The following episode of Cooking Issues has been brought to you by TechServe. This January, responsibly dispose of your old electronics at one of ten e-waste recycling events held across four boroughs of New York City, hosted by TechServe and the Lower East Side Ecology Center. Computers, printers, monitors, and lots of other electronics are being accepted for safe and proper recycling. Visit www.techserve.com slash recycling for more information and drop off location details. Hello and welcome to a late starting cooking issues.
I apologize to all the cooking issues listeners for being so late. I was stopped by the New York City subway system today, which decided it would take more than an hour to take me from my house in Manhattan to uh Bushwick here at Roberta's Pizzeria in Brooklyn, which uh should only be a half hour ride. Uh I could have run about twice as fast, Nastasha. What do you think? And then uh to top it off, uh what made it even more fun was as I was running from the subway station to the pizzeria, I uh nearly stepped in an eviscerated pigeon.
Oh, I saw that. Oh yeah. Yeah. And there's a dog outside the pizzeria tied up uh on a leash so long, uh, and it hated me so much because I was running. I guess it thought I was frightened, that I had to literally jump out of the way of its lunging teeth as it was flying towards my jugular.
Awesome. Uh so uh an inauspicious start to our show. Uh it's gonna have to be slightly abbreviated because we do have a show coming in at one. Uh call in all your questions too. What's the number, Stuff?
718 497-2128. Am I right, Jack? That's 718. What is it? 497-2128.
So call in all your questions, but make it snappy because uh unfortunately we're gonna have an abbreviated cooking issues uh this week. Okay, so our first question comes in uh anonymously via tweet deck, whatever tweet deck is. Uh and uh here she says, uh cooking issues has embraced the equipment of the stoner in various ways, from the spice grinder to the smoking gun, etc. So maybe it's time for a fair trade back. I know it might be a touchy subject on air, but uh I thought I'd try for some insight.
Uh after having surgery a year ago, I can no longer partake in the smoking of anything. I guess presumably marijuana is what is going to be asked about, but I occasionally bake cook with with it, meaning marijuana. If people who write about uh marijuana are so cagey with what they're talking about, well uh and since I don't actually smoke it or bake with it or do anything with it, I have no problem talking about it. We're talking about marijuana here. Um anyway, uh okay.
So uh I occasionally bake cook with it as a substitute to smoking. Uh Google hasn't provided any answers as to what temperature THC, that's uh what's that, tetra, tetrahydrocannabinol, right? Someone uh is extracted into fat. And uh while the double uh boiler method is fine, this means putting your marijuana finely ground into butter in a double boiler and cooking it. Uh I have an immersion circulator who was curious as to uh which temperature I could utilize the low temperature of the immersion circulator to more effectively and with less attention, uh, replace a double boiler with low temp method.
Well, um I don't think there's a specific temperature. I did some research yesterday. There's not a specific temperature at which THC is extracted, just increasing the temperature, increase the extraction rate of THC. There are some people who say that uh storing uh high temperature for too long can degrade some uh of the THC, but then I have uh some other sources that say uh cooking your oil at a at a higher much higher temperature, actually, can take uh uh s some some types of uh pot and uh actually increase their potency, presumably by taking um uh uh t THC that's has a carboxyl group on it, an acid, uh decarboxylating it, and then uh converting it into THC. But uh I don't I don't know about that.
I would say that you're gonna be uh really good if you use a vacuum bag, so treat this like a cooking problem, right? Uh if you use a vacuum bag, you're gonna get the fat more um injected into the um into the leaf, and so I would assume you get a faster, better, more complete uh extraction. Um I haven't really done any experiments on this, but I I encourage anyone else to to write in. I spent about an hour, an hour and a half looking for it, but I also didn't get anything uh specific. I would just set your circulator to like 85 C with a bag.
Make sure you squeeze the bag a bunch to get agitation. Agitation seems important. And uh let us know how it works, uh, Mr. or Mrs. Tweet Deck.
Uh, we have a caller? Yes. Okay, caller, you're on the air. Hi, Dave. Howdy.
Quick question. Um over Christmas break, my mom made uh scalloped potatoes, and she's had mixed results before with um graying of the potatoes. Um she's using not reactive uh cookware, uh corning wear. Right. I mean, is this a does need to put the potato slices in acidulated water first, or what's going on there?
Uh yeah, so uh when you say graying, you mean um kind of the color that you get when potatoes are leaving out, kind of a bluish gray, blackish blue. Bluish gray, almost, I mean, not quite black, but getting, yeah, just looking a little, you know. It tasted fine, but it just looked a little scary. Yeah, I think your analysis is pretty much right on here. I think what's happening is is the uh the heat isn't getting to them fast enough to um cook them before uh the enzymes in them have a chance to start uh working on them and and turning them brown.
I've never tried, um, although I don't know why I feel silly saying this, but I've never tried doing something like uh ascorbic acid as an attempt to prevent uh that sort of enzymatic browning because usually my technique is to just keep them submerged in water until I'm ready until I'm ready to cook. But that's not really an option in the gratin. I mean is it is it in a really slow oven? It's it's not a convection oven. It's a conventional, yeah.
That might have something to do with it. You know, I think it's also uh quite interesting that you say that it's in uh corning because a corning is going to obviously transmit the heat to the potatoes slower uh th then uh you know i if it goes in cold now it'll trans it'll transmit it like a champ if you preheat it but then it becomes a pain to layer the gratin into the dish uh when you're going um you know be if you minimize exposure to oxygen make sure that all the uh all the potato pieces are coated in kind of uh in in you know the sauce or whatever before you go that might not be an option with the recipe you're using. I mean you could try a little ascorbic acid. I'd be curious whether or not it works. Obviously a pre-blanch would work but then that's kind of a hassle to have to pre-blanch your potato slices before you do it.
Um you know but I would just make sure that before you assemble that the that the the chips are stored under water for as long a period or you know or use as quickly as possible because that's also gonna save you some some browning. Um I don't know what do you think any of these are the actual culprit or what? I I your guess is as good as mine, yeah. Um I think yeah I think in the future I'll I'll advise you to just try the uh the acid water I guess. Yeah but I wouldn't I mean the problem is you don't want the thing to taste like lemons.
I would get ascorbic acid which is vitamin C. Okay. Or you can get um i if you uh uh you know, go to a natural food store, not a natural food store, but a place that deals with dehydrators. Um they make uh sodium metabisulfite, which is uh some people use as as the you know as a uh antioxidant as well. But I wouldn't use lemon juice because I think it's really gonna kinda mar the flavor of what you're looking for.
And even ascorbic ascorbic acid, you know, has some flavor, but just not very much, and you would need a relatively small amount of it. Because remember, you you only need it to last until it gets hot enough to kill the enzymes anyway, and then you're good to go. Yeah. All right. All right, and so try a faster pan, try preheating the pyrex, try using ascorbic acid, but let us let us know what happens, see whether or not uh any of our guesses were uh on the money, all right?
Awesome, Dave. I'll keep you updated. All right, cool. Um now uh we have a question uh that comes in from Tucker saying on yesterday's radio show oh yesterday, well, last week's radio show, Dave mentioned a modification to a soda stream to deal with foaming when carbonating things other than water. I got one because my girlfriend goes through a liter of soda water a day, only a liter.
Only wimpy. Come on, get your girlfriend to start drinking liquids. Christ's sakes. Uh I tried carbonating a couple of white wines, which foam too much to get very carbonated. What would the modification to the soda stream be to solve this problem?
Okay, first of all, you're gonna uh in order to make a white wine taste as carbonated as water, you're gonna need to actually put more bubbles into it because uh uh wine, anything with alcohol in it tends to absorb more uh CO2 for the same level of sensation on your tongue, right? Which means that you're gonna have to have the wine to be very cold. So the the first trick you're gonna have to do is not try to um decarbonate white wine when it's right out of the uh, you know, just out of the fridge, because that's probably not gonna be cold enough. I would get it ice cold. Ice cold, okay?
Ice cold. And then uh I would put it into uh the soda screen machine. It it is gonna foam. Anything that has kind of surface active properties like that is gonna foam a lot more than um your typical than water. Water is the only thing that we really carbonate a lot that doesn't foam at all.
So here's what I would do. There's a in for those of you who don't know what the heck I'm talking about, soda stream. You can go, you can buy them at uh like a Whole Foods, you can buy them at a bunch of different places, and they they use kind of an intermediate size uh CO2 canister and allow you to carbonate I don't know, several gallons with one with one canister and then you recycle the canister and get a new one, and you only have to carry the CO2 bottle around because you produce the water at your house. There's not a lot of plastic waste, etc. etc.
Okay. So uh in the soda stream that you're supposed to fill the bottle, I think like two-thirds or a little more up, and a little tube goes into the bottle, and that's what actually carbonates. It's like a little like almost looks like a cappuccino frothing thing that comes down. Now, the problem is is that if you actually fill up your bottle with wine to the level that that tube touches, it's gonna foam, and there's really nothing you can do about that. It's gonna foam a lot.
So, what I would do is put a tube over that, right? So get get a piece of rubber tubing uh and then just slip it over that to extend the length of the CO2 uh wand down closer to the bottom of your container. You're gonna have to jimmy it around to get the container onto it with that longer tube, but that's gonna allow you to carbonate with a much smaller volume of liquid, right? Now, so now you have your super ice-cold white wine, you uh have your tube extender on your soda stream, plug it in, hit it a couple times. Now remember, this is all theoretical because I don't own a soda stream.
Uh, hit it a couple times with CO2, but don't carbonate it as much as you think. Now, now, purposely, purposely foam off that wine, right? Now you're gonna be bubbling all the stuff out, you're gonna be getting rid of any uh trapped air that's in the wine from the pouring, and in that kind of trapped air is gonna cause a lot of foaming and bubbling. And so if you do that once or twice with a small amount of CO2, you're gonna get rid of some of the crud that's in there that's causing the foaming, and you're gonna get a better carbonated product all the way around. Then hit it with your maximum amount of CO2.
I would pick up the unit a little bit and shake it a little bit to get the the CO2 in. Then let it settle out completely, completely before you uh vent and allow it to open it. Because I think this I've never, again, this is all theoretical. I think the soda stream lets you pressurize and then vent separately, but I'm not sure. But this technique should work.
Even if it does not, this technique should work. The main thing you use is foaming is not your enemy. You just have to uh account for it, which means you have to use a smaller volume and you have to get the CO2 down into that smaller volume, and that you should definitely carbonate more than one time. The only time we carbonate once is with water. Everything else we carbonate, and even water sometimes a couple times.
We carbonate two, three, four times to make sure that we've gotten rid of all of the nucleation sites and that uh we get a good product. And um, you know, just empirically from the years and years that we've you know I've been carbonating, this proves to be a uh technique that works, and I'm assuming you can get it to work with the soda stream. We can jimmy almost anything to work. Um what do you think? Absolutely.
Yeah, all right. Okay, so uh let's rip through this because we're we're on short time. So I I think we're gonna be commercial. Oh, by the way, uh Tucker, who sent us that enjoyed our country ham post. Nice.
Nice. Thank you very much. Uh okay. Um Marty from Eagle Rock, California says, San Gabriel Valley represent. Is that where you're from?
I yeah, yeah. Yeah. Eagle Rock is a place that has a rock that looks like an eagle. For real? Yes.
Oh, all right. Like a like uh like an eagle with its wings out or like a big dead eagle? Like a big head, an eagle's head. Yeah. Specifically an eagle's head.
Yeah. Hmm, okay. Okay. I read on the site that you can use the ISI infusion technique on uh to make flavored oils. Have you ever tried cacao or coffee infused oils?
I have not. Uh I have not. That's uh an interesting question. Um I know people obviously we've we've done a lot with uh cacao and uh alcohol because I do most of my stuff with alcohol in the ISI. Um and uh I know people that have done coffee coffee bitters.
Don Lee is working on a coffee bitters. Um so the the short answer, no. Uh I I haven't. The um uh I would I would just try it and and and tell us tell us what happens. I mean, there's no reason why it shouldn't work.
The main thing we've done with it is lemon peels, uh and we may made our own lemon uh oils and um other things like that, citrus. Uh the m the for those you don't know what the heck I'm talking about, ISI infusion is where you put uh you take an ISI cream whipper, you put in um uh you we use liquor, but you can put in water based foods or uh uh oils, you put in something porous, you pressurize it with nitrous. When you pressurize it with nitrous, it forces the fat or liquid into your porous product. You shake the the heck out of it to get it to infuse in, then you rapidly vent it and all the flavor gets boiled out uh and you have a delicious infused product. Um remember though, when you do oils, you're gonna want to use a lot more product.
It doesn't suck up the flavor as readily as alcohol. Although, you know, this might be an interesting way to suck some of the flavor out of the marijuana, going back to our marijuana post. Maybe I'm not uh I'm not advocating this. I'm not advocating this, but someone might want to try uh uh ISI in conjunction with uh with a water bath. Put you know, put the ISI into a water bath um and see whether or not you can extract uh herbal oil essences, let's say.
Yeah? Don't be cagey. Uh yeah, marijuana. I'm talking about marijuana. I can say that because I don't really care.
Um now Marty also wants to make a uh Telegio uh cheese whiz, which sounds like a good idea. Um I didn't uh unfortunately I was gonna talk to my uh cheese whiz expert, which is uh Wiley Dufresne, whose favorite favorite food isn't really cheese whiz, it's eggs and but he loves American cheese. Right. And so the trick with the cheese whiz is getting the the texture just right. Now I've you I've made many uh cheese sauces, including some that could be gunned, um, but I've noticed um you know that unless you unless you get it just right, sometimes it can go grainy.
I don't think it's gonna be a problem with the telegio, the telegraph you're just gonna want to stop from breaking. But I hesitate to give you a recipe now. I'm gonna have Nastasha remind me that when I talk to Wiley, I'm gonna see what he thinks the best kind of telegio spray cheese would be. It uh my son's actually fascinated with not with cheese whiz, but the actual pressurized, because he wants to Marty wants to do this in his ISI. Uh who else has a recipe for that out there?
I think uh is it Bayless? Someone like no no. Who has a re someone has a recipe out there? Anyway, we'll we'll find one for you. And the my son though is obsessed with the easy cheese.
Easy cheese is like you know, the spray cheese that comes in, but it sprays out really slowly, and that used to be my car food of choice. I used to drive 24 hours straight from uh New York or or Connecticut down to Florida to visit my grandparents with friends, and we would just pack the car with uh Diet Mountain Dew, easy cheese pretzels, and prunes, and that combination of like like like it somehow leveled us out and got us uh to Florida without crashing uh crashing and dying. So, yeah, good good memories, easy cheese. Anyway, uh we'll look that up. Okay.
Okay. Uh now, um did you find uh oh, here's the one we didn't talk about last week, the one I flubbed last week. Uh Howard from Montreal asked us whether or not we thought that potassium chloride, which is used in a 50 50 ratio with sodium chloride as a salt replacer, would be uh a good um replacement for salt in brines. Uh and so and for some reason last week my brain was completely fried. I don't know why my brain's working any better this week with the transportation problems I've had.
But um he uh I think he's pretty much right. I think that in most situations uh potassium chloride mixed with sodium chloride would uh provide a lot of the same uh functionality as just straight sodium chloride in a brine scenario. Uh possibly in a uh in a bread scenario. I don't know how specific the reactions are to sodium versus uh you know, uh sodium as a particular ion versus uh potassium as a particular ion, or whether it's just ionic strength that's doing the doing the the business. I know that most of the time when we're brining, even when we use things other than table salt, we do use sodium uh based things like the sodium polyphosphates that are used to plump up hams uh and things like that.
Uh one thing I would caution against is that potassium chloride tastes nasty to me. It's got like a metallic bitter taste. I find it nasty. I just don't like it. Um I really don't like it.
Um magnesium chloride um I like a lot better because it's sweeter. Uh as uh Howard points out though, magnesium might not have the same effects because it's a divalent cation, so you'd have to add uh more of it because it's got uh all the extra chloride in there. Uh Nastasia's not a huge fan of the magnesium chloride. No. No?
No. No? No. Yeah. We m we did a test where we made a bunch of different uh uh fake bottled waters by using uh a filtered water and then adding our own salts to it.
And I actually like the magnesium chloride water, although it really tasted nasty after we carbonated it. Am I right? Mm-hmm. I mean, like, yeah, I mean pretty nasty, but it did have a sweet taste by itself. Um but this brings me to uh my next point, which is uh salt in general.
Now uh I don't remember whether How Howard's uh I believe it was who is it that couldn't his mom, I guess, couldn't have uh straight salt. Uh but Ken Kirshenbaum from the Experimental Cuisine Collective, professor of polymer chemistry at uh at uh uh uh NYU, friend of mine, friend of the blogs. Uh we were having discussion because a friend of his actually uh uh shot a beaver or trapped a beaver and then you know shot it to to kill it. Uh legally, by the way, completely legally. The guy's like a game blah blah straight state trooper upstate.
Uh and he brought brought me the tail. So we're gonna cook it for him. I'm gonna invite Ken over and we're gonna have some beaver tail. Flapper and tail, by the way. Not just tail, not just flapper, flapper plus tail.
Anyway, uh so uh we were having this discussion, and Kent, as a scientist, uh he and I get into uh discussions a lot about how crappy most science is, specifically food science, but uh but even more specifically uh nutrition-based science that tries to make claims about things. And one of the one of the problems he has now, uh, and we're trying to figure out is is there's a huge kind of uh war on salt right now, right? I mean Nastash and I uh well it's a long stupid story. Yeah, but we were out of California, this guy was like, hey, this was uh this is in May. He was like, hey, I hear that they they're outlawed using salt in.
In all of New York City. All in New York. I was like, no, that's not true. And he's like, yeah, they outlawed it. I was like, I was just there.
He's like, no, no, no, they outlawed it. I was like, I work in a cooking school, I'm pretty sure I would kind of know, you know, and I'm up on this anyway. Uh but it is true that people are trying to limit the the the use of salt. Uh major corporations, including some that uh we've worked with, uh, you know, have come out with a lot of um products that where they're trying to reduce the salt because salt is seen as this kind of evil additive that people are adding to processed foods. Uh I don't know to get us a I don't know, I don't know what the the gripe is.
Here's the thing, right? Is that uh the data is awful. The data sucks, right? There is no data showing that the majority of us need to curtail our salt intake, right? I mean, we all forget that before uh you know, refrigeration, right, we consumed a buttload of salt, right?
Because everything we had was preserved in some form of drying or drying and salting, or drying and salting and smoking, but it was a lot of salt. Our great grandpappies and grandmammies had much more salt in their diet, I would guess, than us just because we happen to eat a lot of easy cheese. Now I'm not advocating going out and buying easy cheese, and I'm not advocating on going on salt overload, but what are the ramifications, right, to saying that we have to reduce all of uh salt and everything? I'll tell you what they are, right? Because it's not it's not that you're gonna suddenly go out and eat less processed food.
I mean, maybe listeners for our blog are because they're pretty hardcore people, right? But the real ramifications are that instead of reducing uh salt or making it less processed, what they're gonna do is they're gonna try and keep palatability the same, and they're gonna do it by ramping up umami. So if you taste a lot of these, um if you taste a lot of these uh these you know products that have reduced sodium, right, they have natural versions of free glutamic acid and whether or not they're the sodium variant, which they won't be because they're trying to reduce sodium. It's the sodium, not the salt, right, that people are worried about. Uh but they're gonna be ramping up things like potassium uh, you know, uh monopotassium glutamate uh or natural forms of this so they can say that they have a lower sodium content.
And the upshot is all of these products taste like dashi, right? They all have a brothy, dashy sameness, like uh uh uh because we're not used to those flavors being in those products. So, you know, you don't the the problem with MSG isn't that it's bad. I don't believe it gives you a headache. The all the best studies are that if and Nastasha thinks it gives her a headache, by the way.
That's that's crap. I'm just saying. It's crap. Anyway, uh we'll do a double blind study. But my point is is that uh is that um you you know everything in the world shouldn't taste like it has a lot of whether or not it's natural, whether or not it's got the sodium, whether or not it causes a problem, not everything in the world is meant to taste like it's doped up on on MSG.
It's not supposed to taste like dashi, it's not supposed to taste brothy or or mushroom y or parmesani or or tomato y. Do you know what I mean? And so I think the the upshot is is that in order to increase passability palatability, we're gonna get to an even uh greater level of homogeneity and taste. And I think this is a a huge problem. Now, that's just from a taste standpoint.
From a science standpoint, um, you know, I was reading an article and uh you know, and it cited uh another article that was really, really crappy on uh that salt is like the biggest killer uh today. And the article basically said, well, uh heart disease kills everyone, a lot of people, uh, and uh salt is a big cause of heart disease, and therefore salt causes most this is all this is all horse hockey. Like the truth is is that majority of us can eat as much salt within reason as we want and not uh not have hypertension as a result. Now, uh this is my feeling. Now we're I'm like I'm basically here.
I want people to call in on me and say that I'm full of it, right? I won't but I want to see if we can form our own kind of war path, pro salt war path. Salt, salt, salt, love it, right? Not because I need to make it force food that's bad down people's throat, but because salt is the universal delicious maker, right? Salt will make everything taste better.
We all need salt. Like our civilization is built on salt. Like we are a salt loving group of folk. And I think that there's no reason for us to um to stop just because some nincompoops say that we are uh, you know, that that all of a sudden we're all gonna get hypertension as a result of our salt intake. And I definitely don't think that they should make processed foods even worse than they are now by making them all taste like dashi broth.
Not that dashi bra is not delicious, and in fact, I have a post in draft mode, it's gonna go up later today on kambudashi. I swear to swear, I swear to God, it's going up today. Yeah, it's it's in draft mode. So it's gonna be we are extremely pro uh kombu dashi. Um, but um, but I just don't think that my pasta should necessarily taste like kombutachi.
Now, uh one last what was the name of the way. Well one last thing. It's my it's my it's my outro. Okay, Ken. Uh Ken.
So Ken, who wrote in about the Aero Press uh coffee machine, uh told us to read an article last week. I didn't get time to read it until last night. And it's called The Truth Wears Off by uh Joan Alaire and the New Yorker, and it's a very interesting article on uh the fact that scientific research tends to be um that pe people like have these great results that tend to turn to crap over time. The more the studies are replicated, the more you find that uh the results are are crap. Now, this is uh you know dovetails into what we were talking about before is that a lot of people report things by data mining.
They data mine things and then they figure out that, well, uh, you know, XY or Z nutritional thing is great, or XYZ food is bad. But uh uh I'm gonna t and everyone should read the article. It's very you know, great article, important article, uh, as was pointed out to us, but uh, I want to f focus it more on cooking. And the same thing happens to us with cooking. I find that um we all rush to and I'm you know probably guilty of this more than anyone else because we write a blog that's supposed to have some new new results to it.
But I think we all need to uh be careful when um when we're cooking to make sure that we are actually doing what we think we're doing. That we actually um we pay attention to uh what tries to make a food better, what tries to make a food worse. Um that we don't give explanations right away, that we try to uh disprove what we're working on rather than prove what we're working on, because I think that's gonna make us think more like scientists in the kitchen, and I think sinking thinking like a scientist in the kitchen is gonna make you a better cook. Uh sorry for the late start, and this has been cooking issues coming back to you on time next week.
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