Welcome to Cooking Issues on the Heritage Radio Network. I'm Dave Arnold, the host of Cooking Issues. We're here with Nastasha the Lopez Hammer. No, Stasha the Hammer Lopez. Man, that's the first time I've ever messed that up.
Coming to you live every Tuesday from noon to 1245. This is the Thanksgiving version of the show. Call in with all of your cooking related questions, technical or not, to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. And now to break with tradition, Nastasha is going to read our sponsor's copy.
Go ahead. Because she says I'm a jerk. That's why I'm having her do it. Because she says that I'm when I read it, I'm dismissive and a and a and a jerk. So go.
So today's today's show is brought to you by Cabot Cheese. For your favorite party recipes, let the great taste of cabbage cheese make them even more special. Award-winning cabbot cheese. 100% of our profits go to New England and New York farm families on the web at Cabot Cheese.com. Nice.
Thank you. Nice. Alright. So while we're waiting for uh we're waiting for our first caller, I will uh start him with some of our email questions. Here's one from who is it who wrote this?
I can't tell. Here's one. I was hoping Dave could offer some insight for a novice candy maker. This is Steve from Miami. Uh he's trying to make a uh pumpkin maple caramel from a uh from food52.com.
And uh he wants to add bourbon to it. Um, but he's worried that that it's gonna affect the texture of the caramel. Um he needs to know whether the whether enough of the bourbon's gonna evaporate out by the time the care the caramel reaches 240 uh Fahrenheit on the thermometer. Okay. Uh he's also curious, can he smoke the caramel as it's cooling down with uh policycy and smoking gum, etc.
etc. etc. Okay. So here's my here here's the the good news on this. The the I read the I read the recipe, and the re the recipe is fairly standard for a caramel except for it cooks it to a s a slightly lower temperature, but it has a lot of pumpkin puree in it.
So I'm thinking that the pumpkin puree is maybe the reason why it's cooked to a slightly lower temperature than normal caramel. Normal caramel's will be cooked a little bit over 240 Fahrenheit, somewhere I can't remember I've been a long time since I cooked a caramel, but probably in the more in the range of like 248 Fahrenheit, something like that. But the good news is is that if you cook it to the same temperature you're gonna have the same water content. So when you're cooking a candy out right all you're basically doing is ensuring that you have the uh the exact amount of water removed from the system that you want. So once you assuming that all the solids are the same right the pumpkin puree etc etc assuming all the solids are the same and that you know 99% of the alcohol will have evaporated out once you reach those high high temperatures the good news is that you uh will have the same water content in your candy and so your texture will be the same.
So my feeling is is that is that if you cook to the same temperatures the addition of the bourbon's not going to make that much difference. That's why the amount of water added to a candy cook at the beginning is really not that important um you know plus or minus a little bit because you're the that it's the temperature that guarantees um that your that your candy's gonna have the right the right texture. And that's the great thing about uh cooking candies right Nastasha yes yeah and actually we've been doing a lot of candy cooking recently you can go to our blog we posted our first video uh what was that our video blog post on uh making dragon's beard candy, which is a hand pulled cotton candy. Maybe we'll talk about that a little later, a little later on in the program. Um the as to the second part about whether or not you can um smoke it with a smoking gun, I'm sure I'm sure that you can.
I I have never done it. This the smoking gun uh made by Poly Science is kind of a beefed up version of a uh so here's the history of that. So basically they used to sell little vacuum cleaners for uh like vacuuming out your keyboards. I had one because I was a huge geek, huge dork, right? So you had one too?
The little things that clean out the keyboard? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, nice, nice. All right. So anyway, so uh I didn't know you were that much of a geek.
I love that. It's good to know about Nastasha. Anyway, so um those little vacuum cleaners, and then uh at some point, some enterprising uh pothead was like, hey, if I put the battery in upside down and put pot in the top of it and light it on fire, I don't even have to suck on the pipe to get the smoke out. Right? So hence was born this new thing, basically this kind of automatic uh pot pipe, right?
So then uh at some point in the late 90s, some chefs in Europe, I think, you know, the first person I saw was uh one roca that demonstrated at Madrid Fusion in uh I think uh oh oh I don't know, oh five or something like that, 04. And uh basically chefs then started uh using it to inject smoke into things. Um and you know, one of the fame some of the famous presentations were Juca uh took uh a cloche, you know, the little the glass like like pheasant under glass, old school kind of cloche, and then cloche means bell, and then uh and then injected smoke into it, uh like plated the dish on the on the plate part of the cloche, and then injected smoke into the bell part, and then brought it over to the diner, lifted the top, and then the smoke would billow out, it would perfume the area, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They had another famous dish where they had like a basically a slipper-shaped glass bowl that they then like uh sealed a piece of plastic over the top, made a pinprick hole in it, and then injected smoke into it, and then every time your spoon they plated it on top of the plastic, every time your spoon hit, it would throw a smoke ring up. These are some of the famous dishes that are made with it.
Anyway, Philip Preston, our good buddy from PolyScience, who makes the circulators, the only circulator we use, uh, immersion circulator, you know, which you should, if you don't know what it is, just check out immersion circulator on the web. They're fantastic. Anyway, so he makes a kind of a beefed up version of uh this you know pot pipe gone uh food that's used to inject smoke in. I have one, I don't really use it that often, so I'm not I'm not I'm not that much of a wealth of knowledge on on that, but it should work. This is a very long way of saying it should work.
However, you might be better off if you want a traditional smoked flavor, not just a little hint of smoke, actually smoking it in a cold smoker. So a lot of people have, and you can look it up, modified uh smokers to be able to produce a cold smoke, mainly by removing the smoke source from uh from the you know, away from the chamber and then running the smoke through a pipe that they pack ice or cold water on or run water over. But yes, that should work. And the uh second port well, there's actually two questions. There's one about the caramels, and then any good sous-vide sweet potato ideas.
Yes, again, we have some, we've done some work with sous-vide and sweet potatoes. Those of you that I don't know, brand new listeners don't know what the hell I'm talking about. Sous-vide is any sort of cooking in a vacuum bag. Uh, and in particular, sous-vide is useful, um, a useful way to do low temperature cooking, low temperatures where we um control the temperature where we cook very, very accurately, and it lets us do some interesting special effects. And one of them happens to be with sweet potatoes.
Okay, so sweet potatoes contain an uh an enzyme, beta amylase. So a lot of things contain uh that you know it's the same beta amylase, similar beta beta amylase to what's used in brewers to convert starch to sugar. And so what happens is is if you keep uh sweet potatoes at a very accurate temperature, let's say uh 60 uh 60 to 65 uh Celsius 60 Celsius probably better or you know no 50 55 what do you think stuzz I have to go look it up let's say 55. I don't want to um I don't want to kill the enzyme and I don't want to uh you know have the you know what strike what I just said this is like not necessarily safe but cut the sweet potato into pieces vac it on high to get rid of the air put it in the you know in a bag maybe with a little oil or not this is not safe forty do it at 40 Celsius right 40 to 45 Celsius uh only for like two two and a half hours and then ramp the temperature to kill anything that you've uh grown during that time because you're still within the safety limit right so uh what that'll do is that will um cause the beta amylase to start breaking the starch down on the inside of that sweet potato and make it even sweeter okay then uh there there's it's interesting I haven't really run the studies we've done it to try and make the sweet potato sweeter before but there's certain enzymes that you actually need to to activate at a at a higher temperature that will eventually destroy the enzyme but in order to actually liberate the enzyme in a way that it can touch the cellular tissues you need to get to a high enough temperature to have that happen. The one I'm thinking of is pectin methylesterase this the potato strengthening and the well any cell wall strengthening enzyme typically you need to circulate in the area of 60 to 65 Celsius to get that to work, but we've had good results with um with sweet potatoes in the 40 to 45 range.
Then you ramp the temperature up to almost simmering to cook the potatoes through and sweet potatoes through. And the advantage is cooking them in a bag is that you can get um there's no flavor loss and there's no flavor addition in or out. So you have like you know, nice looking potatoes. They're not kind of roasted, but they have the in common with a roasted potato, the fact that uh it has been watered down by cooking it in a um by cooking it in uh in a liquid, and also it doesn't, it doesn't uh it doesn't look shriveled or anything. So it's very good.
Uh sweet potatoes are excellent in the bag. We do it all the time, and you can ramp up the sweetness by by doing a pre-treatment in the bag. And then by the way, when you're at 40, I would then slowly ramp the like 45 Celsius. I would slowly ramp the temperature up to the you know the simmering point to get it to cook. But you it's gonna take a long time to cook in the bag, a lot longer than it would normally take uh to cook in a pot.
More like it would take when if you were gonna roast it, because uh it takes a long time to break to actually break down the the structure of the sweet potato in the absence of a lot of excess water, right? So it's gonna take more um more like the time it would take to roast than the time it would take to um than the time it would take to uh boil. And I would definitely you know cut them into smaller pieces. Is it making any dang sense at all? Yes, Dave, yeah.
Yeah. And it's good, it's apropos of Thanksgiving. This is the Thanksgiving Thanksgiving uh episode of cooking issues. All right. So Steve, I hope uh hope I answered that question.
Um okay. Now uh I have a question from Teddy DeVico uh and uh teenchef Teddy dot blogspot.com. And he says, uh I recently had an awesome meal at WD50. WD50 is my brother-in-law's restaurant in uh in downtown New York, actually two blocks from my house. And uh, you know, I love I love Wiley, I love his cooking.
Uh and uh Teddy says, Wiley uses transglutaminase a lot in his food, shrimp noodles, cold-fried chicken, etc. Is it possible to glue skins to pro skin to proteins? For example, uh, could you take the skin off the back of a chicken and then wrap it around the breast so that the chicken skin would be wrapped around the whole breast. Oh, yes. Oh, yes, Teddy.
That is more than possible. Uh that is uh what we do basically every day, you know. Uh not every day, but whenever we cook with meat, we're often doing stuff like that. So for those of you that don't know, transglutaminase is an enzyme that glues uh different proteins together. It can glue any any protein together.
It's fantastic, it's all natural, it's a miracle. I love it. Anyway, uh you sprinkle it on like it's powdered sugar, you put the two pieces of meat together that you want to glue together, you let it sit four hours, done. Done. Beautiful.
And it's seriously, it's fantastic stuff. Uh, but we don't just glue uh chicken skins to chickens, we glue chicken skins to steaks, right? So we make like a chicken fried steak. You like that, right, Stas? Yeah, it's good stuff.
Uh the uh and so with that, like we take a skirt steak and we glue chicken uh skin to it, let it sit four hours, then we can fry it, and it has the skin of a chicken, which is like one of God's great creations, chicken skin, right? Yeah, chicken skin's delicious. And uh, but you know, the inside of skirt steak, which is also delicious. Uh so yes, you can use it for a lot of stuff. You can actually buy it.
Um it's not cheap. It's uh it's like eighty dollars for a kilo, but if you store it in the freezer, it you know, they say six months, but really I've I've used it uh longer than a year, and it's that'll glue a lot, a lot of meat together. When you buy your uh transglutaminase, and by the way, the company is a Ginamoto that sells it, and the brand name is uh Activa. And you're gonna want to get Activa RM from a Ginamoto. You can buy it directly from Aginamoto at Aji Foods USA.
Or I think uh I think Le Sanctuaire might sell it, and I think Terra Spice might sell it as well online. Uh and you get it, store it in your freezer, and then uh make sure that it always goes back to the freezer. That's that's how you you know are gonna keep it okay. You wanna do all your gluing in 20 minutes, and if you need to test it, put it on a piece of raw meat, and it should smell a little bit like a wet dog or a wet wool sweater, and that smell will go away. I've never been able to detect that uh when I'm when I'm eating it.
It's just showing you that the reaction's happening. It's a good way to test out your meat glue. For more information on transglutaminase, please go to our blog, cookingissues.com, click on the primers link at the top, and go to what is it called, Staszi? Is called transglutaminase or meat glue? It's called transglutaminates and in parentheses meat glue.
Oh, nice. All right, so double action. So anyway, so go to see the primer section. We have a lot, including like, you know, my ex I'm not gonna say exhaustive, I'll say exhausting. It exhausted me anyway.
Research on safety of transglutaminase and uh and whatnot. So uh go go check that out. Um let's take a break. Take a break. Go to our first commercial break.
Call in all your questions to 718 497-2128. That's 718 497-2128 cooking issues. Thanks so much, Bone Brother. How you feel, mate? I'll feel all right.
Yeah, how you feel, fella? Head! Sure getting down. We're gonna have a bump good time. We're gonna have a bump good time.
We're gonna have a bump good time. We're gonna have a bump good time. We've gotta take your high. Alright. Yeah, let's do it again.
We gotta take the high. Now I won't have a body. Let's bread blow about two cores. And then I want to wave in. Alright, alright.
I'm gonna get that fella with a low hole on a little bit. Welcome back to Cooking Issues coming to you live. Call on your questions to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. We got an interesting uh email in from Steve, uh, who basically just sent us some information.
Not really the question, but I thought it would be interesting. Uh it's ba it I'm interested in microwaves. So you're interested in microwave, Styles? Not really. Not really.
I am. Well, you know, I'm interested in almost everything. But uh, you know, back when I was a kid, I used the microwave mainly to uh melt butter and to blow up light bulbs. You know, because that's those are the two things like blow up eggs, blow up light bulbs, melt chocolate, melt butter. Um, but you know, thanks to the internet, there's a whole bunch of uh people out there doing very, very interesting things with microwaves.
And Steve points out that if you if you search uh um neon lamp, I think it's neon lamp, yeah, neon lamp microwave. There's these guys in Holland who have I think Holland, who have a series of videos on how to visualize the patterns of energy in a microwave by basically using a piece of foam core that they stuck a bunch of tiny neon lamps in, and then you put it in the in the oven, and it's like a grid, and you can see the pattern of light that's formed. And the pattern of light, the intensity of the light, is basically showing you the intensity of the uh of the wave in that particular of the magnetic of the uh electromagnetic waves, the microwaves in that in that area. And then they have a couple videos where they show like they put some water in, and they can see how the um how the the placing a load, the water is basically a load absorbing the microwaves, affects uh how the uh the radiation is being distributed in the rest of the in of the microwave. And it's really quite interesting.
They show some in the in the, you know, they they have the thing in the top, they have it in the bottom, they have it in the middle, they have it spinning, and it and it better than any other technique I've seen, including the putting the flour in and burning it and things like that, really shows in real time uh what the um what the pattern of energy is. Because you know, one of the big downfalls of the microwave is the unevenness of the energy absorption in it. And the fact that if you put something in, it changes the it changes the cooking characteristics of the entire oven cavity. That's basically the big drawback of uh microwave. Uh, you know, that and for instance, like you know, you have some weird phenomenon, like if if something starts to char in a microwave or if there's things on it that are charred already, they preferentially uh preferentially absorb uh microwave energy, like the carbonized areas do, and then get even hotter and then catch on fire, things like that.
I mean, there are some fun things about microwaves. But anyway, so that's a very uh interesting uh experiment, and it's made me, for the next time we do the Harold McGee class, it's made me think that uh, you know, dang, uh, I'm gonna do this, but I'm gonna I don't want to go crazy with it. I wanna uh don't do this. Don't like don't don't ever do this. But the reason the reason the hole size, there's there's a mesh, right, in the front of your microwave uh and that you can kind of see through, right?
And the reason it's not bigger than that is is that uh that mesh is designed such that the microwave um which has a uh you know a wavelength much larger than that hole can't propagate at all through that mesh, right? Really, you know, they could make it a little bit bigger, but they want it to be 100% safe. So even so if you put your eyeball against the door of the microwave, which you know my you know, my mom always told me not to do, it's not gonna fry out, fry out your eye. But if you stayed back on it a little bit, you could have a bigger hole like pencil size, right? So don't ever do this.
But I'm thinking like you could put like a slightly bigger hole and I could put an armature in that I could actually manipulate the load on the inside, have like a series of lamps on the inside, and then manipulate a load so you can really see by moving the load around in real time what was happening. What do you think, Stash? She's shaking your head. No, Dave, no. Well, I mean, I can do it.
I don't want anyone else to do it, but I'm not gonna fry myself. Yeah. I mean, look, don't ever experiment with microwave ohms. Seriously, don't. But like I I will.
Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. But I don't I don't recommend you do it. But for the next time we do the McGee class, I mean I've all of a sudden, like seeing this, seeing this uh these posts, which by the way, only have like 13 views.
It's crazy. Yeah, you should go look at them. They're really cool. It's like some of the best visualization of microwaves I've seen. Did you ever talk about your dangerous centrifuge thing?
Which which dangerous centrifuge? When you put the glass on top and ran it? No, no, we haven't posted that yet. Well, I'll talk about that one sec. I got a little more on microwave.
So Steve did a really interesting thing when he was uh an undergrad in um uh physics undergrad, his professor asked him if asked the whole class, I guess, could you measure any fundamental constants, uh physical constants, in in your kitchen? And so he came up with a fun way to measure the speed of light. So microwaves have a known uh frequency, right? Your microwave oven operates at a known frequency. It's I forget what it is, it's something like 2.4 gigahertz or something like that.
You know, you know, in that area, too, you know, 2.4 gigahertz, I think. Memory. This is my memory, doing it from memory. So uh what he did was he stuck a bar of chocolate, a big like a slab, a sheet like a bar of chocolate into the microwave and then turned it on uh on high, right? So you we like you I think it was on high, because you need to establish a standing wave.
Has to be a standing wave pattern. And then looked to see uh exactly when the surface started to melt a little bit on the on the bar, pulled it out and measured the distance between the uh the two points of melting in the grid. There's like a grid where it's melted. And then uh using that to calculate um the high power regions, right? So that's each high power region is going to be half of a wavelength, multiply it by two, and then you have the the you know you can calculate if you know how many cycles per second it is and you know how long the wavelength is right then you can calculate the speed of light.
So he was able to calculate the speed of light and he got within three percent uh of the correct answer using a regular household ruler, a microwave and a bar of chocolate. Wow. That's another cool microwave trick, huh? That is cool. That's c that's a cool trick Steve.
I like that. That's good thinking. And plus I'm sure you made some sort of delicious brownie with the chocolate when you were done at least that's what I would do. That's what I seriously that's all I used to use the microwave for besides blowing up light bulbs and and and eggs was melting chocolate for brownies. But um so anyway so Nastasha said have I talked about my dangerous centrifuge practices.
You are into dangerous things. So it's like I'm not into dangerous no, but you know and you say you do it alone but it's like hey I'm gonna run the centrifuge open. Stand behind me and film it. And if it's a good thing, it's not crazy. Listen, we run.
Or we'll be in like the National Fruit Collection, and you'll say, if my throat closes up, the epipins here just stab it into me. Liz I don't want to give people the wrong impression. I'm pro safety here. Like, seriously. I'm pro-safety.
Um, but sometimes I will do things that some people might consider unsafe, but I feel like I have a hand a handle on. So centrifuges, right? You're not supposed to run them open ever because um just not come on, it's a bad idea. Like, you know, a lot of force involved. If the if the okay a lot of centrifuge parts are made of aluminum, aluminum tends to fatigue.
At any minute, if something goes wrong, a bucket could blow out. And if a bu uh a centrifuge is something that separates things based on density, the one I have, the couple of the ones I have have swinging bucket rotors, which means it's basically like holding a paint pail on the end of a stick and spinning it at 4,000 RPM, generating 4,000 times the force of gravity, right? So at these kind of speeds, every gram is equal to about four kilograms. So they use aluminum because it's lightweight, and so you can spin it a lot faster, otherwise the mass would be too high and you wouldn't be able to spin it. Problem is aluminum fatigues and it can be unpredictable and and basically just give out on you at any moment, as any of you may have known.
Like, you know, with you know, if you've ever had an incident with an aluminum bicycle, most aluminum bicycles are great. My bicycle is made out of aluminum, nothing against aluminum bicycles. Okay, so uh the point is is that if one of these things goes south, the thing like you know, it can go way far south. Now that the one I'm using is safe as long as it's not like you're not thwarting any of the safety mechanisms. Unfortunately, I know how to thwart all the safety mechanisms, so I can run it with the lid open, which you should never do.
So Nastasha's saying it's unsafe, but I want to take a video of the thing while it's running. By the way, there is a centrifuge that's made by Lab Conco called a centrovap that is made with a clear top that we can run, and it comes with a stroboscope so you can see it running while it's going, but it only does very small samples. But maybe we can borrow one or use it to do filming. Anyway, I bought uh a half inch thick piece of um, you know, really tough, I mean it's not quite bulletproof at only a half inch, but like half inch thick um Lexan. And then I used, you know, like 4,000 pound rated uh ratchet come-alongs to to ratchet it down to this top of the centrifuge after I had defeated the safety so I could run it with the lid open.
And we took some videos of the centrifuge running, and I used a stroboscope, you know, with like a strobe that with a variable speed on it so that I could like kind of freeze the buckets when we're looking at them. So maybe sometime we'll we'll do a video. What do you think, Stas? Alright, alright, alright, we'll do it. Basically, this is just a long involved way for Nastasha to have you get off my butt and do some more do some more work for the bug.
The videos are actually easier to put up on the blog than uh than writing. I you know, writing is such a pain in the behind. But um anyway. So uh so there you have it. That's uh centrifuge and safety.
But I don't want like like I said, I don't want any of you guys uh having the impression out there that I do things that are that are unsafe. I wouldn't that's not that's not the case. All right. So now and uh I know we're gonna have to take a break in a couple of minutes, uh, but we're gonna start our uh turkey Thanksgiving turkey extravaganza set of notes. So we have uh uh a nice uh note in from um uh Ken uh Ingber uh from Citroën Mass.
Is that how you pronounce Citroën? Citroate Mass? I think so. But he grew up in in Brooklyn, and his question is, uh, why is he still alive after eating his mom's turkey? All right.
So his mom, right, and I I'll just read it, right? So uh basically, uh he loved, by the way, his mom's Thanksgiving turkey, right? So his mom slathered the turkey with garlic. Uh this is his quote. Mom slathered the turkey with garlic a couple days before Thanksgiving, covered it with aluminum foil, and kept it on the enclosed back porch.
This is New York City in the 50s and 60s. Some years uh uh some years we had snow, but many of those years I would play touch football on the street wearing a t-shirt. Garlic may have had some minor uh antimicrobial properties, which it does, but could that overcome sitting in a climate of 50 degrees for two days? And he in Perenzi goes, I cannot be absolutely sure, but I don't think that mom started with a frozen bird. Uh the fact that none of us ever got sick from the turkey, the fact is none of us ever got sick from the turkey.
As a matter of fact, mom's turkey dinner was renowned in the family, eagerly anticipated each year before the event, and then finally recalled afterwards by as many as twenty-five people at a sitting. With all that, I still ask, why am I still alive? It's an excellent question, Ken. I'm glad that you are uh still alive. Uh, but I did a little bit of uh a little bit of research on this, uh, but the the the first thing that pops into my head is uh I wonder whether your mom also put some salt on the outside of the bird as well as garlic.
Um, right? I mean, so she put some all like garlic is antimicrobial and uh salt on the outside of the bird would be uh would also help, which she probably did, even if she didn't start with a frozen bird. Uh the only thing I'm curious about is the aluminum foil, because I think what would stop kind of the rotting would be kind of good airflow in a cool environment, right? So it's actually gonna take quite a while for something to spoil at 50 degrees, let's say it's fifty degrees. It it would take a while for something to spoil out in those kind of uh temperatures, especially because um if the cavity, right, which is contaminated, and if the outside of the bird, which is contaminated, is exposed to uh airflow, relatively dry airflow.
See, the one thing is is that in in and we're in New York, at this part of time of year in New York, even if it's not very cold, it's also not very humid. So there's not a lot of moisture. So I would assume that you would get basically a pellicle, sort of dry coating that would form on the outside of the bird uh and on the inside cavity. And that to a to a good extent would help prevent some of these spoilage bacteria from growing, right? On its own.
The garlic would also help uh prevent some spoilers' bacteria. The inside of the muscle, assuming that the butchering is done properly, is relatively sterile, right? And so it's not going to have a lot of bacteria growing. So as long as it's not really warm and really moist, I'm not surprised, frankly, that it didn't um didn't spoil. Now, the the food safety people are going to go crazy on me here, but listen, listen, if you look back in the day, right, when you hunted birds, what did you do?
You hung them up, right? So in the in the old days, when you go hunting, and and a lot of the hunting season for these kind of birds would start in the fall, right? And then uh continue continues through the the winter, but in the fall, you would in relatively cool weather like this, you would hang birds to age. And what would happen during this hanging period, right, whether you drew it or not, you know, meet you know, gut it or not, is the meat would become more tender, especially on something like you know, a wild bird that's going to be tough and stringy, um, the the hanging it is gonna at those slightly higher temperatures, like 50s or so, is gonna encourage the enzymes in the meat to break uh down the meat a little bit and to stop it from being so tough, and so it and also probably inf improve the flavor. So this is a time honored technique.
I was reading actually like Texas Hunters magazine from like 2004 or something, and they they you know they were saying, why don't we go back to to aging and hanging meats? But I was not able to find anyone who's done uh I didn't look too much. I mean I'd like to look more because I'm kind of interested in the subject, but I was not able to find uh any scientific studies on uh the microbiology of hanging uh hanging game, you know what I mean? So I know that uh you know the the hunters they recommend that if you shoot something that you you know if it's been hit really hard with shot and the shot penetrates the intestines, right? Then you can't really hang it for too long because you've contaminated the meat with stuff that's that's nasty.
But a relatively well killed animal, right? Uh poultry especially, you know, would be would be hung for a while, and in fact, most people don't die. And you know, just to go even further, I mean, it's not necessarily uh it's a it's a bad it's a it's a specious argument, right, to say that that just because I haven't died doing something, for instance, let's say I cross the street every day and don't look, right? Just because I'm not dead doesn't make it a safe practice, but on the other hand, uh techniques like this that go back, you know, since time you know from time immemorial, hanging hanging birds out, um, and not like this is exactly the same because it's a you know, it's uh it's you know a bird that you got from the supermarket or from wherever, um, you know, sometimes these old practices they have validity and they just haven't been uh validated yet by through scientific research. Or maybe it has.
I mean, I haven't done uh enough research, but a lot of people, especially with food safety, tend to argue on the extreme side of 100% safety. So there's many things that are forbidden by food codes and food regulations that would be safe that just haven't been adequately studied. So, you know, one way to get things uh, and so I'll give you some more examples. Like you go to Chinatown uh and you see all the meat hanging in the window, right? And that stuff's in the danger zone for a long time, right?
So why is that safe? Um well, the the meat's already been cooked, so presumably the bacteria on the inside, with the exception of spores, has been knocked out by the cooking process. Then it's hanging, right, in a relatively warm environment, but it's painted with a shellac of stuff that has a very low water activity, right? You see how they're all glazed, all that meat in the window is glazed or has a dry, fried, crispy surface on the outside. And because there's no uh that there's not a lot of water on the outside, which is where bacteria would be infiltrating, right, from the outside, because they're not going to come from the inside.
You killed all those. Um, but because of that, um, there's not a really good place for bacteria to start growing. And so you don't die. And that's why you can go to Chinatown, get one of those ducks that's been hanging in the window all day and eat it without dying, right? Anyway, so uh, you know, I uh the only thing that confuses me a little bit is the aluminum foil because I would think that you might be able to like harbor some bacteria where the aluminum foil is touching the bird because um because there you you wouldn't be dry enough, you might have like a moist environment that could cause some problems.
But also most spoilage bacteria you'd be able to smell. So if the turkey started to go south on you, you'd probably know it. You know what I mean? Anyway, excellent question. And uh, you know, my family would never eat it if I tried that technique, but uh apparently it made for a delicious Thanksgiving turkey.
And we're gonna go to a break, but more on Thanksgiving turkeys when we come back. Call your questions to 718-497-2128, 718-497-2128 cooking issues. You know what? When I hear a groove like this groove. Oh, baby.
Yeah. Yeah. Someone got a groove like this. You know. No.
I need to grip. Grip. Need to grip. You know. I've a green bread job.
You're listening to Cooking Issues on the Heritage Radio Network. Uh, call in all your questions. We're gonna be here for another 15 minutes or so to seven one eight four nine seven two one two eight. That's seven one eight four nine seven two one two eight. So we uh we wrapped up the last segment talking about uh turkey safety and particularly uh, you know, early uh fifth fifties and 60s Brooklyn garlic sitting on the porch turkey.
Uh which is a very interesting question. Uh but now I'm gonna turn to the kind of perennial question that people say is what about stuffing the turkey, right? So all the food safety sources, they tell you not to stuff your turkey beforehand. Uh and the reason is is because uh they're worried that you're not gonna get the inside of the stuffing up to temperature in time, right? Or that you're not gonna cook the stuffing at all to the proper temperature, and that you're gonna have possibly an unsafe situation.
The other thing that could theoretically happen is that stuff could grow in the stuffing during the time while it's heating up because it takes a long time to heat up, right, to get to the center. And so you're apt to increase your chances for uh having a serious foodborne illness coming out of your turkey. Now, uh here are my feelings on that. If you stuff a bird, right, you're drastically increasing the amount of time it's gonna take to cook the bird because all of a sudden, like, you know, it's it's become a lot a lot bigger thing. So if heat can get into the cavity if it's open, it's gonna roast a lot quicker because you have a lot fewer inches of meat to go through.
And doubling the number of inches that something has to go through to get up to temperature radically, radically, radically increases the amount of time it takes to cook it, right? So, first of all, from just from a um a time management standpoint, it takes a long, long time to cook a turkey with stuffing in it. So you're you're apt to not hit a high enough internal temperature to have the stuffing be safe. So they recommend that you don't uh that you don't do it, right? And it's true, uh, you know, I don't like to put my bird in like you know, some people who shall remain name is Nastasha.
That's not me, it's my mom. All right, all right. But put the bird in at like the beginning of the day and then like take a like a like a burnt cinder out at dinner time and you know, try to crack it with a hammer and serve it to people. Like that's not how I'm into doing turkeys. Anyway, but um, you know, and and there are uh recipes out there, so the way to really do this, right, is to kind of pre-cook your stuffing a little bit and then shove it into your bird, and this is a good alternative, but it's kind of unsatisfying because you're gonna be cooking the stuffing before you put it in the bird, and that's no good.
But if you have a circulator, here's my Thanksgiving stuff stuffing tip for you, my my listeners who have uh immersion circulators. Uh, make your stuffing beforehand, right? Put it in a Ziploc bag. You know, don't be too mean to it, but like, you know, put it in a Ziploc bag and you know, make it fairly compressed, right? And circulate it at 57 Celsius for like an hour, right?
Before you're gonna put it into the turkey. Now, when I say 57, I'm assuming that you're keeping your packs of uh stuff look like thinner than about an inch, right? Your Ziploc bags are about only about an inch thick or less. So 57 for like an hour, an hour and 20 minutes, right? Like that, that should kill almost anything in that stuffing, right?
Plus, plus, now that stuffing is at 57 degrees Celsius. You could actually go a little higher, like 58, 60. So but 57 is good, and I'll tell you why. There's nothing in most stuffing mixtures, unless you're doing an oyster stuffing or you're doing a like uh, I don't know, like a like a roast beef stuffing. There's nothing in there that is gonna get damaged by 57 degrees Celsius, right?
So the binder in most stuffing mixes is gonna be eggs, right? Eggs uh are basically raw when cooked to 57 for the length of time that we're that we're talking about. Raw but pasteurized, right? Um uh bread is gonna be relatively unaffected by these temperatures. Cook sausage, unaffected by these temperatures.
Things like celery, like onions that you've swept sweated out, all the textures and tastes of that stuff are gonna be pretty much not affected by 57 Celsius. So, and that's like what, 135 degrees Fahrenheit, somewhere in that range, right? So, uh medium rare for a steak. So you you circulate it for like an hour, hour and a half, up to two hours or so in a Ziploc bag, right? And now you have hot stuffing, right?
So now it's time to cook the bird. So you have the bird cavity, salt out the inside, you know, put salt over the inside, which is also gonna help kill some of the bacteria on the inside, blah, blah, blah, make it taste good, yada yada. And then uh take uh like uh a clean pair of dishwashing gloves, nice thick gloves that you know you can hold something that's 57 for a while without burning, and stuff the bird with the hot stuffing, like directly out of the ziplocks, put it out of the circulator, stuff stuff the bird with the hot stuffing. Now the stuffing is safe, right? And you know, you're gonna be cooking it like up to the thing, and it's also gonna give the bird a jump start on cooking, right?
What's so funny? What? Nastash is having some sort of lew thought about stuffing hot stuffing. No, no, it's just you saying the bird. That's it.
Oh, oh, I did anyway. Okay. So anyway, so you stuff it up with this stuff, and then uh you're giving a jump start, so now the turkey's gonna cook faster. It's gonna cook uh like uh on the insides, it's gonna get a jump start. So it's gonna be, I think it's gonna be a better bird all around.
I haven't had time to test it, but I think that the technique in general is a good one and is gonna give you a better, more even cooked uh turkey. So, anyway, that's my Thanksgiving tip for you folks out there. Now, on to my Thanksgiving, right? So uh for readers of the blog uh might know if you read last year, we uh uh developed a technique for cooking turkeys that involved uh boning glove boning, where you basically turn the turkey inside out and uh you turn a turkey inside out, rip out all the bones, and you don't cut it. So it's like basic, it's called glove boning, but it's basically like reaching into a turkey and ripping its its bones out and leaving it whole.
And so you have this basically this turkey sack, right? And I also take out the bones of the of the legs. And the reason I do this is because I want to speed up the rate at which it cooks, right? Because if it turns out if you cook a turkey for a long time at low temperature in an immersion circulator, that the meat can get kind of fibery, even if it's not overcooked. So I want to keep the cook time down to about two hours.
So I remove the bones because that's extra mass, right? Then I take out the bones in the legs, because the legs want to cook to a higher temperature than the breast, right? Right? Right, right, right. So the legs you're gonna want to cook to about 66 Celsius in that range, and the uh and the breasts you're gonna want to cook to about 64, 65 Celsius.
Also, if the legs take too long to cook, especially at these low temperatures where you're not gonna overcook the hell out of them, the redness by the where the bones are never goes away. So you gotta cook fast. So, what we do is is you take aluminum, I make an aluminum skeleton and I pump hot oil through the aluminum skeleton to cook it from the inside out for like an hour or something before I drop it into the rest of the hot fat and then cook the whole thing at the um at the slightly lower temperature. So I give the legs a jump start, I cook them through at 65, because they can also cook a lot longer than the breast without turning kind of fibery. Then I drop the whole bird into the thing, we cook the whole thing through in butter, pick it up, cool it down, and then when it comes Thanksgiving time, we just like spray hot you know fat over it, you know, like crisp it up with a fryer, serve out a bird, delicious, awesome.
Also, it has no bones, so you can just slice it. Oh, I forgot. You s we put aluminum foil into the cavity to keep it puffed up during the cooking, otherwise it's you know a nightmare. Also, I use two circulators so that I can cook the inside and the outside at once, you know, whatever. I'm uh, you know, I go, you know, whatever.
I I take it to the extreme, but I like a good bird. So this year, and uh the the other thing about it is I can cook a giant turkey like this. So the first time I did it, I did it with like a 30-pound turkey. Uh this time, uh this year I'm cooking a smaller turkey. I'm cooking a heritage breed turkey.
I'm actually cooking one from Heritage Foods, the uh, you know, the the patrons of this fine radio network. And uh I'm cooking one of their Narragansett birds. So a Narraganset is an old breed that um is derived from a cross between an old uh commercials, Norfolk something, I think, and wild uh you know, indigenous turkeys from it comes from Rhode Island from the Rhode Island area. These turkeys, by the way, literally roam around on the houses, like around the lawns in in Westchester where my parents live, where my you know, my mom and my stepfather live. And we see them all the time.
My stepfather, so divorced from the idea of like food coming from anything other than the supermarket that we saw uh like a what do you call it? Like a gaggle of of wild turkeys running across the lawn one day, and he looks, he goes, Look, fresh turkeys. I'm like, fresh, they're alive. What do you mean? Anyway, so uh so like this Narragansett turkey is a heritage breed.
Uh, this one is the one I have is about uh 16 pounds or so, and uh so it's already been boned inside and out, and as soon as we get back to I mean they're sold out this year anyway, so you can't get it. It's too late. It's too late. This is from next year that you should be getting a heritage turkey. Uh there, you know, some people they want to know why why it costs so much, but these are you know, these turkeys are raised by kind of small farmers and they're they're processed you know nicely, and then um, you know, they're they're shipped to you, they're harder to grow, and they're done in smaller numbers, and you know, you're only doing it once a year, so you know, spend the extra money on your don't you don't you love your family?
Anyway, so uh so we're cooking this Narraganset uh this bird, and I'll report back uh hopefully next week because I'm assuming it's gonna be incredibly delicious. Because the meat that they they choose these breeds not just because their heritage, but because the meat quality, they're raised not just because they grow fast or have a high what they what's called feed conversion ratio, where they can basically turn, you know, they can produce X number of pounds of turkey for X number of pounds of grain. These breeds are chosen, presumably because the meat tastes better. So uh, you know, I am I'm gonna put as soon as I get back to work today, I'm shoving the aluminum skeleton into this one, and you can read about the old post online. But anyway, so I'm shoving the aluminum skeleton in, we're gonna cook it up.
I'm gonna take it up to uh Westchester and uh we will report back uh next week, right? Yeah. Okay, so uh I'll you know end with a a couple of a couple of things. Uh here's one. So uh I did uh an article for cookingissues uh dot com uh about eating weird meats, popular science then approached me and said, We want to, you know, can you write a modified version of that for our blog?
I was like, sure, yeah, right? I like popular science. Popular science has been very kind to me in the past, printed, you know, uh a really uh Ted Allen, you know, the food network star wrote something there about me, very nice. And um uh, you know, we like popular science, but whoever edited the piece kind of sexed it up a little bit and made me sound kind of like a bloodthirsty animal hating monster a little bit, right? Yeah, right?
But and I didn't even know it. So all of a sudden I start getting all these negative comments on the blog, which I've never had before, and then Nastasha goes and looks at at the actual popular science website, and there's literally someone there who threatened to kidnap me, fatten me up, not necessary, by the way. Fattening me up, not necessary. And then uh, you know, so it could save them some time, right? They they thought they'd have to spend an extra week to fatten me up.
Totally unnecessary. Uh and um kill me and then serve me to his dog, right? Serve me to his dog. And and here's my question, right? Your dog's a meat eater.
Why aren't you mad at your dog? Right? Anyway. Uh I mean, that's crazy, right? Yeah.
Here's the thing. I have so many people. Look, I like I I am not a cruel, heartless bastard, right? I mean, I am, but not about that. Not about the animals.
You know, I get all these people writing in about uh these weird animals that we're eating, saying that, you know, we're terrible people, they're sickened, like, especially like there's a picture of a whole cooked raccoon on the on the on our blog, right? And they're like, well, that that whole raccoon is revolting. Here's the thing. Well, it looks like a small child. Well, I hope your child doesn't look like a cooked raccoon, Stasi.
You know what I'm saying? My point is this, right? They would prefer that meat eaters have no idea that they were eating an animal. They would prefer that everything be packaged so that you could kill animals indiscriminately and never know that there was an animal involved at all, right? So when a meat eater actually is honest is like, here is a whole animal that we have cooked and eaten, like that's revolting to them.
Crazy, right? Yeah. Not logical. People are illogical, you know. And plus, and we'll end on this one.
Uh well, we'll end on Happy Thanksgiving. But we'll end we'll end on this one, right? Like, how is the life of a raccoon more august, more worthwhile than the life of a pig, which is clearly a smarter animal, just more delicious. The pigs only is just the picture, though. The picture, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, like, you know, I'm not a believer that stuff that you do should be hidden behind closed doors. I'm just don't believe that. Anyway, uh, happy Thanksgiving to you and your you and your family, you and your own, from cooking issues in the Heritage Radio Network. We'll talk to you next week. The New England and New York farm families who own Cabot Cooperative are offering listeners a chance to win some of the world's best cheddar simply by calling in to our network at 718-497-2128 or emailing us at info at heritageradio network.com.
What a great way to start the holidays. We'll be picking a winner for the program one week from today. Cabot Creamery is a proud supporter of what heritage radio is all about. You got my head all twisted, and I just can't get it straight.
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