Wonderful! - Wonderful! 283: Vaping the Beef

Episode Date: July 6, 2023

Rachel's favorite science that makes the food taste good! Griffin's favorite lawn-based experience!Music: “Money Won’t Pay” by bo en and Augustus – https://open.spotify.com/album/7n6zRzTrGPIHt0kRvmWoyaWorld Central Kitchen: https://wck.org/  MaxFunDrive ends on March 29, 2024! Support our show now by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join.

Hi, this is Rachel McElroy. Hello, this is Griffin McElroy. And this is Wonderful. Back in the saddle. Back in the cockpit of the jet we call wonderful. A show where we talk about things we like that's good we're into. Sorry about last week. It was my bad.

I mean, we put up an episode. Yeah, but it wasn't. It was, you know, the people who were at that live show in Raleigh, beautiful Raleigh, North Carolina. They already got it, you know? Yeah, that's true. I want to make sure that we're serving the whole crowd. I don't want to leave any city out in the cold. Okay.

Like our poor friends in Raleigh who had to hear the same thing two weeks in a row. Yeah. But I literally couldn't speak, which was a new experience for me. Yeah. Very raspy. Yeah.

Griffin usually gets like an achiness when he's sick, but his voice maybe one day is kind of rough, but this time. I did a lot of recording myself singing different songs. Oh, you did? Yeah. I did one of Wheels on the Bus while I was singing it to Gus, and it was like a low, haunting, just sort of like monastic sort of chant.

I was literally sending people voice messages on my phone of me singing different songs just because it was an unbelievable register that I did not know my vocal cords when sort of afflicted in the way that they were could produce. That's kind of fun for you, I think. It was really was really fun i miss it i actually wish i had not gotten healthy um it impact i didn't record fuck all last week yeah because i couldn't you know speak for long periods of time you've got so much swearing built up i do i do well uh i wrote a lot of swears down okay do you have any small wonders um bear season two bear season two real

real sexy food in this one holy shit yeah they're they're going really hard on the sexy food in this one griffin and i made a shared decision to reduce our snacking in the evening at the same time we made a decision to watch a season of top chef and the bear yeah which has been challenging but i mean okay but this the you know we're not uh we're not having snacks of shiso jelly uh right so when i see somebody making a delicious shiso jelly uh i don't think like boy howdy that you know old box of sour patch kids that we have in the pantry is really calling my name. I know. That's not true. It is always calling my name.

That's very true. But yeah. Oh, yeah, it's good. It's good. It's got big, even more than the first season, just like Chicago. It's Chicago porn in the way that it is also food porn. Just a lot.

A lot of beautiful B-roll. We're only about halfway through the season. Yeah. So it's, as I always like to say, it's possible there's a dive here and we don't know about it yet. I doubt it. I trust this show. Maybe there's some murders. We don't know.

Okay. I guess so. I'm just saying. That would be a wild twist. That would. And people would maybe leave the season thinking, like, well, I watch for the cooking. Yeah. And then all these murders came season thinking, like, well, I watch for the cooking. Yeah. And then all these murders came in.

Did we talk about Siren? I think so. I think we might have talked about Siren. Probably. We finished it. That show beats ass. I evangelized really fiercely on Besties this morning. So it got me all fired up to talk about Siren again.

Were none of the other guys watching it? I mean, Justin uh had watched it but russ and plant had not heard of it brief reminder it's uh it's battle royale capture the flag with the six teams of different professions and yeah different different just four women in each team just like fucking battling it out. It is some of the best made reality television I think I've maybe ever seen from a like just a plotting standpoint and a cinematography standpoint. It is a staggering. I can't even imagine how many

like camera crew members they had. Yeah. Just thinking about the terrain and the number of times that people would split off. Yeah. So many amazing shots. I don't remember reality television shows for the cinematography, but there are so many things. I remember this one shot in one episode that just shows this whole team walking leisurely down a hill going to the market to buy something.

And then they walk off frame off the right side of the screen and then boom this air raid siren goes off that marks the start of the battle and then just like there's a beat where there's nothing and then all of them just go fucking booking right back up the hill in the same shot it is so good it's so good uh i've yeah i've never been sadder to be finished with a reality show than we then then i was with that one. Gotta assume that one's coming back. I pray to God. I feel like they did something.

They ended with this kind of like... Hilarious cliffhanger. I don't know if it's really a cliffhanger or if it was just kind of a fun way for the audience to end the show, but they ended as kind of like a, did they win question mark? Yeah, it's...

Y'all, watch this fucking show. I cannot... It is the wonderful seal of approval uh as as hard as we can stamp that down on something oh by the way wonderful.fyi has been updated i saw that thank you so much i i don't know who is running that but it really is an invaluable resource for us yeah we we had kind of gotten used to it not being uh where we were and now it is and and it's tremendous. Thank you so much.

Thank you, whoever does that. You go first this week. We've arbitrarily decided. What do you got? Okay, so my wonderful thing this week, originally I had told you I was going to take a leftover from the rally show, but I decided against it to talk about something a little bit sciencey which is when food gets brown when food gets brown you like this when okay but from our friend heat or from our friend decay heat okay you know i thought maybe you're talking like when apple gets brown i

don't like that yeah no i'm so goth You like it when the food gets hot and turns brown. Yes. That's awesome. Yes. I was thinking about this because this is a skill I feel like you really have. I like to make the food get brown from heat. Yeah, for sure. I'm very tentative when I'm, especially when I'm on the stovetop and also when I'm in the oven, I tend to get impatient or I worry that I'm going to go too hard. Yes. So my temperatures are too low or I stop cooking too early. Right. But you, man, I'm really impressed with your brownness.

I genuinely feel like it was when, in the peak of when we were like, and by we, I mean the country, was like swept up in Bon Appetit fever. And there was that one dude that always described cooking things in a pan that he called ripping hot that really sort of like pushed through the idea in my head and there was that one dude that always described cooking things in a pan that he called ripping hot,

that really sort of like pushed through the idea in my head that like, that pan needs to be really fucking hot before you put meat in it. And since then, like, it's really changed the game for me. No, it's true. And I found out there is a science-y way of talking about this, which is the Maillard reaction. The Maillard? Maillard? Yes.

I mean, it's French. So it's M-A-I-L-L-A-R-D. Maillard. There you go. Maillard. Magnifique. Thank you. So, well, first I went to America's Test Kitchen to find out why it tastes better when the food is brown.

Yeah. And so there are proteins in our taste bud that are temperature sensitive. Okay. So the taste buds just perform better at warm temperatures. So if food is cooked to 59 degrees and below, these taste buds, like the channels in them, barely open. When it is heated to 98.5 degrees or hotter, these channels open, and the sensitivity increases more than 100 times. Counterpoint, ice cream.

Very cold, but I taste it really good, like really strong. Here's America's Test Kitchen recommendation, is that if you're going to serve a dish chilled, make sure that it is aggressively seasoned. So, you know, ice cream, super sweet, lot of flavor there. So I think it makes up for the lack of heat. That's interesting. So I need to turn it, like when I'm making my cold gazpacho, I should spice it up even a little bit more. Gazpacho is the exact example that America's Kitchen gives. Well, there's not a lot of cold dinners that people talk about. Gazpacho is kind of the main game in town.

The other thing, and this is where Myard comes in, is that when food is cooked, it is easier to inhale what they call microscopic molecules that are diffused from food so the hotter the food the more energetic these molecules are and the more they are likely to travel to our nose that makes sense so i'm kind of it's kind of like i'm vaping the beef vaping the pork in the pan that's cool you know before vapes we did we i mean we did still take in smell sure sure but we have we have we have more language for it now like vape the vocabulary has changed and improved we can be more specific in what we say um when we talk when we talk about food because of things like vape yeah yeah and all the language that comes with it which is pretty much yeah um is there a high concept restaurant that has done like a vape menu like you know how there's

like you know oh they put the little cloche over it and like a cloche and then flavor obviously like we have like smoke and steam and like all that that yeah like really figured it but i'm talking about like you know you pull it up and there's just like a little you know pin there and then you're like what the fuck is this and then they can be like it's you know eggs florentine or whatever oh yeah i mean there are probably restaurants that do something like that i don't know if they put an actual vape pen on a tray but i bet that exists i bet. I bet you I'm not joking right now. Okay. Okay, so the Maillard reaction is named after a French chemist

who talks about, you know, when food turns brown. There is a chemical reaction that takes place. The sugars and amino acids in the food react with the heat and produce complex molecules. And these molecules are responsible for aromas and flavors. You do have to be careful with this because if you go too far, another reaction occurs called pyrolysis. P-Y-R-O, pyrolysis. Pyrolysis, okay.

Which is when it turns black and gets bitter. Yeah. So there's Maillard, what I was just talking about. There is another chemist in 1953 named John Hodge who worked at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Not just Hodge. I bet he had a mustache. It's possible. It's possible.

So he kind of understood the like distinct periods within the Maillard reaction to kind of really make your cooking very precise. Okay. So that first there is a group of sugar that reacts with an amino group to produce water and unstable glucoslamine. Oh, wow. Which makes sense. You notice a lot of times when you cook something, there's like moisture that comes out of it. Yeah. That's another trick to get that food real brown is you got to dry it out a little bit before you toss it down on the pan.

This glucoslamine produces a series of other compounds. And then the last is a group of molecules that include the flavor aroma color great so this is this is to you to your expertise i'm saying like a lot of times i don't get to that last stage yeah i'm just like oh it looks like a mike book i push it to the limit yeah no it's true um it's a you know i'm a risk taker i don't think i've ever burned meat before i can't remember a time where i have burned meat i have i have i dramatically under under produced a lot of gray meals but i have not produced a lot of just like charred blackened sort of briquettes yeah no i will say that you set off the smoke alarm quite a bit we have a we have a

fucking feisty smoke alarm though i took some um french fries out of the toaster like a toaster oven that set off the smoke alarm they were not burning they were not they were just sort of steam they were giving off their potato steam their potato vape and that was enough to like set it off so yeah i mean usually i will say what it is is you get that pan real hot and then you drop something in and then yeah you know i love it that's how you know you're fucking cooking baby i love that there are workarounds which i didn't realize and this again i think is from or no this was a video i watched about that reaction that you can add baking soda to onions, for example, which increases the pH and will make them brown faster.

That's interesting. I have a real problem getting onions to brown. I'm not good at caramelizing onions. I know. Well, this isn't even caramelizing. This is just browning. Okay. I mean.

I'm just, I want to be clear. Okay. But it's the same. That's the same thing, right? Is there a difference between browning? Well, caramelizing is when there's like sugars involved. OK, you know. Yeah, I guess.

OK, I will say so. The little video I watched about this reaction said that it typically happens between 230 and 340 degrees. That's a huge range. I know that's that's wild. I think it's like how long you stay at that temperature. Okay. That makes sense.

From my brief foray into hard candy making, I was always sort of dazzled by the like hyper specific. Yeah. Like if you want it at hard ball, it's got to be like exactly 145 or whatever. Probably much, much higher than that and if you get it up to 147 you fucking destroyed it and the pan and the oven on which it was cooked and the spoon that was in there that's done it is it is easy when cooking to kind of forget the science behind it like particularly if you get in the habit of making substitutions um i have started trying to infuse more brand into our children and i have just been adding brand willy-nilly to various

types of muffins and these muffins are not rising particularly well anymore uh because the whole texture and the science is off so i like it i like i like like a dense, moist muffin? Whenever I watch Bake Off and they are like, this is stodgy, in my head, I always go, that's good. I kind of like it to be sort of thick and sticky. We should stop. We should stop, shouldn't we? Can I steal you away? Yes. What is up, people of the world?

Do you have an argument that you keep having with your friends and you just can't seem to settle it? And you're sitting there arguing about whether it's Star Trek or Star Wars, or you can't decide what is the best nut, or can't agree on what is the best cheese. Stop doing that. Listen to We Got This with Mark and Hal only on MaxFun. Your topics asked and answered objectively, definitively, for all time. So don't worry, everybody. We got this. We got this. They can be anywhere. At your office. In your car. And they are wrong. My mom says that the Grey House didn't exist. But she's wrong. He just doesn't wrong. Someone in your life is wrong about something. Something small. Something weird. Something vitally important. Only one person has the courage to tell them just how wrong they are.

You know what you did was wrong, but your daughter is a liar who eats garbage. They call me Judge John Hodgman. Listen to me on the Judge John Hodgman podcast. If someone in your life is doing you wrong, don't just take it. Take it to court. Submit your case at MaximumFun.org slash JJHO. For my topic, I want to talk about yesterday. We went to a Fourth of July block party in our neighborhood. Okay. Where we only knew like a couple of people. Yeah. of people.

I am never particularly confident in those kinds of situations and this situation was no different. We did have children which is helpful sometimes I think because you can be like, hey, look at that kid doing that thing. Like you have a shared investment in a young

person. Absolutely. That definitely helps but what helps more is when I saw a bunch of wooden blocks and sticks getting busted out kube yeah i was so excited for you because i saw these people reading the instructions and i was like oh they could use some help yes so kube i i believe i've talked about on the show before in a segment that i did about bowling, because, you know, there is definitely a, there is a similarity there in the games that bowling has kind of inspired and been inspired by, like Skittles, different sort of lawn-based experiences. I think Koob is probably my all-time favorite yard game,

or maybe tied with croquet, which I know I've also talked about on the show before, both of which we used to play with our buddies back in Austin before, you know, we had kids. But I saw people playing, getting ready to play cube at this, at this block party. And I was like,

hell yes, I'm in. This is a great social game. Couldn't be easier. Just walk up, pick up a stick and start throwing it at other pieces of wood um so the basic rules of cube and again i apologize if i'm restating some of this stuff from when i uh did a whole thing on bowling but you mark out a big rectangular playing field

it's five meters wide by eight meters long i have no idea yeah how long that is in sort of my own sort of spatial journey. This is like when we play croquet and it's like there's a very specific process for placing the wickets. I never really know. No, we just kind of freestyle it because it's all, you know, it's still croquet.

So on this big rectangular field on the far sides, you have two teams. Each one places their five cubes, which are these sort of thick rectangular wooden blocks. And those are the targets that the other team is trying to knock down with the batons that they throw. Well, wooden dowel rods, basically, that you toss down the field trying to knock down these bigger blocks on the far side. So each round, a team throws their six batons toward the other team's cubes trying to knock them all down. And the point of the game is once you've knocked down all five of the other team's sort of back line of cubes you try to knock

over the kingpin which is a much bigger sort of wooden block that is right at the very center of the field and it works sort of like eight ball rules in pool where if you knock down the king before you have taken out all the other cubes you instantly lose which did happen yesterday fortunately not to me i was not the one who ran afoul of that i didn't know that many people there and that would have been a very humiliating experience fortunately i was not the one who made a big stink there i heard a lot of like loud shouts is that was was it that was probably related to the the great the grand failure that took place uh on on my team um so where the game gets really interesting is

between each round uh a team has to pick up their toppled cubes uh and throw them onto the opponent's side of the field uh and from that point they stand up and then those are called field cubes and you have to knock those down before you can go after the back line um so if you fail to do that if you leave any of the field cubes out and then it's the other team's turn they get to throw from the closest field cube so all of a sudden like they get this huge advantage because they're not having to throw from the very back of the field they could throw from you know right behind the king potentially and have just like a really sweet spot so the games have this like momentum that is they they have this push and pull to them that it really sort of defines the game

in my opinion like it makes it gives it the feel that it has and gives it the either sort of steam roll powerhouse effect that you feel if you're like crushing it or uh incredible come from behind victories if you manage to you know completely, completely clean out the field and completely demolish your opponent's advantage and then start clawing your way back. There's also like different tactics and how you set up the field coups. Like maybe you want to throw them really, really close to the front line so that they're easier for you to knock over when you're targeting them. But taking a bigger risk because if you don't knock them over, all of a sudden your opponent is going to be able to throw from much much much closer up there's also fun stuff i think this may be a house rule that i've always played with but uh whenever you're throwing one of your toppled cubes over to turn it into a field cube if you knock over another field cube you stack them up

so you just kind of want to try and group them up so you can try and knock over maybe even a few of the field cubes with a single toss of one of your batons. That's like it. That's like pretty much all the rules that there are in the game. It's maybe a little bit hard to sort of spatially imagine this. But it is the type of game where you play it for – you play one round and you get it. It completely makes sense like what it is that you are doing in this game. It feels great. It completely makes sense what it is that you are doing in this game. It feels great. It feels really, really good.

The batons have a really nice weight to them and when you can really just snipe something from really, really far away, it makes a really satisfying wooden clonk sound that hits just so right every time. I'm smiling because I'm thinking about when we were leaving, Gus just ran up and picked

one up and threw it to the ground and all the adults like cheered like oh yeah um it is it's really easy to set up it's really easy to understand it's easy to play it's just a treat of a game especially in like a big group social setting like like uh the the block party we went to because you can really play with as many people as you want right like you could play with six people on a team each person throwing one baton or you know you know you could just pass the batons around like it is so loosey-goosey it really it really you can play it however you want yeah and it's it's a good like chit chat game yeah it's a great chit-chat game great drinking game because you only need the one hand to toss the batons.

It's great. So there are a lot of forebears to Coob throughout history. It has its origins mostly in Sweden and Gotland, which is an island off of Sweden's coast in the Baltic Sea. And it was in Gotland that in 1931 there was an etymologist who noted the first use of the name Coob for the game. But there have been games throughout history, like dating back to the 16th century of people, you know, throwing wooden balls at pins in a big, big field. Can you spell how? K-U-B-B. That's how you spell Coob. For the past like decade or so, it started to become like

much more popular in North America. There's a city in Wisconsin called Eau Claire that has hosted the National Coupe Championship since 2007 and named itself the American capital for coupe in 2013, I believe. There are different coupe leagues that have popped up. There's seven major coupe leagues, mostly centered around the Midwest, like Wisconsin and Minnesota have their own sort of Koob leagues. And I don't know, I feel like I went from not hearing anything about this game, not knowing anything about this game, playing it for the first time in Austin,

you know, maybe six or so years ago. And now a lot of people I feel like know about Koob partially because like big, you know, outdoor hangs became a bit more common in the COVID. And the fact that like cube sets are pretty inexpensive compared to like, you know, you buy a nice cornhole board and the thing that's, you know,

the, the bags that's cost, how much is a cornhole? 500, $600. But this cube is just some wooden blocks, right? Like it's, it is not that uh the barrier of entry is pretty low and you can play it more or less anywhere um yeah that that's cube i

uh i really like this game a whole bunch and it still feels like a thing that not everybody knows about and is like i it is i i'm mostly bringing this because it surprised me how excited i got when i saw some people busting out the kubes because i haven't played in a couple years and i was very very rusty i didn't do like an incredible job uh but i still just like seeing this game got me so stoked and made me realize like just how badly I missed sort of playing it with a group of buddies with some, you know, some brewskis on the side. Yeah. I came like my college experience, there were not a lot of games involved.

Like we would just kind of sit around and talk and drink. Oh, God. And it's amazing how much more fun you can have if there is a game. Yeah. fun you can have if there is a game yeah it's a it's a i think having a having a diversion reduces a lot of the like societal pressure to like hang yeah that uh that that i think a lot of people feel i don't even think you have to be particularly introverted to when you're like in a big group setting talking to a lot of people and trying to keep the conversation going um the the pressure that you feel to like keep that going and not you know run afoul of any kind of like social norms or

anything like that like it can be it can be a lot especially if you are an introverted person but having like a thing you're doing while you talk oh my god that's the best shit ever this is why i you know beer pong was the the kind of craze that it was uh certainly when i was in college uh and i don't know i feel like cube is sort of in that grand tradition of just it doesn't take a ton of mental like uh you don't have to be particularly locked in uh your interactions with the game are very brief, and there's windows of time where you're not throwing a stick, so then you talk in those links.

Yeah, there's skill involved, but there's not so much that's a barrier to entry. You can luck out. Yeah, sure. So that's Koob. Get there. A lot of people, when I was Googling it, apparently Virginia and Maryland have pretty big Coob communities.

So, you know. Coob. I don't think there's a portmanteau there that works. Coob communities. You still tried it, though, and I really love that about you. Do you want to know what our friends at home are talking about? Yes. This is a good one.

If you want to send in your small wonder, just shoot us an email at wonderfulpodcasts at gmail.com. There's so much spam we get in that email account. And so your submissions are much appreciated to sort of change the signal to noise ratio a little bit. Keep it brief. We just did one or two sentences about your thing. Here's one from Trin who says says my small wonder is making your own soup as someone who is not the biggest fan of celery a very common soups ingredient it is wonderful to make your own soup and thoroughly enjoy every ingredient making something in a big big pot also feels very cool i love this phenomenon i have food categories that i don't necessarily enjoy or seek out but when i cook it and i know yeah what happened to it for whatever reason it unlocks that

gate in my mind and it's like yeah this is why i started making chicken pot pie because griffin is not a fan of peas and i could make it without peas despise peas but in a chicken pot pie i will eat most of them but not all it's not my favorite part of it's still my least favorite part of the chicken pot pie um jess says my small wonder is people thinking of you whether that be vocally like this reminded me of you or friends slash family tagging you and things online especially post-pandemic most of my communication has relied on being in online spaces and opening my phone to see notifications where i've been tagged in things or people have sent me links to things no matter how big or small always makes my day. Yeah.

I always do this to our friend Anna. Yeah. If I see something that just like gives me a real vibe of her, I will send it to her. Anna of wonderful podcast fame. Yeah. Our third love episode. Third love episode. One of my favorites.

She loves a llama. Sure. You know, and she loves a good reference to frazier absolutely and so when rachel finds like a great tiktok with frazier's and llamas in it um that that gets sent right down the pipeline uh-huh thank you so much to bowen and augustus for the use of our theme song money won't pay you can find a link to that in the episode description thank you to maximum fun for having us on the network. Go to MaximumFun.org. Check out all the great shows that they have there and just sort of vibe with them, vibe on them. In the McElroy merch section of McElroy.family or however you want to get there,

there is a Poetry Corner candle. There is a new Poetry Corner candle. I'm going to pull it up now so I can pull up the description. Yeah, the scent profile. McElroyMerch.com is the website, by the way, that you can go to. There is a new Appalachian Workshop candle and a Poetry Corner candle. The scent is ozone, jasmine, leather, patchouli, sandalwood, tonka bean, amber, dark musk, light musk powder. Fucking fantastic. Yeah, dude.

Fragrance oils infused with essential oils, 100% American grown soy wax. Oh, my God. You are going to love it. I guarantee you. Yeah, that's at McElroyMerch.com. And we have a bunch of other stuff there. That's it. Thank you all so much.

Thank you. Thanks to Rally for being so warm and welcoming. You're saying this word, I always heard Raleigh, but you're saying it Raleigh, which is like the short A sound is usually my kind of domain. Can I tell you, I didn't really, it just came out of my mouth. I didn't really think about if that was the way to pronounce it or not. I like Raleigh. I'm sure they don't. I'm sure it's one of those things that people living in Raleigh or Raleigh don't.

They're like, whatever, man. It's probably Raleigh. It's all good, man. I think you're right. It's probably Raleigh. No, man. Do not worry about it. I said Raleigh when talking to them during the live shows, and they seemed to not say anything or boo me or yell at me.

Anyway, it was a fun show and I had a good time and thank you. Yeah. I also had a great time in rich mode. Bazinga! Okay. Working on it, money won't pay. Hey! Hey! Hey!