Christopher Kimball: This is Milk Street radio from PRX, and I'm your host, Christopher Kimball, today we're touring our stomachs with Elsa Richardson. She says, a couple of centuries ago, it was common to blame your stomach issues on workplace stress. It was written up in a series called diseases of the desk,

Elsa Richardson: Which are all about the terrible kind of gastric harm that you can do to yourself by sitting too late at the desk, not eating anything, apart from some dry crackers, getting really stressed out about this workload that you've got and that this all becomes something which causes indigestion and various other kind of gastric ills

CK: An eternity of wrestling with her guts that's coming up later in the show, but first is my conversation with a true legend of food media, Florence Fabricant. Florence has been a food writer at The New York Times since 1972 over her career, she's reviewed restaurants, critiqued cookbooks, and expertly honed her opinions on how we cook and eat. Florence, welcome to Milk Street.

Florence Fabricant: Glad to be here.

CK: So you got started before I did. I got started 1980 you got started in ‘72 (Yeah) your first piece that the East Hampton star was about tomatoes, so the New York Times saw that, and that's how you started to get the gig at the New York Times.

FF: Well, what happened is this, I started writing that column kind of by default. I had two kids who were about to start school full time, and a couple of ideas I had were not working out, and I seemed to be the one out on the east end of Long Island who always knew which farm stand to go to for the tomatoes and which one for the corn and so forth. And among my friends, I was the one they asked and then I'd have dinner parties, and everyone would love the food. And I was basically a self-taught cook who watched Julia and Diana Lucas, and as a result, I pitched the idea of a food column to the local paper, because I got tired of seeing people in the supermarket buying these pink tomatoes with the size and texture of tennis balls. And the editor of the local paper the East Hampton Star said, write a sample. I wrote a sample, and he agreed to pay me a little money. And then I would say, within three months, there was a small article in The New York Times by Alden Whitman, in which Craig Claiborne was quoted as saying that I was really good. And Alden said that, you know, you go to a dinner party in East Hampton these days, there's bound to be a recipe from Florence Fabricant. And within about a month or two, I started doing pieces for the Times, and I never looked back.

CK: So, you know, the food section today, at the Times, I think, has like 100 people. (It's just huge). Back in the day, what did the food section? There are times look like in terms of people

FF: It was a handful of reporters. 1980 you would have had Mimi Sheraton, and you would have had Frank Prile doing wine, and you would have had Marion Burroughs. There was a small group of writers, and there was a copy desk and a few editors, and that was that. And in fact, in those days, if you talk to anybody on the foreign desk, score in the Washington bureau and said something about food, they laughed. They said, we don't need food. That's not serious journalism. Now they can't wait to get their hands on food stories.

CK: I find a lot of food writing to be not very creative or thoughtful, because people tend to describe the food or try to sell you the food, or, you know, they use a lot of adjectives. (Oh, yeah) which I just drives me crazy. Is there a kind of food writing that just does drive you crazy? Like, you go, like, come on, this is we can do better than this?

FF: Well, you know when it's when, as they say, it's formulaic and not creative, and doesn't convey to me in an interesting way what to expect. You know, it's, it's a talent, somebody like Mark Kurlansky could talk about salt or cod endlessly in a very compelling way. But I think there is a great deal of food writing by people who do not know what they do not know, and they think they've reinvented the wheel, and they do not do enough of their own homework. I'm not saying that a restaurant review has got to talk about Proust and his madeleines, but at the same time, there’s a certain amount of information and knowledge and background that I find missing, and which I try to as little space as I'm allotted. I try to be not just opinionated, but as informative as possible.

CK: So, recipes, you know, when I got started in this business, when you get started, I don't think recipes particularly well written. They might have been written for people who knew how to cook back in Fanny Farmer’s day that certainly was true. Do you think that recipe writing is now vastly better than it was 3040, years ago? That the overall quality or not?

FF: You know, it's really tough to say. I just got a cookbook, and I won't name it, that had some of the worst written recipes I've ever seen in my life. I mean, I couldn't believe it. Among the ingredients would be one artichoke. What? How? Trim, not trim. Boiled, not boiled. When I write a recipe, and I don't know that a lot of people do this, I start the recipe with shopping. And if I tell people, for example, to buy green beans, I wanted them to know exactly how much weight wise, they will need in terms of green beans, most people have no idea how big a hunk of parmesan they need to get their half a cup of parmesan, or whatever it is the recipe needs. And so, I think first about, how am I going to get these ingredients and how much and what shape will they be in? And then figure out how they're used, step by step in the recipe, and list them in the order in which they're going to be used. I mean, I think that's just basic.

CK: Yeah. I think the other thing I would add to that, which you probably agree with, is that visual clues are enormously helpful, and cooking times are pretty useless so, when a recipe says, you know, cook for 15 minutes or bake for 25 minutes, that's that's useless. Every oven's different. Every pan's different. Every stove stops different. I so getting people, what does it smell like? What does it look like? What does it sound like? You know, what a chef told me here in Boston, said, you know, when you're sauteing onions, listen to them. And it was such a good point, because you can listen to onions, and they're, you know, too much heat. They sound angry. I think listening is an underrated skill in the kitchen.

FF: Well, you know when a kettle of water comes to a boil by listening. (Yeah) my eye is always on the reader, because it's about cooking and there's a practical aspect to it. I'm writing for the person who is going to read this and maybe learn something and feed their family and enjoy it. I don't want to befuddle the reader. I'm not interested in showing off. I mean, I learn stuff all the time, and some of what I learn comes as a result of doing my homework, in other words, something I may never have thought of. And then I'll say, yeah, but I want to know more about that, and I'll look it up, and that will lead me down all kinds of rabbit holes, but at the end of the day, I'll have enriched my knowledge, and maybe, if I can communicate it properly, enriched the knowledge of who's ever reading whatever it is. You know, somebody asked me, when would I stop doing what I'm doing? And I said, I'll stop when I stop learning things, and as long as I'm learning stuff, I'm keeping at it, and so far, I'm still at it.

CK: Well, it's just been just a real pleasure to speak with someone who's thoughtful, been doing this a long time as a sense of history, and you know, and keep on doing it. We love your work.

FF: Thank you.

CK: Thank you so much.

FF: My pleasure.

CK: That was food writer and New York Times contributor, Florence Fabricant. Now it's time to answer your cooking questions with my co-host Sara Moulton. Sara is, of course, the star of Sara's Weeknight Meals on public television. Her latest book is Home Cooking 101.

Sara Moulton: So, Chris, is there anything new you've learned in the kitchen since the last time I saw you that just was like a wow.

CK: Yeah, that happens daily actually.

SM: Tell me a favorite one?

CK: Well, I just learned in southern Italy, in Calabria, people flavor their cooking oil and then take those flavorings out of the pan. Obviously, they do garlic, which is not peeled. They call it in their coats, and they cook it for a couple minutes. Take it out. But they. Also, I've seen them take dried Calabrian chilies, which are not that spicy, and they basically draw them through oil, or put them in the oil, just to season the oil and take them out. They use olives. They'll put olives in olive oil, oddly enough, and just cook them briefly and take them out. So, the idea that you end up with flavored oil, but not the sofrito or not the other ingredients. It's just a wonderful idea because the oil then subtly imparts flavor to whatever you're cooking. Or you could just drizzle that oil over seafood, or fish, for example, or pasta, whatever. But that idea of flavoring oil, not overpowering the oil, I think, is a really, really smart way. (I agree) wonderful. It's really good on that note, let's take a call.

SM: Welcome to Milk Street who's calling?

Caller: Hi. My name is Devin Burgess,

SM: And where are you calling from?

Caller: Huntington, West Virginia.

SM: Nice. How can we help you? So there's a local

Caller: So there's a local thing around here called ramps, and there's a like, local farmers market that sells wild ramps. And I picked them up, and I was just wondering if you guys had any suggestions of something kind of special I could do with them. I've tried a few things, but I was just wanting to get some recipe ideas.

SM: Well, let me just say, for anybody who doesn't know what ramps are, they're wild leeks that taste like sort of a cross between onion and garlic, and they're pretty pungent, and they're absolutely a sign of spring. They're only around for like, a month, six weeks, so it's really fun to sort of grab them, do something with them. You can really use them in any place you would have used scallions, Asian cooking, scallion pancakes, ranch dressing. Let me see you could add it to kimchi, mashed potatoes and ramps and add a little bacon in there. You could make a chimichurri with it. You know that sort of herb mix from Argentina. Be great in pesto. Be great with pasta. You could either with cream or just with cheese and pasta. Chris, you can keep going from there.

CK: I do one thing with them. I grill them. Scallions are mild compared to these. These are stronger (pungent.0 I would put them in a bowl with some olive oil and salt with your hand. Mix it up, throw it on a pretty high grill, stand there and keep turning them on the grill. And they'd be fabulous with grilled fish or steaks or meat or anything else. I just think that's the easiest way to do it, because they're pretty strong. And grilling them I think really goes well with that strong flavor, but that's what I would do.

Caller: Okay,

SM: What have you done with them? And liked or not?

Caller: Liked I replaced them in a tray bake. I usually do, I think it's actually from Cookish, but you usually have scallions, and I used the ramps. It was kind of too much going on, though (they're strong). The tray bake has fennel and lemon and everything, and it was good, but it was kind of too much. And then I just did them with fried potatoes in a pan, and that was really good.

SM: Oh, that sounds wonderful.

Caller: I was wanting to do something kind of special with them too. So you guys have given me a lot of ideas.

SM: Wonderful. Well, thanks, Devin

CK: Devin, thanks for calling. appreciate it.

SM: Yes. Take care. Bye, bye.

CK: Looking for hand in the kitchen. Give us a ring. Anytime. 855-426=9843 one more time. 855-426-9843, or email us at questions at Milkstreetradio.com

SM: Welcome to Milk Street. Who's calling?

Caller: Hi. This is Sarah from Wilmington, Delaware.

SM: Hi, Sarah, how can we help you?

Caller: Well, I watch a lot of those competitive cooking shows, and so I've been kind of obsessed with trying to cook the perfect steak. And I've been getting kind of a thick cut steak and putting in the oven for about 15 20 minutes, and then putting it on the grill for a couple minutes on each side, and it usually comes out either too raw or overcooked

SM: Well, I guess, and I think I'm probably right. You're not using a meat thermometer, are you?

Caller: No, no, I'm not.

SM: It's such a great investment. They're not that expensive, and that's the only way you're going to know this is what Chris and folks at Milk Street call a reverse sear. So instead of searing it first and then finishing it in the oven, the point of the reverse sear is that instead of the meat being seared on the outside, so it's sort of well done on the outside and rare in the very center, let's say you want it all to be rare this way, when you cook it low and slow like that, and you take it out, say, at 105 and then you have a hot, hot pan waiting, or a grill, and you put it in, just get a quick sear on both sides. It's good to go, and it will be rare from top to bottom, you'll have much better success. And when you put the thermometer into the steak, don't put it straight down, go sideways, press it in from the the edge into an inch or so. Really, you'll suddenly be a wizard at cooking steak. All you need is a meat thermometer. (Okay) right Chris?

CK: First thing you do is take the steak out an hour before you want to cook it. You salt on both sides, and just let that sit. And that's going to help. Okay? 275 or 250 oven and you want to temp it where it's about 90 degrees to 95 degrees internal. Okay, if you let it sit in that oven till it's 100 or 110 or 105 you can overcook it. So, when it's about 90 degrees, and Sara's right, you want to use an instant read thermometer, push it in sideways, and you want to take the temperature more than one spot by the way, steak is really unreliable because they're different thicknesses, et cetera. So, 90 to 95 take it out and then throw it on the grill or in a skillet and then cook it for just a minute or two a side. And then you want to take the temp. One thing I've noticed with steak particularly is it might register 105 and 30 seconds later, it's a 115 like once it starts to get up to temperature, it can move really fast, so you don't want to be doing anything else, no phone calls, no podcasts. If you get it about to 115 is where I would take it off. 115 to 120 take it off. Let it rest. Five minutes. You're good to go. This doesn't work for a really thin steak, like a flank steak, for example. It's going to work for a thicker steak.

Caller: I've been trying to do this get like, a really thick steak, so that I can try to get it like really rare in the middle and then more cooked around the edges.

CK: Well, if you want it more cooked around the edges, just grill it. Don't put it in the oven to begin with. Two other things on the grill. If you want to just do it on the grill, don't use high heat. I use more medium heat on a grill, it will get a nice char on it. It just takes more time. When you want more time, because steaks, the timing is critical. The other thing is, you got to move the steak around all the time, because if you get those grill marks right on a steak, the gray area between the grill mark has no flavor. You don't want grill marks. You want the entire surface of the steak, both sides, you know, with Maillard reaction,

Caller: All right. Well, yeah, I'll definitely try that. Well, when I was doing the grill, it kept being overcooked. So that's why I was trying the oven.

CK: What you want is an instant read digital thermometer. Yeah, some of them are expensive if you want it to take a reading within a second or so. And the other thing you want to know about them is some of them, the very tip of the probe is what's going to read the temperature. Some of the less expensive ones might read like half an inch in. That's no good, because you want the very tip to get right to the center of the steak. That's where you want the temperature taken. So, make sure it's a thermometer that's going to read at the very tip, and it's going to be very quick.

SM: I think it will change your whole cooking adventure. And let us know how it goes.

Caller: Ok, I will thank you so much.

CK: You're listening to Milk Street Radio up next the secret intelligence of the stomach. Hey, it's Chris Kimball here. You know summer will be here shortly. So, I've asked my friend Meathead to join me in answering all of your questions about grilling, from barbecue to which grill to buy and fresh ideas for your future cookouts. Email your grilling questions to [email protected]. Again, please send your questions about grilling and barbecue to [email protected] and we'll be in touch. Thanks. . This is Milk Street Radio. I'm your host. Christopher Kimball, throughout human existence, one thing has remained constant, our struggle to control our stomachs.

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CK: Joining me now is medical historian Elsa Richardson. She argues that the stomach isn't just a demanding organ, it's also an intelligent one. Elsa, welcome to Milk Street.

Elsa Richardson: Thank you so much for having me on

CK: So, we're talking about one of my favorite topics, the gut, which is, I don't know why it's so interesting to me, but I think the science that you're about to explain is fascinating. So, the gut is related now to a number of things, including obesity, metabolic health, the immune system, cognitive function, mental illness and neurodegenerative diseases. So, going back in time, what were some of the theories linking gut and brain?

ER: So I think for as long as we have been interested in how bodies work, physicians lay people and so on, have been convinced that the stomach is essential to both physical health and mental health. So, have you come across humoral medicine before? Has that been humorous? (Yes) the humors Exactly. So basically, before the, let's say the kind of middle of the 17th, early 18th century. Humoral medicine was in the West, the kind of dominant way of understanding the body. And in humoral theory, the stomach is really key. And that's because one of the kind of main ways that you were able to balance your humors was through consumption, right through deciding what you eat and what you choose not to eat. So, for example, if you were of a particularly caloric temperament, right? Which would mean that you had too much yellow bile in your system, which would mean that you would have particular diseases associated with having too much yellow bile, but also that you would be of a kind of irascible and angry temperament. If that was the case, you would want to balance your diet by eating kind of, maybe less spicy dry food and more kind of wet, plain foods. So, the stomach is the way that you do that. And I think that what's really important when we're thinking about that model is that it's both about the body, right, bringing the physical back into balance, but it's also about the mental, right? It's also acknowledging, again, this connection between stomach and mind, right? You eat particular foods, your temperament will become, in this case, less grumpy, less angry.

CK: Well, it's until Western medicine, in the late 19th century, sort of won the battle and took over. It seems to me, like almost all other systems of medicine in the world were holistic in one way or another, right? They treated the body as everything was connected. Now you wrote about in 1794, Erasmus Darwin, the eventual the grandfather to the Darwin we all know, the girl of 16 who had a remarkably vocal gut and the prescription to quiet his patient’s obstreperous belly, he devised, especially Taylor course of treatment. Swallow 10 corns of black pepper after dinner. Take a daily dose of crude mercury. Ouch. That really, that's really not good, and allow a small pipe to be occasionally inserted and directed to facilitate the escape of air. I mean, you go like, you know, on one hand, there was an idea of an allistic approach to medicine. The other idea, you know, they ended up killing people because they got a few key things wrong, right?

ER: Yeah, absolutely. And, I mean, the the stomach, again, is, is really interesting in terms of the kind of development of Western medicine, partly because, you know, for most of the history of medicine, it has been an extremely dangerous endeavor to cut the body open, right. When we were unable to open up the body right, because of the danger of like sepsis, or because of, you know, anesthetic hadn't been invented yet. The gut, even outside of humoral medicine, continues to play this really important role, because it's a way of, kind of treating the body, but also a way of diagnosing what is going on inside the body without opening it up. So when, for example, Erasmus Darwin is listening to his patient's stomach, one of the things that he's trying to do is quiet in that stomach, right? Because it's embarrassing for his patient to have this kind of extremely, excessively noisy gurgling gut. But he's also listening to it to see if there's anything he can discern from its rumbles, right? Can its kind of loud gurgles tell him anything about what's going on in the interior of his patient that he doesn't yet have an advanced scanner to look into her stomach, or he doesn't yet have, you know, the kind of surgical technologies he needs to be able to go in and have a look at what's going on. So, the stomach has both been a kind of curative in western medicine, but also, I guess, a kind of diagnostic device too.

CK: It's A good point. I mean, your liver, your kidneys, your heart, other things just sort of do their job and you don't notice them. But you're always aware you have you have an empty stomach, you have full stomach, you have a stomachache, you have etc. You're always aware of the state of your stomach,

ER: Absolutely, absolutely. So, your stomach is in conversation with you.

CK: Yes, that's a better way of putting it

ER: In a way that you know the other organs of the body are not right, like, I mean, unless it's in trouble. You know, there's plenty of other parts of your body that you don't really hear much from.

CK: So okay, let's talk about the gut being a brain. So, you write that there are 100 million neurons in the stomach or the elementary canal capable of operating independently of the central nervous system and have a function beyond digestion. So, in addition to speaking to the brain, some people have suggested the stomach is a brain, right?

ER: Yeah. So this is one of, I think, one of the most, for me, the most interesting, I guess, kind of arguments in medical history, which is not only that there's a connection between the gut and the brain, but is it also possible that the gut is a kind of independent thinker, and this can be traced back, I think, as far as someone like Galen, the kind of ancient Roman physician who argued for a kind of intelligence which was much more dispersed around the body than we would have it today. And the example that he pointed to was the stomach. So, for Galen, the stomach has an independent kind of intelligence because, as he puts it, it's capable of registering its own emptiness. For him, that was proof that there was some kind of independent thinking.

CK: Well, as you report, the octopus, each of his tentacles has neurons that can make decisions independently. Which is a frightening notion. I mean, which is wonderful, it's good, well, it's glorious, but it's like, now you have to step back and go, what is intelligence, right?

ER: Yeah, exactly. Like, precisely. I mean, the octopus is the key example of a kind of dispersed intelligence, right, that each of its limbs, each of its tentacles, can act independently of the kind of the head brain. Let's say there's head brain and 10 particular brains in the octopus. And I think that we tend to describe that, or think about that, as a kind of almost alien intelligence, right? Like it feels like it's from another planet. But I think studies into the gut and the history of the gut offer up instances that might lead us to think that perhaps we're a little bit closer to octopus than we might at first imagined.

CK: We've talked a lot about the impact of the stomach, the digestive system, on the rest of the body, but a lot of people thought that what was going into your head would affect digestion, and still today, people think that's true. So where do we stand with your mental state and how that would affect your digestive state?

ER: I mean, again, I think, you know, the connection between gut and brain has, I think, throughout history, been viewed as a kind of two-way connection. So, one kind of really interesting example I would point to is the way that in the 19th century, particularly in Britain and particularly in North America, the gut and digestion become seen as being kind of under threat or placed under undue strain because of cultures of overwork. So, there's a lot of kind of really interesting linkages in the kind of 19th and early part of 20th century between overwork anxiety and stress, like the stress of the office and digestion. So there's a really great treatise from the middle of 19th century called diseases of the desk, which are all about, you know, the terrible kind of gastric harm that you can do to yourself by, you know, sitting too late at the desk, you know, getting really stressed out about this workload that you've got and that this all becomes something which causes indigestion and various other kind of gastric ills. And the example that they often use as a kind of counterpoint is to say, well, you know, look at the farmer in the field. He never suffers from indigestion. And I mean, patiently, that probably absolutely was not true. Like, I'm sure the farmer had bad digestion sometimes, as well as did the worker on the street. But I think it's interesting that there has been this kind of persistent tendency to characterize gastric disorders as being somehow linked to the mind, to thinking right, as if like thinking and digesting can't occur at the same time. Yeah, but also, I think there's a kind of class element here, which is to say that there are certain bodies which have been throughout time, imagined to be more prone to gastric distress. And there has been an association between kind of hearty manual labor and, I guess, digestive strength.

CK: So, they've discovered the stomach has millions of neurons. They discovered that the stomach may actually be able to think on its own, that is without a connection to the brain. So, where is this headed at some point is this headed to, you know, the humors of the body, more everything's connected biome are and are there any practical applications of all of this at some point

ER: Well I hope for the belly. So, what I would like to happen would be that research into especially our gut microbiome would go some way to convincing us all, in a kind of material way, of how interconnected and embedded we are with the worlds around us. So, I'm a big dog lover, and I'm endlessly, endlessly charmed by scientific research which shows dog owners share something really high, like 20% of my gut microbiome is the same as my dog's gut microbiome, right? That we are, we are linked at the belly, profoundly linked to the belly. Right, we are absolutely enmeshed in the world around us, and that our personal gut health is entirely dependent on the health of the world around us. So that's what I really hope happens, that what this new research into the gut reveals is our entanglement with the world. What I worry that it will do instead, at the hands of kind of wellness consumerism, is that all of this kind of fascinating new research into the stomach will be used to kind of reinscribe the individual, right? So, it will be used to, you know, produce personalized nutrition acts. My hope is that we will relish the weirdness of our bellies and become kind of more creaturely and more in our world. What I fear will happen is that the belly will become something that we have to purify and optimize at the expense of joy.

CK: So, you're, you're kind of a belly socialist,

ER: Yeah, I am a belly socialist. Yeah, exactly.

CK: The belly just shows we're all connected. Elsa this has been a fascinating, fascinating discussion. Thank you so much.

ER: Thanks so much for having me on. It was wonderful.

CK: That was Elsa Richardson, author of Rumbles, a Curious History of the Gut. You're listening to Milk Street Radio up next. Kim Severson reports on the latest in Food News. I'm Christopher Kimball and you're listening to Milk Street Radio right now. My co-host Sara Moulton and I will be answering a few more of your cooking questions. Welcome to Milk Street. Who's calling?

Caller: This is Tamara.

CK: How are you?

Caller: I'm great. Chris, how are you?

CK: Pretty good. Sarah, are you still with us here?

SM: I'm still here.

CK: She's still here. Okay, we're all here.

Caller: Hello, Sara,

SM: Hello.

CK: How can we help you?

Caller: I had called before about getting more almond flavor from a granola recipe I had, and you gave me several suggestions, and I managed to try all of them, and then another one. (Ooh) so what I did is I combined all of the other ingredients in this recipe. Except for the difference that I was going to make. And then I divided it into five, because that was easy to do, right? And I added, I think, a quarter of a cup of almond butter to one of the sections that was probably the least successful, only because it changed the texture so much, it made it a bit grainy. I didn't get any more almond flavor from it. We still ate it. It was delicious, but it just didn't deliver it's also as a baseline, I used my normal almond extract. Yeah, it was the same. I didn't taste any almond flavor at all. But Sara, you had made a suggestion, or you made a comment. Do you have good almond extract? I thought I did, and I still think I do, but I did Google it. From what I found, somebody had also done a test of good almond extract. And the winner was actually an almond flavor, not almond extract, which has almond oil in it

CK: almond oil yeah,

Caller: and that actually made a bit of a difference.

CK: An almond extract probably is 35% alcohol, and that's one reason you have a problem in the oven, (it dissipates) but the almond oil probably, just by definition, is not going to dissipate as much in the oven, right,

Caller: Right, okay, so, yeah, I got a little bit more flavor from that almond flavor, which, if I hadn't read that, I would have totally overlooked it in the grocery aisle, thinking it inferior, but it did an okay job. While I was doing all this searching, I found something that bakers use, almond bakery emulsion. (What's that?) Yeah, I'm not even sure, other than it has natural and artificial flavors and then a whole list of ingredients, which I usually stay away from. You could taste the almonds, but along with that, a major chemically taste

from it.

CK: Oh, good, yeah, it's really like a little phylmadihide in my granola.

SM: Oh, dear.

CK: By the way, did you ever try the mahlab

Caller: I did, and what I did is I bought whole mahlab seeds

SM: Wait, we need to pause for a second for people who didn't hear that last call. What mahlab is is it's the powder of cherry seeds, and it tastes like almond. Okay, go ahead. I'm sorry.

Caller: It just has this great smell when you're eating it too. I maybe would not pinpoint it as being an almond flavor, but I will start adding it to my granola now, because I love Greek pastries. And when I smelled this, I thought, oh my gosh, that's what I'm eating when I eat Greek pastries,

CK: I have a few secret ingredients, but that's my favorite one for baking. You don't use much, but it's absolutely fabulous.

SM: Well, that's a fun discovery there nice

Caller: Definitely. I'll be using Mahlab a lot more.

CK: It's subtle. It's interesting. You can put in cookies. You can put it in quick breads or cakes.

Caller: I ground it up in my with my mortal and pestle and I used a teaspoon

CK: I buy it already, ground in a powder.

Caller: I was worried that if I already got it ground, that it would go off faster. And so, I thought, oh, I'll just find a seed.

SM: You were doing this serious baker thing where you start with the whole, you know, seeds, or pods, or whatever.

CK: I think she should grow the tree now first

Caller: Yeah,

CK: Come on

SM: Tamara, you are very impressive in that you did this totally scientifically with the control group and everything. Yeah, wow,

Caller: Well, we ate a lot of granola and my family were happy, but I'm going to keep noodling around with this, but they're all great suggestions, so they were delicious. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you

CK: Yeah. Thanks for calling.

SM: Yes, definitely. Bye, bye,

Caller Bye, bye.

CK: This is Milk Street Radio. Give us a call anytime. 855-426-9843, that's 855-426-9843, or simply email us at questions at Milkstreetradio.com. Welcome to Milk Street who's calling?

Caller: Hi this is Deb Liebman.

CK: How can I help you?

Caller: So, my husband is on a low sodium diet, and it's interfering with my baking efforts. I'm confused. So recently, I was thinking about making a pizza recipe, and it called for three quarters of a teaspoon of salt, and I didn't know if I just left out the salt, whether that would interfere with the yeast or not.

CK: Two-part answer. First is yes, it controls fermentation, strengthens gluten, does some other stuff, so you probably don't want to leave the salt out. But here are the numbers on salt. The RDA for salt is a teaspoon of table salt per day per person. Americans tend to have more than that, but 90% or so of your salt intake comes not from home cooking. It comes from prepared foods, convenience foods, etc, processed foods. So, you can have up to a teaspoon of salt today, maybe less if you're on a low sodium diet, the amount of salt he's going to get for a couple slices of pizza, if the entire pizza has three quarter of a teaspoon is really not much salt. If I was on a low salt diet, I wouldn't be worried about home cooking, per se. I'd be worried about all the other stuff. I would cut down on the prepare foods, the takeout foods, the restaurant foods, the processed foods, because that's where the salt is for this is going to get an eighth of a teaspoon of salt, or quarter teaspoon of salt, or something like that. So, I think it's okay, and you could try it without salt, but it's not going to taste very good. And it's also the fermentation may sort of run amok as well, because salt helps control it. So do you guys do most of your most of your food comes from home cooking, or

Caller: Yeah, we try not to eat out a lot. He watches the sodium content on all the different products and everything, and I've on my cooking when I cook, generally, I try to leave out most of the salt and amp up the spices and stuff like that. We don't miss the salt too much, but I'm baking has been kind of a challenge.

CK: My take is that, when home cooking, the amount of salt you add per person per meal is relatively small, right? I would say maybe you want to cut back a little on the salt. You could try that, but he's not going to get a lot of salt out of this by the time, unless he's going to eat the whole pizza. So, the problem is, you go out and buy foods at the supermarket, right? Most everything is supermarkets processed in some way or another, and that's where your salt intake is going to come from.

Caller: Is there a salt you would recommend, like, you know, kosher salt,

CK: I use Diamond Crystal. I just like it because I can pick it up.

Caller: So, if it's like a quarter teaspoon, you would just use a quarter teaspoon of, like, kosher salt.

CK: If a recipe called for a half teaspoon of table salt, you use about a double amount, about a full teaspoon of diamond crystal.

SM: How many people does I think Chris is, that's the best point. How many people does this pizza serve?

Caller: Probably makes like six to eight slices.

SM: Oh, right. Well, and your husband probably would eat, what two?

Caller: Maybe three, given this opportunity, but

SM: but even so, that's negativable

CK: Cut the salt to half a teaspoon. And yeah, he eats half the pizza quarter. So, he's in for a quarter teaspoon his daily. I mean, for most people, it's a teaspoon, although most people have more, I don't know, he's probably having less, yeah, just be careful about what else he eats, you know. Just stay away from processed foods, that's all, yeah,

Caller: Okay, thank you very much.

SM Bye, bye Deb

Caller: Okay, bye, bye.

CK: You're listening to Milk Street Radio. Now it's time to hear from our newest contributor, Kim Severson, with the latest in food news. Kim, how are you?

Kim Severson: Good Chris, glad to be talking to you again, as always

CK: My pleasure.

KS: So, I have been thinking a lot about eggs we are in. I think an egg crisis, the bird flu, is taking out millions of birds. I think between October and December 26 million birds have been lost. It's like 7% of the national flock, and that's just in those three months. So, this is a big issue, but I want to test your egg knowledge a little bit. Chris, how many eggs do you think each person eats a year?

CK: I don't know, two eggs a week, maybe 100 ish or something like that.

KS: Fair, completely wrong, but fair. 280 eggs,

CK: Really? 280 eggs. Okay, yeah, that's a lot.

KS: That's like 70 billion eggs that we eat in this country every year. And for every 100 hens, you get about 82 eggs a day. So, they're not all laying every day, but, you know, takes a lot of hens to make that many eggs. And let me, let me just give you one more little trivia question, the state with the most laying hens,

CK: Maryland.

KS: I don't know, there probably a lot of chickens in Maryland,

CK: but Maryland's tiny, so that's not

KS: Right, not as many as there are in Iowa.

CK: I didn’t know Iowa was big.

KS: I know. There you go. So anyway, the interesting thing, right, is what this is doing to price. I am in New York at the moment, and I just saw a dozen eggs for $18 which I found stunning. And at the bodegas here now they're selling Lucy eggs. I don't know if you're familiar with loosie cigarettes that they sell at a bodega in New York. You can buy one or two cigarettes, but now they're selling loosie eggs. So, you can buy, like, two or three eggs for 50 cents apiece. But I think we're finding that the increase in egg pricing has got everybody sort of in a spin, because eggs have been a very cheap source of protein, right for so long, like five years ago, just on a kind of a mean average for eggs, $1.48 a dozen, five years ago, and now the average is about $5 and that's just for your basic. A Grade A eggs

CK: Would do different consumers have a different pain level for pricing for eggs?

KS: Yes, yes. It's interesting. This was last year. I probably shifted a little, but I saw the study. All these shoppers, for example, have a price ceiling of $3.83 for a dozen eggs, while an Albertsons shopper will pay up to $5.21 and Whole Food shopper will pay a little over $8 so, you know, people have a different sense of what they'll spend on eggs. One interesting thing is the shortages have really been hitting the sort of standard, you know, supermarket eggs, but the pastured eggs and the organic versions, there tend to be more of those on the shelves, and so people are trading up only because that's what's available. And I, you know, this has always been fascinating to me. I always thought that those pastured eggs tasted a lot better. I'm not sure that's true.

CK: It's not (because you've raised chickens). I've raised chickens for years, and they look better. The whites are firmer, the yolks are deeper orange. But there's no difference in taste that I could tell, which was really upsetting, because it was costing me probably a lot more than $18 a dozen in the time I got finished with the hen house and the feed and the loss of birds to hawks and fox and other things so

KS: Well, there's, there's a lot of value add in a backyard chicken

CK: There is a lot of value added. But I was surprised I didn't find a taste difference.

KS: Yeah, I always insist that that can't be true, because, like, you know it's not true for like, a pork chop, right? But apparently it is for eggs. One interesting side thing too, that's happening to our average supermarket eggs, because there are fewer chickens, the farmers are letting them lay longer than usual. So usually, it's about two years that a chicken will be in business as a layer. They're stretching it into two and a half and three years, and as a result, there's less calcium. The bird has less calcium to make the shells hard. So, I don't know if you've noticed this, but shells are getting more fragile and brittle. So, when you crack them into your scrambled eggs, you tend to get more little bits of shell because the shells are thinner.

CK: Well, in 2025 if this is the worst thing we have to look forward to.

KS: Well, you want to control. You want to control. I can anyway. I this. I kind of fascinated with how eggs became such a part of our culinary canon in the kitchen. And I mean, obviously people have been collecting bird eggs, and you know, you could pick them up and eat them. And you know, long before domestication, right? But the Romans, they were starting to use eggs in omelets, which I had no idea. And then the eggs, golden period, the Renaissance, with the French chefs, right, where you're starting to standardize egg recipes. Souffles, the emulsified sauce became a thing because of eggs, right? Yeah,

CK: Yeah, custards,

KS: Right. There you go.

CK: Well, it's interesting. The history of cakes. Like all cakes were yeasted. That's how they got their rise. And then they decided that egg whites would be the way to get the lift before you had a lot of, you know, baking powder, baking soda available.

KS: But then, of course, we have the what happened to the cake mixes in the 30s and the 40s. I think you'll recall those. So Betty Crocker, Duncan Hines, they had this brilliant breakthrough. You could just make a cake with water and the premade dry mix, and they were not selling. And what they discovered is there was no personal touch, right? People felt like they were cheating. So, the solution was to encourage people to add eggs to the mix, even though they weren't necessary, but (they didn't need them), right? By doing that, you had this, like home cooked thing, this tradition, and I love this Betty Crocker slogan, “you're not just baking a cake, you're making a cake”. So this idea that I feel better about myself because I put a couple eggs in this mix was fascinating.

CK: So, what about egg substitutes? Are people who don't want to spend $18 a dozen? What do they do?

KS: Well, it's interesting, right? You know, the idea of egg substitutions got big in the 70s. You know, we went through the whole cholesterol scare and vegetarianism and some of those old methods are being brought back. You know, the chickpea water aquafaba, which you can whip into like a meringue like thing. But there are a couple, I found two substitutions that people seem to really think worked to perform like an egg in cakes and that sort of stuff. Number one was just a quarter cup of carbonated water, which, I don't know if that's true or not.

CK: Well, what about the fat, though?

KS: Yeah, that's what you need, right? But the one I found really that made a lot of sense to me, two tablespoons of water, two teaspoons of baking powder and one teaspoon of vegetable oil, which kind of makes sense, right?

CK: Yeah, that's really interesting. I’ve got to try that. Now another comment, which is in Vermont, where I shop, their egg case was packed, I mean, just full of eggs, because they're all local, almost all of them. So, this shortage is really hurting places that are selling the big, nationally distributed eggs. But I guess if you have a lot of local providers like Vermont, it's less of an issue, right?

KS: Apparently, nothing bad ever happens in Vermont. Very happy for you.

CK: What happens in Vermont stays in Vermont, that’s all I can say yeah.

KS: But this is obviously, these are, these are big, big chicken houses, and when you start to get a couple of cases of bird flu in that big chicken house that might have, you know, a million birds. It's a little different situation when you have a smaller flock.

CK: Well, it's a good time. Just, just to say, there are a lot of reasons to support small farmers in this country, but that's one of them

KS: Absolutely, absolutely it is funny. You know, it's, I think we learned during COVID that the big supply chains that seem so great that you can get something shipped overnight to you when that chain breaks down, I think the idea of being able to get things locally is important. Eggs too.

CK: So Kim, kind of a tough story. What's going in the egg industry. But you know, maybe small farms will come out of this better than ever, and people will figure out how to make the egg substitute. Kim, thank you.

KS: Yeah, my pleasure. And you know, I think this is good for the eggs. You know, we take them for granted. So, if this helps us all appreciate the egg more, that's not such a bad thing.

CK: That was Kim Severson, food correspondent at the New York Times. That's it for this week's show. Please don't forget, you can hear more than 300 episodes of Milk Street Radio at our website, Milkstreetradio.com or wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple podcasts Spotify and the iHeartRadio app, you can find out more about Milk Street at 177 Street at 177 Milk Street.com there, you can become a member, get 1000s of recipes, access our online cooking classes and get free shipping on all orders from the Milk Street store. Plus, we have a complete collection of all of our favorite recipes at Milk Street Radio.com/best recipes. Please check us out on Facebook at Christopher Kimmel's Milk Street on Instagram at 177 Milk Street. We'll be back next week, and thanks, as always, for listening.

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