304: Odd Apples

0:28This episode is brought to you by Resi and American Express. I kind of like that people mistakenly name them and some apples have their own like regional names. It feels like an interesting intersection between like plant and human, like this idea of like storytelling and how like we all have like, you know, local legends and different stories in our localities. This is Taste. I'm your host, Eliza Barbanel.

0:59if you'd call yourself a fruit person you'll eat this episode up william mullen is a photographer and marketing manager whose book odd apples documents the stunning strange world of heirloom apple varietals his love of fruit extends to caring for urban apple trees in south brooklyn and brewing his own cider clearly there's a lot to discuss it's so fun to have william on the show to nerd out on fall fruit wine harvest and more

1:31William Mullen this is taste thanks for coming on the podcast hey Eliza how you doing I'm feeling good yeah is fall like your Super Bowl I mean I actually really like August a lot and but I would say September is as perfect as a month can get because like I'm still eating watermelon I'm still making tomato sandwiches. I'm also eating apples. Like I'm getting a little bit of late summer. I'm getting a little bit of early fall. I'm still swimming in the ocean. Seasonal overlap. Yeah. Yeah. I let the record state that William showed up to the studio with a huge bag that has a watermelon in it and also some apples that I had never tried in my life before, which just feels like a very on brand way for you to travel.

2:15Yeah, it is. The watermelon has become a bit of a thing for me which is kind of crazy to carry around so much you you often are carrying around an entire watermelon i um every time i go see my boyfriend ryan in new hampshire i like to bring up at least around this time of year a watermelon because i like i watermelon is kind of like a it's like a sexy romantic food to eat with someone like the juices and stuff so and i i i love watermelon so much i feel like i hold on to it till it's like just gone like removed from the market so if i see it at the green market i'm absolutely getting it oh i love that it's like a better than a bouquet of roses it's definitely tastier tastier than a bouquet of roses let's put it that way yeah so you and i met because i don't know actually i think you're the only person i've ever done this to before where i just lit into your dms on instagram and i was like please i want to hang out with you specifically please take me to all of like the urban apple trees that you care for in Brooklyn.

3:16Like I just wanted to see all of that. And I think back so fondly to that day that we just kind of walked around Carroll Gardens, that part of like kind of South Brooklyn. And you showed me all these different apple trees that you were involved in the stewardship of. So I'm wondering like how everyone's doing. How has the flock grown? How are the apples coming in? Yeah, those trees, like one of them has a pretty bad case of fire blight which is a disease that attacks it's like a bacterial um so yeah it is kind of sad there's like a couple that are doing pretty well and this is a good year for urban fruit it would have been a really good year for all of new england because there was a beautiful huge bloom there was also a really bad late frost that pretty much decimated most of the fruit crops in the northeast new England also the Georgia peaches so but luckily didn't drop as low here in the city it's just like in May I think it was like 26 and parts of New England were I think it got to like the 40s in New York so those trees are doing great aside from the fire blight which you know it could decimate one of those trees it could spread you know I've kind of been like I'm really happy to have gotten to like picked these trees and like seen them while they're alive because i feel like in the next like 10 years they might not be there why because of climate change i mean a fire blight will eventually like kill the entire tree it's a big problem for orchards and a lot of people will have like spraying programs and stuff to um i guess mitigate it or treat it like you literally spray like an antibiotic on the tree um it's it's kind of it seems really obvious but it is like literally like a bacterial infection the same way that like we get infected with bacteria there's even like antibiotic resistant fire blight oh my god because they're not finishing their courses just like us yeah yeah exactly wow so is that going to be contained to that tree or is there a risk of that fire blight kind of spreading through the tree community so far so So if you remember, there's four of them in that parking lot in Red Hook.

5:28Yeah. By the Liberty Warehouse and Valentino Pier. The other three, I think, are fine. Just one of them has a pretty bad case of it. And I noticed, it must have been like last year, that it just kind of came through the city. There's a couple other trees that I've picked before that also have it. But since then, I've discovered more apple trees. So, yeah, like there's a couple in Dumbo in the there's like that on ramp park when you get onto the Manhattan Bridge. It's like that green space. There's two beautiful, huge apple trees there. I'm not sure what they are. Maybe like a golden delicious type.

6:10Do you think it's the kind of thing with fruit trees in the city where once you become aware of them, you start to just notice them more often? Yeah, I was thinking like I've said before it feels like a sixth sense, but then I was like, OK, well, wait, I'm using my sight, which is literally one of the five senses. So I feel like it's more just like, you know how like they say that, like, if you like maybe if you removed people from like our urban environments, like our civilized worlds, we would pick up on all these senses that other animals have. I wonder if it's just like a thing where once you see it you see all of them like yours you know your site is attuned to it and like even your periphery is kind of like pick it up your peripheral vision I feel like I saw the first one in Carroll Gardens there was um I was like on a run and there were just like some apples that had fallen on the sidewalk and this was like late later early August of like 2018 and I just looked up and I saw this apple tree in somebody's yard and I was like wow okay of course yeah why wouldn't an apple tree grow here you don't really think that they could survive or like produce what was a really hefty crop on that tree and then I tasted one I was like this is amazing um I pretty much deduced it was a gravenstein by the way it looked and how ripe it was for that time of year gravenstein is a danish cultivar from the 17th century that was like heavily planted throughout sonoma county california and then like a lot of it was used to actually feed soldiers in world war ii um like into with applesauce and apple like dried slices it's not very common in new york i feel like new england has like mcintosh and um mcown but But like Gravenstein, there's like a whole festival for it in California.

8:04It's great for baking. It has like a good sweet tart flavor. It doesn't keep very well. There's a little bit of a spice note to it. But this apple had like the classic like green coat with red like tiger stripes and was like ripe in August. So it's like I've never sent it in for genetic testing, but I'm like 90 percent sure it's a Gravenstein apple. Right. And I think maybe that sounds funny, the concept of sending it in for genetic testing. But I think if you are aware of the heirloom apple varietal world, that's a real thing that you can do, right? You can do. And you know the guy. I think his name is Cameron Peace.

8:42OK. I might have that wrong. But and I think it's like three or four hundred dollars per apple. So it's not. It gets expensive. So what's the use case for somebody doing that? I think there's there are a lot of apples that have been mis-ID'd. um so like there's a couple cultivars in maine that are like all one cultivar and that's duchess of oldenburg and like they all have like different names like one is called nutting bumpus which is really funny uh but it's really duchess of oldenburg and there's like lots of examples like that i can't think of any others at the top of my head but um you know it's said that there are over 7 ,000 different cultivars of apples.

9:26And that very well may be true, but I think that there's a lot of overlap. And even if the number is like 3 ,000 or 4 ,000, that's still pretty incredible. It seems like a lot. But why would somebody go to like spend hundreds of dollars to genetic test an apple? That is a really good question. I guess if you really want to get it right and you want to know like maybe you're selling scion wood to like craft um you probably want to be correct about the cultivar but that is an interesting question because like i don't know i could get myself in trouble here but it's like if you're selling an apple with like a slightly different name from its original name but it has like all these flavor qualities and aesthetic qualities that like someone wants when they graft and want to grow an apple tree like i don't know I guess it matters for history and tracing lineage and finding things out.

10:21So maybe that was a bit silly of me to say. But, yeah, I kind of like that people mistakenly name them and some apples have their own like regional names. It feels like an interesting intersection between like plant and human, like this idea of like storytelling and how like we all have like, you know, local legends and different stories in our localities. And I like that. And I also, you know, apples are grown all over the world, but they do feel like a very American fruit and they're tied up in the history of this country and the way that it was settled and like different civilizations like grew up.

10:59And so like even you talking about the Gravenstein before, like I didn't know any of that history. But knowing that, I think, brings a new depth into what we're eating now. Yeah, it's kind of crazy. Like, you know, Malus Domestika, which is the eating apple, basically came to be in Kazakhstan and Kurdistan in the Tianzhen Mountains. Basically through like years and years of like birds and bears and then later horses like selecting larger fruit and then later humans. And then, you know, they spread the seeds through their poop. And sorry, I'm like laughing so childish. But and then, you know, they were cultivated in Europe a lot.

11:45But from what I've read, it was like a mixture of things. One is that Europe had a lot of like set farmland by then. So they didn't sort of go crazy there. Though still some of the best apples are from Europe. And then when the colonists brought seeds over, you know, and they just like planted seeds. So all these new apple cultivars just grew. So anytime you plant an apple seed, you're going to get a new apple tree. You'll have some genes from the seed parent and then some genes from the pollinator parent. So like, you know, pollinator, like bee or butterfly brought some pollen to that apple blossom.

12:29um and so you have a new apple with um some traits from mom some traits from dad just like us um and because of both like the open landscape and like the specific climate in north america like the amount of like cool hours and the seasons like apples just like took off here and like exploded in a way that um i guess was kind of unprecedented for the cultivar outside of it It's native lands. My friend Benford recently just found some research about how there's another gene or there's another species from the malice genus called malice coronaria that is native to North America. So maybe it's also just kind of like malice finding like another home.

13:19Yeah. Like the species like does know this climate in this soil somewhere like, you know, thousands and probably millions of years ago. Um, yeah. Wow. That's kind of beautiful. I didn't know about that. They've been around for a long time. Right. You know, it's interesting because I grew up on the West Coast and apple culture, I don't think was as prevalent then, especially growing up in that era. There was kind of like Granny Smith, Red Delicious, and that was it. When did you fall in love with eating apples? What was your childhood with apples like? So for most of my life, probably, yeah, just eating normal apples.

13:55And then when I moved, I guess normal, LOL. What does that mean? but uh justice when uh i uh lived in the uk from like 2002 to 2008 um when i was like in middle school and high school um and i started cooking for myself which we will not get into um but i started grocery shopping for myself like with my money that i made from being like a hairdresser's assistant and a movie theater custodian and i got really curious about different foods basically okay long story short i wanted to cook salmon and i wanted to eat salmon my mom didn't want to cook it so i was like i'm gonna cook oh my god and so i started going to the uh waitress near me which was like honestly someone making like my like five pound an hour like wage should not have been going to waitress because it's like so expensive but it's just like what we had on the high street so um and you know they had all the classic um commercial apples there like pink lady like we ate a lot of pink ladies um granny smith and then they had this one bin um of like brown rusty potatoey looking apples like i would say it looked like a gold sprayed potato called eggermont russet and I was like that is such a British name and also that apple looks like a potato and you know being I knew that Waitrose was like a specialty kind of upscale grocery store so everything in there there was a certain level of quality so I was like let's get it like you know it could be great it's probably really good um and I bought a bunch and I ate one on the way home and it it It tasted like it had been slow-baked in the sun.

15:45It was, like, incredible. It was, like, nutty and tasted like rich, like, warm, like, Michigan cider. Like, it had warm apple cider. Yes. And it had, like, chestnut notes and spice notes. And it was—the texture was, like—it was definitely a little drier than, like, a really juicy apple-like honey crisp. But I really liked that about it. And I was like, what on earth? like where did this come from and so i went home and i googled eggermott russet i was led to this website called orange pippin which is like this huge online database of apples and like what i pictured to be a bunch of old british guys like rating apples which was really funny and from there i just would like read about apples and i tried a few more like the cox orange pippin that I brought in Bramley's seedling but from there like I was you know still a teenager and my access was limited and I was like pretty happy to just like eat Eckermont Rosset and read about a couple apples but I it was like my favorite thing to do you're like my dream child that's the cutest thing I've ever heard and then when I went to college in California and I in Orange County which was not a great place for finding apples but when I moved to LA for a year after college to work I found pink pearl at a co-op which is an apple bred by this man called Albert Edder who was German but moved to like Humboldt County California in like the late 19th century and was experimenting with strawberries and different flowers i think it was dahlias i could be wrong about that um in fact some of his strawberry work like he like crossed like wild um coastal pacific strawberries from like chile with mountain strawberries from europe if i'm not mistaken and those genes are still like really um present in like modern cultivars um and then he was like obsessed with red flesh apples and creating a red flesh apple that would be popular and kind of take over and go to market and um you know none of them really blew up um he there was like 30 of them um and the one that's really famous is pink pearl and um i'm not really sure what it's across of there could be some French apple genetics in it and there's definitely some genetics of an apple called Surprise which is a German pink flesh apple and anyway so I got that at the co-op and it was pink inside and I was like this reminds me of Marie Antoinette the movie by Sofia Coppola such a good movie because like we think it was like that the pink of like the font that she uses in that film and it felt like you know the way that she uses music like the strokes and new order in that movie it's like anachronistic with the setting and then she's like throwing converse into one of the shots too i was like this feels like that like anachronistic like we think of apples like wholesome farmhouse fall you know um but this apple was like lemony and tasted like strawberry champagne it was like neon pink inside you know i was like this is like la this is like cool like and so that got me obsessed again with apples so i was like researching albert edder and um i moved to new york so i was like need to figure out my life um and be closer to apples and and yeah i knew i had no plan when i moved here but i was like i want to get involved with either chocolate apples or dairy and i actually kind of did all those things i worked for a yogurt maker which we'll get into later because it coincides with one of your questions uh which question my answer to the food thing might be a little weird okay we'll come we'll come back to it but um now you work in chocolate now i work in chocolate and um which can you just say for the record i guess what you do in chocolate i am the brand director for rocket chocolate a great delicious chocolate maker down in Red Hook.

20:19Yeah. So yeah, I moved to New York and, you know, for a little while I wasn't really actively getting into apples more than just going to the farmer's markets and, you know, just trying all the cultivars that I could and reading about them. And kind of back to the pink pearl again, I was eating a pink pearl like in 2018 and I had learned product photography for Raka um and so I was kind of like looking a lot of product photography and if you remember around that time on like Instagram it was like a lot of like really bright poppy stuff like that's what was in and so I was seeing a lot of that so I just kept seeing the pink pearl like on this like kind of poppy backdrop um but kind of like in a surreal way and I was like maybe that would be an interesting photo maybe I should take that photo I at least want to see what it looks like so I just went and took that photo and I was like wow that looks cool and I had fun doing that like really like just simple impulse it wasn't that deep at the beginning um and from there I just got I was like well this is actually a really cool way to look at apples Like typically they're depicted in more of like a rustic kind of aesthetic in photos.

21:42And I just thought it would be really interesting like to make portraits of apples that are like less driven by like the season and the time of year that we eat apples and more driven by like the character of each apple. Right. Right. So and, you know, photography, like I'm not a trained photographer, really. But it was the right medium for that because, you know, some of these apples are pink inside. Some of them are red. Some are like totally cylindrical, like a candle or some are shaped like stars. Some look like potatoes. Some look like potatoes. Some are like jet black. And so I was like, you know, you could paint these apples, but you can do anything in the painting.

22:29Right. That's what's so beautiful about painting. It's like pure imagination and then like style and technique where a photograph like, I mean, you can Photoshop and stuff, but generally the concept of photography is that what you're looking at is actually real. Maybe you've, you know, manufactured what's in the frame a little bit, but like it is supposed to represent some kind of reality. So that's how the photo project began, which turned into the book Odd Apples, which is such a beautiful book. Thank you. And I imagine that tracking down all of those different, as we're saying, strange and unusual apple cultivars must have been a difficult feat.

23:07And I'm curious if there were any like did you have the holy grail for the book that was especially hard or important to track down? Yeah, there was probably two. One was a piatois, which is a Swiss apple that is like small and related to the, you know, lady apples, those little. I don't know how they're related, but I. Yeah. they're both like the same size and I think they're both like there's something about the lady apple that's related to a piatois I'm blanking on it but it's shaped like a star like literally like it's so cute and it's it's biannual so it doesn't crop every year and it's it's crazy it'll like literally last like not in the fridge for like once it's insane it's like such a good keeper wow um like how you're lowering your voice to tell me that as if it's a big secret it's like um so how did you find that one that's actually so random i had been searching for it and literally a really good friend of mine emma she texted me like she was like thought of you and it was like a photo of those apples she was at a farm stand for montgomery place orchards which is upstate um near like red hook um red hook upstate which is because we're talking about Red Hook City as well.

24:26And I was like, oh, my God. Like, I will pay you whatever if you can, like, get those in a box and send them to me right now. I've been looking for those apples. So just coincidentally she found them and sent them a picture to you? Yeah. Wow, okay. Crazy. What's the other one? Really anything from the Albert Etter orchard. So Albert Etter had, like, a big homestead orchard where he grew all of the different cultivars that he liked and was experimenting with. So dozens of different red flesh cultivars, but also just like some other really interesting eating apples, a really popular cider apple from Albert Eder is called Wixen.

25:03And it's this really high acid, high sugar crab apple that tastes like a salty kiss from the Pacific. Like it's like, it's so good. And just like kind of classically Californian. and basically this orchard had come into I think ownership by a family called the Fishmans who I think that's the name of his name is Ram Fishman who I was like calling and emailing they were ignoring me and who is this guy I sent them a copy of the first Odd Apples book that um andrea uh tribucco campos and i published like on our own um before the hadja cons one um and basically they like didn't respond and i called them and i was like hi did you get my book and like um his wife answered the phone and like he wouldn't talk to me and i was i was actually so pissed i made them send the book back to me it's so petty but i was like no you should if They don't want it.

26:07I was like, okay, well, whatever. Send it back. Send it back to me. And they did, and it was, like, in such bad condition. Anyways, so basically by, through, like, I forget how I came into contact with this guy, Tom Hart, who I think owns Humboldt Cider Company or is involved in that in some way. Tom, if I'm getting that wrong, I'm sorry, and you're listening. but he um i think contacted a friend of mine sean and sean was like i know you really want these edder apples like tom like is going to the homestead orchard and documenting and restoring there and let's send him a box so we both we split these like wholesale fruit chippers which are these little foam things you can like put fruit in so like stay like you know safe in a usps flat rate chip box um i have so much of them um that's the kind of thing that i didn't know existed but of course it exists and of course you're intimately aware of this by now yeah hard to get because you had to buy them wholesale so you got to be ready to have like a lot yeah luckily you probably are going through them oh yeah i'm actually in a shortage right now keep an eye out uh and so tom sent us a bunch of these albert edder cultivars that um you know i feel like no one really has tasted like they don't even have names some of them just have numbers and some of them made it into odd apples and they're all like you know different variations of like pink flesh stuff or different like wixen related apples so like really kind of like salty acidic sweet crab apples like really beautiful fruit with incredible flavors that you know like who knows like they might never see the light of day after this like if they if the trees die and they're not propagated and named like um yeah it's like i feel like to be obsessed with apples like this is to be obsessed with like history as well a little bit i was gonna say i'm curious if you were to generalize like what are the overarching qualities of the apple people that exist out there that you are kind of in virtual and sometimes physical community with definitely like all walks of life um but i would say the the one binding thing is like obsession that is almost like related to solving puzzles um like a finding this obscure apple that you read about in a book that was propagated and then like you know ceased to be documented or was you know fell out of popularity for whatever reason and then like how to go through records to find like where the remains of that tree might be or anyone who might still have it um so it's a lot of like detective work and going through like old records um and then from there it's like i guess like you know like things that connect a lot of people who get obsessed with different foods like just like a flavor thing like it's i've had apples that taste like red bell peppers and olives i'd have one that tastes like licorice one that tastes like strawberry champagne like wow it's pretty crazy how many flavors can be in just one species of fruit it's really cool and i think as you're talking i find myself thinking about what apples have that allow them to be kind of fascinated upon in this way that other fruits don't and it's kind of their hardiness right that like you can be sending apples through the mail to somebody else and that they can't have a long shelf life because you know like peaches I think are another fruit that is kind of held up very dearly by people and that people kind of fetishize oh like the first summer peach in the same way that people that like fall think about apples or apple cider but peaches like obviously are so fragile and like can't really be kind of investigated at length in that way does that resonate for you definitely I mean, a lot of, you know, the apples we eat are shaped by that like commodity capitalism.

30:12Like what stores well? What can go on a railroad across the country in the 1800s? Exactly. So, you know, like the thing about Cosmic Crisp, like that new apple that came out a couple years ago is that it like can stay fresh for a year. And there's a couple of apples that have really long shelf lives, at least when they're kept cool. Like Black Oxford is – which is an apple that has – that's like pure black on the outside. Sometimes it's more like just like a really dark burgundy. But it's from Maine and it's nicknamed the July apple because if you pick it in November or December and you keep it in the fridge, you can have one in July and it will still be good.

30:50And I've actually confirmed this and it is true. This is like my family for Passover every year. we keep the box of matzah from the previous year and then we do a taste test to see if it's gotten any stale and like we can never tell the difference because it's inherently just such a dry thing that's cool it's kind of a joke but you know it's a real thing we do um and you the point about peaches is really good because like you know some fruits that grow really well here like native persimmon um you know you can't commoditize that because like a it's when it's ripe it's like like a soft saggy orange soda cloud or like it's like really like you know it's gonna drop from the tree and it's gonna splat like it's you can't ship it or anything like that and it's a bummer i mean maybe it's not a bummer it's just what keeps it like not widely known i think but it's like so delicious and even though i love apples i do want to say that native persimmon is like the perfect fall fruit.

31:53It tastes like pumpkin pie. It's crazy. Wow. Okay. I appreciate you shining a light on other fruits also. Yeah. And I want to talk to you about like wine harvest and other fruit things as well. But I guess one more thing on the apple note is I'm curious, like commodity shipment aside, if you could nominate one or two apples that you would love to see get kind of that shining recognition that Honeycrisp, for example, has gotten, what would they be? So I would say in general, any russeted apple. Russeting is so interesting to me. So I mentioned Eggermont russet earlier. Which can you just describe what russeting is?

32:31Yeah. So it's like basically that like rusty coat on the skin like that you see on, I think it's bosque pear has russeting and then obviously russeted potatoes. It's almost like scabby kind of to use it. Maybe that's a gross word. It's definitely, yeah. And it's thick. It makes the skin tougher. Basically, it's interesting to me that we accept that in pairs and not in apples at the commodity grocery supermarket level. But there's apples like golden russet and Roxbury russet, which are native to New York and Massachusetts, respectively. And basically, russeting happens when, A, the apple needs to have like the genetic trait to express it.

33:11And then after that, it's like damage to the outer layer of the skin that happens to the apple while it's growing from, you know, little baby apple to big apple. And that can be anything from like rain to like other weather, atmospheric related conditions. And then so, you know, the apple, the tree tries to repair the apple and then there's water loss from that skin damage. So then the tree starts sending all these metabolites into the fruit, like extra, more than usual. So it's pumping it with more like flavor, basically. And then that water loss also makes for like a concentration of flavor.

33:52So I rise to apples sometimes tend to be drier as well. So they just have more flavor intensity. Now, I mean, the skin is like if you don't like skins, you might like never get into that because like they are tougher. You can always peel them off, though, and still like the flesh is really tasty. Like knob rusted is one that looks like a toad. And it like looks like warty and like crazy. The skin is like tree bark. It's very tough. But the flavor is like orange creamsicle and like nutty and citrus. It's like so good. Or it tastes like you glazed a chestnut with like orange glaze. It's so tasty.

34:33And like, I think what I've heard is that because of that water loss, there are some storage issues with rusted apples. But I'm going to be real. I've stored them. I feel like they last for quite a bit. Maybe not as long as Cosmicris. But, you know, in New York, you can get rusted apples at the green market, but still like not everywhere. Like they're not that popular. They're not as popular as something like a Macintosh. And there's different russet apples in different localities. There's lots of great European russets. We have quite a few in New England. Is some of it a cosmetic thing that people don't want to try it because it looks a little banged up?

35:14I think it's both cosmetic storage. It's like all those things working against it in the commodity world. OK, so we're rooting for russet apples is the takeaway. OK, I love to hear that. And I'd love to hear a little bit about the work you've been doing with Wine Harvest, Because based on what I've been seeing on Instagram, you're kind of getting out of the city most weekends to be like out in the field. So what are you up to? Yeah. So I guess I sort of became like wine adjacent through the Odd Apples Photo Project because I was meeting a lot of cider and winemakers. and in 2021 I met this dashing man named Ryan Williams who yeah we just I guess we just vibed and we've been together for almost three years now and he is a winemaker in New Hampshire he's from Massachusetts but he's been making wine in New Hampshire for a couple years now with this guy Nico Kimberly and their the label is called N-O-K and it stands for not otherwise known and they farm six different vineyards throughout New Hampshire that are mostly hybrid grapes so stuff that grows really well in cold weather and they're hybrids of Vitis Riparia and Vitis Labrusca and those are two grapes that are native to North America so most of the wine that we drinks is from Vitis vinifera, which is the European grape.

36:46But North America has their own grapes. There's also Vitis rotundifolia, which is muscadine, which is native to the south. And so things like Concord grape, that's Vitis labrusca. And a lot of Vitis labrusca grapes have that kind of Concord grape flavor, that muskiness. I kind of think Manischewitz might be one of the only Concord grape wines I've had before, which is maybe not the best expression of the fruit. maybe not um but maybe still tasty um yeah i mean the nostalgia of it alone yeah i mean the there's a couple people who've done some great stuff there's um uh topeka which is pascaline uh lapeltier who's a hopefully i'm not butchering that her name um she's uh owner of chambers restaurant or partner in chambers restaurant um in lower manhattan and she's also sommelier I think she's Master Sommelier.

37:42And she collaborated with Nathan Kendall, who is a winemaker in the Finger Lakes. And they focus on mostly like native grapes and hybrids of native grapes. So Catawba in Delaware and Concord. And they made a nouveau style wine with Concord that is really tasty. And I have a couple of friends who are making wines with Concord that are pretty tasty. That's so cool. So have you, what harvest is this for you? Have you done harvest before? Yeah, this will be my third year with Grape Harvest. Okay, so coming back on Grape Harvest for the third year, like, is there any knowledge from the previous two years that you're bringing in or that you're trying to get out of like this new time?

38:25I'm mostly like kind of absorbing. Right now, I haven't like made my own cuvee of wine. Ryan and I are making a red flesh cider together. That's a Solera style. So it's been a couple of years that we've been working on that and harvesting each year and pressing and fermenting. So what's like the goal and flavor for that cider going to be? Oh, that's a good question. Last time we tasted it, it had like sort of like a lemon saffron kind of flavor, which is really interesting. We have more apples that we're going to be pressing and I think we're going to bottle it as a pet net. So we'll see what it does.

39:02But bright and kind of herbaceous and like red fruity. Do you have a name for it yet? I think we're going to call it Williams Kiss because my first name is William and his last name is Williams. So we're going to like kiss the labels. This is so cute. I'm going to collapse. How many bottles are you making? I'm not. I think we're hovering around like 80 bottles with the pet net. I'm reserving one right now. Yeah. There'll definitely be one for you. And I think we're I'm not sure how we're going to move it yet, but but we definitely want people to have it because it's it's shaping up to be good.

39:39I have made another cider before with those Brooklyn trees that we went to that I will admit on this podcast turned out atrocious. So I'm not really sure what to do with it because I didn't dump it. Can you make vinegar? I think I might have to. It's at my friend Benford's house. And I think you should make vinegar. I think having a house made vinegar is really cute. um yeah and also you'll have to reduce it down right i think so basically that'll help get rid of some of it also yeah i didn't it was a huge learning lesson for me it was in it was like i had like 10 gallons of juice in a 15 gallon demijohn there was too much oxygen and they were low acid low tannin dessert fruit which um you know don't have a lot of protective qualities in the ferment so it got mousy basically um and so now i'm like so paranoid about mouse which for our listeners don't know is a flaw that you will find in wine sometime um it's basically a bacteria um and uh i like yeah and it gives it that kind of like uh rodenty smell or taste corn chips corn chips yeah okay let's not ruin corn chips for me actually yeah i like fritos but you're but when are you gonna bottle this current cider you're working on um probably sometime this fall um we have some apples that we'll be adding to it and pressing and then we'll top it up and um we'll kiss some some paper and make a little label oh i love that so much i'm excited to see that finished cider and hopefully get to try it um and i want to talk a little bit about the work you do with raka as well because i think that like chocolate is such a fascinating ingredient and like product to have a close look on i guess i'm curious like what you're working on right now and also if you've ever done something that kind of hits on the collab of apple and chocolate yeah it's funny because they i feel like as my identities like my rock at work identity and my apple photographer identity are pretty separate yeah um like i've never like collabed with rock as me i mostly stay pretty behind the scenes at rocker um like i've i've never put myself on the rock on instagram for example um something separate yeah i think i like to be a little more private i guess like that um but uh but my interest in both of them i i think is like very similar like i've always not always pretty recent to like my adult years like when i was like 18 and beyond found chocolate like really fascinating because it's like like wine and cheese and stuff it's like pure pleasure right there is some nutrition in it because it is a fruit seed so you know it's not bereft of nutrition and nutrients antioxidants magnesium fiber theobromine yeah theobromine um some even say it's a health food uh but uh you know so it's like this fruit seed that we ferment we dry and then we remove the shell we grind it mix it with sugar.

42:47We refine it down to a smooth particle size, and then we temper it to make the crystal structure even so it forms this confection bar that is shiny and snaps. And in the meantime, we've coaxed all these flavors that were there, all the precursors were there. And this collaboration with microbes and our machines and our creativity makes this beautiful, pleasurable, magical food So there's that really exciting like human creativity side, right? Like no other animal does this. It's like, you know, bats have sonar, but like we can make chocolate. So it's like we each have our own things. But and then on the flip, like, you know, cacao is from South America and was, you know, consumed by South American peoples and Mexican people for a long time or different tribes in Mexico.

43:46and was, you know, brought to Europe by the Spanish and then was like made into confections by the English and other European cultures and commodified and essentially homogenized, like made into like a consumer packaged good product, was planted all over Europe. Most of the cacao that we eat in chocolate and that goes into chocolate products is grown in Africa now where it's not from and it's grown as commodity and not specialty. Like, you know, the flavor of its region is not as important, which, you know, is a bummer. And so it's like, it's on one hand, you have like the magic creativity side of it.

44:30And on the other hand, you have, you know, to look at the history of chocolate, it's truly look at the history of like, you know, colonialism, capitalism, commodity markets, markets commodification of things like it's like both like what's beautiful and dark about our species like you can see human capability through chocolate um and i always found that really fascinating and i love to eat chocolate and you know it's like a you know a pretty i feel like the broken supply chain thing like broken it was like it's working the way it was intended to right It's just like bad for a lot of people. And a lot of us are trying to make that work.