Hello, you're listening to Cooking Issues on the Heritage Radio Network coming to you live every Tuesday from 12 to 1245. Cooking issues the show where you call in with your cooking issues, and we hope to uh solve them. Call in your questions to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. Uh, this week's Cooking Issues is brought to you by the Barter House.
The Barter House is a proud supporter of the Heritage Radio Network. The Butterhouse works with family vineyards and small bottlers from around the world to bring only the finest and most flavorful wines to market. To learn more about Butterhouse, please visit them on the web at www.thebarterhouse.com or call them at 917-463-3076. That's 917-463-3076. That's not our number.
That's the Barter House's number. And today we're actually sampling one of their uh one of their wines. Uh this wine is from uh from Uruguay. Yeah. And it's a mixture of uh uh what's it a mixture of?
It's Tembernillo and Tanat, uh, or I don't know, it's pronounced Tanat. I think it's Tanat with a T. Anyway, T-A-N-N-A-T. We'll get to that in a minute. But the name of the wine, I swear to God, the name of the wine is Boozer.
Boozer! Like it's the best name for a wine ever. I could see a cult following building around a wine called Booza. I mean, it's just genius. I I have never actually, I don't think had a wine from uh uh Uruguay before, but it's quite nice.
It is and um and this Tanat's a very interesting variety because uh several years ago a uh scientist out of uh England um did a study trying to figure out what it is about red wines that actually makes them uh healthy uh from a cardiovascular standpoint, right? And uh he settled on the on this class of chemicals called procyanidins that are in red wine, and he did a bunch of uh studies where he basically studied the um the cardiovascular health of different people in different regions and discovered that people that drank a lot of wines uh that were high in uh procyanidins basically got less heart disease. It's his findings, right? And it turns out that the wine with the most, the variety with the most procyanidins in it is is to not. Uh and so uh I tend to believe that all health and food stuff is horse hockey and will eventually be proven wrong.
But if you believe that sort of thing, uh that uh you know that you're gonna get super healthy from drinking a lot of red wine, uh then I mean um obviously there are some cardiovascular benefits to drinking uh moderate amounts of alcohol, but anyway, whether or not his particular analysis is correct, uh to not as made a splash over the past couple of years as perhaps being an extraordinarily cardiovascular health uh cardiovascularly healthy wine. But I think it's quite enjoyable. What do you think? Yeah, it's really good. I like it.
Yeah. Anyway. The Barter House and Booza. I love it. I can't I can't get enough of it.
I really can't. I might I don't know how much this costs, but I might uh I might actually buy it just so I can. You know, I I tend to refer to all liquor as booze. Yeah. And my wife, Jen, she hates it.
She's like, it sounds so coarse. She doesn't sound like that at all, by the way. It sounds so coarse. You call it booze. I'm like, I can't help it.
Anyway, booze. We have a collar. We should try to call it. We have a caller? All right.
Uh let's take our caller. Hello, caller, you're on the air. Hey Dave, it's Julio. Hey, hey, Julio, oh my god, I feel terrible. I meant to uh do the research this morning and I got all tied up.
Um you didn't do your homework? I'm a b I'm a I I feel it's it's interesting that I didn't do my homework because I actually am going back to class later today. I'm retaking organic chemistry at NYU uh just to brush up, and so I this is a prefigurement of what it's like to not do your homework and to be caught red-handed not doing your homework. But uh you know, I was trying to think more about it. Specifically, you were you were interested in uh uh meringues that uh have uh a lower sugar content, correct?
Right. Now, do you want to be able to make them at home or do you just want to be able to purchase them? Well, you know, I have a sweet tooth, so I appreciate anything sweet that I can make at home that I don't gain weight on. Hmm. Well, remember what I said before, the good thing about meringues is they're actually uh very, very large percentage error.
So they're actually not that caloric on a volume basis. And so they're they're they're actually very, very good snacks to have around if you have an intense sweet tooth, but you want to eat you want to eat something that's gonna satisfy that sweet tooth, but you don't want to get a lot of calories because they provide a lot of sweet sensation for the amount of calories they had. Uh I remember I said last week, and this is what I was going to investigate more, is seeing whether or not we could do a high intensity sweetener mixed with uh high intensity sweetener mixed with um uh like a bulking agent, like uh, you know, like a non-nutritive uh sweetener that has the properties of sugar that you want in a meringue. I'm hesitant to do it though, just because it goes against kind of what I what I spend my time thinking about, which is uh, you know, tr trying to always increase things from a quality standpoint, not necessarily to try and get around um different issues. But but but this time, I swear Nastasha, the hammer is usually the hammer for other people.
But Nastasha, you're gonna force me early in the week rather than wait until the last minute. And even if you even if you don't have a chance to uh cause actually I won't be we won't be here live next week because uh I'd be teaching uh low temperature sous vide cooking at the school. But I I on a stack of Bibles promise to to get this information and and either the next time we go live if you call in or else uh I will I will get this information to you somehow. I promise. Here's your penalty for not doing the homework.
Uh oh. What's a good what's a good recipe for kale? I c I you know I live near the farmer's market on Union Square and there's beautiful kale out now. Right. Uh I always like I say, I always I've had kale raw in raw food places and and uh I don't really like it raw.
I I would recommend cooking it like you would like you would basically cook any green, which is just you know, I I actually t like kale when it's kind of overcooked. I always uh chop it. Um I don't bother removing the large uh uh I remove just the end of the stem, but I don't take the whole vein out. But I know some people that take the vein out of the center of the kale and then chop it. I'll usually saute uh I would usually saute um uh onion and then at the last minute throw in uh the garlic and then throw in the kale, which will provide provide its own moisture as it cooks down, and then you can decide whether you want to add any uh sweetener.
Uh definitely hit some acid after it's done cooking down. I would add a little acid at the end to brighten it up and you know make sure you add enough salt. What do you think, Nastasha? You cook greens like that, right? How do you do it?
Uh with oil and garlic and salt and cook it down. Like I just said. Yeah, yeah. Good for paying attention to the channel. Yeah, I remember once in Italy having something very similar to kale and then prepared it with pine nuts and raisins.
Does that sound familiar? Not not necessarily familiar, but it sounds delicious. I mean, uh, you know, I like any kind of cooked green, although you you'll be upset with typically when I do it, I cook uh a lot of meat into it as well and mix beans. I mean, I grew up eating uh basically every week my mom would make uh an escarole dish where she would take esquerol and we would uh we would do the onions and then the garlic and then uh and then basically uh uh uh hot sausage and uh bacon and cook it down and then we would then we would add the escarole, which is a really good bitter green, and that would counteract with the you know with the bacon and then we would add some acidity. I would usually add it in the form of mustard, although you could use vinegar or lemon, and then uh we would finish it off actually with beans, with uh, you know, with white beans, because it's super hardy, greens and beans and bacon.
I mean, you can't really go wrong. Uh you know, as soon as the fact as soon as the weather starts getting a little bit colder, I'm gonna go ahead and and uh go make that because that's you know childhood childhood memories. Right, right. Comfort, comfort. Yeah.
All right. Well, thanks. All right, well, thanks for calling in. I will get the answer. Okay.
I'll call you not next week, but the the following week. And good luck at the your class next week. Thank you so much. All right, thanks, Dave. All right, bye.
Uh all right. Let's take our first email question then. Uh, because uh I I believe well, we're still drinking the booze. We'll we'll let you know whether or not our heart feels any better when we're done finishing the booze, whether the procyanidins in the tanat are actually helping us or not. Um But uh we have a question from Gabe in New York City.
Any advice for making chocolate at home? Well, Gabe, you asked the right people. Uh there is a website called Chocolate Alchemy.com, which caters to making chocolate at home. And basically what everyone uses is a small when you're making chocolate, one of the steps is the grinding of the chocolate, right? There's a bunch of different steps when you're making uh chocolate, assuming you already have beans, cocoa beans that are roasted.
So you want to break those down first do a grind, and then basically they get ground to a finer and finer dimension. The whole point of grinding down chocolate is so that you don't feel the uh graininess of the chocolate after it's ground. You want to get the particle size very, very small, down to like, you know, 20 uh 20 microns or so. And uh what what that does at the same time that you grind it, you're doing a couple things. One, you're reducing the particle size of both the chocolate and the sugar that you've added.
You're also uh making sure that the cocoa uh butter is totally covering all the particles so that it's nice and smooth and you don't have any cocoa particles that aren't coated with butter. Okay? Now uh that that said, basically, chocolate, you can't make chocolate just out of uh cocoa beans out of nibs, because uh chocolate, bar chocolate, has more cocoa butter in it, the fat from cocoa, than is in the whole beans. So you're gonna need to get a hold of some cocoa butter, right? Usually you get um the deodorized cocoa butter because uh most cocoa butter you get apparently I'm told wasn't good cocoa butter to begin with, so they have to deodorize it.
But anyway, that's what I use at the school. You get cocoa butter, you you and and you get cocoa nibs. Now there's two pieces of equipment you need. You need uh basically a champion uh juicer, right? Because champion juicer also makes things like peanut butter, and that's the way we use it when we're when we're doing chocolate.
So a champion juicer has a bunch of little teeth and it just grinds up the nibs. So you throw the nibs into the champion juicer, and just like you're juicing carrots or making peanut butter, it grinds it to a paste. And you keep grinding it with the champion until it warms up and kind of liquefies. It's a kinghell mess, but it's you know it's it doesn't take very long. And then you put uh melted cocoa butter and and the ground up chocolate that you have, along with sugar, usually a little bit of uh powdered uh lecithin, which is an emulsifier, a very small amount, like you know, uh I think less than half a percent or something like that, even less, and usually some vanilla.
You want to make sure that you don't use any uh you can't do use things like honey because it'll soak in water. Water is the enemy of chocolate, so you want to make sure there's no uh chocolate in it at all. I mean sorry, no uh water in it at all. So you you know, no honey, no um nothing with water, not vanilla extract. You want to use straight beans or even vanilla sugar if you have it, if you have it that you like.
And you want to put it in this machine uh called a uh Santha, which is basically a very small version of a chocolate, I don't know how you pronounce it, melanger, like a chocolate mixer. It's basically two little stone wheels that roll on a round stone surface and just grind chocolate. If you look up chocolate melanger, melanger, melanger, yeah, who knows. Anyway, you look at it's basically two rocks that rotate around on another rock, and and that over the course of a long time makes the particles finer and finer and finer and finer and finer, and eventually you get chocolate. Um now uh and I believe we might have a recipe for ketchup flavored chocolate on our website, but just you know what, don't start with that.
Start with regular chocolate, go to chocolate alchemy and look up look up some of their some of their things. Now, normally when you're making chocolate, you grind until the particle size is is right, and you also in you're also like flashing off volatiles in this. So you want to make sure that you are releasing just the amount of volatiles that that you like. Now, a chocolate maker can do this by running it in this uh in this breakdown machine Melange, whatever it's called, Santha, whatever. Uh it's this one by the way was not made for chocolate.
It was made for uh grinding up uh lentils. They're they're Indian um anyway. So that you grind it for a for a little while with the lid off and that's going to release volatiles and allow you to kind of get where you want uh and it's also going to let you flash off some extra water and then you're gonna want to cap it. And in order to get the texture right in other words very very smooth, you're gonna have to run it for two, three days. Now um uh that might affect the and I'm sure it will affect the flavor of your chocolate, but the guys at the school, our pastry department the school now does this as part of their demonstration for the pastry department and they've gotten some pretty good stuff that that tempers uh the tempers fairly well and it's a a lot of fun to play around with so you're you're looking at an initial investment roughly five hundred dollars for a Santa and a uh and a champion juicer but from there on in you could basically make whatever you want.
Now that there's it's also an interesting time for chocolate because there's a lot of companies that have started making some smaller batch chocolates around. So you know uh for many years now Jacques Therese has made you know the dean of our pastry studies has made his own chocolate first in um in Brooklyn in Dumbo and now uh at his larger facility in Manhattan. Um you have Mass Brothers makes chocolate in Brooklyn and there's a new company actually uh just starting out called Cacao Prieto that we visited Nastasha and I visited when was that? Friday Friday and uh they're you know associated with the Razor and shiny knife people uh here in Brooklyn and uh they're actually starting a new line. They bought the uh uh the remains of the Sharpenburger, the old Sharpenburger chocolate line, uh, and they're gonna be making some new chocolate.
What's interesting about what they're doing is that uh basically the name pre Prieto is uh the family name of the one of the the founders of the company, uh uh Dan Preston, and his family's done uh cacao plantation, sugar plantation for a long time uh in the Dominican Republic, and so they're actually gonna have complete vertical integration. They can play with breeding, selective breeding, they can play with um they can play with different fermentation techniques, um, you know, and they basically can control it from from soup to nuts, which is pretty interesting. It's very rare. And so they're gonna launch in January, so we'll see kind of what that complete control and vertical integration can bring. Because they're gonna bring uh they're gonna do, I think, mainly uh liqueurs and and chocolate, bar chocolate.
So we'll see how that uh pans out. But having visited their setup, it's a very, very good setup, and they're gonna be using some kind of new equipment um and custom built equipment. Uh Dan actually used to build some equipment for chocolate makers. In fact, he built some parts for the Mast Brothers line. Uh so anyway, so that should be that should be interesting.
Um but you know, back to selecting your beans, I mean the the main problem is uh uh you know, when you're making your own chocolate, is uh crap in crap out. You know what I mean? And so you you need to get a hold of some good quality nibs to do your work. And um the the final product that you make in chocolate is very dependent and finicky, depending on every little aspect of what you do can uh can affect it. So it's it's uh a field well worth uh investigation and study, and uh Gabe, I wish you luck in your uh exploits.
Anyway, with that, I think we go to our first commercial break. Please remember to call in your questions at 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128 cooking issues. How you feel, man? I feel all right.
I don't want no people to know you're in here. How you feel, fella? Hey Dam! Sure getting down. Look in.
We're gonna have a bump good time. We're gonna have a bump good time. We're gonna have a bump good time. We're gonna have a bump good time. Take them up, Brad.
We gotta take you high. Alright. You wanna do it again? Yeah, let's go on back. We gotta take you high.
Brother. Yeah. Now I won't have a body. Let's bread blow about two corpses. Let's go and do that within it.
Now alright. I'm gonna get that belly with a little horn over there. Brad, get it take us higher. Yeah. Take us higher.
Brad! Welcome back to Cooking Issues. Call in your cooking questions to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. Uh coming to you live for another, I don't know, what, half hour or so?
Um all right, let's go to some email questions. So, Brian uh writes in from New Zealand uh and says he just made a batch of lemon cello and added his sugar syrup to the infused alcohol cold so it stayed clear. Uh, uh and then it you and then basically let me go into this and this here's the question. Uh the question is when you make limoncello, lemoncello is basically you soak uh lemon uh peel or zest in uh alcohol, sometimes high proof alcohol, sometimes not, until the flavor has gone in, then afterwards you add uh sugar. You strain and add sugar, right?
Basic lemon cello. I don't actually drink it, so I don't know a lot from first hand experience, but that's that's what lemoncello is. Uh many of the recipes on the internet tell you that if you add sugar to uh sugar, you know, the sugar syrup sugar solution to your lemon cello when the sugar solution is still warm or hot, that it will turn cloudy. Uh whereas if you add it when it's cold, uh it will not. And then um the the question is, uh I I don't know if that's personally true, but everyone says it, so I'm sure that it must have some truth.
And then the question is, is there any uh is there any taste difference? Is it gonna be any taste difference? Is it gonna have any impact on texture, aroma, flavor, etc.? That's that's uh Brian's question. Now I since I don't make lemon cello, I haven't had uh firsthand experience, but it's very interesting to me that limoncello would turn cloudy um w when you add warm stuff as opposed to when you add cold stuff.
Now um I I did some preliminary research in the scientific literature this morning on this problem and I was not able to find anything, unfortunately. I guess it hasn't really been studied. Usually when liquor turns cloudy, the reason liquor turns cloudy when you dilute it, is because there are oils that are uh soluble in uh high proof alcohol, but when the when the proof has been diluted, right? When the alcohol level goes down, all of a sudden those oils are no longer uh soluble and they and they precipitate out of solution into oil droplets and they become cloudy, right? This is known as the uzo effect.
So if you take uzo, sambuka, any one of these kind of uh usually pheny-based things that are high in uh in oils and you dilute them or or you know at um what's it called? Absinthe, uh, it will it will go white, cloudy. Um also uh we have this that happened a lot when I do distillation work, I do distillation at low temperature, we bring a lot of oils over, and those oils often will cloud our beverages when we dilute them or when we chill them. Usually it's when you chill something that it goes cloudy because all of a sudden uh chilling it reduces the uh solubility of the oil, and also diluting it reduces solubility of the oil, right? Now, here's my question, and you'll have to write back and and uh and answer this.
Uh my guess would be that this this is the only thing I could think of that would make it cloudy, is that oils would suddenly become not soluble. Now, if you were to add uh if you were to add um sugar syrup when everything is cold, let's say it was cold and clear and you add it, my guess is it would go cloudy right away, but maybe the oil droplets you form are big enough that they settle out. I've heard people say that uh when it becomes cloudy like that and stays cloudy, that it's bitter. That would mean that the oils stay in. So if if what's actually happening is you add the cold syrup and it forms oil droplets right away that are large enough that the oil droplets can coalesce, and then you can get them off of the product and have them go clear again.
Because I've had that happen with liquor too. I've had liquor that had so much oil, went so cloudy on me that uh after a period of a couple of days it settles out and it's clear because the oil separates out. And the the lemon oil would have a bitterness. So it so basically my my theory, and this is completely not backed up because I've never done it, is that if you it it if this phenomenon is true, perhaps what's happening when you add um warm uh when you add warm syrup, right, it doesn't actually cloud as much as it would if you added cold syrup, but that those droplets are smaller and thus more stable. There's therefore there'd be more lemon oil in it, and therefore it might be more bitter, which is what people report on the internet.
Uh whereas if it's cold, the droplets formed are larger and then might coalesce and get out of the beverage uh as it sits for several days before before you've finished bottling it. But I don't know, and I've never run the test, and I would welcome anyone to either call in who's done this and talk to me about it, or or else write into the blog or the forums because it's uh it's an interesting subject. Usually the exact opposite happens, and cold things cloud up or uh uh when you dilute them more than warm ones do. So it's definitely an interesting question. I wish I had more of a finished answer.
Um Derek from San Francisco writes in, and uh this this might end up being a long one, this might go over the over the break, but he he read it, and the stash is like, oh geez. I've read a number of articles and recipes, usually general source chicken or sow, whatever. What do you think? Sour so? I thought it was salad.
Okay, well, I'm gonna defer to Nastash on this one. Uh about the velveting technique for cooking meat, but none has given a reasonable scientific explanation for how it works. How does velveting improved improve meat's texture? Uh, which are the typical ingredients, cornstitch, uh, cornstarch, eggs, uh, egg white wine, etc. play a significant role.
Uh, thanks in advance, Derek. Okay. Uh well, uh, I don't I don't cook this way, but I did do a lot of re research on this one. It's uh it's very interesting. Um, velveting is the procedure whereby you usually take small chunks of meat, uh, you uh marinate them for a time in an egg white uh the main thing that's always there is egg white, and then usually also cornstarch.
Uh and uh sometimes wine, uh salt is usually uh always present. Some people add a pinch of baking soda as well, and some people do a premarination in baking soda before they add it to the velveting mixture, the uh the egg white mixture. And the claim is that it produces a more tender uh result. If you look uh basically after you do your marination in that egg white you know gunk, you then uh take it and um either drag it through hot oil to set the egg white on the outside, or else through boiling water to set the egg white on the outside, and then proceed to stir-fry the recipe as normal, right? A couple of things are always true in these recipes.
One, the pieces are small, which means that marination effect is going to be able to penetrate quickly through the whole thing. Okay. Uh that's that's the the the primary the primary thing that's true. Now, um why does this work? What the hell's going on?
Uh if you look at some of the videos on the web, people say that the egg white is sealing in the juices when you search uh I have uh extreme doubts as to this. I mean, one of Harold McGee's uh you know big uh initial proofs uh in uh on food and cooking, the original one, is uh that uh you know searing does not in fact seal in the juices because you can see a whole crap load of sizzle in the pan and the sizzle is coming from evaporating water uh and the water is coming from you guessed it, the meat. Now uh having seen uh pictures of these uh chicken pieces stir-frying that have been velveted, I can tell you that there is a lot there's a crap ton of moisture escaping from those things. Now, uh the egg white coating could pr uh protect somewhat uh that you would more preferentially get the water out of the egg white first before it makes it to the chicken or whatever, thereby um you know producing less um less moisture loss inside of the meat, uh just like a batter would. Um in which case, yes, it is protecting the the meat from losing its moisture.
However, uh there are a couple of other things that are going on as well that are very interesting. Um if you add baking soda, uh baking soda is alkaline, and baking soda can actually uh tenderize meat, and what we'll talk I'll talk more about baking soda uh in a minute in general, alkaline conditions in general. But um egg white is also alkaline. In fact, what's interesting is is that if you go to a uh Chinese market here in the US, eggs are often not refrigerated. Uh eggs as they age uh in a non-refrigerated environment don't necessarily become more dangerous, but they do become more alkaline.
So uh an egg an egg white that starts off in the mid-sevens, pH wise, by the time it's kind of uh you know aged and become older, can have a pH upwards of uh in the nines, very alkaline, right? And so perhaps a soak in uh a very alkaline egg white would have tenderizing effect, similar to the effect that uh uh a baking soda rub uh can have, because when you lower the the pH, you're you're basically increasing uh the rate of kind of protein and uh collagen breakdown. So this could be an additional tenderizing effect. That would be offset by any sort of wine that you're adding. So any sort of wine would have acidity, would tend to counteract uh any tenderizing effect from the baking soda.
So I don't know how those two things or for the baking soda or from the egg white, so I don't know how those two things would necessarily interact. The other key component in this is the salt. So whenever you add salt to uh a meat, you are basically increasing its water holding capacity. So even though you think of salt as something that dehydrates something over time, uh when you are adding salt to meat, you uh you're changing the amount of water that that protein can hold on to. So you're actually uh increasing the amount of water that it holds on to.
So there are a bunch of possible effects here. And I don't know where, because again, I searched the you know before, like I searched scientific literature for limoncello, try to search the scientific literature for velveting. It just did there's nothing there. So I searched uh on bicarbonate solutions and tenderization, and there's a there's a lot of anecdotal evidence on uh bicarbonate solutions, sodium bicarbonate as baking soda, by the way. Uh so there's a lot of anecdotal evidence on that, and people who've done tests that marination and bicarbonate solutions causes tenderized meat via two different mechanisms, actually.
One, straight tenderization, uh presumably because of the alkaline nature and also the uh ionic you know character that it's changing the water holding capacity of the proteins. But also uh uh when uh baking soda is heated, it decomposes, forms uh carbon dioxide gas, and so makes a porous structure in the meat and actually creates a porosity in the meat that can be interpreted as tenderness. Those are two different um two different things that could be going on. Egg white perhaps is having some of a similar effect in terms of uh of tenderizing because it can be alkaline. Um salt would tend to tenderize.
I don't know where the wine would fit in, and thirdly, just straight in robing in a uh protein mixture of uh egg white would help to protect the uh the chicken from uh overcooking. A third thing that would would be happening, I mean a fourth or fifth, who knows how many I've done. Uh another thing that might be happening is alkaline things brown faster. So uh when you have something that's uh alkaline, in fact, there's a people who do studies on adding a little bit uh in Holland, they did it in Netherlands, they did a study where they added baking soda to ground meat, and they found that it browned a lot faster because alkaline conditions uh increase browning rates, right? So, for instance, you take a pretzel.
Pretzels are boiled in uh either baking soda or lye, alkaline conditions before they're baked, and that's why they have that really dark, dark color and also that characteristic pretzel taste. If you cook uh cook a pretzel without boiling it in alkaline conditions, it doesn't taste like a pretzel. It tastes like mm you know like a bagel or something that's hard, you know. So you definitely need that alkaline condition to get that really rapid browning. Um I tend to hate it when it's applied to meat.
We ran a bunch of tests when uh you know when Harold McGee comes into his lecture at the school, we do a bunch of tests where we cook baking so uh we put baking soda into ground meat, and yeah, it browned fast, but it tasted god awful. I mean terrible. Did you taste that one, Nastasha? Terrible. Uh very small amounts of it added to um added to onions can radically change the browning characteristics of onions, make them brown very quickly.
It and you know, made them actually lose more water too. Is very is very interesting. So these alkaline shifts in alkaline uh alkalinity really have a huge effect on proteins and how they brown. Similarly, when you're making noodles, uh a lot of uh a lot of uh you know, Asian noodle recipes will use something called can sue, which is basically an alkaline uh uh additive, and it and it makes the gluten more stretchy and also makes the noodles uh yellow because you're basically shifting um the functionality of the of the gluten proteins by uh shifting the pH towards more alkaline conditions. Um, uh long story long and long story confusing is that uh you know the alkaline uh egg white might be making it brown faster.
It might also be um it might also be tenderizing. If it makes it brown faster, then you think it's done faster, meaning uh you're not gonna overcook it as much. So that could be another reason why perhaps the meat is more tender when it's when it's cooked this way. So it's a uh a very complicated subject. I don't think it's been adequately studied.
I don't uh I haven't done any uh side-by-side taste tests, so it's hard for me to say for certain uh what's going on. But these are my uh best and worst guesses at at what what's happening. Uh anyway, so that brings us to our second break. Uh call in your questions at 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128.
Cooking issues. I want to get on your good food. I got the eat on the food food. Going down through the three, and let all hang out. I wear some beef button, but let it all hang out.
Where people can find the hand. And then you hear the music. Do it with the good foot. Say the whole battery, all get together, all these tracks, and they put it. That's on my favorite.
Welcome back to Cooking Issues on the Heritage Radio Network. Uh Dave Arnold and Nastasha Lopez here. Today's Cooking Issues brought to you by the Barter House and uh their fine wine from uh Uruguay. Booza Booza with temporary and tanat grapes, which we're enjoying right now. Um we're boozing on booze.
Okay, so uh we have another. Oh, by the way, you still have a couple minutes to call in your questions, and I know you want to, to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. And uh a little programming note, next week we won't be coming to you live from Tuesday. We're gonna try and pre-record.
We'll put on the blog when we're gonna do it in case you want to call in. But next week I'll be teaching uh sous vide and low temperature cooking with Nils at the French Culinary Institute. Uh it's actually I like that I like the class a lot. It's a good class. We're already we're already full for all of you, Sous vide nuts, so you'll have to sign up for the next the next one.
But it's an interesting class. We do, you know, uh a billion different tastings, and it's uh it's pretty hardcore, but it's uh it's a lot of fun. And I actually learn something every time I teach it because we get to we get to you know uh taste together with a group of uh seventeen, you know, people and the the people who take the class are usually pretty hardcore. So I I end up always learning a lot, even myself. Anyway, um okay.
Uh let me see this is b uh uh sorry. Okay. Uh we have a Swedish listener uh who you know can't call in. I guess the time difference is too great for him. And uh he says that uh I assume it's a him.
Let me see. Hans, yes. Uh uh, he has heard it's possible to make frozen slushies um with a soda siphon. He's interested specifically in the possibility of a frozen mojito. Uh do you have any experience with that?
He says he's tried it, but he hasn't gotten good results. They were nice and bubbly, um, but no freezing. Okay. Um and he says he hasn't tried it with a soda siphon yet, just with a cream whipper. Okay, cream whipper, by the way, we're talking about is a whipped cream maker that you charge with nitrous oxide, and a siphon is basically a soda siphon is one that's meant to operate to make to make seltzer.
Now, um I don't think it should make a difference whether you use uh nitrous oxide or CO2 because both have relatively the same weight and similar solubilities in water. So I don't think it's going to make a difference which gas you use. So the question is do the mechanisms of the two uh are they different? Now this uh harks back to something we talked about last week, actually, which is uh the idea of super freezing. We talked a little bit about super freezing.
Was it last week, Nastasha? Super freezing? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Uh and maybe that's why Hans wrote in the the question.
Um here are some issues. One, I don't think you can do it with a mojito because mojito has uh the crushed up um uh mint in it, and so that's going to provide a nucleation site, so you're not gonna get very much supercooling. The way that this slushy thing, if it works, which I have never done it before, uh if it works, here's how it works. You uh put a drink into a clean vessel. It's clean, right?
The drink itself is clean, clear, doesn't have any cloudiness in it, right? So lime juice might be a problem. I'm not sure, right? Uh you might want to you might want to keep the lime juice separate, you know, chill your lime juice down and then take the frozen drink with everything but the lime juice and and and slush it, because the lime juice I think is going to cause a problem. You want to chill it below the temperature at which it freezes, right?
And then uh you want to initiate ice nucleation so that it forms crystals. It's a technique called super freezing. You can look it up on YouTube and you can see uh you know super super supercooling, rather. You can look up supercooling and freezing, and this works. So, one, your lime juice is gonna be a problem.
Put your lime juice uh last after it's basically been slushed out. Um, your the advantage of using the siphon is that when you are um when you charge it with gas the gas is actually lowering the freezing point of your of your mixture okay so it allows you to supercool it uh even more because what happens is when you when you spray it out you're doing two things one you're introducing a bunch of nucleation sites because it's gonna bubble and the bubble provides ice nucleation sites and you're gonna get your crystal growth you're also as the stuff foams out of it you are um you are releasing gas and as it releases gas the freezing point goes up and it should crystallize faster so you win two times so here's what I would do I'm not guaranteeing this is gonna work because I haven't tried it but I would mix your drink with water and by the way you're gonna want uh uh assuming you want the same sort of dilution that a daiquiri has uh the post that we're gonna hopefully put up in a day or two on cooking issues part two of our of our mega cocktail post part one went up on Thursday I think part two is going to go up probably tomorrow um you know it turns out that shaking drinks are quite dilute more dilute than you'd think more in the range of like 16% alcohol in that range so you're gonna want to uh dilute it down to finish right except for you know hope you know keep in mind that the lime juice is gonna dilute it more omit the lime juice just water sugar syrup and booze right uh any salt if you want charge it with uh with nitrous put it in your freezer right uh that mixture should freeze uh somewhere in the vicinity of like minus eight, ten, minus, no, like minus ten, somewhere in that, somewhere minus Celsius. I have to look it up exactly, but somewhere in that region, so you should super cool it down. Your freezer should be fine. You're gonna have to experiment with it a little bit.
Then immediately turn your siphon upside, you know, your cre whipped cream thing upside down, you know, like out. You want to get rid of as much gas as possible and also um, you know, and also get it into your cup as fast as possible, and with any luck, you will be able to get some uh foaming. Another thing you could do is just unscrew the lid and let it de-aerate like that, and then you should be able to get some. Pour it out into a uh in into a juice, stir in your lime juice, done. Done.
If it works, if it works, and there's there's no guarantee, there's no guarantee that she's gonna work. Okay. So uh uh on the subject of cocktails, uh, I did an interesting study over the weekend, Nastasha, and in uh in preface for the uh for the post that we're working on. Um shaken and stirred drinks, and we've mentioned this a bunch of times, but stake shaken and stirred drinks are different, right? So one of the differences between a shaken drink and a stirred drink is stirred drinks are typically less diluted than than shaken drinks, right?
Typically a stirred drink is gonna have a much lower amount of water added to it than it than a shaking drink is. Uh two, shaking drinks are aerated more because they're shaken, right? And back in the day, I used to think it was you know malarkey that uh that all that aeration would stay. I thought it was a very transient effect, but through several blind tastes that we've done, I've been proven wrong, as is often the case. And uh shaking drinks are in fact different on a textural basis from stirred drinks, as well as being uh more diluted.
Now the question is then if you're having a party, how are you gonna make uh shaking drinks for everyone if you want to do pre-if you want to pre-dilute the batch? For instance, you're gonna run out of ice, you don't feel like having your ice around, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You don't want to shake live because it's a pain in the ass, etc. I mean, but etc. etc.
etc. Uh, and in the school, we tested uh a couple of different things. One, we just uh served a chilled shaken drink, right? That we had a chilled drink that was diluted the same amount as a shaken drink, and that um uh you know didn't taste like a shaken drink. We uh could be tasted that side by side with a shaking drink, and also one that we'd put in a blender.
The blender didn't work because the bubbles were too big, it was weird. And then we also chilled one with liquid nitrogen. And liquid nitrogen, it turns out, as it as it cools, with the advantage here is you can use warm drink as well. As it cools, it adds little bubbles because the nitrogen's boiling off, and that turns out to be very close to shaken drink. Uh, I realize that most of you out there don't have liquid nitrogen.
So here's the good news. I ran another test over the weekend where we took the chilled drink, we took a chilled drink straight out of the freezer, we diluted it uh as much as you would for a uh a um shake and drink, and just tune into our website in a couple days to find out what that answer is because it's too complicated to explain over the over the radio, it wouldn't make any damn sense anyway. But uh look it up on our blog. But here's the good news. Dilute the drink, put it in your freezer, don't let it freeze, put it in your freezer, and then um just put it into a cocktail shaker without ice and just shake it before you pour it out.
That's it. And you can get most of the stuff back. So I ran a test over the weekend where we took uh chilled diluted cocktail, a fresh shaken cocktail, and then a chilled diluted cocktail that we shook just in a quart container, and a chilled uh a chilled diluted cocktail that I shook in a quart container with a bunch of uh I have a bunch of strainers, uh Hawthorne uh strainers, um, you know, the the ones with the spring, the cocktail strainers with the spring. I ripped all the springs off and threw them into the core container. This is a trick I learned from Audrey Saunders, who was testing this to aerate her egg white drinks, you know, a number of years ago.
Anyway, so and I did a one with uh one with the springs in a core container and just shook the heck out of them for a couple of seconds and then poured them out. And blind, the shaken, fresh shaken drink was very similar to the ones that were shaken uh just in a core container, uh straight from the freezer, and ones that were uh shaken in a core container with uh springs straight from the freezer. Uh the shaking drink was a little bit different uh and uh was preferred by some people, but the other two are very, very close approximation. So if you pre-dilute your drinks, store them in core containers in the freezer, you know, take it a core container is uh it's what you get from like a takeout joint. You know, we have them everywhere at the school, but it's what you get takeout joint.
Store your drinks in the core container, uh, you know, make sure there's a lot of air left in it, and then as they're ready, just pull them out of your freezer, shacka shaka, shaka, shaka, shaka, shack. So what drink did you make and how long did you keep it in your freezer for before you took it out? Uh I kept it in there for like an hour, and uh it was probably a little colder. I was trying to make it exactly as cold as a shaken drink. If I let it sit there longer, it would have gotten a little bit colder.
Um I was making um what was it making? I was making uh daiquiris, straight daiquires. And the um and I used the same exact mix, so I pre-mixed everything, held some aside and shook one live, and then the other ones I shook um, you know, I I I pre-shook. I actually pre-shook them traditionally and then let them sit for uh you know for a while to get rid of all the texture from shaking and then froze them down. The reason I did that was uh I wanted to make sure that they were diluted exactly the same amount as the fresh, fresh uh frozen guy.
Um what was interesting is some people preferred the one that was in the freezer. They preferred it because it had it was more intense, uh, because it didn't have the air bubbles in, and the one with the springs was actually the most aerated, and therefore some people liked it the least because it was the the least intense. My mom oh, it wasn't uh Dacri, sorry, it was whiskey sours. My mom, who doesn't like whiskey, was that happened to be my house at the time, she liked that one best because it tasted the least like whiskey. It was well or actually no, she liked the one without the springs, which wasn't the most airy because everyone said that that one tasted sweeter, which is bizarre.
Just because it show how complicated the cocktail is. Uh, my stepfather who's booze hound and w wine nut, an amazing palette. I've seen him pick wines blind out of, you know, uh mean a m you you'll walk up to him with a wine and a tinfoil wrapper and you know, pour it and he'll be like, Yeah, that's blah, blah, blah. Me's mean you can't argue with the man's palate. You can argue with a lot about uh about uh Gerard, but not his palate.
Um so you know, he he actually preferred the one that uh w was allowed to sit in the freezer because he I guess it was denser. He preferred it more. Uh and he he preferred the one that had the most air in it least. Um We have a collar. We have a collar.
Oh, at the last under the wire, collar comes in under the water. Caller on the air. Hi, this is Garrett. Um I'm calling because I have a question about carbonating cocktails. Okay.
I've seen the systems they have, like the Perlini system, but I wanted to know just how to do it with a regular soda siphon and uh if you've had any experience with carbonating cocktails, and uh yeah, just your ideas about it. I have had a lot of experience carbonating with cocktails. Um I tend to carbonate cocktails with uh 20 pound CO2 tanks and um and uh ball lock fittings, which is like you know, so old soda fittings that home brewers use. And for a list of the stuff, it doesn't cost that much to get that system actually. That's what I've been I've been doing that for a long, long time.
Um there's on our forums you can look up a list for that. Now, carbonating with it with a siphon, here's the problem with it. I've done a I've done it. I wouldn't use a soda siphon, I'd use a cream whipper for it. Um there also ISI is introducing a new system called the soda stream.
Uh not the soda stream, oh geez, that's a different company, but soda something. Sparkle, soda sparkle, sparkle and shimmer or something. Anyway. But um, here's what I would do. The pro the main problem with any of these systems is you can't get rid of the air space above the drink.
Air is the enemy of carbonation. So when you uh have that head space with air and you're and you're shaking it, it does two things. It it it decreases um the places where CO2 can make it into your drink, and also when you un when you uncap it, they're not that soluble and they form bubbles and they they foam out. So if you have if you can afford it, you're gonna need to use two chargers to charge it, right? One, you want to do like a quick shake out with it, and then uh take your whipper.
This is why I say use a whipper, right? Not the soda siphon, unless you have a soda siphon. If you have a soda siphon, turn it upside down when you're doing this. So to shake it a couple of times, uh you're trying to get a little bit of CO2 in, and it's gonna get rid of the nucleation sites in your in your in your drink and also get rid of the air, and then immediately vent out all of that gas. And so what's happening now is you're getting rid of the air and the oxygen and all the nasty stuff that's the enemy of carbonation, and you're getting rid of some of the nucleation sites that are in your drink.
Then you want to add your second, make sure it's ice cold. In fact, if you have a couple of ice cubes in it, it's even better because you want it really, really cold. Then you put your second charger in, and then you shake it for carbonation, right? Then you let it sit for a couple of minutes to settle out. Then you slowly vent it, open it and pour out the drink, and you can get get good results.
I would start with uh things that carbonate well I tend not to like carbonated rum drinks that I carbonate for some reason. That's personal preference. I know some people that like a carbonated daiquiry. I tend not to like things carbonated like Manhattan's but I don't like the really bitters when they're carbonated. But you know I carbonate a lot of gin drinks a lot of gin drinks uh carbonate um you know carb carbonate I like bubbles in almost everything you know what I mean but just a couple a couple of drinks that that I don't like um the other issue with uh the with the siphon is that uh you only get these seven gram seven or eight gram increments of CO2 and really you want to fine-tune the amount of bubbles that you're putting into a drink so people don't notice it as much in cocktails because they're not used to tasting for for specific flavors in cocktails as much as they are in wine but if you carbonate wine wine is extremely sensitive to the amount of CO2 that you put into it such that the difference between um I I use pressure because I'm using a tank so the difference in using like 30 uh 35 PSI versus 40 psi is the difference between delicious and you blast the fruit out of it and accentuate the oak too much right so the that that's my other gripe with using the the cartridges is that they don't have the fine control over the amount of bubbles present that you would get if you had a tank.
The tank system's really easy actually like you know I have like I say I'm a little bit nutty I have it in my house but you know it's uh it's not actually that nutty like you know I live in the city in a tiny apartment with two kids. You know what I mean? Like on the on the third floor. Uh but you should definitely experiment. Uh you can definitely experiment using a cream whipper or or a siphon to start.
How would you how would you vent the gas with the siphon? Because you would vent out the liquid, wouldn't you? Turn it upside down. Turn it upside down. Oh, and then the gas would come out without the liquid coming out if you turn it upside down?
Exactly. Oh, okay. All right. Yeah, but I how much uh how much the system that you have, how much is that? How much of a problem money wise?
It's not. And here's here's the thing, right? I'm gonna offend my good friends at uh at uh EC, but uh there's a a company out of uh Guntersville, Alabama called Mark Powers, and uh they they sell soda equipment and the stuff there is so cheap, you can get like a 20-pound CO2 tank empty for like ninety dollars and a regulator for like thirty dollars, the hosing's like thirteen cents a foot, and the connectors, you know, they're like you can get the whole thing, including the carbonator caps, which you have to order from a homebrew supply, uh, and then you use soda bottles, you get the whole thing for you know, under under like one thirty, one fifty in that range. You go to your I don't know where you live, but you go to your local welding supply shop, and then you just unfortunately this is like kills people. You hand them your new tank and they hand you like an old beat up tank, but it's full of CO2.
That's like an uh uh like an $18 problem. But one tank of CO2 uh will do two to four hundred gallons of drink. Okay. Now one thing you have to remember, you everything has to be cold when you're doing it, and if you want to be consistent, you want it to always be the same amount of cold. And here's the other thing that a lot of people don't think about.
Water, uh alcohol is actually uh CO2 is more soluble in alcohol than water. So in order to get the same effect of bubbles in in an alcohol drink, you need to add more CO2 than you would in water. Okay? So the higher the alcohol content, the more you need to add. So I happen to like carbonated Negronies, right?
And so uh carbonated Negroni is a high proof, so you need to add a lot more pressure to a Negroni than you would to uh a wine, right? That's why sake typically, if you're gonna carbonate sake, you carbonate sake at a higher alcohol, uh higher pressure than you would carbonate like a white wine, which typically has a lower alcohol content. So you have to scale the pressure to the alcohol content of your drink. So the higher the proof, the higher the pressure, basically. Bingo, for the same flavor, yeah.
For the same effect of carbonation on your tongue, yeah. All right, well, thank you. Alright, well, good good luck. You're entering you're entering one of the most rewarding things in the world, bubbles. Bubbles, bubbles, bubbles.
All right, thanks for calling in, and that was cooking issues for this week. Uh we won't be live next week, but we will figure something out for you. And thanks to Barter House and Booza. Vicious Vish. Oh, you did me on this corner.
And I don't know where I'm at. Supposed to meet my baby. Between a minute's late. You got my head all twisted.
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