Five Things You Missed on Heritage Radio This Week

Heritage Radio is the food-focused, listener-supported internet radio station that broadcasts from a studio attached to Roberta's in Bushwick. Every week, many of the big players in the food world host and appear on shows, and oftentimes they reveal interesting tidbits about their work. Here's a guide to five notable pieces of recent programming:

1) The Loss of the Indigenous NYC Oyster:

A pair of HRN reporters attended an event at the BBG hosted by the BOP, (respectively the Brooklyn Botanical Garden and the Billion Oyster Project, a student-run NYC local oyster revitalization effort). Though nineteenth century New York Happy Houred its indigenous oysters to death, the BOP is trying to slowly reintroduce them as a means of water purification, with edibility being a distant hope given the oysters' daunting task:

You figure those billion oysters will filter the standing water in the harbor once every three days.

2) Bed Stuy's Hattie Carthan Community Farmers Market:

HRN Executive Director Erin Fairbanks spoke with Farmer Yon, Yonette Fleming, founder of the Hattie Carthan Market, a community revitalization project and educational farm in Bed Stuy. She spoke about getting youths engaged in growing and caring about their food and their community:

In order to be sustainable, sustainability has to do with the perpetuation of practices into the continuing generations, and so in order to do that work I had to call the youths in my community who were visibly not attracted to urban agriculture at all because of that historic wounding that has been done to many communities of color around agriculture, so it was a plan to involve the youths in working the land but also in nurturing them and healing the ecological rift that was created because of some of our historical occurrences.

3) Pizza Boy Adam Kuban:

Founder of the blog Slice and the bar-stlye pizza pop-up Margo's was on this week's episode of Roberta's Radio, the radio show of, by, and about the goings on at Roberta's Pizza. On his preferred method of booking his pop-up events, ticketing:

There are people online who are like, ‘what is this bullshit, I gotta buy tickets for pizza?'...I sell tickets strictly because I can do about 30 pizzas.

4) Drinking to Avoid Stale Beer:

Community Beerman Jimmy Carbone of Jimmy's No.43 hosted Dave Brodrick of Blind Tiger, author John Holl, writer Jake Davis and Sam Richardson of Other Half Brewing to talk about the issue of freshness in canned and bottled beer:

There are so many new breweries on the shelves piling up. It puts a lot of onus on the customers to pay attention to who's doing it the right way and get to know where they buy their beer. There are so many brands and you just don't know how long they're been sitting there.

5) Sous Vide in a Sink and a NYC Apartment Charcuterie:

On this week's episode of Cooking Issues, Dave Arnold answered his usual slew of listener questions this week, which featured an explanation of how curing charcuterie in an NYC apartment might work and how to build a sous vide bath in a three-compartment sink:

You have to remember that you're never heating all the way to the bottom of your tank, especially if you've got food down there.