Hello, everybody, and welcome to a brand new series on heritage radio network called the culinary call sheet where we give a peek into the back kitchen of culinary media. I'm your host, April Jones,

and I'm your co host, Darren bresnitz. Part of why we started the show was to offer an unofficial mentorship for anyone who's interested in learning about all aspects of food and video, whether that's TV, social media online, or just something you want to do for fun.

Absolutely what was once niche or a little silly, as I'm sure you remember, Darren, when we started out, this man has now become such a massive playing field for so many creatives using food as the medium.

It's something that has driven us professionally and personally, for so many years. What excites me the most about this show is that we're going to sit down with some of the industry leaders to hear how they made it and what drew them into this industry.

With 20 years in the culinary production game ourselves. We're hoping we can give through these conversations an insider's view into personal stories from the field, as well as an in depth behind the scenes look into some of the most popular food programming. In today's evolving culinary media landscape.

We'll be covering everything from how to style your food, to how to license IP, to developing your own ideas, and some tips from the masters of how to host your own show.

Yeah, it's a little bit of conversation, how to and how do you do the things that you do in color media, which I'm so excited about? I love so many of the guests that are coming on this season. We have talent from Food Network from Vice media eater refinery 29,

we've met some of the best people in the world both in front of and behind the camera. And we're bringing them all together to share their stories, their delicious adventure and their unique journey into this crazy world.

So to be the first to hear our episodes when they launched this fall, go to wherever podcasts are streaming and hit subscribe and make sure to give us a follow at the Culinary call sheet on Instagram.

This episode of Cooking issues is brought to you by Bob's Red Mill, an employee owned company that has been offering organic stone ground products for decades. Their flowers and whole grains are the highest quality and are minimally processed at their stone mill in Oregon, visit Bob's Red mill.com to shop their huge range of products use cooking issues 25 for 25% off your order.

I'm one of a trends interns Needham Edmonds guy with a preview of the next episode of meat and three, our weekly food news roundup, this week's topic, the marriage of food and danger. Sometimes danger lurks in the food that we eat. So instead of saying what is poisonous, I'd rather say what's not because it's literally just the flesh. And the fins. Food poisoning doesn't just threaten our bodies, but it endangers our environment as well. The emissions

of JBS combined with the other top five meat companies exceed the annual emissions of Exxon shell or BP.

For more tune into this week's meeting three on heritage Radio Network, available wherever you listen to podcasts.

Hello, and welcome to cooking YouTube. This is Dave Arnold, your host of cooking issues coming to you live on Aaron's Radio Network every Tuesday from I don't know what the hell time is it now. Geez. to about one o'clock from Roberta's pizzeria in Bushwick. Brooklyn. joined as usual with the Stasi, the hammer Lopez, how are you doing? Good? Yeah. Got Matt in the booth. How you doing? Hey, we're joined from the radio mothership. We got cat in the studio to talk about I don't know, I don't know what what are you here to talk about

our end of your drive. Okay, first, should we talk about the gala?

So a couple of things about the gala list. For those of you that have listened to this podcast before. There's a couple of things that Nastasia enjoys the suffering of others. Maybe is me maybe the highest one, right? But just below that is this creation that she and Piper who used to work with us, made years ago called the wine Santa. Now for those of you that don't know, what the wind sent is, it is a Santa Claus mannequin and outfit right? With a tube running through his body out of its mouth. And it continuously. One might say spirits if you're in a fountain mode, one might say vomits up wine into a bowl and then it goes it drains and just keeps circulating. So you're supposed to stick your cup underneath and just you know partake of Santas you know spirits. So, you know, one year Anastasia had a friend of the show Phil Bravo with a with a deep voice, you know, saying, Oh, I shouldn't have had so many cookies. And like the wind will come out this year Nastasia has decided that she's going to use one of these. It's like a very large version of those little flower pots where where you play music, the plastic flower dances. So imagine that, but on a Santa scale on a human Santa scale. So Santa moves back and forth, and she can play whatever music she wants. And it's vomiting up wine the whole time.

I didn't know that wine Santa danced until the night of the gala. Yeah, and it was a delightful surprise.

Okay, so the Stasi also, like I, like perennially refused to help her until the last minute. So she tried to make one by herself. So it's too late to do it. Well, no. So then she forces me to waste my time anyway, and do it even though I'm horrified by the whole idea. So horrified is the term it's gonna come up later. So she makes this wine sad. And instead of constructing when I looked at it first, she's like, how should I do this? I'm like, You need to build a large enough base. So that the bowl when the bowl is and I would support the bowl, because otherwise, it's gonna be a tripping hazard. She's like, I don't care what happens. So she gets to like super weak PVC. This could not look more, this could not look more like little rascals, like, you know, that thing out of there. And it was not secure. Yeah. So I've got these two like red spray painted PVC ski poles down to its base, which by the way, note to everyone out there designing things for structural boards, like putting a pole to the base does not increase the size of the base. You like you cannot prevent something by from taping by not increasing the size of the base. So anyway, so here's Sandy is not only is this giant Punchbowl cantilevered way out, she of course also hasn't tested it prior to this. You did not? This was a different unit. You did not you'd never plugged in the unit that we brought to the thing. They said you hadn't because none of the screws or anything fit. No, the bowl didn't fit the bowl was twisting around and touching every direction. Well, once

you took out that little piece, and it was flowing faster than it was when it was

had the bolts still tip anyway. So it has so many untested things. So it's at the Heritage radio thing. We're filling it with red wine. This is that the gala, which was a fun event, right? Yeah, yes. So she fills it with red wine. We get it going. We have to she makes me go out to a hardware store hours I have to think about this crap. And like get a screw to screw the bowl into Santas chest into Santa sternum. So the bowl won't flip around. Yeah. And one of the event organizers I don't remember who I don't know whether they were on the Brooklyn Botanical Garden side or on our side. Anyway, I'm walking behind her because I have to get napkins to continuously wipe up the dripping red wine all over the floor. And the giant splash of red wine which thank God did not get on the felt plant art that was all over the wall.

It almost did. And I spent Tuesday cleaning wine off the wall.

Oh, yeah. So anyways, it

was it was not bad.

So there's this lady is walking, I'm walking behind her and she goes, That's horrifying. I wanted 86 And then the guy from the Botanical Garden was like, I don't know if we can do you know the guy I'm talking about. I don't know if we could add six. They brought it. It's not a people. Anyway, so she's like, ah, z, so they pull wine sands and we drink the wine out. And they say you can't bring wine Santa back out until 9pm. Okay, so at 830 Anastasia is like it's nine somewhere. And she goes, Evers all there are pictures of this wine Santa, which looks all beat up like oh, like silicone glue and spray painted nightmare. And it's turned against the wall like it's being punished in elementary school. She goes, she there's pictures. So she goes she pulls it out this time. Jack Schramm from you know, existing conditions. He's like, Let's fill it with vodka instead.

And thank God for Jack shrimp.

Well, I mean, horrifying in a different way. A warm vodka spout is hard. Gross. Yes. But it means of the Malbec that you had had an earlier. Hard nasty all the way around. So they turn it on. It's, I don't know some form of cool in the gang or something they're playing Santa is dancing. All of a sudden, you see, Santa is like Oh. So Santa starts saying all of a sudden is like no, I can't do this anymore. Blah. Santa starts tipping forward. So Stephen hoppy from a lot penultimate, who came to the event? He's standing next to Santa he's like, I'm going to save this only Santa had already crossed like the 30 to 40 degree tilt. So he Iron Palm Sanjay in the chest. As he Iron Palm Santa in the chest and his head flies right off Santas head just goes tumbling through the air flying across the hallway. And then and then like just goes around Steve's hand and hits the ground and then keeps on dancing in a pile of his own vomit and, and vodka like leisurely vodka and like you can't see on the radio because it's not a visual medium, but just imagine your hand just slowly pumping back and forth while your face while not in face down, doesn't have a face anymore. head fell off, like chest down, dying in your own pool of vodka, blood and vomit. And that was the wind said so then the next day to stasis like so you're gonna help me build that again. I'm like, what? Version 2.0 or 9.2. Anyway, so like, whatever. So I'm like, You know what, so she's, this is how the Stasi it gets you This is how terrible the Stasi is and Stasi and says, I have all of the things of the topic that she's right here. You know, she talks like you like I have all of the things we need to build up hosta via I'm like, you have nothing that popped the flyer with which to build this. She plans on building it out as we get it. She's like I have a hand auger and like and like a screwdriver. I'm like, listen, it's all like I'm like And then she's gonna take Jack Schramm the head bartender from existing conditions and waste his free time to do it. What do you ever wanted to force people and they say they want to do it don't anyone say I wanted to do this I'd never want to hear that I wanted to do this so I'm like looking at her and at Jack and I'm like you're both idiots neither of you a have the skills to do this neither do you have the tools so we went to new lab with a shop that Booker and DAX you know has is a member of and we had to build it but then we ran out of materials so we stole some we didn't steal oh god I'm labeled wood is community property but this guy had just brought it in there. He was still there but he was working on something else. I was like hey, literally how long would it take me to turn that thing into pedestals

five minutes

I took a four by eight sheet and I was like crap on it be me me me me me me. And like with it's all there you know what I mean? And like the guy was like he literally turns around and goes Hey, nice pedestals where's my wood so we had to buy him wood and now Anastasia wants me to make more because someone read to here's what she says. day this is going to be big money. I'm like first of all,

for one month a year now. Oh, really?

You've made three this year it's cost like it's cost eight years off my life in terms of the anger scale plus, like my actual time money her time that she could have been spending I don't know selling freaking Sears halls and centrifuges stuff like this getting more of the made instead, we're doing this I was like, Oh, how much grand total did you make this year? Well, nothing this year. This is like the fourth year of just you know, building up Pinterest. Next year is when the real money comes.

This year has been the year of the Instagram for wine Santa. Okay, but wait. That's a grassroots campaign. It's true.

Okay, but before like a burning Savanna

before he talks about wine Santa, you said the sassiest favorite thing was making people suffer?

Oh, yeah. Great. Yeah. Tell this story. This is awesome. Oh,

so about two weeks before the gala. I go to existing conditions to chat with Dave and be like, what cocktail Are you gonna make? I brought the to keep the Mezcal for the cocktail. Just making sure everything's going well, you had texted me and said, I'm gonna be late for the gala. I have an event at the bar. And I was like, no, please. No, I told you the day in March for this reason. So you made me very nervous, the

most anyone has ever spent on a buyout at the bar, like and they were like we're doing this because we really liked the cocktails and the attitude you have towards drinks. I was like, Ah, alright, go ahead. Sure.

Sure. I respect that. But yeah, sounds like I really, really needed you at the gap. So you make You're making me nervous. And I was like, No, it's gonna be fine. Day you reassured me you were like, I know how to show up and make drinks somewhere. And I was like, that's all I need, which is true fact. It's just true fact. And oh, and that day we figured out you're gonna do a frozen cocktail and we got a frozen drink machine. It was all looking great. It's worked really well by the way. I loved it. It was delicious. I had I think a lot of people had too

many make frozen Corsairs for those that are interested in which preserved lemon preserved lemon drink so the spec that home is you make partially clarify and others don't make it fully clear. Tape preserve lemons, blend it completely the juice the lemons with the pith and everything. Blend it. Spin it out, but don't make it fully clear. It's a it's one and a half tequila. We usually used to kill that one and a half tequila, half of that preserved lemon, half of lime half a simple syrup, some spice shake it up. That's a course here. We made a frozen version. Go ahead.

So, yeah, I was a little nervous, but I trusted you. I knew you're going to be there. And I knew Anastasia was going to be there with one Santa. I've been talking to her and Rebecca about that. And it's like, you said you would be there at like, three. It's maybe four. And I get a text from Anastasia. I'm at the bar with Dave. He wants to know what time to load in the garden tomorrow. At the garden, I am waiting for you to all of you to arrive. And I knew Jack was coming with you. So I texted her back. And I was like, sorry, I was a little bit snippy, Anastasia. But I was like, This doesn't make sense. I had like, all the like text messages, all the emails, I double checked everything to make sure I'd never put the wrong date in. I'm just like, having flashbacks to like managing Momofuku chefs of like, what's gone wrong, right? And, and you don't she doesn't respond. She's like, Oh, shit, you go. Oh, shit. That's it. And then I can't

say it right.

I didn't have that context. I was like, What's your inflection? What does she mean? Damn, certainly show. You gotta believe that. Yeah. So um, so then I call I'm trying to call Dave. I'm trying to call us. And then I call Rebecca. Rebecca pelvics. Who works with you guys. And I'm like, I talked to her that morning. So I was like, what has happened? And I'm like, Rebecca, like, they know they're supposed to be here today. Right? And she's, she's like, Yeah, I mean, Stasi. They're 430. And I was like, okay, cool. He was like, Can you give me Jack SRAMs number? I call Jack shrimps. No answer,

like, do not pick up.

And then I then someone else calls me that's trying to load in. So I'm like, had to table this crisis for a moment. As I'm on the phone with someone else. Here. They all come strolling in. And I just I looked at you guys. I just pointed at the table. I was like, I can't look at you right

now. Yeah. So you know, Dave dared me to do that. But then you did it and then wouldn't allow me to back down. You loved it.

And so I said, I feel like I've been initiated into y'all sorority now. Hey, whatever

happened. So like, also Anastasia. And I, of course, by the way, set up in like Jack, Anastasia and set up and what, like we were set up. Oh, like, Okay, we're done. Now what? So we go out to get some sort of food. And we find a five kilo bag of super fancy soba flour on the sidewalk in the middle of Brooklyn. And we're like, this has to be for the event here. Like

I get it. I get to talk to Mr. Rossi that says, We found buckwheat flour, no context. And I'm like, huh, and then she's like, is it doesn't belong to someone? And I was like, of course it does. We have a soba table, which was awesome. So thanks for picking so we

just walked back into we're like, we know it was at the table because I'm sure they were out looking for their flour. He didn't he didn't know he didn't know he lost it. Oh, really? Oh, Jesus. Yeah. You know what's really hard to make without buckwheat flour. 77 are very hard. Very hard. All right. Wait, so we are going to talk more about the

so very quickly are we're doing our gala is over. But we still have a little bit of time left in our end of your fundraising drive. We're trying to do it bigger and better this year, trying to get many, many members because next year is our 10 year anniversary. Did you guys know that? I did not know that 2019 HR is turning 10

How long have we been doing this show?

I think you're at like eight years. And you started around? 2011?

I don't know. i All I know is that very early on. I came on Patrick show. And then he's like, that's back when he would anyone that would come on his show. He would ask them to do a show. Totally. You should do a show that like oh like what? Like, yeah.

So yeah, so that we're gonna be celebrating, like, all year long doing lots of fun events. So you can become a member and be a part of all this by going to heritage radio. network.org/donate Do you guys have any thoughts on why people should become a member? Why they should support cooking issues? Now's your time.

The stasis like no, I can't think of I can't think of any. What do you think so? Like, I'm not gonna, like I'm just a bad person. I don't know. I support it. Support. If you like it, eventually we're going to be like, Okay, no more pizza. Goodbye.

And we don't want that so that you should become a member?

Yeah. What do you know that you're the pitch? Yeah. I mean, you're literally like, your whole livelihood depends on it. So why don't you give them Yeah,

I mean, that's true. Well, because we have 35 shows. I know a lot of people maybe don't listen to other shows on the network. They should they should explore heritage network.org But members directly support all 35 of our shows, including cooking issues, and they keep everything on the air like we couldn't do it without members.

Oh, speaking of heritage radio, in the lead into this they talked about meat and three poisonous foods. Yeah, and I can tell obviously, because anytime someone says poisonous food what's the first thing I To people who have served a cup you couldn't be wrong off you up, you know? Yeah, I get it. But clever. Yeah, my wife has had FUBU by the way, I would love to have FUBU. But it reminded me to struck something in my head. There was a video years ago I got from Japan. And maybe this is where miracle of moisture management came from, because the title of the video was the miracle of poison removal. Because if you take fugu rose sacks poisonous, you ferment them for a long period of time. And bacteria consume that tetrodotoxin and make the egg the egg sacks edible. Hmm.

Yeah. Wait, what does that have to do with membership?

Oh, just thinking about other heritage radio pros that you might listen to? Yeah,

you should listen to meat. And three, for sure. Dave has been on it several times talking about water and other things, museums,

museums, here's something here's something you should think about with poison. So a lot of foods, like plants specifically. And there's been a lot of published stuff on this recently. But a lot of the compounds that give herbs for instance, they're like special, pungent flavor like MIT, for instance, the maintenance of it, right? Is there to prevent bugs from eating it, right? It's like poison against bugs. And so we eat it in a smaller relative amount to our body weight. So it seems okay. So when we were doing our first exhibit for the museum of food and drink, like the crew, we were sitting around, and we're trying to simulate this for flavor, we were talking about flavors. So we're like, Well, what does it like to be a bug on a meat plant? And so we all took pure mint oil, and we took hits of pure pure mint oil. And we're all like that's what it's like to be a bug. So you could do that test yourself. If you really want to know what it's like to be a bug chewing on a, you know, a piece of spearmint.

Where else could you learn things like this other than heritage Radio Network, and that's why you should support our programming. Alright, that's my pitch. All right. Thanks, Dave.

Do you already have a caller on the air? Caller? You're on the air.

Hey, Dave. It's Josh from Norfolk, Virginia.

How you doing? Um, well.

So I don't know if my Safiya is still doing the poll. But for what it's worth. I'm 28 married and my wife likes food and drink too. So she lets me buy like whatever the family show. I want.

There you go. There you go. Did you guys get the snow there too? Or did it stop before it got up to Norfolk?

We're coming back from Raleigh right now. And there's a ton of snow but we just got some like terrible rain. But it's alright. So my question is about proofing whose finos so like, I know, it doesn't change in like a close centrifuge. But in a spins all when making like banana whose dinos or whatever? Is there a reliable way to calculate proof on that with it being an open container? Because I tried to use a hydrometer and give me some like, terrible wacky stuff.

Okay, so no, no, you can't because you're adding sugar. Like what, what I have done is I've measured just straight evaporation amounts. And so with when you're using further open bucket, centrifuges, also, we would also get evaporation, especially people who had non refrigerated centrifuges. If you ever, like the way to really reduce evaporation in a commercial centrifuge is to put lids on your, on your buckets, and refrigerate your centrifuge, right? And that tamps down on it, you know, almost entirely in the spins all you want to make sure that you have all like the gasket really firmly on the bottom, the the intake top lid down on, and I even put what's it called saran wrap over the over the output pipe, and I make sure that the tube feeder is on. And when you do that, you also got to make sure that your your product is below either at or just below ambient, it can be colder, but doesn't really help you know what I mean. So you want to have it be at ambient or below, because the by far and away what the what the spins all wants to do is bring your product up to room temperature as quickly as possible. It doesn't heat it in the same way that let's say a spinning bucket rotor does, because there's not nearly as much friction but it brings it up to temperature very, very quickly. So if your product is warm at all, it'll evaporate a bunch. So I've only done like evaporation tests and having it without the tube feeder lit in it and all of that you can get very high evaporation rates like 10% And then if you do it right and keep your spins as slowly as possible your with alcohol that is you get your evaporation rates down to like you know under five. So that's really the only way to test it. The other way you could do it is by using like an alcohol refractometer and a just spinning plain spirits, right? But once you add sugar to it, right, so you're talking about there's two losses of proof, right? There's a loss of proof, theoretically, because you're adding a liquid to it in the form of I don't know, let's say bananas or dried fruits. And then there's a loss of proof because of evaporation. But, you know, the evaporation one is the only one you could really accurately test because you could do it when you don't have sugar in it. Anything else, it's very hard to properly measure. But I'll have you know, that I'm trying to work. I have talked to the guys in China, I'm trying to work on a on a lid, for whose dinos that seals it entirely, just around the shaft. So if you're doing batch mode, who still knows, you'll get almost no evaporation. And it should be easily what's the word of saying retrofittable to old and new because we're not changing the dimensions of this stuff on our second printing, printing second run. That makes sense. Yeah, yeah, definitely.

Is there any like appreciable loss of proof? Do you think into? Like the, the pup?

I mean, there is alcohol in the puck, for sure. But like, you know, there's also like, it depends on what you're saying. Give me an example.

So like, strawberry most college Keenum?

Yeah, so like, the fact of the matter is, is that what I tend to do is I tend to assume I tend to be conservative because there's some evaporation, right? So what I'll do is I'll say, Okay, I'll take the strawberries, even though the strawberries are really only like 85% water or something like this 90% Water, I'll just take the entire base of the strawberry as water weight. And I'll assume my proof dilution is basically, you know, strawberry, you know, plus liquor, that's the new weight of product and the original amount of alcohol is there and distributed equally between puck and liquid is usually how I just do my estimations. And then well, you know, that's conservative, because obviously, there's solids that are left behind those solids don't have alcohol in them, it's trapped in the water and liquids between them. But there's also evaporation. So I tried to think that Well, you know, maybe, you know, if you add those two things together, they kind of wash themselves out of it.

We now bring you our Bob's Red Mill food fact of the week. Potato starch is a starch extracted from potatoes. Well, that's a tautological frickin statement people. But I'll tell you something about potato starch. I like potato starch for a lot of reasons potato starch swells enormously versus other starches. And so it's got kind of unique properties. If you look at potato starch under a microscope, it looks very different from other starches. And I really like dusting things in potato starch that are gonna get fried it has a very particular friable texture that I enjoy, and a lot of applications. Also potato starch is what they call hygroscopic. So if you include potato starch in recipes, you can get effects similar to what you get in like Martin's potato rolls or something like this. So you can make kind of that kind of like chewy or denser, water loving feeling that you get in like a potato roll or something like this. So you can use it in baking. You can use it in frying as part of your coding mix, or all. Typically I use it as part of the coding mix, but I really like using potato starch in frying applications. Thanks to Bob's Red Mill for supporting cooking issues, visit Bob's Red mill.com to shop their huge range of products use cooking issues. 25 for 25% off your order. That's cooking issues. 25 no spaces 25. Alright, caller you're on the air.

Hey, Mikayla 26 out in Seattle, Washington and thoughts for your poll. I am trans female. So I don't know if you've had one yet. But Hello. I had a question about I really want to replicate a campaign that my grandmother always made growing up, but I'm now with a partner who can't eat eggs. And I've tried like three different goes at it and getting something that isn't just like a mucky sludge out of it.

Your phone click for a second what kind of pie? Was it? Pecan pie? Oh, yeah. Okay, now, here's my question. Yeah, bunch of questions. Are you a nuts on top with goop below? Or are you a nuts all the way through pi?

I'm going nuts all the way through. Right?

Yeah, so what can you do to get rid of the I'm gonna have to, first of all, anyone in the chat room help us out on this. I mean, it's probably going to be see the thing is egg replacers I don't know a lot about custard based egg replacers but you'll have to look at like, because you fundamentally you want to make something that's relatively custard like I know that pecan pie is more are a little harder to gel than most customers but most of those eight free custard things are some some starch base. You know what I mean? Some form of?

Yeah, I've tried Bob's Red Mill egg replacer it's potato starch based. It was not a good goopy mess. I've tried a different egg replacer that was pea protein based. Also not good. I tried making it more like just like a cake, like a really wet cake with flour in it instead. Not not a good choice. Yeah, no,

yeah, you're not like so those egg replacers are mostly trying to replace the functionality of egg protein and a leavening and binding sense. Not yet Not in a in a custard based sense. What you want is like, like, like, probably like a tapioca custard kind of a thing or something that is mimicking the more custody texture, which requires the yolks is more of a soft set kind of a situation. And I have done these before, I just don't have them at the at the tip of my tongue. I mean, there are specific starch bases that are made specific, you know, they're made specifically to do this. But a standard egg replacer isn't going this is what like, I like to tell people all the time, there is no egg replacer that will replace everything that an egg do, right. And specifically, the ones that you're mentioning are for a different, a completely different application. I'm just trying to think if I know off the top of my head, something that will do it. I don't mean there's plenty of there's plenty of like custard powders that don't have eggs in them. And I would try. I would just try one of those like, even if something just just as a test don't waste a whole pie on it. Like are there other eggs and might be fine? Someone look up mighty fine and see if their eggs and might be fine. And then of course you're gonna want to go more brown sugar on it, then they're kind of normal vanilla hit. Sorry, my little stuffed up again. So I'm gonna sound a little bit might be hard to understand what I'm saying. But I don't know. I look it up. And is anyone out there in the chat room? Is anyone there's anyone alive, Matt? One moment. But anyway, we'll think about it. And then hopefully, I'll I'll try to come up with good stuff. And maybe if you follow me on Twitter, I'll try to Twitter it out to you or shoot me something on Twitter, and I'll see if I could find any good. Any good recipes and shoot back at you.

Sounds good. I'll hit you on Twitter.

Cool. Thanks a lot, Dave. All right. Nothing from the chat on that chat. Where are you when we need you. Alright, so we have a question from Jane in Toronto. I like toronto, toronto, a good place to start. So you never been there? Right. It's so close. Why have you never been?

I don't know. It wasn't at the one time when you had dinner with the radio show fan.

At at Momofuku joint there that five for one. Well remember, I had to remember they were doing a film festival, a food Film Festival. And they're like, What movie do you want to talk about? Yeah, and I was like, Willy Wonka. And they were like Christina Tosi already took that she's like, 20,000 times bigger than us to craft wine. You you get Soylent Green. I like but like you could choose any movie you want. As long as it's Soylent Green. I was like Soylent Green. I'll choose Soylent Green. So I went to that. Toronto Film cube TIFF. Yeah, yeah. And you know, watch the movie and and talked about it people get Soylent Green entirely wrong, by the way. I've never seen it. You should watch it. I mean, people get it completely wrong. They're not murdering people to make that that people like Are they married people that make a good

size people are they know, but

they encourage you to kill yourself, that's for sure. But they don't murder people for the Soylent Green instead. It's Oh my god, we destroyed the planet. We're about to die. So we have to trim up human beings and make them into food or we'll run out of food. That's the story people it's not about the murdering people

don't they get to see what the plan it was like, as they're dying. Like what it was before

they go into some sort of sensory deprivation tank and it's like I love love happiness. Yeah, and they die anyway. Like, to me, like that's just good recycling us. But it's like a perpetual motion machine. Like you can't feed people from people. It doesn't. It's not energetically favorable. You know how many pounds of people it takes to grow a person, like a lot. Like it's called feed conversion ratio people. So right now chickens for animals it takes listen to how crazy this is. Chickens are grown in about six weeks. It takes less than razor this less than two pounds of feed to make a pound of chicken. Think about that. Got a second thick. Think of how big we'd all be if it took less than two pounds of stuff to make a pound of us. You got it. So people incredibly inefficient food source, not to mention ethical problems, of course.

Those pesky ethical problems.

Yes, but Toronto is super close to New York so close. They have a good Chinatown. They have a lot of good stuff. I really liked it. That's where I learned the Canadian bacon that we've been, you know, maligning Canadian bacon for all these years. It's actually quite good. Anyway, so this is where this has nothing to do with James question just happens to be James from there. Alright. So far we've gotten to Jane is from Yeah. Jana Anastasia likes to do it. Sasha is a sound person's worst nightmare because she loves to sit next to a microphone and rub squeegee thing. She's in a booth. And she's wearing a precut parka. And go squid ubiquity. The good book, which I have to be on conference calls with this lady in China. And she doesn't put it on mute. And she rattles pots and pans around there. And we're trying to have these engineering conversations that by the way, their internet connection in China is so bad, how bad is bad that we can't ever understand. Like, half the thing we're like, I've handed us down what he is saying, You know what I mean? And then like, and then she's like, rattling her pots around. And now on the radio. She's like, let me just Gucci in my pocket. Let me do the let me do the wine Santa dance in my pocket. Shoo, shoo.

That's it. She get into ASMR it's the thing on YouTube, where people like when people like Russell brush. Oh, I don't like that.

Is it as bad as spores? Mold? Yeah. Oh, by the way. So in the wake of the David Zilber fermentation thing. I went home, and I had accidentally bought like five times as many tomatoes as I needed. So I was like that crap on it. I'll submit it. Remember that? Like years ago, I made the fermented salsa. Yeah. So now now I've started fermenting again. And my wife's like, really? I'm like, Yes. Really, really. Anyway, back to Jane. Hi to the cooking issues gang. I received an infrared thermometer from my birthday a couple of months back and want to get more use out of it cooking wise, and just checking that my water is the correct temperature when I'm making matcha. I understand that it reads surface temperature. But what are some practical applications for it in the kitchen? Love the show? And thanks as always Jane from Toronto. All right, well, I mean, I use my infrared. I use it, what do I use it for? I use it to shoot a lot of times like the inside of my ovens. I use it to shoot when I make stone bowls. But this is not normal applications. Like I'm trying to think of a normal person application for this. And because I'm not thinking of a normal person application for this, instead, I will go through my usual diatribe of mistakes people make with infrared thermometers, there are two main mistakes people make with infrared thermometers. One is not understanding what's called the emissivity of your infrared thermo so infrared thermometer is measuring. It's measuring the the light coming off of an item. It's looking for a specific wavelength, it's correlating that with the temperature of the thing, right. And here's the problem. Water, they're all calibrated. So like different objects, right, have what's called different emissivity. And if you think about it, it's you know how, how, how to explain it normally. Basically, a high emissivity means that it's going to register a higher temperature, it's going to get more of that light coming off at a at a particular temperature and a very low emissivity, which usually corresponds to very reflective metal surfaces is going to mean that relatively little of the light that you're measuring is coming off of it. And so low emissivity things like aluminum metal, very hard to measure with infrared thermometer, so people try to read a dry pan, dry aluminum, dry stainless steel, dry aluminum pan with an infrared thermometer, getting wild, wildly inaccurate readings, right? So the emissivity is something that's called a perfect blackbody. So, flat black spray paint is one something that is completely you know, the other direction like the shiniest, shiniest metal is emissivity zero something like stainless steel aluminum pan is like 0.05. Most of the food that we measure is point nine five 2.97. So most, most infrared thermometers are calibrated to that emissivity and you can't change it. What that means is, is that different foods are going to give relatively different readings not only on their temperature, but based on their emissivity. Luckily for you water which are mentioned from ASHA has a fairly because it's not clear at infrared temperatures has a very fairly, you know, close even 72 What it's measuring things like glass, don't necessarily so you can't measure the side of a piece of glass and get a good read. No, pants do not. If you have a bear pan and you want to measure the temperature, let's say you're gonna fry an egg or mean like I, when I fry an egg or fry or whatever. Who else does this the old school where you just take a drop of water and throw it in the pan? Is that what everyone does? Or is that just me? No, everybody does. Yeah, that's what I do, I don't bother measuring it. But if I really care, I'll measure it with an infrared thermometer. Or I'll sometimes measure the temperature of my large griddles with an infrared thermometer. So cast iron, black cast iron, good. Add some oil, if you're going to measure a pan, even a little bit of oil, like like 5000s of an inch of oil brings your emissivity from point 05, all the way up to like 80% 8.8. Right. So any more than that, you're bringing it up to where oil is, which is like point nine, five. So that's the first thing is like figuring out what you're measuring. Also, you you can't measure through anything, right? So you're literally if you were to have, if I was to sit here and try to measure the forehead of this knucklehead wiping his eyes, see at this table here waiting for his frickin pizza to come. I can't because the glass, all it's going to measure is the glass right? The second thing people get wrong or don't think about an infrared thermometer is what's called the aspect ratio or the field of view. So someone will stand like 10 feet away from an object point the laser, for instance, a cat's head and try to measure her. But what's happening is, is it's measuring a large cone and usually on the side. And so it's an average of cat, the wall, everything else, what you want to do is get as close as you can with infrared thermometer. And what I usually do in buying an infrared thermometer is make sure that have a very narrow field of view. So that it's getting a very narrow spot that makes sense does. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, there's good good look, not contact thermometers are great, but they can't replace, they can't replace everything you need to say, it's also hard to get a non cocked contact thermometer that can measure very, very, very high temperatures. So if you're trying to measure which by the way, it's another gripe, I have people like, my boiler is like 5000 degrees. Now it's what does that even mean? Doesn't have any MIDI trying to directly measure the temperature of like, of like a combustion element and trying to relate that to how hot your food is, is almost almost meaningless. So anyway, whatever I could talk for, you know, hours and hours because I have to worry about this with things like cereals and crap like this,

because it asked you a question about like a digital thermometer like thermometer. Sure. Do you ever have to worry about that becoming inaccurate?

Yeah, so like, if you're working with it, typically, there's two ways to calibrate your thermometer, you can do the the boiling water, where you're putting it in boiling water. The only advantage of that is that it also, you know, sterilize a thermometer while you're working but ever held your hand directly over a pot of boiling water for a long time. Yes, and that sucks, sucks real bad. And like the other thing is, is that that is that the temperature of boiling water isn't actually uniform, it's like the very bottom of it, the top of it's usually cooler the bottoms, you have to stir it for a while, unless it's rapidly boiling, and it's really hard to hold your hand over it. Sometimes the steam can mess with the thermometers, it's like it's a nightmare. Much easier is the ice technique. So you get some it was like you have to use the Stillwater garbage garbage. It's used as long as you don't live long as your water is not like you know, saltwater. Don't use ocean water, you know, water and like crush up some ice and you want like a lot of ice and water you stir it. Keep stirring it for like 510 minutes, it should drop. And you could see how close you get to zero should be at zero. You know, tensor to above you know we keep stirring. If you as soon as you stop stirring, the temperature will start to rise. Just keep stirring with it. And you can hold your hand above ice water forever. So I always do ice and not the other way around. Yeah. Can you get in one more color question? Yeah, sure. Caller you're on the air.