Hello, you're listening to Cooking Issues on the Heritage Radio Network, the show where you call in, hopefully, with your cooking related questions, technology related or not. The number to call into the studio here is 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. I'm here in the studio today with Cooking Issues Hammer Nastasha Lopez. And we have some uh email questions in.
But before that, today's Cooking Issues is brought to you by Fairway, like no other market. They have at least three locations I know of. One uh up in Harlem where I used to live, uh up where my studio was back when I did the art thing. They have a huge walk-in meat like meat refrigerator there, which is pretty nice. Uh great cheese section, uh, and then of course the original midtown, I guess uptown, really 70 and Chain Street on Broadway, and one right here in Red Hook, Brooklyn, close by to where uh our studio is.
So Fairway like no other market. Uh okay, so uh Nastasha, we had a couple of questions in uh via email. Last week and this week, yep. Yeah. So let's uh let's uh take a look at take a look at some of these.
Oh yeah, by the way, we're here from noon to 1245 every Tuesday. Uh okay. That's 718-497-2128. 718-497-2128. Okay, so uh we had a uh a question coming in from Richard.
It says, uh some friends and I saw Miracle Fruit on a TV show and ordered some powdered fruit to do a tasting experiment this weekend. Do you guys have any thoughts on this flavor inverting fruit? Have you tried it? How does it work? Yada yada.
Okay. Well, uh, yes, we uh we love the miracle fruit. There's a bunch of different ways you can get it. You can buy the fresh frozen berries, you can buy uh a freeze-dried powder, and you can also dry compressed uh tablets uh known as like miracle fruities or whatnot. No matter how you do it, right, uh the active principle uh from this, the the miracle fruit is uh a uh protein called miraculin.
And what what miraculin does, now you're you're talking on my memory because I haven't actually researched it in a in a long time, but if memory serves, what miraculin does is uh it binds to your sour receptors and causes uh sorry, it binds to your uh sweet receptors and causes things that taste uh sour, things that are acidic, to also activate uh your sweet uh your sweet sensors. So basically things that have acidity, things that are sour taste sweet. Now the effect doesn't last forever. You want to put it in your mouth, make sure it coats, don't swallow it right away, coat your whole tongue with it. And usually depending on how strong, uh how big a dose it is, how strong the one you have, it can last anywhere from like 15 minutes to half hour or so.
Uh and um basically anything that has acidity in it is gonna is going to be uh modified. Um the acidity actually doesn't go away, so the effect of when you're sucking on a lemon is that it tastes like lemonade. Typically, I mean people like to taste all sorts of things when they do it, like vinegar and you know, uh a friend of ours, Clifford, who was an intern at the French culinary with us, uh just graduated recently, used to do these flavor tripping parties, and he loved tasting like uh cheap tequila, he said tasted really good, right, Nastasha? Um things like radishes he really liked. But you know, I'm kind of an old school guy, and what happens is is uh I cut up like 10, 15, 20 limes, and then I just start sucking on the limes like like rapid fire because I can't get enough until my lips are bleeding from the acid and your stomach feels like it's about to drop out because uh remember it doesn't actually take the acid away, so it's still eating away your enamel and your lips and your stomach.
It's just you you feel compelled to to kind of keep eating them. Uh what else does Clifford really like? He liked uh we did vinegar. V yeah, vinegar, and she uh mentioned that hot peppers, he liked uh like uh jalapeno pepper said, did something, but you know, really just get an array of things that have any sort of acidity to them and then uh just start pounding them. I mean that's basically my recommendation.
Um right? No. What do you mean? No. Oh, you like you don't need all the acid.
Well, you know, Nastash's doesn't her iron uh you know constitution is not as iron as mine. So uh anyway, so yes, we highly recommend the uh miracle fruit. And if you want to do it under a controlled uh you know circumstances, come to the Harold McGee Lecture Series at the French culinary where we we not only eat miracle fruit, we also eat something called gymnemic acid, the sugar destroyer, which uh what happens is tastes awful. Tastes like you're uh like you're licking the uh bottom of a rabbit's cage or something. It's me, it's completely awful tasting, but that's not the point.
The point is it erases your sense of sweet. So anything that has sugar in it, all of a sudden the sugar is completely wiped out, but everything else stays the same. And it's we do you know, we do the miracle fruit, which is fun, and then we do the genemic acid, which is very, very instructive because it allows you to taste uh all kinds of products that you don't think of as being sweet, and then um basically seeing what happens when you actually do erase all sweetness from it. So um strawberries, I guess what you do think of as sweet, become preposterously acidic without uh w when the sense of sweet is knocked out. So these are things you can come experience live with Harold McGee at the uh Harold McGee Lecture Series.
I don't know where the next one is. October, November, something like that. You know, go to the uh French culinary website. Okay, uh thank you, Richard, for that question. Okay.
So we have a question in from Julia that says uh she's a a recent grad student. She uh grad student recently married and is beginning to invest in cookware that she wants to last basically forever and she wants to get a Dutch oven. I have a Dutch oven, I love my Dutch oven. She says that, you know, she looked at Staub and also at uh the uh La Crusay, and she doesn't like the plastic knob on the La Crusae, and she's like, why that why did why the hell do they use a plastic knob? Well, that plastic knob uh is true.
It's not, I mean, it's he you can put it in the oven, that plastic, but it does I mean I'll tell you from experience that knob does chip. Here's the good news you can unscrew that knob and put kind of any knob uh you want on it. Um I don't really know uh of the quality difference between La Crusade and Staub. Uh I think they're both uh I mean someone's gonna call in and tell me I'm a jerk for saying this. I haven't used a staub a lot, but I bet they're probably fundamentally similar.
Both of those Dutch ovens are enameled on the inside, so you have an enameled surface. You can also buy Dutch ovens that aren't enameled that are standard cast iron. Um the use of that's gonna be a little different. You want to be careful with your enameled cast iron that you don't get it too too too too hot over an open flame because you can get popping of the enamel. Uh I've had I've never had that happen to me, but I've had people report in.
If you go to the cooking issues website and look at our um cat we have a uh post on cast iron uh cookware and basically the heat properties of cast iron and you know kind of the myth, there's a lot of myths around what cast iron can and can't do and and you know why it's good and why it's not. And uh, you know, I spent a lot of time on that on that, trying to trying to think about that uh post. In fact, I was supposed to write it for somebody for uh for another magazine, and they they said it was too boring and technical. But anyway, but I still recommend you go look at it. Uh and and there's a bunch of people who commented in that post uh on um enameled cast iron specifically, and I believe Dutch oven and uh Dutch ovens and uh La Crusade.
So uh if you go to that post, you can check it out on www.cookingissues.com. Uh and by the way, I don't know why they use La Crusade on the Food Network uh instead of staub. I I guarantee you La Crusade gave them that stuff for free. So I mean I wouldn't I mean I have La Crusade at home that and I purchased it, but I wouldn't take the fact that it's on the food network as any indication of its quality versus uh staub. Um anyway.
Uh thank you, Julia. I hope that answers uh your question. And then uh this one I'm I'm literally just reading for the first time, so I'm not even gonna I don't even have the time to think about it. So you're gonna hear my first cuff reaction. It comes from Pete Stapleton in Detroit, and uh says, I know this must uh sound like a stupid question, but there's no there's no stupid questions.
Uh uh that's what they always used to tell me before I asked a stupid question. Uh I would love to hear Dave's advice for cooking pasta. What temperature is best? Does it matter if you boil quickly, then reduce heat, adding salt, etc. etc.
Okay. Uh I'm a novice who loves listening to the show. Thank you very much. I love you listening to the show. Uh and would like to uh answer some questions.
Okay, now here's the thing. There are uh so a friend of friend of ours, friend of the school, friend of the show, Cesare Casella, uh is uh, you know, renowned Italian chef uh from Tuscany here in the city. Just goes to show you how far afield from normal pasta cooking that you can go if you want to. Man sometimes cooks his pasta like a risotto. Now don't do this with something like that's you know long, but like thinner things that you can stir around.
He'll literally, like uh I th I think he does he he uh fries it a little bit first, right? Like a risotto, right, Nastasha? Yeah, it fries it a little bit first in water uh in uh in oil, just like a risotto, uh, you know, sautés, and then just starts adding liquid slowly and it's absorbing liquid, and then basically you keep all the starches then that are released, and it becomes like a creamy, creamy, uh creamy pasta. You're not losing all the starch to the cooking water. So if you want a starchy risotto-like thing, you can cook pasta that way.
That just shows how far afield you can go from normal pasta cooking uh and still get a good result. The tricks with pasta are this. One, yes, salt your water. Why? Not because it's gonna raise the temperature.
By the way, boiling water is probably the easiest temperature. I don't think it's really crucial, but just you know, boiling water is fine. Um the only time you don't want to go super boiling is when you're doing something delicate like a ravioli, it's gonna get the crap beat out of it in the thing and it's gonna explode. Then you want it then you want to lower the temperature of your of your water a little bit just so it's not rolling around. You want to use salt for flavor.
See uh, you know, the inside of pasta has relatively uh low salt, low flavor. I mean, you know, don't yell at me for that. But anyway, like uh add salt, uh mainly for flavor. It doesn't increase the temperature enough for it to uh make a difference. Um the other thing is you're you know you're gonna it doesn't you're gonna want to pull your pasta a little bit in in advance uh just because uh hopefully when you're adding it to a sauce, it's gonna integrate some of that sauce into the pasta and finish off cooking.
So you're gonna want to pull it uh a little bit early uh and then toss it. Uh sometimes if you have a really thin sauce, you could toss it uh, you know, over the heat a little bit and the pasta is gonna absorb absorb some of that sauce uh when it's when it's finishing. There's lots and lots to say uh about uh pasta and and cooking. Um, I would get a higher a higher quality pasta is also also gonna help. A pasta that's gone through uh uh really rough dye, holds on to sauce better bronze dye.
So, you know, go I would go go that way. But I encourage you to ask more questions and I will think longer and more specifically about your pasta questions. But I hope I've said something of interest to you, Pete. Please keep listening and thank you for your question. Oh, we have some callers on the line.
Uh who do we have? Hello. Hello. Oh. Hi.
How are you doing? Yeah, my name's Ernesto. I'm uh calling in from Boston. Hey, how are you doing, Ernesto? Oh, that's the topic you were just cut them.
Uh I also uh uh check out uh the uh ideas and food website pretty constantly. Your your website's awesome. I'm constantly on it. And there's the uh the whole pre-soak dry method that they've been trying. And I've been doing it yeah, with dry pasta where you pre-soaks, where you pre-soak it before you actually cook it to reduce the cooking time.
Right. Now I've been doing the trial and error and sometimes it gets a little too over soaked. Is there something have you ever experimented with this at all and have like more of a guideline or time kind of thing for me? No, now I now I feel bad. I have not experimented with this.
Uh Chesary ever experimented with this? No. No, I mean look, I mean like this is the kind of thing that sounds like a great technique. It's not so mu for me, it wouldn't be so much a uh I mean time, because I mean b pasta bowl is pretty darn quick, but it is a big energy savings. So y you know, and and big energy in terms of your uh you know, your heating bill, meaning your c your air conditioning bill in the summer when you're boiling water.
Is it mainly for energy savings or do they want to do it for time savings? Well, actually I uh uh uh Alex from uh Ideas and Food he infuses flavors into it where he did it where he did it with uh mozzarella water to actually add flavor to the pasta before. But see, I've tried it and I've gone a little too far and it seemed like the pasta was a little too soggy. It loses kinda like that al dente thing. Huh.
Yeah. Because you reduce the cooking time to maybe like two minutes. But the actual soak time, you know, I I guess as far as I've tried it with like uh spaghetti and and and pasta like that, but it seems like it works better with w uh thicker cut pastas. Right. I mean I I think the thinner it just gets too soggy, and I'm I'm just trying to gauge the time and wondering if you knew a kind of like a uh a basic um minimum time that you might need to with different sizes pasta.
But maybe that'd be something you guys can do for uh the the cooking industry's website too. I'll definitely check out I'll check out Alex's and uh Aki's thing and see what see what they're doing with it. I mean I mean I've cooked pasta in flavored stuff. I guess the advantage of soaking is it doesn't require quite as much, but the one of the issues you're gonna get a lot of leaching of flavor out when you do boil it back in in a large quantity of water. I mean that's something you might want to do risotto style the way Cesare does, um, unless you really don't want that creamy starchiness.
But I'm definitely I'll definitely check that out and um maybe we'll put something in the forums on it, right? Yeah. Anyway, by the way, thanks a lot for your question. It's definitely a lot to think about with pasta this morning. So thank you.
Okay, we have it someone else. Yeah, it's uh Hi, it's uh Ship from New York City. Hey, how you doing? I'm doing well, thanks. How are you?
I'm doing well. I've got a a question about uh meat glue. I well I kind of test it out, but I don't necessarily want to invest in a two-pound, you know, two-pound bag of it. Do you is there any you know local sources that we can use? Something that's a little more reasonable.
That's an excellent question. What do they charge now for a kilo? Uh like eighty-six, eighty-eight, something like that. Um this is something I need to investigate. It used to be that uh you could call up uh Bob Tanay, who's the local Ginamoto.
By the way, uh for those of you that don't know what's going on, people who aren't kind of like you know, tech tech people. Meat glue is an enzyme, transglutaminase that you can use to bind any two proteins together. It's uh it's derived from a soil enzyme, it's totally natural, it's destroyed by cooking. Uh there's no known um there's no known problems with it. I've read several, I've read like six, seven hundred pages on the safety of transglutaminates.
It's in your body right now. It's like part of the thing that helps your skin get created. It's part of the stuff that helps blood clot. Um this particular one is uh unique in that it doesn't require calcium. It's very easy to use.
You just sprinkle the powder onto meats, you put two two meats together and they and they stick together after about four hours. And you can glue anything, basically cow, donkey, chicken, moose, whatever. You can glue it all together, and it it it's not just for special effects, it really helps you make really nice portions that cook very consistency, it's very consistently very good. Problem is is that you have to invest in a uh a kilo of it and then uh you have to keep it in the freezer, otherwise it goes bad. It does last a long time in the freezer.
It used to be when you call Bob Tinay from the Ginamoto, who makes makes the stuff, he's the New York City rep for it, that you could um get a sample before you invested. Did they not do that anymore? Uh you know what I I I've been trying to get get a hold of him, but I haven't able to uh to reach out for him, but I'll try again and see if I can get a sample or something like a little more. Yeah, okay. Yeah, because the sample pack, they'll usually send you one sample pack.
They used to. I mean the the chef uh the the desire for it among chefs has really increased, and so it's not as easy, maybe. I don't know, I haven't tried in a long time. I'll tell you this though, you know, another way to do it, I don't think it's something because we don't buy that stuff in bulk, Mustacha. So we don't like it's not even we could we could it's possible that we could uh re repack it because I know but I don't know that they want us to repack it.
Do you know what I mean? Whereas like uh La Sanctuaire, I think they only sell it by the kilo as well, and uh Dairyland used to carry it here in New York, and I think they only sell it by the kilo. You're not gonna be disappointed. Let me put it that way. It's worth the eighty bucks.
You're not gonna be disappointed. It's like one of the great products in the world, but you want to keep it in your freezer uh because what happens is if there's any moisture, the uh the enzyme basically gets ruined, and then you're out um you're out the product. You know, so uh but it you're you're not gonna be sorry getting it, but try to get try to get a sample if you can. Uh and uh th thanks so much for your question. We have to go to our first break.
All right, fine. Thanks. How you feel, mate? I'm feeling all right. I don't want all people to know you're in here.
How you feel, fella? Yeah, yeah. Sure 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. Let's take them up, Brad. We gotta take you high.
Now I won't have everybody. Let's bread blow up by two corpses. And then I wanna wave in, let's go and do it. All right. I'm gonna get that belly with a little horn over there.
Brad, can it take us higher? Hello, you were listening to Cooking Issues, and this is Dave Arnold. Uh call in with all your cooking related questions to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. So, uh, well, we're waiting to see if we get another caller in.
So we have uh let's take some more email questions. Isaac Miller writes in from San Francisco saying he he wants to talk about ice, right? And so he he says there's a lot, he's it's aggravated there's so many pseudoscientific uh proclamations about how ice works uh and says he thinks he heard me say that large ice cubes will keep drinks colder with less less dilution than smaller ice. Heaven forfend. I have never I if I ever said anything that gave the impression that I said that uh you know, please expunge it from all sorts of records because that is clearly not the case.
Here let's let's go through this a little bit. Uh I'm gonna I'm gonna go into my feelings on ice for just a second. Uh okay, the fundamental rule of all cocktails, this is the fundamental rule of all cocktails. Remember, uh there is no remember, bar ice, ice in a bar, is at zero degrees Celsius. If you don't believe me, come to the lab, we'll run the test.
But once you take it out of the freezer within 20 minutes or so, all that ice is at zero degrees. Any deviation it is uh has from zero degrees is not going to affect the temperature of your final drink that much for reasons that are too complicated to go into now. But uh I mean if you take ice directly out of the freezer, obviously it will make a drink colder eventually if you shake, not necessarily if you stir. Very long story. Anyway, uh so assuming that the ice in your bar is at zero degrees Celsius, uh, here is the fundamental law.
This is the law, right? Uh there is no chilling other than through dilution, because the only way the ice can chill is through melting. And there is no dilution without chilling because it requires energy uh to melt the ice. So that ice has to chill when it is melting. So there's basically a one-to-one relationship.
So in the short term, when you're stirring or mixing a drink, you're not losing that much energy to the environment around it. Uh there's pretty much, you know, uh the temperature and the uh and and the dilution, the chilling and the dilution are linked together. Now it doesn't matter then uh what size the ice cube is or or or any or or anything really. Uh and the big ice cubes are definitely no more colder, ice is ice. I mean, for a gram per gram, uh ice at the same temperature all stores the same amount of uh energy.
Now, uh where where do things deviate? Uh the greater the surface area something has, I big ice has a low surface area to volume ratio. So a big chunk of ice is less efficient at chilling because it has less surface area and all the melting and chilling happens at the surface, right? So uh big ice is going to be less efficient. So when you're stirring with big big ice cubes, it takes longer to get down to the temperature that you want.
Um and consequently you're also losing more to the environment, probably, although these these effects are negligible. Uh smaller ice is going to chill relatively uh faster because it's going to have greater surface area. Now, the other problem is is that ice at zero has water on its surface, and the greater the amount of surface area, the more entrained water, the more water is present on the surface of your ice, right? Therefore, smaller ice is going to dilute your drink more because it has more entrained water on it. If you actually put your ice in a salad spinner or in a center fuge, should you have one, it's not really practical, I'm just saying, uh, then you I mean really just shake your ice out before you use it.
You get all the extra water off. The differences in dilution are going to be negligible. And we've done this through experiment, experiment, experiment, and the d and the differences are negligible. In a stirred drink, the speed at which you can get something to chill down with small ice means that you actually will dilute your drink more and it will get colder with small ice simply because you're not stirring long enough, typically, which could take up to a minute with a large chunk of ice to get your drink down to temperature. So ice, ice from a from a you know, physics standpoint, ice is ice.
And then the question is how much water is there on the surface, and what is the um and and then you know what what is the uh how much water is on the surface and what's your surface area. Those are the two important parameters, and then how effective are you? Shaking tends to be so effective that the ice really doesn't matter so much. Stirring it makes more of a difference. But I have not, because of my extreme laziness, done the post from Tales of the Cocktail where we're gonna discuss ice and stirring uh in great detail, the same way we did shaking last year.
Uh but I I hope this answers your question, and uh, you know, please put a comment on the blog and we'll talk, we'll talk more about it. Um next question from uh Richard. Oh no, we already did this one. We did the miracle fruit. Hmm.
Hmm. Have I answered all the questions? I don't think so. Well I might be missing a question, which case we'll come back to it. But uh but I have some some good news for eBay wins for myself.
Check this out. So uh you might know, uh list l you know, readers of the blog might know that we have several centrifuges over at the French culinary that I use, and I use them primarily for uh centrifuge is something that's spins, and with spinning it separates things based on density. And uh what is what what can I do with that? Well, we can make really delicious nut oils, like really mean super delicious, fresh, fresh nut oils. We can make we uh we take cured olives and we make an olive oil from it that I think is delicious, but some people think is is uh nasty, but I find it delicious.
I like it. Yeah. And then uh and she doesn't like anything, so that's a that's a ringing endorsement. Uh uh, but you know, recently what we've been doing is we have a technique where we add an enzyme, we blend fruit, and then we clarify and we make uh fruit juice. And that's mainly what we're doing with it now.
We're making gallons and gallons of different kinds of fruit juices every day, but strawberry juice, peach juice, apricot juice, plum juice. I mean, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Well, anyway, centrifuges are expensive. Um there's one sweet spot in the centrifuge market, and that's uh for for chefs, and that's uh what's called a three-liter bench top, um, a three-liter bench top uh centrifuge. They have swinging buckets in them, they take uh three liters, they hold three liters of four seven hundred and fifty milliliter buckets, and they can all do roughly um four thousand G's.
Now this is the sweet spot because four thousand G's is enough to do almost everything we want to do uh in the lab uh in the lab, in the kitchen, with the exception of clarifying lime juice, but I have other techniques for that. It's relatively small, relatively inexpensive, relatively safe, relatively easy to use. This is something that I think more more chefs would get. Anyway, uh I buy one that's uh Zhuan is the model from Thermoscientific. I buy it because these are out the company's out of business, but there's still a lot of these on the market and they're relatively inexpensive.
Um I just got one, a refrigerated centrifuge. This thing's worth probably when I say cheap, it's worth probably two grand, right? One to two grand uh on eBay. Ninety-nine bucks. $99, $79 shipping.
This thing shows up, right? I bought it because it said uh that it wasn't working, right? It said it wasn't working. Display doesn't come on, lights don't come on. Let me tell you something.
If any of you out there are uh you know what I'm talking about, if you do troubleshooting on equipment, if you don't, listen, this sounds counterintuitive. Uh what you want is to plug something in and have nothing happen at all. Well, because what this means is something probably happened very early on in the system. Something probably fairly easy to fix, right? Right?
You know, you don't want to hear that it powers on and the numbers come on and it spins at like one quarter speed and then craps out halfway through spin. Like this kind of stuff, this is difficult to troubleshoot, right? But nothing at all happening, bueno, right? So we order this thing, we come in, I crack the thing open, blown fuse. Seriously, a blown fuse.
So now we have for like $179, including shipping, a an almost, you know, it relatively new considering the company went out of business, but like basically pristine refrigerated three-liter centrifuge that I'm gonna modify with a stroboscope so that we can take pictures of uh things clarifying and make them look like they're standing still. It's gonna be crazy. It's like seriously pimped out. I'm gonna pimp the hell out of this thing. It's gonna be like a pretty cool centrifuge.
Anyways, so um, yeah, so it just goes to show, like with a little bit of troubleshooting and a keen eye for eBay, you know, you guys out there can get some serious, serious deals. Now, here's my other recommendation. This thing came from a blood lab, right? Which means you want to uh clean the hell out of it. So what we did is we we basically soak the inside of this sucker with in chlorine, uh, and that's not even gonna touch food that we're ever gonna eat, but just chlorine the hell out of it.
Then I chlorine the hell, well, I should say the interns clorine. I didn't do I didn't do squat. Anyway, yeah. So we chlorine the hell out of the buckets, right? And then we pressure cook the buckets because a pressure cooker is like a poor person's uh autoclave.
But what you want to be careful when you're pressure cooking to sterilize, you want to be really careful to make sure that all of the uh air is out. You want to have the the buckets actually underneath the surface of the water when you're pressure cooking because otherwise you can have uh air bubble trap that might not get up to temperature, and uh at least this is what I say, I don't really know. This is what they say on the sterilizer websites. So I just make sure that the buckets are all the way underwater. We pressure cook them for like 20 minutes.
Uh they're made out of aluminum, so the you know, all of the the heat goes into it and it kills whatever might possibly ail you in those things. So it came from a blood lab. Stasi, you've been drinking, you've been drinking juice out of a blood lab for like a year now. Alright? I mean it's like, you know, it's a question of can you clean the thing properly?
Are you taking the right steps to clean it? Yes, yes, we are. Yes. Anyway. So that is the saga of our $179 uh centerfuge worth two grand.
That's making me extremely, extremely happy. You you you know, you don't know joy until you've opened up a piece of equipment and seen that really is just a blown fuse that's causing it to not to not work properly. I feel kind of sorry for the people who didn't take the trouble to troubleshoot it, but not that sorry. Um it cost you three dollars to fix it. You only got shocked once.
Well, a little bit shocked. A little bit. Not a lot shocked. No. No.
But I'm glad I opened it up actually, because uh these centrifuges have what's called an imbalance sensor in them, so that when you're not balanced as they're spinning, because all hell breaks loose if the centrifuge isn't balanced. Uh I mean like all hell, I mean like really bad, like makes a bad loaded washer seem like nothing. Anyway, so uh uh anywho, the the imbalance sensor was uh was disconnected, so I did get to catch that. So I'm kinda glad I opened the thing up because some knuckleheaded disconnected the inbound switch, and you that's not something you want to have disconnected. You just what happens when when when it senses it's not balanced, it just shuts the whole thing off right away, which stops it from uh uh flying apart.
Yeah. Yeah. Here's the question. Okay. Uh let me see.
Oh, well, we have two minutes, so. Oh, we have two minutes? All right. So let me see. Let's see what the oh, by the way, if you have any questions, call in to 718-497-2128, 718-497-2128.
So uh I'm gonna probably start this question and then probably have to go to it after break. Uh Paul uh Paul Kay writes in and says, uh, I'd be grateful uh if you could answer my question about uh getting meat soft. He's cooking for a population for whom food s food safety is the utmost important and the meats must be very tender. Okay. Um and so he's saying with with chicken, he doesn't have a problem getting these characteristics, tenderness, taste, and moin moistness, but he's having difficulty with turkey, everyone does.
Everyone does brother, like unless you use low temper sous vide and beef. And because food safety issues, he's hesitant to use sous vide, um, you know, he wants to get him as hot as possible without without really you know beating them to heck. Okay, well here's the thing. First my pitch for Sous vide. First of all, sous vide, I don't know where the regulations are uh where where you are.
I understand uh your trepidation in using them because if you use it improperly um you know it might might have problems. But sous by the way for those of you that don't know is uh is uh where you put a uh food in a in a bag you seal it you remove the oxygen you seal it you cook it uh and then you know you can re-therm it and uh and then serve it. Uh properly done, Sous vide is the safest, uh basically the safest of all cooking techniques and it allows you to get the the entire thing up to temperature. So if you're willing to take the time and investment to do it, I think Sous vide is actually incredibly s safe way to provide very very high quality uh items. Well barring that you could get uh uh a combi oven that can cook at a relatively accurate temperature for something like turkey you know I would want to take it to like uh sixty five uh at least and once you once sixty not at least but I mean sixty five actually at maximum for me but sixty five Celsius uh is enough if you cook it long enough to kill anything in there right uh and at the same time it's still gonna be very very moist.
So if you had a combi oven um they're quite expensive if you don't have space for that we could get you get a CVAP oven which basically is uh like a holding oven with a bain marie in it. It was developed for Kentucky fried chicken. It holds a fairly accurate temperature, and you could cook your turkey uh in in there uh at at 60 64 to 65. I think you're gonna really, really like the results. It's gonna be extremely tender, extremely juicy, and extremely safe, and not require any extra regulations.
Uh we have to go to break. I'm gonna think a little bit about beef, maybe, and we'll come back with some beef uh recommendations uh in a minute. We've got to payback. I need some get back. Payback.
Payback payback. I'm mad to get down with my girlfriend. That ain't right. Whoa! Holland cast.
Hey back, here's the thing, you got to see. Never do any damn thing to me. Sold me out the chicken chain. Told me that they had all the rain. Now you're pumped.
Welcome back to Cooking Issues, the show where we take on your cooking issues, most often technically related cooking issues, but not always. Uh, call in to the studio at 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-222-2822. We're going to be here for at least another 15 minutes, maybe more if you if you call with a really compelling question, right, Nastasha? Yes, please call.
Alright, so uh before the last break, I was answering uh Paul's question about how to cook meats so that they're tender and also extremely uh safe. Uh presumably someone who has trouble, you know, man, I don't know, maybe like a uh I don't know, someone who can't chew something to the needs really tender, but they also really safe, maybe someone immunocompromised old I didn't want to say it that way, Nastasha, but you know, thanks for just you know saying that. Awesome, great. Okay. Hope hope we haven't offended anyone out there.
So uh anyway, so uh we discussed turkey, which I thought should be cooked uh probably between depends, like breast meat, um leg meat, you need to go at least sixty-five uh Celsius from a taste standpoint, not really from a safety standpoint. You can cook it lower if you cook it for a long time. You have the temperature times um and c and you know that on our on our website on cooking issues, you can take a look at Doug Baldwin, I think also has that, uh has some safety uh guidelines uh on his website in his new book. Um but to beef. So uh with beef, um it depends on on how you want to cook it.
If you don't want to cook it sous vide, but you want to do low temperature, which is really the only way to guarantee you're not gonna overcook uh the items. Now, if you're gonna do a braise, right? We can all do braises without necessarily overcooking the meat. But if you want to do something that's not a braise and you still want to remain tender, you want to guarantee safety, you're gonna have to cook it for a fairly long time. Um and you want to do lower temperature, I would recommend getting something like a CVAP oven and uh as describing it before, it was invented for Kentucky Fried Chicken to hold Kentucky Fried Chicken, and it's basically uh a hot box with a with a water bath in the bottom.
And the water bath means that you can um really kind of accurately control the temperature. In a regular oven, you can't accurately control the temperature because uh A, the the uh you're not getting a lot of good unless it's convection, you're not getting uh really good heat transfer, and plus you're getting evaporative cooling. Moisture is always evaporating off the surface of your food, lowering its temperature. So it's really impossible to judge the internal temperature based on the oven's temperature uh with you know regular cooking. In a CVAP, you can set the uh humidity at a hundred percent on the inside, and you can really, really dial in exactly the internal temperature and really uh make sure that something is cooked all the way through and yet is still gonna remain juicy.
So I'd look at that, but I would really also look into g doing low temperature work with a circulator and sous vide, uh, because I you know I think that once you make the leap uh into Sous vide, the the fantastic thing about Sous vide is that there's very little potential for recontamination of a product, and so you can have products that uh are cooked and kept in really good shape and are very, very safe. Uh I mean there really is no safer way to do it other than you know than sous vide, so long as it's done properly. I mean um you know the the dangers obviously with you know with sous vide is that you don't uh you don't thermally process properly and that you you might leave bacteria in or you might not refrigerate it properly and you might get things growing in the bag like botulism, but you know, in a properly treated product, that's just not that's not gonna happen if you just treat treat the food properly. So I uh Paul, I hope that answered your question. And now uh maybe I will talk about some stuff that we're we're working on uh at the school, huh?
Yes. So uh we've been working on water. So for those of you that haven't read uh Fix the Pumps, Fix the Pumps is a book by uh uh Darcy uh O'Neill. It's uh basically saying uh, you know, we should take a look at um the soda fountain. So the soda fountain was uh you know phenomenon in uh in U.S.s uh back in the day, uh, you know, where you would go and they would make sodas for you, but it was a lot more than that.
It had a lot there was a lot going on a lot of recipes a lot of artistry a lot of XY and Z. So go check out the books uh fix the pumps um you know it's a lot of interesting stuff going on you should read it um now uh what I was most interested in was a section where he started giving recipes for making your own mineral water uh you know in in the vein of other famous mineral waters like you know seltzer was originally water from a place in Germany uh I forget Seltzin or something like that the town up until actually a uh like a decade or two ago you could buy that particular water um and then um you know you know all the famous waters you can you that's known constituents like a Polinaris uh Grollsteiner all these things and so we give some of these recipes so we started uh experimenting with making our own our own mineral waters now I can't you know you know me I can't be normal about this so you go on Google Books and it turns out you can get all kinds of books from the uh late 1800s that have all of the all of the constituents of all the famous mineral waters at the time because people were obsessed with the medicinal qualities of these various different bottled waters. And there's a couple of main constituents that you want to you want to get and so rather than trying to actually make any of the recipes what we did is we we just got all of the constituents so uh we you know we bought calcium chloride actually I have that because we use that when we use uh alginate tastes god awful it's like it's it's hideously terrible stuff but it's in some famous waters in small amounts uh magnesium chloride right magnesium chloride is better known uh to people as bittern or uh nigari it's used to as a tofu coagulant um uh so we you know we got some of that uh NACL, better known as salt, uh, is in a lot of things. Uh calcium chlor uh and then we also got so those are all the chlorides we tasted. Um you know, and by the way, you see these uh these waters and they're and they they list you know calcium chloride, magnesium chloride, like they once they go into water, they just turn into ions anyway.
So it's not like it's not like the calcium knows it belongs to the chloride as opposed to the calcium belonging with the carbonate. So anyway, uh okay. So then we also used uh magnesium uh sulfate, which is Epsom salts, which uh I'll get into later. You don't want to put too much Epsom salts into your uh waters. You know, one of the things people used to like about bottled waters uh was bottled waters that were known as purgative, which is fancy for makes you poop.
So you want to you want to stay away from pounding too much magnesium sulfate water uh as I unfortunately found out. Uh so we have magnesium sulfate, we had calcium sulfate, we had calcium carbonate, uh sodium bicarbonate, and uh potassium uh potassium bicarbonate, I think. Yeah. Uh anyway, yes, potassium bicarbonate. Uh and so we basically tasted all of these things uh separately to see kind of what they tasted like.
So in a different concentration. So when we were doing all the chlorides, like calcium chloride, magnesium chloride, sodium chloride, we tasted them two ways. One where there were equal amounts of the metal ion in it, right? So equal amounts of calcium versus magnesium versus sodium in the water, and then we tasted it with equal amounts of uh chlorine, you know, uh you know, the chloride ion in it. So equal amounts of Cl.
And um what we noticed is what we thought the calcium taste calcium chloride tastes like death. Uh in lower concentrations, it's not as bad, but it has a bitterness. Um then you know, the salt one obviously tasted like salt. The magnesium one was was sweet and kind of uh almost had a milky taste, which was strange because the calcium didn't. Um but uh when we carbonated then the very high amount of one, it all of a sudden went bitter, something that we didn't have when we were tasting it on its own.
Uh but we were using much higher concentrations than you would actually use in a normal mineral water. Um then in the carbonates, we actually really liked the uh the calcium carbonate water and it really modified the bubbles. Because I only care, but by the way, I only care about bubbles. Don't give me flat water, which is like spoiled, spoiled seltzer water. I hate it.
Flat water is an abomination. Uh you want bubbles in your water at all at all times. If you're me, I mean bubbles, bubbles, bubbles, bubbles, bubbles. And when you have the calcium carbonate in, uh it modifies the bubbles um and makes it look kind of less effervescent, I would say, but also kind of you know smoothed it out. So the problem with calcium carbonate is that it's not very soluble.
So uh really to make it soluble and not taste chalky, we added a little bit of uh we added a little bit of uh phosphoric acid, which you know uh allowed us to dissolve the thing in. And so we made a bunch of this water. We ended up liking magnesium sulfate was sweet and taste refreshing, but makes you poop. So you want to watch out for it. The calcium carbonate tastes like chalk unless you can get uh get it all in solution.
The calcium sulfate was not as chalky. Uh calcium sulfate is gypsum, which is another thing that they is used for uh coagulating tofu. Also, I think will make you poop in large quantities. Uh Nastasha, you enjoyed the uh the potassium bicarbonate. Maybe we should work with that a little more.
And I kind of like the the sodium bicarbonate in little amounts, which is baking soda. Um so anyway, we're trying combinations of these things, but we're working on our own kind of what we think is like the best tasting blend uh to to make it uh kind of a refreshing, maybe a little more refined mineral water rather than our normal, like hypercarbonated nitrous uh CO2 water, which is also delicious, but we're anyway, it's something we're working on. Uh now, um anything to add on that, Nastasha? I don't like any of the ones you've made. Oh, Jesus Christ.
You know, the thing is like i you don't like it because here's the thing. She's like, here I swear to God, folks. Uh, she was like, I like that, what's in it? And I was like, sodium bicarbonate. She's like, I hate it.
Right or wrong. A little bit. Yeah. I mean, like you you are very, you know, easily swayed by you know, knowing what's in it or not. Anyway.
Uh so I found something out interesting. I was researching uh a book called uh the mineral waters of Europe from the eighteen eighties, uh, by a guy named Tishborne, and I was downloading on Google Books because I love downloading things on Google Books, which is like one of the greatest uh things in all the all the world is Google Books. All of these public domain books are available. Basically, you can have the state-of-the-art knowledge from uh anything in the in the late 1800s before, and some of their state of the art knowledge is good, particularly with water, uh not in terms of science, but in terms of the actual composition of somebody's waters, soda, things like that. Uh I read you know I do lots of research on it.
Um and anyway, so I downloaded this thing by Tishborne, and I had this interesting story which I will relate to you in the next two minutes. Uh I came upon this by accident. There is this uh there is this thing in England called the Tishborne Dole, right? Dole like Bob Dole, but you know, dole meaning giving things out, right? And uh, and so basically, here's the story.
In the 1100s, the uh Baron Tishborne was a cheap, cheap, cheap, cheap bastard, right? Cheap bastard. His wife was nice. And his wife, she was on her deathbed, and she said, I don't remember his name, Baron, you know, I really wish you would give you have all this great farmland uh and you don't give any of the proceeds of that farmland to the poor. Please give some of the proceeds of this parm farmland to the poor.
He was like, No, because he's a cheap bastard. And then she said, Please, please, I'm dying, please. You know, give some of the proceeds of land to the poor. No. So he says, listen, finally, because he was a real dick.
He says, uh, listen, um, I will I will donate as proceeds uh to to the poor all of my land that you can walk around under your own power carrying a torch. Now it was like it was like winter time and she was dying, right? Right. She gets up, gets up, gets a torch, crawls around twenty-three acres of the Tishborn property with a lit torch before she collapses and the torch goes out, right? To this day, that this is all true, by the way, this is not like you know, horse hockey.
Like uh they to this day that area of land is called the crawl. So as she's dying from doing this, she basically says, Okay, you are gonna give the proceeds of this twenty-three acres in perpetuity to the villagers here, or uh there's a curse on you, you will have set the the house of Tishborn will have seven sons followed by seven daughters, at which point the name will be extinct and the house will fall in ruins. They continue this dole uh since the 1100s. They had one break in the dole starting in the late uh 1700s, uh so it goes from the eleven hundreds to the seventeen late 1700s, uh, and they stopped because uh the authorities said that there was a there was a like a the disturbance. And then swear to well, according to the history, they had seven sons uh in the Tishborne family, and then they couldn't start producing sons.
They started only having daughters, and all the sons were dying uh soon after they were born. They petitioned to restart the dole, they restart the dole. One son survived that had a son, and the Tishborn name was propagated again. In the in the late 40s, there was flour rationing after the war, and they thought they were gonna stop the Tishborne dole again. And people from all over the country of England uh sent flour, their flour rations to the Tishborne so that they could uh still distribute it out.
Every uh every inhabitant of Tishborne uh is is allotted one gallon of flour a year and every child's allotted half a gallon a year and they still get uh you know a couple tons of flour in every year they bless it with holy water sprinkle it out and dole it out to the uh to the people so here's to the Baron of Tishbourne and his dole thank you for listening to Cooking Issues I'm Dave Arnold here with Nastasha Lopez Vishus
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