Hello, you're listening to Cooking Issues on the Heritage Radio Network. Uh coming to you every Tuesday from 12 to 1245, where we answer all of your cooking questions. You know, usually tech-related questions, but we like any any kind of questions. Uh we're here live in the studio at 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128.
Call in. I'm here today, of course, with Cooking Issues own Nastasha Lopez, the hammer. And uh, you know, she's here to keep me keep me honest, I guess. Uh today's food today's show is brought to you by Whole Foods Market. Uh Whole Foods Market is turning 80, and they've partnered with some of its favorite friends for 30 days of Twitter giveaways.
Follow at Whole Foods Sync. Whole Foods NYC. I should read this beforehand, really. Uh follow at Whole Foods NYC and use the uh hashtag WFM NYC B Day. That's Whole Food Market New York City B Day.
WFM N Y C B Day to qualify and win prizes from Brooklyn Salsa Company, Rick's Picks, make good pickles, uh Gus Soda, uh Housing Works, whose bookstore you should support on uh Lafayette Street in uh Manhattan, and the New York Botanical Garden, an excellent place to visit, and more. Actually, those really are good places to get together. That's a 30th birthday. What'd I say? 80.
Oh, 80? Well, 80, 30. Yeah, same same same same thing. 30th birthday. Whole Foods is not yet 80.
Although more power to you, Whole Foods, may you make 80. Uh, right? Anyway. Uh okay. So uh today's first question is uh a follow-up on last week's question from Ryan Santos.
The first part of his question has to do with uh Nastasha. Uh he was the call um the person last week who asked for a date. I said uh don't even try, don't bother. He still wants to know Nastasha's sign. Uh it's uh Taurus, not Sagittarius Taurus, correct?
Oh I think he was saying that's his sign. Oh, uh I don't know. Uh anyway, his question his question was um we have a new infusion technique. I'm not sure if we talked about it on the radio or not. But basically what you do is you take uh uh whipped cream maker uh and uh that takes nitrous uh oxide uh chargers.
You put uh I usually use liquor, but you can use any liquid. You put something porous with flavor in it, herbs, like cilantro or Thai basil, uh regular basil, I guess, uh things like ginger, things like cocoa nibs, anything porous basically. You put it in with the with the liquor and you charge it with uh nitrous and you uh which is laughing gas, you know. Most people uh it turns out a lot of people who use these things use it to get high, right? They use uh the laughing gas.
Yeah, sure you don't. Anyway. I really don't. Okay. Uh anyway.
Uh I I tried it once in high school and I didn't actually like it, so uh uh I don't really use it to get high. But apparently there's a lot of people out there who don't even cook who have the equipment to do this. Uh so maybe they should try it with uh with um with liquor. Anyway, so you you charge it with nitrous, you swirl it around for about a minute, and then when you release the pressure inside the canister, basically uh you know you've the pressures forced all the uh liquor into your into the food that you're trying to get the flavor out of. And when you release it, all that stuff uh boils back out again, and you have a really very, very quick infused uh liquor.
You can see it on our blog, www.cooking issues.com. It's a good technique. Uh anyway, Ryan wants to know does this also work with solids? Uh and the answer is yes. I haven't tried it, but uh uh Alex and Aki at uh Ideas in Food, go check their blog, uh did it with uh Mozzarella, and there's a bunch of other people out there now who are using this technique to infuse solids with with flavor.
Anyway, uh so that answers that question, right? Right. Okay. Uh now let's go to some other email questions. Now remember, we will answer your questions live if you call in at 718-497-2128.
That's 718-497-2128. Okay. So Sam Liechtenstein calls in or Stein, what do you think? Liechtenstein? Okay.
Uh anyway, Sam c uh wrote in and said, uh, do you uh disagree or agree with the following statement um made by uh a fellow by the name of Chris uh Onstad, who's the uh author of a comic book called uh webcomic called uh Eakewood, and he has uh a cookbook, it's actually no longer available on Amazon, and uh Sam thinks it's a great cookbook. I have no idea because I've I've never read it. I haven't read any comic book cookbooks, actually, have you? No. No?
I'm willing to willing to read it. But anyway, uh so uh Chris Onstad, the author says uh in the book, once you make a potato chewy, and he's referring to hash browns, uh how you sh this should never happen to a hash brown. Once you make a potato chewy, you're doing things to it so wrong that it would be best if you just gave that person the potato and let them take it home and try to make sense of it themselves. Basically, if you make a hash brown that is chewy, I might as well just hand the dude a raw potato and let him go home and work with it because you've done a far worse thing to him. And Sam wants to know if I agree or not.
Uh well, I do agree that uh hash brown should not be not be chewy. Uh but um potatoes can be chewy uh and and be good. And so the the first thing I thought of was uh our stretchy potato ice cream, right? Because we make this ice cream and you read about it on our blog. I think I've mentioned it on the radio before, right?
Yeah. Where uh you but you blend cooked potatoes, steamed potatoes, into ice cream base and you freeze it, and what you get is this chewy, stretchy potato ice cream, and I think is is quite good. Um but I'm I'm assuming that that's not what Sam was wondering about. So I did some more research on the internet, and uh most people point to potatoes becoming chewy when you microwave them. And other people actually make chewy uh sweet potatoes uh by dehydrating them for for dog treats.
Apparently, if you have a dog, they like dehydrated sweet potatoes, he has cut pot uh sweet potatoes up and they turn almost into a raw hide chewy. So this led me to think well, what is it about a microwave that is going to make potatoes chewy? Uh and uh this also leads to the the answer that those people who are making hash browns chewy probably reheated the potatoes in the microwave, right? Uh and what's going on in a microwave is you are dehydrating uh the potato uh relatively quickly along a fairly large uh surface because you're actually heating not just the outside of the of the potato but uh a good region of the inner portion as well. So you're very effectively dehydrating the potato in a microwave.
So this chewiness is probably uh uh a dehydration phenomenon, right? Now uh this led me to think uh a lot of interesting things. One, uh perhaps our stretchy potato ice cream is actually a dehydration phenomenon because freezing is actually uh dehydrating. So what you're doing is you you take a starch that's got a lot of liquid in it that you've cooked, it's potato starch, and in the this is the ice cream I'm talking about, and you start freezing it. What happens?
Uh ice crystals are forming in the ice cream, and the water is being withdrawn from the starch complex as it's freezing up. So maybe uh the reason the potato ice cream is uh stretchy and chewy is we're partially dehydrating the potato starch as it freezes. What do you think, Staszi? Good? Yeah, that's a good idea.
You like that theory? Mm-hmm. It could be totally wrong, but uh, it's what I was thinking about. Um then I was thinking about microwave dehydration in general. I mean, microwave is a great way to dehydrate uh some fresh herbs.
It's also a really good way to make a small quantity of really crisp bread crumbs. It works a whole lot better than uh putting bread in an oven and drying it out. You just put uh you know thin uh slices of bread in your microwave and you slowly uh microwave it. And what happens, you have to be able to get rid of the water, but what happens is is that uh the water heats up and boils off, and then uh the it basically the microwaves focus on the area where there's water. So the whole thing dries out very, very, very evenly, and you get these incredibly crisp uh bread crumbs uh or you know uh croutons, whatever, very quickly.
And it's a very good technique. The problem with it is is that if any area of the bread starts to get uh warmer, because as soon as the water is gone, um basically uh there's nothing to stop the bread from getting well above uh well above the you know the boiling point. And what happens is if any area starts turning brown, the brown uh areas, the burnt areas of the bread absorb microwaves at a ferocious rate, and so they tend to grow very, very rapidly. So if you're not careful, your uh your bread can scorch and you can get these brown marks. So you want to be careful with it.
But if you if you slowly keep checking uh as you're microwaving bread, it's a great way to make make croutons. And this, you know, this is also why if you go to a place that makes sandwiches, this used to happen at this tackery I used to go to, because I love Mexican sandwiches, tortas, and they're one of my favorite sandwiches. Anyway, they would nuke their bread to reheat the bread, and every once in a while they'd overnuke it, and you get those little interior pockets of hard stuff in the bread, Stasi. You know what I'm talking about? Yeah, gross, right?
Anyway, uh so these are all microwave dehydration things. But there's this blog, it's a vegan blog, and I forget the name of it. It's something like Jugalindo or something like that. You can find it by searching microwave potato chips. But uh, you know, they seem to have a nice blog, even though they're vegans, they seem to have a nice blog.
And um uh they have a technique for basically making potato chips. We'd a slice of potato chips and you put them in the microwave and you and you microwave them like 30, 40 seconds at a time, keep checking them to make sure that they haven't gone uh that they haven't turned too crisp and start turning brown, and they dehydrate into these potato chip-like things. They're not actually potato chips because they're not fried, and God only loves a fried potato chip because potato chips are something like like 30, 40 or even upwards uh percent oil, the oil they're fried in. And to me, I want my potato chip fried. If I I don't want a baked potato chip, I've never liked baked potato chips, I think they're an abomination.
But it's an interesting phenomenon, this uh dehydrated potato chip, and it actually works uh quite well. But if you under-dehydrate them, they're very, very chewy. So uh Sam, if you want to uh experiment, very long way of saying, if you want to experiment with um with making chewy potatoes, I would recommend something like the microwave or a dehydrator and just partially dehydrate them until they become chewy but not crunchy. And uh like everything else, you know, um you know, uh what what's his name? Uh Chris Onstad, the author of the cookbook, he didn't like uh chewy potatoes because they weren't what he expected.
But a lot of times, uh, you know, uh whether something is good or bad is just a matter of expectations. If you're expecting French fries and you get something chewy, well, that's awful. But if you want something chewy and you like the flavor of a potato, then there's nothing wrong with making chewy potatoes, right, Stas? Right, yeah, it's good, right? Yeah, okay.
Uh oh, another note on microwaves. Uh microwaves, uh, we talked about last time because uh one of our listeners is going to college and basically can only have a microwave. Well, uh and I told her, uh Stasy said that I was a jerk for suggesting this, but I told her to go out and get a cutting stone made of uh silicon carbide, throw it in the microwave, and get it super hot uh to use as a searing plate. Uh well, the good news is I tested this and it works fantastically. So go ahead and make your super high heat searing plates using silicon carbide cutting stones.
Anyway, uh I think we have a caller. Uh caller, are you there or you're on the air? Uh this is Don. Hey Don. Hey, how's it going?
I'm good with it. I was just asking, I was wondering if you heard about this uh bacon vodka. It's been out a little bit, but I guess it's uh starting to gain ground. Who's making it? It's uh it's spelled B-A-K-O-N, and it's uh bacon infused vodka.
Oh, infused. Yep. And I've had it in the Bloody Mary and it's terrific, but was wondering if you had any other ideas or recommendations of using it and something else. Well, I have I have not I have not tried it. Uh I've had many bacon infused uh liquors uh specifically whiskies that they make here.
Are you in New York or no? Nope, nope. I'm actually down in Merrida, Georgia. Hey, how you doing? Uh so great.
The um so in here in the city, there's was a number of bars doing uh uh bacon infused uh liquor, and they do it with a technique called fat washing. And in fat washing, you mix the bacon fat, preferably a real smoky bacon fat, like uh like Alan Benton's out of uh Tennessee makes a really fantastic smoky bacon and uh you know you use the fat from that. Is that's what they used, and you mix the fat up with the liquor and then you uh chill it and let it solidify. You take the fat off the top and you have bacon infused uh uh liquor. It's it's fantastic.
I've never tried it with vodka, so I'm not sure exactly what I would uh what I would what I would use it for. I'll say this though. Um that Lance, a guy named Lance, who's the master distiller over at Hangar One, was making a series of meat and other interesting uh vodkas that were distilled where he distilled them rat rather than infuse them. And he kept on having a problem with the bacon flavor getting rancid as he was distilling it, and he couldn't really do a good distilled one. At least he hadn't the last time I spoke to him, which I don't know, Nastash was that like a year ago or something like that?
No, like nine months, yeah. Yeah. Uh so it yeah it makes sense that it's an infusion. It probably would be good in in a bloody merry. I I'm sad to say I've not done too much experimenting with meat li liqueurs myself, with the exception of I did a beef and tomato uh distillate once that I thought was it uh it wasn't delicious in the sense of would I go out and order that instead of a beer?
No. You know what I mean? But uh it was it was good in the context that we were serving it as a small short shot next to a bunch of grilled uh uh tuna uh sinews, so it was so it was it was good. But this is definitely something that if you like doing this sort of thing, you could definitely try to do yourself. Just save up your uh bacon fat or any other uh fat uh that has a lot of flavor uh and then you know, melt it, stir it in with your liquor and then let it uh you know, put it in the freezer, let the fat come up to the top and solidify it.
You could probably make your own. Um and really play around with it. Yep. All right, uh I'm sorry I couldn't give you any more recipe ideas. I just I hadn't thought about it much.
Is that partially answer your question? No, no, yeah, I mean I tried doing the uh just the bacon martini and that uh of course fell kind of flat, kinda like you were saying, drinking the uh the meat flavored one with the tomato all by itself kind of didn't, you know please the palate. That's kind of what I experienced. Did you put any salt in? You know I didn't.
That's a good idea. That might cut back some of that that weird flavor. Yeah, I would put a little salt in because uh, you know, any time you have uh something that started out either with salt or sugar in it, and then that stuff all of a sudden goes away, you kind of miss it. I mean, think about when you eat just bacon fat by itself, it kind of tastes a little bit uh a little bit flat, a little fabby fla uh flabby rather, but not in a fat sense, but you know what I mean, in a taste sense. Right.
So if you if you throw a couple pinches of salt in that, and maybe even like a little hit of sugar, even though it's supposed to be a martini and not have a lot of sugar into it, I think you're gonna brighten up that flavor quite a bit. You might bring it back to kind of where you want it. All right. Well, that was very helpful. So I'll give the give that a whirl.
All right, thanks for calling in. You got it. Thank you. All right, bye bye. Um, we have another caller?
Mm-hmm. All right, hi, caller, you're on the air. Hi, Dave, it's Julio, Priscilla Morgan's friend. Hey, good to talk to you. Thanks for calling in.
Doing well, dude. Sure, sure. I finally got your number. I was at the restaurant this weekend and picked up one of the cards. Oh, nice, nice.
Oh, uh talking about the French culinary restaurant, I assume, a great restaurant. You talking about the French culinary restaurant? No, no, no. Roberta's uh Roberta's, yeah. Oh, Roberta's, okay.
So there's two things, by the way, uh just for a second. Like I work at the French Culinary Institute. We have a great restaurant like Hull, which is like one of the best deals in Manhattan, and then I do the radio show here out of Roberta's in Brooklyn, which is a fantastic restaurant, does a lot of really great work, grows a lot of their own product, uses really high quality meats, including the meats from uh Heritage Foods, etc. etc. So we're talking about Roberta's restaurant.
You had a good meal, I assume? Fantastic. I I actually went went in early in the day and went back late that night. Oh, nice, nice. Double double hit double hitting.
Great. Double hitting, double hitting. But I thought of you and I thought, you know, I I I may not be calling the right person, but I've been on a diet for about six months, and I'm trying to figure out what desserts I can have that have no sugar. No su are you on a mean uh is this a not a calorie diet? This is uh a diet that you you can't have sugar, or is it just a calorie issue?
Calorie issue. Okay. Uh well, first of all, you know, uh he he is uh not a uh large man. He does not really need to diet, so you know you shouldn't worry about it so much. That's the first thing.
And uh the the the second thing is um sugar doesn't actually have uh that many that many calories. It's not normally going to be the sh depends on what you're eating, but a lot of times it's the the fat and other things in in the item that are gonna basically bulk up the the caloric content of it. You could do a lot of reduced uh again, nutrition, not my necessarily my specialty. I'm more of a taste and a and a tech guy. But you can you can focus on um obviously fruit-based uh desserts have a lot of bulk and s some fruits have quite a bit of sugar, but some don't, and just a little bit of sugar uh, you know, brightens them up.
Things things like uh berries. You know, we've done a lot of stuff that's fairly low in calorie and high in flavor, um, but they use a lot of technology. Like we made something that looks and eats um like uh pumpkin pie, but it's basically peach puree, you but you know, that's like not really achievable in a normal kind of restaurant. It requires liquid nitrogen and a whole bunch of other uh, you know, and a centrifuge and a whole bunch of other uh fan fancy stuff, but I mean, especially now at this time of year, you know, if you're gonna focus on I would focus on things that are satisfying but contain a lot of air with a with a little bit of uh sugar and and fat. For instance, whipped cream is not that bad for you because it's primarily air.
Do you know what I mean? Right. So if you're if you're doing if if you're like a uh um the kind of person who would go for a bowl of fruit and uh and cream, you know, if you use like a really nice whipped cream, you can get a real luxurious feel and it's still not gonna be uh that bad on the calories. So you see, I always focus on eating smaller quantities of stuff that's truly delicious rather than um you know not being satisfied eating an even larger quantity of things that just don't taste as good. You know what I mean?
Uh and you know, I walked past a box of meringues the other day, and I thought maybe Dave has an answer how to make fat-free meringues. Oh, well, meringues are often I mean, uh, real meringue is often fat, you know, fat-free if it's made with sugar, sorry, sugar, yeah. Sorry. Um, yeah, it's tough. I mean, but meringues, I mean you feel them, they're so light, there's not actually that that much sugar.
Think about it. So if you cook, right, you're taking let's say you take uh a dozen egg whites and you whip them in in your kitchen aid and you put maybe a cup of sugar in, right? Now you filled your entire kitchen aid bowl with uh you know, with meringue, and the whole thing only contains uh a cup of sugar, which doesn't have that many that many calories. So on on a pound per pound basis, meringue is extremely high in sugar. But uh on a volume basis, and and a lot of times we tend to eat based on the volume of how something looks, it doesn't actually have that much in it.
Now the sugar is there uh not just as a sweetener, as a structural component. You can move to things that have the bulking capabilities of sugar, but without the calories, but then you're moving into kind of um what's the word I'm looking for? Fake sweeteners. You know what I mean? And so you can you can do that.
So if you want, I mean, like I I tend not to focus on those kinds of problems because like you know, we're where I use a lot of ingredients that uh people some people are horrified by things like Xanthan gum, carrageen and gum, uh methyl cells, things like this, right? But they my my whole shtick is that I use them uh to try and make food taste better or be better, not to get around um not to get around nutritional or economic problems. And so the the upshot of that is is I very rarely get to focus on problems that are primarily related to nutrition or to um or to things like calorie counting because it goes counter to my mandate at the French culinary which is to focus on uh on quality first and foremost. Um you know but like like I said there are many there are many uh things that have the structural so what what typically what someone will do is uh and sometimes they do it for diabetics uh although there they use um basically uh sugars that have the same functional and sweetness as sugar but just don't have the uh they don't have you know problems with you with the insulin um but what they tend to do is they they add a bulking agent that has no calories and then they add a high intensity sweetener that has no calories so they have to use kind of a two part problem uh you know and there's people that have uh invented they invented this stuff called lites which I actually don't remember how it's made but it's a it's uh a sugar that uh has no sweetness and no calories but whips into a meringue just like sugar and I was experimenting with it to make savory marshmallows right but you could also use it in conjunction with a high intensity sweetener to make a meringue that had kind of zero zero calories other than the uh other than the egg white protein uh right right anyway I hope this is what honey be a solution putting honey in the no honey has like uh honey is uh just as many calories you know and and also the problem with honey is honey is very uh hydroscopic it pulls water in so it's very very hard to make confections with a hundred percent honey that uh that don't weep or or suck water out of out of the air which is what you know certain confections use honey and they need honey, like Tironi is a characteristically has a lot of honey in it. Uh but uh other confections, like when you add honey, like if you're making chocolate, you can't really use honey as a sweetener because it's going to pull water in and then ruin the chocolate.
I see, I see. But I will I will research this more, and the next time I see you, uh I will ha I will have some decent answers. Alright. I'll call you next week. All right, thanks.
Thanks for calling and we'll talk to you soon. All right, Dave. All right, bye bye. See you soon. Bye bye.
We have another caller side? All right, your caller, you're on the air. Hi. I um have been reading a lot lately about ethnic foods and the trending popularity of specific ethnic foods like Indian food growing in popularity, and I've had Indian food in restaurants and really liked it, but I've always been reluctant to prepare stuff like that at home. Right.
So I'm wondering if you have any advice or tips on specific Indian dishes that might be a good starter American dish to prepare. Okay, so you've never uh you're what kind of Indian dishes do you like? Um I mean, pretty much every Indian dish that I've ever tried, I've enjoyed. I like stuff like butter chicken or um dolls, things like that. Right.
Okay, so I would I would uh shy away from any of the dishes that for their completion require specific uh pieces of equipment. So for instance, certain Indian dishes require the use of a special oven called a tandoor that's basically shaped like a vase and and uh very high heat. And so things like non, things like uh 10, you know, like tip like typical like tandoori chicken or chicken tika masala, things like that, to really get the flavor as as you just how you would want it in a restaurant requires a uh a tandoor, right? Not that you can't imitate those at home, but you know, it to really if you really want to be satisfied and make it 100%, those are gonna be difficult. So I would I would not do those first.
Secondly, I would go get uh a good Indian cookbook if you don't if you don't have one, because the the best way to to first is to eat some like you've done, but then to really immerse yourself in how a specific cooking system works. So if you grow up like I did, basically, you know, where in the house the go-to was some Americanized form of kind of basic Mediterranean Italian style cooking, right? Which that's my upbringing, is you you you know what to do when you put a pan on, you know you're gonna put in some oil, some onions are gonna go in there, you're gonna saute them, and then at the end you're gonna put in your garlic, whatever else. You know, you just you know how it flows, right? So what you need to do is read a couple cookbooks, Indian cookbooks, that just get a feeling for the flow of how Indian cooking works.
So you're gonna start here similarly with like you know, with uh probably ghee, which is the melted butter, and then you know, things like uh uh onions and then you know, maybe uh, you know, ginger or whatever spicy things, then you're gonna probably saute your spices because that's a characteristic part of uh the Indian cooking is to saute the spices, bring out the aroma, and then start adding your other things, right? So like I would read a couple cookbooks, a good one, it's vegetarian, but um Lord Krishna's cuisine, I forget, was the one that I bought a number of years ago. I'm sure it's been surpassed, I'm sure it's dated. But I would get like a like a fairly authoritative Indian cookbook, one that has enough recipes for you to try, but focus on ones that are more about the mentality of Indian cooking. Because I think that what you really want to do is immerse yourself in the mentality.
Uh and and you know, I I I do a lot of uh curries, um they're also really good when vegetarian friends come over because there's so many good Indian vegetarian dishes out there. You know, it's one of it's one of the cuisines that is based on uh on vegetarian dishes. And so, you know, and and actually, if you ever uh you know, again, I'm not you know supporting being a vegan, but if you have a vegan friends come over, a lot of times uh, you know, if you substitute, if you use dishes, like for instance, there's a dish that I really love to make called uh Navratan curry, right? And I do my own version of it, it's Americanized, but basically it's a sauce uh where you start by uh sauteing uh onions and then you put your spices like um it's got coriander it's got cumin it's got uh it's got uh ginger it's got some uh hot pepper in it uh regular pepper you know a host of other things but then you also saute cashew nuts in it and then uh you after you do that you add some tomato paste coconut milk pineapple you blend the whole McGill and then you can toss it with any kind of steamed vegetable you want and it's delicious. N Navratan curry it's delicious delicious curry uh and if you if you use the coconut milk and you use olive oil to saute instead of butter you have a vegan dish and so you can if you have a vegan coming over and you know it's a really good way to make it uh and have um have something that's vegan that you also like um another uh another you know trick with Indian uh food is really sourcing the ingredients I think you know I'd really focus on sourcing some ingredients that are uh high quality um and that you know allow you to achieve the authentic taste so when you're getting a rice you're gonna want to get you know uh one of the the actual rices that they would use in a particular particular dish I mean often you're gonna use a basmati or something like that um and you know do it with a little with uh you know throw some some spices in when you when you make it but again uh the key to anything is to first taste what you've done and so you know whether you've hit the target or not right I mean I've never been to India proper.
It's one of the places on earth I'm really dying dying to go. Uh I've never been but first you know I I know what American Indian food tastes like. It's and I know what London Indian food tastes like, but I don't know what Indian Indian food tastes like. But anyway, so you have a target, and that's good. Now figure out the the the fundamentals of of you know what it's like for someone to step into a kitchen in India, uh what they're thinking, what is going to go in the pot.
And then the recipe itself isn't so important. It's more understanding the flow of how they cook and how they're going to be doing it. Does that answer your question, I hope? Yes, it does, actually. And with um respect to something you said about the different flavors and the spice mixtures and things that go into Indian, from what I understand, there are many different recipes that can make up a garamasala, for example, or like a curry powder.
So just looking at the shelf, you know, in the grocery store, it appears that there's a a bunch of different products that you can buy that kind of would help along that way. So I'm excited to start trying some of those. Right. And you know, but it's funny, you know, you try a bunch of different ones, they're all very different. Eventually, if you really get into it, you're gonna want to make your own spice mixtures because they're just gonna be a lot fresher and you can tailor them to your to your exact needs.
Think about it this way. It's you know it's i in the US, we think about um, you know, we we're amazed at the kind of variation in something like a garamasa, things like that. But you know, but if you go to North Carolina, right, the difference of like 20 miles in North Carolina is enough to uh cause a fist fight over what you're gonna put in your uh barbecue sauce. Okay. You know what I mean?
And so, you know, you when you think about it that way, and you then you go to India with which is huge and has so many people in it, you know, it's it's it's an extremely, extremely varied and interesting cuisine. You could spend a whole lifetime doing nothing but Indian food and it would it would repay your efforts. You know what I mean? It's like a huge it's a huge and interesting uh journey that you're embarking on. So really regional.
Yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah, very much so, very much. And and again, I only know the the the surface of it just because I haven't had a chance to travel over there yet. But uh I wish you well, uh, and I'm sure you're gonna have a lot of fun. Thanks so much. I appreciate your advice.
Thank you. Okay. So uh uh I have another email question coming in. Uh, we're taking a break. Okay, we'll take a break and we'll come back with uh more questions on cooking issues radio.
Oh, how you feel, brother? Feeling good. You feel good? Thanks so much, Bone Brother. 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? Hey Jam! Sure getting down.
Look at him! We're gonna have a bunk 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. All right. You wanna do it again? Yeah, let's go on.
We gotta take you high. Brother. Yeah. Now I won't have a body. Let's bread blow about two cores.
And then I wanna wave in. Let's go and fill that within it. Now, all right. I'm gonna get that belly with a little horn over there. Brad, get it take us higher.
Yeah. Take us higher. Brad. Brad! Hello and welcome back to Cooking Issues.
I'm Dave Arnold here with Nastasha Lopez, the hammer. And we're here to answer your cooking questions for a couple more minutes at 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. So uh Jesse uh emailed in and asked, Do you guys have any advice on slicing mint without turning it black? As soft as I try, it still ends up turning black.
Interesting question, Jesse. So what's happening in mint or basil or anything like this is that uh as you're cutting it, you're breaking the cells. As you break the cells, the uh the enzymes, the cells rupture, and the enzymes within the cells can mix with certain compounds inside of uh of the mint uh and they form brown, uh brown colors. And there's very little uh you can do to prevent that, uh with the exception of it's not how soft you cut the uh it's not how soft you cut the mint that's going to uh cause it. It's how sharp your knife is.
So if you use an extremely sharp knife, right, you're gonna rupture as few cells as possible. You want to use a very thin, very sharp knife. Um if you and slice it, and you're gonna get the minimum amount of uh blackening of the cells, right? Um if you even if you cut softly with a dull knife, you're just mashing it, right? You also don't want to just whack it around on the board.
You know, that's why people they roll their their leaves up and then they slice uh not just gently, but you know, v with very sharp knife. Uh another technique you can use is you can blanch the mint briefly in uh boiling water. And what that's gonna do is just kill the enzymes. Uh Harold McGee, the author of On Food and Cooking, had a second book uh called The Curious Cook. Unfortunately, it's not in print anymore.
You can get it on Bookfinder. Um but The Curious Cook has a uh a long chapter basically on pesto where he deals with just this kind of problem how to make a pesto, which is the same problem as mint. It's basil, but they're in the same family, it has the same problem. Uh how to keep it bright in a in a in a pesto. And it's really interesting uh an interesting chapter to read because it it really shows what we do in general here uh in in cooking the way we approach it, which is to break it down into a series of variables and then try to figure out what's going on with each one of the variables.
And the the entire book, The Curious Cook is about that. It's really uh it's a shame it's not in print right now because it's a very good combat companion piece to on food and cooking. Whereas on food and cooking is more of an encyclopedic reference with uh some lore about you know cooking. The Curious Cook is more how to become like Harold McGee, right? Uh how to think like he does, like uh, or you know, for that matter, it's a similar way to think how we do when we're cooking, which is to break break things into a series of variables and try to understand what's going on.
So if you can get a copy of the Curious Cook and and read it, it would be use it's useful for everyone in a way of figuring out uh a method of thinking. So uh blanching the the mint has the problem that you um you know you you change the flavor, it's no longer fresh. You could cut it under alcohol, and that's gonna not, but it's in alcohol then. I mean, that's what I would do. Cut it under alcohol.
But uh it's uh it's uh, you know, that's usually only useful in alcoholic beverages. So it's it's a difficult problem. Um McGee experimented with using things like ascorbic acid, and that doesn't really uh or scorpic acid is an antioxidant, stops many things from turning brown. He didn't get it to have that much of an effect in basil, probably because it didn't get to where it needed to go fast enough before the browning happened. I bet if he vacuum-infused ascorbic acid into the mint leaves, he would have been able to get a decent result, but alas, he did not have a uh vacuum machine or even an ISI whipper to check check it out when he was writing the book, but that might be uh another another way to go.
But if you're not, if it doesn't matter that it's not hyper hyper fresh, uh quick blanch will help. Otherwise, just use an extremely sharp knife and be ginger about it. I'm sorry I didn't have any sort of magic bullet for you, Jesse, but that's uh, you know, you chose a uh a tough problem. So uh okay, so on to a separate and weird phenomenon, um an interesting one, I think. It's called the impembe effect.
Impemba impemba. What do you think? Impemba? Mm-mm. Mpemba effect.
Uh and uh what that is is um and it's just interesting because it just shows how you can be wrong in so many ways. Um it's been known for a long time that if you take and you heat water up uh versus water that's cold and you put them in the freezer, that it's possible for the hot water to freeze first, right? That seems counterintuitive, yes, that's right. Right. In fact, it seems so counterintuitive that you know you would say things like, Well, that's absurd or ridiculous or impossible, or that someone who says that must have uh a cog loose, right?
Because on a simple on a simple level, you know, physics, you think, well, look, the hot water, when you put it in the freezer, has to chill down to zero, right, before it it freezes, and the cold water starts closer to zero, so it's gonna get there first, it's gonna freeze first, right? It just seems physically impossible that anything else else would happen, and yet it does. Uh and and it just goes to show that this this simple thing, it seems impossible but is true, was observed by a schoolboy in uh uh what country was he in? He was some it was a country in Africa in the 60s, and he observed this phenomenon as a child and was laughed out of the school, and then later, you know, kept on basically saying, Look, it's true, and turns out he's right, and now they've named the effect after him. His name was Mr.
Mpemba, right? Mm-hmm. Anyway, so uh anywho, so the the thing is is that how can this possibly be true? And it took decades, decades for scientists to actually figure out what the heck was going on in in this in in this situation. And the new scientists back in March of this year published uh or talked uh referenced a paper uh that was written, a 30-page paper written by um uh a guy that had spent 10 years researching this problem, and he thinks he's you know finally come up with the answer, and the answer is this, and it leads to an interesting phenomenon the phenomenon of supercooling.
So supercooling a liquid means that you cool it down below its freezing point before it starts to freeze. And the reason this happens is because ice, in order to form, it needs to have a uh a nucleation site for a crystal to start. It's very hard for crystals to start forming in water to become ice. So they need these things called nucleation sites. So when you super cool something, you supercool it down to a point where the ice can nucleate and then bam, the whole thing rises back up in temperature to freezing and starts freezing uh starts freezing up.
That's how ice forming works. So it turns out that by heating uh a sample, you actually alter the nucleation sites such that they can't super cool as much before they freeze up. So in fact, the mass of ice does freeze uh faster if it's been can freeze faster if it's uh been been heated. But it led me to think then of the concept of supercooling, right? So there's supercooling and there's superheating.
Water is pretty interesting. If you you need to supercool it below zero degrees to get it to start freezing up, right? You can also superheat it uh above a hundred degrees uh because it the same way it's very hard for ice crystals to form, it's also hard for bubbles to form, right? So bubbles need a nucleation site. That's why if you have a super clean glassware, like hyper analytically clean glassware, like you use like uh chromic and sulfuric acid to melt all of the organic crap out of the inside of a glass, don't do that.
But if you did that, then you filled it with champagne, you get hard no bubbles because there's no place for the bubbles to form. So in superheating, what you do is you take something that has no nucleation sites, like you've boiled it once, right? You stick it in a microwave, which heats it all uh without a lot of convection currents because it's heating it around instead of heating it from the bottom, and then you pull it out, it's well above a hundred degrees, you throw sugar in it, and it instantly boils and sp splashes boiling water in your face, and you get horribly scalded and have to go to the hospital. It's a known phenomenon. Anyway, back to microwaves, right?
Anyway, so supercooling can also be used, right? Uh and so there's a uh chef, Seiji Yamamoto in uh Japan, who has uh uh an apparatus to do supercooling, uses extremely clean glassware, I guess, and he puts water or water-based liquids in and he chills them well below zero, and then as you agitate them, right? You just boom, you agitate them, you create little bubbles. Those little bubbles become nucleation sites, and ice starts to form. So he has these really cool demos, and I believe it's on YouTube, where uh you take supercooled liquid and he pours it, and as he pours it, it turns to ice, forms a slushy, which is pretty cool.
Um and uh just the impemba effect got me thinking about all this. Uh unfortunately, it's not possible to freeze an entire block of ice solid. In order to freeze an entire block uh uh like a thing of water solid using supercooling, you would have to supercool it down to negative eighty Celsius, and that's just not possible. You can't get really um you know you're probably at best only gonna get a couple, 10, 10, 20, twelve twenty best degrees, not even below zero uh Celsius before it starts to nucleate. So you can but you can freeze something like a quarter, a third, not probably not a third, probably a quarter of the water in into slush, which is pretty cool.
But my favorite way to do this is actually a multiple effect is uh when you put soda in a freezer and you pull it out just before she freezes, and then you uncap it, and then it all of a sudden turns to ice, right? Uh and the and I like that because I like super cold, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, the reason this happens is twofold. One, uh carbon dioxide is uh dissolved in the liquid, and that actually lowers the temperature at which it wants to freeze, right? It's a freezing point um depression.
When you uncap it, all of a sudden carbon dioxide leaves, there's less carbon dioxide, the freezing point's less depressed. So now all of a sudden the liquid's more super cool than it was before. Secondly, those little bubbles provide nucleation sites, a crap load of them, like all at once. I almost cursed on air, I apologize. It forms a crap load of these bubbles all at once.
And uh so the entire thing basically just turns to a mass of uh flaky ice crystals. So I'm still trying to figure out a good uh way to use this in uh in the in the kitchen. You got anything, Nastasha? You think that there's any kind of use for that? I don't know, Dave, no.
No. She's probably right, which brings me kind of she's you know, and stash is always right about we not really always right about these things because there's many things like I say negative. Just negative, right? Like she, you know, you in case you meet her, right? You know, like I say, she there's many things she doesn't like for no apparent reason, like French fries or you know, for some reason she doesn't like french fries, doesn't like potato chips except salt and vinegar, which is bizarre, bizarre, bizarre.
So you can't really trust her on these things, but in this case I think she's right. Uh just because uh although supercooling is really, really cool, I mean, well, sorry, nifty, right? Uh super cooling is really nifty, it's probably gonna end up being uh just uh a gimmick. And on the topic of just a gimmick, uh, I'll mention one last thing before we leave. And uh this is a cool gimmick.
If any of you out there have liquid nitrogen and a vacuum machine, um, which you know, you should have both, frankly, you know what I mean. Uh and this was told me by Johnny Asini Patriot Chev at John George, who in turn learned it from Chris Young, who's working with Nathan Mirvold on the miracle book that's coming out at the end of the year. Um, if you stick liquid nitrogen into a vacuum machine and then you close the vacuum machine and let it run for several minutes, all of a sudden ice starts f forming on the top of the liquid nitrogen. Okay. Then as soon as you release it, the the vacuum, the ice goes away.
So you can never touch or get to the ice, right? Ever. Uh, and uh, and so Johnny was like was wondering about this, and I did a bunch of research and uh what's happening, and it looks really cool. It's like this like frosty snow ice forming on the top of the liquid nitrogen. What you're actually doing is forming uh nitrogen ice.
And it turns out that liquid nitrogen, which you know clocks in around minus 200 Celsius in that range, minus 190 something Celsius uh at atmospheric pressure. Um, solid nitrogen isn't that much colder than liquid nitrogen, right? And so what happens is is you put the um liquid nitrogen, you let the container come up to or come down to temperature, so you're not boiling for that reason too much, put it in the vacuum machine and you suck a vacuum on it, what you're doing is uh evaporating a crap load of nitrogen off the top of the uh vessel, and you're actually evaporatively cooling the liquid nitrogen down that extra couple of degrees Celsius and forming solid nitrogen snow on the top of your and it looks really cool and it's really you know, whatever. Anyway, uh so you're f and you can YouTube it if you if you want to see it. But you're forming solid nitrogen snow, but yet you can never touch it.
Another, another pain in the butt in kitchen technology. Anyway, so uh that was this week's cooking issues. Join us again next week at uh from 12 to 1245. And another shout out to Whole Foods' 30th birthday, not their 80th birthday. Happy birthday, Whole Foods.
Oh you did that. Got me on this corner. And I don't know where I'm at.
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