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Let's retake our plates. Oh, you dead. And I don't know where I'm at. Hello, and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, the host of Cooking Issues, coming to you on the Heritage Radio Network.
I am not in the studio today. Today we're coming live to you from London's Heathrow Ape uh Airport as uh Nastasha the Hammer Lopez and I are waiting to fly back to uh New York City. But we're still here live to take all of your cooking related questions. Uh call in to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128.
Now, unfortunately, Nastasha's sitting next to me and we can't have two of our cell phones calling in at once, so she's gonna have to just make comments uh next to me from the from the peanut gallery. But we're gonna try to do uh the best we can. Actually, Nastash and I were both over here doing uh demonstration uh for uh of rotary evaporation here in London, which is interesting. We had to hang out with our other good rotary evaporation friend, Tony Calliaro. Uh and uh it was a good time, right?
Yeah. Anyway. So uh we have some email questions, thankfully. Oh, do I like to set up the call number? Call in your questions to seven one eight four nine seven two one two eight.
That's seven one eight four nine seven two one two eight. Uh so uh Marv Woodhouse from Belfast UK writes in uh I'm hoping to get an ISI cream whipper for Christmas. Can the same unit be used for CO2 and N2O cartridges? I would like to use the same unit for infusion and for carbonation. Uh okay, so first of all, what we're talking about is the uh the you know the things that you buy to make whipped cream.
They're made by ISI, which is a company out of Austria. Uh anyway, so they have the ones that are made for soda water, uh, which are you know, the soda sisons, and they have the ones that are meant for whipped cream, right? Uh and the main difference between those two is the soda ones have uh a uh like a tube. First of all, the neck is much smaller, and they have a tube that goes down to the bottom of them so that when you press the the little lever to dispense it, the the liquid is forced through the tube and out of the uh nozzle, just like you know, in the three stooges. Everyone gets sprayed in the face of seltzer, that kind of thing, right?
Uh but they both take the exact same cartridges. So you can put uh N2O, the whipped cream cartridges into an into a CO2 machine, and you can put uh you can put and and vice versa. They they they both work. Now I would definitely recommend getting the cream whipper rather than the uh rather than the seltzer one. The seltzer one has a much smaller neck, so you can't put a lot of things into it uh as easily as you can into the whipped cream one, and you can actually carbonate.
I mean it's not my favorite to carbonate, but you can carbonate with the whipped cream uh with the whipped cream thing. The the trick is um you know, you you have to just vent off the excess CO2, open it, and pour it all out. You can't dispense it like a three stooges uh movie. You have to actually vent it and then pour all pour all the carbonated liquid out. Usually when you're carbonating with a with a uh whipped cream maker, though, what you want to make do is put some uh put some ice in so it's very, very cold.
Make sure everything's extremely, extremely cold, and it's probably gonna take two chargers. You're gonna want to shake, you're gonna want to, and this is in a regular whipped cream maker. You're gonna want to put your first CO2 cartridge in, shake it up a bit, and then vent it out. Now you're getting rid of all the air and everything in there. That air is what's gonna the air is your main enemy in carbonation.
So one of the main problems I have with carbonating in those bottles is that you can't get all the air out of the headspace. So basically, that first charger is really venting all of the air out of the head space and also uh getting rid of a lot of the stuff that's going to make it foam. And then the second charger you put on, the second CO2 charger is what's really going to get it nice and fizzy. Then you put your second charger in, shake it, and let it stand for a couple of minutes for the bubbles to settle down, slow, slowly, slowly vent it, unscrew it, and pour it out, and you should have a delicious carbonated product even in your whipped cream whippers. So that is a I would definitely go uh Marv for the uh whipped cream maker and not the CO2.
Uh anyway, okay. So we have uh a second question from Melissa. Uh Melissa actually uh graduated from uh Stanford, you know, for those of you out there, Nastasha is a Stanford graduate, the same year uh as Nastasha, uh, and so uh they have, I guess, some sort of uh kindred kindred spirit. Uh but she has a couple of questions. One relating to mangoes.
Um both uh she and her fiance are uh huge mango fans. I mean, she grew up in Malaysia, I guess, which is you know, they have some good mangoes in Malaysia. I've never gotten to go to Malaysia, but I hear they have some good sort of there, so we'll assume they were good. Um so they they you know, eat them by the by the boat load, everyone loves the mangoes, and then all of a sudden, about six years ago, her fiance develops this uh this allergy to mangoes, right? And uh and actually I feel, you know, I I feel for this as well because uh I was allergic to nothing growing up, and then all of a sudden when I became about 30, 31 years old, I developed a uh an allergy to cherries.
Now they my throat closes up and I have to go to the hospital and all this, it's it's a nightmare. So my wife doesn't let me have any more cherries, even though they're actually my favorite fruit. I guess, you know, I was being punished for uh always making fun of other people's allergies. So because I always make fun of other people's allergies, you know, someone said, Hey, how about you become allergic to your favorite fruit? Anyway, um and interestingly, uh, he became allergic after sitting down and consuming an entire box of mangoes in one sitting.
This guy sounds like he's you know, kinda like me a little bit. The way I did it with cherries is well first I had a preposterous m uh number of lobsters at this summer party, and then, you know, I I bought a giant bag of cherries to kind of wash down the the lobsters, and of course I ate the whole bag by myself and I ended up in the hospital. So I guess there is something too you know, too much of a good thing. Uh and so her question is, is there any way to neutralize the toxin in mangoes to make them edible for someone who's allergic to them without compromising the integrity of their flavor or texture, uh either through some physical cooking method or by adding some kind of neutralizing it. The first uh way, and this is the way I hope it is, uh for him, that you can be allergic to mangoes, is you can be allergic to uh uh a a chemical uh which I can never get the name right, but it's like u your which is basically it's very similar to the right here's the chemical that's in poison ivy, and there's a little bit of that chemical in the out in the mango skin and in the sap, right?
So and then you're gonna get like a contact, like you're gonna get a rash, basically a dermatitis from touching it. Well, just like you would get from poison ivy. The good news is if you if you wear gloves and you peel the mango relatively thickly and don't let the peel get back onto the fruit after you cut it. The people who are allergic to that, to uh the eruciool or however you pronounce it, like th those those people can um can have mango, okay. Now um the there are people though who are legitimately allergic to the mangoes uh themselves, right?
And that's closer to the allergy I have with uh with cherries. And most fruit allergies basically uh have uh uh to do with proteins that are on uh that are on the fruit, in the fruit, and and somehow they seem to be from the research I've done related to um actually pollen allergies. And unfortunately, uh there's no way to uh get rid of those in a raw fruit. Now it certain of these proteins are destroyed by cooking. So it like theoretically with me, I could eat cooked cherries, but unfortunately I never really like cooked cherry products.
I just like raw cherries, and I don't feel like experimenting with it and ending up in the hospital and having my wife like you know, call me an idiot for for experimenting with cooked cherries and going to the hospital. But it is theoretically possible that um that you can cook it and have the allergy go away. Now, all this is assuming that it's not like an anaphylactic, like uh I mean I go to the hospital when I eat these things because my throat closes up and I sound like daffy duck because you know I can't breathe anymore, and you end up in the hospital, but it's not really a full-on anaphylactic reaction, like my body doesn't shut down. It's just my throat closes up because of the contact with the stuff like my throat. So if it is that, um, you know, you have two basic things you have to figure out.
What you know, what are you allergic to? Uh is the actual mango, uh, or is it just this chemical in the skin? And then it does cooking make it go away. I'm not s sure specifically with mango, but it you have a a good shot, but there's nothing you're gonna be able to do that's gonna make uh if it is the mango itself, to make a raw mango uh, you know, not uh not cause a reaction, unfortunately, you know, because uh I'm sure you know a raw mango and a cooked mango, they are not the same thing. Um so Melissa also asks uh whether she knows that uh Nastasha's worked with Cesare Cosello, one of our one of our good friends, uh Italian chef from Tuscany.
He's uh used to be the uh the salt he like he's a sultan of salumi now, and he was the what the uh wither of beans or something like that, the the empresario of beans. I mean he has like these Tuscan beans, he has this Salumi, he runs the Salamaria Rossi and uh you know up in the uh upper west side of New York. Uh all-around good guy, and we like him. And so um Melissa was wondering whether Nastasha had any recommendations because she's setting up a tour to Italy, uh, and you're uh uh lucky that uh Cesare has just started uh a culinary tours company of Italy where he takes people from the USA to visit and uh taste and visit not not only just restaurants but shops and vendors. And if I know Cesare and I do, you know, it's gonna be an interesting tour.
I mean, the man knows his suppliers over there, and he knows uh, you know, he knows food and he definitely knows uh Tuscany like the like the back of his hand. And uh I don't have his website here, but it's Cesare Cosella, and or you can you guys who are you know write questions into the to the radio show can just write uh Nastasha if you're interested in in contact info for that. Um we have a caller, Dave. Oh, we have a caller? Oh, caller, you're on the air.
Hello? Hi. How are you doing? Um I just had a quick question, uh, and I'm gonna make it super short because I'm actually in class as we speak. But uh I had a question about making bitters.
Okay. Hello? Hello? Hey, what's your question on bitters? Um I was just curious about the process of making it uh in your home.
Like uh where could you find information on it? Um and like where to start really. Right. So if you troll the uh if you troll uh kind of bartender's forums and probably on on uh e-gullet, there's a load of information on bitters. Another excellent source is a little some of the old bitters recipes are in the old kind of alcohol handbooks that are available on Google Books, like the old stuff in the eighteen hundreds, like there's a look at those.
Uh yeah. And you can get a lot of those uh yeah. I was just gonna say, is it better to start with uh overproof alcohol like a spiritist or an everclear, or is it better to use something flavorful, or really does it depend on the profile you're looking for? It depends on the profile you're looking for, but most often people start with an overproof product and they get you know a faster and probably a more complete result with that, and then you can water it down when you're done. But most people are starting with with an overproof product.
Um, one thing I you know I will say that's interesting, a lot of people ask, because you know we have a lot of new techniques for infusion, and uh, you know, I don't like if you use one of the newer techniques, I don't think you're gonna get the same result as you would get with the older technique. Like I say, not better, not worse, just different. So we'll definitely look into the you know into some of the older some of the older recipes if you're trying to achieve an authentic order result. I mean, I know John Derragon was one of the first people to make Abbott's bitters, but I think Abbott's is now maybe commercially available. I don't know if the maybe the Bitter Truth has it or not.
Also cocktail uh cocktail kingdom grapeholms uh website, he has a lot of information on bitters because he has a lot of the old recipe books. But it's very simple to do. It just takes time and sourcing of the herbs. And if you're in New York, there's a couple places uh downtown that have like very good uh herb selections or else online. I don't have the website off the top of my head where to go.
But most of that, most everything's available. Okay, great. I'm actually uh in New York, so I guess most stuff is readily available. Um really they say that the the slow time is the best way to do it. There's really no way to push it.
Well, it's not the only way, but if you want the actual specific flavors that you would get from those uh older older ways of doing it, then I would do it that way. I mean I haven't experimented so much with straight, like actual like uh using a similar recipe, for instance, to like an Angostura or an Abbott's or a patient should try and get a fast result using one of my new techniques. The new techniques would, I'm sure make a great result, but they would be different. In other words, I don't just don't think it's a matter of better or worse. I think it's just different in what you're shooting at.
If you're trying to recreate an old recipe, then I would do it the old way. If you're just interested in your own flavors, then buy you know, by all means, use one of the newer techniques and see whether you come up with something that you like better. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, absolutely. Uh thank you so much.
No problem. Good luck with it. Tell us what happens. All right. Uh so let me see what we have going on here.
I have another question. Someone uh asks, uh Colin, uh, do you know what is in a Ferron Adrian's product, Fizzy from his texturas line? Now uh Ferrand Adria, you know, the famous chef from Albuli has a whole line of products called texturas, which are kind of new ingredients that are unfortunately called molecular gastronomy uh ingredients uh, you know, by people because they they're you know, a lot of the ingredients that are you know labeled by uh reporters and whatnot as molecular gastronomy, even though anyone that knows me knows I did test that term, Ferrand Adria to test that term, uh Hesson Bluewenthal to test that term, Harold McGee to test that term, Wiley Duflain to test that term, uh pretty sure Grant Aikens to test that term. Uh I can't uh it's very hard to find someone who likes the term molecular gastronomy who who you know, speaks English. Um but that said, uh that's often how they're labeled.
So Fizzy is one of these products he has. He sells a methyl cell line, he sells uh he sells uh an alginate, he sells all this stuff. But pizzy is one that's supposed to be a carbonation uh kind of thing, the fizzy, but and it and it it's a solid. Now unfortunately I haven't actually used it. So uh the question is is there's two basic ways that it could could be I since I haven't used it I can't say what it is, but there's two basic things that could could happen.
One, it can be similar to a pop rocks. And Pop rocks, uh the way you make pop rocks is you take sugar and you heat it till it's molten, until it's molten sugar, and then you put very high pressure on it, like eight thousand uh eight sorry, eight hundred to a thousand psi uh it's pounds per square inch uh of carbon dioxide into it and basically infuse the the CO2 at that very high pressure. You then allow it to set into a block, you release it, at which point the the candy explodes, leaving you with these little rocks inside of the rocks are high pressure carbon dioxide. When you put it in your mouth you melt the candy and pop that high pressure carbon dioxide comes out and hits your tongue. And that's why uh pop rocks is so much sharper in taste than um than a normal seltzer because it's actually you know quite a high concentration pressure of CO2 there.
Anyway, that's pop rocks. So and you can buy neutral pop rocks. Uh there's a company in um in America called Chef Rubber that sells them and there's a bunch of people who make kind of blank pop rocks and then you can just mix them into things. Now the other way to get a fizzy effect is by using an acid and base reaction. This is similar to how kind of alcohol seltzer works or something like that.
So you when you're doing that what you're doing is you you know the classic one you could mix uh like when you make a kid when you're doing a a uh a volcano when you for a science project you mix baking soda which is a base and vinegar, which is an acid, and it'll foam up and you're supposed to color it red, of course, so it looks like a volcano. You you add the vinegar pfft it foams all over everything, right? This classic acid base. But you can also use that to make things fizzy in your mouth. And so you you can use citric acid, and then you could use uh a you know, you could use a base like baking soda, you could use a more neutral base, and you you arrange them such that they neutralize each other so you don't have a residual base or acid.
Uh so it's possible that they're taking an acid and a base and then mixing them into uh sugar, uh syrup solution, and then turning it into granules, and then you eat it and it and it forms fizz in your mouth. So I'm not exactly sure what the what the fizzy is, but it could be uh either one of those things. It's probably an acid base because a lot of the recipes for fizzy have you grinding them up to use them, and that wouldn't work with uh pop rocks. Um but uh I unfortunately am not sure. Someone has to send me a container of it, and I'll play around and report back.
So uh we're gonna go to a commercial break and we'll come back, or not commercial break, a music break, I guess. But please call in your questions to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128 cooking issues live from Heathrow. I feel fellow. You're getting down.
We're gonna have a pump good time. We're gonna have a pump button. We're gonna have a pump cook. We're gonna have a pumpkin. We've gotta take a high.
Welcome back to Cooking Issues. Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues, call in all your cooking related questions to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. Now, before I come back to answering any questions, uh, you know, tell you guys a little bit of what we've been doing for the past week, uh two weeks, three weeks. Uh and so uh and apologize a little bit for the fact that we haven't had a lot of posts going up on the bog.
Uh part of the reason is is you know, uh Nastash and I were trapped in uh trapped. London's a great place, but we were in London and the hotel had no free Wi-Fi. Not sorry, no Wi-Fi at all. The internet was completely broken. So we had basically no internet access for the past uh three days.
It's kind of weird to think how your life changes these days. I mean, you know, it didn't even have the internet when I was in college and uh, you know, not much of the internet, and now you know I'm complaining when I don't have it for for three days. So anyway, so uh since we last spoke uh uh on cooking issues, I've been to Kentucky and I went to a bunch of distilleries in Kentucky, and then uh we just went to London, but it's been kind of an amazing week, so I think I'll just talk a little bit about that. I don't I usually talk about kind of where I've gone or what I'm doing, but might as well since some of it's uh pretty interesting. So uh in in uh in London, I visited uh Nastasha and I visited the Broedale collection.
Now the the Brodale collection is the largest uh collection of fruit in in the world. It's in Kent, which is about an hour outside of London by train. And it is like it is nirvana. It is like, you know, if I had to pick the closest place to, you know, heaven on earth in terms of temperate, you know, temperate climate fruits, this is it. It's crazy.
Yeah, you first of all, uh everyone there, which is three people, apologized that, you know, that we went on a Monday because there was no one there. And remember, this is now it's prime apple season, and Nastasha and I went there for the apples because I visited with Harold McKee. I had visited uh you know about four years ago, three, four years ago, the uh the Geneva New York apple extension, which is the largest single apple collection of apples in the world. And it was a life changing experience. It was amazing.
You know, I got preposterously sick off of apples over the course of two days with McGee wandering through the trees and just eating and spitting, eating and spitting, eating and spitting, you know I you know we became our own cider presses. Anyway, so at that time I also decided I wanted to go to the Brogdale, which is the English collection. Now the English and the and the Americans, we kind of had a you know, like a friendly rivalry back in the 1800s up to the early, early 1900s of kind of who could grow the best apples, you know, who could who who had the because it was kind of a you know the Victorian area Victorian era, a lot of people were developing new fruit varieties was really kind of an important thing to do. And it was really kind of the golden era of fruit and this is when you know the thousands and thousands of varieties really you know became available. And so I really wanted to come over to England where I am right now and um taste some of these English varieties in their native setting and just basically see how the Brodale uh you know works.
So anyway, so Nastash and I show up on a Monday the place is deserted. We saw not one soul, not one soul the entire we were there for five hours eating fruit, and we saw not not one person, a tour bus showed up. It took like three pictures of the outside of the orchard, they got back on the tour bus and they walked away. I mean, those guys, these guys missed out on the biggest, the coolest thing they possibly could have gone to because it's not turns out it's not just apples. Like for me, the apples ended up being a side bite because I've already tasted a bajillion jillion apples at the at you know the Geneva Apple Extension in uh upstate New York.
Uh and by the way, you know, New York apples are some of the finest apples in the whole world, not to toot our horns, but you know, two toot. Um so you know, we go there and apples aren't the first thing you come to. Pears are. And you know, I've never been such a huge pear person. But I go in there and uh they have something like 400, 500 varieties of pear, uh a lot of which are still on the tree.
It's actually past prime picking time for the pears. But on the tree they're still fine, so it's prime eating time for the pears. Uh and Nastasha and I tried maybe, oh, I don't know, maybe uh uh 200 varieties of pears, uh most of which, you know, at the end, we were just we would split the rows in half, and Nastasha would take the right half, I would take the left half, and we would just eat them, and if they were interesting, we would tell each other uh about it. But and we'll post on soon on the blog, but uh suffice it to say that there is a lot more to know about pears than you have ever known if all you've had is a supermarket pear. The range of flavors and textures in pears is astonishing, not surprising, astonishing.
We had pears that tasted like rose water, we had uh we had a whole variety of pears that I didn't even learn about, which are pears that are uh only cooking pears. So they they never get soft. You can actually, these are pears that can actually be stored a long, long time over winter and be used into spring, and they're they're hard like rocks, and they they need to be cooked. They don't develop their flavor uh or their proper texture until they're cook until they're cooked. But you know, unlike cooking apples, which are you know have similar characteristics but are basically just tart, like these ones are you know big useless uh until they're uh until they're cooked.
And we we tried a couple, unfortunately I can't bring any back to the States to uh cook them to see what happens, but you know, case of Rasra. Uh we had uh just an infinite variety of textures and aromas. And so when you read the old books on uh plumology, which is the fruit study, you know, usually these temperate fruits like apples and pears and stone fruits, you'll uh you know, you'll you'll hear people say how awesome pears are, but you're sitting there as a modern person being like, pears, who cares about pear pink pear? Yeah, I like a pear, but what's the big deal? Uh and then you really get into it and you see what the huge, huge, huge differences are.
And all of a sudden, all the old recipes, like the you know, the medieval recipes for cooked pears, like chardwardens, the famous one, like these ones all make kind of more sense and you kind of want to cry them with the actual with the actual pear now. And and you know, four or five years ago when I became infatuated with the idea of all these apples and flavors that we've lost, I didn't even consider the pear. And now I'm just as hyped on pears as as I am on apples. Uh but that's not all this farm has. I mean, this farm is acres and acres and acres where they they basically let you roam free.
They have signs to say don't walk off the path and go into the orchards, but I mean, come on, I mean, that's just there, I think, for liability reasons, because they have huge rabbit holes. By the way, I mentioned this place is full of game. There's game everywhere. There's rabbits, there was like pheasant, there was like if like if you w like were allowed to just go on that land and like with a shotgun and a still, you would never have to leave because they have all the game, all the fruit, you could distill, I mean, it's just it's crazy. Anyway, so uh they have a huge plum orchard with uh several hundred varieties of plum.
Uh, unfortunately, as I said earlier in the program, I'm allergic to cherries, but you know, maybe Nastasha can go back during cherry season because they have hundreds of varieties of cherry and they specialize mainly in sweet cherries. Kent is interesting as a group, they specialize mainly not in in cider apples, but oh they have cider apples, but they specialize mainly in in not in cider apples. Cider apples are apples that are are toutannic to use by themselves, they're very good for uh for cider. And Kent, the local ciders are actually made with uh sweeter sweet apples, sweet apples and cooking apples, not with tannic cider apples. It's the West Country uh ciders in the UK that are famous for their very, very tannic apples, small tannic apples that they use in their cider.
So Kentish cider actually traditionally uses so a lot of people in this country, well in this country where I'm now but where I live in the US, they think that you're topping out if you're using non-civered varieties for uh your cider, but it turns out it's actually fictional in certain places like Kent to use non cider varieties um of apples. So these but these guys have cider varieties, sweet varieties. They also have a huge nut forest with like a billion different kinds of hazelnut. I mean the place is nuts. I mean I wish I could have spent Nash and I have a huge gastrointestinal problems as a result of being there because uh you know we provide uh you know like I say you know if at least w one or two hundred varieties of pear a b you know bazillion apples.
Uh we had some plums even though they were well past prime and don't bother with the plum. A plum plastime is uh i is is no fun. Uh and then we went back to their little cider shop and drank ciders. But uh if you were in in England, you know, skip the Tower of London, skip anything and go get on a train, go to Faversham, which is the little town where it is, uh go to the Broadale and uh go there in fruit season and have one of the most miraculous fruit experiences you are uh ever gonna have in your entire life. A completely uh uh life game uh operation there.
Hey Dave, we have a caller. Hello, is that you Jen? We have a caller? Hey Car, you're on the air. Great.
My name's Corbin. I'm from San Diego. And I had a question about reproducing a barbecue pulled pork using sous vide. There are a couple things I like about barbecue pulled pork. One is the smoky flavor.
The other is like the uh a nice crust of bark that you get on the outside. And I know sous vide is a good way to control the temperature and make it nice and tender, but how can I get the smoke and the bark after or before using sous vide. Yeah it's tough. There's a couple of problems. One is that when you use sous vide, at least with uh the lower temperatures that are associated with Sous vide, you're not gonna get the same texture.
So if you I don't know if you've done it before but when you do like a short rib when you're cooking sous vide um you'll notice that the connective tissue gets soft but it doesn't render out right so the fibers never get kind of stringy the way that they get in a traditional uh in a traditional braise. So in traditional braise or a barbecue the the connective tissue is going to melt out and the fibers in the meat are going to basically going to be lubricated by that connective tissue. That's why the meat without connective tissue never tastes good done barbecue right so when you're doing it in sous vide the stuff turns soft but it doesn't render out and that's why one of the interesting things about sous geed like short rib for instance is that you can slice it unlike normal thing which is going to break apart because the fibers are totally broken apart. So the texture is um a little bit a little bit different. Um and so it's not I'm think going to pull the same way that uh texture wise that a that uh normal barbecue I mean I don't know what you're making I assume pork right pulled pork is gonna it's gonna work.
The other thing is is that you s that the the outside crust, I mean you but you one way you could do it I mean the smoke is going to be tough. You need smoke, right? And I'm assuming that you know there are some high quality smoke applications that you can put on uh or you could do a cold smoke kind of a situation but it doesn't taste quite the same. Like something that's smoked doesn't taste the same as something that has the smoke flavor from barbecuing it from being bar you know from being made into barbecue. They don't to me they don't taste quite the same although I don't know the chemistry of why that's the case.
But um you could apply a smoke. There are some very high quality smoke products that taste a whole hell of a lot better than liquid smoke, but it's still people don't like to do it because you're basically applying a smoked flavor to something rather than smoking it naturally. But you could you could like cold smoke or uh even uh hot smoke after the Sous V step or after the low temp step but you're still gonna need if you want that that that surface on the outside you're gonna need to apply some dry heat to it to actually get some of the moisture out of it. Now you can apply that with a higher uh higher temperature than you would do when you're making normal barbecue and that would allow you to keep the inside still um you know have the advantage of the low temp but uh you know we're having the outside dry out a little bit but it's gonna be totally different because then it to obtain that same surface that you would get you want to have a kind of a the browning happen for a long time over a low temp and it's not going to provide the same result because in order to keep the low temperature result on the inside you're gonna need to put it like in a five hundred degree uh like grill or oven or something that to really get the outside you know to crisp up on you and and get it to firm up without overdoing the inside but it's not gonna be exactly the same result. It would still be delicious, right?
But I don't think it's gonna be the same result. Is that that makes sense or no? Yeah, yeah. So I might get a di a a different product, but I could still uh get something that's delicious and um maybe approximates barbecue. Yeah that's uh yeah I mean it's gonna be totally different but yeah low temp cook and you can you can either put something smoking in the bag or you can smoke it a little bit afterwards or get a real like put some chips or something to make your grill real smoky get your grill hot as hell put it in there you know not touching the fire maybe but like a away from the hot as hell and then crisp up the outside and uh and get some smoke flavor in it that way and you can make a delicious product but I don't think it's gonna be the the same as like regular barbecue.
Delicious but different you know what I mean? Yeah yeah great yeah so I I called a couple of weeks ago and I had some questions about I bought a used lab circulator so I'm gonna I'm gonna try it out. I got some good advice last time and I think I got some good advice this time so I'll let you know how it goes. Yeah let us know how it goes and uh hopefully it works out for you. I think it will great thank you.
All right thanks for all right we're gonna go to our third second commercial break uh call in your questions to 718 uh 4972128 that's 718 4972128 cooking issues live from Heathrow Airport You know what? We're not here, groove like this. Oh, yeah, baby. Yeah. Yeah.
Back way up young man. It's thing. Look at you. Never got a groove like this. No.
No. Grip. Welcome back to Cooking Issues. It's Dave Arnold with Cooking Issues. Uh, calling your questions to 718-497-2128.
That's 718-497-2128 on the Heritage Radio Network coming to you live today from Houston Airport in London, where Nastasha the Hammer and I are waiting to get back to New York City. So we have a couple of more questions here. One is uh Colin writes in that he's interested in buying quinine sulfate. Uh and he says he's having some problems getting quinine sulfate. Now, quinine uh is the product in tonic water that gives it its characteristic bitterness.
It's also uh what is uh I mean the reason it was there originally is quinine, which comes from a bark, by the way. Uh Kinshona, I think it's how it's pronounced, so I can never remember. Uh this this quinine uh is an anti-malarial, right? Which is why uh, you know, you take it if you're gonna go to India, if you're a British, if you're a British officer in the uh 1800s, you don't want to get a malaria, you you drink your quinine. They eventually, you know, made this tonic out of it and they mix it with gin, and there you have it.
Now, uh, the amount of quinine in and quinine also has other cool properties like it, it's uh it's uh phosphorescent. So in clubs, if you go to a club and a black light hits it, it lights up. It's kinda cool. Anyway, so uh quinine is in the tonic water, although that is the characteristic flavor, the bitterness flavor of it. Quinine is not there in enough of a quantity to stop you from getting malaria.
So if you're you know, don't think you're gonna, you know, cure your malaria with tonic water, right? In fact, uh the doses that you need for uh for for medicinal reasons are much higher, I think at least two times higher. Um the in the in the way that we normally put it into a drink is by using a uh derivative of salt of quinine quinine sulfate, right? And you can buy this stuff, but you have to be incredibly careful when you buy it because uh an overdose of quinine is uh you know a b a bad thing. It causes a disease known as chincotism, it's it's no good.
You have to be careful. Uh until recently you could just go in and buy it uh at a pharmacy because people will take it for leg cramps, but now it's considered a prescription medication. So there's two ways you can do it. You can get a doctor friend to write your prescription for quinine, uh you know, because you say, Oh, I have terrible leg cramps, and then they'll prescribe you some quinine. You can get quinine and do it that way.
Or I mean I don't rec I don't uh that may or may not be fraud, in which case I don't recommend it. Uh but the uh you know the other way is you go to a lab supply house and you buy uh quinine sulfate uh and you have to buy the USP grade, which is basically a pharmaceutical made food uh considered okay for consumption, and you buy a uh you know, you buy a little little vial of it. The stuff I bought, I bought from a company called Spectrum Chemical, and I bought their USP grade of quinine sulfate. And but you have to be extremely careful with it. Quinine sulfate, you're gonna want to be using on the order of well, the the legal limit for tonic water is less than eighty three parts per million, which is way more bitter than you actually want it to be so you want the the best way to use uh quinine is first of all don't let other people handle it you know you know keep it safe so people don't just you know use it like they would sugar or creamer or acid or something like that and then um make a solution of uh quinine in water or in alcohol is actually better that you keep there and then make use it as kind of a bittering agent but you gotta you want to be careful not just for a safety reason but also quinine can become uh it'll go from being not bitter enough to being very much too bitter extremely bitter uh with very small additions because the taste at least in my mind seems to be cumulative so you know a little bit of tonic water a little bit of quinine okay a little more okay a little more you know okay and another the next shot and you're like boom it's it's ruined it's too bitter.
Um so uh I would just say uh you know be careful with it but you can get it it's not cheap. I paid eighty dollars for you know a little vial of it uh but that vial has lasted me years because it takes such a small amount of the quinine to uh to to bitter up your your tonic water and then of course you you know that for the rest of your quinine work for your tonic you're either going to want to use an acid mix which which lime acid to mimic the flavor of limes which I recommend would be uh two parts of citric acid which is the um which is the acid from lemons one part malic acid which is the acid from limes and then a pinch of succinic now succinic is really going to give you the characteristic authentic lime taste uh and that one you can only get from chemical supply houses like spectrum again is where I got mine USP but you can do a fairly good but don't you again be careful with that one because it's really nasty if you add too much. But um the citric and malic acid you can get from a homebrew supply shop. It's a really good way to do it. Otherwise, you can just make your tonic water uh with the clarified lime juice, uh, which you know we have uh on our blogs.
Go to ClickingIssues.com and look up uh clarification. We have a way to clarify lime juice, and you can make a tonic water with that. And that is delicious carbonated with uh gin. Uh Colin also asks um about uh he just got a big block of peat uh and he's one you know, peat as you know most of you might know. Uh they uh roast uh malt with uh peat when they're gonna do uh you know, scotch is more or less peaty, depending on which scotch is uh and it's that you have the characteristic flavor.
So he wants to use peat, maybe uh distill peat or get uh some essential oils out of it. Um but my impression is that you don't want to use the peat directly, and that the peat is good for making peat flavor when it's being burned. So I would uh I would definitely use the peat. Uh you can smoke something with uh peat, throw some peat on the on the grill, and then uh and then let the tr flavor transfer over to your food from from roasting uh from uh you know, using the peat to to burn it. I've never actually used it, but it's something I would definitely definitely love to do.
I'm kind of like secretly fascinated with peat and also with uh bog mummies. I'm I'm with like you know, bogs, you know, what I like to pee is you go, you cut peat with bug, and there's very acidic uh conditions because you're breaking down stagnant moss in there and and it releases chemicals and acidity down there that basically you know well can uh you know, so human beings back in the days, you know, druid days and whatnot, that you know you would have these people who one reason another human sacrifice execution, whatever, killed and thrown into these bogs, and they're preserved for thousands of years very well. Um so I'm kind of have a secret fascination, I guess not so secret anymore, with uh bog bodies. But another interesting thing about pogs that uh that I'm fascinated with is the idea of bog butter. So you'll have these strange fat deposits in bogs uh called bog butter.
And then I I believe, although I can't verify this, that some people would actually put uh fat into bogs to preserve them, and then you could use them like a long, long, long, long, long, long time there. So I'd always find some ancient stash of bog butter and then um and then cook with it, but you know, uh I don't think that's uh that's gonna happen. But speaking of things that I've always wanted to have happen, and just did happen, is uh, you know, in in the US, it's very difficult to get game birds to eat unless you are a hunter because you cannot hunt meat in this commercially in the United States. So uh so anyway, so it's very difficult to get birds like woodcock, we have to get it shipped from Scotland to cost an arm and leg, uh, grouse, uh did I say grouse? No, yeah, grouse, woodcock, teal, which is kind of like a tiny duck, wigeon, which is kind of another kind of small duck, uh, knife all these birds, these great birds that you know I've read about my whole life, these great game birds, and I've never had them before.
And went uh two nights in a row to a restaurant here in London called Hicks. And the first night they had grouse on the menu, which I instantly ordered, I got the last one. I I almost had to beat the crap out of someone else so that I can make sure that I got this l last grouse because I wasn't gonna leave London without having it. And then by chance, and delicious by the way, like game bean, uh unlike any other bird I had ever had. Like everyone's says, you know, well, grouse is just different.
And I was like, well, it is, you know what I mean? Uh and menu says, you know, make and cane shot if you eat it and whatnot. And the next day we went back randomly, and the person apologized for, you know, making us go to the same restaurant twice in a row, but their menu was almost completely changed. And I just I know it must have hit a really good menu change. And they had a game feast, a game bird feast with woodcock, teal, wigeon, and snipe.
And I w uh I just went I went I went crazy. First of all, woodcock, you know, the what you know the what they say about woodcock, and it's one of these things with a really long beak, is that it takes off and as it takes off, it poops out everything that's in its intestine. So it's not basically eviscerated. All the guts are still on the inside of the woodcock and they cook it and and they serve it to you and it's got this a long beak and the head's still on the whole thing's basically entirely whole. And uh and all four birds were let's just put it this way, they're a little bit bloody.
I w I did spit some shot out onto the plate they're in the middle and this gives you even an idea of what the meal is like. So uh so anyway, so I'm there with uh these you know two friends of mine from uh 69 Coba Clow, Mimi and and Stuart, Nastasha, they're there and uh Mimi's actually I guess not for C S and Coba Clow she works with the Havana Club. We can't buy in the US. There's a fake Havana Club in the U.S. It's not really the real one a real Hannon Club can't come to the US because we're on Bargain of Cuba.
Anyway, I'm sitting there and uh I'm eating these birds like literally there's blood from the birds all like all over my hands, not looking over I have like a piece of heart from the woodcock like stuck on my knuckle. You know that I'm looking across the table and I'm sure I have blood all over my face from the and everyone's completely horrified. But and I said look, you know I I'm sorry uh I'm sorry but I've never had the it had a chance to eat these birds before and you know you really need to pick them up and it's really not like a neat and danger and I apologize for you know making such a mess of it but you know that's kind of that's what it is. I think I'm done. And I apologize to everyone for this horrific carnage scene.
I'm sure the entire restaurant was repulsed. Uh and and as the guy play say play plate away, he's like, oh so how was the head? And this is after I just apologize for making me this. And I was like, well what do you mean? He's like, well you're supposed to split the head of the woodcock open and suck the brains out.
So then after all that I sit there and I shove the knife through the head of the woodcock and split it in half and then uh suck the brains out. So I think that was kind of the last nail in the the coffin of decency uh for the heat. But it was a chance um that uh uh you know that I've never had before but I was that meal and I'll leave you with this that meal I had uh right after Nastasha and I had just eaten uh you know several hundreds of varieties of fruit uh so it was it's uh it was an a gastrointestinal extravaganza that day. Let's just say I had uh we had you know we're about three quarters full up with uh with uh mangled fruit parts and then we stuffed it down with yeah with with uh with our game birds and then of course I had to have dessert because it's me uh and since I was in England and going full traditional I had of course the famous pudding spot dick and this has been Cooking Issues live from Heathrow London come back to uh come back to us to the next week when we'll be back in New York City um don't know where Spoiled to be
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