It was like, you know, everything. It was like, they put that on more things than we put on ketchup in the US, right? But it's like, every damn recipe had garments. You know, why delicious people. But the point is, is that if I handed you a bottle of that, you would have no idea how to make it, right doesn't taste like its constituent parts. I mean, it's like vaguely kind of, but you wouldn't be like, You know what, I bet you the way to do this is to just take a bunch of fish and salt and throw it in a pit. You know what I mean? You know, like, you wouldn't think about it. Like the idea that somehow mastery of fish sauce comes via rote, it just doesn't make any sense to me, that's all.

And now for our Bob's Red Mill moment, we're going to talk about amaranth and amaranth flour. So amaranth is a pseudo grain that is native to South America. It's a tiny little thing. And in fact, you can pop it really well. If you have the whole grain you can and try it you can pop it and then mix it in fact, they make a whole series of candies and stuff. Remember the name of that candy is the one that making Mexico with the honey and the Amaranth you're not talking about though yes, yeah. Anyway, I forget the name of it. The Bob's Red Mill sells and amaranth flour. The cool thing about amaranth is it has it has a really nice taste. I haven't figured out exactly what to use with 100% amaranth flour yet, but I have substituted as much as I hate telling people to substitute it into things like muffins and pancakes, small amounts up to about 25% of amaranth flour in those recipes are nice and good and add a kind of a bit of a nuttiness to it. Amaranth you know it's if you believe in health, it's people believe it's a healthy thing. I of course don't believe in health. I care only about taste, but I still enjoy using amaranth flour. Bob's Red Mill carries whole green stone ground amaranth flour, go to Bob's Red Mill done common use the code cooking issues 25 That's one word all caps, cooking issues 25 or 25% off your order.

Hey, we want to do another another caller question.

Yeah, sure. Caller you're on the air.

Hi, Dave, Dave and Dave, question forgive. I have been trying to track down on the recipe or some kind of clue about how to make Portuguese fermented hazzan. I know it's made these with the small period period chili. I know it's got some garlic in there. And I know it has some kind of spirit. Other than that, no clue one or final review of seeing anything or in putting me in the right direction. Portuguese fermented hot sauce. Nothing, nothing on my radar. And I just had a Portuguese intern with me for three months. And nobody I mean, I haven't I haven't heard much about that.

Maybe you can call them up. Put it out. Tweet. You're not really on Twitter. Are you?

I am not on Twitter. Yeah, I'm on Instagram. Yeah. But no.

I will email it to us or whatever. If you get if you get an answer if you ever speak Did you like the Portuguese intern? I loved him. He was fantastic. You will you will speak to him again someday. Maybe you can get back to us and let us know something and then I can I can forward it.

Yeah, well, I will do that.

Speaking of questions we had off of the internet. Wes Hendrickson wrote in Would you talk about this is for you, David, would you talk about koji aging meat. They omit it in the book but the DIY koji crowd is nuts about it discuss. We don't really omit it. You talk more about marinates not about aging it for long periods of time, right?

Yeah, that's because putting meat in an incubator freaks me out. Yeah. Just putting a hunk of meat at 32 degrees for 48 hours of just mix. Knots it makes me a bit uncomfortable. So I didn't want to tell people to do that.

What about some sort of middle of the road thing doing kind of refrigeration? dry aging with already made kind of doing the marinade just for a long, long, long, long, long time about that?

Yes. Yes, that that works. And that's that's what we say to do in the book. I mean, it's like, make make it your makes your koji blend koji with water and salt turn it into a pace and then rub your meat down in that and leave it on for as long as you want. How long have you gone now i that at the restaurant we marinate our ducks for maybe about five four to six hours and it really actually does help to tenderize the skin in the flesh

right you're not doing like like a week or a month

no but you have you could you would make them meet extremely tender but I think after a point you're you're not you know it's like a law of diminishing returns

I don't particularly like over this way like I you know I know that in your buttermilk fried chicken recipe with I forget what you added to it with anything. Like I like buttermilk batter, but I actually don't mean I like it but it's not my choice to marinate for super long periods and acid just because I think the flesh of the chicken breaks down too much is it is accelerated even more using a harder chicken because American chickens are so so freakin tender anyway, that if you really if you do too much more kind of breakdown on an American piece of chicken. I mean suckers pulp, you know what I mean? Now if you were gonna do it on like, you know, you know an older chicken like a hand or maybe like you know the kind of chickens that uh you know I had when I was in Colombia or that you get in Asia sometimes you know older tougher chicken like maybe but we I don't know what you get in Copenhagen there you getting like American style like hyper tender things. Are you getting tougher pieces of chicken?

I mean, you can you can absolutely get like factory farmed rockins and all of that. But we haven't really sort of fried chicken and nama. That was the that was the recipe that Renee came up with, you know, just as like, oh, this could be a good use and we tested it and it was good.

Now, back to black fruit. Well said Go ahead.

Yes. No, no. So just just getting back to the Cody on meat. A lot of this is centered around like rubbing your meat down. Rice flour and then

made a face when you say that when you just said rubbing your meat that Anastasia gave me such a look.

Praise God. once before, and I was looking through the window, nobody was looking at me.

I go ahead, go ahead.

So the coach is growing on the right flower, it's not actually growing on me. Some of those enzymes do kind of go through the other side of the layer of rice cake, and Lee chin, but it's not going to be anywhere near the same level of enzymatic production or release that you would experience if it was growing on a completely starchy substrate. So we've tested this in the lab, you know, it's when we see when we see people doing interesting things, we want to be able to understand it ourselves if it's worthwhile, and it's not. It's to me just making a paste and rubbing your code, or rubbing the koji over the meat is a more effective, safer and more controllable way of actually, you know, getting some usefulness out of his hands arms.

So here's some more random questions back to the blackened alliums and fruits. Have you ever tried the higher temperature or the pressure cooker methods? You just don't like them? Or it's just you're sticking with traditional or just curious? Yeah, so

I fall Simon Davies on Instagram, and he was recently posting about pyrolysis. Which is the thermal, the thermal breakdown of whatever plant matter at high heat in a short amount of time. In the absence of oxygen. Yeah, garlic at those temperatures, I find you'll end up getting those burn flavors out of them. Those those kinds of charred acrid notes. And for me, that's why That's 60 degrees for a really long amount of time. And it's quite special.

I mean, it's what I've never tested. So I don't know. But what I know is 100% true. Is that you that no reaction is the same carried out in a way, if you change almost any of the parameters of temperature, time, pressure water, like all everything changes. You know what I mean? And so you can't, even though the same style of reactions is taking place, you don't get the same flavors. It's just a question of, maybe they're not better or worse. Maybe they're different. But you're thinking on something like garlic that you think it's worse to do the higher temperatures for shorter times.

Yeah. In the rare instances where our fermentation chamber has spiked up and jumped, I've always found that you do get these kind of like this, like burnt garlic flavor. And it may not be like overt and then I'd be like, Oh, this is like, garlic that was stuck to the pen. And it's gross. But you do get a little like, in the back of your mouth at 20 of it. Yeah, but I wonder what might

work better running it so long. He's only running for like a like, in 111. He's running with a high tempo in the crock pot. He's running, I think a couple of days. And then I think in the pressure cooker, he's doing like 16 hours. I've never cooked garlic more than an hour and a half in a pressure cooker. So I don't know, you know what I mean? I mean, I know that shifting into pressure cooking range, like drastically accelerates my reactions drastically. drastically, but. But it's numbers. No,

I haven't. I haven't heard that.

And I'd love to do it live to Sunday. So when I would love someone to do a side by side test, and then bring the results to me, so I don't have to do the work. I'm too old to actually do more. I want someone else to do the work and bring it to me. Yeah, what are the questions that Oh, when you're making your, your shrimp now shrimp? I'm assuming you chose shrimp for one, I think right? Garmi did a shrimp shrimp Garm I think one of the reasons you're doing that is because it already comes with his guts in it right? So you appreciate us by the whole thing. Easy peasy, right? And it's got lots of guts and lots of enzymes in it now. And in fact, isn't that the reason you started koji doping a lot of your stuff because you were using things that didn't have a lot of endogenous enzymes in it. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I mean, yeah, the grasshoppers do, but it really came about with with the meat scraps with the beef Karen and you know, you're like oh, well what what sort of digestive juices can we get from a cow and any butcher shop would be like we're not selling it because you're gonna kill people with E coli. So so we switched to Kochi for that means and then we're like, oh, wow, this flavors developing really fast and discovered that the shrimp their MO is it's very It's classic. Shrimp, lots of salt. Just let it go at room temperature for a month a month.

Should you say? Why? Why no farm shrimp? Is that just because you're hating on farm shrimp? Or is there some actual technical reason the recipe won't work with farm trip?

No, I won't. It won't not work. I just find the flavor to be lesser than the amazing wild shrimp that you can get. I mean, I know that we're a bit spoiled. You're in Copenhagen, but but I just I just think well term tastes better. I mean, strictly from a taste perspective.

Yeah. Okay. So it's just a tasting. You know, one of the things about

if, if, if a weekend warrior is going into a grocery store and getting like frozen tiger shrimp from Thailand, that chicken shed or whatever, I don't think it's going to be the best.

Well, it's because a farm shrimp are raised in in low low salt situations. You know what I mean? Don't you think that's why I think like, like from the research that I've done years and years ago, you know, one of the main issues with farm rain forest farm raised shrimp is that they're raised in kind of kind of concrete pits at lower salinity levels. And the free amino acids and kind of like nice tastiness of a shrimp is kind of directly one of the direct relationships that has is, you know, how much salt there was in in the environment in which it was living. Same with like bass, right? So you get like your, your hybrid stripers. One of the reasons they don't taste very good, is because they're raised in freshwater, you know what I mean? And no offense to freshwater fishing people. But I mean, most of the stuff that what comes out of the ocean tastes better. Am I wrong about this?

No, I would completely agree.

Now, a couple of things here, one, you, you you make a please say You know, you've moved away at Noma almost entirely from long cook stocks, and you call it a greasy smear. Like the old school gelatin race stocks. That's a pretty harsh language there. You guys don't like you don't really no longer even find a place for it. I mean, like,

you know, actually, no, now with this game with this game season menu, we do have, we have a dish of cold seven jelly with caviar. And that is a very, very classic stock. So it did make a comeback. And there's no koji in it.

Yeah, I'll read the quote. Koji helps us to find the finesse in our raw ingredients and highlight their natural beauty without smothering it. Like adding a spray of just right lubricant to a creaky door, rather than a thick layer of grease, hatin on the gelatin Bay stocks, just hate on them.

They're heavy. They, for me, honestly, they take me back in time. And I'm not saying that deft hand can use them well. But these are the things that I learned how to cook, you know, 15 years ago. And they do they they do taste of the time and they taste of a certain way. And they do weigh you down. And, you know, Renee is the final gatekeeper of what actually makes it onto the menu. And, you know, one thing he is he is adamant about is that like the flavors don't we weigh you down in your mouth that nothing is like so incredibly heavy, that you're like bogged down in the middle of your meal, things should be lightened flow and like almost flutter on the palate. And that's something koji helps us do more than traditionally cooked stocks. So that's, that's why that's part of the mantra in the book and how we attire.

Alright, well, so we're coming up on the end here. And I was going to get in a long, protracted argument with you about chaos theory and hand taste and consistency in the kitchen. So for those of you that want to that want to get into it in the section on hand, so the cover of the book is kind of hidden stuff. We didn't get to say it and Stassi hates the word sports, the sports floors, you said and she said, yeah, she hates the word sport. But there's kind of like, there's kind of like a fungal hyphae thing with a hand on the front cover. Right? That's what's going on there. Yeah, yeah. And, yeah, it's a discussion of kind of this idea that micro changes in the cooks hand hand taste, taste, taste of Cook, taste of place, right hand tastes, Korean idea can taste, but then you go into chaos theory. And this is where I have a bone to pick with you. But I don't have the time to pick it because you should just go the question, well, we'll do it again, sometime, the bone to pick is is that with a hand, like having an actual hand taste? Look, there is a true statement, that batch to batch you're gonna get changes because you're not controlling it. 100% Because things are wild. But part of having a taste from the hand in the hand does lend some consistency through practice, right? I mean, that's the thing like it is a trained hand, not like the random hand, you know what I mean? Not like that. Anyway, well, we I wish we had more time to talk about it, because instead I have to ask you this last question on the way out, and I don't know I didn't get in any of the questions. Question is what we'll think about it. Maybe you come back on some time. You know, when you're back in, you know, in New York sometimes to see it. Oh, I didn't get to ask you by the way. Real quick. Coffee, coffee, and come Bucha coffees show you and kombucha you make them with spent grounds. I get it as a way to reuse waste but revelatory or just something to do to prove you can do it and not waste the coffee grounds.