You are listening to Cooking Issues coming to you live every Tuesday from noon to 1245 on the Heritage Radio Network. I am Dave Arnold, uh, the host of Cooking Issues. I'm here with Nastasha Lopez. Uh, we're from the French Culinary Institute. We're here to answer all of your cooking questions.
Call in at 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. For those of you that don't know us, we specialize in technical kinds of cooking questions, pieces of equipment, new techniques, new ingredients, but we uh we're interested in basically any food-related question you have. Uh today's show is brought to you by the Fairway Markets. No matter where you live in New York City, you're probably pretty close to a fairway market.
Uh I believe that uh we're actually being sponsored by Steve Jenkins from Fairway, who is uh one of the great cheesemongers in uh all of uh the country probably that Fairway has and has had for many, many years. An amazing selection of cheeses, uh great selection of meats and other produce. Fairway like no other market. Uh all right, Nastasha. So uh you want to start off before we answer any questions with uh kind of what we've been doing over the past week or so.
Well you've been gone for a while. Right. Well, I just got back from New Orleans. Uh New Orleans every year has this event called Tales of the Cocktail, where uh a good chunk of the uh bar industry in the United States heads down to New Orleans in the middle of uh summer when it's piss hot and humid and gets horribly, horribly drunk over the course of a couple of days, all in the interest of uh theoretically learning more about uh you know how to prepare fine drinks, and a lot about the history of fine drinks. I was down there doing a uh seminar called uh The Science of Stirring, which was a follow-up to our smash hit last year, The Science of Shaking.
Uh basically I was there with Evan Clem, who is the uh the uh the head of beverage for Be Our Guest. You know, they do those Caminos restaurants here in the city. He serves something like 8,000 margaritas on Cinco de Mayo. Um and uh Thomas Waugh from uh Death and Co. Uh, which was you know just I guess this year just won like best bar in the universe at Tales of the Cocktail or something like that, best cocktail that's in the universe, something like that.
Like a bunch of best in the universe kinds of things. Anyway, uh this year we were investigating how stirring uh, you know, what is the basic science behind stirring a cocktail? Um the interesting things about it, I'll talk about it for a minute, is uh last year when we did shaking, the fundamental uh thing we learned about shaking was that it really your shaking style doesn't make that much of a difference in terms of the temperature and the dilution of the drink when you're done. Also, the ice doesn't make that much of a difference, assuming there's not a lot of water on the ice doesn't make that much of a difference within reason. And that's good news for people, especially at home, because it means that they can make a decent quality drink without without being basically the yoda of the shake.
Uh, you know, as long as they you know do a relatively decent job and they shake, you know, for about you know twelve to fifteen seconds, they're gonna you know get uh fundamentally this similar dilution all you know every time they do it. Uh stirring, unfortunately, uh is a lot more a lot more complicated because stirring is not as efficient as uh shaking in in chilling. So that the first rule of all of cocktails, by the way, uh especially in bars where the ice that they're using in the bar is almost always right at the melting point. It's not from the freezer. And by the way, even if you use ice it's in a freezer, you think you're winning a lot because it's a lot colder than ice that's you know been sitting out.
Uh you don't actually win that much because uh ice doesn't have that much extra energy in it stored uh in the form of temperature. Most of it is given when it melts. It's the melting of ice that really does most of the chilling and dilution. So the fundamental rule of cocktails is there is no dilution without chilling, and there is no chilling without dilution. They're related.
Uh and so because stirring is less effective than shaking, a chilling, uh, it you actually um can alter the drink greatly by how much you you stir it. So while a cocktail, uh when you shake it only takes about 12-15 seconds to reach equilibrium, a stirred cocktail can take uh up to a minute or or longer. Um with that, that's what I was doing for the past week. And if you want to call in with any more questions about stirring, we're gonna put a blog post up pretty soon on you know, with all kinds of nice purdy charts and graphs on stirring fast, stirring slow, stirring with big eyes, stirring with crappy eyes, yada yada yada. Um anyway, so you know that's what we've been up to.
Uh now I'm gonna take some of the questions that we had emailed to us over the past week. Uh Michael Natkin, the author of Herbivoracious.com, which is a vegetarian recipe blog, asks a very interesting question. He says, Why do some things taste better the next day? Uh for instance, tomato sauces, lentil soup, and stews. Uh and he says the conventional wisdom is that the flavors marry uh when it's left overnight, but that doesn't really seem very well defined.
So, first of all, is this true? He asks, and if it is true, then you know why? Can we pinpoint anything specific uh on a from a chemical standpoint uh of why that's the case? Well, this is an extremely interesting question. Uh the short answer is yes, some foods do taste better uh you know after they've been sitting for a while, uh, and but some taste noticeably worse.
Um in the vegetable world, for instance, uh potatoes can uh when they're stored take on an off flavor that's you know perceived as kind of cardboard y and the same with with meats can take on, although you don't care because you're a vegetarian recipe blog, but uh certain meats can take on a flavor called warmed over flavor when they've been chilled and reheated. And what's happening in those cases when things taste bad is that uh there's an oxidation, a fat oxidation going on. So uh you know, there's certain you know uh polyunsaturated fats in there that are being um oxidized to create kind of these off cardboardy rancid warmed over flavors in in certain potatoes and in certain meats when they're uh reheated and stored in the presence of oxygen. And a vacuum bag can kind of ameliorate those problems. Now, the problem of things actually tasting better and changing is a lot more complicated than that.
So certain people certain foods that people think taste better when they're reheated, like for instance, pizza, if you reheat it properly, is because let's say the person who made it uh didn't have their dough uh balance quite right and water migrated to the crust, right? So now your crust is floppy. If you reheat it properly, you can recrisp the crust, and it's actually crisper than it used to be because there's less water in the crust, and so you can get a crisper crust. So certain in certain pizzas you can actually get a better product when you reheat it versus when you when you had it the first time. Uh lasagna is another thing pointed to often people say, well, lasagna tastes better.
Uh lasagna as it's cooling, the pasta presumably can then reabsorb more water than it can than it could. It absorbs water out of the sauce. The sauce becomes more concentrated. That's one effect, so it's gonna taste uh, you know, good upon reheating. A secondary effect with uh strong flavored sauces, uh like like tomato, like uh stews, like soups, um, is that these sauces have lots of high notes uh in the volatiles that kind of uh can stick out.
Now uh these volatiles can flash off when it's cooling and flash, you know, flash off again when it's when it's rewarming, and this can uh basically create an evening out effect of the flavor. But even more so as it's being stored in the uh in the fridge, the actual uh the actual levels of the different volatiles can change as they're de degraded or uh you know broken up or hydrolyzed in the food as it's being stored. And what's interesting is is that the breakdown of these vol these volatile compounds, a lot of them are created when the when the food is cooked, right? Uh and they react a different way when they're uh on the heat than they do when they're uh in the fridge. So you I you get a different kind of breakdown of these compounds, and then when you reheat it, you you break you're breaking more down again, and basically um you can cause a leveling off of these volatiles.
So there's uh and I was uh I was hard pressed this morning, I was looking to try and find some sp specific papers on it so I could cite some for you, but I couldn't. But this is my feeling, uh my memory, I should say, of of what's going on in the situation. Uh you know, that and that's aside from any actual kind of effect they have where you know maybe the spice didn't penetrate to the center of a bean, let's say, and when you let it sit overnight, it does. So there's many, many multiple uh effects uh going on. It's actually quite a complicated uh process, but yes, uh certain foods can taste better and certain foods can taste worse.
Um hopefully that uh answers that question. Uh I have another one. Uh someone says, uh my mom wants uh anonymous by the way, my mom wants to know if she can put a frozen piece of meat into a crock pot. Uh yes, yes, you can. So here's what happens, and I believe we have another question on freezing that I'm gonna deal with later, but freezing is fundamentally a dehydration technique.
So what happens is when water freezes, it freezes into uh into ice, it's pure water. So you have water that's bound in cells. That water basically crystallizes out and freezes at as crystals, okay? So the the ice uh that forms is basically removed from uh either between the cells or in the cells of your meat. It's fundamentally, or whatever product you're freezing.
It's fundamentally a dehydration process. Now, super rapid thawing in certain cases can prevent uh certain foods like meats that might reabsorb that liquid from reabsorbing them. Also, improperly frozen things that have a lot of damaged cells in them will not reabsorb the liquid, and you'll you can tell a good quality frozen product from a bad quality frozen product because you'll see a lot more what's called drip loss. You'll see a lot of liquid flowing out of the out of the you know product as it's thawing, right? That's a the hallmark of an improperly frozen thing.
Now, certain things you just can't help it, like berries, they're gonna that's gonna happen unless you have some very good freezing technology like liquid nitrogen. Um because the faster you freeze it, the less damage uh there is uh to what within reason. I mean, if you freeze it too fast, it turns brittle and shatters, but uh that's you know, that's another story. So now, when you're cooking something in a crock pot, right, a crock pot is uh uh fairly it's fairly gentle in that it doesn't scorch foods, but it's also a fairly high heat. You're gonna basically cook the heck out of that meat, and you're gonna cook it so long that you're gonna cook all that water out anyway.
Uh and you're you're getting the juiciness out of the sauce that it's cooking in, and you're getting the juiciness out of the gelatin that's cooking in. So there's there's absolutely no reason why you can't uh sear your meat from frozen if you want to do that and then throw it in a crock pot and go from there. You're gonna cook it for a long time. It's not gonna throw off your cooking times that much unless the meat is very, very thick. Uh, and so I think uh I think that's that's fine practice and it's definitely gonna save you, save you some time.
Another uh anonymous question uh came in. Uh I want to know if it's true that putting your face in front of a microwave is going to damage you. Well this is an interesting question. I've had this question asked uh many times and as someone that has done many unauthorized things to microwave ovens, I'm somewhat qualified to answer this question. Um you'll notice that the inside of your microwave is uh is all metal okay and that there's a shield a grate over the front door of the microwave that's also made out of metal and it's perforated with little holes.
Now those little holes are specifically designed to not allow microwaves through. So the m even though you can see the light the light is a very uh much uh shorter wavelength than uh microwaves so light can make it through without a problem but um uh the microwaves um cannot at all in fact even if those holes were a good bit larger like the size of a pencil you still wouldn't get appreciable radiation uh through that now if you have a uh a microwave microwaves have that that metal that metal perforated sheet and then they also have usually a plastic or glass sheet in front of that perforated sheet and what that's doing is that stops you from putting your eyes directly against that metal grate. If you put your eyes directly against that metal grate you will have some microwave energy that can make it through those little holes for very very short distances. I'm talking very short distances. So I do not recommend removing the metal grate and then putting your eyeballs against the uh against the uh the that perforated you know perforated sheet now it is true that certain microwaves if the latch fails or they have problems with their gasketing in their door material uh such that you know basically the microwaves can leak leak out and there's not a good uh grounding between uh all the different parts, then yes, you can get uh some leakage of microwaves.
They make basically microwave detectors, which are just meters that sense whether there's microwave radiation. You can walk around your your microwave and and see whether or not it's leaking. Uh you know, if you're paranoid about these things, you know, they're not that expensive. You can get one. Uh and you know, I used one once when I did a lot of modifications to a microwave and want to make sure I wasn't gonna turn anyone's eyeballs into uh, you know, poached eggs.
Because uh, you know, once the once the protein in your eyes goes white from being denatured, it's uh it's you know, end of story. And this actually used to happen. You know, microwaves are very similar to radar uh technology. In fact, the old story, my grandfather uh, you know, uh before he retired was a uh a radar technician, uh not technician, engineer, built radars, including including radars for Air Force jets uh back in the day. And the old story was that an engineer at Raytheon figured out it's probably apocryphal, but figured out the microwave oven because he was working on a radar uh unit and the uh and the candy bar in his uh pocket melted.
And he was uh you know, I was like, ah, that's interesting. Candy bar in my pocket melted, and then kind of it all all uh you know went from there. But I believe that there's also been cases, and I don't know whether it's just to scare the crap out of me, uh, that you know, people have stared down uh they know an old school radar, continuous way radar thing, and you know, been blinded and all this other stuff. So anyway, I hope that answers, I hope that answers your question. Uh okay.
Let's uh take one. We have two more minutes. Oh, we have two more minutes? All right, well, maybe I maybe I shouldn't take uh a complicated uh complicated question then before I uh before I go to break. Um I will say that I hope you call in.
Uh our number is 718 497 2128. That's 718 497 2128, or you can email Nastasha at Lopez dot N-A-S-T-A-S-S-I-A at gmail.com. Right. And we're gonna try to handle all of your cooking related questions. Uh when we get back, we'll answer some more questions and I will talk about the weird variety meats that we've been cooking.
Feeling good. You feel good? Thanks so much, Bone Brother. How you feel, mate? I'm feeling all right.
I don't want no people to know you're in here. How you feel, fella? Hey Jure getting down. Look at him. We're gonna have a bump good time.
We're gonna have a bump good time. We're gonna have a bump good time. We're gonna have a bump good time. Take them up, friend. We gotta take high.
We gotta take high Brother. Yeah. Now I won't have everybody. Let's bread blow by two cores. And then I wanna wave me and let's go and do that with now.
Alright. I'm gonna get that belly with a little horn over there. This is Dave Arnold, and you're listening to Cooking Issues on the Heritage Radio Network. Call in with your cooking related questions, or you know, at this point, any questions. 718 497 2128.
That's 718 497 2128. Um okay, so we have a question in from uh Greg Kreckleberg, uh, and he asks actually some very complicated uh technical questions. He he wants to know uh the first question actually is a little easier to deal with. He says, What can a uh home cook do to freeze foods or sauces that will break when you freeze them? And he wants to know should I add gelatin, agar, starches, fats, blah, blah, blah.
And he liquid nitrogen is one of them. I like uh I like Greg that uh you're saying a home-friendly technique for doing this is to use liquid nitrogen. I really appreciate that, and it just shows how far we've come in uh in the past uh couple of years. Now liquid nitrogen probably actually uh it doesn't help freeze thaw stabilize some things, but I know that it does prevent um other things from getting um damaged by by freezing. I haven't done a lot of testing with liquid nitrogen free stawing.
Liquid nitrogen, liquid nitrogen will um preserve the quality, you're gonna get a lot less drip loss out of foods that are frozen with liquid nitrogen. If you're gonna freeze something with liquid nitrogen and you think it's gonna become too brittle, uh one way to do it best, and I I learned this from um you know uh someone who basically works in a cow semen uh calceman operation, uh you want to suspend the food above the liquid nitrogen, just above the liquid nitrogen for a number of minutes to pre-freeze it uh before it becomes hyper brittle, and then you can immerse it in the liquid nitrogen, and you're gonna get a uh a very uh you know nicely frozen product. But I assume that this is not what you mean. Uh uh things like so the question he's saying, should he add things to his uh his sauces uh like gelatin, agar, starches, and fats to to make them more free sauce stable. Um gelatin is not free sauce stable, uh, and neither is agar.
In fact, we use both of those things, uh we use the fact that they're not free sauce stable when we're clarifying uh juices. We basically freeze them and then when they thaw, they weep uh they weep fluid uh quite readily. And we use that fact to uh to clarify things. So those don't work. In general, what you want to add to to uh increase freeze thaw stability are uh thickeners.
Uh thickeners like uh locust bean gum, thickeners like xanthan gum. So uh something that basically holds together but uh is you know has a tendency to weep a little bit or or or break a little bit. You know, a little bit like under a percent of locust bean, um locust bean has to be heated, of course. Uh guar, but guar tastes kind of bad uh unless you have the really nice guar made by TIC gums, the flavor free guar. Um little bit of xanthan also acts as a stabilizer, it's gonna stop things from from weeping out.
There are starches that will will help. I don't um I don't happen to know what they are. I didn't have chance to research them before I before I came over. Um but uh in general you you move towards some sort of uh thickener to help stabilize uh situation, especially a gel. If you want to make a gel more free sauce stable, you're gonna use some sort of thickener.
Um like I say, like like leg locust bean, like um legwar like xanthan. Um, um let me think. I'm trying to see the other questions. I'm not exactly sure. He's saying um uh sauces like whole whole vegetables roasted, but I'm not exactly sure what the freeze saw problem with that is.
If it's weeping because of of texture uh being broken down, then the best way to make sure that you freeze and thaw those nicely is to use very, very rapid freezing. Uh and the best way to do that is of course liquid nitrogen. Barring that, you can make an ice slush with about 25% uh salt by weight with ice, make a slush with that, put your foods in a bag, and then immerse them in a slush, it's gonna freeze them very quickly with very small ice crystals, and it's going to uh preserve the flavor uh in those in those kinds of things. Now, uh he says on the flip side, what's a good way to thaw these ingredients? Thawing is actually a really interesting problem.
When you uh it's easier, believe this, it's easier to freeze something uh in quickly than it is to thaw, and here's why. Uh ice is actually a much better heat conductor than water. Much better. Uh the only reason you think water is a much better conductor of heat, right, is that uh um you can move around. Inside your food, the water can't move around, so it's not as good a conductor uh as um as uh as ice is.
So once something starts freezing in the freezer, the outside becomes ice, it now becomes a very good conductor. Now it's easier for the inside to freeze. When you're thawing, the outside uh thaws first, now it's water, now it's harder to conduct the heat in. It also takes more energy to heat ice than it does to heat water, and so it actually takes longer to uh to thaw something than it does to freeze it. If you want a speed thawing, obviously the best way to do it is to, if you want it to be fast, is to put it in a bag and then put it in uh running water.
Inside a bag in running water, ideal. It's gonna thaw it out, it's not gonna um it's gonna be fairly gentle, assuming you're gonna use it right away, uh, and it's going to be fairly quick. I mean, that's the fastest way um, you know, that we know of. I haven't experimented a lot. People used to sell thawing trays that were basically big blocks of aluminum, and that aluminum would just, you know, draw the heat away from the uh food.
But I don't know whether they're any better or worse than just putting something, probably worse, than just putting something in uh running water in uh inside of a bag because that way you're wicked wicking heat away from all sides, not just from the side with the with the metal block. Another question he has is uh he really loves habaneros, uh as do we, uh habanero peppers were until very recently the hottest peppers kind of uh known they've since been superseded by a couple other peppers called the ghost peppers but those peppers to my I've never I've never had a fresh ghost pepper but to me nothing beats the flavor uh and the amazing floral aroma of habanero peppers uh and Greg uh apparently agrees with this he says I do not like the heat they bring because most people are overwhelmed but uh but he loves the floral delicious floral aspects of the pepper. Now he says he's developed basically a surgical method for lowering the heat presumably by removing the uh the interior uh portion of the veins and seeds and the you know the very in interior portion of the um of the uh skin uh on the inside uh but he says it's moderately labor intensive and no one would do it in bulk and I agree that sounds like a huge pain in the butt and I know from a lot of experience with him in the kitchen that when you deal with them a lot everything gets contaminated and people get pissed and they start hacking and wheezing all over the kitchen because it's just just horrible. Could there be some low or mid temperature way to dissolve and move the capsacan out capsation is what makes things hot uh out of the picture while preserving uh the enchanting floral nature of the pepper. No vodka, no rotovap.
Okay, maybe vodka but still no rotovap. Well Greg you're killing me here because the rotovap is the primo way to to do this. I I don't know you might be able to do regular distillation without a rotovap. I mean you you could try um just uh macerating or or grinding the the uh peppers in vodka and then doing a simple stove top distillation with uh you know just with a a bowl of ice uh w you know uh y you look up anything on the any on the internet, any site on simple stovetop distillation, you just need a pot, some ice, and a bowl. Now, the the downside is is that this is gonna happen upwards of you know eighty degrees or so Celsius, whereas I can do it down at like forty Celsius.
Now, I I I don't know for a fact how much those amazing floral aromas are gonna be affected by that higher heat. But but uh I you know I would love it if you would try it and then and then tell us. Um I don't uh it just soaking in vodka, rem like that the vodka sucks that heat up. Now, it uh m perhaps the perhaps the alcohol preferentially soaks up the capsace, in which case you might be able to use the peppers slightly deheated after you do it, but I don't think you're going to preferentially take the capsacation as opposed to those floral aroma uh aromas. I think you're gonna lose a little bit of both.
Um he suggests maybe using peelzyme, which is an enzyme that we use to break down uh the tissue. Unfortunately, peelzyme uh breaks down the actual flesh tissue of peppers and turns them to mush. And so I don't think that uh that that's gonna help. Um I don't uh and he says possibly that in um in conjunction with uh an oleophilic, something that's going to bond to fats. That's a possibility.
Uh, but I just I haven't tested it, so I can't say whether it's whether it's gonna work or not, but it is something that I will look into more. And if you have any ideas, uh Greg, I encourage you to please uh write or or call us and and um give us some good ideas, right, Nastasha? That's something we're interested in. Um okay. Sorry, I couldn't be more help on that.
Here's another one I can't be more help on. Uh someone says, Do we have any comments on the aeropress type coffee filtration? Uh the aeropress uh type coffee maker, uh, and the question is like, how does it how what does it taste like? Uh the you know, how does it flare, you know, the flavor? What's the acid balancing, blah, blah, blah.
Uh unfortunately, uh Paul wrote in that. Unfortunately, Paul, uh, I have not used uh the AeroPress. Um I have good friends who've had a done a lot of work with them. I have some calls into Jeffrey Steingarden, but I he's even harder to get in touch with than I am. He's like the only person in the world harder to get in touch with.
He answers his phone less than I do. And uh I couldn't uh he's a big advocate, so I wanted to ask what what he thought. For those of you that don't know the Aero Press, it was designed I think by the same what's the name of that frisbee Nastasha with the hole in the middle that that flies for like a million yards, the Arabie, is that it? I don't know. Araby?
You know what I'm talking about? Anyway, I think it was designed by the same um same fellow that did the Arabie, I believe. And uh it's basically a cylinder with a filter in it and a piston. You put the coffee in the hot water, you push the piston down, it provides some amount of pressure and then forces it out. And the the main thing is it's supposed to make delicious coffee and it's supposed to it's cheap, and you can carry it wherever wherever you want to go.
Um the reason I haven't experimented with it is that uh although it is a pressurized coffee system, it doesn't generate 135 or so PSI, like you know, eight nine uh bar, uh, which is what you need to make espresso. And it's just not because I'm uh snob at all, but I uh basically I only drink espresso and I drink like a billion cup I drink a billion cups of it a day. And for years I've had uh just because I'm like this, I went on eBay and actually to a restaurant auction. I went to a restaurant auction once and I bought a uh the first espresso machine I owned was a two-group ranchillio restaurant machine from a restaurant auction where the restaurant has been shut down by the uh drug enforcement agency because they were also dealing drugs out of the restaurant. When the drug enforcement agency shuts down your restaurant, what they do is they walk up and they put a padlock on the door and the f and then they unplug all the lights, right?
Uh well, actually they just flip the circuit breaker and then all the food just sits there and rots in your fridge until they get around to figuring out what the hell they're gonna do. Well, this place was in uh somewhere, you know, in the in the 150s, uh 160s somewhere near Broadway, and uh they just let it rot for like a year or you know, eight months a year, and then they had a restaurant auction. And so uh, you know, I showed up at the restaurant auction, and when they opened the door, the aroma was so over the st aroma. The miasmal stench was so overwhelming that uh, you know, literally like like seasoned veterans of restaurants were running out of there. And to me, I was like, hey, this is great news.
This is awesome because what it means is is that no one is gonna bid on this crap. I mean, no one is gonna bid on this crap because no one can even stand in the room with this, you know, like like all the Cuban sandwich rolls were still there all desiccated and half eaten. Like you you would have like a a bun and then a mouse that was eating the bun that had died, and then the mouse had in turn been eaten by whatever else was in there. It was horrible, horrible. But tell them how you got it home.
Well, I uh another guy was being there, another guy who who he like, you know, he actually like literally was a crack dealer at one point and decided he was gonna, you know, go legit and had uh started a uh was starting a downtown restaurant, you know, like a food cart, and he was buying stuff and you know I I paid him twenty dollars to drive me home, and then uh I left the espresso pump in his car and I had to go out and find him, and he was like, Who the hell's calling me? Anyway, whatever. I got this machine for almost for nothing, but I I had to disassemble it and boil it uh every single port of it and reconstruct it. I learned a lot about espresso machines. But though the that's a long way of saying that I've had a commercial espresso machine for a long time, and so I haven't necessarily investigated other techniques for making coffee, and I apologize that I have a very uh small amount of knowledge on the Aeropress coffee system.
But from what I hear, it's uh it's it's pretty good. That's what I hear. And so if I I'm sure that uh and you you now made me feel bad that I haven't experimented with it, and I don't know what it costs. It costs some like minimal amount of money, I think. So now maybe I'll just go buy one and play with it, or at least maybe get uh Steingarden to call me back and have him tell me why it's why it's so great.
Uh next next segment, I promise I will talk about the weird meats that we ate. You're listening to Cooking Issues on uh Heritage Radio Network. Call in your questions at 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128, and this is Cooking Issues, and I am David Arnold. When I have a homeless money, I promise I would think to stay real straight and sober.
I swore I wouldn't drink bed whisking. Made me a lose my habit. Give the boss slip. Before the man was over. I started in the sick.
You are listening to Cooking Issues on the Heritage Radio Network. I am Dave Arnold, and we are here to answer your cooking issues, whether they come in via email or via telephone. 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. So we ran an interesting experiment last week where we ordered a whole bunch of odd meats from a butcher in Chicago.
I'm gonna I'm gonna ruin the name. What is it, Nastasha? It's like Zy Zymer Zy Zymer's C Z I M E R. Okay. And so these guys for generations, I think since you know the uh the teens, since like 1919, 1990s, so 1914, something like that.
These guys have been uh dealing in uh kind of odd, odd meats. Now, one of the strange things, not strange things, uh, America used to be known as kind of the game uh the game food capital of the world. We just had so much of it uh, you know, uh early on, uh, and all of it was legal to sell. So if you go back and you look in um on the web at something called the the markets assistant, and it was in basically a guide to the New York markets that was written um both before and after and around the Civil War. Uh, you know, you'll see, and you it's available on Google Books, and the guy at the front looks like Bill the Butcher Pool from uh from uh gangs in New York.
It's kinda cool. But the list of foods that was available to purchase in the markets, even in New York City, was shattering, amazing. I mean, just the the the different types of meats, and the reason was is that anything that you killed, uh shot, you know, caught, whatever, was fair game. There were no rules, there were no regulations. Uh a combination of things has caused that to not be the case anymore.
One is sanitary regulations, so you things have to be slaughtered in uh basically in approved slaughterhouses now, so that cuts down the amount of things that you can do. And you're also not allowed to sell foods that you hunt, game that you hunt, and that's uh due to you know the fact that we were just killing too damn much, and to keep the animals uh, you know, to keep a good stock of animals, there was the conservation uh laws put on them. Also, specifically things like birds that you used to be able to shoot any damn thing. It's like the the the birds that you're allowed to kill now are are very, very highly regulated, and and um like one of the ones I really want to actually eat is this thing called the the bobble ink. This is off topic, I don't care.
The bobble ink is this is this tiny bird. Okay, listen. Many of the viewers out there are viewers, many of the listeners are listeners out there are familiar with the ordelon. The ordelon is the famous French bird that you eat bones and all. They roast it whole, and you're supposed to put a napkin over it.
Some people say to preserve the aroma, some people say to hide from God. And these Ortalon are basically little birds and they go on a long migration. And uh somewhere in, you know, in near the beginning, in the middle of the migration, they stop by in the Mediterranean area in France and they gorge because they need to get a lot of energy and they get very fat so that they can fly all the way south, right? It's a passerine type of bird, it's bird migration. So what these what they've done for centuries is grow is catch these birds and then fatten them specifically so that they're little plump, fat, little juicy morsels, they then, okay.
This sounds awful, uh this part's awful. Then they, they uh they usually suffocate them in liquor and then roast them whole. So this is the famous Ordelon that's now now illegal. Now, by the way, fattening things like this has a long, long, long history. It goes back, you know, to the Romans and probably before the Romans, where they used to fatten animals like fig peckers and dormists and things like that, fatten them specifically for the kitchen, catch them and fatten them.
Okay. Now, the Ortolon is not the only bird like this. There are two other well known to the cultures that do them, uh migration birds like that that get super fat and get caught and get eaten. One's in China, and I I forget the name of it, it's like the yellow breasted patty swallow or something like that in English. I forget the name of it.
But the other one is the bobble link, which used to be known as the rice bird. And when we used to grow a lot of rice in South Carolina, uh all the way up until the early part of uh last century, uh, the migration of these birds would go down. They'd see all the rice and these flocks, these like you could like basically this huge, huge migrating flocks would go down and they would eat a crap load of rice, get amazingly fat, and uh all but it's because they were hurting the rice crop, and because apparently they were incredibly delicious, you'd basically just fire these like small shot shotguns into the air, and the birds would just, you know, fall like rain around you, and you'd pick them up, and they were supposedly the best thing in the world. They were called rice birds. Anyway, you used to be able to get those, and I called every single country, their their the commissions involved in every single country in the migration from here all the way down to South America to see whether any of them allowed me to eat that bird, and they didn't.
Uh anyways, it's just a rant on the on the bobbleink. Um, okay, back to the weird meats that sorry, back to the weird meats that we were uh we were eating. So this place gets all these weird meats that are typically now unavailable, but maybe would have been available before all of these uh these these laws, uh, which by the way, the laws are good. I'm not saying the laws are bad. Um now, uh the meats we got were we got uh lion meat, and the lion is obtained.
I think I said last week the lion is obtained because um lions that aren't wanted anymore by morons who have them as pets or uh breeding programs, um they're not wanted anymore, they give them up, and typically they can't be placed again. They're slaughtered uh for their fur, and then the meat becomes a byproduct. Uh we had beaver. I don't really know like why I don't know what happened with the beaver, I don't know what the deal is with that. Um but the um we had black bear, probably a similar situation to the lion.
We had yak, which I believe was actually farmed for this purpose. Um what else we had? Whole raccoon. We had a whole raccoon. Uh we had one other, didn't we?
Or is that it? Um I think that's it. That's it. Okay. So I'm here to tell you what this stuff tasted like.
Lion was quite interesting. Lion tastes like pork, right? Pork chop. Tastes like pork chop. A little bit more savory.
It's interesting. It's got kind of a it's a pork-based flavor with kind of a unique savory thing, probably due to the fact that it's uh carnivore. It eats only meat. We very rarely eat uh carnivores. So it was uh I I like the lion a lot.
It was an older animal. Uh we cooked it at uh 50 s no. Yeah, I what I cook it at? 60. I cooked it at 60 degrees uh Celsius for only it felt really tender, so I only cooked it for an hour or two, and it was quite tough.
I think we needed to cook it a lot longer to kind of because it didn't have a lot of like visible connective tissue, but since it was so old, it was kind of tough. So next time I cook lion, I think I'm gonna cook it for a good maybe ten hours at sixty Celsius or thereabouts. It was it was good. It was very good. Uh we did uh I might have done fifty seven.
I wish I could have remembered. I gotta go look at my numbers. Uh bear was extremely dark, black almost, and also felt very, very tender before it was cooked. It felt very soft. We cooked it at um fifty seven, I believe, uh, because it looked like a steak, so I wanted to cook it like a steak level, also for about an hour, and it was also tough, but it had a really kind of right aftertaste, like really kind of to me, bloody mineral aftertaste that I didn't really enjoy it.
You didn't like the bear, are you? I didn't try it. I was scared of the chicken. I told you that the trichinosis is gonna be killed by that kitty procedure. We looked it up, we know the like the the thermal death curse for trichinosis.
I told you we killed all the trichonosis in that thing. I was still sick. I had food poisoning that week. Oh, geez. She okay, so she reads trichinosis about it, and she thinks she has trichonosis.
I'm like, you don't, your body's not full of worms. I mean, it's a whole different ball of wax. Whatever. I'm not gonna get into it. I didn't enjoy the bear that much.
Um people say it tastes greasy. It didn't taste greasy, it just had kind of a weird metallic uh aftertaste for me. Uh the raccoon was a big disappointment. I cooked that raccoon. Probably I need to cook it a lot longer and at a higher temperature.
I cooked it only for four or five hours at 60. Uh lion, by the way, I remember now, I cooked it at 57. The uh the raccoon I I cooked at uh 60 for like uh four and a half hours because I thought it was you know, but it just because it's small doesn't mean it was uh it it's young though, so it was tough. It doesn't have that much meat on it. In the future I would cook it to a much higher temperature for a much longer time, like probably 63, 62, 63 degrees for like 24 hours and then shred it like for a stew.
Uh but it had a lot of fat on it, really freaked people out anyway. Uh, you know, it's not wasn't nearly as delicious as the guinea pigs that I've cooked from South America, which you know I think are delicious. So but I'm willing to give raccoon another chance, but the raccoon I had very high hopes for, and I I was disappointed. Now, on the positive side, that beaver was delicious. So there's beaver tail, which isn't actually the flapper, and then there's the flapper.
Uh the beaver tail we cooked for 24 hours at 60 Celsius, and it was just delicious. It had a really interesting woody aroma that you know I'm uh I've never really had before in a in a piece of meat. We soaked it in a in a little bit of uh uh vinegar water before we uh cooked it because every recipe basically tells you to do that. So we did that uh and then we we salted it a little bit, let it sit, and then uh put it in a bag, cooked it at s uh in butter at uh 60 for 24 hours, and then shredded it to tail meat, and just just fantastic. I love that beaver.
That beaver was delicious, right? Hey, come on now, Stasi. Get your mind out of the gutter. It was like a woody pulled pork. Yeah, it was very good.
Uh very, very good. The flapper, which is the actual tail part though, is mainly fat and skin, and we cooked that at a very uh we we skinned one first and then we we cooked another one whole after we had scrubbed it. Uh we cooked those at a high temperature, like 80 Celsius or so, for a couple of hours, and um they rendered out and but they were just kind of I fried them afterwards and they got kind of puffy and crispy on the outside, but there was just kind of too much fat on the inside, and we ate them last. Really, what needs to happen, we've got to run some more experiments, is to cook them, then uh take the fat out, use it for another preparation, and then use the skin, dehydrate it, and puff it like a chicharron. So I you know, in the future you'll be having from us from cooking issues team probably beaver flapper chicharron because I think it's gonna be good.
It will. Yeah, yeah. Stasi's having a tough time keeping it together here in the uh in the in the room. Uh and the the last one, also really, really delicious, was the yak. Now, the yak we did cook for uh overnight, uh the same time as the same amount as we actually no sh shoot, I keep on getting my stuff wrong.
I didn't I cook the yak at 57 for a whole day for 24 hours or for overnight rather, and the beaver I actually cook for two days, 48 hours if 60. I cooked it just like I cook a short rib. Okay. Excuse me, people. Sorry about that.
So uh but the yak we cooked uh overnight because my f my theory was that it was kind of you know, maybe not quite as tough as a short rib was gonna be. And uh so a short rib if you cook it for uh a full day at 60 for 24 hours at 60 degrees Celsius, comes out with the texture of like a skirt steak, and so that's what I was shooting for. So we did that with a yak, and the yak was just really savory and delicious. The odd thing was is that a lot of us detected a little bit of a duck kind of a note tuna. Duck into but it was just I thought I thought it was really good.
Uh yeah, and and the the really interesting thing about these is that these animals are all old animals. Uh and so you know, a bunch of friends of mine like uh Steingarten who won't call me back and uh Harold McGee have gone over to Europe where they have a culture of eating older, older animals uh for the flavor, and and you notice the flavor is really, really good. So I really I want to do a lot more uh experimenting with cooking uh older animals. We just gotta figure out uh figure out uh a way to get them. So if you want, I believe there is probably time for uh one more caller if you if you are near a phone.
Call in at 71. Oh, we have one. Oh, we have a caller in? Alright, so there's probably no more time for other callers. Hello?
Hello. Hi. Hi. Name's Jason. Hey Jason.
How are you doing? All right. Great. Um I recently became obsessed with faro. Ah.
I just don't know how to cook it right. So what's happening to it? Well, so my my obsession began at an uh a restaurant that served the faro salad and it was just nice and uh it's perfectly cooked like rice. And uh I've been cooking it at a uh ratio of three parts water to one part faro for about fifty minutes and it just doesn't puff up as nicely. So I'm wondering whether I should toast it initially or if if I should soak it or or what?
Well the soaking the soaking will probably help. Um I'm trying to remember I I had done a lot of cooking uh done some cooking with it rather a number of years ago. I haven't cooked it recently. What kind of equipment do you have? Do you have a rice cooker?
No, just a pen. Oh, yeah. A rice cooker might help. And also a lot of times when I want to cook tough grains that have a real tough coat on them, like faro does, uh, aside from any initial soaking that I do, uh sometimes I'll reach for the pressure cooker because the pressure cooker does a really good job of um of pushing the the liquid into those kind of uh sea coats, but those th the faro can take a long time. You have you cooked that with Cesare, Nastasha?
I can't remember how to do it. What's it I don't know. Cooks it for longer than fifty minutes? I don't know. I don't want to say something.
I don't want to say something that's not true, but yeah, I've seen him cook it. Oh Jesus say it and I'll try it and I'll call back and let you know if it's true or not. All right, yeah, right. We'll do some research. Yeah.
I'll call Chesare. Well, text Chesare now, see if we can get it while you're going. But um if you don't uh a rice cooker, they're good because they're not gonna scorch it while you're going, so you don't have to watch it as carefully and they're gonna get the water and eventually um and you know, on a brown on a brown rice setting. Uh or or I, you know, I I would definitely reach for the pressure cooker, and the pressure cooker's a lot easier because a pressure cooker, you just cook it for like you know, ha half hour in a pressure cooker and you know it's gonna be done. And that's how I cook similar grains, like uh like I'll do um I cook rye berries that way in a pressure cooker.
So we do it, and I assume it's gonna cook fairly similar to a rye berry. So to get a rye berry nice and fluffy, you know, you cook it in the pressure cooker from anywhere from 30 to 40 minutes in excess liquid. You also might want to use excess liquid. Are you you know, uh was it absorbing all the liquid? Um it started to, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, toward the end. Yeah, so things like that that are tough. You might want to use excess liquid. I don't know that you're gonna dilute the flavor that much, and then the the liquid that you have left over, you could reduce down and use for something else. So that you know that a lot of times those things, you know, once once you start getting in a situation where it's liquid pour in the pan, then you start running into problems where you're actually gonna start maybe uh losing water again out of the outside.
The outside's gonna harden up. I would keep it, I would keep them in liquid while they're while they're cooking. Uh because that's definitely how I do it in a in a pressure cooker situation. I don't know if that's gonna help. Have you tried that yet?
Uh don't own a pressure cooker. No, no, I meant uh keeping uh keeping uh excess liquid. Well, if if water starts to run out, I'll I'll just add some some more water. And still it's not getting fluffy, huh? Yeah, it's not.
Alright, listen. So Cesare Casella is the Dean of Italian studies at the uh at the school, and the man cooks far all day every day. And so uh what it's what's gonna happen is I'm gonna I'm gonna ask uh I promise Stasi, make sure I don't forget to do this. I just texted you. Okay.
We texted Cesare Casella and I'm gonna ask uh Louis Di Paolo from DePalo from DePa because I buy most of my faro from DiPalos here in New York City. Yeah, I love I love DiPalos. Uh and so I think it says here he cooks it risotto style. Oh. Okay.
So if he cooks it risotto style, then he probably does do an initial fry of the grains. Um although I don't know what that's going to do from a from a texture standpoint, and then just keeps adding liquid the entire time while he's stirring until it absorbs enough. Um have you tried that one? Have you d tried it basically just like it's a risotto, but it's gonna take a lot of it. That seems like it would take a lot longer.
Uh oh, a whole lot longer. Yeah. I mean a whole whole lot longer. I mean got kids at home. Yeah, I know what that's like.
You know what though? So you have ki you have kids at home. Listen, not just for the far, consider buying a pressure cooker. Pressure cooker is like a genius piece of equipment. Um I don't know if you have the room for it in your kitchen or if you know your anti-pressure cooker, but no, not at all.
I've very much pro pressure cookers, just don't have the means to buy one. Oh, yeah. You guys would wouldn't happen to have an extra one just lying around collecting dust, would you? And we we kind of rip through 'em because they use them on the menu. But look, look.
So, you know, if you've on our blog, uh we we we don't technically recommend any. I use Coon Recon, and Coon Recons are really expensive. But you know, for a lot of applications, the cheaper pressure cookers, they they do a serviceable job for especially for things like you know, like uh grains like this that you want to cook cook quickly. Um the advantage of them also is in the summertime they're not gonna heat up your kitchen very much. Um because as soon as they come up to pressure, you can turn the temperature down.
Uh I mean turn not the temperature, sorry, turn the uh the uh heat input down. And so they're actually fairly efficient cooking vessels um um to you know to just to stop your you know, cut your air conditioning bills down a little bit uh in in the summertime. Um I wish I had the recipe in my head. Anyway, we have texted the appropriate people. And Nastasha, your job is to make sure that the answer is put up into the forum section of the blog.
We should we I'm gonna start a separate thing in the forum section. It's just like radio radio show answers. It's a great idea. Yeah, all right. So I'll do that for you, and that'll be there within within the week.
And I apologize that I didn't answer your question to I think you've done a great job at uh at attempting to. All right, thanks so much. I'll try to buy a pressure cooker. All right, I I appreciate it. Thanks for calling.
No problem. All right. And uh oh, yes, alright. So as we leave, there is still room uh in tomorrow, Wednesday, July, what is that, 28th, uh at the French Culinary Institute downtown. Come do high-tech cocktails uh with uh me uh and with Nils Noran.
We're gonna do liquid nitrogen, rotary rotary evaporation. We'll teach you how to clarify lime juice using agar at home. Uh we're gonna do three of six cocktails really, but three different ones done in a home friendly way and then done in a techno well but still using technology and then in a technology intensive way. And so you could taste the difference and see kind of what we do with all the fancy equipment and what you can do at home. That's tomorrow at the French Culinary at 6 p.m.
I think it's six to eight six to eight or something like that. Burgers, fries, and liquor. What could be better? You're listening to Cooking Issues on the Heritage Radio Network this week brought to you by Fairway, like no other market. Vicious fish.
Oh, you didn't got me on this corner, and I don't know where I'm at.
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