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Hello, you're listening to Dave Arnold on Cooking Issues on the Heritage Radio Network, the show where you call in with your cooking issues and we try to solve them. Be they technical, uh be they not technical, we are going to work on them for you. Uh the call-in number here is 718-497-2128. That is 718-497-2128. And I'm told that for live call-ins, uh, we are authorized to give away uh heritage meat uh pork shops, Porter House Pork Shops.
So that's an incentive to call in. Please do call in with your questions. I'm here with uh Nastasha Lopez, also working at uh Cooking Issues. And uh we we actually have some email questions. If you want to email questions, email them to N Lopez at French Culinary.com.
Right. Okay. So uh let's start Nastasha with some questions that were emailed in from uh last week. Uh what what do we have here? Uh we have one from Mike who wants to know about uh curing a large cut of meat, I think, or pastrami.
All right, so uh yeah, so Mike is making pastrami uh with beef blade and uh he's been pumping it with uh liquids to to cure it. And he wants to maybe move to uh a vacuum machine. Now, some of the advantages of the vacuum machine is you don't have to use a lot of brine. You can go dryer uh with a dryer rub and cure quickly, and I can assure you that curing in a vacuum bag does work. Uh I apologize to Mike.
We we actually just got a vacuum marinator so that we can run a bunch of different vacuum tests and see uh exactly what the optimum vacuum level is. There's some disagreements. Some chefs I know when they put their uh they they'll use something like uh an instacure powder or Morton's tender quick, which is basically salt plus uh curing powder in it. Curing powder is is n nitrates, uh nitrites rather. Uh and uh, you know, these are these aren't some sort of crazy thing.
These have been used for hundreds of years, so I don't want anyone saying we're adding some sort of crazy newfangled, you know, artificial crap to it. Nitrites have been in cured meats for centuries and centuries, uh actually millennia in the form of impurities that are already naturally occurring in salt deposits around the world. Uh so that aside, it's a little uh tirade tangent for you. Uh but um if you just you know either use a brine or rub uh your cure onto the meat and pack it in a vacuum bag. I think you'll notice uh I usually use a high vacuum.
Some you know professionals say that you actually don't want a super high vacuum because it can actually at a certain point hinder the uh uh uh you know the penetration of the brine, but I haven't tested it yet, so I don't know. But you'll notice much, much quicker penetration uh in in a vacuum bag, much quicker. So for instance, I haven't done pastrami this way, but uh pork belly, uh you can get almost all the way through a pork belly overnight in uh in in a vacuum bag. Um so vacuum machine is definitely a great way to accelerate a cure. Now, from a taste standpoint on a long cured item, I would never use it to accelerate a cure on a long cooked uh long cured item rather, like uh like a ham, let's say, because uh a lot of the flavor of a ham, you know, I'm specifically talking about you know longer cured hams, uh, has to do with the length of time it takes for uh the curing to happen.
So in general, even though I'm a tech guy, uh things that are cured over a long period of time for flavor, I tend not to uh try to accelerate too much. Uh thanks, uh Mike. If that didn't answer your question, please you know post uh something on the forums at uh www.cookingissues.com forward slash forums or email us another question. Uh thank thanks for the question. And uh before I take the next question, I'd like to say that uh today's show is sponsored by the Hearst Ranch.
Hearst Ranch is the nation's largest single source supplier of free range, all natural, grass-fed and grass finished beef. Since 1865, the Hearst family has raised cattle on the rich, sustainable native grasslands of the central California coast. The result is beef with extraordinary flavor that's as memorable and as natural as a surrounding landscape. For more information, go to www.hurstranch.com. That's www.hurstranch.com.
Actually, I'd like to taste some of that stuff, huh? Yeah. Maybe they'll send us some. Yeah. Uh and again, the number to call in for this show is 718 497 2128.
Cooking issues at 718 497 2128. Alright, Nastasha, what's up next? We have another question from uh an email from Jason who's a health nut and is going to buy uh circulator from Polyscience. Wants to know the best way to cook a skinless chicken breast. Uh he wants to avoid butter, duck fat and use something like olive oil or coconut oil.
Uh should he bag it, should you brine it, bone off? What do you think? All right, so uh what is the name again? Jason. All right, Jason.
So uh you know you caught me at a little bit of a disadvantage because I almost never cook for health. I almost always cook for pure taste. So I you know I'm always a little bit out of sorts when uh when you know I have to comment on um nutrition. Uh however, uh if if you just want to know how to make a skinless chicken breast taste as good as you can, uh you've gone the right route with it with a circulator. Now here's the problem.
If you vacuum a chicken breast uh at in in a vacuum bag and then circulate it, uh you can uh I would I would do it at 63 degrees, by the way. If that's a little too uh a standard chicken breast in a vacuum bag, uh 63 degrees for roughly uh an you know an hour or so is more than enough, that's a good way to go. If that's a little too underdone for you, uh I would up it to um maybe sixty-four. I wouldn't go above sixty-five. I know this runs counter to what you're taught your whole life, but uh trust me, try it uh and I think you'll you'll agree.
Uh I tend not to like to vacuum the chicken because when you do, it tends to take on a canned chicken texture. It's almost too juicy. And when you bite into it, all the juices kind of flow out and uh and then the third and fourth chew are a little drier than I than I like. So I tend to uh put them into Ziploc bags and cook them that way. Oh, uh by the way, for anyone listening uh who doesn't know what the hell we're talking about, uh the the piece of equipment we're talking about is an immersion circulator.
And an immersion circulator is basically just a piece of equipment that uh lets you keep very, very accurate uh water temperatures. And this allows you to cook things very, very accurately. So you never you never overcook them, you don't have to monitor them too much. It's very simple. Uh you know, food doesn't dry out.
It's it's a great piece of equipment. And you know, if you look under uh low temperature and sous vide on www.cookingissues.com, we have enough information to choke you uh on uh emerging circulators if you want to know about it. So go go look at it there. But they're actually a fantastic piece of equipment that people are using more in their homes. Now, back to your question.
I wouldn't vacuum bag them, even though I love vacuum machines. I would use uh Ziploc bags. Uh and the way you put it the reason is is because if if you don't put a vacuum on it, you're gonna get much more of a natural texture in the chicken breast. Now, you can use any liquid you want, really, you know, from chicken stock up to uh olive oil. I tend not to bag too much with uh my really flavorful olive oils because I think the taste interaction can be a little bit strange sometimes.
But you know, you can use basically any anything you want. And you don't need that much of it in the bag, actually. So you just seal the bag up till it's almost done, and then the trick is dunking it under water. Uh and then the water basically displaces all the air so that you get a nice uh seal. Uh and it's very, very simple to do.
There's there's uh, you know, not to pump the blog again, but on WW.cookingissues.com, there's a section on Ziploc bagging uh with step-by-step picture instructions on how to do a really good uh bagging job with a ziplock. And I I can I can make my Ziplocks very quickly look as good as a vacuum-packed job to you know the untrained eye. So I think that's really kind of the way the way to go. And you can, you know, season it normally. You don't really need to brine it, uh, except for the brine's gonna increase the salt level on the inside of the meat, which is gonna give you uh kind of probably a better taste and texture, but you don't need it from an overcooking standpoint because you're not gonna overcook it.
Now, because you're not gonna have a lot of texture on this because it's a skinless chicken breast and it's gonna be somewhat soft, these preps are usually better, I think, kind of chopped up for use in salads. They're really good for cold preps uh the next day. Um, but you know, I tend not to eat skinless uh chicken on its own. But you know, this is a really good technique uh for a cold prep because when it cools down, it's still going to be delicious, it's not going to be dry at all. Uh and so to recap, 63 uh for about an hour, 64 maybe if you like it a little bit firmer.
You think that that got it? Yeah, I think so. All right. Um we have another question. We're gonna wait to see if your friend Michael Isconis calls in.
Oh, yes. Uh we have a question regarding uh a recipe from Michael Asconus, the pastry chef at La Bernadette. Uh and I was too stupid to uh text him beforehand to ask him the answer to the question. So we we have a text into him, so we're gonna handle that uh that question towards the uh end of the uh program. But since we were off last week, why don't you tell them how you spent your fourth of July and what you cooked?
Ah, well, okay. So uh, you know, Fourth of July, I usually go either to Maine or to Cape Cod or some combination thereof. Um this year I went to Cape Cod, and and you know, as many of you know, Cape Cod in Massachusetts is you know kind of lobster country. The guys in Maine actually make fun of the Cape Cod lobsters. They say the main lobsters taste better than the Cape Cod lobsters, and the guys in Canada make fun of the main lobsters.
So for the further north you go, the more they make fun of the southerly lobsters. Anyway, that's that's that's neither here nor there. But uh so anyway, so main lobsters, right? They have a there's a catch size limit. Like you can't catch lobsters that are too small, and you can't catch catch lobsters that are too big, and it's based on uh the measurement of the of the back shell.
And that's a conservation uh method, uh, you know, effort, and uh uh it must be working because the the you know the lobster uh fishery in in Maine is actually still quite healthy. Uh now in Cape Cod, they don't have those kinds of limits on male lobsters. Male lobsters you can basically take any size you want if you dive for them. There's certain I think there's limits on how many you can take per day. You're not supposed to take big females because lobsters unlike most creatures as they get older and older and older they still bear more and not just the same amount of eggs more and more and more and more eggs.
So an older lobster female lobster is much more valuable to uh the lobster population than than a young female lobster. So you shouldn't take the older the older females. But um the older males I kind of think are are fair game. Now a lot of people think lobsters big lobsters they that they taste bad and this is just because two problems one they cook them too long because they have to cook them a long time to to cook them through. And secondly they don't uh they don't serve them properly.
Lobsters as they get older the muscle fibers get bigger and bigger and coarser and coarser. So if you were to bite into uh the lobster tail let's say of an old lobster it would taste kind of rubbery and tough now the trick with this is is to just slice the tail and meat like that into discs and then the fibers are already shortened and you're actually biting uh you know kind of with the grain and it breaks apart and you know it has a different texture from a young lobster tail but it's still you know very delicious. So uh you know a lot of people they don't kind of they don't believe this and you know usually the biggest lobster I'll cook is like six eight eight pounds which is still a monster by most standards. I mean uh you know you know most people are out there with their you know one two and three pound lobsters sissies and uh and so uh what I you know what we did is I went walked into this store in Truro mass and uh I was like yeah what kind of lobster you have what kind of you know what what kind of size lobster the guys 20 pounds it was 20 pounds 20 pound lobster I was like, geez, 20-pound lobster. I bought it, basically uh and a 20-pound lobster is really, really big lobster.
And I thought if you could get any lobster to prove my point that big lobsters aren't any worse than small lobsters, that, you know, it's gonna be harder to get one bigger than about uh 20 pounds. Now the guy in the store told me that a 20 pound, this 20-pound lobster is like 130 years old. And you know, and then everyone else was like, oh my God, you're eating something that's 130 years old, it's older than anyone at the table, you know, that the lobster almost could have fought in the civil war, all this kind of thing. And but that's the nonsense. First of all, that's the lobster does not fight in the civil war.
The lobster is sitting at the bottom of the ocean, you know, killing other lobsters when it can and hiding whenever it molts. You know, it's still just a lobster. It's still, you know, its brain function doesn't get any higher just because it's old, right? I mean, that's kind of thing. This kind of sentimental notion that just because it's old, you know, gooey duck clams can live to be uh 140, and uh, you know, people don't have that much simple well, I don't know anyone that has a lot of sympathy for the gooey duck.
Anyway, anyway, that's aside the point. The fact of the matter is, this lobster wasn't actually 100 and uh 30 years old. Uh, you know, that's based on these kind of crazy formulas that they have for lobsters, uh, you know, that don't kind of fit older lobsters. It was probably, but I mean, it was old. I mean, it's be honest.
It was probably like 60 or 70 years old, you know. So uh anyway, uh so here's what I did. I had the guy at the lobster store. He wanted to cook it for 45 minutes, which obviously would have made it, you know, inedible and terrible, and this is why people think big lobsters are bad. So instead, what I had him do is I had him steam it for uh eight minutes.
This kills the lobster and it lets the meat separate from the shell. Then I got metal shears because the shell is so darn thick, and I cut the all the meat out of it, right? And then I sliced it thin and I ziploc bagged it uh with butter, and then I quick poached each individual slice. So each slice was cooked very quickly, which preserves the texture. The lobster that's cooked for too long gets mushy, and it was sliced properly so that when you chewed it, it wasn't gonna be tough.
And it was like I think it was one of the best lobsters I've ever made. And it, you know, it certainly it fed our whole crew. Delicious. So anyway, that you can check out that post uh also, you know, pumping ourselves again, why not on www dot cooking issues dot com anyway uh I've been told that we're uh what are we we're going to break yeah we're gonna we're going out to break and we'll be right back with cooking issues funky sound nest hey listen to the man follow hey back cold bloody boom gotta get over before we go under beep up we gotta get over before we go under hey country it didn't say what you mean it just changed brand new funky president stock market going up jobs going down and no fucking job to be found uh keep going up change from my glass nah I drank from the paper didn't bag beep a beep we got get over listen to me let's get together and basic let's get together cut some land raise our food like the man save our money like the mob like this old job hello, God. Hello!
Turtle! Get down and bring his load. Get sex to sex to get focus! And dang. Love the baby.
Love it. Don't make it fun, but can you make it twice? I like it. Beep, beep, bum. We gotta get over before we go under.
You are listening to Dave Arnold on Cooking Issues on the Heritage Radio Network, where you call in and we answer your cooking issues. Uh please call in to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497 and 2128. Call in with any cooking related question you want, and you will get free delicious pork chops. Emailing won't get you the park.
Yeah, email sorry folks. You know, email em no no uh no pork chops with uh with the emails. Um uh we we talked about uh lobster. I'm gonna I'm gonna wait a couple more minutes to see whether or not we get Michael Sconis to uh get him on the phone to talk to him about his recipe. Um the we're talking about the the question came from actually uh uh uh person uh who reads our blog and she it came from the person who sent us uh yeah mana yeah delicious mana uh candy which you can also read about uh uh on www.cooking issues.com pump pump pump.
Okay. Uh so uh let's talk about cocktails for a minute while we're while we're waiting. Um next week, I guess uh I'm going off to New Orleans to go to the Tales of the Cocktail, which is a you know kind of a cocktail convention that they have in New Orleans every year, and you know, a lot of the great, you know, bar people go every year, and it's uh it's kind of a crazy debauched drink fest. It's in New Orleans in the middle of the summer because you know they're too cheap to have it in New Orleans any other time, and no one, no one wants to go to New Orleans, you know, in the middle of July, where it's a billion degrees and you know, a hundred percent humidity and sit in uh you know some of the best old bars in the country, unair conditioned, you know, drinking yourself into oblivion, but yet I do it I do it every year. Uh anyway, uh just kidding, it's great, great event.
Um the um so this year I'm going uh and I'm part of a seminar called uh what's it called? The science of stirring. No, I did shaking last year. Uh you know, Evan Evan Clem, the you know, the kind of well-known bartender, he's kind of the you know the head of the BR guest, you know, mega restaurant chains bar program, and uh he pulls me in uh every year. Last year we did kind of the science behind shaking a cocktail, where we we actually came up with some interesting uh information, which is as far as the dilution of your cocktail uh is concerned, and as far as the temperature of your cocktail is concerned, uh really with as long as you're within reasonable limits, the way you shake the cocktail doesn't make a bit of difference really.
Uh it it makes a definite difference on the also the ice type doesn't make as much difference as as you think. It makes a different difference uh difference on the texture of the drink, how it tastes, you know, the texture of it in your mouth. But in terms of temperature and dilution, it it doesn't really make that that much much of a difference. This year we're taking on uh stirring, and you'll have to uh you know we'll I'm I suppose I shouldn't post the answers before the seminar. That would mean people didn't have to go to the seminar.
Yeah, right. So uh we'll be posting that stuff hopefully after next week after the after the seminar Tales of the Cocktail. But something I will talk about is uh dilution and pre-batching cocktails. So you know, a lot of times you have to make uh a cocktail and then you know b batch it all together. Let's say you're doing an event or a function or party, and you have to put all the cocktail together beforehand and then serve it out.
Uh and a lot of people have kind of crazy ideas in their heads on how to figure out how much water to add to a pre-batch cocktail to uh to really get it to work properly when you when you put it in the fridge. Uh so let's pre bat by the way, pre-batch cocktails. It's very hard to pre-batch uh a shaking cocktail because uh you know you really do need to shake a shaking cocktail to get the texture right. We ran side by side blind taste tests of uh drinks that are uh should be shaken versus stirred, and uh and we we did we did them both shaken and stirred. So we did a daiquiri, which should be shaken, and we did you know a daiquiri stirred and a daiquiri shaken, blind with blindfolds on, and you easily tell the difference.
And we also took drinks that should be stirred, like a Manhattan uh, we know, which is uh you know, whiskey, we used uh you know, rye whiskey, uh vermouth, uh some bitters. And uh you know, we we stirred some and shook some and tasted them blind, and huge huge difference. Uh now uh the shaking is hard to emulate in a pre batch cocktail unless you have liquid nitrogen. It turns out we've done some tests that if you if you chill a drink alimute that you've already diluted with liquid nitrogen, you can emulate the texture of a shaken drink pretty well. But uh stirred drinks uh are basically good if you just dilute them properly and then chill them because uh basically stirring is just a chilling and diluting process, it's not a texturizing process, and that's why that's why you use it for those drinks.
You don't want to add a lot of extra texture in a stirred drink. So, you know, if you can, you choose a stirred drink to do your pre batched drinks with. And then here's how to determine how much how much water to add. Make your uh make a single drink, right? Make it.
Uh using volume like you normally would with jiggers. Then uh weigh that on an accurate scale. Weigh the drink, write that number down, right? That's how much drink you're starting with. Now, uh add your ice, stir it, just like you're making a normal drink.
Normal drink, right? Stir it, right? Then strain it. Now weigh how much the drink weighs now. That is uh that is the weight of the total cocktail.
If you subtract the weight of the liquor that went into it, the liquor and ingredients that went into it from the final weight of the cocktail, you have basically how much water you should add, right? And that's really the best way to determine instead of guessing in your head 25%. And it also doesn't work to try and dilute it by just diluting it with water when it's at room temperature and then tasting it, because when you chill it, the balance is going to be off. So you really just want to make a drink the traditional way and then weigh how much water is in it. It's slightly more complicated than that because some of your liquor is actually held on the ice, and so you have to do a lot of fancy finagling.
Uh but within two or three grams of uh water, uh it you know, you're gonna be pretty much right doing it the way the way I just told you. It seems complicated, but you're I think your your pre-batched drinks are gonna thank you for it. And you only need to do it once. If you write down the recipe, uh you can get that recipe right every time. You don't have to re-retest it every time.
So it's a little bit uh of a pain in the butt, but well, well worthwhile, right? Right Snazzi? Yes. Yes, yes. Uh okay.
So uh see that's uh pre batching, uh pre batching cocktails. What else should what else should we talk about? Let's talk about the meat that's coming in today. Oh my god, yeah. So okay, so that what's the name of the butcher again?
Ooh, it's like Sissy. Sismer, yeah. Sidmer, yeah. In uh where are they at? Chicago?
Yeah. So there's uh there's this butcher shop, and uh, you know, I'm I'm ruining the name, but it's like Sismer, C Z C Z what? C Z I M E R. Yeah, uh, and uh these guys have been around for decades and decades. I think they're, you know, a couple generations old the business now at this point, right?
Right. Yeah. And uh they specialize in uh bizarre rare meats, right? And meats that you wouldn't normally get. Uh so what does that mean?
I'm not talking, you know, buffalo, although they do have that. I'm talking beaver and lion. Uh, you know, uh what else? What else we get? Raccoon, bear, you know, things that you can't you can't normally get, and meats that you can't normally uh buy because you can't, you know, in this country, you can't buy meat that's been hunted by a hunter.
You have to know a hunter who legally bags meat in order to get these kind of game meats. So before I get people writing in telling me I'm a horrible person for ordering lion meat to taste, uh, and by the way, we're gonna we're gonna taste a tiny piece of each one of them, then bag them and cook them sous vide because we'd think that these tough, you know, tough older meats are gonna be best that way. Anyway, so before you get angry at me uh about ordering these these meats, um, you should know kind of how it how it happens that these meats uh are sold. Uh it's not a a pretty story, but here's how it is people get lions as pets because they're crazy. Right?
I mean, if they're insane, you know. So they get lions as pets, or they have lions and they use the lions as uh to breed, you know, like they're breeding lions either for I don't know for what, for Zeus, circuses, whatever, for other, you know, freak shows who want lions as pets, right? So they they breed them, and then once they're no longer um good breeders anymore, or if someone has a pet and they don't want that pet anymore, they give them to uh animal brokers. And uh, you know, just like stray cats, you know, you give a your stray cat and they get put down. You don't have to see it, you don't have to do it, but you basically know your cat's being put down.
The same thing happens with a lion. So they get the lion, and if they can't sell it, which often they can't on an older lion, the lion is killed. The actual the most valuable part about is the skin. The skin is sold off for you know for fur, for lion fur for whatever, you know, whatever, making rugs, rugs, I guess, I don't know. But then the meat is basically a byproduct.
So you know, rather than let it go to waste, uh, you know, these guys uh, you know, in Chicago uh buy, you know, the the meat from these uh exotic animal brokers and then freeze it and resell it. So you're you no one's going out and slaughtering lions for the purpose of food. These are you know animals that probably shouldn't have been in the situation that they were in, but not through the fault of the you know the butcher. Uh it's just you know, you know, once it once you've killed the animal, you might as well put it to use. So we're gonna taste uh all of these meats.
What do we have coming in? We got we have lion, black bear, a whole raccoon, and two beaver tails. Two beaver tails. Uh I thought we also got some of the regular beav beaver meat, too. No, no.
I thought we did. No. You sure? I'm pretty sure. Hmm.
Beaver tail is an interesting one. They'll yak. Oh, yak, yes, yes. The Tibetan favorite yak. We'll get some yak milk cheese.
We'll go get some yak milk cheese, and then we'll have you know, yak, yak, and yak. We'll get some yak butter and we'll make Tibetan Tibetan tea with yak butter floating on the top of it, which is actually wretched. I don't know how people drink that, but uh we'll make it, you know, in the sense of you know, we'll we want to be authentic. Authentic sous vide Tibetan dinner. Anyway, um Beaver's an interesting one because uh back in the day here's the thing the butcher laughed laughed his uh you know rear off because uh he says there's no meat on a beaver tail, and he always has people asking him to to to buy it to eat it, but he says there's basically no meat on it.
So you know what are you gonna do? And um, you know, I think the reason most people call him, I don't know how much of a history buff he is, but for all you history buffs out there, um, you know, back in the day, there were many days, not just Fridays, when Catholics weren't allowed to eat uh meat. There were many, many, you know, fast days uh and Lenten days, and on those days you weren't allowed to eat meat. You could only eat fish, right? And so that you know that in fact that's my theory why in Italian uh recipes you'll find very few recipes that use dairy and uh fish, because it wasn't just meat you weren't allowed to have on a fast day, it was it was dairy.
So you didn't cook with dairy, you didn't cook uh, I believe also eggs, and you didn't cook with meat. So these were f you know basically fish-based uh fish-based dishes, and this helped, you know, fuel the uh the dried stockfish uh the you know and the you know the dried cod um you know dried fish business for hundreds of years. Uh anyway, uh, you know, and there's all sorts of religious reasons why they thought meat inflamed the passions and it was good, etc. blah, blah, blah. So anyway, so uh beaver tail, because uh, you know, they had kind of you know, whack this is pre-Linnaeus, they had wacky, you know, ways of categorizing animals.
So the the actual beaver was a uh an animal and you couldn't eat that on the fast days, but beaver tail was seen kind of like fish. And so you could eat beaver tail on a fast day, and so you actually get these recipes or these mentions anyway in medieval documents of beaver tail cooking beaver tail. And this has got to be why this guy gets the interest in it, because there's lots of uh history buffs out there who, you know, are are doing this kind of thing. Oddly also, whale clearly is not labeled as a meat, strangely, it was labeled as a fish. So if you could get a hold of some whale meat back in the day, I don't advocate that, but if you could get a hold of it, you could have that on a on a on a fast day uh as well.
I believe. I'm not sure well how seals classified, but uh I don't know. Anyway, so we'll let you know how the uh the beaver tail and the lion is. The lion's actually supposedly interesting because if you think about it, there's no commercially raised meat that we have that uh comes from a carnivore. Uh and supposedly uh, you know, they have a completely different uh taste uh carnivores do.
So we'll we'll let you know uh when that when that comes in. Uh what's going on, Sassy? We have two more minutes, and then uh we're trying to look up the tables from Douglas Baldwin. Okay, so uh I have a uh a question that came in. Who do you come in from?
Caleb. Caleb, I have a question coming in from Caleb who's looking up uh you know Doug Douglas Baldwin. Douglas Baldwin has a on online a sous vide, and he just came out with uh a book on Sous vide cooking. And he's uh he's a mathematician. I believe he lives uh out in Colorado somewhere near Denver, uh, and he has a bunch of tables uh in there uh that allow you to calculate uh exactly when food's temperature, when food has come up to temperature when you're cooking it uh sous vide or low temperature in in in a circulating bath.
And for you know, for those of you not not hip to the fact uh this is uh you know a huge way of cooking now, is that you'll put something in a bag and then put it in water and it very gently and very evenly heat heats food. But a lot of people when they're starting out, they worry a lot, lot, lot about whether or not the inside of their food has come up to temperature. Uh and so they'll do things like stick thermometers into it, which is I think really kind of fraught with problems because uh you have to get the thermometer in the right place, otherwise you don't get the right answer. Uh and you know, a lot of times you won't get it in the right place, and then you'll un undercook something. Um, you know, the thermometer can puncture the bag and you can get leaks, and this causes problems.
I most often I think thermometers cause more problems uh than than they help. So uh Douglas Baldwin, being a mathematician, along with Nathan Mirvold, who's coming out with the uh the super book uh in December, I think, uh November, December, on cooking. Nathan Mirvol is a uh the m Microsoft guy who um you know uh has a huge passion for cooking and has probably one of the greatest kitchens in the world, is working with uh Chris Young, formerly the fat duck and fifteen other cooks on on making the world's kind of uh greatest technology cookbook uh you know coming to uh Amazon uh soon. I believe you can actually pre-order it now as of last week if you've got the got the money for it. And uh anyway, so uh Nathan Miravold on a on a website called e-gullet uh a number of years ago, a good number of years ago at this point, published a bunch of tables on uh how to figure out uh how long it would take food to get up to a certain temperature in a water bath based on certain dimensions.
And those tables work and are probably easier to work out than a formula. I don't know uh the formula because we haven't been able to be able to find it yet, but I would definitely look up on e-gullet Nathan Mirvold's tables, which are gonna be much easier to use than a formula, unless you're trying to create your own Excel uh document. Um without having the formula in front of me, it's hard for me to tell exactly what he's doing because he could either be calculating the food based on the fact that it's treating it as a big slab and trying to heat through the slab, or he could be talking about cylinders that are heating through. Uh but I'll tell you this uh all formulas that his formula I'm pretty sure is right. I've seen it once and it it's and it's good, and he's a mathematician, he's he's good at that sort of thing.
But any formula tells you X number of inches per uh X number of minutes per pound or X number of uh minutes per inch are are egregiously false because as as things get bigger, it's not linear how much longer it takes to cook it. I tend not to use these formulas. I tend to cook a couple of things and then store in my mind how big those things are and how long they took to cook, and then just do it that way. And I'm almost never uh, you know, wrong. So I know that an egg uh takes about uh 45 minutes to an hour to get all the way up to temperature.
A rolled chicken, uh, you know, like a like a tochon thing ta takes uh like an hour. I know that uh 36 inch striped bass, the size I normally get takes three hours. You know, so you kind of build up this knowledge. Uh but um I'll try and post some information on that in the forum uh for you sometime this week. Sorry, I couldn't be more accurate on the on the answers.
We should go to break. All right, so we're gonna go to our second break now. Uh please call in to uh claim your pork. You can ask anything, you know, the the price of eggs, although I don't know it right now. Uh uh anything like that at 718-497-2128.
That's 718-497-2128 cooking issues. Don't play those blues so sad. Don't play the blues say magical land. Johnson. My love.
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That's seven one eight four nine seven two one two eight. Call or gets free delicious pork chops. The pastry chef at Labernadan. And so I'm just going to look at the question from Kitchen Girl. Uh Kitchen Girl without the uh it's G uh by the way, if you're looking, she has a blog, if you're looking for a blog, it's Kitchen G R L Kitchen Girl.
Uh that's her that's her blog. And um she sent us some delicious, actually, before I go into a question, some mana candy. So uh did we talk about that last time, Sasdy? Mana? No, talk about yeah.
All right, so you know, mana uh is a r real interesting substance. It uh it it when I'm when I say mana, I mean like mana from heaven, like like in the Bible. Uh and uh, you know, for you know, my whole life, you know, this is something I've you know read about and known about, uh never knew was actually a real a real thing, a real product. Until uh this guy named uh um you know uh Baruch Shruf Sharifi, the uh saffron king, uh uh gave us some. He's like, here's mana.
I'm like, what? What the hell are you talking about, mana? And then I basically I did a a lot a lot of research. It turns out that mana isn't one thing, mana is a huge variety of different products. And in here here's what they all have in common.
One, they're sweet. Okay. Two, they appear as if from nowhere. Uh they you know, they're not they're not cultivated. They're they're wild things, they're providential.
They're uh, you know, they they're kind of their their bonuses. Uh and uh and so you know, those are basically the two main main criteria. Most of them are actually dried uh sap from trees. Uh, you know, probably you know, a lot of it hasn't been researched, actually, strangely, but uh little bugs will chew on the undersides of leaves, the sap will come out, then dry up, uh, and and that dried sap is mana, mixed mixed along with you know, little bits of twigs and leaves and uh other nonsense like that. Another way mana is made is is actually it's it's honeydew, which means that a bug bites into the leaf.
Uh and this is honeydew is you know what aphids make, you know, here in the States, and ants collect it. So what what honeydew is is a bug will bite a juicy leaf or stem of a plant, and the pressure of the sap is so uh strong compared to the bug that it literally shoots uh it shoots sap through the bug and out it's behind. Uh and that's honeydew. I mean it's gross to say it that way, but it's basically like force-pumped bug poop that then uh dries up on the outside into a delicious sweet substance. Uh anyway, so they go out into the desert.
Most of these manas happen in the Middle East, you know, kind of you know, uh, because it's dry enough there for these manas to form. And uh people will go out in the morning with twigs and beat on bushes and catch this mana that comes down uh you know from you know from the bushes and and use it. And uh there's dozens and dozens of different types, but there's a there's a candy that's been made uh, I guess, in you know, the entire that entire area, uh, you know, Iraq, Iran, uh, and uh called gaz in Iran. I forget what it's called in uh in in Iraq, but uh Kitchen Girl sent us some of this mana candy, which is basically just mana uh with a little bit, you know, more sugar and and and nuts in it. I forget whether they put egg whites in.
I have the ingredient list on the on the blog. Uh, but uh it's it's delicious and uh it's got a really unique texture that uh you know that's it's weird, it's kind of chewy and but it breaks, and it's very mana-like. Or you can get the straight mana, which is delicious, you know, uh mixed in in bourbon, uh which we which is incredibly delicious. You can get that from Saffron King. Uh he has a website, the Saffron King.
And this stuff is is crazy because that the not so much the mana candy, that didn't change as you as you bit at him uh all the time. That was more of a textural thing, the candy. Uh, but um the actual mana itself, every bite you take of it tastes a little bit different than the bite you had before, and different people have different perceptions of it. Uh I wrote an article in the uh New York Times on it, which uh you know you can you can search for and we we did a blog post on it. But anyway, it's a long way of saying kitchen girl sent us a question.
Uh you know, the she very kindly sent us the uh the mana, and then she she has a question. She's working on uh a pate de fouie recipe uh pat I never know how to pronounce it, whether it's patate fruit or pate fruit. I'm terrible at that. And and pastry chefs always laugh at me and correct me, as do all the Frenchies at the school, but you know, crap on them. Uh so anyway, so she's working on Michael Osconis's uh his recipe here, and uh basically what you do is is you're cooking the um fru uh fruit puree to a hundred uh and eighty degrees Fahrenheit uh uh with sugar, then you add pectin, sugar, and glucose syrup, and then bring it up to a higher temperature, 225 uh Fahrenheit, and then pour it into a silpat tray to set.
Um and she's having problems with her sugar uh with with the sorry, the fruit burning in the in the puree when she's doing it. Um and ph I don't disagree. I'm sure she is uh having some problems. She says that at 180 degrees Fahrenheit, her fruit is starting to brown and sometimes burn, uh, and that it only gets worse when she adds more sugar. And she's thinking that what's happening is her pan actually is getting too hot.
Uh so she's actually getting scorching because her pan is too hot. Uh now I don't have a lot of uh experience with this, so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna make some random stabs at ways to try and fix this, and then I'm actually going to try and get the actual answer, and I'll post it on in the forums at cookingissues.com. Um but um I guarantee that Michael uh is probably using an induction burner, which is going to be much more accurate as temperature control and so much less likely to scorch than if you're using an open flame burner uh and a pan, especially, you know, I don't know uh you know how good the temperature you know conduction is there, but um anyway, uh 225, you should actually be okay. It shouldn't actually burn if at 225 if you if you have good temperature control at the bottom of the pan. And I know this because uh I've I've been trying to test out um caramelization of uh of sugars and uh and fruits in pressure cookers at temperatures well in excess of that without uh burning.
Uh and so you should be able to do it. So I would uh I would use an induction pan that's got very accurate temperature control to prevent scorching and maybe go slow. Uh and you know she asks at the end, she has a circular immersion circulator, can she do it in a water bath? No, there's no way to get uh a water bath up to um up to 220 225 unless you put it under pressure, but then you're you're you're ruining the whole point of boiling it isn't the temperature actually. It's it's at a certain temperature you've gotten rid of enough water that when it cools down, it'll have enough solids.
So if you if you do something in a water bath, you're not boiling the water off. And any of these pectin and candy recipes with sugar are basically requiring that you remove a certain amount of water. And the way that you guarantee that you've removed it is by reaching a certain temperature at atmospheric pressure. Now, you could I've never tried this actually, you could maybe do a very low temperature pat fui in uh in uh in a in a rotor vap it's kind of an interesting question you know what I mean you like if you evaporate the water off of uh off of uh you know uh you know a a mixture under vacuum I should be able I've never thought of this before crap this might work yeah you like it like we could do a low temperature one of these because the the pectin needs to make it to a certain temperature to uh to work right so it needs to get up to at least regular boiling but I could take something to regular boiling then throw it in the in the roto vap I could set the roto vapid boiling right dissolve the pectin in it right and then and then evaporate off the water and I know exactly how much I know how much water because I can look up I know seriously like I can I I can figure out like what my finished total solid solids content is pectin is one of these a pectin's a hydrocolloid it's natural we've been using it for you know since there's been fruit we've been using pectin. I don't want to hear that we're chemicals or any crap like that.
Pectin's great but standard pectins that you use for these kinds of things pat fui they they uh first of all they need to be heated up uh to I think to boiling or roughly there close to there to to work properly but also they require two things acidity and high soluble solids. They need uh uh and what that means is something like sugar that's gonna bind all the water that's that that's left there so that the gel uh so that the pectin gels and forms a good uh thing that's why if you try to make a jelly and there's not enough acid it doesn't work and why you like you know you always add not just for flavor to make a tart but to make it work and why if you don't cook your jelly long enough it's not going to set right that's how pectin works. Caramels, on the other hand, are basically just solidifying sugar by removing water. Or, you know, f candies, rather, caramel, you're actually breaking the breaking the sugar down. Anyway, that's basically how it works.
But I should be able to do a a uh pectin, right, at a at a at a much lower temperature using a standard pectin and a rotovap, making an uncooked uh thing with traditional pectin. Maybe I'll try it. Of course, you know, you can use you can use different kinds of pectins and get the same uh effect without having to go to such high soluble solids using a kind of pectin called uh um L LMA Lomethoxyambidated pectin, which you know, uh whatever, but most people don't have access to that. Of course, most people don't have access to a roto vap either, so what the hell am I talking about? Uh okay.
We should tell people that you're teaching a class uh on the 28th for high-tech cocktails at the school if they're interested. I am yes, you are. When? The July twenty eighth. Okay, July twenty-eighth.
Uh Nils Noran, the head of uh the uh whole Megillah at the French Culinary Institute, and I uh are cooking a uh teaching a high-tech uh cocktail class for the public. Yeah, for the public. And basically what you do is you come to the French Culinary Institute and we'll do, you know, like two or two or three cocktails that you know that you can't possibly do at home using like a using a rotary evaporator and liquid nitrogen. Well, you could, I mean, if you're Nathan Miravold, you could do anything at home. But you know, uh we use uh most of you can't do at home.
And then we're gonna actually teach you some technology that you can use, like for instance, how to clarify lime juice in in 20 minutes. This is something we do. It's actually, you know, that technique is exactly one year one year old. Wow. Yeah, cool.
Uh anyway. So yeah, come uh look go to uh www.Frenchculinary.com and uh you can look up that class. Um you know that's uh we're actually headed back there. We got a lot of cocktail tests to do uh back at the at the French culinary. I'm slightly, I have to say, I'm slightly disappointed.
So am I that nobody called in to claim their pork. I enjoyed all your email questions. Uh please send more email questions. But if you can call in live, it gives me the opportunity to speak to you, which I enjoy. I'm you know, I like talking over the phone.
This is why I never answer emails, but I do speak over the phone if you can reach me. Uh so next week we're gonna be here live again. With Harold McGee. Warold McGee. Harold McGee will be our telephone guest.
He's not gonna be live in the studio, but he's gonna call in and he'll be here answering your questions as well. So if you don't care what I have to say about your questions, perhaps you will care about uh what Harold McGee has to say about your questions. And next week the say a number will be the same 718-497-2128. Uh Cooking Issues Today has been brought to you by the Hearst Ranch. Hearst Ranch is the nation's largest single source supplier of free range, all natural, grass fed, and grass finished beef.
I'm Dave Arnold, and this is Cooking Issues on the Heritage Radio Network. Oh, you daddy got me on the score. And I don't know where I'm at.
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