Nine times out of ten, when someone is taking the time to break away and do their own thing, it's because they either have a specific point of view or a specific passion that really sort of speaks to maybe not a mass audience, but the customers that I have and the customers at Barter House tries to culture and and cultivate, I think are are those type of people who want that story and feel like if they take a an allocation of an 80 case made wine that they've got something special and it's something that only they have or maybe one other person has. So that's kind of what we specialize in. And you know, it may not be business savvy to the nth degree, like we're not making a hundred thousand cases of Pinot Grigio and you know, flogging them all over New York, but the customers that get wine from us are kind of believing the same stuff we do, which is supporting these small farms, supporting these young winemakers who have a passion for doing it, and and we supply them with a market and we allow them to get their product out there to otherwise an untapped uh group of people. Oh, you did that. Got me on this corner.
Don't know where I'm at. Hello, and welcome to Cooking Issues Radio on the Heritage Radio Network, the show where you call in with all your cooking questions. I'm Dave Arnold, the host of Cooking Issues here with Nastasha the Hammer Lopez, the driver of the technological bus. All right. Uh call in all your questions to 718-497-2128.
That's 718-497-2128. We'll be here for about the next forty-five minutes. Nasasha, I hear we already have a caller, yeah? Yeah, we do. Nice.
All right, caller, you're on the air. Hello, uh, this is Obi. I'm all the way out in Tucson, Arizona. Nice. Um a couple of questions.
Uh I've got a CVAP. I'm I'm a chef, uh, and we we got a CVAP in our kitchen not too long ago. Um and we've done a couple things, a couple cool things with it. Did kind of uh uh, you know, we did a 48 hour short rib just the other day and it turned out really, really good. In the bag or not in the bag?
In a bag in in uh Ziploc, you know, with just a little bit of uh a little bit of stock, and uh it turned out amazing. It was it was kind of weird because um the temperature does shift in them. What I had to do was I have a um I can't remember what model is it, the five five oh five hundred something. Yeah, I don't know them by model number anyway, I just know them by looking at them. Yeah, the well it's I the the thing I had to do was to keep it on um keep it on the load cycle, like not actually even press cook.
And uh it kept the temperature more steady. Uh that's hot. But um I it kept it around between thirty-four uh one thirty-four and one thirty-six degrees. And uh they came out really, really good. Uh but my question was I mean, I'm sure you've messed with them a lot, and I was just wondering if there was any other cool things that that uh that you guys had done with them.
Okay, well for well, just before we get into it, but for those of who don't know what a CVAP is, for our listeners, a CVAP is a type of uh uh oven originally designed to hold actually Kentucky Fried Chicken. It was invented by a guy by the name of Winston, uh actually for Kentucky Fried Chicken. He was friends with Colonel Sanders, and they built this thing. It's basically a Bain Marie in the bottom of a holding oven. And you adjust the water temperature of the Bane Marie and the temperature of the oven separately, and you can adjust the humidity in there and you can keep things uh, you know, nicely for a really, really long time.
When uh the sous vide uh crackdown happened in the New York City with the health department about four or five years ago, uh CVAPs all of a sudden became very, very popular because chefs could use them to do low temperature cooking, uh very accurate low temperature cooking with fish. Uh and so uh and here's where I get in that's just the background. Here's where I get into your actual question. A lot of chefs here in New York retrofitted CVAPs into their kitchens because uh either they couldn't afford a combi oven right away, uh, or they couldn't retrofit because uh the venting requirements of a combi oven. A uh C C VAP ovens are a lot less expensive than a COMBY oven, and and they don't require venting or drains, and they take up a lot less power.
And they're fairly accurate, actually. Uh I don't know what's going on with yours, but Nathan Mirvold and Chris Young, who are coming out with the Uber Tech book at the end of this year, have done uh independent tests on CVAPs, and they hold about two degrees with a plus or minus two degrees uh accuracy uh over the long haul. And I think they they're slightly better now than they used to be. It depends a lot on temperature and the size of the oven you're using. Smaller ovens, obviously more accurate.
Or not obviously, but they are. And uh the uh so one thing I really recommend you try out there is fish, not in the bag. So you can do really quick work with fish. You know, you set the temperature 10 uh 15 degrees higher than you want the fish to go, and you know, you depending on the size of the portion, you're looking at like a 10 to 12 minute uh cook time in in the CVAP, and a lot of chefs in New York move to this because they're not allowed to cook fish in the bag. So the CVAP is very, very good at low temperature work, uh direct service, low temperature work not in the bag.
The one thing you have to worry is when you open and close it a lot, it starts sucking a little bit of wind, and you're gonna have to increase your cook times a little bit. Um it's also good for hamburgers, anything like that that you want to keep. Now, I don't really like this. If we did hamburgers, hamburger's worked great in it. Yeah.
Hamburgers were awesome. I mean, you have to post sear them because things lose the texture on the outside in uh in a CVAP after they've been sitting there a while. But uh Howard Richardson, who's the guy at the company that you're gonna want to talk to if you have any problems, he's the rep. His favorite demo in uh, you know, when he goes out to the NRA, the National Restaurant Show, not the National Rifle Association show, is uh to hold tortilla chips in him because you can use them actually with in very low humidity uh circumstances to keep stuff hot without drying out. It's completely counterintuitive that you could have a water bath in the bottom of something and hold tortilla chips in it.
But yeah, they were talking about when I first bought it, they were talking about how good steam is like dry steam or something. Well, yeah, it's not this dry steam is really just hot steam, so it's not uh see not this is it's it's different, it's literally setting the humidity level. But uh I plan on doing a lot on CVAPs in our next uh installment of the uh low temperature primer. If I ever write it, Nastasha's rolling her eyes at me right now because I've been very far behind. But uh I guess we'll be coming back.
We came up with a beautiful prime rib. I mean, we've we've been trying I've I don't know how many prime ribs I've put through it, and we came up with a formula that pr produces an awesome prime rib. Yeah, no, I mean it's uh it's fantastic at those kind of things and very economical to run. Uh but you know what you should do uh phone in with some more specific ones next week. I'm gonna think more about specific CVAPs as I think more about uh recipes, but it's definitely a very important piece of equipment.
It's becoming very very popular. Thanks so much for your call. We have another call. Yeah, we do. Hello, you're on the air.
Hi, this is Corbin from San Diego. Hey Corbin, how are you doing? Good. Um, so I recently had an opportunity to pick up a used VWR circulator from a uh university surplus auction. I I got it real cheap.
It was only like fifty dollars. But now I'm trying to figure out how to sterilize it, clean it, and go through it and make sure all the key components are still working. Do you have any recommendations? Yeah, do you know what kind of lab it was in? Um I don't.
They don't have any information like that. Okay. Um so most like did it have a lot of oil deposits on it or no? It's pretty clean, but the the coils have a little bit of like uh calcium deposits on it. But other than that, not not too bad.
Okay, so it was probably used in water as opposed to in oil. It's a lot easier to clean that way. Uh I would suggest um spraying everything with a fairly concentrated bleach solution and then letting that bleach solution soak into the coils. You want to make sure for first you actually you should go over with a toothbrush and get all of the actual deposits. Any deposit that's on the uh uh on the circulator itself is going to harbor uh evil things even after it's been soaked in bleach, right?
So the first thing you want to do is get off any sort of deposits. Then you're gonna want to circulate in it uh like a CLR tablet, which is gonna you know the the uh calcium lime rust remover, and that's gonna get rid of uh the calcium deposits, and then after that I would soak it for a while in uh a fairly concentrated bleach solution, and that's gonna kill anything that remains into from a biological standpoint. I would wipe down the entire surface of the piece of equipment with with uh with bleach, uh, you know, try not to you know don't have it plugged in. Duh. And uh and then um you know, from there on out after she dries, and if you want, you can circulate it, you know, up to boiling to be darn sure.
But at that point you should have killed everything. Now uh how long the circulator is gonna last depends on how long it was run and what kind of care they took in it, right? The older circulators have a problem with the bearing. The bearings on them tend to go bad. If she starts to squeak and squeal on you, then you can put some WD uh I wouldn't put WD forty actually, because you know it's not food grade, but if you put a food grade lubricant on the bearing, you'll extend the life cycle by a couple of months, probably of hard usage, I mean restaurant-style usage.
Um I would also open up the circulator. Are you good with electricity or no? Yeah, I'm pretty good. Okay, open up the back of the circulator. Uh, all of the old circulators have a lot of uh contact points with spade terminals in them to make electrical connections on the inside of the unit.
I would uh take a file and I would file them clean. They become resistors because they get uh water vapor or they corrode. When they corrode, they become resistors, and you lose uh uh, you know, you basically you start generating heat there. And I've seen a lot of circulators fail that way. So I would go to all the internal connections and I would just make sure they're good and clean, uh, and that's gonna extend the life of the circulator another good long, good long chunk of time.
So uh the the first thing to usually go is the is the bearings on the old ones, and the second thing is usually the electrical connections. Uh I've had occasional ones, but not with VWRs, but uh certain old Lauda ones used to have problems with their triacs blowing, in which case you need to then be able to uh replace the triact, which is a little more challenging than other things, but still possible. But that's in general what dies on them. Is that but is that a good uh roadmap for you? Yeah, that's great.
Exactly what I was looking for. Super, right into the blog and tell us how it worked. I'm always curious about these kind of things. Thanks so much for your call. Okay, thank you.
We have one more? Yeah. No. Wait, let's take a break, I think Jack is saying. Oh, we gotta take a person's been waiting.
All right, all right, we'll take a break. We'll be back with cooking issues. Oh! How you feel, brother? Feeling good.
You feel good? So much bone, brother. How you feel, mate? I'll feel all right. I don't want to people to know you're in, yeah.
How you feel, fella? Get down! Sure getting down. Look at him. We're gonna have a bump good time.
We're gonna have a bump good time. We're gonna have a bump good time. We're gonna have a bump good time. Don't take them up, Brad. We gotta take you high.
Alright. 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 up by two cores. Now alright. I'm gonna get that belly with a little horn over there.
Take us higher. Brad! Welcome back to Cooking Issues on the Heritage Radio Network. Today brought to you by the Barter House. They poured us a nice wine, uh, Jules, which is a Syrah Granage, and I have no idea where it's from.
Uh call in all of your questions too. 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. And as I feared, Nastasha, we lost our caller over uh over the phone during the break. Uh and uh one more thing.
I have a shout shout out to the best device ever built. We're in a uh studio that's in basically a working farm in the middle of Brooklyn, so we have uh fly problem here, right, Nastasha in the studio? And they've bought these electric fly rackets, which are about the greatest things I think ever invented, no? It's just the greatest thing ever. It's like uh, I don't know, it's just so satisfying.
It's like I'm gonna kill a fly, see whether you can hear it on. No, I'll we'll try it later. Anyway, uh because I have too many questions to get to to uh to meander about with uh electric flies water problems. Okay, Red writes in, he says, Dave, uh, I need a recipe for bone in chicken thighs or legs, uh, time and temperature when you're cooking low temperature. Now, uh, for those of you who I don't know who don't know me or don't know what we do, low temperature cooking is one of the most important uh new, I want to say new, like the past 10 years, kind of ways to cook in uh in professional kitchens and increasingly in home kitchens, you can now go into Williams and Sonoma, Williams and Sonoma?
Williams and Oma. William Sonoma, and uh buy an immersion circulator, which is kind of the best piece of equipment to start doing this kind of work with uh and do it. Now, uh the problem is is that when you put something like chicken and you cook at low low temperature, by the way, you you're gonna want to cook uh chicken legs around 64 or 65 degrees Celsius, in my opinion. Uh right in that range. I wouldn't do 63, I wouldn't even really do 64 for lys and uh thighs and legs.
I would do uh I would do 65 Celsius. So I apologize uh for not knowing what that is in Fahrenheit, but uh you know, you use Google. Uh the um here's the main problem. You don't want to do a bone in uh chicken thigh or leg in a vacuum or a very high vacuum. And here's the reason why.
The inside of bones, uh chicken bones, even particularly, are hollow and they have in them a red uh kind of gunk on the inside. When you suck a vacuum on on these things, what happens is that red gunk is pulled out of the bones and goes along the meat near the bone, and then that meat becomes permanently red, okay? Uh, and nobody likes to eat permanently red uh chicken meat. They just don't they don't like it. They say it's not cooked, it's not cooked.
I've uh as a test, I have made it where I've cooked it for a long time at you know at these temperatures that I know are cooked. The texture is cooked, you have people close their eyes, they like it, uh they look at it and they just won't put it in their mouth. And this is you know, trained people, this is like my family and friends. So you you you really want to be sure not to suck too high a vacuum. The other problem is if you cook very slowly in one of these uh in these situations, you might still get uh this phenomenon, what we call persistent pinking.
If that happens to you, you're gonna have to cook it faster, which means jacking the temperature up a little bit, maybe to like 70, and then only cooking it for like 30, 35 minutes. I do mine at 65 uh 64 or 65 Celsius for about 45 minutes. If they're thin pieces, you don't want to have them all glumped together because you want the heat to penetrate rather quickly. You don't want them to take a long time to get up to temperature because then you're gonna have more problems with the red not going away and it's staying red. Uh uh so you know, if you have a problem with the with the red not going away, I recommend just boning them, getting them to go flat, and then you can cook them very uh fairly quickly and you won't have that problem.
Hope that answers your question, Red, and good luck with the uh with the chicken. Uh Nastasha just pointed out that the electric fly swatter, which I promised I wouldn't talk about anymore, is also a lizard killer, although that seems rather gruesome. So gruesome. Anyway, okay. Uh so we have a call, uh sorry, a um uh what's it called?
Question email, yeah, a question from Nathan. It says, uh so there's a lot of uh low temp and vacuum questions uh having to do with meat, and it's true. There's a lot of like in protein questions. And he has a vegetable question. When you roast beets, he can never seem to get them to be uniformly cooked.
One side is too crispy, the other side is too hard, presumably undercooked, and the whole thing dries out. He tries wrapping it in foil, olive oil, etc. etc. ovens at 350, ovens at 400, it's all a big it's all a big nightmare for Nathan, the beets. Well, uh, this is an excellent application of low temperature cooking.
What happens when you put uh and specifically sous vide, although you could probably do it in a Ziploc, um the what happens the whole advantage of putting something in a bag right is that nothing gets in and nothing gets out right so you're not leaching flavors out and you're also not evaporating much moisture off the surface of your of your product right and also it's it's different from putting it into water where then the water or whatever cooking medium you're using is actually leaching into the product right so um what it basically is like is it's like roasting even though you're doing it in water in a bag it's like roasting in the sense that you're not um you're not you know inside of a poaching liquid but uh on the other hand it doesn't get those those roasted flavors like it's not gonna get dehydrate on the outside you're not gonna get those brown flavors so what I would recommend for a beet is I would uh I would peel it unlike you do I think the reason you don't peel it when you put it into an oven is you don't want it to bleed out into your oven and you also don't want it to lose a lot of moisture and so the skin is preventing that kind of moisture loss when you're on the uh if you heard that pop in the background that was Nastasha kick killing a fly with the electric fly zapper um so when you have it in the bag right you're preventing that kind of moisture loss so I go ahead and peel it beforehand because inside the bag I think you're gonna have a tendency for the earthy notes on the skin to kind of get into the whole beet and I don't think you're gonna want that very much so I would peel it put it in the bag you could put any kind of fat uh in it you want even up to you know no fat at all but I would put a little fat in uh some sort of you know either solid or liquid neutral fat I wouldn't use olive oil it tends to flavor in the like the good quality olive oil that I like for finishing I don't really like so much when you cook in the bag and then you can just simmer it in a pot of in a pot of water. Now the the thing is is that unlike it's not like boiling a vegetable, the times are closer to roasting because there's not a lot of excess water inside the bag to break down the vegetable. That's the whole benefit because it's like roasting. Okay. So what you're gonna have to do is is you're gonna have to cook these vegetables simmering in the pot for as long as you would have to basically roast it, sometimes even longer.
Okay. And so uh you want to keep it in and keep uh testing it by pinching with your fingers and seeing where when it's done. Make sure the sides of the bag don't hit the um the side of your pot. If they do, um, you're gonna be in trouble. It's gonna probably it might have a possibility it's gonna melt the bag where it where it touches the edge of the pot if flame is licking over the side of the pot.
But it's a fantastic technique. Just remember it's gonna take a good long time to do, so be patient. The other good news is it does it's not gonna really overcook on the inside of the bag too much, so it's the timing is not so critical. Just let it go basically as long as you want, pull it out, and then if you want some of those caramelized roasted flavors, throw some oil in the bottom of a pan and throw it into like a 450 or 500 degree oven just to throw some color onto the outside of your uh beets, some roasted flavor, and you're good to go. It's actually an excellent application.
Uh carrots, similarly good. All these kind of uh root vegetables and things that can be roasted are great inside of a vacuum bag, and it really keeps a bright preserved flavor, not preserved in the preserved sense, but it preserves the bright, clean, pure vegetable flavors that uh that a lot of us love. So, thanks so much for that question. Because we definitely should not overlook vegetable cookery uh when you're doing low temperature. Okay, uh now Brian calls in uh and he said he just received the NOMA cookbook, and there's a recipe for um milk skin where you add milk protein and milk uh and cream in a pot and then heat it, uh, and then you have to take this the skins off, kind of like what happens in your coffee.
And these and he says the instructions say it's advisable to first remove the few skins that form as they will be fragile and subsequent squint skins will become more and more resilient. And uh Brian wants to know what's causing this, and uh, etc. etc. And can't he just leave the uh the the thing to form longer to form a thicker skin before he pulls it off? And can he do that instead of removing the first few?
No. Uh so this is actually a complicated question. Uh and it's one that I've been interested in actually in a long time, although not in the form of milk skins, in the form of Yuba. So I'm gonna talk about Yuba and milk skins and cream skins uh and uh and how they're made and kind of what goes on. So I'm gonna start with Yuba.
Yuba is basically uh you heat soy milk in a wide shallow pan and a skin forms on the top, and then you pull the skin off and you dry it a certain amount, and that's Yuba or bean ski uh bean curd skin. And this stuff is I think delicious. And you know, I make it at home, uh, I think it's in incredibly delicious. And what what it is is is that you need and the same thing happens with milk and cream if you add milk protein as well. But uh, the same exact phenomena is happening.
You have a large surface area, uh, you're heating it underneath. It the heat needs to be above 60 Celsius, and in practice, you want to get it up higher, up near like 80, 90 Celsius, just under the boil. You don't want it to boil because then you're gonna have problems with boil over and uh with gas bubbling it, and you're gonna hurt the surface of your skin because the the top of the the top of the of the milk or or soy milk needs to be relatively placid for a good skin to form. Um so you heat it, you're partially denaturing the proteins, uh, you know, the the milk, either the soy or the milk proteins, and they're kind of floating up to the surface where they get concentrated, they aggregate onto fat droplets that are on the surface, and then all of a sudden, as they start evaporating, as they lose moisture because it's heat and you have evaporative cooling coming off the top, they form a skin, and that skin bonds together, polymerizes, and forms a permanent film. In the case of soy milk, it forms a yuba, which is a uh bean curd uh skin.
And in the case of milk, it forms a milk skin. Now, most of the time this is a nuisance to us when we're, you know, in our cup of coffee or we're heating milk or something like that. And so you try to prevent it either by uh putting a f uh, you know, a foam or a froth on top, keeping the lid covered so that it can't so that moisture can't evaporate, or you know, putting uh some sort of film over the top. But uh there are a couple of old cases where this is actually done on purpose. So there's something called cabbage cream where you would take very cream-heavy milk and you would lift uh you would lift sheets of it off and then layer it with more cream.
It's like an old Elizabethan dessert. You can read about it in Harold McGee. There's very few kind of references to it online. Uh but Yuba is really the one that's used the most often. Now the problem is is that it's actually a complicated phenomenon.
It requires uh different protein concentrations and fat concentrations. So what happens is is the first couple of ones that solidify are very delicate. They're also higher in uh protein uh and they have a different composition of proteins. As you remove that, the actual chemical uh composition of the rest of the batch is altered somewhat. And so in Yuba, as in milk skin making, the first couple are are very fragile, and in Yuba, actually, those first couple are considered the highest grade.
They have the least flavor and they're the most delicate. As you go in and in, you've depleted some of the protein and fat, and so the yuba becomes, or I guess milk skin, although I haven't done as much with milk skin, becomes higher and higher in sugar, and they also become thicker and thicker, right? Because the sugars in milk. So from Yuba, you start with a relatively bland, tasteless, high protein with fat uh you know skin forming on top. And by the end, you have much thicker, not as strong, red and sweet Yuba, which I actually like a lot.
So like the as you take each successive skin off, because you're changing the the the actual makeup of the leftover milk, the yuba itself changes. So it's not enough to just sit and wait for the skin to go longer. You actually want to remove the first couple if that's what the chef wants. Maybe you could use them for something else. And then um and then you know go from there.
If you're interested in making uh milk skin, I guess read the Noma book, although I don't have it. Uh if you're interested in Yuba or any form of tofu, which I highly recommend you make at home. Once you start making tofu or go to a really high grade shop, if you make it yourself, you're not gonna want to go back to the crap that's in the supermarkets. Like real tofu, I think has a flavor. You can control it.
I love it. It's fantastic stuff. And when you make it, you just want to eat it, you know, by itself. You don't want to ruin it and you know, you don't you don't want to turn it into some sort of fake turkey or some sort of BS crap, you know, fake meat analog junk. You just want to eat it for what it is.
Tofu gets a bad name because it's misused and the stuff that we uh buy has been soaked in so much water that there's absolutely zero flavor of the actual uh you know, bean left. Uh and there's just kind of no subtlety to it. You know, what you can when you make your own, you can control the texture from almost like a cloud tofu that you can put in the soups. It hasn't been pressed at all all the way down to firm tofu. You get the okara leftover, which is the uh which is the pulp from the from the soy, which you can mix into you know, muffins or pancakes.
You you get the soy milk, which you can make yuba from if you want. I mean, it's just incredibly amazing, versatile product that uh is really fun to work with at home, but it's a mess. So if your spouse uh is you know, make them leave if they don't like messes. Uh alternatively, have them help you if they like to cook. Uh so the uh so it the what you need to buy is go out and buy a book called The Book of Tofu by a guy named William Shirtleaf out of uh out of California.
He has like the soy institute. He himself is kind of a nut, well, I shouldn't say it's for me, kind of a nut job. He believes he's gonna save uh God bless him, I hope he does, save the world through inexpensive uh vegetable and soy proteins. The he and his wife, uh, what's her name? I forget her name.
Anyway, she they they have this soy Institute, and it's uh it his books are amazing. Don't buy the small abridged ones, buy the big ones because they haven't been chopped up and the information is there. But the book of tofu is one of the all-time great reads on how to make tofu. Don't call him on the phone and ask him whether you can make tofu from edamame because he's like, Why would you waste edamame by making tofu out of it? Don't do it.
I did it. It was a mistake. I got a stern talking to by the man. But uh, I highly respect I highly respect his work. And you can then use what he says about tofu and make all sorts of other curds as well.
You can make peanut curds, although they're really like tofu out of peanuts, although it's and probably also peanut skins, the same way you make edamame skins. But uh, it's uh more difficult because the fat content is higher. So you might need to dope with uh up with protein or else use transglutaminase, aka meat glue, the chef's friends, which we've spoken about here uh, you know, on several occasions. You can look at the blog cooking issues, get more information on meat glue, but I'm sure you can make a peanut skin by adding little transglutaminase. So I hope this answers your milk skin questions, and we're gonna take another break and come back with Cooking Issues Radio.
Call your questions in to 718-497-2128, 718-497-2128. We're not here, groove like this. Oh, yeah, baby. Yeah. Yeah.
Back way of yeah, man. Ah thing. Look at you. Some of a guy groove like this. To know who know.
No. I need to grip. Need to grip the bit no bread. You know, I believe hey, Brad Dum. Bravo!
I'm getting ready to wave y'all leave. You know what? I feel so down. I need to get down and all the vomita gets down. I gotta get in the deep.
Welcome back to Cooking Issues Radio on the Heritage Radio Network brought to you today by the Barter House. Call your questions in to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. So I almost missed it, but uh Brian had a second uh part of his question. It's actually probably interesting for some of uh our listeners.
He's uh training in New Zealand, land of legal distilling, by the way. Thank goodness for New Zealand and its legal distillation laws. May we all have your laws someday. Um he said he's uh thinking of either going to Australia or uh the United States to work in restaurants afterwards, and he's interested in restaurants here in the in the states like Townhouse in Virginia, WD-50 in New York, or Moto or Linney in Chicago, and wants to know the best way to get into it. Now he's about to stage at a at a you know kind of a very modern you know modern cuisine restaurant called uh Attica in Melbourne and wants to know how to get to these other restaurants.
The short answer is that uh if you are willing to work for free in a stage, you can come work in almost any of these restaurants, if you set it up far enough in advance and they have space. The best thing to do if you're staging at you know a well-known restaurant like Attica is to because all you know, all these chefs basically know each other. Like everyone who's in this kind of business, they they know the people that are in their same circle, same group. And they all extend um they all extend professional courtesy to each other, whether it's making reservations or whether or not it's taking on cooks. So what I would do is I would bust your behind at this place.
Just you know, break your back at this place at Attica, right? And then go to the chef or the Sioux or whoever you're closest to and say, listen, I'm really interested in these restaurants, and and do you know anyone there? And that's the surest way to get into one of these restaurants. Much, much, much surer than uh just trying to cold call or do something like that. And that's really the way this kind of business is done.
So when you're in a cooking school, you have all the the cooking contacts from the cooking school, and then once you're in a restaurant, you have the the um the contacts of that chef, and it's all about you know, they're gonna put their name on the line because they believe in you because you've worked hard for them. And that's how the business works. Wouldn't you say so, Nastasha? Yes. You know, so you know, and I know when I send people to restaurants, that's how it is.
I say, this person is good, take them on, and they almost always say yes, or if they really have no space in the kitchen, they say, Well, can they wait until X, Y, and Z when I'm gonna have some space in the kitchen? But assuming you're willing to work for at least a small amount of time gratis, then uh, you know, you you get for free. Then um, you know, you can definitely get in. And if you've already had a paid job at one of these places, it's a lot easier for them to send cooks from place to place. That's just to me, I think that's just the way the business works.
Uh so I hope that's helpful and good luck and choose America. Okay. Uh so um uh um Ari Del Rosario uh writes in, he found us via uh Josh Azursky's write-up in time. Thanks. Uh thanks for coming.
Uh he wants to pester us on some tips for uh Asabuco. Uh I love Asibuco, it's one of the things that my mom uh used to make growing up. Asubuco is veal shank. Uh that's uh cooked until it's delicious and tender. Um but he doesn't really want to wait to braise it three hours, and he wants to know.
He said, Can you pressure cook instead and hope for the same results? You're actually uh not gonna get the same results in a pressure cooker as you're gonna get over a slow braise. I happen to think that they're delicious. I like pressure cooking, but it's gonna be a little bit different. The meat's probably gonna be uh the fibers are gonna be a little more distinct, but it'll still it'll still be delicious.
Yes, you can do asubuco in a pressure cooker. It's gonna take you um on average, if you use second ring, which is 15 pounds per square inch, I would say it's gonna take you on the order of 25 minutes. And so, what you're gonna want to do to adapt your recipe is uh the main problem with asebuco in a pressure cooker is going to be uh the tomato scorching and sticking on the bottom of the pan that you cook with tomatoes. So you're gonna want to maybe have to make the sauce a little bit thinner than you would normally. Make sure it's you know you want to sear off your asubuco, put it in, uh, and you're gonna want to um make sure that it's boiling and you're stirring and boiling before you close the pot, or you're gonna might have to get some scorching from the tomato in the bottom.
Uh so it's not gonna be the exact same result, but it's gonna be uh delicious. I believe I've made asubuco in the in the pressure cooker before. Yeah, I think so. The other thing you're gonna want to do is don't uh force vent it because that might dry out the surface and like blow apart the meat a little bit. So let the pressure come down on the pressure cooker naturally and then open it up.
And and he says uh that he made a variant of asubuco, but with Spanish chorizo, chickpeas, carrots, and potatoes, and he said everything went well except the shank was really tough. And uh and he said it didn't help that I was rushing. Exactly. You know, when you cook, when you braise a piece of meat traditionally, what happens is is that until it's finished brazing, it's tough, tough, tough because you instantly overcook the meat with the with the high temperatures. So now you're relying on the collagen breakdown to give it that kind of uh tenderness back and and to make it so like an under-braised piece of meat is gonna be dry and tough.
And so that's why it seems counterintuitive. But uh what happen, you know, what happens is the longer you cook it at that point uh until you break down the collagen, then um you know it's gonna get it's gonna get tender again as the as the collagen turns to gelatin. It doesn't help to cook it any longer than that. Once you start cooking it longer, it's just gonna turn mushy, and eventually, if you boil any liquid out of it, it's gonna go dry again. But pressure cooker is definitely the way to go.
Uh, and you know, please write in and tell us how it worked, but I'm sure it will work well. Pressure cooker has another advantage, by the way. It doesn't heat up your whole damn kitchen. Uh, and it's actually use it's fairly energy efficient, so it's actually uh a really good way to do it. And Asibuco is of course one of the great recipes of all time.
Uh okay. Val writes in and said uh Val's curious about our opinion on Nathan Miraval's soon to be released book, uh Modernist Cuisine. Is that what it's called? Modernist cuisine? I didn't know that was the actual name of that.
I guess so. I don't know. Uh is it worth uh the price? Uh also since you're interested in the best way to do things, what kind of knives do you use and why? And do you use oil or water stones to sharpen them?
Okay. These are two uh interesting questions. The first one that I'm gonna talk about is the Nathan Miravold book. And uh I guess the question of whether it's worth it uh depends on how much money you have. Uh, you know, I think uh, you know, if you have the money, I think it's definitely uh worth it.
I mean, I think it's you know it's gonna be it's a Herculean effort. It's um it's unlike any book that's uh ever been published in cooking, to my knowledge. Um it's uh you know what's interesting about it is that it's at this at one time it's got a lot of uh technical points, but it's also uh you know got a lot of personal points too. It's got a lot, you know, it's very, it's very personally written, it's got a lot of personal opinions. So you get a lot of the opinions of of Nathan and Chris, and uh and it's uh you know it's it's unlike any other book.
I mean it hey, it's good to be a billionaire, you know, like they they got to do what they wanted to do in this book and I think that um you know it's a hundred percent worth the worth the purchase price. Now if if you didn't make rent last week you know then uh you know that's a different story then you know go go and read it in the library but if you can afford to go to uh I in fact when uh I had a meeting with Nathan Miravold and I say wow you know it's kind of expensive he's like well look you know if a cook can afford to go to per se uh you know they can afford to buy the book and I was like you're right you know what I mean it's like you know you're gonna learn a lot in the book and it's uh so you know I think it's definitely worth the purchase price and if you knew the amount of work that they put into the book it's probably underpriced. I mean in terms of the amount of work that it took for them to do it it's probably underpriced. If you look at the images and what happened I there is I I there's never been a book made like it I don't think what do you think Nastasha you saw I think you're right the pictures are beautiful. Yeah and just the work that went into them you know I mean it's just uh you know for any of you who have ever had to actually make uh any images it's a huge hassle and uh you know they they had a rule when they were make doing the book that any time they bought a piece of equipment they'd buy two and cut one in half so that they could have pictures for the book.
Think about it. You know what I mean? So uh yes. So then the second part of this question is what kind of knives do we like and how do we sharpen them oil and water stones. This is an excellent question.
There is so much um what's the word crap out on the you know out on the web and so many kind of ill considered opinions on what the best sharpening technique and the best um best knives, and there's so much hype and there's so much hoo-ha um that it's hard for me to make any kind of actual uh pronouncements. I will say this. Um don't compare American grits. Uh you know, the grit is the size of the uh is how they rate abrasives, right? What the grit size is, right?
Like so smaller, uh you know, high higher numbers like 2,000, 3000, 4,000 mean finer grit. And if they're it's rated in microns, then smaller numbers mean finer and finer grit. But Japanese grits, right? Most most high-end chefs here in the US, we you know, they tend to like uh Japanese knives, Japanese style knives, Japanese sharpening stones, and those knives are fantastic. Um but um Japanese grits and American grits can't be uh they're not one to one.
So don't think that if you have like a 5,000 Japanese stone and then you have like a 2,000 or whatever, I don't know what the the American stone, that you can just relate relate them that way. Also, how sharp your knife is depends on uh what you're using it for. Okay. So, you know, a knife that you're gonna use for aggressive cutting, right, might actually be better not taken to a polished uh surface because it maintains what they call kind of micro serrations on the microscopic level, even though it doesn't look serrated at all. It's like little imperfections at the at the surface of the of the edge help to uh basically break through things like tomatoes that you would otherwise crush as the knife begins to dull, right?
Whereas the Japanese style of sharpening is to take it down to a mirror mirror edge, right? Also, whether like so in general, I tend to use, and most chefs don't, they they kind of poo-poo them, but I tend to use diamond stones, specifically these composite diamonds, flat diamond stones made by I think uh uh we'll we'll look it up on the blog, but like DMT or something like that, or DMZ, some of that, and they're flat uh with a diamond and I use the fine and the ultra fine. Uh, and I like them, and then chef, and I use them basically dry with with water with oil. Um I use tech, I tend to use water. Uh you know, chefs poo-poo them and then they use them and they're like, damn, my knives are sharp.
You know what I mean? Uh, if you're gonna sharpen a lot of knives at a time, an interesting system was built by the Edge Pro because a lot of the reason why your knife aren't sharp, it doesn't really matter how good your stone is or how good your knife is, your hand's not that good. You're not really sharpening the knife properly because you're not maintaining proper uh contact angles when you're sharpening, right? Or you haven't learned to feel the burr on the edge of the knife. Typically, what you're doing gonna do is sharpen one side of the knife until it rolls a burr over on the edge very slightly, and you'll feel for that with your finger by dragging along the knife for the burr, then you'll turn it over and you'll take that burr off, and then you'll progressively go softer and softer.
And then afterwards, I even leather strop it because I find that a leather strop is a is a nice way to kind of refine the edge. Um, but uh so the Edge Pro system uh is good if you're gonna sharpen a lot of knives. It's a it's a little hokey if you're gonna sharpen one because you've got to set up this big system. Uh I would recommend you learn how to freehand sharpen a knife just by eye, but it takes a takes a lot of practice. You know, what particular knife you buy depends on your particular cutting style.
If you're used to the German and French styles with kind of a thick bolster on them, you know, stay with them. They're not, they're they're not they're not bad. Well, most chefs I know ships uh have uh switched over to Japanese Western style, and Japanese Western style typically have a much much thinner blade that people have become uh accustomed to now. When you switch to them, if you've never used them before, you're gonna get a different set of blisters and calluses on your fingers, and it might hurt for the first couple of weeks that you use them because you're not used to choking up on such a knife with such a thin edge in the back. But most chefs that I know now use Japanese Western style blades.
What I don't like about a Japanese Western blade is they're typically sharpened more on one side than on the other. And I find it for me difficult to sharpen, although most chefs don't have that problem. I don't like it. Uh the uh typical Western style blade is sharpened um on both sides an equal amount. I either like a Western style knife or uh on the extreme other side, traditional Japanese uh knives, which are sharpened almost like a chisel, where it just has one bevel edge that's fairly easy to maintain, and then you take it off uh off the burr off the back by holding the knife almost flat against your sharpening stone.
I find traditional Japanese knives to be incredibly easy to sharpen. And I find you don't need to buy the most expensive ones to have the good time. Go to go to Corin, uh K-O-R-I-N.com, get their get their house brand of uh of you know original Japanese style uh knives, get like a Deba, get like uh a Yanagi, which is a slicer, and they're not gonna break the bank. They're like, you know, a hundred dollars a piece, and as long as you maintain them, you have to sharpen them almost every time you use them. Uh they're gonna be unbelievable performers for you.
And then if you nick the edge, because they're fragile, don't cut bones with them, please. You know what I mean? Like, but if you nick the edge, you know, you haven't lost a $500 knife. So if you're gonna want to go into Japanese knives, traditional Japanese knives, which I highly recommend, then I would get one of those. But you don't need to listen to all the mystical hoo-ha necessarily.
I don't think I'm gonna get a lot of nasty comments about this, about the way, you know, exactly using the right watering stone. If you get one of these new really good diamond stones, and go on, you know, the knife forms and check it out, see what people say about it. Don't take my word for it. Uh, you know, you'll see that they're pretty good performers, uh, you know, if you if you use them properly, and I sharpen my Japanese knives on them all the time. Uh so that that's what I would that's what I would recommend doing.
And one last story before we go. Uh there is a uh there's an interesting problem I was thinking about, uh a bunch of related problems about when going to a restaurant. You ever go to a restaurant and it's really loud, all of a sudden it gets really, really loud all of a sudden? Yeah. So there's this uh there's this phenomenon that was first brought up in 1959, originally called the cocktail party effect, but now called the cafe effect.
And and but there's actually another problem called the cocktail party problem, and then another thing called the Lombard effect, and they're all uh interrelated. And what it is is the cafe effect is that you can have a normal conversation with uh a group of people, and more people show up at the party, you can have a normal conversation, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then all of a sudden, one more person shows up and everyone starts shouting. Right? Okay, yeah.
Yeah, yeah. So basically it's like this kind of threshold effect where one more one more body shows up and bam, everyone starts shouting. And it has to do with a set of differential equations, basically, where uh, you know, all of a sudden that little bit, you now talk a little bit louder uh to be heard, the other group talks a little bit louder, you talk a little louder, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, until everyone starts shouting to a point where it becomes uncomfortable to shout anymore, and then everyone just moves closer together. So that's the cafe effect used to be called the cocktail party effect, first brought up by a guy named uh McLean in 1958 or 59 in the Journal of American Acoustics. Dude was clearly joking.
I went back and read the paper because he was like, these are just first-order approximations, and he was talking about apartments and parties and and bad guessing and stuff like that. So he was clearly having fun with it. Uh, but it got picked up in the in the literature in acoustics, uh, and then got folded into a separate problem called the cocktail party problem, which is interesting in physics and interesting to the CIA, because the CIA really wants to be able to pick signals out of the air and analyze them so that they can tell what you're doing, even if you're on a bunch of other problems and uh uh doing a bunch of other things. And so the cocktail party problem now, if you Wikipedia it what it refers to is your ability in a cocktail party to tune out uh everything else and listen to somebody's conversation, even though there's a lot of competing uh information in the air. And it relies uh very heavily on the fact that we have two ears, and so if someone has a hearing deficit in one ear, it's why they have such an impossible time understanding conversation in crowded rooms, and which is why you should be nice to them and look at them so that they can see your mouth and stuff like that.
So uh so that's the the cocktail party problem, and they're all related to something interesting called the Lombard effect. And the Lombard effect is the effect where uh you instinctively talk louder when people around you are louder. Where you just it it's it's it's instinctive, and in fact, it's the way people it's the way uh experts test to see if you're lying about your hearing deficit. If you start talking louder as as uh talking is ramped up around you, because it's a reflex, you can't help it. They're like, you're a liar, you're a faker.
Anyway, so uh the cafe effect, uh the cocktail party effect, and the Lombard effect. Three related interesting uh phenomena that you might notice at your next cocktail party or if the restaurant is too dang loud. This has been Cooking Issues and come back next Tuesday. Cooking issues on the Heritage Radio Network brought to you this week by the Barter House. Oh, you dead.
Timestamps may be off due to dynamic ad insertion.