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Supposed to meet my baby. Between it and it's late. You got my head all twisted. And I guess can't get it straight. You are listening to Cooking Issues.
I'm Dave Arnold. We're coming to you on the Heritage Radio Network. It's a show Cooking Issues, a show where you call in and we solve your cooking issues, related or not. Uh today, Cooking Issues is sponsored by Acme Smoked Fish, located in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Acme has been a mainstay in New York's culinary landscape for over fifty-five years.
Using old world recipes, Acne produces the finest smoked salmon, whitefish, and sable that the Cerning Palets demand. For information on where to find Acme, Blue Hill Bay or Ruby Bay products, visit WW.acme Smokedfish.com. And they actually supply most of the most of the big places in the city. So even if you don't know you've had Acme, you've probably had Acme. Now, the number to call in to the radio show, we're here between 12 and 1245 every Tuesday, is 718 497 2128.
That's 718-497-2128. And we already have our first caller for the day. Hello? We got uh we got Jordan on the line. Yeah, I'm right here.
Hey, how are you doing? So what's your question? Hey, I'm doing pretty well. Um, so uh I want to throw a barbecue for my wife's birthday, and I've been experimenting with uh just basically trying to cook ribs in a sous vide. I've got a sous vide supreme.
Um I've been experimenting uh cooking the ribs in that. Um trying to get them to the point where they're like where they're fairly soft and yielding, and at the same time they'll still stay on the bone. Because my my plan is to basically keep them in the machine until guests arrive, and then I just want to finish them on the grill. Right. Right?
Right. That's uh that's a good call. May I just say before we go any further that you are in luck for being the first caller today? You have won some Heritage Foods Boneless Barbecue Riblets. So No kidding.
Yeah, no kidding. So that should go uh that should go uh pretty, you know, pretty well with your barbecue. But so the cool. Here's the thing. So uh typically when we're gonna do a rib, you can do a rib at any temperature between about fifty four four Celsius, which is rare.
I wouldn't recommend that because it's kind of uh weird. People aren't used to it. All the way up to a traditional temperature of like 80, but I would recommend something closer to 60. It's a little bit pink on the inside still, but it's uh you know it's it's really uh it's it's a good nice temperature. And the good thing about cooking uh this way and what we're talking about is low temperature cooking.
For those of you not aware what we're doing is we're sealing the food in a bag and we're using a water bath to very accurately keep the temperature and cook it for a long time. Now what are the advantages of doing it this way as opposed to traditional that we've talked about you know the advantage you want is that the meat's going to stay on the bone it's not going to shred and break apart. So you'll be able even though it's very tender and 60 I would do it for about 48 hours, 48 to 56 hours in that range. Okay that's that's the part I was having trouble with is I've got uh you know I was looking at some stuff from Baldwin and uh a couple other things online and everybody was saying oh yeah you know twelve to twenty four hours tops for the ribs and I just they weren't coming out where I wanted them at all. You said 60 Celsius.
60, yeah what what what temperature were you about one about 140? Well 140. It was 60 is like a magic number because it's 140. It's easy to remember. What what what temperature were you using?
Uh I tried everything between uh about one thirty five to one fifty five. But the the factor that I was not getting right with the time to cook and I was afraid if I left it that long I was afraid if I left it uh you know forty eight hours or more I was concerned number one that I was gonna lose some structural integrity in the bone itself and and number two I was just I was concerned it just wasn't gonna stay on the bones. But you're saying that even at 48 hours it's gonna stick to the bone enough that I can toss it on the on the grill, it's not going to fall into the rack or anything. Absolutely. Let me let me put it to you this way, and uh we'll we'll we'll leave it leave it at this.
Right or wrong, after 24 hours it had the texture of skirt steak. Awesome. Yeah, right, is that right? After 24 hours, they should have had the texture right about of skirt stake, and after another twenty-four to thirty hours, it'll have the texture of short ribs. Okay, yeah, that's that's much closer to what I'm looking for.
Yeah. Alrighty, super. Look at uh stay on the line because we've got to figure out a way to get you these uh these boneless barbecue riblets, and thanks so much for calling in. I think we already have we already have another collar, so we're we're doing well. All right, so uh I have some questions about uh preserving cilantro.
Essentially, every single time I buy it, it seems to turn into an unusable pile of mush and all the aromatics just leave it pretty much right away. So I was wondering if there's a way to render it more stable. I don't have a roto vap or anything, so I'm looking for a more conventional method. Right. Cilantro actually, even in the rotovap when you wrote a vap, but it doesn't stay uh stable.
This is actually uh an interesting question. Uh the next segment we have, um Harold McGee's gonna be on. He's done a lot of uh tests with preserving uh things like herbs and berries. My guess the problem is is that my my guess is the way to to do it is gonna be like a quick blanch in shock, but that's probably not what you're what you're looking for. And and the other one would be to keep the moisture level not too high so it's not gonna rot, you know.
Uh right. Uh I do dry it. Yeah, oh yeah, so you're drying it still towel. Yeah, you dry it with a paper towel. I mean you could physically dry it, but it's not the same as fresh.
I'm gonna what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna defer this question and Nastash is gonna remind me to ask uh McGee. Uh m Nastasha's gonna ask me to remind McGee to to answer this question, but I would guess he's gonna he's gonna say something uh of the nature of making sure air can get to it in your fridge so it's not gonna turn bad, making sure that it's not wet when it goes in. He might say something even like allowing water to get to the stems, but I don't know. And he might suggest something like a blanch just to kill anything that's on it, which is what he does with berries. This is not my uh like uh not my exact area of expertise, but you're lucky that McGee's gonna be calling in today because it's right up his alley, so we'll make sure to ask him.
Okay, well actually, just beyond it, Ronnie. I mean, also the aromatics on a plant are just so fleeting. It seems like no matter what you do to it, that they're just gonna leave pretty much right away. I know it's true. You know, I've been doing a lot of experiments recently with uh, you know, when you when we rotovap, a lot of times I'll rotovap uh with for those of you who don't know, low temperature distillation, we do it in a rotor evaporator.
We do it with alcohol just because it's the only way to really lock down those aromatics, and when you do it with water, you really those aromatics they they leave very quickly. We've recently been doing experiments with uh freezing uh with liquid nitrogen to try and keep those aromatics and it works pretty well. Uh, but you know, I'm not ready to necessarily make any statements on it. Do you have liquid nitrogen lying around? Uh no, I don't, but that doesn't mean I couldn't get some.
Right. I mean you could try. I mean, like that that might be good, keeping it like ul ultra frozen like that. Now it's gonna go black as soon as it thaws out, unless you blanch it beforehand, but then you won't have the aromatic. So it you're always gonna try you're always gonna trade, because we do a lot of work with liquid nitrogen where we powder fresh herbs.
When you powder the fresh herbs, when they thaw even with liquid nitrogen, they go black because you've ruptured the uh uh when you blend them, you rush rupture the tissues, and so they they go black and you get that characteristic not so good aroma. So what we'll always do is blanch uh in boiling water and shock, and then that'll preserve it. But you're still you're gonna lose some of that. I mean, uh I haven't again I'll ask McGee this, but you know, it's very hard to get that fresh off of the plant kind of uh kind of a flavor. But yeah, this is well I'll bring up both of these things with McGee because I know he thinks a lot about this, specifically this problem.
Because especially because he grows his own stuff because he lives in California, you know. Right. So I apologize I'm gonna have to defer to later in the segment, but we'll get we'll get an answer for you. Is that sound good? Wait, who am I speaking to by the way?
Absolutely. My name's Chris. Hey Chris, thanks thanks for calling in. We'll get we'll we'll get some answers for you before the hours. Also I just had a quick question about uh sous vide coffee.
I've been just taking my coffee brows and putting them into a bag and basically doing a uh a high duration, low temperature. Right? Like around sixty-eight C. Similar to like Kyoto higher than like a cold coffee, higher than Kyoto style coffee. Yeah, much higher than a cold coffee, but you know, it sort of doesn't leach out all the astringency or anything like that.
Uh provided you don't do it for two days. Yeah, how how do you like it? Uh I like it a lot actually. You know, it seems to strike a good balance as far as having a lot of coffee solids in there versus a lot of the nasty stuff that people don't like. And then you coffee filter it and drink it, or what do you do?
Right, exactly. I just do a coarse filtration. Huh. Well we'll t we'll test that out. I've done the the cold and I've done a lot of work with uh you know with normal like espresso type stuff, but I've never done any kind of in-between work.
We've done it with tea. We've never done it with uh with coffee. That's interesting. You know, you should post something to uh our forums and let's get a discussion going on that and I'll I'll try and uh you know, we uh W dotcookingissues dot com forward slash forums. Post something like that, because uh you know I think that's interesting.
I'm sure a lot of the people uh you know who troll around uh will think that's interesting too. Maybe we can get something something started, huh? All right, great. Alright, cool. Thank thanks a lot for calling in.
We have another caller. We do? Yeah. Oh, hey, we have another caller. Great.
Hello. Hi. Hey, who am I speaking with? This is Nathan. Hey, Nathan.
Um, so I had a question. I I remember a post you made a couple couple months ago, I guess, on cooking issues about um how carbonation was perceived. And you mentioned sort of offhand that you tried stuff that was carbonated or not carbonated, but force forced gas with NO2. That you've tried dissolving in liquids and what that tasted like. Alright, well n uh, you know, uh N2O nitrous and CO2 are the two readily available gases that um that are soluble to a large degree in water.
Uh I don't know and also alcohol uh and also CO2 is very soluble in alcohol, uh and also I don't know about CO2, but N2O, I guess CO2 as well, is also soluble in liquid fats. So these are um you know they're very soluble, which is why you can put a lot of it in and why you can get a big effect. Other gases, you know, other ones that I know of that you know are food grade aren't as as soluble, so you're not gonna get the same kind of now you could definitely get some sort of maybe aroma or flavor out of putting some gases in, and some noxious gases can clearly go in. But I haven't experimented with any other gases because basically, you know, the you get the effect of carbonation, which is what I'm looking for out of the CO2, and then we use the the nitrous as a as kind of a balancing act. So if I want a lively beverage, I want a lot of bubbles in it, and the the the number of bubbles in it is determined by the total pressure dissolved gas in it because that's what's determining how fast it it's bubbling, right?
And also the bubble size for a given liquid and a bunch of other things. But uh if you added that much CO2, it would rip your face off. You know, your nose would be you know we've had I like actually overcarbonated things, but you know, but yeah, I like my face being ripped off. But the uh the the thing is is in order to make it a a really lively bellet beverage but more mellow, we we add the N2O. The side effect of the N2O is that it's sweet, right?
Now, there are situations, like I'm sure people have heard of uh beer gas. So beer gas is a mixture of CO2 and straight nitrogen, and the reason that they put the nitrogen in is because they want to keep their kegs at a high pressure so that they can push uh beer out at a reasonable rate. But they don't want to increase the bubble load by adding too much CO2. So they're adding a relatively insoluble gas, right? Nitrogen to it, so that it can uh so that it basically just adds extra pressure.
I believe also it's nitrogen and not CO2 that's in the Guinness widget that's sitting in the in the bottom of Guinness. And I think what's going on there is they're literally just forcing some bubbles into it to create kind of a creamy head, even though they're not increasing the actual total amount of CO2 in it, right? So there are reasons to use other other gases, but I don't know uh uh anything that would help necessarily in a in a carbonation setting. What do you have any uh ideas or things you want to try? No, I was just wondering because you said you know, CO2 is kind of sour tasting and two O is kind of sweet tasting if there were any other things that would sort of give you other flavors.
Well, poisonous, obviously. I mean I'm sure we could put some you know sulfur containing gases in that would dissolve in just fine, but it would make it taste god awful. You know what I mean? But uh but I haven't I haven't uh you know maybe someone will you know call in or post uh something they think is uh good to try, but they're they're the two readily available food grade gases that dissolve to uh a fairly uh large degree into into your you know, into beverages. So that those are the ones that's why we use them.
Gotcha, cool. All right, thank you very much. Thanks for calling in. All right. So uh that uh brings us uh pretty close.
We're I'm gonna talk about one thing before we go to our first break, but coming up on the next uh right after the next break, uh Harold McGee is gonna be here. He's gonna help us answer answer some questions. One thing I wanted to address, we had an email question. Oh, uh for your calls, by the way, please call in to 718-497-2128. That's uh 718-497-2128.
Uh so we had a really interesting uh question come in by email, and don't worry, all the email questions we'll get to, so don't worry if I'm not doing yours first. Um someone uh called in, uh Matt Matt, how you pronounce Matt's name? Hasa, has Hasa? Has uh uh he his restaurant group uh is using someone who grows their uh own cattle and there's using ultrasound to check the marbling of the meat while while they're alive. So basically you're taking a cow, they're walking, they're putting in an ultrasound uh on the cow, and they're trying to measure uh the fat content of the cow.
So the the the idea is trying to get a higher percentage of prime marbled uh meat than you uh otherwise would. And said he had never uh heard about this tech technique before and he wanted to uh know something about it, know about uh these guys running tests. Um this is uh kind of I don't know how well I don't know how often it's used nowadays, but using ultrasound to test the fat level of animals has a fairly long history. They've been doing it since at least uh the eighties. Um and there's a bunch of different ways.
So basically uh lean muscle meat and uh fat have uh different uh properties for ultrasound. The speed of ultrasound, uh ultrasound is just basically any uh sound wave faster than you can hear it uh than you can hear over about 20,000 uh cycles per second. And it can penetrate uh through tissue, which is why they use it to check for babies for ultrasounds and for medical diagnostics stuff. They can take pictures of it. But uh even simply without an image, uh, you can tell based on the speed that the ultrasound is going through, uh, whether it's going through more fat or more lean.
You could tell because fat also reflects ultrasounds in different ways. Uh, it also uh can I think shift the frequency as it goes through. So there's there's uh several different techniques they can use with ultrasounds to take a live animal uh in a very quick, you know, easy-to-do way out in the field with a with a piece of machinery and uh take a picture and figure out um figure out kind of uh a best guess as to what the uh tech you know the inside of the muscle is like in terms of its fat content. Uh and for in general, there's a lot of interesting work being done with ultrasounds, and a pay a review paper you might be interested in is ultrasonic innovations in the food industry from the laboratory to commercial productions uh by uh Alec uh Alex Patist et al. And that was in uh what journal?
The Journal for Innovative Food Science and Emerging Technologies in July 2007. Uh thanks for calling in and please post a question to the blog on that. I'm interested in talking about ultrasound and meat quality more. And this is our first break. You're listening to cooking issues on Heritage Radio Network.
Two. One, two, three. Just let me walk the new tier than you tell you that you should. Hello. Uh it's Dave Arnold.
You are listening to Cooking Issues on Heritage Radio Network, the show where you call in with your cooking issues, and if we're lucky, we get to solve them. Our number here is 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. And we're coming to you live every Tuesday from 12 to 1245 Eastern Standard Time. And we have a real treat today because uh calling in as our call-in guest is Harold McGee.
And Harold McGee, for those of you that don't know, there's probably a couple of you that don't know, uh, is the uh ultimate all-time master blaster of science as it relates to delicious things in the kitchen. So not industrial science, but the science of how to make things taste better. And he's calling in from San Francisco. Harold, you there? I am Dave.
Hey, good to talk to you. How you doing? Likewise, pretty well, thanks. How about you? Yeah, I'm doing well, doing well.
So uh actually, you know, uh Harold, we have a caller calling in right now, so you want to just uh you want to just take their question real quick and then we'll uh then we'll we'll hit some of the email questions we've got. Sure. Alrighty. So uh who do we have? We have Derek on the line.
Hi, Dave. Hey. Great to talk to both of you. Um big fans, both both you, Dave and Harold. I I was thinking the other day, um, would it would you get more flavor out of your stocks if you started with distilled water because it tends to it pulls in stuff such as carbon dioxide, would it be more would it pull in more flavor from uh whatever meat or what you were using as the base?
Do you think? Harold, what do you think? I I I I wouldn't think you get much of an effect because it's going to become non-distilled water pretty quick as soon as you put stuff into it. And you typically uh what do you think, Harold? Uh I agree completely.
Yeah. There's uh I mean it's it's it's distilled and nice and pure, but the moment you put anything in it, it's not. And uh the difference between I think, you know, uh uh a few parts per million of of minerals in tap water and uh and distilled water by the time you've made the stock is not gonna be detectable. But I mean maybe it depends also on how hard your particular water is. I mean I there the the Jap the you know the Japanese chefs insist that there's a huge difference in combucks uh if if the water is excessively hard and they so they say that you know at the European water, it's hard for them to make a good uh combu stock, so they use uh bottled water.
And of course, for beer brewing it's important, but I just I don't I don't know that for regular stock, right, Harold? I mean wouldn't you wouldn't you think? I mean, yeah, the thing about combu is that it it's so delicate and uh and you're d extracting for a relatively short period of time, you know, just a few minutes. And uh so I think uh, you know, something where you're throwing in meat bones and vegetables and cooking for hours, uh it's gonna be much less important. Of course, you know, if you do the experiment, you taste them blind and you, you know, get back to us, we'll post it because they you know there's no I always say that, you know, whatever I think is uh you know secondary to what you actually observe when you do it.
Awesome. All right. Exactly. All right, thank well thanks so much uh for calling in. And uh but before we go to anyone else, Harold, d I don't know if you heard before we had someone calling in wanted to preserve the uh the kind of the aromatics in cilantro and I said that you might be the the best person to talk to about the best way to keep cilantro in top condition to try and make it smell like you just took it out of your garden.
Do you have any tips on that? Boy it's it's tough with with fresh herbs because the those flavor compounds are really fugitive and the cells are delicate and when they dry out, you know everything gets scrambled up inside the cells and um i in the case of cilantro you know the the more that you uh beat it up, if you try to make a pesto for example, the flavor actually becomes much milder. And so what you want to do I think probably is um uh just dry it as gently as possible just to to minimize the damage to the cells right he says he was doing it with a paper towel but also I think people store it too tightly a wrap you almost want those like uh those bags that allow air to go through them right because I think he's also having loss in the refrigerator. I think he said they were turning brown and and kind of muddy you know what do you think? Uh-huh well yeah I think uh you know if if it's if it's a matter of keeping it alive, you know pres uh by preserving I thought you meant you know drying or something like that.
Uh uh if you're if you just want to keep them alive, then yeah, what I would do is um uh you know, cut the cut the stems to get a fresh uh end, and then put them in a glass of water and then put a bag around the glass. Right. Uh you know, put a a rubber band around the bag and that gives you uh prevents the the cilantro from drying out in the refrigerator, keeps them cool, gives them a supply of water. Uh they're not gonna be happy in the dark, so that won't last forever, but it's better than nothing. And th and there you go, there's the answer from the source.
We got another interesting one that I think is uh up your alley. Uh Harold, uh Jeff Saltz writes in, wrote to Nastasha, uh you know, we had take email questions as well. And says, if we can whip cream with sugar and we can whip egg yolks with sugar, then why can't we whip creme anglaise? And just to verify this morning before we came out to the show, I tried to whip some creme anglaise and indeed it does not whip. Um, I also know that there's some problems sometimes people have problems whipping uh cream even straight cream that's been heated.
I mean what do you what do you think? What do you think's going on here? Well, in the case of the creme anglaise, uh it it's true that uh cream can be can be whipped and egg yolks and egg whites can both be whipped into a foam. Uh but that's true of the r raw versions of those things. Right.
Creme anglaise has been cooked. So uh uh and in the case of cream, whipped cream, y it only whips if it's cold. So it's uh the the conditions aren't right, the proteins have been denatured and the temperature is wrong. But I didn't I mean I took the creme en glaze and cooled it down to like back to fridge temperature, still doesn't whip. There's some there's something about heating cream and then cooling it that may do you need to wait a long time.
What are you disrupting in cream that stops it from whipping like that? Boy, uh with with cream b all by itself, I mean the in in a creme en glaze, of course, the cream is the the the surfaces of the uh oil droplets are gonna get coated by the egg proteins and by you know whatever else you might have in there, sugars in the way, so it's just gonna make it much more difficult. If in the case of just plain old cream, heating it and then cooling it back down offhand, I can't see why that would um uh make it harder to whip. Yeah, I mean I've never done the experiment myself, but I know people who have done it and said that they were able to do it, and I've known people who've done it and said that they weren't able to do it. So I don't know I don't I don't know where that where that is.
But I know that uh the you know the the fat inside the the droplet takes a while to get organized again after it's been heated. You know, you heat it up, it becomes m molten inside, and then as you chill it down, it it begins to crystallize. And I think you know, maybe maybe it just takes a while for you to get that the optimum crystal structure so that when you whip it the the edges of the crystals break through the membrane and begin to stick to each other and and you get a good foam. That makes sense almost like the theory of uh aging uh ice cream base. Right.
Yeah, yeah. All right, Jeff. Well, I hope that uh answers uh your question. Um let me see whether we have anything. Ah, here's one that uh Harold, you'll enjoy.
Uh uh Val called in and said, uh I love the radio show. I'm traveling to Turkey in three weeks. I was wondering if you guys had any suggestions as to where I could find some good selep donderma flower in Turkey. And uh for those of you that know, like uh part of the current interest in uh Celep uh here in the United States is due to an article that uh Harold wrote uh a number of years ago in the New York Times on stretchy ice creams. Uh and Celep is an orchid powder uh that is uh available in Turkey but can't be exported because it's not that it's endangered, but they just don't have enough, they don't allow exports of it.
And uh if you add this to ice cream and then beep the ice cream vigorously it forms a stretchy, stretchy ice cream. It's kind of unlike uh any other ice cream and it's a traditional uh kind of product over there but I don't know of any s I don't never been to Turkey. I've only ever had it smuggled back for me. What about you uh Harold do you know of any? I've never been to Turkey either so um yeah I don't I I really don't know.
Yeah. There are a couple of uh people who um uh who blog who are who know the the Turkey in the Middle East in general really well and who blog and you might uh check their sites and ask them uh one of them is uh Nisa Helu, A N I S S A H E L O U. I forget the the uh the name of her site, but uh she knows that part of the world really really well and she could probably give you some good advice. Right and it's important to get a a good source because uh different salap powders are very different in how much of the active principle they have in it. And uh you know also like they sell some that's just meant for for drinks and it doesn't necessarily have the same uh capability to make uh ice cream stretchy.
Um the two times I had it were smuggled back by uh interns and they just you know they packed it. Uh one time though the the my intern's mom got stopped in the airport for coming from Turkey with you know a vacuum bag thing of you know kind of powder and spent three hours talking to you know a very irate customers official about how it was not any sort of drug product that they were trying to bring back in and it didn't uh you know it it didn't make it in. But you know, I would get as much as you can as as you can. You're gonna use uh anywhere from half to one percent in your recipe, so that gives you any idea of how much you need to buy. And uh Val asked one more question.
Uh, what would the results be with salap ice cream if you froze it and spun it in a Paco Jet? Alas, this will not work. Uh the Paco Jet, I've never had any luck trying to paco jet it. It needs to be manually beaten. After it's frozen, you need to manually freeze it, uh you know, freeze it and then manually beat it.
And that's the only way to get that texture. Would you agree, Harold, or no? Yeah, that that's right. Paco Jet is is great for a lot of things, but it what it's basically doing is chopping the the mixture into tiny little bits, and that's the absolute reverse of what you want to do with uh salap ice cream. You want to create this uh this network like a gluten network in bread dough, and that's what gives gives it that wonderful stretchy quality.
All right, all right. So we're about to go out to our second break. But before we do, I'm gonna give you the number to call in one more time. 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128.
We're coming back with Harold McGee. This is cooking issues. And you're slipping you. You're more than alright. You know you're out of sight.
You've got a shape, bigger mama. That's keep me up tight. Keep me up tight. You know you're out of sight. Hey, the way you do the thing you do, the way you kiss me too.
The way you do the thing you do. The way you kiss the tea. You know you're out of sight. Oh! You got a sweet disposition.
Oh, always right. You got a sweet disposition. You know you're always right. You know just what you're doing, baby. You know you're out of sight.
Out. You're the hand. You saw him, baby. You are listening to Cooking Issues on Heritage Radio Network. I am Dave Arnold.
I'm here in the studio with Nastasha Lopez. And on the telephone, we have Harold McGee. Uh so you have uh one last chance to call in at 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. And I'll sweeten up the pot.
We will give away another packet of riblets if you call in. Uh anyway, so uh Harold, we have a couple more qu email questions we have to get through. Uh so why don't we take take care of those? Um we had someone call uh calling actually last week or right in last week who's interested in kind of Doug Bald Baldwin's uh formula for calculating the uh calculating when meat is gonna be done. And I know you've done uh some work on it, so Douglas Baldwin has this this kind of rather complex, well, not for him, because he's a math professor, but complex uh formula for determining uh the you know the heat of uh uh you know w when meat's gonna get to it.
But uh w what do you what do you think is the best thing is I think the best thing is to just cook a couple of things and get a feel for the size of thing and then just go go that way. What do you think? Yeah I agree. It's uh it is true that you you can calculate uh how long it's gonna take for something to heat up in a water bath and uh it takes a lot longer than you think because the um the difference between the temperature of the bath and the temperature of the food is relatively small and that means that um you know there's there's not much of a uh and uh a push behind the heat on the outside get to the inside. So it it it takes takes quite a while but you know the the calculations great uh they're they can't account for all the variables that you're gonna encounter like variations in the the thickness of the meat and the uh you know the effect of the wrapping whether if if the if the wrap isn't isn't perfectly sealed if you've got a couple of bubbles here and there it's it's gonna slow things down.
So I agree the best thing to do is just to have several packages and check every once in a while, give them a good good long time and maybe use the formula as uh as a guide. Yeah. But uh but test it. Yeah I've never had really much of a need to know exactly how long it's gonna take but uh but also Nathan Mirvold posted a bunch of things a number of years back on eGullit. Um oh I see we have another we have another caller.
Uh who do we have on the line? Hello? Hello? Yeah, hi, how you doing? Um uh I'm a chef working uh on the East Coast and uh I have a couple of questions about Sue V cookery.
Um specific situations we're in right now that we're trying to kind of fine tune. Right. I I don't want to mention anything specific 'cause we're still kind of operating under the radar. Right, right. Um so right now we're uh working with a couple of different cuts of meat.
Um some have been really successful, some we're still trying to you know, they're very good, but they still could be a lot better. Right. Uh right now we're working with a uh a s a thick cut pork chop which is kind of cut from the shoulder end so it has a high fat content. And um, you know, we've tried cooking it at around fifty-two, fifty-four degrees Celsius or anywhere between four hours, twelve hours, up to twenty-four hours. And uh the problem is that you know the fat isn't breaking down in a in an appealing way.
You know, we used to cook it conventionally in a more of a hot oven and we get like a nice sort of caramelization on the fat. Um and it would be very pal palatable. Right. And uh, you know, at those those low temperatures it would just kind of be like hammy and and you know, just ha not have a nice mouthfeel. So we upped the temp up to seventy degrees.
Too high, yeah. And we ran it. Yeah. We ran it with a thermocoupler uh just to check the temp. We'd pull it at like fifty-four degrees.
And that was better. Yeah, but still that's too high, right? Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, it was still a little like it got a little hammy.
Um, you know, it wasn't perfect. Then we brought it down to sixty-four degrees. Um and that was kind of a nice, you know, medium. We're kinda happy with that, and we just basically would run it uh in the thermocoupler till we hit, you know, fifty four degrees Celsius. On the inside.
So I just wonder if uh yeah, I was wondering if you had any comments on that or any ideas of directions we can go. So low temp fat's not gonna really render out when you're cooking uh low temp, and that's kind of one of the main things to work around when you're doing this kind of work. And in fact, you know, Harold will agree, like that's one of the things, you know, he you don't particularly like some of these dishes because we don't get things like the like the rendering of fat. But I'll g I'll give you uh uh agree, Harold or no. Yeah, yeah.
Exactly. But you know, uh one technique you might want to look into. First of all, are you are you doing a pre-sear on your meat or no? We're not no, we haven't tried that yet. I would do a pre-sear on the meat that's gonna start getting the flavor going, and also you notice you're gonna pick up a lot more color a lot quicker uh on the finish.
Uh right. But uh you might do something we we do called uh low temp for insurance purposes. And so what that is is you cook the meat to like a a medium, like uh you want the inside to be whatever you want to be, you know, fif fifty and sh fifty high fifties and change or like uh sixty somewhere in there, right? You cook it through, then you chill the whole thing down, then you throw it in a blazing hot oven, right? Now you're just focused on the external texture of the of the chop and and and you can pull it as soon as it looks good because the inside's already been cooked and it's gonna be warm enough.
And so th this way you can serve something where you get a lot of the benefits, reproducibility, uh, you know, fairly quick turnaround time uh on on a pork chop uh that you would uh and get more of a traditional flavor out of it. Uh where you know, but still get some of the benefits of low temperature. And so th this works a lot on bigger bigger cuts or uh things like that where you basically you just want to ensure that the inside is done. So we call that kind of low temperature for insurance purposes. And so you might want to look into something like that.
Like just cook it through to the lowest temperature you want, cool it down, and then you know, take it from normal in a in a hot, hot oven and just get that outside where you want it. And I think you might be happy with the results because a lot of times we want a more traditional tasting uh especially on something like a pork chop. What do you think, Harold? Yep. Sounds good.
I have nothing to add. And and definitely like with the at the 64 degrees is actually it's it's great. It's really, really good. But we just, you know, we want to see if there's if we're missing anything and if we can try and take it to a higher level, which this sounds like a something we're definitely going to try. Yeah, I'd be I'd be careful with the l the lower temps like 52, 54, here's why.
I mean, will you kill bacteria down there? Yeah, probably. But uh one of the issues is when you load up a circulator uh and you g hit those fairly low temperatures, if the circulators crowded at all, um sometimes um the the the pieces of meat that are near each other they'll be shielded from the temperature for long enough at those low temperatures that you'll get uh lactic acid bacteria growing in. So if you look in the s people who post on Sou vide you'll notice people saying, oh my thing smelled like sauerkraut, my thing smelled like blue cheese. But and it's because they're not killing the lactic acid bacteria fast enough.
So when you're doing those low, low temperatures, I would recommend a quick dunk of the uh bag into um into um maybe into simmering water just to kill all the lactic acid bacteria that are on the outside and um and then uh and then and then go go from there is another thing if you're having that problem. I know that's some people are having that that that problem and just just real quick I know you guys are have a lot to cover, but do you have any sort of guideline basic temperatures that you work with uh in your laboratory just for for you know for poultry let's say game meat you know stuff that you know things like that. What's your braising temperature? What's your um I do a lot of braises at sixty um because the lower ones I think are you know people don't really people don't really uh they want their braises much lower than that and uh when I go higher than about sixty three I start feeling like I'm losing the advantage sixty three sixty four I start losing the advantages of low temperature so I tend to stay in that range. Uh but the the best we have cooking charts.
If you go to cooking issues dot com and look up uh low low temp uh charts there's a chart that has basically all of our temperatures on it. Uh temperatures and times that we work with yeah and that's that's pretty that's pretty up to date. Um I I would I would check that out. And then let me let me just knock something out real quick Harold before because I want to talk to you something about 'cause Harold and I are back we're gonna go to Tales of the Cocktail. Oh wait we have another caller so I can't talk about Tails of the cocktail.
All right we have another caller coming in Harold Okay. Hello? Okay. How you doing? How are you man?
All right. I'm here to ask you a question. All righty. So I know you guys are talking sous V but I don't have a sous vide at home. Right.
Uh but I do have an oven. Okay. So my entry my entree into kind of the technical side of cooking has been to kind of fudge it at home. Right. I'm trying to uh I brine my meat usually before I I roast it.
So are you familiar with this River Cottage meat book? Yes. I have in the River Cottage Meat Book he'll talk about how he describes a two part roasting process. One at like four twenty five and then it comes down fifty seventy five degrees for like the longer roast to cook through. Right.
You know to make the crust and then to cook the the meat through. Right. So but I I found at home after brining that it didn't work. What I've been doing is roasting a chicken the whole time at the same temperature. So I wanted to know what what you guys thought about that, about that two temperature versus one temperature and about that process 'cause I've been, you know, getting a good brown on the meat and cooking it all the way through with a lot, you know, the more uh technique I applied to it, the worse the results got.
Harold, I'm gonna let you take this one because you focus a lot on these kinds of techniques specifically with ovens. So I'm gonna let you I'm gonna let you take this guy. Okay. Well um my feeling is that you can you can get a good result uh in a lot of different ways and um it just depends on on the details of what you do and and what you're looking for in the end. So the the high temp followed by low temp is uh you know pretty standard um way of doing things uh it gives you that initial blast of high temperature starts the browning on the surface and um then you turn the heat down to cook it through more gently uh if you left it at the high temperature too long then you'd end up overcooking the outside while the inside was still cooking through but with something like a chicken which is relatively small and which cooks relatively quickly um I uh I find that you can get good results uh with all sorts of techniques.
You can stick it uh chicken in at five hundred degrees and uh it's done really quickly and it comes out pretty juicy because even though the outside temperature is so high uh the rapidity of the cooking means that you you end up with a you know reasonably uh juicy inside you can also cook um at a at a low temperature um when you say that you're cooking at the same temperature constantly is it is it like uh what 400 degrees, three seventy five four it's like three fifty three seventy five right in there. Yeah, yeah. And you're ample put it in for like forty five minutes how long with the browning that you get on the on the skin? It works because I think the brine, the brine and then the drying after the brine allows it to brown easier. Yeah, yeah.
So you do take it out of the brine and you what do you do? Let it sit in the fridge for a day to to dry it. Exactly. I take I brine it overnight and then in the morning, you know, with my cereal, I'll take it out and dry it. Dry it, and when I come home, then make it for dinner.
Yeah. So that's the the those are the little details that can make all the difference in the world. If you if you brine without the drying, then you're gonna end up with a soggy chicken at four hundred degrees or three seventy-five, and you really need that high temperature to bake out the the moisture and get the browning going. But if you've already pre-dried it, then that's not an issue. And then it forms that kind of pellicle, you know, and it gets brown there.
The skin gets kind of clear and tacky. Mm-hmm. Um my other question to you is if you're cooking that at five hundred, really high, really fast, do you have to rest it then? Like is there a tin foil? Is there do you have to I mean 'cause how does it cook through that fast?
Uh resting it does uh is a good idea, uh, and that's uh because the the outside parts of the of the bird have gotten pretty hot and it's a chance for the for the juices to um to kind of redistribute, you know. They're they've been squeezed out but they haven't exited the m the muscle completely, and so they can kind of settle in and find the find the dry spots and uh and and redistribute and give you something more evenly juicy. Okay. Well, thanks for you answered me. I was just feeling guilty because of the two different temperatures versus the one.
I felt that somehow I was being unfaithful. And now I realize that the drying made all the difference. Yeah, yeah. I mean, uh you you only owe your faith to a delicious result. Exactly.
So in the pudding. All right. Thanks for calling in. And we have very short amount of time. I gotta knock two things out with you, Harold.
We got a follow-up, and this is right up your alley. Uh, Chris, who called in b uh before about the cilantro, just sent us a a text saying, uh, I realized I forgot to mention that I've had some luck preventing rot by washing with aqueous ozone. Uh it's really the stabilization of the flavor itself that I'm after, and he thinks that maybe it's decanal in it that he's in it, and they it's so quote, it's so damn fleeting, even in totally unrotten bunches. Anything to say about that, Herald. Uh well, um it just speaks to the uh the variability among uh among people and their sensitivity to these uh aroma compounds because they're there are people who who can't come within uh a mile of a bunch of cilantro without smelling the you know the tiniest quantities.
So it it may just be that um uh he uh is uh he he loves the the aroma but is less sensitive to it, and so it's gonna be harder to find a bunch with with enough of the stuff to to really make an impact for him. All right, and then we we have one quick question that came in. I promised I'd get to all the early email ones. He uh Scott from your hometown, San Francisco, wants to know how to make a foam uh to put on top of his dirty martini with an olive brine based on a drink he had at the bazaar in uh Los Angeles, uh, and just wants to know some basic pointers. Can you do it with uh stuff from the supermarket?
Yes, I would get yourself some uh I'll get yourself some some uh lethosin, the granulated kind, uh and and or Xanthan gum andor a combination. I would not add any more than about a quarter of a percent or so of uh Xanthan. You could actually add a little more but I wouldn't add much more uh and anything up to about half uh to three quarters of a percent of lecithin. Put a stick blender into the mixture, hold it at an angle so that the blade of the stick blender is going in and out of the uh liquid and that's going to cause the bubbling and frothing uh and you should be able to get uh a foam. If not just post a question to uh the forums or the cooking issues and uh and we'll answer it.
Uh Harold and I are actually going to uh in a couple days actually going to both be in New Orleans. We're going to Tales of the Cocktail which is an event where Harold will be speaking with my good buddy uh Tony Canigliaro and good buddies and Audrey Saunders. And then um one more cocktail related thing uh if you want to come learn high-tech cocktail stuff including some home friendly things uh from uh me personally and Nils my my uh the head of the French culinary and my partner in crime here uh we're doing a class on June twenty eighth at the French culinary institute at six PM. Uh sadly we're out of time and I'm really upset because Harold I had a bunch of interesting stuff to talk to you about with uh new rotary evaporation breakthroughs that we made just yesterday but I guess that'll have to yeah well it turns out I think I might have a way to do really delicious distillations water based and then add it to alcohol quickly to try and keep the aroma in. I I found that like I can with liquid nitrogen I can uh I can basically uh even though water-based distillations are normally you know not so flavorful is so fleeting that if you if I'd use a cold finger with liquid nitrogen, do my distillation that way, and then immediately melt it into alcohol, that I get a very good result.
But I'm still working with it. So I was hoping to talk to you about that on the radio, but alas, we're out of time. So I hope, Harold, I hope you enjoyed calling in. I enjoyed having you. Hopefully you can come again.
Uh anyone who uh texted Nastasha a little bit later, I'm sorry we didn't get to your questions. We'll get to them next time. And you have been listening to uh Cooking Issues on Harris Radio Network brought to you by Acme Smoked Fish. Thank you. Oh, you didn't have to be a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit.
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