Hello, you're listening to Cooking Issues on Heritage Radio Network. I'm Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues, where you call in with all your cooking related questions here in the studio today with Nastasha Lopez, Cooking Issues Hammer. Call in all of your cooking questions to 718-497-2120, 718-497-2120. We're here every Tuesday from noon to noon forty-five. That's 718-497-2128.
Oh, sorry. 718, scratch that. 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. I'm not gonna put any blame here, but Nastasha told me to write down as 2120.
So, you know, it's the first time we've ever given the wrong number on the air, so we apologize. Uh yeah, alright, alright. So, while we're waiting for you to call in, uh, I will answer a few questions people have sent in. Uh hello, Nastasha and Dave, my name is Lucy. I'm about to start college at Northeastern in Boston.
Congratulations. Uh well, I'm very excited to get my life started in the pseudo-real world uh of college. Uh I'm sad to be losing access to a kitchen. Unfortunately, they won't let Lucy have anything in her dorm room like uh hot plates or uh what else do they say she can't have? Basically anything with it with an open burner, no toaster ovens, and no hot plates.
So what what is she what is she gonna do? Because right now she has just an immersion blender and a food processor, but she really wants to be able to cook. All right, listen. First of all, here's the bad news. Uh whoever your RA is, whatever they call those things nowadays, uh, they're probably gonna be too stupid to realize that something like an induction burner is not uh like a fire hazard, and so they probably won't let you have an induction unit, even though they are freaking awesome and they're completely safe, and you should be able to have them in college.
So before you buy one, make an argument with your with your uh person that you should be able to have an induction unit because they don't actually produce heat unless a pan is on them. Uh and even then they're not they're not a fire hazard the way that other things are. Uh okay, now it assume I'm gonna make a couple assumptions about you. One, you're not, you know, overly wealthy because you're a college student. Uh two, you don't really care about rules all that much, right?
So one way to get around it is uh if your RA is not the smartest person in the world or they just don't care, they make things that are microwave toaster oven combinations that look for all the world just like a microwave that have an infrared heater in the top of it. So it just looks like a microwave and yet acts like a uh acts like a toaster oven. Um so that's one way because you know, I'm not so much about rules. Uh another thing you can do, they used to make in the 50s, and I actually this is what I did in college. Uh I bought uh I went to a thrift shop and I bought a Westinghouse turkey oven.
And these are things that they used to make in the 1950s, and they look like overgrown crock pots. Uh, crock pot's another thing you can have, by the way. Uh they look like overgrown crock pots, and uh they were meant to cook a turkey in in Thanksgiving time so that your oven would be free for whatever else you were doing, and you could cook a turkey in this countertop uh oven. I had one of those and I used it to uh bake bread. In fact, I wooed my current wife.
Uh one of the things I did was I used to break uh bake bread for her in my dorm room in this Westinghouse oven. And they're pretty they're pretty safe looking. No one's even gonna know what the hell it is. And I think I spent, I don't know, two dollars on mine in the thrift shop. You know, maybe you could look on eBay, something like that.
So that's an option for you. Here's some more options. If you're willing to get a little more involved, now's a perfect time to get started with uh low temperature and sous-vide cooking, right? Now, I'm assuming you don't have eight hundred dollars to go spend on a new immersion circulator. And an immersion circulator, for those of you that are listening, is basically a piece of equipment that allows you to heat water or any liquid really to a very accurate temperature and to achieve really kind of stunning results in a very small amount of space uh and have it be repeatable every single time.
And you don't need a big vacuum machine to run this. All you need to do is be able to put your food into Ziploc bags. Now, I almost I never recommend making your own or or buying one used on eBay, even though that's what I used to do because it's actually very nice to have uh the brand new one, and you know, I deal with restaurants and they shouldn't really have crab together things, and I want Philip Preston from Polyscience, my friend, to get as much business as is humanly possible on his brand new circulator, which is now available in William Sonoma for I think seven or eight hundred dollars, something like that. However, it is very easy to build your own immersion circulator, they're not quite as nice. But you can look on the on the web.
I've done it myself back in the day for as little as fifty dollars if you're really a good eBay searcher. But even if you buy all the stuff new, you can get everything, everything uh for about for under $150, $150, $200. Uh, a good place to look for cheap temperature controllers is auber instruments, uh A-U-B-E-R uh dot com. You can also uh then you know you can use things like immersion uh coffee heaters, like those little things you're supposed to put in coffee mugs. You get like three or four or five of those because you need a thousand watts of heating basically, and an aquarium pump, and then once you have the temperature control with a with a therm, you know, with a thermocouple in it, uh, a bunch of heaters and a pump, you're done.
I mean, it's kind of you know crab together. I will warn you about this as well. I shocked the hell out of myself the first couple times I built this because those heaters leak a little bit of electricity. But if you're willing to spend a little bit of time, I I could build one probably from parts in under an hour, but you know, if you've never done it before, give yourself like four hours. But uh, you know, it's fairly easy to do.
There's a bunch of um websites devoted to this. In fact, in our forums, there's a section on in cooking Issues forums. There's a section where people have posted some of their do-it-yourself uh circulators. Uh, and uh, you know, that's a good way to go in a dorm because it doesn't, you know, there's no open flame, and you could put out serious restaurant quality food out of your dorm with that. Now, here's the problem.
In order to do really good low temperature work, you need to be able to put a really good sear on something when it's done, right? Now, here's where I'm about to recommend something that you're not supposed to do. See, they think your microwave is safe because they've never seen someone really use a microwave. Now, I'm not just talking getting a case of light bulbs out of the closet and blowing them up every Saturday night, which is what I used to do. You can use a microwave to get up to 800 degrees Celsius.
Well, wait, I forget what that is. It's like 1800 degrees Fahrenheit, something absurd. Uh, here's what you do. You go to the hardware store, get yourself some silicon carbide, silicon carbide sharpening stones, right? You put insulating fire bricks around and put them in your microwave, turn it on, walk away.
In about 10 minutes, those uh silicone carbide uh blocks are gonna be glowing red, red hot, okay? Because they're what's called a micro uh they accept microwaves, they absorb microwaves, silicon carbide does. Now, you have like an amazing hot rock searing plate where you can sear the bejesus out of anything. You can melt metal, you can use your microwave to smelt metal. You can do some serious things.
Look up uh metal smelter microwave. There's an article on it in popular science in 2003. You can melt metal in your microwave, you can certainly sear a piece of meat in it. So just get a couple of silicon carbide uh uh sharpening stones, insulate them somehow with fire brick or with uh you know corning ware on top of like little things, and then turn it up till it glows red hot and sear away to your heart's content. Do not light your dorm on fire.
It's her first year at college. Well, um I mean, if it was anything like my first year of college, this will be the safest thing she's done. Anyway, I'm not saying to go do that, I'm just saying these are options. These are options. All right, Nastasha, they're options.
We have a call. All right. Uh hope that helps Lucy. Uh uh hi caller, you're on the air. Hi, Dave, good to talk to you.
This is uh Derek calling from Seattle. Hey, Derek. Uh I'm looking for some tips on doing sous vide pot rows. So um I like things that are done at a little bit lower temperature. My wife likes things that are done at a little bit higher temperature.
So I'm trying to find the sweet spot where uh I get something that's kind of has the texture of a traditional braise, which is what my wife likes. It's something that's not quite so dried out. Okay. Here here are you using a vacuum machine or are you using Ziplocks or what are you using? I'm using uh a vacuum machine and then a uh uh used lab circulating bath.
Oh, yeah. Which one by the way? Which which company? It's uh Fisher Scientific. Okay, so that's probably it's most likely it's uh it's an old poly science because they used to build uh Fisher's as well as I think VWRs.
I think. Anyway. So here's what I would say. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh the thing to be careful of, obviously, with used circulators is that a lot of times the bearings and things go bad.
Uh here's what here's what I would recommend. Uh there's no way to get a completely tradition. First of all, over reduce your sauce before you put it in the bag. That's the first it's the first thing you always need to do. Over reduce it well beyond what you think a normal uh a normal uh braise should be, because the meat when it cooks in the bag is going to release juices and and seriously water down your juice.
That's the that's the first step. Okay. Uh and it's a classic mistake people make. Uh the other one is that you know, although you can go as low as fifty-seven degrees or even lower when you're doing this, right? Most people prefer uh more of a traditional temperature.
I find a happy medium is somewhere between sixty and sixty-two Celsius, okay. Once you get up, although some people cook as high as seventy, what I think once you get above sixty-five or so, you're losing a lot of the benefits of uh of low temperature cooking, but then in that 60 to 62, 63 zone is a nice happy medium. It's just barely still pink, it's still got a lot of moistness to it, and you're gonna have uh I think you're gonna have a good result. But some people go as high as 70 even in in the bag, and you can try that too. It's still gonna retain more moisture than it would uh cooking in a traditional in a brave situation, but just make sure to over reduce your sauce, and I think a happy medium is gonna be somewhere between 60 and 62.
I would also uh really burn the hell out of it, not burn, but you know what I mean, really roast the hell out of some scrap meat and throw it in the bag, and it's gonna give some of those higher temperature flavors that your wife uh is craving, but still retain some of the texture that that you want. Does that help? Uh yeah, I I will say I've I've done it in the uh in the rain. I think I did it at about 65 for for 24 hours. I think one one issue that I have is it didn't quite soften up enough for her, and and and I'm typically using grass-fed beef, so I'm wondering uh what sort of difference that makes.
So at 62, you're gonna want to go for two days, about a little under two at 60, you're gonna want to go for two days. So I think you maybe you should also try going a little bit longer. So, like a good number for for like a short rib, you know, it's slightly different, but a good number for a short rib would be 60 degrees Celsius for 48 to 50 50 hours, somewhere in that range. And so 62 to 63, you're gonna want to go uh around the same amount of time. I wouldn't go as high as 65 because that's right where you're gonna squeeze a bunch of water out, so you might as well go a little higher if you're gonna go 65.
It's stay in the 62, 63, 60 to 63 range in there for about two days. Okay, sounds great. All right, give it a shot. All right, thank a lot. Thank you.
We have another caller? Yeah, I think we do. Hello, you're on the air. Hi, yeah. My name is Dennis.
And uh I'm a big fan of you guys. Um do you mind if I ask like a career question, sort of a cooking focused question? Sure. Okay. Um uh I am of you, I gotta say, all kind of jealous of what you do.
Um, you know just thinking about food all the time and experimenting, being on sort of the that intellectual side, you know, things. Uh I'm a cook right now. I cook at a very um well regarded restaurant in DC. But I'm really a lot more interested in more of a research or teaching role, something in more academic settings potentially eventually. Right.
And uh I was wondering if you have any advice or how you got to where you are, what skills you did have or what you did may have helped you get to what you're doing right now. That's an excellent question. So uh uh I knew that uh I didn't really want to be a restaurant chef because uh it just it just wasn't in me. It's it's not in me to to go and and pound out uh you know uh a service every day. Also I'm not organized enough to be a real restaurant chef, which I think you really really need to be.
The one skill that uh I did have that's really helpful, or still have, I hope, is that uh I can read anything almost and understand what's going on. So from a research standpoint, you want to be able to first of all you you want to be very curious, you want to be able to absorb things, and you want to be able to focus on problems very very closely. That's like that's the first thing to do pre mean to do precisely what I do, right? Now to be involved in just the food world in general, I think um you you know, if you're not gonna be a cook, then you know then and you still want to be in in the in the field. I mean, writing if you can write is a very good is a good way to do it.
I mean I know a lot of people that that have done that. Uh you know, for instance, my sister in law, uh you know, Wiley Dufrein's wife, my sister-in-law, which is actually my wife's sister. She, she you know, went to French culinary where I teach, and she's now the you know, editor in chief of the Food network magazine. So I mean there's lots of there's lots of different pathways, um, whether it be in writing or or in media. Now on the research side, you know, there's a couple of things you can do there.
I know some people that do uh you know consultancy work or they have uh you know specific high-tech catering kind of catering opportunities where they don't necessarily want to, but they want to spend more time researching because in a catering thing you can you know focus on one job and you don't have a daily pound out of a service and you can get more time to focus. The main problem with the kind of cooking that I that I do at the French culinary is that it's very hard to do when you have a daily service to grind out because you just don't have the time to focus on uh on solving problems. That like you know, and you're not necessarily going to be able, if you take a job at a big comp company doing uh kind of cooking in that way, you're not necessarily going to be able to focus on problems that interest you. But there are places that have jobs like that, like Cuisine Solutions who does a lot of uh low temperature work. They hired someone who uh that I know you know who went to the French culinary, and he gets to do a lot of research, a lot of interesting work.
So there are opportunities out there, but I think to do you know, just to do this kind of work, you just you know you you need to be able to you know it's like what Wiley does too. Wiley reads all patent, you know, patents constantly he's constantly reading. So I think you know, if you're very curious and you always want to learn, it helps if you can write, but it's not you know not necessarily you know a prerequisite. But um, you know I'm sorry I couldn't give any more specific advice, but uh that's um that's kind of what I did. I don't know if you know that's great.
Really? All right, well well uh thanks for call thanks for calling. And you can you know, always post anything to our to our forums or to the the blog and you know we'll try and help you out. I like anyone to get in this field that that can. Surely well.
Thank you. Thank you. We have anyone else? Yeah, hello, you're on the air. Hi, this is Dan from New York.
Hey, Dan. Hey, so I just have a I guess a question. I'm cooking this chicken. I got a heritage chicken for the first time. And it smells a little, I guess, sulfuric because it has, I guess, blood in the bag.
Huh. And I was wondering, what should I do in terms of will that affect the taste or how should I cook that? Or should I even cook it? Well, it smell well, it smells like like sulfur or like like a like a like a like rotting. Smell like it's rotting?
Just like when I would when I asked before, they said it was something about how it's packaged with the blood and it's just a little strong. So it is kind of old, um, because I'd gotten it through this roundabout way. Yeah. So I was just wondering, do you think that's safe to eat? And if so, should I worry about the flavor at all?
Was the bag did the b was the bag inflated at all? Was it still tight? No, it I mean the bird looks beautiful itself. Yeah. It's just And the bag was still tight.
Yeah, still tight, still everything. Looks nice. It was a cryo bag, right? Correct. Okay.
Does it it doesn't smell blue cheesy at all, right? No, it's it's just like it has a strong arm. It might not even be sulfur, it just smells like something, and I was kind of curious if that would be in the taste. Alright, well, if you've smelled uh rotten chicken before, then you know, and it smells like that, then I would avoid. Um you could try just giving it a c like a quick dip rinse in in um in uh you know in uh in water or vinegar vinegar a little bit to try and see what happens to it, pull it out, see how see how it smells.
Uh I have been in your situation before where you really want to cook something, you really want it to work and you really want it to be delicious because you've been thinking about it, right? So uh um and then like you've handed over to your wife and they smell it and they're like, Are you freaking cracked? Are you gonna serve that to me? Do you know what I mean? So that's another that's another good thing to do.
Like if you feel nervous about it, I wouldn't I wouldn't bother with it. Or if you really want to, I would test it on yourself. I would cook it for yourself. I've done that before too. Test it on yourself and just eat it yourself and see what you think rather than subjecting your your friends and and family to it.
I'm sorry that I can't give anything kind of more specific because I can't smell it, but you know, as a general rule of thumb, never serve to someone else anything that even makes you a little bit nervous. I mean, that's kind of a rule that I like to live by because I do serve bizarre things uh quite often, and I want people to trust me. So, you know, uh, as far as I know, I haven't gotten anyone horribly sick. I'd like to kind of maintain that record. I think it's kind of a good call.
But, you know, if you feel comfortable with it, by all means cook it yourself and see uh, you know, eat it yourself and see see what you think. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, absolutely. All right, thank you. All right, thank you.
Have a good one. You too. It always makes me nervous, uh, Nastasha, to uh to cook something if you think it might be bad, right? Bear. The bear was not bad.
We're talking about the bear we cooked in the thing. She Nastasha is nervous that the bear had trichinosis, which is indeed possible. Trichinosis is a worm that infects muscles. It's it's an awful disease. It's measured in uh number of worms per square uh per cubic centimeter muscle mass.
It's a terrible disease to get. Uh however, you kill it by cooking it, which is what I did, Nastasha. You should have eaten that bear. Nastasha apparently not taking Jeffrey Steingard's advice last week. Some of the best advice you'll ever hear on on uh on learning to become a good eater.
Jeffrey Steingarden, one of the best best eaters that I've ever met. Uh, but eat everything. You know, so so long as it's safe. He would eat something that's unsafe, because that's Jeffrey. But you know, as long as it's safe, uh, you should try it.
Uh anyway. So uh I think we're coming up on our first yeah, first commercial break here. Uh we're coming back at you in a couple of minutes. Cooking issues. Oh!
How do you feel, brother? Feeling good? You feel good? So much bone brother. How do you feel, mate?
I'm feeling called your name. I don't want all people to know you in here. How you feel, fella? Sure getting down. Look at him.
We're gonna have a bunk good time. We're gonna have a bunk good time. We're gonna have a bunk good time. We're gonna have a bunk good time. We've gotta take your high.
Alright. Yeah, let's go on there. We've gotta take the high-human. Now I won't have a body. Let bread blow about two courses.
And then I'm gonna wave in. Let's go and do it with dinner. Now alright. I'm gonna get that bellow with a little horn over there. Hello and welcome back to Cooking Issues.
I'm Dave Arnold, your host of cooking issues. Call in your questions to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. And while we're waiting, let us take a question. So uh from an email question.
So Bob Good writes in and he says, I like your write-up of herb grinders on the website, but how do they fit in? How do they compare to a mortar and pestle at home? And keeping wife is uh wife's motto is clutter is the enemy. Sounds like our wives would be good friends. Uh so for those of you that don't know what I'm talking about, uh herb grinder is the euphemism for a marijuana grinder that uh pot you know, pot users, potheads, as I lovingly call them, uh use to uh kind of grind up their marijuana before they roll it into a cigarette or stuff in a pipe, whatever they're gonna do with it.
Uh they're a fantastic way to grind up small quantities of spices when you don't want to, you know, coffee grinders they don't really work for small quantities because the blades don't hit your spices. They're fantastic. And you can look on our website at ground, I don't know what I do, like 10 different spices, 15 different 10, something like that. So you can see kind of what results you get on different spices. Now, the the question Bob has is listen, I already have a mortar and pestle at home, so why do I need this?
You're probably, you know, Bob, you're probably right. Uh if your mortar and pestle is small enough to be handy, they work uh pretty well unless you have a big problem with your mortar and pestle with spices bouncing out of it. I don't know that you need to have this as well. This is m you know mostly uh uh useful for someone like me who's at a cooking school and you don't want to lug over lug around your mortar and pestle or if you're gonna be cooking off site. They're incredibly tiny.
So you can stick it kind of in your uh you know, right next to your peeler in your utensil drawer. So it's useful having around. At home, I use my mortar and pestle, but when I'm at school, I use the herb grinders. So I hope that was that was helpful. I think that uh answered that that question.
Uh Ray Mac 007 asks, he was thinking about cooling um sauces and then vacuum, putting them in vacuum bags and storing them into in his freezer until needed. Are there any downsides to storing sauces this way? Um not r not really. I mean, uh it's a really good way to store something because uh when you once you put it in a vacuum bag, you're not gonna have any uh water loss or kind of freezer burn problems as long as the vacuum bags that you're using are um you know are are oxygen impermeable. They're meant for for freezer storage.
You want to get ones that are meant for uh cooking and chilling, and then the great thing about uh bat vagging bac that's sorry, vagging down sauces, is that you can then throw those bags directly into uh hot water and reheat them in the bag without the possibility of scorching them or or you know having any sort of problems. In fact, you can reheat several different kinds of sauces at the same time in the same water uh if you have them all in bags. So it really is a very good uh way to do it uh if you're doing large quantities, and and that you know that they'll really last a long time that way. And he says he's assuming that uh emulsion-based sauces would not be a candidate for this process. I would guess that's probably right.
You can freeze emulsion-based sauces is if you stabilize them with different stabilizers, but I've never really experimented that because I haven't tried to get extended storage out of sauces in in bags that way. I mean, it's not kind of my focus is always on uh kind of achieving new new quality benchmarks instead of trying to necessarily um extend the shelf life. But if I was doing it for my house or for uh a restaurant where that was useful, I'm sure I would have researched how to make an emulsion uh kind of not breaking the bag. There are people that have done that kind of work, so it's definitely definitely possible. So I would go ahead and do that.
It's also a great way to store uh fruit pureees. They the sauces all of a sudden they store flat in bags, they're frozen, they're really easy to reheat. So I think that's a really good that's a really good technique. Um now, before I answer uh the next question I have, I just want to uh say that last week New York magazine really shoved it to me. They really gave me the shaft because they wrote up my favorite tomato that I wait every freaking year.
I wait for this tomato. Uh it's the Aunt Ruby's German Green Tomato from Stokes Farm. They're at the Union Square Green Market. Um they're on Saturdays, and I think also Wednesdays, the other day they're there. And their Aunt Ruby's German Green is the greatest tomato I have ever had.
It's my f favorite tomato. And New York magazine wrote their particular one up as the greatest tomato in New York. And consequently, now they're completely wiped out. Like I got there at noon and they said they'd been sold out since 10 a.m. Because everyone from New York magazine apparently who reads the magazine went and bought all of this, all of uh Stokes Farm's tomatoes.
So I was pretty bent, pretty bent about that. Um luckily for me, their second favorite tomato of the uh you know in the New York magazine was the German stripe, which by the way, Aunt Ruby was a real human being uh and uh Aunt Ruby Arnold, no relation to me. And uh, you know, she not only came up with the uh with the with the Aunt Ruby's German Green, I believe she was also the source or one of the sources for the German stripe, which is a huge red uh um yellow and uh red beautiful tomato. Uh and the um Stokes also has that. It's my second favorite of their tomatoes.
I'm growing that one too. Yeah, but apparently your landlord made you throw them away. Anyway, so oh yeah, anyway. So, but Stokes's uh Stokes is is excellent, but they didn't write up Stokes' as being the uh second best. So they cleaned out some other farmer's German stripe and cleaned out his ruby.
So I spent this weekend eating stripes, which are which are also excellent, but it brings me to my pet peeve, which is first of all, you can't just call out a tomato variety and say it's great, right? You you know, because I've had Aunt Ruby's German Green, which is a large green, kind of like weird shaped tomato, and the bottom gets a pinkish red blush when when when it's ripening up. Because you know, you look at the bottom of a tomato, not the part attached to the plant, to see kind of that's it ripens from there first and travels up towards the uh where it attaches to the plant, and it also softens at the bottom first and gets and goes harder as it goes up to the top. So when you're judging the ripeness of a tomato, you want to look at the bottom first, right? See how she's going.
And you have to know what an ant ruby looks like. I think it should start getting that pink uh flush at the bottom, and I think it should be getting a little soft, although the guys at Stokes uh disagree with me on this because they don't want you mangling their tomatoes by picking them up and squeezing them. That is a rotten thing to do to their tomatoes. Don't do that. Um, uh here's here's a I don't know how I got on that, but here's here here's the thing.
Uh their ant rubies are sublime, and other people's ant rubies are crap, right? Different tomato varieties taste very different depending on where they're grown, how they're grown, you know, the the location, the type of soil and everything. It's not enough to just say, I like ant rubies. You have to say, I like although they are by and large an excellent variety. You have to say, I like this farmer's ant rubies, I like that farmer's ant rubies.
So, you know, you can't just go and buy a variety, you really have to find a supplier, a farmer that you like and get their tomatoes of that particular variety. I mean, that's the thing I think also people then they they just put out big farm stands, so hey, these are all heirloom tomatoes. I'm like, that's great. 80% of these taste like like nothing, they're garbage. Like a lot of heirloom tomatoes, I I apologize.
A lot of heirloom tomatoes don't taste that great, or they don't have that great great a texture. And so you'll go to these farmers' stands and they'll have heirloom tomatoes. And this happened to me before because I feel when I see something I've never had before, I'm compelled to try it. Like I'm compelled to try it. That's just kind of how I am.
And uh, there's a farmer's market right by my house in the lower east side on Sundays, and as I saw a tomato, I was like, oh, uh, this looks interesting because it had a shape of an ant ruby, but it was red with like very thin yellow yellow stripes through it. And I was like, uh, what varieties is? He goes, I don't know, it's an heirloom tomato. I'm like, you're you're uh I can't curse on the radio. I'm trying to think of something to say, you know, to insult the man because you know, thank you.
Now I can't ever replicate this experience. Thank you. You know what I mean? Heirloom tomato. That's like saying it it's a vehicle with four wheels.
Well, is it a Mac truck? Is it is it a Hyundai? You know, am I getting a Lincoln Continental or am I getting a gremlin? You know what I mean? I don't know.
You know what I mean? Please, you know, to tell like tell the if you're not actually the farmer at the market, at least tell the people the varieties that you're selling so that we can figure out what the hell's going on as as eaters. Anyway, that tomato, now I was even angrier because I bought it and it went home. I was hoping it would suck, and then I wouldn't have to worry about trying to find it again. Only it was delicious.
You know what I mean? And and even tomatoes that some tomatoes look fairly similar, but they're different. Like there's this tomato called the Everlast, which looks like an ant Ruby if you're not experienced with it, but it isn't. It's a little more yellow than a Ruby. Anyway, so that's my stupid spiel on heirloom tomatoes.
Have you tasted your uh stripes yet, Stasi? I only had one. And how was it? It was good, but it was really tiny. Why the hell did you what why did you pick it when it wasn't ready yet?
I think the container I'm growing it in is really small, so it only allows for tiny tomatoes. Yeah. Tiny tomatoes. That's my that's my next band name right there, tiny tomatoes. All right, let me take an email question.
Uh Ryan, Ryan Santos uh wants to know about uh the book called The Handbook of Hydrocolloids. He says he's interested in hydrocolloids and and modern cooking, and most of his uh recipes he's done are just adapting other people's recipes for using hydrocolloids. And for those of you that don't know what what what I'm talking about, hydrocolloids are a group of um basically complex sugars, polysaccharides, new you know, gums, whatever you want to call them, that are used to thicken and gel, uh used to thicken and gel uh you know different products. So Xanthan gum, carrageenin, these sorts of things. And uh most people do just adapt other cook's recipes, and that's fine.
But if you want to learn more, where do you go? He he was mentioning a book called the Handbook of Hydrocolloids. That's like a $200 book. It's very technical. I read it, it's it was very useful to me.
Um, but I wouldn't be the first book on hydrocolloids I would get. The first book I will get on hydrocolloids is put out by the Egan Press. I think it's I forget how to spell it, it's like an E-A-G-A-N press, uh, which is a portion of the uh the Association of American Sereal Chemists or something like that. It's a very thin book, it's only sixty, sixty something dollars. You can get it at Kitchen Arts and Letters, uh, the world's greatest cookbook store, at least the world's greatest that I've been to.
It's here in New York City up in the 90s on Lexington Avenue. And it's a great introduction to hydrocolloids. It's extremely useful. It has a bunch of tables and charts in it that talk about uh, you know, the problems when you try and mix different hydrocolloids together. It has flow charts of trying to figure out you know how to choose what hydrocolloid to use for different systems.
Extremely readable, extremely useful. In fact, there's a that whole Egan Press put out a bunch of books. They have one on starches, which is excellent. They have one on sugars, which is excellent. Um their emulsifier one I didn't think was so useful for cooks, but I would definitely start there.
If you're hungering for more technical information after that book, you know, then by all means go to the the handbook of hydrocolloids. But the handbook of hydrocolloids is set up as a as a an ingredient by ingredient um book. It's like 300 and something pages, and it's like, you know, here's Agar, here's the chemical formula, you know, for agar, and then you know, here are its various properties. So uh, you know, I it I think it's useful to a small number of cooks, but not as useful as it could be, and not necessarily $200 worth of useful if you can go get the uh Egan Press book instead. Uh they used to run a deal on the on the uh serial chemist website.
You have to really search around for it where you could buy a one year subscription to all of the Egan Press books for 99 bucks and then you could download all of them on on PDF for just 99 dollars. And that's in fact what I did. So I have them all on on PDF like the uh you know fats which is another good one actually and I even have the ones that uh are useless to me like food colorings, useless. Uh non-nutritive sweeteners, aka all the things to make diet soda and whatnot, also fairly useless for me. But you know me, once I once I have access to it, I'm gonna download it because that's just the way I am.
I I'm a sucker for a sunk cost. You know that's why I don't go to all you can eat uh all you can eat restaurants anymore because you have to roll me out of those things in a wheelbarrow. First of all, I you know like obviously I'm not gonna eat don't be a chump and go eat the salad bar. You know, like hit the most expensive literally I don't care whether I like it or not. I walk into an all you can eat restaurant, I zero in on whatever has the highest food cost for that restaurant instantly.
Instantly and then I fill an entire plate with whatever that is whatever it is. I pound a couple plates of that then once I'm sick of eating the most expensive thing they have I find the second most expensive thing they have and I continue to eat that until I'm sick of that item. Two or three items down the line I'll start feeling physically sick but it's not until my wife pulls me away because she's disgusted to stand next to me. That is when I stop and leave an all you can eat restaurant. I have similar problems with open bars.
So I try to avoid these kinds of things now because you know as you as you get older it's it's more and more unseemly to be to be doing this sort of thing. I don't know how the hell I got in. Oh, yes, it's because I downloaded even the useless books. This is what it's like to be me, by the way. That's what it that's what it that's what it boils down to.
Uh I hope that I hope that uh answered answered your your question. And uh I think we want to go to one more commercial break. Alright, let's go to one more commercial break. Cooking issues, call in your questions to 718. Uh what is it, Nastasha?
718. Oh my god, I can't believe this. 497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. When I left a home this morning, I promise I would think to stay real straight and sober.
I swore I wouldn't drink bed whisking. Before the night was over. I started in to say bedsky. Coming back at you with cooking issues. I'm Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues.
Call in your questions. You have another like 10-15 minutes to call in your questions to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. And today's cooking issues is brought to you by Hearst Ranch. Hearst Ranch is the nation's largest single source supplier of free-range, all-natural, grass-fed, and grass-finished beef.
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You um I I want to uh say that last week apparently I did not give our sponsor TechServe enough of a of a run because I forgot about mentioning it until the very end of the show and basically blasted through it at the speed of sound as fast as I could speak, which when I want to is quite quickly. And uh I used to do that in debate in high school, speak very quickly. It's a technique called spreading for all those who didn't go to debate in high school. Anyway, so I apologize to TechServe. A fine a fine service for fixing your computer.
TechServe. Alright. Nastashi, feel better now? Yeah, that's better. Yeah.
Uh oh, and by the way, uh, Mr. Santos, his second part of his question was how do you get, I swear to God, how do you how do I get a date with the hammer? And I I have to say, you don't bot don't bother trying with that one. Don't, you know, she's uh, you know, I just I would I would stay away from that one, right, Sazi? Right?
Yes. I'm just kidding, Nastasha. Just kidding. All right. Brandon asks using larger ice with reduced surface area will reduce the rate at which ice dilutes a cocktail, but how does that affect how long it holds temperature in a finished drink?
Well, using larger ice, hold temperature in a drink longer with less dilution and smaller ice. Okay. Uh he's not very concerned about shaking or stirring, but he's more mostly worried about um the final drink. Um, and how does that differ from something that has been chilled uh basically as opposed to something that's coming from from room temp, for instance, pouring a spear on the rocks. All right, here's the here is the answer to this question, as far as I can tell.
That particular experiment I haven't run in probably a year and a half. But my memory of it is this. Uh a larger uh ice cube will in fact dilute less in your uh in the cocktail, but it will not keep it as cold. Now, what are we talking about? If you put a lot of small ice in, to stir a drink, you put small ice in, that drink will probably hover around the like one, you know, one or two it's gonna start out at like min anywhere between minus four and minus uh a half a degree Celsius, depending on how they stir it.
Okay, that's gonna be the the range. Uh a shaken drink is going to be in the range of minus seven to minus three degrees Celsius if it's done properly. Okay. When you pour that drink into smaller cubes, it's gonna maintain its temperature better, but it will get more diluted because of the extra surface area, especially if they throw it, pour it onto ice that you didn't shake off, that you didn't get the water. You'll get an initial hit of dilution out of that that's gonna dilute it right out of the gate.
Um in that case, I actually recommend using that. Don't yell at me, cocktail people, please. I don't want to hear it. But I mean it's not of course I want to hear it. Let's have an argument.
I'm just kidding. But the um but if I was going to shake a drink and then serve it kind of on on the rocks, I frankly think you'd be better off serving it with the things you shook with, especially if the ice was slightly larger as they still looked good because you've already gotten the surface water off of those things. Do you know what I mean? You're not adding extra surface water. But you know, I'm sure there's people that'll disagree with me.
Uh, and I'd be happy to have that discussion because I'm just thinking about this off the top of my head. A larger ice cube uh will, you know, so if you're using small ice cubes, let's assume you're going to maintain a temperature within a degree or two of zero for a while. You know, the experience I had with a big ice cube is that the temperature is going to go up to about you know somewhere in the range of five degrees Celsius, somewhere like that. So it's not going to keep it anywhere near as cold. So long as it's cold enough, right, then I think it's going to be it's gonna be um okay.
Um it's just not gonna maintain um the temperature nearly as well. If it maintains it enough for you, then I think that that's okay because remember, there's a it's it's very strict. There is no melting without chilling, and there is no uh chilling without melting. So there's no way with an ice cube to keep a drink uh well, unless you use freezer ice, but you know, stay tuned. I promised last week I was gonna post on the blog, but I spent like you know, ten hours working on the charts for the blog post, so it's gonna go up soon, I promise on stirring and ice.
But um that you don't get to win, so you either get a drink that's more diluted because you had to melt more ice, or you get uh a drink that's not as cold because it's not as diluted. It's basically a one-to-one. In fact, I'll I'll spoil it a little bit. I gave uh I did a a test, right? So when you're stirring a cocktail, you uh when you're stirring a cocktail, it actually takes a long time for the cocktail to get to basically an equilibrium point where you're not really chilling that much more and you're not melting that much more.
It's a relative equilibrium because you're always, you know, you're you're losing energy to the to the atmosphere, so it's not a you know real equilibrium. But you can definitely, when you look at a chart of temperature versus time as you're stirring, it basically drops very quickly at first the temperature, and also is diluting a lot at first, and then it basically plateaus out, and you get only very small changes from from there on out. But uh, and when you when you're shaking a drink, that that curve plateaus very quickly, like in the in 12 to 15 seconds in there. You you're basically hitting the plateau. In uh in a stirred drink, it's quite a bit longer, like on the order of uh one or two minutes of of stirring is where you hit the real plateau.
Um so uh I did a test where instead of um pulling basically stirring for two minutes until it was done, I put thermocouples in and I stirred with small ice until I hit exactly uh a certain temperature. I forget what it was, I had to go look up, but I think it was like minus uh minus 0.6 Celsius, something like that, right? And I I poured the drink out. Then I took small ice and stirred it until it reached exactly minus 0.6 Celsius, poured it out, and uh both drinks had identical dilutions, identical, but one right was stirred in, I have to look it up, but it's something like 30 seconds, and the other one was stirred in like a minute. And so, you know, that's why stirring, why we said I think before a couple times ago, is there's kind of more of an art to stirring a cocktail because you really can affect the dilution and the temperature of the drink by um how long you stir, whether you stir fast, whether you stir slow, whether you use big ice, whether you use little ice.
In a shaker, uh it's so violent that uh basically all things equal out, and you get to your equilibrium point in if you do it enough, basically no matter what you do. Um so in stirring, I mean in shaking, rather, where you have everyone really worried about their technique on shaking, uh, we find that it doesn't make that much of a difference. The most difference you're gonna get, as long as you shake enough, the most difference you're gonna get from shaking is actually in how you finish it, whether you strain it or not, whether you know whether you push the gate down when you're pouring. Like these are kinds of things that make a big difference in the finished cocktail. Um in stirring, where you're not really adding a lot of texture, though, those things do matter, the size of the ice, the how fast you stir, how slow you stir, because almost no one, in fact, no one I've ever seen stirs a drink until it reaches its temperature plateau.
Uh and so, you know, this is spoiling a little bit what you know what's going to go with the blog post. So uh, but but hopefully, you know, the the this one chart that I'm gonna put up where basically, you know, I pull two drinks at the same temperature, even though one was stirred for a minute and one was stirred for 30 seconds, and they're basically identical from a dilution standpoint, will show that really, you know, that this is the fundamental rule of cocktails is that um you know there is that chilling and dilution are linked, in extra inextricably linked, and that there is no chilling without dilution, and there is no dilution without um chilling. Um now, a lot of people, they uh you know they say, but you know, my ice comes from the from the fridge and uh uh for the freezer rather. And uh we have a chart that's coming into the blog post about that as well. And uh it it is true that there is some energy stored in an ice cube that um when you when you put an ice cube from the freezer into um into your drink, it chills your drink a little bit before it starts melting.
But that effect is not as big as you think, right? So if you were to stir two dr and you're gonna see this chart for yourself, if you stir two drinks, one with ice cubes from the freezer and one with ice cubes that have been left out on the you know on the counter until they've reached up to zero degrees uh Celsius, you will see that the uh freezer ice cubes only get the drink like half a degree colder, right? And and and I I really don't know whether this is an artifact or not. Some some scientists will have to call in and talk to us about it. But you know, Ebon Clem and uh Thomas Evan Clem is the uh B you know head of BR guest um uh beverage program and you know, well-known bartender and used to do a lot of high-tech cocktails, still still still works with a lot of these things, and Thomas Waugh is you know uh bartender at Death and Co.
Great bartender. We we all did this stirring uh thing at Tails of the Cocktail, and they noticed that when they used freezer ice as opposed to not freezer ice, that their freezer ice actually took longer to chill than uh a drink down than the one that was at zero degrees. Um and we replicated it, and in my ex in the experiments that I ran with them and one that I did separately, I found that that was also the case. I don't feel comfortable enough saying that that's actually happening, that it actually but it was it's interesting that that you know that that even appears to be the case. I don't really know why uh that would be except for the fact that maybe it takes longer to get the energy out from from raising a temperature than it does just to melt it because melting is such a a big wallop.
So, but in the chart you'll see in the blog post if you go to it at www.cookingissues.com, um it in fact took longer to chill a drink that was uh with ice creams from the freezer, and it didn't even make it to a final temperature that was that much lower. So you don't really win by um you don't really win by using ice that's in the freezer. The other interesting thing about uh freezer ice, people think that ice maintains a temperature for a long time below zero, it's not the case. We froze a cube, and you'll see a picture of it, um, around a thermocouple, and then put it into a big ice bin, and we let it sit there, and it went from minus 20 Celsius, which is about minus four or so in in Fahrenheitville, and uh it came all the way up to zero in in under 20 minutes. So ice doesn't really maintain its uh it's below freezing temperatures that long um because it's such a good conductor of heat, um, and you're not really winning from freezer ice.
Uh and the fundamental rule I think holds, remember there is no chilling without dilution, and there is no dilution without chilling. And with that, I think we will sign off from cooking issues. One more shout out to our sponsor, Hearst Ranch, cooking issues on Heritage Radio Network. Vicious visions. Oh, you did crap me on this color.
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