I'm Sam Edwards. I'm third generation cure master from S. Wallace Edwards and Sons in Surrey, Virginia. We support the Heritage Radio Network because we believe in the cause and what they're doing. They're supporting family-raised uh livestock, small family farms, uh certified humane, pasture-raised, antibiotic free.
Basically, we take the products from Heritage Food USA and make them into uh Serrano style hams, prosciutto style hams, bacon, sausage, like my grandfather did. You can find us at SurreyFarms.com or Virginia Traditions.com. Oh, you daddy. Got me on this corner. You're listening to Cooking Issues Radio on the Heritage Radio Network, coming to you live every Tuesday from 12 to 1245.
Um Dave Arnold, our host of Cooking Issues, and we're here with Nastasha the Hammer Lopez. Call in all your questions to the studio at 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. So uh today we're being sponsored by uh S. Wallace Edwards, the ham company.
I happen to know Sam Edwards personally who makes that ham. Ham happens to be Country Ham particular, although I know Nastasha, you're more of a prosciutto head. That's true. Yeah. But American Country Ham happens to be uh one of my favorite subjects in the whole world, so I might maybe I'll talk for a second about country ham before we get into anything else.
Um Sam Edwards Country Ham, uh our sponsor today. Uh his family has been in Surrey for, you know, I don't know, probably a couple hundred years, something like that. Surrey is across the river from Smithfield, which is kind of the well-known name in American country hams. They don't really make a good country ham in Smithfield anymore. But uh, you know, Sam Edwards really does, and you know, he he mentioned that his grandfather started the business.
His grandfather actually wrote an interesting article uh back, I think in some time in the 60s, and it was about um peanut-fed hogs. It you used to be, you know, everyone talks about the Bayota fed hogs that you get out of uh out of Spain that make the best, you know, most delicious ham. And in fact, they do uh make delicious ham uh because the basically the acorns that these Spanish hogs eat give them a uh they have a lot of unsaturated fat and it changes the fat characteristics of the ham, which means that the ham has this awesome taste that you can't really get any other way. Uh but the only reason that's really preserved, I think in Spain is because the the economics are such that they're not allowed to chop down the forest where those nuts are produced, so that they have these, they have the ability to produce it, whereas we don't. Our hams used to kick a similar level of butt.
In fact, we're world kind of known. I mean, our curing techniques are are are amazing. And um, so Sam Edwards' grandfather actually wrote an interesting article, I think in the 60s, or it's quoted in one saying that ham production is going to hell in a ham basket because um being because we're not feeding the the peanuts anymore, we have a lower slaughter weight than we used to. Uh, because you know, the older a pig is when you kill it, the more the enzymes and the enzyme profile in an older hog is different from uh the one in a younger hog, and uh on a larger older hog, aside from being bigger that can take more age, also the enzyme profile is different, which is going to lead to a better tasting ham. So these are all things that we've done.
But that aside, American curing is totally different from any other kind of curing, ham curing, and it's a totally different product. Like should not be confused with prosciutto, should not be confused with the serrano. Like these are like, you know, uh actual American treasures. And so Sam Edwards is one of the few people who's, you know, a still a fairly large production, uh, in other words, you can buy it here in in New York. Um, you know, he can ship, he's USDA, that is doing a very traditional, you know, great American product.
And traditional with in Virginia would be kind of a heavy smoke on on his hams. And you can make sure you get ones for him that are you know a year a year or older. Uh and then actually I'm traveling tomorrow to Kentucky. I'm gonna uh tour another great ham producer, Finchville Farms. Finchville Farms uh out of Kentucky is another great old producer, and you know, a lot of the people who produce hams in Kentucky, so think Finchville, think um Colonel Newsom's, which is Nancy Mahaffey's ham place, these are people also who've been curing for hundreds of years, not them personally, but their families, you know, and a lot of these guys moved to Kentucky back when Kentucky was still Virginia.
Uh so anyway, so I will be uh visiting um I will be visiting Finchville Farms tomorrow, actually. It's the first time I've been there, so I'm excited, along with of obviously drinking a lot of bourbon. So probably probably talk about that more next week. Although next week, Nastasha, we might be doing the show live from London. Live from London, huh?
So we're gonna do this. Our second road show is gonna be in London. Because next next week uh we're going to be out in London doing the what's the name of the show we're doing, Nastasha? Do you even know? It's just called the London Cocktail Week.
And uh yeah. So we're doing rotary evaporation over there. Yes, with Oxley Gin. Yeah, which is a vacuum distillation technique for those of you who don't know what the heck I'm talking about. Uh right?
Yes. Yeah. Okay. Uh so anyway, uh, let's go on to some questions because we have some email questions from before. If I can just find them.
Um my gosh. Oh my gosh, Nastasha, I've lost the email questions. No, no. So the first one's an answer. First one's an answer.
Oh, that's right. So uh okay, so uh some of you might recall several weeks ago, uh, we tried to answer the question. What was her name again? What was her name? Uh Colleen was the big girl.
Yeah, Colleen. Uh she she's a very tall woman, and she was having problems with uh with countertops, countertop heights. And we call Mark Ladner. Uh Mark Ladner is the newest four-star chef in New York City because Del Posto, his restaurant, just got upgraded to four stars in the in the New York Times. So congratulations.
Um, and he is tall, he's six four, and so here's what he wrote back. We asked him, how do you deal with the with this problem of being very tall? He said, When when I was younger, I often hunched over, which was obviously horrible for my back and neck. Uh when I built El Posto, uh, had a kitchen designer uh who recommended a 42-inch counter, which is higher than our normal what, 36, 35 counter, which which he recently designed for Gray Kunz, who's also, I guess, tall. And he says that this counter is a lifesaver.
And he says, most except for the very short love it. And he doesn't see any reason why uh Colleen, right, should not be allowed to use her special adapter unless it's unsafe or unsanitary. And he hopes that that's helpful. Okay, so we have a we have a caller. Caller, you are on the air.
Hey, how's it going? Going well. Awesome. Well, I've always heard that um if you burn garlic when making a tomato sauce, it's gonna make your sauce bitter. I was wondering if you could tell me why.
Huh. Uh that is true story. Uh I don't know why. It kind of caught me uh uh off guard. I mean, gar garlic is pretty complex uh and easy to burn because it's got a uh high sugar content.
I think that's why it burns so easy. Uh but I don't like the that acrid burnt taste that you get. I don't know exactly what's going on. It has to be like all of the interesting stuff with garlic has to do. I mean, garlic doesn't really have that much uh of its characteristic um sharp pungent flavor until it's been cut.
Right. So what happens is is that there's enzymes in the garlic, and when you cut it or crush it, those enzymes are acting on um there's like they're the I always forget the names. It's like Al Alanin and alison and all these ala blah blah blahs like that are like these chemicals that start out being relatively odorless uh and then uh develop all of their all of their pungency uh after they're cut and then are modified more or less by cooking. And since those are the chemicals that lead to the pungency, I would think that those are also the ones that lead to kind of those acrid uh flavors when they when they're cooked or when they get burnt, but I can't say for sure. There is an excellent book out on the subject.
It's called um I believe it's called garlic and other alliums, something like that. That it's lore. I just bought it. I actually read it but it's very dense so I can't remember whether there was any explanation of it because it was too much to look into. But uh next week we have Harold McD we have a list of stuff to ask Harold from the radio show?
We can make one. Let's make a list and uh I'll ask him that whether he knows specifically what it is because it he's read that book and spoke with that person so he he's thought a lot about that kind of a problem. Uh that's something I should know off the top of my head but do not I I do know however when you pressure cook garlic it uh it actually destroys a lot of the of the pungency so that in fact you know how even when you roast garlic you when you roast it still if you eat a lot of it it comes out of your pores over the over the course of several days and and your coworkers don't want to be anywhere near you. Again I know this from awful experience. When you pressure cook garlic uh th those principles are gone and you can actually eat a whole bunch of garlic without in fact we make sauces that are s you know upwards of fifty percent garlic and no one has a problem with them and it's very mellow, mellow flavor, and it's because a lot of those sulfur containing compounds that are in the garlic that give it the its pungency are kind of destroyed by that by the high heat uh on the inside of a pressure cooker.
So uh we will we will keep a list. Uh okay. So um we have uh Colin Gore writes in and says he has a handful of things on his mind lately. So let's look at those handful of things that are that are on his mind. Uh Collins built a vacuum chamber using a compressor harvested from a window mounted air conditioner to make uh a vacuum.
I love this kind of DIY kind of you know, do it yourself kind of stuff. And he says it works wonderfully, uh, but he's wondering about running it for more than a few minutes at a time because he's afraid he's gonna burn it out. Uh, you know, I wouldn't worry about it so much. The kind of the the great granddaddy of websites dealing with uh this problem is uh called the Bell Jar, uh and a bell jar being the you know an old vacuum thing that you put things in vacuum, the bell jar. So the bell jar, and it's based on a bunch of articles published a long, long time ago in Scientific American, the amateur scientists, which were fantastic.
Like I had one when I was a kid, like how to build lasers, amazing stuff. Scientific Americans old amateur scientist column, freaking amazing, amazing stuff. Anyway, the Bell Jar has a list of these things uh and and it it talks a lot about making vacuum pumps cheaply out of air conditioning units and refrigeration units. And a lot of w what the capabilities of your unit are depend on whether it's a rotary uh pump or whether it's a piston pump. Most refrigerator compressors are uh you know piston pumps and they're not gonna operate near you know nearly as well at low vacuum as these as these rotary pumps are.
So uh, you know, um so a lot a lot of air conditioners have a rotary pump. So if as long as you keep the thermal overload switch on the on the pump, you should be fine because if it cuts out, it's not gonna get hurt. You also obviously have to make sure that you didn't let the oil drain out of it. Um, you know, otherwise it's gonna burn out very quickly. But you should be able to run it no problem.
If it's overheating, you'll be able to tell because it's exposed. He also makes a uh a good note. Uh please uh don't just cut out a uh um you know a compressor out of an air conditioner and let the freon spray everywhere because you're opening yourself up to a fine and you're destroying the environment. I might also say don't use a saw when you're cutting a a compressor off of something because the little filings can get into the compressor and then that's bad, bad, bad, bad news. Colin has more questions, but first I think we're gonna go to a caller.
Caller, you are on the air. Hello, it's Joe here from London Dave. Hey, how you doing? We'll be out to see you in a just a couple of we'll be out in London in just a couple of days. Oh, great.
I hope to meet up with you. We've been really inspired by your uh blog and uh the show over here. Oh, I appreciate it. I appreciate it. Dave, my question is um I'd like to prepare um large prawns or I guess langustin or you may call them shrimp, I'm not sure.
Right. Um I want to prepare them ahead of time, uh sous vide. Uh, and then finish them off on a grill so I can get some kind of mailard on them. Um I'm just not sure um what kind of temperature to cook them at and for how long. Right.
All right. Sh uh shrimp and prawns are interesting because they contain enzymes in them that if you uh if you cook them for extended periods of time, they go mushy, they turn to a paste, right? And so uh, you know, vacuum is a and sous vide is a very, very good way, first of all, to infuse flavor into into them and also to make sure that you know none of the flavor leaches out when you're cooking. But but you're gonna want to make sure that you um that you do it fairly quickly. You want to make sure that the um that the it's cooked through in like you know I would I would keep it if you can under twelve minutes or something like that.
It's otherwise you're gonna start breaking it down. And a good thing to do is to run a test just to see what happens when you cook it for a long, long time. You'll see it just gets really uh it gets really nasty. One way to do it is if you like more traditional texture is obviously to put the bag into a very high temp water. And that's what someone like George Prolou would do where he cooks his shellfish almost in boiling water, even when it's in a vacuum bag.
Another option, if you want to go more like the texture that you that people want off like a butter poached lobster or something like that, is to run it more like 65 degrees for like Celsius for like uh you know, 10, 10 to 12 minutes once it's out of its shell, obviously. You know what I mean? So that might be a similar thing you do with with uh with a prawn or a shrimp, but that's gonna give you a soft texture, more you know, more akin to uh on the lower side of being done than on the higher side, and then obviously you can firm it up with your finishing step, you know, with your finishing sear step, which is gonna put more of a uh, you know, more of a a crust on the outside and get it done. But you really the the key thing with it is just to not cook it for too long because it's gonna be and cool it down quick after it comes out because it's just gonna be a complete nightmare to you. You're gonna get you cannot believe how bad the texture of a long cooked uh you know shrimp or prawn can be.
I mean, I've uh it doesn't always happen, but it happens enough and you have to spit it out. It's like just it's just terrible. I yeah, that's really what I was trying to avoid by doing the sous vide step because I find that if I do it directly on the grill, if I'm doing like a large, say, like a 10, 12 um prawn, um I I can easily overcook it and it it gets very mushy and not not a pleasant flavor at all. Right. But you're gonna flash finish them on this one, right?
You're just gonna pre-cook them and then flash finish them? Yes, but I I'd like to do them in the shell because uh the shell adds a nice flavor when it's uh when it's grilled. So I d just will that change the cooking times, you think? No, not much. The shells are usually pretty thick.
You can do it head on too, or no? Yes, head-on too. Yeah, because the head's the best part anyway. But the uh uh not the best part, you know, it's delicious, that's what I mean to say. Sure, yeah.
But um one thing you want to be really careful of is that uh is that the shells on um on shrimp and prawns uh almost always pop vacuum bags. So you're gonna want to either double bag or wrap them in in something to protect the bag and to make sure that you have uh you know the the air doesn't come back into the chamber too fast because you're gonna start popping your bags. And after you pack them, you're gonna want to let them sit for I mean it's good to let them sit to marinate anyway. If you're gonna use like oil and salt and pepper or something, I mean I don't know what your recipe is, but you know, uh inside the bag, um, you know, then you're gonna want to let it sit for a half hour or so, not just to pick up the flavor of whatever you put in, but also to make sure you don't have any holes in it, right? Then I would I would go for a fairly quick cook, like uh like maybe 10 to I don't know the size of them, but like 10 10 minutes, 10 to 12 uh at like 65 or something like that.
And pull them out, cool them down, and then do your do your flash finish almost from cold because they'll already be cooked. And so you can cook them as at high a heat as you want to get that nice color and taste on the outside of the shell without having to worry about cooking the inside. Perfect, Dave. Perfect. Thank you so much.
All right, and and and uh please tell us your results, like write in and tell us whether whether it worked. This way I can uh see whether whether that worked. Okay, I'll maybe even put some photos in as well. Sounds great. Thanks so much.
Oh, and we're going to our first commercial break, but call in your questions at 718 497 2128, 718 497 2128. Cooking issues. Oh, how do you feel, brother? Feeling good. You feel good?
There's so much bone, brother. How do you feel, man? I'll feel my way. I don't want to know if people don't know you in. Yeah.
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Let Brad blow up my two cores. And then I want to wave me and let's go and do that within a now. All right. I'm gonna get that bellow with a little horn over there. Yeah.
Take us higher. Brad! Brad! Bad! And welcome back to Cooking Issues.
Call in your questions right now to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128 coming to you live from Roberta's in Brooklyn, New York. Okay. Uh we have some more of Colin's questions here. He has quite a few questions.
We're gonna try and hit them all. Uh so Colin, uh, to refresh you if you didn't listen to the first segment, Colin built his own vacuum machine, uh, his own vacu chamber vacuum machine using a uh a pump out of a uh a compressor out of an air conditioner. And there's lots of over the past couple of years, people who have done this kind of DIY chambers, but not just for food packing, for like making models, for doing vacuum bagging, like when they're doing resin. A lot of good reasons to build vacuum pumps out there and a lot of sites with a lot of great information on it. So uh he asks a question Can the walls of quartz size canning jars withstand uh a full vacuum, 14 psi.
Oh yes, they can. In fact, I use this trick all the time. When we're if you have a vacuum machine and you don't have what's called gas flush. So when you're using a vacuum machine and you have gas flush, it means that you suck a vacuum in the bag. Uh but you know, if you if you would then seal it and let the air come back in, let's say you had potato chips, bam, the potato chips will get smashed when the air came back in, it would just get shattered and you have potato dust, which is not what you're looking for, right?
So you have something called gas flush. And what that is is that you suck all the air out, so all the moisture is gone, so now your potato chips are not gonna go, and there's no oxygen, so the potato chips aren't gonna go rancid, and they're not gonna get uh they're not gonna get soft and nasty, and then you inject uh a neutral gas back in, usually nitrogen, you know, sometimes depending on what you're doing, CO2 or some crazy mix depending on what you're doing, and then you seal it, and then when the air comes back in, there's a neutral gas in there so that it's bag is still puffy. Your potato chips don't get smashed. And in fact, your potato chips are protected because they're inside of a pillow. So, anyway, uh so this is a technique that you can use.
If you don't have gas flush, which we just got actually in our new, we have a new vacuum machine in the school, and we'll be reporting on that at some point. But the um uh if you don't have gas flush, quart uh and larger liter canning jars are a very good way to do it. I would get the and they can take the pressure no problem. Uh what I would do is I would get the ones not the ones that have the the the thin metal lid that you then pry up. And the reason is that um they seal once great, and then like after you open the lid to pry it up, like make that noise when it pops up.
A lot of times they won't reseal. I like the old style ones that have a glass lid and a glass base and a rubber gasket, and then you just set the rubber the set the lid with the gasket on top of your canning jar, take all the metal hardware off of it, it's just gonna get in your way, suck the vacuum, and then when the vacuum comes back, the lid gets smashed back onto the top, and the actual vessel takes the pressure for you, not your potato chips or whatever the heck else you're gonna pack. And those vacuums, I've had them last for months and months. Sometimes you'll get a bad seal on those, but you you can usually tell within you know a couple of hours to a day that the seal on that jar is not going to be. How do you do it without a vacuum machine with those rubber seals?
Well the rubber when you're canning with those things, usually the rubber seals, they have a um a lid on it, right? So you'd you'd boil them and you know, you you boil them, um, I guess you start boiling them and then maybe seal them while they're boiling, and then they and then as they as the uh as it cools down, you'll suck a partial vacuum on the top, and then you have to open it. I mean, it's like I guess it's an old, it's I've never actually used them to can, I've only used them to package things. But they're great. You can get them in most in most uh houseware stores, and we use them all the time.
So if you're bringing something that's crisp, like apple chips or potato chips or methyl cell F50 uh, you know, meringue pus, which is what we do a lot, um, you know, you can keep them for a long time and you can, you know, travel in a rainstorm, you know, through Louisiana in a bayou, what it doesn't matter, and the and the stuff's not gonna go bad on you. So it's actually a really good technique for bringing stuff with you. Not as good as having gas flush, but um because it's just a pain in the butt. But anyway. Uh so on the subject of vacuums, Colin wants to know that he's making apple chips and he wants to he wants to get that same kind of same foamy texture that you get from um from doing uh freeze drying.
Uh, and he wants to know how can how can you do that? Well, that's a pain in the butt, Colin, because freeze drying is a really good technique for doing that. Nothing else really approximates freeze drying the way freeze drying does. So the way a freeze-dryer works is you freeze something uh, you know, uh usually at a fairly low temperature to get you know to minimize the destruction of stuff to the cells quickly and low temperature, and then you let it you put a very strong vacuum on it and you let it uh heat up slowly in that until the water uh inside of it basically sublimates. And what that means is you put it in a condition where uh the water doesn't want to go from a solid to a liquid and then to a gas, it just evaporates directly from a solid to a gas.
And so what that means is is that the structure of the product is held rigidly by by the ice until the water leaves it, at which point it it maintains its structure. And that's why you have things that look pretty much life size, but they have no more water in them, they're very porous, they're crunchy, they're great, and that's freeze drying. The problem is the equipment is usually somewhat expensive. You need a you need a fairly good vacuum pump. You also need what's called a cold trap because everything that you everything you um suck off, you then need to um recondense back.
So you need a fairly cold cold trap. I've tried to do it kind of a ghetto style freeze dryer using my rotary evaporator, but my pump isn't quite good enough. My vacuum pump isn't quite good enough. So you know, some people have one. Alex Talbot at Ideas and Food has one.
Um, you know, a couple of restaurants have them. I think I think maybe Laurent Gras might have one at L2O. I don't know. Anyway, we don't have a vac uh freeze dryer. Someday, someday I'll have one.
Um anywho, so but there is an interesting uh patent that's been applied for. I think it's still under patent. So if you do this, you're going to be breaking all kinds of patent laws. I don't really care about that, but there's a technique called uh uh basic it's basically fruit puffing using vacuum and then carbon dioxide. And if you are the kind of person who can rip apart an air conditioner and build a vacuum chamber, then you are also the kind of person who can do this.
And hopefully I don't have time to do it, so maybe you can do it and tell me tell me how it works. So here's here's what you do. First thing you do is you partially dehydrate a product till it's down to like about 60% 20 to 60% water. You can do that with a standard dehydration or you can use what's called osmotic dehydration. What that is is you put you put your fruit into an a very intense sugar syrup and that draws the water out osmotically.
It's osmotic dehydration. So you can do it that way. You could do it with a partial dehydration step. But the trick is to get rid of I think about half the half the water or so a little under half the water. Then you take your apple slices at this point and you put them into uh into your vacuum chamber and you suck a full vacuum on them for a little bit, right?
Then you put a CO2 tank on and you pressurize it to about you know a little over 200 psi, right? So uh and that's the minimum is about they in the patent literature the minimum is about 200, 220 psi of CO2 and you want to leave that for like 60 minutes under the high pressure CO2. So what's happening is a CO2 is going into the fruit and it's basically getting uh it's is going all the way into the uh the cells and then you want to vent it uh over the course of like uh 30 seconds so after that 60 minutes you vent it over the course of 30 seconds and the rapidly escaping CO2 takes with it the water and puffs the fruit up at the same time so that's dehydrates and then any further dehydration you could probably do in a normal dehydrate or something like that. So it's a room temperature technique so it's similar to freeze drying that way and um it doesn't require um as much expensive equipment as a as a as a freeze dryer does. So if you can try this vacuum then CO2 puffing Colin I would be much obliged if you then tell us how it works and post pictures.
But be extremely careful with pressure vessels. Make sure that you are using a pressure vessel that can handle the pressure. I don't want anyone blowing something up and you know, basically creating a pipe bomb and killing themselves uh over something I said. So, you know, certain um, you know, schedule 40 pipe, which is a standard pipe you get will not handle these kinds of pressures um safely. Uh schedule 80 pipes, some schedule 80 pipes can handle it.
Um so just anyway, so be careful, make sure you know what you're doing. Uh, you know, and just but I'd love to see someone try that, even though I think you'd be infringing on a bunch of patents, and you know that they might come and arrest you. But uh, you know, again, uh hopefully not. Um and Colin's last question is uh he's making an alginate bath and he wants to know how long he can keep it. All right, so I don't know whether have we talked about this ever?
The alginate bath? No, I don't even think you talked about the pancakes. The pancakes? Yeah. No, all right.
Well, we'll talk about this then. Okay, okay. So uh sodium alginate is uh kind of very famous. It's made from seaweed, and what it does is it's the stuff that people make little balls out of uh in restaurants, like they call it caviar, blah, blah, blah. And the standard thing is you take, and by the way, it's also how they make the pimento on the inside of uh of an olive, it's how they make fake onion rings, it's how they, you know, some dog foods are made this way.
And so you take this seaweed, sodium alginate, and you mix it in, and whenever it touches anything with calcium in it, it all of a sudden turns to a gel, right? So the standard technique that uh, you know, it was used for forever to make fake blueberries, and it was used also by science teachers who, you know, do it in science. But the famous early restaurant application was Ferron uh Adrian, who's actually coming to speak at the French culinary today. Later today. He's gonna be signing books and coming to the coming to the FCI.
So uh so Ferron, you know, famously made melon caviar out of alginate, and alginate in restaurants was born, right? Now the problem with alginate is that it doesn't really have a great texture or taste. And so in fact, it steals taste. It's like a flavored thief. So alginate, and also the other problem is if you make these balls, you drop alginate into calcium, it forms this beautiful sphere, but then over the course of the next couple of minutes, it turns solid.
And once it turns solid, it's completely unpleasant. If it doesn't pop in your mouth, it's it's unpleasant. So then the next step is that you know, Chef started doing what's called reverse alginate. So in reverse alginate, instead of dropping alginate into a calcium bath and forming this little balls, you're dropping calcium into an alginate bath, and then you get a little film of uh of alginate around it, but the inside stays liquid forever, right? And so, and so that is kind of I think it's it's it's a better technique from a from a food standpoint.
But then you have these alginate baths sitting around, and the question is well, how long can you keep that alginate bath without it going bad? I've never kept one longer than about two or three days. Uh, but a lot of it depends on how heavily it's used, how much calcium you know gets touches it, and you have to use something called a sequestrant. And so what a sequestrant is a sequestrant um sucks up the calcium that's inside of your uh solution and uh stops it from causing the alginate to react until there's so much calcium there that a reaction happens. And they and and the the two goods I mean sodium citrate is kind of the the sequestrant that people just have lying around, it's not so good.
Sodium citrate is also a buffer, uh, which is good, but it's kind of crap. You really want to use sodium hexametaphosphate. Uh I'll say that again because that's a pain in the butt. Sodium hexametaphosphate. Hexametaphosphate, is that right?
It says anyway, call it shimp, A S H M P shimp. And uh a little little dabble duty on that one, you know, you get yourself a couple hundred grams of that, and that's a lifetime supply of shimp, and uh put it into your into your alginate bath, and it should last a good long, a good long time. We actually did a demo recently, uh Nastasha and I, for what the heck was that show called? Uh foodography. Yeah.
For the cooking channel. For the cooking channel. I mean, it's not it's not out yet or anything, but what we did with that was uh we we wanted to do like our version of the McGriddle kind of, which is you know for those of you that and I don't I don't you know I've never had a McGriddle but it's basically uh McDonald's puts like crystals of uh of uh maple syrup or goop some sort of maple syrup goop on the inside of their pancake and the reason they're doing that is because the pancake becomes I think a sandwich inside yeah yeah something something like that anyway so what we did is we made uh we did reverse allergenate we mixed calcium with maple syrup and then uh put it into alginate so we had these little balls of maple syrup that then when you bit into them they pop you actually get a pop of maple syrup and we folded a bunch of them into a pancake batter buttermilk pancake batter your standard buttermilk pancake battery and cook them and they were actually pretty good I thought yeah no they were delicious they were delicious so you made them into silver dollars so they were yeah right little silver dollar pancakes so take that McDonald's but anyway so uh it should it should your algorithm bath should last a good long time we're gonna go to a break Dave we are all right uh well we're gonna come back uh from our second session but uh call in your questions to 718-4972128 that's 718-497-2128 cooking issues you know what we're not here, group like this oh hey I got yeah, baby. Yeah. Yeah.
Black way up young man. Ah! It's things. No. No.
Grip. Welcome back to Cooking Issues. Uh call in your questions too. 718-497-2128-718-497-2128. We're gonna be here for about another 15 minutes.
And by the way, we mentioned the list we're gonna keep of questions we're gonna ask McGee. He's in Japan right now, or we would call and ask him right now. But uh the man himself is coming to uh the French culinary for his class next week. The 21st and 22nd of October. And there are still slots available for those of you that want to come meet the man in person and take the two-day McGee Lecture Series class at the French Culinary Studio.
It's a class unlike any other, actually. We're gonna be doing some Ikijime, killing some fish. We might be doing what else we're gonna do for the week. We're getting a giant lobster. I don't know where they're gonna do a giant lobster.
We're gonna definitely do some uh lime juice test. It's it's uh it's a class unlike any other. Let's just put it that way. You can go check it out on the French uh culinary website, which is I don't know, Frenchculinary.com. I think so.
Yeah, yeah. Okay. Uh so uh I have a question from Patrick Brawley, and he's wondering uh in general, what percentage of ascorbic acid to use as an antioxidant? Uh and so the the thing is ascorbic acid is it's vitamin C, right? So and we use it all the time when we're when we're you know doing fruits like apples or anything else, it's gonna turn brown.
We put ascorbic acid in to prevent it from turning brown. In fact, we put ascorbic acid into uh apple juice as we make it, it'll stay green and fresh tasting until it actually spoils. It'll never go brown, it'll never have that oxidized apple taste. And uh the question of percentage is an interesting one. Uh I spoke to Nils about it actually this morning.
We always just add by eye. We've never actually measured how much ascorbic acid we're doing. Uh it's not hypercritical how much you use it, but I did some research, and usually it how much you use depends on your application. So if you're gonna make a let's say you're cutting apples and you're gonna put ascorbic acid into uh the water and you're gonna try to try to keep it, then it's usually a higher dose. Or if you're gonna dehydrate it then afterwards, you want the ascorbic acid uh to enough to get on the apple to have it really make a difference, then you're gonna probably use something on the order of six grams a liter, something like that, right?
But if you're adding it to juice, then you probably need a lot less. You probably need like maybe half of that, like three grams per liter, or you know, something something like that. But uh, we usually just add like you know, a teaspoon or so to per quart or something like that or less. Uh, but you know, it doesn't it doesn't really affect the flavor that much. Ascorbic acid is a much lower um has a much lower impact on flavor than like citric acid, which brings me to my next point.
Never confuse citric acid and ascorbic acid. Ascorbic acid is vitamin C. Ascorbic acid is the antioxidant. Citric acid, and it does not taste like lemons. It's an has an acidic taste, but it doesn't taste like lemons.
Citric acid does not have the same antioxidant power as ascorbic acid. Citric acid does taste like the acid in lemons, right? But they're often confused. Sour salt that you buy in the supermarket is citric acid, right? You want to make sure you get ascorbic acid.
And when you buy ascorbic acid, if you go to a GNC or whatever, your vitamin store and you buy uh vitamin C powder or pills, you want to make sure you get the straight stuff and not stuff that's like got rose hips and all this other nonsense because that's gonna add flavor, and you're really not looking to add uh flavor to to your product. Um if you're gonna make apple cider and you put it in there, is it not gonna turn the apple cider brown? It's not only not gonna turn the apple cider brown, it's not gonna taste like apple cider. It's gonna taste like fresh apples, right? So the so the care so when we're doing work where we want the apple, we want the characteristic flavor of an apple.
Like let's say we're juicing uh like you know, my favorite, ashmead's kernel, right? I want the juice to taste like that's an apple variety. Uh and I want the and by the way, Nastasha and I next week when we go to London, we're gonna go to the Brogdale collection, which is uh uh Cornell has the finest collection of biggest, I mean, and also finest, I guess, collection of apples in the world, but they also have a they have a lot of non-culinary apples. The Broguedale, which is you know, you know, the UK's apple collection in Kent, uh, which is outside of London, uh, they have the largest collection of culinary apples in the world. So Nastash and I are gonna go there and I'm gonna eat so many apples that um that basically they have to shove a like a needle in my stomach and like evacuate all of the craziness that's I'm gonna eat apples until I pass out, basically.
I'm gonna take up I've become allergic to apples actually over the last couple of years, so I'm gonna bring a whole bunch of Benadryl with me. And I'm just gonna I'm gonna wait until my throat starts to swell. I'm gonna inject myself with uh with epinephrine and take Benadryl because I'm I'm there to eat as many apples as is humanly possible, and we'll report back. Uh anyway, so if you're juicing ash mead's kernel, which I hope to taste next next uh week, uh, because our supplier of Ashmade's kernel uh gut was destroyed this year because we there was a killing frost in in parts of the northeast this year. Anyway, uh so uh when you're juicing it and you want that taste of the fresh apple, if you want the juice to taste like you just bit into that apple, minus the crunch, then you use ascorbic acid and it's going to retain its original color and its original flavor.
It's not the flavor we associate with apple juice. The flavor we associate with apple juice and apple cider is that brown flavor because the oxidation doesn't just change the color, it also changes the flavor. Uh and so you only add it if you're looking for that fresh flavor, and you don't add it if you want that that you know, cider and or and or juice flavor. Um but that said, I love that fresh flavor, and it makes really great mixers. And so if you're juicing your own apples, we use a sc we go through ascorbic acid like it's like it's going out of style.
Uh the other question Patrick had is he was he was trying to uh uh make an agar gel. I have a lot of uh hydrocolor cushions this time. Yeah. Well, you're having the class coming up too. Uh but I I would push the class, but it's sold out.
You'll have to say it's sold out. Like we do a hydrocolloids class at school where we teach you how to use all these things like agar, xanthan, also meat glue, which is transglutaminase. We're gonna show you how to use SPL, which is the enzyme we use to do clarifications, all this stuff, it's great. But unfortunately, I think the class, I mean, maybe it's not sold out. Check it on the French Culinary.com.
I think it's I think it's sold out. I'm not sure. Um, so uh he's making Patrick's making a an agar gel. Agar is another seaweed gel. It's a great one.
I highly recommend that you know, if if you've just started playing with hydrocolloids, use agar because you can use it to clarify, you can use it to set gels, you can use it to make fluid gels, which are my one of my favorite things to do with uh hydrocolloids in the kitchen. Uh, but he wants to make uh the problem with agar is agar is brittle, right? So it breaks very easily. He's trying to increase the elasticity. And he says uh, you know, and typically you would do that by adding another gum called locust bean gum, another natural gum.
That one's from basically ground up seeds. Um and so the the question is is that he doesn't want to use uh and the locust bean gum basically uh just modifies the agar so it's less brittle, right? So it's a you a lot of times if you add uh like a thickener like that to a gel, uh so thickeners locust bean gum, agar is a gel, you can make it a little bit softer. And he says, Is there anything else you can use? Well, because it because he says LBG, locust bean gum in the biz we call it LBG, uh, that it's too expensive.
I don't know what the per pound cost is on LBG when you're buying it, but you're not going to use that much. I would go ahead and buy the LBG. I mean, unless you're make because you know, one pound of LBG should be in more than enough to do 200, you know, 200 or more, 300 pounds of uh just as a softener uh of uh agar gel. So I don't know what you're charging, what they're charging for. I mean, check Terra Spice in in the US, uh, I don't know, or Le Sanctuaire, they sell it.
But the problem is you can go with a much cheaper gum like guar, but guar tastes terrible. Guar is another bean, it's very similar to locust bean gum, not quite as good probably at modifying the texture, but it will work. Uh the problem with guar is, like I say, is it tastes horrible unless you buy flavor-free guar from T I C gums. But I don't know how cheap the uh T I C gums flavor free uh guar is, but that is one way around it. Uh so hopefully that is helpful.
And we have one last question from Norway. Uh so uh Eric from with the uh real spelling with the K like that anyway. So Eric from Norway uh uh writes in and he's making he's in a restaurant in Norway and he's making a lot of lobster stock. Uh and he's making a lobster stock and then reducing it um for use later. And he says that he's getting a good um he's getting a good taste out of the lobster stock, presumably he's doing it tradition traditional way, which is you break up the lobster shells.
You rope where you roast and or roast and or break up or both, I don't know, whichever order, it doesn't really matter, till you get some color on them, and then you break them up and then you you cook them in uh in liquid to extract the flavor from the shells, right? That's typically then you would strain out the shells and then you would and you know use the stock. Uh after that, he reduces it and makes it uh makes a reduction out of it. He says it's usable, but it doesn't taste like fresh lobster. Um do you have a better way to do it?
And can you do it in a pressure cooker and because he needs an excuse to get one? Well, I will I will do anything I can. Send me a menu, I will give you an excuse to buy a pressure cooker, but this is not that excuse because um I was talking to Nils about this actually uh earlier today. You don't one of the main problems people have when they make a lot any sort of crustacean stock is they boil the uh they boil the shells too long, and they the sh the all of a sudden the stock will take on this like horrible, we ascribe it, I don't know technically whether it is, but Nils and I always call it the calcium taste. And it all of a sudden starts to taste not like the shellfish itself, but like literally like you're chewing on shells.
And we ascribe that to like maybe the calcium being leached out. So while I've never done it, so I'm always horrified. I'm always making sure that people don't leave the shells in my stocks too long when we're doing it because I I dread that taste. Uh once you pull it out and you reduce it, that it's that's fine, you're never gonna get that taste. But um, but anyway, so Nils, so don't use a pressure cooker on that one because I'm almost guaranteeing you that the higher temperature is gonna cause an increased release of of that stuff, and it's you're gonna get that taste.
I can't, I'm almost guaranteeing it because I haven't actually done it, but that's my feeling. That's my strong feeling that that's what's gonna happen. Um, but Mill said that you because he had tested this, I asked him whether he could get a fresher flavor. If you don't roast the shells uh beforehand, you're not going to have as intense a flavor, but maybe it's going to be okay because you're going to reduce it, but it might be closer to a fresh lobster flavor. Another thing, um, you know, you know, um Eric had asked whether he can clarify the stock and is he going to lose a lot of flavor out of it.
I don't think he's going to lose a lot of flavor if you clarify your stock, like doing a gel clarification or like that. But if you're preserving the oil, he said he had the oil on the top of the stock and he takes the oil off, he emulsifies it back into this stock anyway. If you're going to emulsify oil back into the stock as part of a reduction, I don't necessarily see the point in clarifying it because you're you're just you it's going to make it unclear once you emulsify the oil in anyway. So if long if you're gonna have oil in it, I don't see the point of clarifying it. But clarifying the water phase by itself isn't, I don't think going to damage the flavor that much.
Might make it cleaner, a little lighter, but cleaner. One last suggestion I have for you to really extract some flavor out of it, is you might consider breaking the shells up, either roasting them or not, depending on what flavor you want, and then doing um circulating some butter in the shells first to extract some of the oil soluble flavors, basically making like a lobster butter, reserve that, then do a stock with that, suck out all the water soluble stuff, then reduce that, then do your emulsifying like almost like you were finishing the reduction with the crisp with the basically lobster butter you've made, and then you should get the maximum amount of flavor out of those shells without uh hopefully without sucking out the the evil nasty calcium bits. And you know, if you do it right, you should be able to get you know, maybe a fresher flavor. Like maybe you could also maybe do the butter poach before you do the uh before you but do the butter poach before you roast them and then roast them, and then you could do all sorts of combinations. But again, I'm very curious as to what happens, so you know, you you should write in, hopefully, and tell us and tell us what happened.
Just don't put it in the pressure cooker. Uh, but I love pressure cookers again. I'll give you any excuse. Ask me any other question, I'll tell you you need a pressure cooker, but not for that one. Uh one last question I had, it actually came into the blog, but I'll just answer it here.
Is uh can you make bananas Houstina without a centrifuge? And can you do it with agar clarification? So for those of you that haven't uh come to any of our events recently, one of our favorite new drinks, in fact, we did it at the uh Heritage Radio Network, uh, you know, fundraiser a couple weeks ago, is uh bananas Houstino. And uh so uh and the name is too the derivation of the name is too silly to go into now, but basically we we make a rum banana custino and we make a bourbon banana cestino. Uh and uh so what you do is is you blend uh bananas.
So when you're doing bourbon banana custino, it's five uh it's five bananas per liter of bourbon. And you blend them, you add a little bit of uh of our magical enzyme, Pectanex SPL, which is you know a genius. In fact, it doesn't that recipe doesn't work without it, because we tested it at uh the New York Culinary Experience event we did, was that last week? Was that only last week? Holy holy crap.
Anyway, so you you blend it together, you put it in a centrifuge, and you spin it at 4,000 uh, you know, G's uh for like you know, 15 minutes, and you get this delicious clear, delicious clear bourbon with banana in it, and then you we we make uh ice cubes that are basically either if we're gonna use it today, it's brown sugar, lemon, and water. If we're gonna use it tomorrow and vanilla, uh it's brown sugar, citric acid and uh and uh you know, water and uh vanilla if we're gonna use it later. Anyway, and so it's a great drink, and it's garnished with uh candied ginger. It's great. We love it.
Anyway, uh so that particular drink needs a centrifuge, but you could do an agar clarification of it. I don't know what your yield is gonna be, so you might have to add uh you I mean your yield might be not me. I know your yield won't be as good. So what you would do, and the other problem with agar clarification with bourbon is that if you don't have access to liquid nitrogen, the bourbon won't freeze. So oh, but you could do quick agar clarification.
I was thinking freeze thaw. My brain just went on z Zorch. You could do quick agar. So then what you would do is you would blend the bananas and the bourbon. You would um I would take some water, right?
Uh I would hydrate. So let's say, let's let I'll give it we we'll do an actual recipe here, right? Let's say you blend uh what do you think? I don't know, like 200 grams of bananas and a liter of bourbon, so that's roughly 1200 milliliters, right? Let's say you took 400 mils of water.
Uh what is that, 1800? Yeah. Shoot, eighteen hundred. No, two, six, six sixteen hundred. Well, I can't do the math.
Anyway, then point two percent of that. So let's say it was two liters. Let's say you had two liters of stuff. You would take uh um, you know, uh what is it, four grams of agar. You would then hydrate that in the water portion.
Don't add the water to the bourbon and blend the bananas. Hydrate it in your water portion. Make sure that you put it the agar into the water cold, make sure it boils and then simmers for a couple of minutes to make sure it's hydrated. Temper your bourbon back and bananas back into the uh water, and then let that set in the uh and once it sets, break it up with a whisk and like gently pass it through cheesecloth. Again, I don't know what your yield will be, but it should get a similar result.
I mean, the reason we use a centrifuge is I have three. Well, and the events are usually upwards of 300 people attending. So yeah, I mean you could definitely make it at home this way, you know, but but like our yield is just so high using the you know, we get almost zero loss when we do it uh in the centrifuge, and so that's the reason we use the centrifuge, but uh you can definitely make banana Zustino at home using agar and uh and bananas and bourbon and um I almost guarantee you it will work. Right? No?
Yes. All right. So next week, save up your questions. We will be doing live from London, but unlike last week when we did it, uh, we are going to be uh both Nastasha and I will both be in London. And so I think Jack is gonna be our our local our local host.
Is that true? Jack, our intrepid engineer who doesn't come on the air very often, but is runs the show here basically. Without it, we uh we wouldn't have it. Uh but before we go, I will leave you with this with this one thing. So we went uh we did an event on last uh Saturday.
Yesterday, two, three days ago. What now what was the name of the event again? This is uh Live Fit or Die or No, Fun Fit in the City. Fun Fit Live Fit or Die. Where'd you get that?
It's crazy. Fun fit in the City. Anyway, we were at the Discovery the Discovery Zone, it's called right. It's a school, it's a charter school in Harlem on 125th Street and uh was it in Madison or Fifth, I forget. Between both anyway, so it's just it's actually an amazing school.
We went to visit it. It's really incredible. It's like it's a huge place. It looks amazing, like it's a kind of school I wish I could have gone to when I was a kid. Anyway, we were doing an event there for the Liberty Science Center and the Food Network, who were putting an event together and they were talking about nutrition.
And so they asked uh, you know, they asked us to go up and do uh do you know, do a demonstration that somehow had something to do with nutrition for like a couple hundred people, and immediately of course genemic acid popped into my head. So genemic acid is uh the thing we use that erases your sense of sweet. So we passed out uh a you know, a bunch of gymnemic acid, which is a leaf basically from the uh gymnima silvestri. It's a plant from India. Lone Noklia's the sugar destroyer.
And uh, and you eat this incredibly awful tasting uh leaf powder, and for about half an hour you can't taste anything sweet at all, at all. No nothing, no sweetness. And so we passed out the powder, and along with uh bananas, not banana zustino, it was because it was all kids, so no liquor, unfortunately. Um strawberries, marshmallows, chocolate, sugar, honey, uh, and I think a couple other things. Anyway, we pass them out in bags, and you know, we're basically trying to show people you know what food items taste like without the sugar in it.
And we actually do that demo in the McGee class. Uh anyway, so we had a bunch of people there, and then I was on stage, and a lot by the way, like we opened it, right? So we were kind of the opening band, but uh, you know, they had uh Rachel Ray was on next and Mehmet Oz and some guy from Men's Health who I can never I don't remember his name. And uh Alonzo Morning, real yeah, I mean a real dude. Anyway, it's like real like real people.
Anyway, so uh, you know, unlike us. And uh so I'm sitting there and I felt bad that uh you know that the people didn't have more to eat, and plus there was a huge bowl of oranges on the on the counter. And so I open up the orange so I can taste the orange. Oh, pineapple juice is uh I taste the orange to see kind of how bad the orange tastes without sugar, it was awful. And uh, and so then I'm stupidly I'm sitting here eating an orange, and now I feel like a bad host because I have all these people out in the audience and they don't have any oranges.
Of course, I have nowhere near enough oranges for like all the people in the audience. And uh like an idiot, I say, Oh, because I'm eating this orange, oh, would would any of you like to have an orange? And of course, everyone's hands shoot up, right? Immediately. So I'm like crap.
And so now I'm like, you know, like the t-shirt gun lady, you know, I'm like hurling oranges out into the audience. Now, I'm not exactly like Captain Catch and throw here, you know what I mean? In fact, I told this one guy, I was like, sorry, you know, I don't you know, I'm not very good at throwing things. I I hit, I got to him fine, he was a catch. So then my biggest fear was I was gonna, and in fact, I think I said it was like I'm gonna bean someone with one of these damn oranges, and I hit a lady square in the head with an orange.
I bounced the orange straight off the top of her head. I was like, uh and like I saw her, her hands were there. It wasn't actually a bad throw. Maybe it was a little too much of a line drive to her, but her hands were there, and the hand didn't close around the orange in time, and it bounced off of her head, and and uh the lady behind her caught it. So it's total total orange pandemonium.
But I think no one came up and tried to beat the crap out of me afterwards. So I think they were real people. Yeah, anyway, so yeah, so that uh that was uh it was a lot of fun, and hopefully those guys got something out of it. Anyway, so get your questions ready for cooking issues coming to you live from London next week. This has been Cooking Issues on the Heritage Radio Network brought to you by S.
Wallace Edwards, fine country hands. Vicious fish is crap. Oh, you daddy crap. Got me on this corner, and I don't know where I'm at. Supposed to meet my baby between the minutes late.
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