Hello, you are listening to Cooking Issues on the Heritage Radio Network. I'm Dave Arnold, the host of Cooking Issues, the show where you call in with all your cooking related questions. Usually technical, but not always, right? I'm here in the studio today with Nastasha the Hammer Lopez, the uh person who keeps the wheels on the on the cooking issues train. Uh call in all your questions to 718-497-2128.
That's 718-497-2128. We'll be here live for the next 45 minutes or so. And today's Cooking Issues is brought to you by Cabot Cheese. Uh Cabot Cheese of Vermont Dairy Farm family owned since 1919 and proud to be voted your favorite t uh four-time favorite champion cheddar, whoever you happen to be. Uh look for the really great taste of cabbage cheese in your favorite grocer dairy case or on the web at Cabot Cheese.com.
So Nastasha, apparently it's not carried at grocery stores that are not your favorite. Great. Only your favorite. It's only carried in your favorite your favorite local grocery store. Actually, you know, uh they cabot does actually make some uh excellent products.
Um I haven't actually had cabbots in a while, maybe we'll go try it. Anyway, uh so uh let's go to some before we have any on-air questions. Uh let's go to some questions from the email. Uh Ryan Santos writes in, I just recently became fascinated with Vietnamese egg soda, but they confuse me in theory. Uh, first of all, uh everything I read on the internet says that the soda cooks the egg.
Is there any truth to that? Secondly, how does it foam up so much? I'd expect that from egg white, but they use egg yolks, thanks, Ryan. Okay, so for those of you that aren't familiar uh with Vietnamese egg sodas, which I assume is 99.9% of you. I was not familiar with it before uh this morning when I saw this question.
Uh what what happens is is you put uh some sweet and condensed milk in the bottom of a glass, you uh crack an egg yolk into it, and you stir it around to combine the sweet and condensed milk in the egg yolk, and then you top it with uh soda water and then you stir. Uh and it does indeed foam up uh and it gets white at the bottom and uh apparently it's delicious. I didn't have sweet and condensed milk, so I didn't taste it. I actually did crack an egg yolk into soda water this morning. Take a look at it.
Uh I'm gonna go ahead and make this statement. Uh the egg yolk is not in any way, shape, or form getting cooked in this procedure. Like, do not think in any way that you are killing the bacteria in the egg yolk by adding it to seltzer. That's just uh not not the case. That's just not the case.
Uh so I didn't see any scientific backup for uh the egg yolk being uh cooked. Uh again, do not assume it is cooked. If you're gonna serve it to someone who is uh has an immune problem or is uh pregnant or didn't you have to use pasteurized egg to use this technique? Um now uh that said, um, you know, there's not that much contamination in egg yolks these days, so it it's probably not gonna be uh a problem. I think it's one in I don't know, one in two thousand or one in eight thousand or something like that.
Uh eggs is contaminated with salmonella. So the the odds aren't very high, uh, and you're not necessarily gonna get salmonella even if you do um even if you if it does have salmonella in it. Uh that's it, it the egg yolk also is gonna cause a lot of foaming, similar to the way an egg white does, because it contains uh a lot of emulsifiers. So egg whites foam because of the protein, which helps stabilize air bubbles, and egg yolks, they also have protein, which might help stabilize a bubbles uh air bubbles, but they have a lot of emulsifiers in them. And emulsifiers, um, you know, as you may know, are things that make it easier for oil and water to kind of live together next to each other.
They lower the energy uh required uh to keep oil and water next to each other. Now, uh they also lower the energy to keep air and water uh next to each other. And so not only do they stabilize oil and water emulsions, they also stabilize air in water emulsion. So they're the protein plus the emulsifiers, uh like lessithin phospholipids, things like this in the egg yolk are going to help produce uh a nice foam. And if you you know you know from cooking that you beat egg yolks, you can make them really thick and creamy.
They hold uh they hold uh foam fairly well, not as well as an egg white, but still uh there's a lot of uh foaming potential there, especially in something gassy like uh like CO2. That said, also, uh I have to say, uh Ryan, that you caused my computer to crash in a huge way this morning because the first uh Vietnamese egg soda recipe I looked up happened to be on a porn site. And then when I tried to get off of the porn site uh to look up other things about Vietnamese egg soda, it it kept on like you know, like a million windows would come up and say, Stop! Do you do you like Asian women? Do you like Asian women?
Don't navigate away from our site if you like Asian women. So uh thank you, Ryan, for crashing my computer. Uh okay. Second question comes from Chris Anderson in New York City. Uh I was wondering if there are any differences in the way you would sous eat a highly marbolized piece of beef like USDA Prime or Wagyu as opposed to choice or select.
I read somewhere uh that the fat and wagyu renders at a lower temp than standard beef, but I'm not sure if this is true. Also, some people suggest searing meat both pre and post-Souvete, and we are some of those people, actually. Uh is there any advantage to this technique? Yes, uh, over just searing it once right before serving. Okay, these are excellent questions.
I have not done a lot of cooking with uh with with Wagyu. Um uh my assumption is is that even if the fat does render it a lower temperature, which would indicate uh a less saturated fat, um, like for instance, you know, like take for instance pork. Pork the pork fat's a lot less saturated than uh beef fat, and even pork fat doesn't really render out that much when you're cooking sous vide, especially at the temperatures you're gonna be using to cook uh a piece of wagyu, which are gonna be in the range of 54 to no higher, even for skirt or something like that, 57 degrees um unless you're doing a short rib or something uh Celsius. So in that range, you're really not gonna get a lot of fat melt out in in your uh in your meat, even if it's you know, fairly um even if it's fairly unsaturated, uh from a beef standpoint, that is. So now um as to whether or not the texture is gonna be different, I don't know.
I just don't have enough experience, but my guess is is that it's gonna handle pretty much in the same way. Uh it's just gonna have more marbling in in the center. A lot of people try to use uh the a question I get asked a lot for Sous V. And by the way, for those of you who don't know what the hell I'm talking about, Sous vide is any kind of cooking that goes on in a vacuum bag and it allows you to uh you know cook at a very accurate temperature in conjunction with low temperature cooking, which is really what I like to talk about most of the time instead of just sous vide, where we very accurately control the temperature, so there's no possibility of overcooking your meat. And uh because of that, you tend uh meats that don't have a lot of internal marbling, things like uh, you know, lower lower grade cuts of meat, they don't dry out just because you never overcooked them, right?
So a higher grade cut of meat with a lot of internal marbling is gonna taste juicy and delicious because it's got all that dang fat in it, right? Which is great, you know what I mean? But a lower one tends to dry out faster because it doesn't have that protection of all that fat. And while it is true that uh that lower grades can be cooked to good effect using sous vide, I've never been the kind of person who says, Well, I can take a crappy cut of meat now and pretend that it's a good cut of meat and serve it to someone, right, Nastasha? We're right.
We're against that, yeah. Yes. Anyway. But that said, it's a uh great technique for that. As as for your uh second question about searing both before and after, uh, yes, you should sear both before and after.
If you just search uh and we if you come, by the way, the best way to, you know, not to toot our own horn to toot, but it the best way to learn how to to do this if you don't have time in your restaurant, which almost no one does, uh, even if you've been doing uh sous vide and low temp for a while, we teach a course called Sous Vide and Low Temperature Cooking at the school. And what we do, for instance, is give you a bunch of side by side taste tests of um of uh what it tastes like if you just sear it before, or if you sear it just after, or if you sear it before and after, or if you don't sear it. And really the best way to do it is and you can just taste it if you can do it side by side. And really, one of the main values of the class that we teach is that we do all these comparisons for you that you would never have time to to do in your restaurant or uh or at home. Uh that said, um, you know, if you just sear after, can you get a good result?
Yes. But something on the order of 75 to 80% of the any given person in the in a room of, and we've done this, you know, many, many, many, many dozens of times. 75 to 80% of the people given a side by side test will prefer the one that's seared both before and after. And here, and it's also safer. Here are the reasons.
You sear it beforehand, you kill the bacteria on the outside of the meat, which is where most of the bacteria are anyway, unless you stab the meat by accident or something like that, right? So there's a safety issue. Secondly, you're gonna start coloring the meat and you're gonna start building uh the myard flavors in it, which means that it's gonna taste meatier in the bag. And it's also uh the second time when you sear it, uh it's gonna build a crust a lot, lot, lot faster, which means you're gonna get a darker crust, a better crust, a more flavorful crust on your second sear if you prime that sear at the beginning by searing it before you put it in the bag. You know, the one caveat you have to chill the meat after you sear it before you put it in the bag.
But you always have to sear afterwards because coming right out of the bag, there is no crust. It's kind of like, you know, kind of, I don't know, weak looking, right? Weak? Yes. Weak, weak, weak.
The meat is weak. You are weak. Anyway, so you have to sear uh before and after. Thanks for your question, Chris. Michael Nakin writes in, he says, So I just tried the cream whipper infusion with cocoa noes.
And by the way, we have a new technique using the ISI uh uh whipped cream makers, and you can read about it on cookingissues.com. Uh and uh it basically what we're doing is we're using nitrous oxide, which is laughing gas, the stuff that you know in high school people they buy whipped cream and they just spray the gas into their mouth to get high instead of the whipped cream, which is the part I like anyway, because I don't I hate being high on nitrous, it's terrible, it's awful, and it makes you feel really stupid, right? I mean I don't know. Oh, yeah, okay. Well I seriously always see it.
All right, sure. Okay. So uh so anyway, so you put uh you put your food, a porous thing, along with a liquid, we usually use liquor, into a container, you hit it with nitrous oxide, the nitrous oxide under pressure, uh becomes dissolves into the liquid and also forces the liquid into the pores of whatever uh you're doing cocoa nibs, staranis, uh whatever. And then you let it uh pressurize in and sit for a minute, two minutes, three minutes, it depends on the product, and then you vent the thing really quickly. When you vent the container, the the gas all of a sudden the pressure is lowered and it starts bubbling, gushing out, almost like if you shook a can of seltzer and opened it and sprayed it on your buddy, right?
And uh that gushing out and that foaming basically sucks the flavor back out of your product very quickly, and you can make very quick infusion. So that's you know, in a nutshell, that's ISI um that's ISI infusion, you know, nitrous infusion. A lot of people, let me just get into this, because a lot of people, you know, there's a lot of back and forth on the blog, and a lot of people compare it with a technique in the laboratory called uh nitrogen cavitation. In nitrogen cavitation, you're basically giving someone the bends on purpose. You're putting very high uh pressure nitrogen into something and then immediately releasing the pressure, which causes small nitrogen bubbles to form and uh rupture things apart, nitrogen cavitation.
Uh this is not r this technique, I don't really think it's the exact same as nitrogen cavitation. In a laboratory, you want to use something that's fairly unreactive, like nitrogen, and f and has fairly low solubility so that when you're done with the procedure, most of it's gone, right? Uh so this technique works at a much lower pressure than nitrogen cavitation uh because it's using a relatively soluble gas, something that wants to be soluble in a lit in the liquid, nitrous, right? Which is why I think, I think, I don't know, uh a lot of people say that these infusions taste better after they've been sitting five, ten, fifteen minutes. And I think it's because the nitr the nitrous keeps all off-gassing out out of the product.
Now I think that's what's going on, but I can't, but I can't prove it. So um so Michael says his cocoa nib uh tasted like uh a donkey's behind and uh his cocoa nib infusion that he's done. And he said the nibs were raw, he got them at a health food store, presumably aimed at raw foodists. Is that where I went wrong? Short answer, yes.
Uh should I be using toasted nibs? Short answer, yes. And have you tried it with chopped-up bar chocolate instead of nibs? No. Uh so let me go into this uh the longer form of this answer piece by piece.
Uh one, the quality of the nibs makes a huge difference in the quality of the infusion you're gonna get. Huge. Huge, right? Yes, huge. Yeah.
So uh we've tried it with a bunch of nibs, even expensive nibs, and um if you taste the nibs and they taste acrid, or if they taste kind of sour, or if they have any sort of off flavor at all, that's gonna end up in your infusion and your infusion is gonna taste like a donkeys behind. Now, uh, and we've done this with expense, even expensive companies that'll sell you their second grade nibs, uh, they tend to taste they taste bad, right? Also, um, and I have nothing I love uh I I myself have friends who are raw foodists, so I'm not saying anything against the raw foodists, but I have not yet had a raw chocolate bar that I thought tasted like chocolate, right? I mean, anyone here we're oh by the way, we've just got joined in the studio by by Nick Nick Wong. He doesn't want to talk, but he's here, so the presence of Nick is in the room.
And I was have you ever tasted a raw chocolate bar that you enjoyed? What? No. No. Right?
No. Nastasha, have you ever tasted a raw chocolate bar that you've liked? No. Now listen, here's a challenge. A challenge to anyone out there, right?
I want I want to eat a raw chocolate bar that I think is the best chocolate bar I've ever had. I'm gonna issue you a challenge. If someone can send me, if someone can send me a raw chocolate bar that I think it and I'm not a liar, by the way. If I think it's delicious, I'll say it's delicious. Everyone here agree about that?
Like I'm not a liar about that, right? No, not about that. Yeah. So if someone sends me a chocolate bar that's raw that I think is truly delicious, I will only eat raw food for a week and I will say how much I love it on the blog and on it. Only raw food for a week.
If someone sends me a chocolate bar that's raw, and I'll learn how to cook it, and I'll I'm gonna do I'll do all that stuff. If someone can truly send me something that is a chocolate bar that's raw, and by the way, I think a lot of raw food people get snowed by the idea of raw chocolate because there's a fermentation procedure, the temperatures get quite high. I don't know, it has to be uh, you know, there's bacteria in cocoa nibs, it has to be pasteurized. I don't know how you would actually pasteurize uh cocoa nibs and actually actually actually keep them raw. What they might mean is pasteurized but unroasted.
I don't know. I don't really understand in even in theory how that that would happen. Uh but uh so there's the challenge for the raw the raw chocolate bar. So um I hope that happens. Yeah, I hope so too.
Uh, because that would be it would be a good learning experience for me. Now the uh the chopped up chocolate bar, I don't think is gonna work very well because it's just not very porous. There's not a lot of uh air in the chocolate to get a good infusion across it. If you uh I mean if you're gonna use bar chocolate, I would use something more similar to fat washing where you would melt the chocolate into the uh into the um what are the word I'm looking for? Like liquor, and then uh and then put it in the freezer and then separate the chocolate out of the top, but you're gonna get some of the bitterness out that you're not gonna get in the very fl fast infusion that we do uh with with our technique.
Uh if you want to try uh with cocoa nibs, I rec we recommend, and you know, they're not paying us for anything, but it's we've had the best results with uh the Valrona uh cocoa nibs uh among cocoa nibs. And the reason we use nibs, like I say, as opposed to bar chocolate is just nibs are very porous, uh, you know, a lot of air holes in them, so we can get very good uh, you know, in and out in and out. We can put the liquor in, get the liquor out. So I hope that helps with your uh with your cocoa nib infusion problem. We're gonna go to our first commercial break.
Call in all your questions. 2718-497-2128, 718-497-2128. Cooking issues. You feel good. So much bone brother.
How you feel, mate? I'll feel all right. I don't want to know you're in, yeah. How you feel, fella? Sure getting down.
Look at him. We're gonna have a bunk good time. We're gonna have a bunk good time. Fred, get it, take us higher. Take us higher.
Fred. Welcome back to Cooking Issues Radio. Um Dave Arnold here at Cooking Issues. Call in all of your cooking related questions, technical or not, to 718-497-2128-718-497-2128 coming to you live from a uh little box outside of uh Roberta's Pizzeria in uh in Bushwick, in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Actually, um the good people from uh Roberta's did an event with us uh what was it this last weekend, right?
What was that thing called? That was called like Taste Like Teen Spirit, was it? Alchemy of Taste and Smell. Alchemy of Taste and Smell? Yeah, that was the name of it.
Something like that. Oh Jesus, we can't remember the name of it. All right. Well, Daniel Patterson, who's actually you know, one of my favorite chefs from the San Francisco Bay area. And if you ever get out to his restaurant, Qua in uh in San Francisco, you should definitely go.
It's one of my favorite restaurants. He's kind of hilarious because when you meet him, he seems like a laid-back Californian, but he's really like not at all laid back, right? I mean, he's like apparently laid back, but not. Yeah. Is that true?
Yeah, no, it's true. That's true. So he wrote a cookbook whose name I can't remember because I'm an idiot and I didn't look it up before I came on the air. And uh he um it it was basically with a uh a perfumer, a natural perfumer named Mandy Aftel, and it was about using uh essential oils and uh and different you know essences in in cooking. And so uh Mandy and Daniel teamed up to come over to uh New York and have this event about basically taste and smell, whose name we apparently can't remember, even though we worked it for two days last weekend.
Yeah. Uh and so uh there was uh it was a you know a bunch of interesting uh folks involved. Harold McGee came in, uh Dave Chang was there, uh Wiley Dufresne, you know, uh my my my brother in law, my bro, Wiley. Uh who else do who else do we have there? Nastasha, you remember?
Uh Alexander. Alex Talbot from uh Alex Talbot. I already said Robert's colour was there. Carla was there. Anyway, so uh we had uh what what who else was there?
Alex Talbot from uh Ideas and Food, George Mendez, George Mendez from Aldea, like a bunch, a bunch of friends. Who else is? I know I'm missing someone who's like gonna be like all pissed because I've anyway, like a listener. A bunch of really Yeah, right. No, because the one person who listens is gonna go tell them about it.
Anyway, so a bunch of very good good people. So uh I don't know how how you got on this. Yeah, the alchemy of taste and smell is right. Yeah, so it was a fun event. We did a rotary evaporator presentation with Audrey Saunders, who did basically all the cocktails for the event, some really actually very good cocktails, Audrey Saunders from uh from Pegu Club.
Uh and I don't know why the hell I started talking about that. Maybe because she's really interesting. She's like she's a so she is she kind of nutty in a good way, right, Nastasha? What do you say? Not in a good way.
And she uh she gave us some like super high grade uh hove frankincense, some like from Oman, some sort of crazy good frankincense from Oman, and it had us distill it into cognac. It was pretty good. What do you think? You know, I mean It was strong. Uh strong.
Anyway, so that was a that was a fun event. That's what we were doing this weekend, and I had a reason to talk about it, but I can't remember what it is, so I'll go on to something else. Oh, we have a caller? Yes. Caller, you are on the air.
Hi there, Dave. Uh my name is Colin, down from Washington, DC. Sorry, uh the signal's probably kind of bad from what it sounds like. I'm okay, I can I can hear you. Yeah.
So we've got two things. Uh one is I have been working with Judge Wan Papers. Right. Uh and looking to sort of draw out that tingling, kind of numbing parasita thing you get from them. More for the aspect than the overall flavor of them.
Okay. Uh so I was looking at ways to kind of concentrate that and kind of make it the one of the big issues is that it seems to take a couple minutes to really warm up and kick in when you just incorporate the maybe ground peppercorns in something. But I was looking to see if there are ways to kind of speed that up a bit so that it you know isn't so it's been done with the thing that I was having to eat by the time he finally hit this numbing kind of tingling thing. All right. Let me okay, stay on the air because I might have to ask you a question.
But uh first of all, very interesting. As the first person who's ever had a like a crazy cell connection where it sounds like he's on an auto-tuner, right? It's like T Pain calling in to the studio. It's like uh you know, I love auto-tuning. Everyone now, of course, loves auto-tuning, but anyway, so like a kudos to the auto-tuning cell phone reception, because that's awesome.
Uh second of all, so in case you couldn't understand, because I my connection is probably better than yours over the radio for listeners. Uh the the question was he's using Sichuan peppercorns. He's not so interested, I mean he's interested, but not for this application, in the flavor of the Szechuan peppercorn, more in the effect, the mouth, the numbing tingling effect of the Sichuan peppercorn. And so, and the question is how can you concentrate or uh or you know, get get these kind of flavors concentrated. Okay.
Uh it's very interesting. Someone just asked me last week or so whether I can distill the the the tingling effect of Sichuan peppercorn and uh as as one way to concentrate it, for instance. And the answer is I don't know because I don't know what chemical it is, so I don't know how volatile it is, whether it can be distilled. But I'm pretty sure that you can make a tincture of Sichuan peppercorn in high-proof alcohol and get and get that get that out. The other alternative you have, I mean, but besides tinctures and possibly distillation, depending on the weight.
So for instance, capsation, the heat from red pepper, doesn't distill because it's too heavy, but uh the pungency of horseradish does distill. My feeling, if I had to guess, is that Sichuan peppercorn, the tingling sensation would not distill because you can't smell it the same way you can smell the the I mean you can smell the Sichuan peppercorn, but not that kind of pungency the same way you could with like a horseradish, for instance, or a wasabi, both of which distill. Uh so my feeling is that you probably won't be able to distill it. You have to use a um you'll have to use uh uh an infusion or you could try the ISI infusion, actually, frankly, right? Where you just put the Sichuan peppercorn in an ISI container and um and then you know hi uh hit it with liquor, high-proof liquor, and hit it with two chargers, uh swirl it, let it stand, swirl it for like a minute, let it sit for another minute, vent it out, let it stand for five minutes, strain and see whether you get a good result.
I'd actually probably work, don't you think, Nastasha? That I think that would work. Yeah, we were gonna try that last week with Cliff, remember? Oh, is that Cliff? Anyway.
So uh, but here's some other alternatives if that doesn't work. Of course, uh you know, you're probably familiar with the product called uh Sichuan Buttons, which is a little flour, but it's I don't really like I mean uh I have friends who make them and sell them, so I don't want to say anything too negative about them, but I I have a problem with them because they're so strong that it tastes and they're not as subtle as Sichuan peppercorn in that Sichuan peppercorn gives you like a little bit of that funkiness and like a mouth cooling thing. This tastes like you just stuck your tongue on a car battery to me. Like it's too, it's too aggressive. And so uh I you know I can't really uh I can't I can't imagine using it just because it's so so aggressive and the effects are so long lasting that you know like I'd have a problem serving it.
Um that's me though. A lot of people love them. Uh another thing that you might want to look into is on the Japanese side, instead of going for a Chinese Sichuan peppercorn, go for like a Sancho pepper, which you know, these little green ones. And apparently the the the best ones have like two, in other words, like the it like they're looking like little green balls, and then but some of them have like two green balls, which look I hate to say this on air but like testicles kind of. They say it looks like a bell, but really they mean testicle.
Anyway, and those are the ones that are most prized. Guess why? Anyway, so they uh so those uh peppers, uh this little Sancho things, I think it's Sancho, right? Sancho. Yeah, anyway.
The those are kind of intermediate between uh the Sichuan uh peppercorn, which are drier and maybe have some of their pungency gone away, and um and and the um and the the Sichuan buttons, which I think are just kind of like hitting you over the head with a baseball bat. So you might want to try that. Is any of this helpful? You still there? No, he's gone.
Anyway, so uh thank you, Colin Colin. Uh Colin, the auto-tuning call in. Uh, and uh I hope that answers uh some of your some of your questions. So uh meanwhile, let's get back to uh some more of our other questions, which Nastasha thought it would be fun to start looking up directions to someplace while we're in the middle of the radio show so that I can't see my questions anymore. Uh uh just you know, I like to I like to nudge her a little bit while uh while we're here.
So uh Nick Wong, who is formerly uh an intern with us at the school, one of our favorites, good man, and now working at Sambar. Uh Sambar, you know, our friend Dave Chang's uh one of his restaurants, they're working on uh elderberry vinegar. So he brought in some for us to taste. It's true or false. True.
You have to get closer to the microphone when you say true. Yeah, true. Anyway, so he brought it to us in a Sazerac rye bottle, which of course we like the Sazerac rod. And my impression is initially they were going to try and make elderberry wine, but they didn't like the taste of it so much, so they're gonna make it uh in in vinegar. And I like anyone that's trying to make a vinegar, so we're gonna we're gonna give it a taste test here on air.
Hold on a sec, hold on a sec. It's good. It's good, right? Nastasha, what do you well you don't like drinking vinegar, Nastasha? I think this would make a good soda if it was sweetened.
The acidity level of it is not quite up to a normal high proof uh vinegar yet. But I think if you were to um add a little bit of sugar to this and then carbonate it, it'd be a great soda. And we've actually done vinegar sodas uh before. One of my favorite things that we I've ever worked on was we did a uh a vinegar soda that we poured over uh fig ice cream. That was that was some delicious business, right?
That was some good stuff. Anyway, so like uh this this uh maybe uh we could use for something like that. Anyway, so uh I have a question here. Uh maybe I'll hand it that one after the after the commercial break. Uh Matthew Hex writes in and says, It's Matt from uh Uptown who took uh the cla our Sous Vintensive class.
Howdy, Matt. Uh, and he got a great deal on a poly science model 71 immersion circulator on eBay. Uh and it works great, but he has a few questions. Now I'm uh I didn't have time to look up which one was the model 71, but I think I have an idea from what you uh are you know asked me the questions on which one it is, so we'll we'll deal with it. And for those of you uh out there who don't know what immersion circulator is, there's not probably not that many ones of our list people who listen to us who don't know what emergent circular is, but I hope there is.
And and here's what it is it's a piece of equipment that very, very accurately controls water or liquid temperatures, and it's kind of the piece of equipment that you need to do low temperature cooking. And low temperature cooking is the kind of the revolutionary new cooking technique where you know instead of cooking a steak to you know in a 400-degree oven, even though you only want to cook it to 130 degrees, you just cook it to 130 degrees and then sear it uh before and after. Okay? So that's what we're talking about. And you know, they used to be like $2,000.
Uh they then went down to about a thousand, and now you can buy them in Williams Sonoma for about $800. So uh I believe the Model 71 is an old school analog one that doesn't have a digital readout. And I've talked to Philip Preston, the manufacturer uh of the polycynife circulators, um, for a um you know, for a long time about these older ones, and they work great, right? Um the problem is is that you need to uh calibrate them because there's no digital readout that uh you know tells you what temperature it's at. You have to put a thermocouple into your bath and then just turn the dial uh and then you just wait to see where it stabilizes, and you're gonna see the light, the heating light, flash off and on, and it's gonna get stable and it will stay stable.
It's not gonna go all over the place. They are nice and stable, but you do need an external digital thermometer to uh determine exactly what temperature you're at, and that's really the disadvantage of an analog, um, an analog uh circulator. The other question was there's a thermostat on the back, and uh and uh Matthew wants to know what it's for. Uh now uh what that is is that's usually the over temp thermostat. So if like a knucklehead cook in your in your place pulls the uh circulator out of water and then runs it out of water, there's a there's a little safety override such that it doesn't melt the whole machine down and catch your building on fire.
And that little safety thermostat in the back determines at what temperature it decides to click and turn off. I would just turn it up to 200, which is two or like 150, anything well above the boiling point of water, just so it's not clicking off on you all the time, because if it does click off, you have to press a little reset button to get it to work again. So uh that said, as long as that thing keeps working, it should keep working forever. Those older units, well, not forever, but should keep working well and accurately. Those older units have a different style of bearing on them, so you might start hearing bearing squeal after uh you know after um you know a couple months or a year, in which case, you know, you can WD 50 it uh 50, WD 40 it for uh yeah, slip the tongue.
Uh you can WD 40 it for a little while, but eventually then your motor's gonna go, at which point I don't know whether it would make sense to replace it, but you know, if you get a good deal, uh they they work great. And by the way, a note on the on the new circulators that are coming out. If you have one of the new circulators uh from Philip with uh poly science, the ones that they have in William Sonoma, which I you know I like. That's what I use at home now, is the new one. Uh well if you're if you're working in New York City, the first thing you should do is pop the little plate off the front that says Sous vide professional and just sand the word sous vide off of it so that if you have it in your kitchen in New York City and the health inspector walks in, they're not like you're doing sous vide without a hasuk plan.
So that's that's exactly that's the first, even though I have it at home. The first thing I did was pop the plate off and sand the word sous vide off of it. But the second thing is you should be very careful um that none of your cooks uh go uh into the calibration mode in it uh and um and change the temperature. So if you you know you just press a button and you and you can like change it between Fahrenheit and Celsius, which is also awesome. I love that.
But if you press that button again, you're changing the offset, which is basically a calibration feature. But if you're not careful, right, you can basically throw it out of calibration by like three degrees. So it's something you should be aware of is to is to make sure your cooks aren't changing the calibration without knowing it. I had a cook do that, and uh, you know, all the eggs were off by three degrees. So instead of being a perfect poached egg, we had raw eggs.
You know what I mean? Because the difference between a sixty-two degree Celsius egg, which is perfect for eggs benedict, and a 59 degree egg, which is almost raw, is like, you know, huge, huge. Anyway, so uh be careful your cooks aren't changing the offset. I think in in future versions, uh Philip's gonna make it so that uh it's a lot uh harder to change the offset. But that said, we love the new circulator.
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Gotta hell a pump. Oh yeah. Welcome back to Cooking Issues, a show where we answer all of your cooking issues, or at least we try to. Call in your uh questions too. 718 497 2128.
718, still got vinegar in my mouth. 718 497 2128 coming to you live for the next 15 minutes or so. Okay, so we have a question from Max. Uh, and uh part of it I'm just gonna read straight just because uh I can't I can't possibly paraphrase. But uh he recently found a manufacturer of Xanthan gum where he can purchase like a food-grade Xanthan gum.
He calls it blow, which is hilarious. Although if you were like uh he's here, I'll read it exactly. He says, uh, I recently found a manufacturer of Xanthan gum uh near me to purchase food and pharmacy grade blow. Now, assuming you're referring to the Xanthan gum as blow and not as cocaine, don't ever snort Xanthan gum. That stuff's gonna seriously slime up in your nasal passages, and you're gonna be in for a world of hurt.
Am I right about this? World of hurt. I mean, I have look, I'm not gonna say I haven't as a joke packed hydrocolloids in my nose before, but I would not do that with Xanthan. I definitely would not do it. Anyway, so we ordered a couple of kilos, which is basically a lifetime supply.
Uh, because he ordered it directly from the fermenter. That's pretty cool. If you have it, send me the send me the link. I'd love to be able to buy a couple kilos of Xanthan gum at a good price. I think every chef would.
What do you think, Nick? Yes. Yes, goes for yes. Uh, and he's using it uh for baking and subbing it out for agar as a thickener and some sauces. Now, uh, before I go any further, uh, Xanthan, I don't really think is a good straight substitute for agar.
So if you're using agar as the thickener, what you're most likely doing is setting your sauce into a gel with agar and then blending it into a fluid gel. And uh the problem with using Xanthan to get that thick a texture is that it's gonna get really snotty on you. Like I much prefer to use Xanthan as either as a stabilizer, like you said in a in a baked good or something like that, or just to get that last little bit of body out, right? So the sauce is almost where it wants to be, but it just needs a little more body, and that's when I basically I pull out the xanthan. So I'm usually using it in like the one quarter of a percent up to the maybe like like third of a percent, four tenths of a percent range, in that range.
I think once you get uh much higher than that, you really kind of notice the snottiness of a sauce, like unless it's gonna stand still and no one's gonna ever see it jiggle. Um I tend to watch out. So, like a lot of times I'll use Xanthan in conjunction with another product just to help stabilize a little bit. Uh but I very rarely use it as the only thickener in a system, unless, like, you know, you say it's just to stabilize air bubbles for like a baking presentation or something like that. Okay, so uh Max's issue came when he tried to thicken smoked oil.
He used two grams per 100 gram of oil and sheared. Um this this is a lot live quote, by the way, so this is not me saying it. He called I'm gonna use this for now. And he calls an immersion blender, the stick blender. He calls it, I think I can say this on air, he calls it a dildo stick, which I think I'm gonna start using from now on.
At which point the color became a cool fluorescent red due to the extra air and powder, but after he let it sit, it just settled to the bottom of the container. Then he tried it a bunch of different ways. And and he says, Can uh can he thicken the oil on its own with the cantact cantankerous xanthan gum? Or is it uh purely a case of sugars like water not mixing with oil? Yes, it's purely a case of the uh it's a complex sugar, it's a it's a um you know, long long-chain polysaccharide xanthan gum, but yes, xanthan gum will not interact with uh oil.
You can't thicken oil with uh xanthan gum. Uh so here are your options for thickening oil. A lot of people when they thick uh thicken oil, they use uh an emulsifier called mono and diglycerides. Mono and diglycerides is sold unfortunately by some people as glycerin, even though it's not glycerin, it's mono and diglycerides. It's the stuff that's sold as glice by the Ferran Texturas line, it comes in little flakes, and you heat it into the oil, and and if you add enough of it, you can thicken it.
Uh and the the problem is is that uh it's a you know it it's the it really melts out when you get it hot, so it's really only useful to thicken like cold preps. But the the problem is also I think that in when you if to get a really really thick, like spreadable oil, you need to like get it up in the range of like 10% mono diglycerides, at which point I think you can taste the mono and di glycerides, and I think it's nasty. Like maybe if you had a higher quality monodiglycerides than I have, it would work, but I I think it's nasty. Another thing you can do is use a little bit of mono diglycerides and then emulsify in some water, and that's going to thicken it just by having like the all the watery crud in it, right? That'll thicken it.
And of course, the best way to thicken oil is to do it the opposite way and make mayonnaise. Mayonnaise with smoked oil would be delicious, delicious. Everyone here agree that mayonnaise with smoked oil is a delicious product. Yes. Yeah, yeah.
Nastasha doesn't seem convinced, but or maybe she's just not listening. Anyway, but uh the uh anyway, so oh, we have a caller? Caller, you are on the air. Hey there. Hey, it's calling again, actually.
I just found a landline and I had a second question. Although I like the auto-tuner effect, that was nice. Yeah, it was definitely slick, but I'm glad uh hear your beautiful voice on the other side. Yeah, yeah. But uh yeah, so this one pertains to things with a string like very astringent flavors.
Uh so in particular, I made a walnut liquor, and there's some I don't know. It's still pretty young, but it has some very pungent kind of uh astringentness at the end. The thing that makes your tongue just sort of feel like there's fuzz growing all over it. Right. And so I heard recently from some friends who are sort of like wild forager types, that persimmons, uh American persimmons, are also the skins of them are extremely astringent until the first frost or two, and that seems to kill it and then makes them a little sweeter.
So I was wondering if it uh you know much about you know, like uh proaking down astringent flavors and if I could maybe just put this stuff in the freezer and expect that they would drop out or break down or something. This is an extremely interesting question. Uh and um here's the here's the thing. So the uh I've always wanted to try our native persimmons, I never have. I've read about them for years.
I haven't had them. But fruits that are astringent, right? So quince, uh persimmons, if you freeze them and then thaw them out, you can lose some of the astringency, presumably because uh during the freezing, which is a dehydration process, the uh the the the kind of astringent whatever it is, tannic astringent stuff basically bonds together with other stuff and loses its astringent properties. That's gotta be what it is. Because also, if you take a persimmon and dry it, as we all know, it loses its astringency, right?
And apples that are like overly tannic apples that are very astringent back in the day, because you know, when you sew what uh apple seeds, like a lot of them come up tannic and astringent because they they're just you know, apples don't come true to seed. So a lot of these seedling for uh apple orchards, which were used for cider production, especially in like Pennsylvania Dutch company, they dry out a lot of it and they'd make schnitz, which is the dried apple slices, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And and and those lose their astringency because they're dried, and so now all of a sudden you can make a pie or something out of the dried apples or make or make you know schnitz and gnepp, whatever you call the ham and schnitz thing, because um the astringency has been modified by the dehydration process. And and you should always think of freezing as a as a dehydration process.
Now, in the liquor, I don't know that it's gonna work. The astringency, I assume, from the walnut is coming from the skins of the walnut. I'm assuming. Now, uh you could try freezing it, and if you get a good result, I would love to know that whether or not that does anything. Uh it's going to be hard to freeze unless it's a very low-proof liquor, it's going to be hard to freeze anyway.
But you you if you if it if it works, that would be amazing to know. But there's another alternative, which is there are, and I don't know the variety, but Harold McGee wants, you know, you go to Harold McGee's house and he just has a bowl of walnuts on the table. So you're like, hey, when a stash remember this, you're like, hey, these are just walnuts, right? So you start eating, you're like, God damn, this is amazing walnuts. What the hell?
And apparently there's like in California a couple strains of walnut that are extremely the skins are extremely low in uh in tannins. And I think they're the they were the red ones, right, Nastash, were they the red ones? Yeah, they're amazing. So you you you might be able to try one of these super fancy walnuts, or if you another thing you can do is maybe crack the walnuts and try to do the liquor with ISI, and maybe you could get, or like, you know, like smash the walnuts to do ISI and maybe you could get enough of the walnut flavor out without getting a lot of the tannin. Although I did it with pecans and I got a quite a bit of tannin in my pecan uh infusion, even in an ISI, which usually doesn't extract uh bitters and tannins that that quickly.
Um but you could give that a shot. Uh also, you know, it's it's a real pain to skin uh a walnut, but you could try heating it and rubbing it to at least get a portion of the skin off of it, uh you know, to try and see whether that can um whether that that helps. I don't know um I don't know whether or not we can modify the one that already if you have liquid nitrogen, you could try freezing it. That'll dehydrate it and then let it thaw slowly, and maybe you can get some of the astringency out, but I don't know that it's the same chemical process, so I don't know that it would that would work. Is this the actual you know going to a semi-solid that's gonna be well in in fruits, but I don't know whether or not it's this they're the same molecules in like a nut skin, so I don't know if it's gonna have the same sort of fruit.
Not uh not no, not simply a matter of temperature. But it's a very interesting question. I think one that has an acid. I'm interested. So if you find some results, if you could uh email in, tell us what happened.
Yeah, we'll do. All right, thanks very much. Yeah, have a good one. All righty. And then uh we have another question in uh and I forget who wrote it because uh Chris.
Chris writes in and asks whether he can use clarification on canned uh pineapple and uh and bottled uh or you know, cartoned orange juice. And and specifically you want to know about agar clarification, right? Is that true? Mm hmm. Yeah.
Uh yes, it'll work. Uh I haven't done um I mean canned pineapple juice uh I think it will work. I think we've done it. I know I've done orange juice. Uh or in fact, the first application I ever did with quick agar clarification was with orange juice because it was 3 a.m.
in the morning. I didn't have time to squeeze anything fresh. So I used orange juice. Orange juice, as long as it's not very acidic, can also be clarified directly through enzymatic. If you hit it with uh Pectenex smash uh XXL or Pectanex uh SPL, if you can directly uh clarify without using agar.
Um but yes, you can agar clarify. Um I would assume you can do pineapple juice. Pineapple juice, of course, has um proteolytic uh enzymes in it that would make it difficult to clarify using gelatin, but cooked pineapple juice has been cooked, so you can presumably you can clarify it without any sort of problems. I don't see any reason why you could not clarify uh pineapple juice. Um back to uh Max uh with his question with Xanthan gum and uh oil.
He also asks, uh, when am I going to finally admit that I am working for that? Here it is. S S S S S V, the Sofer's Stoffer's Secret Society of Sous Vide. He said, we all know that Sous vide, just like the internet and cable TV, are just fads and will be gone in a year the way Cory Feldman's music career was. Uh I I agree.
This stuff's not gonna last, right? None of us here, none of us here think that Sue Vide's here to last, right? That's hilarious. You know, uh and presumably, you know, obviously he's you know making fun because it's gonna be here uh forever. But it's one of those funny things uh uh you know, people always say, oh well, you know, all this new kind of technology is it's you know, it's it's gonna be a fad, it's gonna go away, you know.
First of all, they label you as molecular gastronomy, and they're like, that was so like five years ago. It's like, well, first of all, we all hate the term molecular gastronomy. And uh secondly, like this kind of cooking is really growing and growing and growing. You might not hear about it maybe as much as you used to uh in the newspapers and magazines because people already know about it, so there's no hooks to write stories on. You know what I mean?
Uh but yeah, so thanks for writing in, Max. More of questions like this. We love them. And I'm gonna leave you with this one. Uh I'm trying to write a uh review of the greatest pomological reference ever to have been produced by human beings called The Fruits of New York.
It's like eight volumes, it's many, many, many, many thousands of pages. It's all public access. You know, read it soon on the blog as soon as I can, which maybe is never for you know, given my current track record because I've been posting so slowly. But anyway, uh they wrote uh uh one also called The Vegetables in New York, one of which uh is on um peas, right? So I had to read like I don't know, 200 pages on peas, uh, you know, as part of this review process.
And here's what I learned. Uh also if you don't know me, you won't know this, but uh I'm fascinated with mummies. I think you know, mummies, right? Would you say that's true? Mummies.
Mummies, yeah, mummies. So uh so there's a huge fad uh about anything uh Egypt related around the time of uh for in the in the mid to late 1800s and also around the time of the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in the in the early 20s by uh Carter, right? So there's this huge thing about mummies all the time. And they found uh seeds in uh in these in these crypts, right? In the tombs, they would find seeds.
And so there were these disreputable producers who uh would say that they had germinated uh seeds from these uh ancient tombs, and then they would sell them. And so there is literally a variety of pea called mummy, right? And by the way, you could actually buy mummy powder because people used to grind up mummies and and as a medicine, like they would just grind up mummies, and it's based on an old it's based on uh uh basically an old mistranslation of some old uh Arabic medical writings. But they would, yeah, they'd grind up, like they there's a huge trade. Like they would just ship like you know, tons of mummies over to Western Europe, grind them up, and you'd buy this dust, this mummy dust, and you would add it to things, and people would think that mummy dust solved all kinds of problems.
So there's all these Europeans eating mummy dust. Uh, there was a paint called mummy that was ground up, you grind up mummies, and apparently like it was the best brown paint, and you couldn't get anything that looked quite like mummy. So, like all these artists would have this mummy paint, and you can go to museums and see paintings that were painted with mummies, as well as the mummies themselves, presumably, if you're going to the to the museum. But uh, these guys all this variety of pea is mummy, and they were saying that you know these were the actual Egyptian peas. So these guys uh in New York's uh Geneva extension station up in New York were growing and were basically like, hey, look, these things are exactly like these other peas.
So basically it's a huge hoax. Turns out peas can't survive for thousands of years. But uh, you know, an interesting look back uh to early 20th century hoaxes and the mummy pee. This has been Cooking Issues. Uh come back uh visit us next week.
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