The following episode of Cooking Issues has been sponsored by Acme Smoked Fish. Located in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, Acme has been a mainstay in New York's culinary landscape for over fifty-five years. Using old world recipes, ACME produces the finest smoked salmon, white fish, and sable that discerning palates demand. For more information on where to find Acme, Blue Hill Bay, or Ruby Bay products, please visit www.acme smokedfish.com. Dave, you're on.
Cooking Issues, Cooking Issues Radio. Dave Arnold coming to you live from Germany, where I'm at the Berlin Cocktail Conference. I have Nastasha sitting uh in the studio in Brooklyn. He's there in the study. Hi, Dave.
Hey, yeah, so uh this uh this radio show is being literally phoned in, I'm phoning it in from Berlin on my iPhone. So if I click or pop, yeah, you'll know you'll know why. And uh Nastasha, thanks so much for putting uh Phil Collins on as our intro music today. I uh appreciate that. Couldn't find your song.
Yes, I know everyone likes the Phil Collins every now and again, so that's that's uh perfect. Everyone has two ears and a heart, Dave. Exactly, exactly. All right, all right. So listen, so uh Nastasha, can you read the numbers since I don't have it in front of me and for some reason I cannot commit it to memory?
Yes. If you want to call in and ask questions to Dave, who's in Germany, the number is seven one eight four nine seven two one two eight. Seven one eight four nine seven two one two eight. I would really like it if someone from Germany called New York to ask me a question while I'm in Germany. We'll see if we can see if we can get that going.
Um and we'll be here uh live for the next uh forty-five minutes or so, and uh meanwhile I'm gonna take some email questions. So uh one of our uh favorite uh blog readers, Schinderhannes, wrote actually from Germany, but not from Berlin. Uh and he says um uh wait away, where's oh, he said why are the two most uh important beverages in Germany, beer and apple juice, beer for adults and apple juice for kids, use so rarely in cocktails, and do you have any good recipes for these ingredients? Schinderhannes is an excellent question. Um the problem with apple juice and cocktails is that apple juice is relatively diluted.
So most cocktails that are produced in bars, and therefore also most recipes that are written for them are are based on the idea that you're going to make a drink and then dilute it with uh you know, chill it and dilute it with ice. Now the the problem is is that if you're using um apple juice, by the time it's chilled uh and diluted, it's just much too watery. So you don't have you either you're not gonna have enough uh uh alcohol in it, and you're also not getting to have enough flavor of the of the apple juice. And so I think that's the reason why uh there aren't that many drinks using it. Now, of course, the solution to this is to um is to chill your uh drinks beforehand, right, or mix them cold and then chill them down so that when they're mixed together, you don't have to dilute it a lot with uh with ice.
A really good technique is to actually freeze the ice cubes in uh freeze the apple juice into ice cubes and then shape with the frozen uh apple juice, and this way, as it's chilling and diluting, you can get it really cold, the same as a standard cocktail, about minus seven Celsius. But uh as it's diluting, it's diluting with apple juice. Uh and that this technique works really well and something we do a lot. I like um I like uh apple juice and whiskey, I think it's really good. When we use apple juice, though, we're often making our own apple juice and we'll uh we'll juice it with uh some ascorbic acid as an antioxidant so that the apple juice stays stays c uh clear I mean sorry stays green and or or yellow if it's a yellow apple or red if there's a lot of red skin and then uh but it doesn't oxidize the important part and then often we'll clarify it uh and and mix it.
So we do a lot of work with that. We'll do we've done apple and tequila we've done apple and and bourbon. Most of the time we we we're only doing the apple juice in a spirit because we tend to use very high quality uh apples uh and we really want to show the flavors that that uh of the specific apple. Most apple juice once it's allowed to oxidize and clarify traditionally uh the taste uh differences are muted somewhat so that's one of the reasons we like to do it fresh and uh some of our favorite apples are uh Ashmead's kernel which is an old English variety uh Spitzenberg which is an old American variety um but you know you you know any local variety that you like assuming it has a you know a high enough acid balance is i a good acid sugar balance you can use and of course you can correct acid sugar with uh malak acid which is the app acid from apples or you can uh you know obviously you can add more more sugar to it. Uh with regards beers there is like a there are a whole bunch of cocktails based on beers they're just not seen as often uh uh these days like you know sh shandy's we do a lot of really old school hot beer cocktails where uh we'll use uh like a beer uh usually an ale, usually not a lager, usually an ale, and uh and like either a brandy uh or sometimes uh a whiskey and then we'll flame it using uh our red hot poker which can basically uh it can ignite the drink you don't really need to ignite it, but you need to get uh something hot, like a hot stone or or just very hot uh implement with it, like with a with a lot of thermal wallop to it to give it the kind of burned flavors uh that are really characteristic of those old style drinks.
Uh and I really like to do that. I don't have any good modern beer recipes uh off the top of my head for cold cocktails, but they've become extremely uh popular in certain bars over the past uh three or four years uh in the States and I I think you're gonna see a return to more beer-based cocktails in the future, especially in restaurants that have um uh they don't have a liquor license, right? So they can't serve liquor, but they can serve uh wine or beer. And so these places do a lot of interesting work with wine-based cocktails and uh beer-based cocktails. But unfortunately I don't have any uh good recipes right off the bat.
Uh what do you think, Styles? Do you think that's good the good answer or not? Yeah, I think that's a good answer. Have you been drinking a lot of beer out there? Uh I've had some beer.
So there's a characteristic beer from Berlin called uh Berlin Weiss uh that is uh they sweeten it with the one I had with uh Woodruff uh syrup so it's green. It's just like big goblet of green beer and it's a little sweet so I couldn't drink a lot of them but whenever I go somewhere I like to try the characteristic uh beverage of the area but the person I ordered from it told me that it was it was mainly a lady's drink. But I did enjoy it. I did enjoy it. So it was and I have been drinking drinking quite a bit of beer.
We have a collar. Um oh we have a caller? Yes. Hello caller you're on the air. Hi there.
I'm Colin Gorg. I'm living down in Washington DC. And uh recently I've been trying to make I've been making sweet grass vodka for quite a while. I've got a sweetgrass patch. I've just been usually just soaking it for a couple days.
But when I saw the uh method you use with the EC panister, I tried doing some with uh you know, pressure pressurizing with some nitrous oxide and trying to sort of blast some of the fresh grassy flavor out. But something kind of curious happened. Uh when I did it, I used you know same concentrations I usually do. Uh and let it pressurize it with two charges, uh let it sit for a couple minutes, about between two and three minutes, let the gas out, and it didn't look too heavily colored. It was like very lightly so I let it sit overnight in the fridge, like we used to do, and you know, it kind of looked the emerald thing that it usually has, but it's now been like maybe a week later, and whereas the regular stuff will be you know still this kind of emerald color.
This stuff has turned very tawny, very almost like uh watered down coffee or tea color. And what's the flavor again? I couldn't hear the very first part. What was that? What's it saying?
What was the flavor again? I couldn't hear. Uh sweetgrass. Oh, sweetgrass, okay. Um, all that.
I mean I would bet, right? Like my guess just off the beginning, and and I don't know whether that the the main question is the main question about the color? Yeah, but the color also the flavor profile is a little different. There's like usually it's kind of very vanilla-y and grassy. There's still the kind of like grassy vanilla thing, but there's also a more I don't know, almost like brandied cherry thing that's not usually there.
Uh so I was just wondering if you know, it's kind of the chlorophyll is getting blasted apart and that's what caused it to change color, or if you got any, you know, potential ideas about what might be going on. Yeah, I mean, I would almost guarantee that you're breaking some cells when you're doing it and thereby releasing some enzymes and the enzymes are getting to work uh busy oxidizing and creating some of those brown flavors. I mean that would be my guess. Now I think that you know uh it's it's definitely tr so like if for instance when I'm doing an herb that I know it has a tendency to go brown, when I do it, um I'm trying to be as careful as I can and use not br uh herbs that aren't bruised and also to not um and to not shake it real hard. I just swirl it around when I use those because I want to minimize breakage.
Uh but also uh you know, we've had some luck, but not great luck, uh doping it with a little bit of an antioxidant. The problem is it's also then gonna add acid, so it's gonna change the flavor, like ascorbic acid. You could use sodium uh metabisulfite instead as an antioxidant, but I've haven't tried it, so I can't talk about its efficacy. Now, the difference in flavor between the two, I think you have two different things going on. Uh and I I again I can't really judge like which one is uh is working.
And by the way, for people who don't know what we're talking about, go on to cookingissues dot com and look up uh I guess infusion uh and I ISI or EC, and you can see it's this technique where we do very rapid infusions of flavor in uh in whipped cream makers, and uh, you know, for me it's really it's really a good technique because it allows us to do something um that we would normally use a vacuum machine to do, which is very expensive, and you could do it, you know, fairly easily. And you can do it at home, you could do it in a bar, it's it's friendly. Um, but uh the flavor t the flavor profiles are different than they are with the traditional infusion that takes a long time. And so I think um it not necessarily better or worse, just different. So it's m the I think it's true that you're gonna extract different flavors using this technique uh than you would um you using a traditional uh longer technique, right?
But I think the longer the product stays in there, the less the difference is gonna be. But I also think you're probably getting some flavor change based on the oxidation. Don't you think so? I think that the actual oxidation is going to change the flavors. What do you think?
Yeah. Yeah, I think so. But it this is almost, you know, in uh in a pleasant way. So it's a little bit I was just curious if uh yeah. No, I guess it could be something enzymatic too, kind of breaking breaking things down a little different.
But uh Right. Well as soon as something oxidizes, right? I mean that's the thing I think people don't people so when you add something like a like an antioxidant, like ascorbic acid, for instance, too, and we're talking a little bit about this in the in the last uh question. When you add something like this, uh, you know, yes, you're preventing oxidation, uh which is a visual cue that something's going on, but it also radically changes the taste. You know what I mean?
I mean that's why apple juice, for instance, doesn't brown apple juice doesn't taste like fresh apples, is because it's gone through this oxidation procedure. It's not just that it's been heated, although that also changes it. And it's not just it's been clarified, but the actual oxidation where it goes brown is is changing the the characteristic flavor of a fresh apple into the characteristic flavor of the of the apple juice. So I think you might have some of that going on. And I think you also might have uh just perhaps a different extraction of things from it in general, you know?
Yeah. So are there some other uh instances where you notice that oxidation has maybe actually like improved flavor? Because uh or is it generally a negative trend that you've uh uh I mean I think it depends. People really like um uh apple juice. Do you know what I mean?
Yeah. And so oxidized apple juice, I mean, it's not what I'm shooting for, so I tend to go uh try to make it taste as fresh as possible. But again, oxidation there is not uh bad, it's just it's just different. We normally associate it as being negative because we're used to uh we're used to it being a negative characteristic, and for instance, in things like pesto, and I think most herb oxidation, like like basal oxidation and cilantro oxidation has a very characteristic flavors, and we're we're we we kind of shun those flavors, and so it takes on a bad name, but there's nothing inherently bad about oxidation. I think I might have to story w once on the on the cooking issues before, but I'll say it again real quick.
There is uh, you know, I pretty sure I said it, but they you know, Reese's peanut butter cups, which I won't use their name, but it's Reese's peanut butter cups. They uh they're characteristically oxidized, the fat's oxidized a little bit in the peanut butter, and that's the characteristic taste of the Reese's peanut butter cup. And if you actually put oxygen scavengers in the packaging so that it doesn't oxidize a little bit, nobody thinks it tastes like a Reese's peanut butter cup anymore, and they don't want to buy it. So it's um you know, yeah, so oxidation it it you know it's it's all in the eye of the of the eater or in the mouth of the eater, I guess. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. Anyway, I hope that answered your question. Thanks for calling in. And uh you just post something to the blog if you have more results with the sweetgrass, because I'm interested. We haven't used any uh sweetgrass infusion.
So uh so yeah, yeah, I'll call it. Um uh once we have some more systematic stuff, I'll put it together and show you guys. But thanks for your help. Very good. Thank you.
Uh all right. We should take a break. We have what? We should take a break. All right, so we're going to our first break, and we're gonna come back live from our our two continent cooking issues from New York and from Berlin.
Search no little runs starting. Asking all kinds of questions. No one is like all this time. I still remember you said I listened. How could I ever find this?
But I just cooked. Dave, you're on. Hey, welcome back to Cooking Issues. Coming to you live on the Heritage Radio Network every Tuesday, even when I'm in Germany. Uh so we're coming to you live as like I said, Stasi's on the studio in Brooklyn, uh at Roberta's Pizza, and uh I am in the Berlin Cocktail Conference in Berlin.
So uh Duncan from Sacramento writes in. Oh, I by the way, call in your questions. We're still here for about another half hour or so. Nastasha, give him the number. All right, Duncan writes in from Sacramento and says he's been trying to make a stable foam from beer.
So he's had a couple beer questions, if I like to see all these questions are working together today. Uh, I think it could be interesting to do a beer mousse or deconstruct a black and tan. However, I've not been able to get a dense and stable foam. Pegan hasn't worked, and I'm not sure gelatin would set up well in the presence of alcohol. Now, Duncan, if you're looking to do a traditional mousse uh style texture with gelatin, I guarantee you, gelatin will set uh the beer fine.
First of all, beer's not that high in alcohol. It's so it will affect it a little bit. You might have to use a little more jelly than you would normally use, but it's definitely gonna work. I've done gillets of champagne many times with gelatin and and and it works fine. If you want to make uh not a mousse, but just something that's dense and foamy, uh, get a really good result.
Uh I will steer you to the same technique as Sam Mason, uh formerly of uh Atlas WD50 and Taylor restaurant, uh, currently has a bar, his name for some reason because in Germany it's escaped me. He uses a product called methylcel uh F50, which is a methyl cellulose product that is uh basically can whip anything into uh a mousse. Uh it's not a mousse, really a foam, but like dense, you know, not quite as dense as shaving cream, but much denser than your normal foams that you make, uh like an egg white. It's like an egg white meringue. And in fact, we use it to dehydrate uh foams into meringues.
Uh and I think we have a recipe somewhere on the blog, don't we, Stasi for that? Or F50 and the hydrocholor problem? Yeah. Uh and so, and so he famously made a Guinness foam using uh methylcel F50, uh, and it makes a nice dense, stable, um, like a little bit thicker than the head on a Guinness, but like of that kind of nature. And so that's a really good technique.
Another one that you can use uh if you don't like uh methylcel, uh you can buy methylcel, I think at a retail at Le Sanctuaire's website and also Terra Spices website. And um some people have a little bit of a gripe with methylcel because uh it's one of the only things we use that's not you know, quote, all natural. It's not a chemical that is natural, it's modified cellulose pro uh product. So then uh people have a problem with that. Sometimes we'll use uh something called VersaWhip, which is basically uh they have a soy-based VersaWhip, which is soy protein uh as a whipping agent, and they have uh uh casein, milk-based protein versa whip.
That you can also get at I think at both of those suppliers and those can whip things into a denser foam I find versa whoop to be difficult to use I think methyl cell F50 and remember F50 don't get a different methyl cell F like Frank 50 uh that one I think is really easy to use it whips up like an egg white uh you might have to add a little bit of a thickener uh like I don't know Zansangum or Maltodexin or something to the to the beer to get it to warm up nicely but uh should work. Um we have a collar. So oh we have a collar? Yes. Uh all right call you on the air.
Hello my name is Derek. I call I wrote in a couple weeks ago about a uh question about um velveting meat. Oh yeah yeah. Anyway thanks a lot for the info I thought was great. Um I had another question I wanted to ask about today which is you mentioned a uh a week or two ago something I've heard before about um cooking sous vide that as long as you sear it you're basically safe because the inside of the meat is basically sterile.
But I had to give this a second thought last week when I uh got a piece of monk fish and found some worms crawling out of it. I wanted to ask about um dealing with pterasites and if you had some uh because those obviously you know aren't only on the surface but I know they're easier to kill than a lot of bacteria but I wonder if we could address the uses of those and how you might go about using doing it. Alright that's an interesting question. You picked monk fish which obviously is full of parasites also codfish full of parasites uh worms I mean uh luckily I don't know about muk mufffish but uh the ones in in codfish aren't going to infect you but they're incredibly disgusting. You know what I mean?
Um and the um you know and in general, but the the the same thing holds true for traditional cooking and sous be there. So and so our discussion is basically when you're when you're cooking something sous vide often we don't cook things um enough to pasteurize them, enough to kill all the bacteria that's present, right? And the reason we don't is often if you cook something that long the texture can be uh ruined. Right. So that's true on uh certain beef muscle cuts like uh uh tenderloin like filet I think if you cook it long enough to pasteurize it or temperatures where you're gonna pasteurize it that you can you can damage the uh the texture but it's definitely true on fish.
You really it's very hard to cook most fish so that they're pasteurized because uh you don't ever really want to get them in general up to the temperatures they could pasteurize them and even when you do you don't want to hold them there that long exceptions like striped bass can take those kind of temperatures but uh so uh so you don't tend to pasteurize them. Now on something like contains a parasite like codfish or a monk the the fact of the matter is that when you're doing a traditional cook you're also probably not getting the internals up high enough to to be any different than you would in Sous vide because uh but you are overheating you are really searing the outside and killing it. So I think my point with safety in Sous vide is that uh I don't think it's any less safe than the traditional method. Does that make sense at all or no? No that makes perfect sense.
Um you know what it does I don't know I know that uh a lot of these worms and things can be killed just by freezing or at much lower temperatures than a lot of bacteria and such so I assume that it only makes it safe so unless I'm making sushi out of it it's probably okay. Does that sound about right? Yeah if you buy a sushi grade first first of all like there's different w there's obviously there's parasites in fish that will infect you and those are the ones that they get rid of by uh freezing it. So anytime you're gonna buy a sushi grade fish, it's been frozen to kill off those parasites, right? So once you're dealing with a sushi grade product, you're you're good to go.
Um with regards to like the worms on a big piece of codfish, let's say my I have to go research because I have research. My recollection is that those are merely gross and not harmful. But um I could I'm not gonna swear on I'm not gonna tell people that you know on the radio because I haven't looked into it. But um but I also think that they're pr like you said, I think they're probably fairly easy to kill. And that if you're you know but the I that's why like I'd be a little worried about doing super low temperature work on a fish that's gonna have a lot of parasites um because then you know you'd you know you might get one of those suckers wriggling out of the plate and that would be that would you know customers running out like free meals you know it'd be it would be a nightmare you know a huge nightmare.
Um and we've all seen like worms coming out of cod or out of monk fish. I mean they're just there. You know what I mean? And so like for instance the the famous low temperature cod recipe, extreme low temperature cod recipe, uh is uh by uh one roca uh from the uh the Sous vide book that came out a number of years ago in Spanish which is you know uh you know one of the first books on SunD a really good book. Uh Stas, you still there I heard a click.
Yeah and think the other guy yeah yeah it's uh it's uh sorry we have to do this up in Germany. But that that recipe is uh famous but um it was mistranslated as cod. So people basically said that they they were heating codes extremely low temperature like 100 Fahrenheit. Uh and in fact it was salt cod where all of the uh that was reconstituted sa salt cod bacalau and so you know all the worms are obviously killed. But anyway.
What do you think Saz is that good answer? I think that's a good answer, Dave. Too bad we lost the guy now. Hopefully that helps. I know it's yeah hopefully that helps so uh Duncan had a a second question, which is he's been trying to learn with cast iron, but he's been having trouble with food sticking intermittently.
And he says, as far as he can tell the pan is seasoned, but sometimes omelets uh will stick to it and sometimes they won't. Well, I think this. I think I can't see your pan, obviously, because I'm in Berlin, but the and you're in Sacramento. But um can look seasoned, but they're not really seasoned as well as if they had been uh seasoned for years and years of use. So the the initial seasoning isn't really enough to make something kind of bulletproof nonstick.
First of all, nothing's bulletproof nonstick. But I think what's probably happening is you probably have a couple of high spots in the pan that can cause adhesion, and then once it adheres, it it adheres pretty well to that point. And so maybe you didn't get a coating of oil uh over one particular section or it dried out, or somehow you got adhesion to the pan, and that the more you use it, the less and less it's gonna stick. Uh and you know, espe especially these newer cast iron, they're they're rougher and surface. I tend to find that you know, until you build up a really good season on them, they're not really uh, you know, even though some people theoretically think that the roughness is gonna help you in nonstick uh phenomena, I don't I don't happen to be one of those people who who believes it.
I mean, I think there's been a lot of discussion on that on the blog. If you look at the blog on the this, I think it's called what's it called, Sazie? Like heavy metal the science of cast iron or something like this. Yeah. Uh I haven't researched it uh recently, but you know, my my thoughts fresh from the research are are in that post if uh if anyone wants to go back and look at it.
Um Chris Anderson writes in and uh he says he enjoys the show, which we appreciate, right, Sazi. Uh and he says, what is the correct ratio in making a simple syrup? Every recipe I find seems to have a different proportion of sugar to water. Uh, does the dilution depend on the application? Uh and then and then he goes, he adds a question about the shelf life of the syrup, uh, should it be stored in the fridge, etc., etc.
Will that make the sugar crystallize? And he's noticed that it when he infuses things into it, like lavender or lemongrass, it tends to last uh not very long before it starts to mold on the top uh and that sugar seems to last longer. Can you extend the shelf life, etc., etc.? These are all interesting questions. First of all, let me start by saying that there is no correct there's no correct uh simple syrup recipe.
Like there's all different ratios that you can use, and uh what's but but the uh particular recipe isn't going to taste the same as what the writer intended unless you use the same proportions that they asked for. So uh I tend it uh we at the school tend to use what's called a two-to-one simple syrup, and and everyone makes a different bar in a bar uh uh place they tend to make their syrup based on volume because they don't have scales, they have cup measures. So they'll bake they'll make simple syrup based on volume. Now, luckily, standard American granulated sugar weighs about as close to the same as water on a volume basis, just lucky. So they they you know, uh a weight simple syrup and a uh and a volume simple syrup are about the same when made with US granulated sugar.
Now uh in a bar they tend to make one-to-one simple syrup because they're not heating it even. They're using super actually, they're using super fine syrup, which is gonna make it sweeter because it's denser. So erase what I just said. But they're using super fine sugar, which which uh which dissolves very quickly, and they're stirring it because they don't necessarily have a heat source right there, and they want to be able to make their simple syrup without heat. So they tend to make a one-to-one simple syrup uh and they tend to do it by volume, and they tend to with super fine sugar.
So, like that should be like that's if a bar recipe just says simple syrup one-to-one, that's probably what they mean. Now, uh another reason that bartenders tend to use uh a lighter simple syrup like that is because it pours a lot faster and you leave a lot less syrup in the bottom of your jigger. The downside of it is that uh that simple syrup also adds a lot more water for an equivalent amount of sweetness, so it can throw off the dilution in recipes uh in certain recipes. I tend to prefer to add sugar in the form of sugar and make a denser syrup simple syrup. So when usually unless I say otherwise, my simple syrup is two to one, two parts sugar to one part water by weight, and then heat it until it dissolves and then allowed to cool down.
Uh and when I need it in a hurry, I do a four-part, I do four parts uh sugar to one part water, heat it until it dissolves, and then I throw ice cubes to chill it down quickly. And that's how I make it. Now, the more sugar you put in a simple syrup, uh, the uh the more sugar you put in simple syrup, the less chance you're gonna get of mold developing. A one-to-one simple syrup is definitely gonna mold over time. If you store it in the fridge, it's not gonna mold over time.
Uh I don't think I've never really had them go moldy in the fridge. Um, but um, yeah, then you have to devote storage space to it in in the fridge. A two-to-one simple syrup probably won't mold as much. It'll still mold if it's outside, and you keep it in the in the fridge as well. Now you might get some crystallization in your two to one, but you're not gonna get that much crystallization in your two to one.
I wouldn't worry about it so much. Um, when you're infusing a syrup, the question uh whether or not you know what kind of shelf life you're gonna get out of it, a lot depends on, and by the way, if you have to leave your simple syrup out, uh, because you know, whatever, you don't have free space or whatever, if you're gonna keep it for a long period of time, if you you know, once a week just you know bring it up almost to the boil and let it drop down again, you're going to you're going to kill the mold in it and you get to extend the shelf life again. Because it's not going to get unsafe on you. Now, when you're doing an infusion of something, uh, you know, like an herb or whatnot, you're probably getting more uh water and it also depends if you're gonna boil the the thing that you're infusing with it with the sugar, right? Then uh, you know, you might be killing some stuff into it, but you're probably introducing some some spores and whatnot, some mold into it, and um you're probably also giving it more of a substrate to act on.
So that might be one of the reasons that you're getting more spoilage. I haven't um researched any specific, you know, mold inhibitors, although that's an interesting question. Maybe we should look into it, Stasi. But uh, I think you're gonna definitely increase the life of those things by putting them in the fridge. And I don't think that any crystallization, uh definitely not on a one-to-one and even on a two to one.
I've had two to one in my fridge for months, and you know, you'll get a couple of crystals around the bottom of it, but not a huge, huge deal. Um, so in terms of consistency, I I I don't think there's a best or a worst. There's what fits your cooking style best. We have both one to one and two to one around. It's all about being consistent from uh time to time.
Um they're telling me. Oh. All right, so we're taking a break, coming back with the last segment of cooking issues, you still have time to call in the house. Okay, Dave, you're on. All right, welcome back to Cooking Issues.
Uh doing it to you in two time minutes. Go over in Berlin and we're in New York. Uh so some time to call in. Seven one eight four nine seven two one two eight. Seven one eight four nine seven two one two eight.
So uh Jay wrote us and asked us a question about uh protein in flowers, and uh and he uh he or she says Jay referenced uh McGee, Harold McGee. And so rather than answer this question, I'm just telling you, Jay, I'm gonna wait because Harold McGee is actually gonna come and teach a class in less than two weeks. Uh what are the dates again, Sasha? October twenty first and twenty-second. That's a Thursday and Friday.
Right. So Harold McGee is actually coming to the French culinary all day, all day. Two-day class. He's coming to teach the Harold McGee class. We'll probably put something up on the blog, uh, in advance of it.
Uh, but anyway, I'm gonna be spending some quality time with him, and you can too if you want. There are still spots. Uh go to the uh FCI website, French Culinary.com and look for the Harold McGee Lecture Series. But uh I'm gonna spend some quality time with him, and he is really up on uh these kinds of things and has done a lot of research. So Nastasha, I'm gonna put the the the protein question, uh flour protein question down as a whole because I want to give Jay a better answer uh when we're hanging with McGee.
Um now uh we have a question. Uh let me see if I can find it. Uh and the thing is, uh when I cook for my this is uh Teddy, Teddy DeVico writes in and says, When I cook for my family, my dad to not eat salt or any food that contains salt, so I have to cook salt uh cook well without salt for him. I still cook for the rest of my family with salt. He did not believe that salt can make food drastically better, but I tell him it does.
Why does salt make food taste better? Uh and is there any way to make food taste good without salt? Uh uh and by the way, Teddy does not think it is possible. Uh so uh uh you're right, it's not possible. Uh it's it turns out that uh salt, and I don't know whether your dad uh dislikes salt or whether or not he ha is one of the you know few people that is actually sensitive to salt from a uh blood pressure uh situation, but I mean salt, sodium chloride is uh is uh 100% necessary to uh your survival as a human being.
Okay. So you know, your neurons don't work without sodium. Like, you know, we we don't work. There is no life uh for us without sodium, and we don't make it ourselves. So we a we have to take it in.
In fact, mammals uh and other things, even humans, although there's some controversy about how it works because uh no, there's some controversy. But we have what's called salt appetite. So other than thirst where you're like I'm thirsty, I need liquid, the only other thing that works that way is salt where there's like you have a salt uh appetite at least mammals do whether or not humans have the same kind of salt uh salt thing that that uh primates do is you know up for question so salt is definitely something you need but you don't necessarily need to sprinkle salt on things because food that you eat naturally contains uh more or less salt depending on on what it is naturally in the product meats have a certain amount of salt in them uh because they come from animals and animals contain sodium um but you know natural mineral waters contain sometimes a good bit of salt in them depending on which one you choose now there's plants that grow like uh for instance uh sam fear or sea beans grows on the on the seashore and it has so much salt in it that I don't I don't even need to add salt to my salads when I make it with that and I like salt a lot. So you know definitely um you know you're always consuming salt. Uh it's just a question of whether or not you add salt.
So then the question is well um you know do you do you need to add salt to food? And for me, yes, you know you too. So for instance the classic food that's that sucks without salt is bread, right? And so you know everyone in the world loves Tuscan cuisine myself included. I love it.
Except for the bread is horrible. Right Stasi come on the bread's hard no we've got wine we've had this discussion I don't mind it I like to say it's horrible. Well here's a Stasi thinks that you can sprinkle salt on Tuscan bread and all of a sudden make it real bread. Yes. I completely disagree because I have baked breads where you accidentally forget to put the salt in how many out there is this happen to you forget to put the salt in and then you pray that you can make it better by adding salt.
You c here's why you can't. Because first of all the salt's not throughout the dough. And second of all the salt actually affects the texture because it affects the way the gluten works. And so you'll notice that the crust on a on a saltless bread, the reason Tuscan bread looks like crap on the outside, it's that sallow looking crust, is because they don't have salt. And the reason the texture is not as good is because they don't have salt.
And the reason it doesn't taste good is because can you guess why Nastasha? It doesn't have salt. Right, because it doesn't have salt. Uh and you can't fix those problems just by sprinkling salt uh on on the on the outside. That's like rolling a turd in sequins.
You know what I mean? It just doesn't work. Um now uh it you know so another place where salt is you know uh often useful not just from a taste standpoint is with meats because salt actually increases the uh water binding capacity of meat. So the uh you know when you brine something you're actually ensuring that it's gonna be juicier by uh applying some salt to it uh beforehand. So it's actually performing a functional characteristic there.
Now the vast majority of the of the you know huge sodium intake by the way like our grand great grandparents' generation ate a boatload more salt than we do because they had to eat everything pr preserved or had to eat more preserved things than we do. And in fact they were more heavily salted preserved meats were more heavily salted in the old days than they are now because now uh we have uh refrigeration. I just read a uh scholarly paper, I forget what it is so I can't reference it, but they said that nothing dr more drastically reduced the salt intake of the population uh in general than the than the refrigerator because now all of a sudden we didn't need to salt anymore. So this a modern idea that we consume so much more salt now because of processed foods in quotes that than we used to is absurd because salt used to be like everywhere everything was salted down to preserve it uh you know prior to the advent of uh refrigeration. So uh so we love salt because we need it.
It also makes things taste d delicious you know so salt affects uh first of all you don't need to salt a lot in other words you don't need to make something salty to have the salt uh have a benef beneficial effect like for instance a little bit of salt in a drink even if you can't taste the salt it's gonna round out uh the flavors it changes your perception of aroma so when you add uh salt to a broth it's actually changing the aroma of the broth because it alters uh the way the volatiles are basically like the the amount of them they're captured allows things to release the release come off and you actually get a stronger impact of volatiles and the aroma uh you know it tends to be synergistic so it makes other things taste better uh without even necessarily having the perception of salt and they try to get around that by adding uh things like MSG which can also increase the palatability of something without adding a lot more salt although uh gram per gram MSC adds uh about one third the sodium that uh salt does because we usually get mono monosodium glutamate it doesn't add as much salt per gram as uh sorry as much sodium per gram as salt does and it's the sodium people are worried about by the way most of the flavor comes from the sodium the chloride is kind of usually along for the ride right um so uh but the the other thing about MST even though it does have sodium in it you typically would use a lot less MSG than you would use salt because it's more potent. Um so anyway I mean it's a long way I don't know whether I've still I totally answer this question I mean I've kind of like it all depends on yeah I mean what what's what's wrong with his dad right? Like if it's for health reasons or if he just doesn't like salt. But I mean yeah I mean there's got to be some people that don't like salt. There's only like one or two groups of people in the world that are known to not add any salt.
I always forget what they are. It's probably like it's probably like some like s like Inuit culture or something like that. There's but again, they're eating like you know, whale meat out of the out of the ocean. I can't I don't even remember whether it's in you what I just made that up. But there's very few cultures in the world that don't use salt, and it's because this stuff tastes good.
You know what I mean? Um and uh maybe I'll do some more research on it and talk about it at at a a later point. And he says on another note, what do I think of uh Grant Agates' aviary bar? Grant Agates, uh as most of the readers will know, is the chef at uh Alinea, which is a uh a very, very fine restaurant. I've eaten there twice, had an extraordinary meals when I was there.
I have not been to the bar. Is it open yet for us? I have no idea. No. I do not know if it's open.
I hear they've had some YouTube videos up, so maybe maybe they are. But um I'm sure whatever Grant does is going to be good, but I just haven't uh tried it yet. Now, uh yeah, one more question from who's this one? Steve. Uh by the way, Steve uh says, PS, thanks for talking about the issues of tall cooks.
Uh we're trying to get uh Mark Ladner, right? He won't he won't talk often. Well maybe we'll I'll just get his we'll why don't you get his comments separately and we'll just say what he said about that. That's good. Yeah.
So yeah, so we can we can uh we can do that. Uh but he's basically uh he's uh he's a physicist and he's interested in ice, and he was just talking about something really cool, which is he makes spherical lenses out of ice so that you can start fires outside. That's pretty cool, right? Yeah. Yeah.
So basically, you know, he says that you know, you could basically with your hands just take a block of ice and smooth it out, uh, you know, you know, heating it to make a a decent enough sphere to light a fire uh using it, which is I I think that's pretty cool. I'd like to try that. Um but so you're wondering about the the problems of making clear ice, because you need clear ice to make these these lenses. Uh and he um you know, he's talking about the difficulties in it, and uh have we talked about clear ice on the radio at all, Sazy, or not? I feel like we did, or maybe you touched on it a little bit, but not it not in depth.
Yeah, so basically, uh back in the day, uh prior to you know uh mechanical refrigeration, most ice that uh was used in uh in restaurants, bars, or in ice houses was harvested ice that was harvested from uh lakes and rivers in the wintertime, was sawn out in big blocks and then kept in huge insulated ice houses for use throughout the year. Now the benefit of this kind of ice is uh that it's formed in thin layers, as you know, Steve mentions. I mean he knows much better than I do because he's a uh physicist, but it forms in thin layers, and um what happens when it's forming in thin layers is that it uh the impurities in it, gas and any other actual dissolved impurities, don't get integrated into the uh crystal structure the crystal matrix of the ice. So when you're freezing in your in your in your freezer, here's what happens. You have an ice cube tray, it starts to freeze on the bottom, the impurities are getting concentrated in the center, as as are the dissolved gases, and then at a certain point the top of your ice cube freezes over, and then the inside, first of all, expands as it freezes, because ice expands as it freezes, and all the impurities are there and the gas is there, and you have a big like messy, you know, cloudy you know, ball in the middle of your ice cube.
You know what I'm talking about, right, Study? Right, right, yes. Yeah, right. So so that's what's happening. So lakes in lakes that doesn't happen because you're depositing thin layers that are constantly being washed and the layers are are built up and they're totally clear.
And as Steve points out, that's the same way icicles are formed, which is why icicles are also clear. So I guess you can maybe make a a good good lens out of that. The problem with doing it at home is uh is that it's just not easy. Even just degassing your ice cube phase in a vacuum machine isn't going to necessarily it's not gonna give you clear ice because the top will freeze over and as the inside expands and breaks the crystal structure and reforms, you'll get uh parts that are that are cloudy. Uh also um it's just difficult or or using distilled water won't solve the problem.
The only way to really solve it i is the way that the climb belt climb bell is m uh it's the ice uh manufacturers that make the machines for ice carvers, right? So ice ice carvers require clear ice. Uh and so uh bartenders have started using this when they call it climb bell ice, which is very clear, and it basically works like a lake upside down. They make sure that the freezing happens from the bottom of the cube up and they keep the water circulating on the top so that the top can't freeze over. And as it's built up slowly over the course of the day or so, because it takes uh forget, like between twenty-four and forty-eight hours to freeze one of these two hundred pound blocks in the climb belt, like as it's freezing slowly up, none of the impurities are incorporated and they're concentrated in the water that's on top.
And at the end they just drain that uh the the impure crappy water off the top and they're left with a block of perfectly pure crystal ice. And so that's how it's made. Now it's difficult to do at home, um, you know, unless you have like an anti griddle and you know, a chest freezer, but it's not something you can just kind of do in your freezer. But uh the good news is is that uh, you know, clear ice looks amazing and it's the only one that you can really carve well because it it's very easy to carve and it doesn't shatter, but it's not really gonna make your drink taste better. So that's the good news.
Anyway, Stasi, how are we doing on time? We're doing fine. I think we have like two minutes left, so say something. Yeah. All right.
So uh I will you know, relay uh what it takes to get stopped in the Dusseldorf airport in between flights and have basically a full body cavity search. So yeah, don't yeah. So don't leave your job at a cooking school after you do a demo with your folding box cutter. Which by the way, like everyone in the world should have a folding box cutter in their pocket at all times. Like in fact, the thing I hate most about traveling is that I can't have my folding box cutter with me unless I know where I can get blades for it.
So anyway, I go to JFK, which is our airport in New York, I take the box cutter out of my pocket and I uh discard the blade and put the empty box cutter, Sans blade, back in my pocket because I don't feel like I'm a human being unless I have a box cutter in my pocket, right? So the and you know, this probably says something bad about security in New York. I showed him the empty box cutter, I'm like, hey, it's a box cutter without a knife. What's the problem? Right, like, hey, right, what's the problem?
Let me through. I show up in Germany in Dusseldorf, and I have to go through security again. I show them I was like, you know, Eskap kein Mesa, you know, there's no no knife in there, right? But then they took they literally took apart everything, including my shoes, everything I own, took everything apart to look to see whether I had stashed a blade somewhere with my box cutter. And then they're looking through it and they see a box that I brought because I'm doing a cocktail demonstration here where we're testing uh temperature and I'm doing basically a recap of of the tails of the cocktail that I did with Ebon Clem and you can go see that on our blog about the cocktail science post.
So he finds this box with all these wires coming out of it, and he and and he's uh he's looking at me a little more than cross-eyed, and then and my German, by the way, is not so good. And then uh after that, he uh he finds a um I'm you know studying organic chemistry again, boning up on it, and I have a a chemical model set in my thing, and he C C sees chemistry wires, and a dude with a box cutter who I'm clearly disheveled, you know, from my flight. And so that's what it takes. That's what it takes to basically you know get the full smack down in the Dusseldorf Airport. So this has been your uh your your intercontinental cooking issues episode.
Uh thanks to Heritage Radio for making it happen. Uh thanks to Acme Fish. Thank you, Nastasha, and we'll see you next week. Looking for a fun night out? K1 Speed puts you behind the wheel for an adrenaline-filled time you and your friends will never forget.
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