Nine times out of ten when someone is taking the time to break away and do their own thing, it's because they either have a specific point of view or a specific passion that really sort of speaks to maybe not a mass audience, but the customers that I have and their customers at Barterhouse tries to culture and and cultivate, I think are are are those type of people who want that story and feel like if they take a an allocation of an 80 case made wine that they've got something special and it's something that only they have or maybe one other person has. So that's kind of what we specialize in. And you know, it may not be business savvy to the nth degree, like we're not making a hundred thousand cases of Pinot Grigio and you know, flogging them all over New York, but the customers that get wine from us are kind of believing the same stuff we do, which is supporting these small farms, supporting these young winemakers who have a passion for doing it, and and we supply them with a market and we allow them to get their product out there to otherwise an untapped uh group of people. Oh, you daddy got me on the Happy New Year and welcome to Cooking Issues on the Heritage Radio Network coming to you Tuesdays from around 12, I guess, to 1245. Uh it's Dave Arnold, the host of Cooking Issues here with Nastasha the Hammer Lopez.
Uh ready to oh, nice, nice. They have new features in the radio today. It's awesome. I love that. That's for the new year.
For all you people listening, those are the new year sound effects. Uh calling all your questions too, 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128 for all your cooking-related questions, technical or not. And uh Jack, I hear we have a caller. Hello, caller, you're on the air.
Hey, how are you guys doing? I'm a big fan of the show. Thank you. I have a question about um using whipped cream chargers for uh rapid infusions. Right.
Um I was wondering if it could be used to infuse um and make flavored vinegars. Yeah, I don't see why not. Yeah. I've never tried it, but I don't see why not. We've done oils before.
Uh-huh. You know, so just you know, for quickly for people who don't know uh what we're talking about. Rapid infusion is a technique where uh we take uh nitrous oxide cartridges usually in uh these I ISI these whipped cream makers, so you can look them up under cream siphons or whatever on the or whippers on the on the internet. Some people use them to get high. We don't, I don't particularly enjoy the nitrous high.
And uh they under pressure basically force liquid into porous items, then you rapidly release the pressure, the liquid boils out, and uh and you and you flavor your liquid. And so the question, and we I normally do it with liquor, but the question is can you do it with vinegar? And I don't see why not. Have you tried it yet? I haven't tried.
I'm waiting on uh on my whipper to get here. I just ordered it through a friend of mine in a restaurant, so I'm trying to get it the cheap way through him. Right. Here here's some some guidelines. Uh the whenever I do uh water-based, and essentially I don't think that the vinegar is going to enhance the uh solubility too much of most of what you're working with.
I don't think it's gonna hinder it, but I don't think it's gonna help it. So my in general, when I do water-based work, you're gonna have to use uh probably a little bit more of the product, and then you're probably gonna have to let it sit a little a little bit longer. Every ingredient that you use has different uh kind of optimum infusion time. And so, you know, for chocolate, I find it's somewhere like a minute and a half or so. Uh I mean it all depends on on the on the product.
Some people I know do coffee for you know many minutes up to hours. Some people I know even overnight on something like coffee, uh, you know, cold. Um and so you're gonna have to play with your your amounts and how long you leave it uh leave it in. But I would definitely do it longer than any of the stuff quoted on the blog for liquor. And I would also, you know, take heed of uh the comments that people said that you know you're gonna want to wait, you know, uh, you know, s many several minutes after you uh vent it for the flavor to fully develop because I think that really is I don't know why, but I I really think it's a real real phenomenon.
Okay, cool. Could I ask one more quick question? Sure. Uh what about using them to um with cucumbers inside of it to kind of make a quick pickle in the charger? Do you think that would work?
It does. It doesn't work as well as a vacuum does. Uh at least I don't think. I mean, I haven't done I mean I tested it once, it works, but you know, I I I think uh do you have a vacuum machine or no? I do not, no.
All right, well then it's probably gonna be one of the better things you can uh you can do. Another way to do those kind of uh you know flash infusions, and we call them quick pickles too, but you have to be careful because when you're when you're pickling, you're actually kind of doing an exchange of fluids, and with it with all of these rapid infusion techniques, you're basically you're not exchanging any any fluids, right? You're just injecting fluids into what used to be air holes. So you're gonna you're gonna need a fairly strong uh flavor base to do it. And you're also gonna need um you're gonna you know not think of them as being preserved in any way.
And they're also things like cucumbers tend to get floppy because you inject it right away, and there hasn't been time for osmosis to kind of uh start up and for the the actual cucumber cells to leach out their uh their liquid because you're gonna put something in that's high in in salt, let's say, and uh or sugar or both, and they the liquid is gonna start migrating out of the uh out of the cells of the cucumber and it's gonna start getting uh floppy. So for like really crunchy, crisp results, you're not gonna want to let the stuff sit around a while. And it will work. Uh if uh if you're gonna do it that way though, I would say rather than use it the way that we say, I would make it cold so that uh it doesn't bubble out as much when you're when you're when you're uh releasing it, because the goal is to keep liquid in and not to have it kind of bubble out, if that makes sense. Oh yeah, absolutely.
Okay, well thanks. I'll post up on the blog with the vinegars if they work out well and let you guys know. No, cool, yeah. I hope so. I hope it works out for you.
Thanks for calling in. Thank you. So uh on a non-cooking related note, uh uh I we just spent the last uh ten minutes brushing muck off of my uh off of my weed. Well, yeah, anyway. It turns out that uh, you know, here in New York City we had uh some snow, not a lot really by normal standards, but for some reason like they decided not to plow it.
And Manhattan, they totally cleaned out. So I was like, oh, it's safe to take my bike that I shattered the rear fender on just before Christmas and haven't had time to fix because I'm lazy and stupid. And so then I rode across, and of course, as soon as they get over the bridge in Brooklyn, it's like it's like mucky snow mo snowmobiling on my bike, and so like my entire backside is sprayed with muck. That has nothing to do with anything. Okay, uh on to onto real cooking issues questions.
Uh by the way, uh we had some people ask us how our how our holiday we were both Christmas folks, so how is our Christmas and New Year's? Excellent. Yours, Nastasha? It was good. Yeah?
Mm-hmm. Not excellent? Not it was good. Good? Yes.
Oh, all right. Okay. Then uh with that, I will get right to the questions. Uh so uh a while back, Thanksgiving time, we had a uh a question from uh a listener who asked why he wasn't dead, because his mom used to basically take cookie uh t cookies, turkeys and salt them and put them uh out to in the in the kind of the back porch uh to kind of cure for a couple days, you know, not under refrigeration. And the question is why why not why not death?
Why didn't death ensue? And um, you know, I think it it has a lot to do with kind of the air drying effect that happened on it and the the salt levels and the herbs and XYZ, all these things kind of um you know go to s stop kind of bacteria from growing on the outside, which is where most of it's gonna grow because the inside's sterile, yada yada. Go back and listen to the podcast for the gory details. But um we had someone uh write in, uh Mark Rosenblatt, uh also from uh Brooklyn says that his mom used to do that uh in Long Island, but not with turkeys, did it with uh ducks, uh and would uh do the same thing with duck. Uh and so I will I will relate, uh I will relate what he says.
Uh he said um he grew up in Riverhead in eastern Long Island in the fifties and uh duck farms were plentiful, so his his mom would cook the ducks instead of turkey and fully prepare two or three ducks two days beforehand and left them to cure outside uh and uh wonder why they never got got sick. Uh her technique was if she would put whole cloves of garlic inside, which are anti antimicrobial, uh rub the but I don't I would never trust it to be antimicrobial, but it is. Uh rub the exteriors of the duck with a thick mixture of olive oil and crushed garlic. Of course that's actually like poison waiting to have could be poison where you have them from a botulism standpoint, but probably not. Uh you know anyway.
I mean like you know that garlic oil is one of the m it's it's like a dangerous can be a dangerous thing. Anyway, uh then coated the entire bird and a blanket of coarse uh coarse kosher salt, uh thereby stopping any botulism from happening, and wrapping the duck in wet newspaper, uh and um you know, because he used to deliver newspapers. And so the the newspaper would dry out and his brother once ate the newspaper and got really sick. And so his question is, is uh with the newspaper, the wet newspaper which does dry out, would that somehow kind of be a host for the bacteria and stop it from growing on the duck? I don't think so because you never want any sort of any kind of host for bacteria if you can help it growing next to something that that you're gonna eat.
Like there's no there's no beneficial protection from the newspaper. Uh I wonder whether or not the sickness was because of some sort of poison in the ink, like lead or some sort of crazy nonsense in in the ink. I don't know. I mean it's it's an interesting question, but I definitely wouldn't eat the newspaper uh in the future. But the newspaper, even if it's wet, if it's placed against a lot of kosher salt, you shouldn't get too much bacterial growth on it.
I think the salt is really what's uh by the way, these ducks were rinsed very thoroughly after they were uh after they were um cured before they were cooked. I shouldn't think that the newspaper would help, but it is interesting that your brother got sick. I wonder whether you know who knows? Poison maybe what do you think? But it's if he knew if it was a GI situation, it was a GI, but very interesting.
Thank you for writing in. Uh okay. Now, a question about venison. Um, hope you had a good holidays. We did.
Uh this is from Andy. He says uh he was lucky enough to to take down a deer. Uh we're a bow hunter, and he took down a deer this year, uh, and he's elbows deep, he says in venison, and he's psyched about it. He patched together a circulator, DIY circulator. The circulator, you know, is what we use to cook things at very uh accurately precise temperatures, usually in a water bath, but sometimes in fat or oil.
And uh he wants to do a boneless venison loin as his first big meal out of it. And then are there any differences in the time uh temperature or timing for this as opposed to beef? Uh and he's thinking about 55 degrees Celsius for about an hour or a little longer. Any thoughts? Uh Andy, uh, I think that sounds about right.
Uh that's just about the right temperature. Uh, even uh even a s a shade lower, like 54 5 or something like that for a tenderloin, usually in beef. I should think the venison would be about the same. They the trick with venison in general is I don't know how old uh the animal you got was, but if there's any sort of tendency to a livery taste in the meat at all, um, which there shouldn't be in the loin, but you know, in other cuts of the venison, you're definitely gonna not want to cook it for uh too too long, or those livery notes can be accentuated. Sometimes, like when we cooked yak for a long time, uh those livery kind of notes, gamey notes actually kind of I think worked with the with the uh you know with the meat, uh, but I don't know that you necessarily want that in the venison.
Um the only other question is is that some meats can feel tender, uh, but then you know, e when you cook them, they're tough even at these low low temperatures. But I should think that uh uh venison loin isn't gonna be that tough. I would cook a small piece of it uh at fifty-five for an hour and see whether you like it. I wouldn't go much longer because if it does cook like beef, which I'm assuming it it probably will, uh, then it's gonna start getting kind of fibery after that and won't be as good. But please write in and tell us how it is, and I'm curious to hear how your homemade uh circulator uh works out.
Okay. Um we had a uh another question. Uh this is an anonymous question. Uh he said, why does an egg that we stored in a mason jar with white truffles not coddle properly? The yolk was cooked perfectly, but the white didn't set up at all.
The egg was not very old. If anything was only around a week old. Jeez, I've no, I never heard of that this. I've done a uh I did a preliminary uh you know web search uh, you know, and scientific literature search. I couldn't find any sort of active principle in um in you know truffles that would stop an egg white from setting.
My only theory is that is it was it was it stored at room temperature, which would accelerate the breakdown of the uh of the white to a thin white and make it so it doesn't set as nicely in a cotton preparation. But other than that, I can't see why uh a white wouldn't set, whereas the yolk would, because typically the you know, typically the uh the white would set much earlier, white would set start setting uh in and around 60 degrees Celsius at 140 uh and be you know basically custardy nice set at around 62 degrees Celsius, uh, you know, and then the egg wouldn't start setting the yolk wouldn't start setting up until uh you know, it would be runny at 62 and would start setting up at 63 get creamy and then get um you know get really firm uh around 65 or so. Now uh you know uh there's there's so many recipes for truffled uh omelets that I I'm I'm curious it's gotta be some sort of weird something going on. Like was the mason jar at room temperature? I can't think of anything.
I can't think of anything. Anyway, uh, but I'll I will definitely ask around, and if any of our readers have heard anything, please uh please tell us. The other interesting point that uh this anonymous caller brings up is that uh they cook Udon noodles at salad for a brunch uh and uh they toss it in uh Meyer lemon vinaigrette. They had some left over, and so they decided to dehydrate it and then puff it. And they notice that the ones that have been soaking in vinegar uh seem to puff more than the normal ones that had just been cooked and uh and and you know blanched and left out and tried.
And um, so is there any question uh why would they puff bigger with the acid? And I have no idea actually. Uh it's interesting. I did a preliminary research on that, and I couldn't find anything specifically with acid and puffing, but uh it might be possible that there's some sort of effect. I mean, acid obviously weakens gluten, but I don't know if it's gonna weaken gluten in products that have already been cooked or not.
So if you if you somehow are weakening the gluten structure and the and the udon hadn't been completely overcooked, because remember when I puff anything, I overcook the bee Jesus out of it. So perhaps there's some sort of weakening there, and perhaps then it only works on wheat versus uh on wheat based uh noodles versus, for instance, puffing uh like a tapioca starch or something like that. That would be the that would be the kicker. If you did a test and you said, okay, look, I'm gonna do a buckwheat noodle. Of course that has you're gonna put wheat in that too.
If I'm gonna do like tapioca or some other kind of noodle and puff it with an acid and see whether that also works. Then if if it also puffs more with an acid in that situation, then obviously it's not the gluten. But uh I hope this anonymous uh reader will uh give us some more information because I'd like to I'd like to experiment on this more. But I love observations like this. Maybe we'll learn maybe we'll all learn something, right?
Yeah. Uh here we have a caller. Hello, caller, you're on the air. Hi, Dave. This is Colin Gord down in DC.
I called in a couple weeks ago asking about uh, you know, possibly using some pectonics to clear up some sweet potato Yes. And we talked about that because we ran some tests. I couldn't get it to work, even with a centrifuge. Did you get it to work? Um, so I got basically I've been toying with it.
I have never uh like I've seen a lot of interesting things that you know it weren't wasn't what I was going for, but now I'm calling in to like maybe get some tips on where to go from here. Alright, so what so what was your experience? So what is that? What yeah, what'd you do? Tell me what you did.
Alright, so what I did was I mean, first thing I did was ran just the sweet potatoes through uh my room they had a champion juicer, so that was perfect. Uh you know, I've I I had never juiced anything that was like a tuber before, but it was uh or you know, so I wasn't expecting a whole lot because they're not like nice and juicy, seeming like an apple, but still got like maybe sixty percent yield. That's pretty good. Pretty pretty sweet. It's pretty good.
So at least compared to what I was expecting, right? And then um so once you have the juice, uh, you know, I had it in a glass jar. I saw and you could see that there was a lot of starch settling out. Right. You get like a white starchy powder at the b at the bottom.
Well the funny thing is you get like a white starchy powder and then stuff that is kind of like acts like starch, but is also more like orange, like the potato. Right, like the mixed layer. The cells were still kind of adhered to some stuff I don't know. Right. Uh I I know what you're talking about.
We had the same thing happen. Then what'd you do? Then all right. Then first time I just hit it with some additional amylase, some additional uh beta. Whatever you get from a brewery supply?
Yeah, from the home like at home brew stores, they sell a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a big I think they're mixes. I think they're actually mixes of alpha and beta amylase, but I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'd have to look it up. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And then I don't have my no I don't have my notes in front of me, but but then I you know, put it in, sealed it up in a mason jar, put it in a circulator bath to a kind of lower lower mashing temperature to try to convert a lot of the starches over to sugars, because it was going for like a sugary syrup to uh simmer down into a caramel. Right. Right. And uh how much of the starch did he did you agitate it? Um no, I left it sick, so I wanted the starch to settle out to the bottom so I could kind of decamp the stuff off.
Right, but the amylase if you agitate it would actually help break down some of the starch, no? Although maybe not if it's locked. Yeah, that would be that'd be a good plan, yeah. I mean, like what I would do like before we go further, because I want to hear the rest of it, uh what I would do in the f the next test, I would cook the starch out a little bit, then cool it, then add the amylase because then you could burst it and you're 'cause the amylase might have if you have intact cells in there, the amylase is gonna have trouble getting to the uh getting to the starch maybe, unless it's been cooked out a little bit. Yeah.
Maybe go ahead. What kind of temperature range would you say for uh that first step? Ooh, I don't know. I'd have to go look at my you know, a good book is the uh eag like for starches in general and pasting and all that is uh and all this is Egan Egan Press has a book on starches. Yeah, yeah.
I mean they're great, they're a great series of books that all of those uh Yeah, yeah, I got the Hydrocolors one a while back. Yeah, their starch book's pretty good. Their starch books good, their nutritive sweetener books pretty good. Um and you can get 'em all for ninety-nine bucks online, actually, uh, if they still run that deal. It's hard to find, but you can get 'em all.
So yeah, so then what'd you do? You you settled it out and then uh that did what what would what the stuff tastes like. Well, well, so actually the interesting thing was uh, you know, I had left it to mash out for a good long time just to you know, kind of uh I mean, partially 'cause I didn't come back for a day, and unfortunately what had what had happened is the water bath had evaporated below the temperature probe. So it ended up just boiling the hell out of that shit. First rule, first rule, first rule of running a circulator, folks, out there in in internet land, is always, always cover your circulator so that you don't especially on a long cookout to not evaporate all your liquid off.
It's a classic, classic uh problem. Yes. Well the good news is is that you'll never do that again. Oh yeah. Yeah, I'm just glad I cut it in time before I burn, you know, burn out the heating coil or anything.
But but but but the magic thing is that uh it looks like this boiling, this like boiling step at the end has caused the kind of sugary syrupy water to separate out in a way that I have not been able to replicate since. Oh yeah. Uh yeah. So I I I figured it what it was just sort of setting the starches and sort of at the bottom there. Uh and yeah, that was the only time that I was able to get a very nice kind of uh translucent caramel out of it.
Okay, this is very interesting to me. Uh the you gotta try to replicate it. I had the same thing happen once. The worst thing in the world is when you're cooking and you do something wrong and you don't and you d ha don't aren't able to like you know replicate it and you love the result. This has happened to me I made a durian caramel by accident in a pressure cooker that was incredible, like had no sulfur note, tasted like durian, but wasn't offensive to like the most mild western noses.
Oh awesome, rich, not burnt, and we went through probably fifteen fifteen durian trying to get that back, and we've never been able to do it. So I wish you better luck with the you def well, we should try so we'll try some of the beta amylase and alpha amylase to see that we can replicate, but I definitely wish you more luck uh in replicating it, and uh you should call back again and tell us uh tell us what happens. We right now though, we have to go I've been told that I have to go to a break. We're going to a break. But call back and tell us what happens, Con.
We're we're interested in it. Cooking issues. Oh, how you feel, bro? Feeling good. You feel good?
It's true. How do you feel, man? I'll feel all right. I don't want to know you're in, yeah. I feel fellow.
You're gonna have a bump good time. Ah We're gonna have a bump good time. We're gonna have a bump cut dye. We're gonna have a bump cut dye. We gotta take high.
Alright! And welcome back to Cooking Issues. Call in all your cooking questions to 718-497-2128-718-497-2128. Jack in the control room tells me that we might be able to go a little bit long today because we had some questions come in over the New Year's break. By the way, speaking of New Year's break, I know, I know we have not been writing a lot.
When I say we, I mean me, have not been writing a lot uh in the blog recently. I just wanted to spend some time with my family over the holidays, alright? No. Uh we're gonna get back on the stick and we'll, you know, I'll be I'll be writing some stuff real soon, we hope. So please, no, no uh no hate mail about how I haven't been writing anything.
Um okay. Uh speaking of uh sweet potatoes, we had a s you know, Colin called in with a sweet potato question. We have a an actually a question about sweet potatoes, uh, which is good. And it comes from uh Eliza Kwanbeck, and she writes, my boyfriend and I have been having an ongoing discussion about the difference between tarot, tapioca, manioc, yam, and sweet potato. Uh they spent a summer backpacking through Southeast Asia, taking cooking courses in every country we pass through.
Yeah, that sounds nice. Yeah, it does. I'd like to do that. Uh and in Malaysian Borneo, we took a cooking class and made Berber cha cha, which sounds awesome. I've never had it or heard of it, but I'll eat anything called Berber Chacha, which is a coconut yam taro porridge flavored with pondan leaves.
I love pandan. We uh panan is a leaf that has a little bit of a kind of a vanilla taste. For those of you that don't know, you can get it in uh in Southeast Asian groceries, uh Thai groceries, uh, you know, anything like that. And um it comes usually frozen, and sometimes the frozen one can have a little bit of a fishy taste when it's thought out, but it's used in a lot of dessert preps, and we uh used to make a really good uh sugar cookie out of it. Instead of vanilla, we would we basically uh blitzed the uh leaves with butter, heated it, and decanted the butter off and used that to make cookies, and and they were like this amazing green color, like pistachio green color, and uh with a like that pondon pondon flavor that you can't you know really replicate without the leaves because I think the extracts are crap, you know, the flavorings.
Anyway, uh that's uh off topic, but delicious. Um you know, she basically got into a bunch of arguments about uh, you know, what these different things are, what the different starches are, where they come from, etc. etc. etc. All right, uh uh Eliza.
First of all, uh this is giving me a great opportunity to pump uh a series of books that I think everyone should own as many of as they can. And it's the uh Brooklyn Botanic Garden, that is Brooklyn Botanic Garden series. Uh and they have a series of small guides that are all really, really cheap. You can get them online, actually. If you go to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, if you become a member, they send you like 10 for nothing, and they're like, you can get them for like five to twelve bucks.
I mean, they're amazing. But the one I'm gonna talk about today, it and it has snappy titles, which I really enjoy. Uh I love I like a snappy title. It's called Buried Treasures, Tasty Tubers of the World. Uh and it and what I like about these guides is you can read them kind of in one you know quick session.
Uh, you know, I don't know, when you're sitting on the hopper or something. It's only like a hundred pages, a lot of good pictures, a lot of good information. Um, and so uh I read it this morning, not on the hopper, please. Uh, and uh, but I recommend that series. They also have a really good uh book called The Best Apples to Buy and Grow.
Uh but here is my and they have a lot of really more rare, interesting tubers, corms, rhizomes, everything in that book that you can go take take a look at. But here's the quick breakdown. I know I'm gonna get some of this wrong, so please no hate mail. You can just correct me uh if I'm wrong. The sweet potato, uh, which I can't possibly pronounce the Latin name, is it's like ipo Ippamoya batatas, I can't pronounce it, but anyway, sweet potato uh is is from uh South America.
It's been cultivated for many, many years, like 10,000 years. Um, it went early pre-Columbian times, probably to Polynesia, and then uh, you know, after you know, the kind of you know, Great Columbian Seed Exchange, whatever, uh, went uh the other way uh over to Africa. It's grown all over the world. They grow a lot of it in China, it's fed to pigs, they make starch uh for noodles. It's also it's it's you know incredibly delicious.
Uh the white varieties of it are still just a sweet potato, the uh boneados are still they're just sweet potatoes. They're the same uh style, different cultivars, they're l they're less sweet. That is a sweet potato. Everything it usually in a New York in a sorry in a United States supermarket, things labeled yams are actually sweet potatoes. Luckily, the US government requires it somewhere on the box, it also says sweet potato, even if it says yam.
Okay. The actual yam, uh Dioscoria alata, is from East Asia, uh, but it made it to Africa well over a thousand years ago, and then from there to the West Indies, uh, you know, um, in I guess the 1500s or so. There's many, many varieties of it. The yam is is distinct, right? The yam, uh unlike the sweet potato, which can be eaten raw, the yam uh has to be cooked.
Okay, you have to you have to cook again. You can't you can't eat it raw. Um I don't really know much about yam starch. I think most of the stuff that I see is starch is uh sweet potato starch, which is entirely different from potato starch, entirely different from uh tapioca manioc cassava starch, okay? So that's kind of sweet potato versus yam.
Now, taro, right, uh colo Casia esquilenta, right, you have to they like you have to cook uh that stuff because it contains some calcium oxalate, I think. Uh it's a corn, it comes from India, but went to Southeast Asia a long, long, long, long, long time ago, right? Uh that's what taro chips are made out of. In Hawaii, that's what poi is made out of. Taro cakes you get in uh in China, like that's all tarot, right?
There's a different thing called giant tarot, right? That's from Sri Lanka that w uh went uh also to the Pacific Islands, also needs to be cooked because of uh calcium oxalate, and and if you eat it, it'll like it'll taste like like thousands of of sharp little needles, and it's very unpleasant. So it's very, you know, don't want to do it. You want to cook it to get rid of it. Sometimes you want to cook it, you want to cook it.
I think that's with a pinch of baking soda helps uh neutralize it. I think, but I'm not sure. Uh I don't I don't do it do a lot of work on it. Okay. Then uh kind of the answer to tarot from uh the South America is uh Yautia, right?
It's the same family as tarot. And so basically, like uh Yautia and taro, you can kind of interchange uh those those two things, right? Uh so anyway, so that's that. Now, an entirely separate ball of wax is the and these are all the same damn thing, just from different different names, different places. Manioc, cassava, tapioca, and yucca, right?
Those are all uh manahad esqualenta. I can't pronounce any of this, so please don't come back on me. They th these are like, you know, uh relatively recent, i.e. like a thousand BC. Uh they're all that's from South America, but it's spread all over the world.
You like now there's two kinds, right? There's the there's the the the sweet kind and then the not sweet kind, and then they all contain certain amounts of compounds that turn into cyanide. So you you definitely want to uh cook them, but the all the varieties usually you buy in the supermarkets now, um, you know, you can just cook them and eat them. You don't need to like s grind them, soak them overnight to get rid of the cyanide compounds and wash them and then you know and process them. Uh but in the old in the old days you did, or or um you'd die.
Anyway, but uh most of the varieties that are cultivated now, uh you don't have to do that. And so that's where tapioca starch comes from, which is what they make the little pearls out of in bubble tea, to the best of my knowledge. And it's also uh what um you know, tapioca starch is very interesting. It's a different shape starch from uh many other starches. It's it's got a characteristic what's called kettle drum shape.
You're gonna want to look uh a good source for different starches is National Starch Corporation and or the International Starch Uh Council, I think, has a website. And the Egan Press mentioned earlier a book on starches, uh which you can get from the American Association of Serial Chemists, uh uh has a good stuff on um tapioca starch, but tapioca starch, aside from its interesting kettle drum shape, uh, is world-renowned for being very bland, so it doesn't uh cause a lot of flavoring uh to you know to things because it's bland. Uh it also uh is used in puff snacks because it has very good uh expansion properties because it has a nice uh amylo amylopectin breakdown. Uh so uh, you know. Anyway, also those things, yuca maniacca uh uh cassava tapioca, you'll often find a thick coating of wax over it, because if not, they kind of turn to crap pretty quick in the uh in the supermarket.
So how is how's that, Nastasha? That was very informative. Quick quick rundown? Did it make any make any dang sense at all? It did.
Did uh all right. Let's take another break before we get back to the back. Alright, so listen, we're gonna take another commercial break, but call in your questions too. 718 497 2128. That's 718-497-2128 cooking issues.
How you feel, man? I'll feel all right. I don't want any people to know you in here. How you feel, fella? Sure getting down.
Look at him. We're gonna have a bunk 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.
Don't take them up, Brad. We gotta take a high. All right. Yeah, let's go on back. We gotta take high.
Yeah. Now I won't have a body. Let's bread blow up by two cores. And then I wanna wave in. Let's go until that we did it.
Now alright. All right, all right. You know, we're gonna we're gonna talk this cooking issues. Welcome back. 718-497-2128.
That's 718-497-2128. We actually had a question about our songs, and we're gonna uh talk about them later. For those of you that actually know that song already, which uh oh, I won't spoil it. I won't spoil it. Uh okay.
So we had a question about carbonation, one of my favorite things. I've never actually written about it on the blog. Uh I guess just because most of the research I've done on carbonation, I did kind of so long before I had the blog that I just never bothered uh writing about it. But you know, maybe someday, if I ever get the time, we'll write a uh uh a primer on it. Um again, I will write a primer on is what I mean to say.
Uh so the question is do you have any thoughts about the uh EC slash ISI? Like both are correct, but I think they're moving towards Nastasha, which one of the C they're moving towards EC. Uh do you have any thoughts on the EC twist and sparkle carbonation system? It seems like it solves a lot of the problems you have with soda siphons and it's cheaper and smaller than the soda stream, uh, but still um does use small cartridges. Long term, I'd like to get a system with a 20-pound CO2 tank, and and this is from Sam, and yes, Sam, you should get a 20-pound CO2 tank.
At the very minimum, a five-pound CO2 tank, Sam. Minimum. Anyway, uh, but I'm a student, and I'll probably be moving a few times in the next few years, so it's not practical to purchase at the moment. Uh I'm also considering as a gift from my parents who buy fizzy water by the case but are not going to be interested in driving around with big CO2 tanks. Hey, they're not that big, Sam.
They're not that big. I live in a tiny, tiny apartment, right? I live in a an 800 square foot apartment with uh two rambunctious kids. Uh and and I have not one but two 20-pound CO2 tanks in there. Anyway, I'm not saying you have to do it.
I'm not trying to make you feel bad. I'm just saying you can do it. I know you can do it, Sam. Anyway, uh a couple more questions I can't seem to find the answers to. How much water can I carbonate with the eight gram cartridges the system comes with?
Are the cartridges proprietary? Can they be purchased more cheaply from someone besides uh EC or in bulk, and how well does it work? Okay. Uh I can't tell you that you can buy it from someone else, but all of those cartridges are uh pretty much uh pretty much the same. Um EC's, you know, guarantee I shouldn't say this, I'm gonna get my my butt handed to me by the EC Corporation because I'm friends with those guys.
But uh, you know, they claim that their cartridges are all very accurately weighed out, uh, etc. etc. They're they're very pure. You can only get really one bottle of uh water out of the eight gram cartridge, and therein is the rub. So for me, it's more of for bars uh who don't want to invest in a carbonation system to maybe do drinks.
And for me to really carbonate a drink, it's gonna take two cartridges because I have to blast off some of the uh stuff. Uh and so I I'd hate to say this, but I think if you're gonna make a lot of seltzer at home uh and you want a smaller system, that you know it's gonna cost a lot very quickly to run through cartridges if you're actually drinking a lot of soda water and uh EC is gonna come tear my head off. But I would definitely in that situation, if you don't want to go for a uh five or twenty-pound CO2 tank, I would go for the soda stream. I'm gonna get my butt handed to me. That's okay, you're telling the truth.
But I would go for the soda stream. I know many people that have it who don't want to have the five, twenty-pound CO2 tanks, you get a a lot more charges out of the um out of the refill um because you're just gonna go you're gonna run through CO2 cartridges like the end of the world is coming with uh with the twist and sparkles. Now the advantage of the twist and sparkle is that you can do liquor and other things in it that they tell you with the uh with the soda stream that you can't do because of foaming problems. I I've never I don't own a soda stream, but I I'm thinking that I can modify one to do drinks like pretty cheaply just by adding a little extender tube to it. But I would definitely consider getting the um you can get the starting level um soda stream, I think, for under $100, like $79.
And I think it'd pay for itself pretty quick in terms of uh in terms of chargers. But uh I've probably just cut off my nose despite my face. We probably will never work for EC again. But uh Sam, those are my those are my feelings. Uh it oh, it it works, it works fine.
Uh as long as you chill it, uh really, really chill your li uh liquids, keep your levels uh accurate. But I usually put two chargers in to really get uh a really strong charge in it because I like it really, really, really fizzy. Uh and so I really feel like you're gonna blast through cartridges with it. Uh I can't believe I say this on air because I'm gonna get I'm gonna get in trouble. Anyway, uh uh here we have a caller.
Caller, you are on the air. Hi, I'm Brian. Um calling from San Francisco. Happy New Year to you, Dave. Happy New Year.
Um thank you. Uh so I have two questions um which are unrelated. Um I'm hoping you can answer um them both. Um so I'll I'll ask them both uh right now. Um and the first question is regarding um distillation.
I've noticed um that there's a lot of kind of distillation equipment. I'm guessing I'm sort of interested in making my own um kinds of essential oils. I bought um a number of essential oils from um from Mandy Aftel in the past. Um and now should pardon me? Friend of cooking issues, by the way, Mandy Aftel.
Yes, yeah. Yes, yes. Um have uh have um and I've used them and they're they're really delicious, and so now I'm interested in sort of making my own. Um and I'm wondering what kind of setup you might recommend to um begin to uh start um doing making my own essential oils and um hydrosols. So that's question number one.
Um and the second question um has to do with pectin, um, which is I've tried m making my own um patch free and I haven't had a lot of success. Um and I've used a couple of different um supermarket pectins um over the counter. Um I've done some reading and one was said that certo, which is the liquid kind, I tried and um that was supposed to be okay, and the other was like Pomonas or Ramonas or something something like that, um, and that that was supposed to work, but I haven't had any success. Um so I'm hoping that you might be able to uh um give a little help me with that and give a little one on one on on pectins as some sources for getting them. So let's go in reverse.
Uh what's your problem with it? Um not setting. Huh. Not setting. And uh do you you're making sure that your acid levels are high enough and your sugar levels are high enough?
I mean the main thing with pectins. I mean, I used it for like cumquat, you know, so it was pretty high acid. And but what about the sugar levels? It was still pretty high. Yeah.
I mean, maybe and I boiled it for a while. Right. You're gonna w you I don't I don't have off the top of my head off my head what the the numbers are, but pe uh regular pectin in order to set needs very high solids level, and uh, you know, which means like a lot of a lot of sugars and also acids. Cumquat should be acidic enough to set it. Uh then the question is is how high is the solids level, which is going to be then determined by the temperatures.
Now, presumably you're taking the temperature high enough that um your solids level is gonna be high enough. That that could be a source of the problem, not taking the temperature high enough, or if you took the temperature high enough, then adding another liquid that's going to um dilute it back down below the solids level where it's gonna set properly. Um you know, the the the different pectins you can get a lot of times are gonna be apple based or citrus based. Um it it I don't I don't know any of the store brands. I've never used any of any of them.
Um, you know, I I tend to use more of like the the weirder ones for kind of hydr hydrocholid applications because that's what people ask me for, and those ones you can use in lower solids and with lower sugars, but they require things like calcium to set. That's one of the pectins they use for kind of low sugar jams and things like that. Those are like, you know, um those are different kinds of like like low low methoxy amidate LMA, you might hear it called. What kind of calcium do you want uh or how do you recommend adding the calcium to those? Oh, you just add like you know, like a like uh gluconate.
I use calcium lactate glucose. It doesn't require that much. And in there's uh there's low methoxy pectin. The problem is it's very sensitive to calcium levels, so that if you know if you put too much, it's a problem, put too little, and there's low methoxy amidated, which is like less, it's more it's a little more bulletproof. But regular pectin should work unless you don't have a solids content high enough, which means you're probably not cooking to a high enough temperature.
That's the only thing I can think of. Um you say solids content, what what what what do you mean by that? Uh so in other words, like the you know, the your jelly is a certain percent, let's just break it, forget all the flavors, right? There's acid, whatever, blah blah blah, but it's a certain percent sugar and a certain percent water, right? And so you need to have the solids content, i.e.
sugar content, high enough for the pectin to gel properly. I mean, that's kind of like that's what pectin needs. It's so the two classic things to go wrong with with pectin-based things are you don't have enough uh the the solids levels aren't high enough, the sugars aren't high enough, or uh the acid levels not high enough. And those are the two kinds of things that you always want to want to look to first. Now, uh what was the first question again?
I got because I had to answer to it in my head. It has to do with distillation and essential oils. Okay. Now, a lot of people want to use like the stuff that I have, like a rotary evaporator, uh, all the kinds of things for distillation for essential oil. So much money.
Well, not too much money, yes, also, but uh also not effective. What you want to do for that is steam distillation, right? And so in a steam distillation setup, uh, I mean, in that's what I would buy. I've never done essential oil distillation, but I've considered buying a rig for it. And the good news is they're cheap and they're fairly effective.
And what you're what you're doing then is you're packing a column with uh your product and you're you're basically boiling steam is going through it, rupturing the cells, and the steam is carrying with it the essential oils, recondensing on the other side. The oils will float to the top or some to the bottom, depends. Some are actually heavier than water, right? And the stuff and the stuff that is left over that's water is the hydrosol. And so it's actually um you know the main problem is your yields usually are quite low, but it's definitely something that that can be done.
It's legal, it's not illegal to do because you're not using uh uh alcohol for it, you're using uh water. And so I would go definitely check out uh steam distillation. You should be able to get a whole small rig to test uh on eBay the parts for it for under uh a hundred bucks. You just want to make sure, you know, just well I saw that there was some that were vacuum uh distillation. Um there was a couple of rigs that were oh you know, under two hundred bucks.
First first for essential oils? It didn't say I mean they were sort of chemistry type type of equipment. I just typed in um steam distillation, uh vacuum steam distillation, and it there was a couple things that popped up on on Amazon, actually. Um I mean they're not they're not rotary evaporators, but would within in that case could you see you know uh it being done under vacuum being being helpful. Uh well I I think it might uh I've never done the test, but I think it it might actually be detrimental.
I mean I can't I get oils across when I'm doing rotovap distillation sometimes, but it's very small quantities and they're dissolved. Obviously they're dissolved in alcohol because I'm doing it in alcohol and a lot of these things are soluble in alcohol to a certain degree. Uh and I'll I do get oozo kind of effects uh when I water stuff down and some stuff, so you know there is oil in there, right? But um, you know, I I uh I think that the high temperature of the steam, which is helping to rupture the cells, is a is a benefit for uh the steam distillation, and I think that you might not uh get uh that kind of action if you put it under a vacuum. Because the main thing a vacuum is gonna do for you is lower the temperature at which everything boils.
Now you can get a more gentle result that way, but I don't think you're gonna get um I don't think you're gonna get uh a high enough yield of uh of essential oil to really have it be worthwhile. I don't know. Now you could try that you know I the one thing for essential oil extraction that I've tried only once or twice, but haven't really had success with is uh butane uh uh extraction, which is used by uh potheads for doing um for you know making honey oil out of uh out of uh swag weed and uh you know and I have it and the honey bee is the extractor that you use for that. And I I I've tried it once and I wasn't able to get a good result, but that's another thing I like to try. But I would definitely go for a regular standard uh steam distillation rig, uh which is pretty cheap, and I think you're gonna get good results.
I haven't in other words, I haven't done enough experimentation to figure out how to do it at a low temperature. Do you know what I mean? Okay. But and the ones that are produced aren't really produced at a low temperature unless they're super critical fluid CO2 extract and stuff anyway, and that's beyond most of our reaches, mine included, you know what I mean? Mm-hmm.
Okay, great. Um sounds within within my price range and and worth uh experimenting with. Definitely. And uh write back or call us and tell us how it works, all right? I will, Dave.
Okay, thanks a lot. All right, bye. Um Jack, should we go to another one or should I just finish out uh our questions? What do you think? Should we go to another break or should I finish out my questions?
No, I'll keep going. Keep going? Nice. Uh okay. So Ken, who wrote us about the uh Arabie, uh the Airby Aeropress, the Aero Press Coffee.
Um, he uh wrote back uh just basically talking to us about the air press. The Aero Press, for those of you that know, was invented by the guy that invented the Arabie, and um it's basically uh a piston that you put coffee in and then you apply pressure to the piston and you force uh the water through the like a puck, a brewing puck, and it makes basically supposedly a very high quality of uh like a mocha style coffee, not true espresso. Um and then uh but um Ken writes that there's this interesting thing. He says some aeropress power users dramatically increase the danger or the drama of using an aeropress by and they're only forty bucks. We gotta order one.
I I I meant to make a mental note to order one before I showed up on Amazon so I could say I've ordered it. Did someone say they were gonna let us borrow theirs? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.
Anyway, some aeropress power users dramatically increase the danger of using aeropress by brewing with the machine upside down and using a polyester or metal metal filter instead of the paper filter to take full advantage of the bloom. I the oil, you know, the coming out coffee oil uh that has uh some yummies in it, and you can preserve them by brewing upside down and flipping the device over on end. Uh I suspect at least some people understandably conflate bloom with crema or maybe the benefits of crema. Uh very interesting. I hadn't thought about this.
And basically the point is is that let's say you're uh um let's say you are a uh uh um a French press person, right? So you take coffee and you push uh and the he points me to a website which uh I then I'll just read a little bit from the from the the the website. Uh and this is from I didn't write down the person's name. You know why? It's because I'm an idiot.
Oh, Scott Markhart. Anyway, the Aero Press uh gives its user unprecedented control over brewing variables, yielding a great cup of coffee, but there's trouble in paradise. It has a shortcoming. Fans of the venerable French press will understand immediately because they are accustomed to a cup that offers a complex flavor of coffee's natural oils. They are lost in a paper filtration systems like the aeropress.
On the other hand, many people do not enjoy the fines that a French press delivers in the brew. They embitter the bottom of the cup as they cause overextraction there and they have a bad mouthfeel. So we're caught between a rock and a hard place. And so what he does is he flips the aero press over, runs it in reverse. And I've always had a lot of uh problems with um French press in general.
One of which is that you can pack the the the grounds down at the bottom. The other is that they don't offer temperature control, which is dumb. The only attempt at a temperature controlled thing similar to a French press was the clover, and that cost like 17,000 dollars or something absurd like that. Until Starbucks bought them, and I don't even know who the heck has them anymore. Anyway, um so uh that's an interesting question.
So now I am uh mentally this morning spent an hour or so just sitting around thinking about um I don't know how to make a uh a French press slash Arabie that had all of the good results that without having you know stuff spraying all over my shirt. So so Ken, there definitely will be more uh thinking and talking on the Aero Press and its kin uh in in the future. We're I'm definitely gonna be researching that in the in the new year. Um now. Uh sorry folks, uh flipping through the uh flipping through the thing.
We have uh, by the way, if you call in the next 10 seconds, I will give you a free pork chop. And you will have the last and I just made that up. But I will. I'll give them a free pork chop. Anyway, um we had an interesting question, and it's uh it's a non cooking related question.
And I think I'll uh round out on that. I'm making sure that I'm not missing anyone uh else's um questions. Oh, I am missing someone's questions. Sorry, folks. Uh we have uh Howard from Montreal writes in and said he just started listening to the show over the holidays and he's loving every minute of it.
Thank you. Uh and uh he basically uh listened to the Berlin show, and he was we talked then about a mixture of uh sodium chloride and calcium chloride to reduce sodium intake. Uh and he says that uh his aunt uses this, and uh and basically uh he's wondering whether or not uh we were talking about like adding ions to things to basically increase the volatility, etc. etc. And and he was saying I'll just read it word for word rather than try to paraphrase it because I'm I'm butchering what he what he's trying to say.
So uh the effects I'm talking about, altering the solubility of volatiles, brining meat, bread, all seem to be related to ionic strength of the liquid. The higher the ionic strength, the more polar the aqueous phase, which in turn drives off organics. Similarly, in high ionic strengths, uh will alter the tertiary structure of proteins, such as gluten and bread. The brining process is slightly different, but the salts are driven into the meat, et cetera, et cetera. Assuming this theory is true, any soluble compound should be used instead of salt to achieve these effects.
However, I think the shielding effects of salt ions play an important role in the disruption of tertiary protein structure. As such, KCl should be a close substitute for NACL, although MGCL2 might be preferred in certain situations, but then you run into coagulations due to the dival divalent ca cation um uh magnesium's divalent cation. Anyway, what are your thoughts? Uh I don't have that many thoughts on it, only to say that um it's not only um uh me I I you know Howard, I just wanted to read this because I'm not ignoring your question. Uh I haven't um I haven't thought about it.
And I don't have enough time to think about it on air right now, right, Nastasha? But I I will think more about it. Obviously, uh there's certain things that different uh cations, for instance, calcium has specific results with uh specific uh in specific systems like hydrocolloids, sodium uh has uh certain results. But obviously just shifting the ionic balance of whatever you're gonna do with is going to mess with the protein structure. Uh but I haven't thought enough about it to uh to to really know.
But yes, you mean for instance, when you're brinding something, actually kind of like like like polyphosphates like uh tend to e like even alter the water binding protein uh water binding of protein more than uh regular sodium, like sodium polyphosphates tend to alter the the binding uh quite a bit more. Um so they're not probably all the same, but yes, they all work somewhat. Now, uh sorry uh that's like a long rambling like bunch of stuff from uh from Dave Arnold in the New Year's, having his brain go on Fritz in the middle of the radio. But here's a question I can answer answer, and it comes from Paul, uh, and it's not a cooking-related question. It's what are the two pieces of music on the Cooking Issues Radio Show podcast.
There uh and it's interesting, he thinks it's fish is fish is vodka is the intro, is what he said, which I love Fish is Fish. It's a great book. I used to read that to my kids all the time, Fish is Fish. Uh and uh we're gonna have a fun good time, uh, which is the one that is in the middle of the uh of the show. Uh, and he haven't had much uh luck googling the songs.
Okay, I'm gonna do it in reverse. The f the one in the middle is Doing It to Death by James Brown. Uh sometimes called Have a Funky Good Time, but that's not what it is. It's called Doing It to Death. And uh that song was uh released in 1973, uh and it's with the JBs and it's got it's amazing, it's got Macy O'Parker, it's got Fred Thomas.
And uh the reason I uh James Brown got me through many, many, many years, uh like late nights in the studio, uh welding at four in the morning. I would crank songs like that to get me kind of like over the hump when you're passing out into your welding mask, uh as you're you know, building like large sculptures alone, which you should never do. Um you should always have someone with you in the shop when you're working. Uh but uh doing it to death is one of those songs that you know it's just it's just so tight and he beats on a rhythm so long, and it's just a kick king. And it's just like minutes of this boom jump.
And so, like, you know, I like that kind of song just keeps me going. And it's what's famous for, even though we never play it uh this section on the radio, it's famous for a section, it's song's in in F. And in the middle of the song, James Brown like says, Okay, we're gonna take it to D, down D, funky D, and then boom, D, bent, that they get the gang, they take it down to D, and it's just an amazing, like it's an amazing transition, and it's like all of other, you know, Jake great James Brown songs, is that he can take it to really high level and then change it and somehow that goes into an even higher level. I mean, like he's a he's a mirac was dead now. Miracle worker with bridges like that.
And so uh he was incredibly influential to me uh from a musical standpoint. And so I had to pick a James Brown song, and we chose doing it, doing it to death. And so you can uh you can find it, uh find it there, and uh maybe sometime next time we'll play the the down D, funky D, skankin' D, down D part, which is uh uh fantastic. By the way, it you know, I guess it doesn't mean you're a bad person if you don't like James Brown, right? No, I yeah, it's associated with no, but it it definitely means there is something wrong with your funk motor.
Uh the uh the intro song is uh a little known song by Amos Milburn called Vicious Vicious Vodka. Although I like fishes, fish is vodka quite a bit. Uh and Amos Milburn, who died in in uh 1980, uh became uh somewhat popular in Los Angeles uh after World War II. Um and he wrote a lot of songs about liquor. Uh and uh, you know, Vicious, Vicious Vodka is actually not one of his best known ones, but he had Bad Bad Whiskey is a great song.
Um but a lot of songs about uh drinking. His uh he also wrote a famous song called The Chicken Shack, and he was kind of a contemporary of uh other people like Louie Jordan or uh Charles Brown, who did some uh amazing work, you know, Louie Jordan, you might know from Beans and Cornbread, or actually not as famous, we're just picking food songs. But uh Amos Milburn, uh, his best known song is actually not best known by him, and it's one scotch, one bourbon, and one beer, which you probably know the uh John Lee Hooker version of, and not the Amos Milburn uh uh version of. So uh apparently he did not actually have an alcohol problem, although all of his songs were like he did another one. I think he did um Milk and Water, which is basically means I'm not drinking right now because I'm back on milk and water because the doctor says that my liver will fall out if I continue to drink.
So uh that is vicious vicious vodka, or in my head now forever, fish is fish is vodka. Uh uh come back next week and listen to us. Cooking issues. Oh, you dead rat. Got me on this corner, and I don't know where I'm at.
Supposed to meet my baby in 20 minutes late. You got my head all twisted, and I guess can't get it straight. Fish is fishing vodka. Oh, you daddy rat. Got me on this corner.
And I don't know where I'm at. I had a chance to swap you for a little gym. Now, when my baby sees me, she's gonna bust my head. Use math to make the world a better place. Become an actuary through the society of actuaries and find solutions to the world's most pressing challenges.
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