The following program has been brought to you by Tabbered Inn. Feast on eclectic American cuisine in their acclaimed restaurant or enjoy a cocktail and listen to live jazz in one of their cozy Victorian sitting areas. Mingle with travelers from around the world who find the tabard the only place to stay when their travels bring them to Washington. For more information, visit www.tabered in dot com Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues, the show where you call in or email in all of your cooking related questions, technical or not. I'm Dave Arnold, the host of Cooking Issues here with Nastasha the Hammer Lopez.
Cooking Issues uh big old hammer, bringing the hammer down on all you people that don't behave. Although we've never had anyone not behave actually. We've never actually had to use your hammer. I think you're just so frightening. Right.
Yeah, yeah, that's it. Okay, so calling all your questions live to the studio at 718-497-2128, 718-497-2128. Uh here for the next 45 minutes or so, so uh please call in your questions. Um so uh what's going on here, Nastasha? I'm flying out to Florida today, right?
Yeah. Yeah. Did you look over the stuff? No, of course not. But they don't need to know that.
Uh by the way, uh if well, it is true. I'll give you a partial announcement now, but uh in in the near future, you know, we might be open to consulting kinds of situations. Uh but just so you know, should you ever hire uh me, Nastasha, which is a cooking issues team at this point, uh, should you ever uh hire us for anything, uh we're not gonna think about your problem until it's actually time to think about your problem. That's well, we'll try to break him of that if we can. Sure.
So speaking of thinking about problem, last week we came on the show and we asked uh for any sort of suggestions as to what to do with our 3D printer. Because we have this 3D printer that was given to us by the Fab at home uh guys at Cornell. It's a it prints basically it's a syringe that moves around in three dimensions and squeezes out, you know, at a at a very precise rate any sort of paste, any paste that you want. And they wanted to come up with a good food application, and uh we didn't for about eight months, we didn't come up with one. And uh, you know, finally a couple people have called to interviewed me actually about what I thought about 3D food printing, and I always said pretty much the same thing, which is no one's thought of a really good application yet, and you know, I think it's a you know there's no need to print, you know, the Mickey Mouse in the in the you know out of uh out of turkey paste.
I mean there's just no need for it because I can you know I could I could I could make a Mickey Mouse mold and then spread I'm going to Orlando today, which is why I'm thinking about it. Is a you you know make a Mickey Mouse mold and spread it into uh into a silicone you know thing, then I could make a whole bunch of turkey things that way. So I never thought that like weird shapes was an interesting application for me for uh 3D printer. And uh lo and behold, we came up with this what I thought was uh a good idea in conjunction with Jeffrey Lipton, who uh runs the uh program, the Fab at Home program up at Cornell, and it was well, uh we're gonna take w what I think is one of the ultimate pastes of all time, which is masa dough, nixtamalized corn. I mean, it's you know, what's better than masa, Nastasha?
Anything? You're going to Boca. Oh, eh, whatever. Florida. Anyway, so is there anything better than uh anything?
No offense to Florida. No offense to Florida, but you know, it's just not my not my place. So I hate the sun, I hate, you know, flat landscapes, and you know, Spanish moss is okay. Anyway, whatever. Uh so the uh but in anything better than masa, right?
So uh we had this thing where we print out this squiggly shape of masa and it looks great and it has a great texture like shredded wheat and it but it tastes awesome like a tortilla chip. I thought it was fantastic. CNN shows up, we give them this long song and dance about you know what these applications are good for. You know, what the printers are really good for coming up with maybe with new textures or for you know um ideation, thinking about new ways to make things, uh, and they basically you know and what I say what I'm not interested in is this whole idea that in the future it's gonna be the Jetsons or Star Trek and you're gonna push a button and and all of a sudden your meal is gonna come out. And you know, for instance, there's nothing I think worse in the world than thinking that if you press a button your meal is gonna is gonna pop out.
I mean, what could be more horrific to a cook than thinking that we're totally going to remove human beings from the cooking process and furthermore, you know, get us even further away from uh you know from the from the food chain from where our food comes from from the from the whole food supply system to a point where we don't care that everything that's served to us, you know, comes in a tube and is extruded out of a syringe into random shapes. Honey, what shape do you want your turkey paste in tonight? We had Mickey yesterday. Uh goofy? I mean, seriously, like what like what is that, right?
Right. It's crazy. Anyway, so we I thought we had one over the uh CNN money people, and yesterday I looked at the CNN money piece on the web, and I was horrified to see that what they took away from it was that in the future we will basically print turkey paste. You knew that. We spoke about that.
I felt like we had made a connection with them and uh and that they kind of you know underst like understood at least our point of view that that was a horrible, horrible, horrible idea. Anyway, uh go read our post on it to see what we what we think about it. That's a enough enough diatribe, right? Enough diatribe for today. All right.
So uh we have a uh a quick couple questions in from uh John Meyer. Uh met him what, yesterday, day before? Yes. Uh and first question is on uh cheese tempering. So the question is, hey, listen, I bought some cheese and I put it in my fridge.
You know, I think maybe that was, you know, maybe the first mistake, put it in the fridge. I mean, depends. If you're gonna buy the cheese today, I would never put it in the fridge. We'll get into that. I have cheese, it's in the fridge, I forgot to take it out.
Or I bought it uh, you know, you know, right before I went to somebody's house and it was in the refrigerated case at the store, the store doesn't know how to keep their cheese, XYZ, whatever. And uh the problem is now I have to eat it. What can I do besides throwing it in the oven and or or the microwave, or just waiting for a couple of hours? Well, I feel your pain, uh, John, I really do. I remember once I uh flew back from France and I smuggled in my favorite my I think my favorite cheese in the world, which is Vachram Mondor.
My wife used to have to go out to France uh to Paris every January for a trade show, and I would go out with her and I would, you know, just basically uh swim through like like w wheel after wheel of Vachram Mondor, and you know, you cut off the top, you scoop it out, you eat it all in there really is almost no better experience on earth than crusty bread and Vachra Mondor. Just d you know, that's it. That's the kind of the apogee so far in my life. I mean uh anyway, hopefully it gets better. Right?
I mean you don't really have the like you know the ultimate food experience like that, and then you know you're only not even forty yet, and then that's it. Anyway, uh so the um so I smuggled this thing back, and I'm planning on having Sunday family dinner because every Sunday I have family dinner, the family comes over to my house and we know we cook a big meal. And uh uh horror of horror, it was put in the fridge. Uh I won't say, you know, I won't say by whom. It was put in the fridge and uh there wasn't enough time to temper the thing out.
And uh, and I was I was you know it was just the it was one of the worst food experiences in my life because it tasted good. I put it in the oven, but it it tasted good, but it wasn't it, you know, the the the greatest thing in in the world. It wasn't what it should have been. Like here you smuggle this wheel of cheese back, you think it should be the greatest thing in the world. It wasn't.
So I definitely feel your pain, John. Here are my suggestions to you. One, if you're buying cheese, just don't put it in the dang fridge. If you have a wine cooler, put it in the wine cooler, let it sit there, unless it's gonna go for a very long time, it's gonna be fine, or something like a mozzarella. Even when I buy mozzarella, I buy it, I don't put it in the fridge.
Even if I buy it in the morning, I'm gonna eat it in the evening, I don't put it in the fridge. Because I know I'm gonna put it in the fridge or freeze it after I'm done that first day, because I don't carry it over to the second day anyway, because that I use it for cooking at that point. And mozzarella really will be okay in a cool spot uh for the whole day. You don't need to you don't need to worry about it. That's one.
I should also further say that there are some people, I'm not one of them, but there are some people that that feel that cheeses should be served a lot cooler than we serve them in general, that they should be served at cellar temp, basically at your wine cooler temp. I don't agree with that, but there's some very you know fine cheese sources that that do say that. Okay, so one is just don't ever put it in the fridge. This would be my first recommendation. Um second would be you could, and this doesn't apply to soft cheeses like Vachron or things like that, but the harder cheeses, and I hate this, but you could do this, you could cut the cheese up into slices beforehand, uh, cover it with a layer of plastic wrap and chamber them because they'll chamber very rapidly if they're cut into pieces.
I happen to not like that because I hate the look of the cheese as it warms up, sweating out, or the fat coming up to the top. I don't prefer precise cheese, but this is definitely an option if there's no uh uh other alternative. Now, on the subway over here, I thought of a third alternative that you might want to look at that I've never actually tried, but I guarantee it will work. That is take tap water, turn it on so that the uh temperature of the tap water is roughly uh in the mid 80s, so slightly below your body temperature, but slightly warmer than your normal tap water, which is probably running between 50, depends on where you live, but could be as high as 60 or 70 uh degrees. Uh put it up to about 80 degrees um and then uh put your cheese in a Ziploc bag and uh use the instructions on the cooking issue blog uh under the uh low temperature primer on which I need to finish, geez.
Uh uh how to package things in ziplocks. Basically you put it in a ziploc and you immerse the thing uh in the ziploc underwater to force out the air, you close it, then keep that Ziploc bag in the running tap water at the right temperature, and it will chamber lickety split without the water getting on the cheese and without overheating it, because I really find there's no good way to temper out cheese in a microwave or in an oven without uh ruining a good portion of it. What do you think, Steph? I think that's a good answer. Yeah, good answer.
All right, good, thanks. Uh okay. Uh uh second question from John is uh I saw Richard Blaze on uh on on uh his television program, uh was trying to make pizza, threw a bunch of binshootan uh charcoal in there and got his oven up to you know eight hundred, nine hundred degrees Fahrenheit. That's a good trick. I hadn't thought oh the question is is it gonna ruin your oven?
Is it safe, etc. etc.? Well, that's that's a separate question. But uh I I feel that that would uh that would work. I mean I have electric uh I have electric heaters, electric stone heaters in the bottom and top of my oven to jack the temperature up to uh 850.
Uh that that that's how I do it, but it c you could definitely light uh coals in your uh in your oven. Here are the caveats. One, the Japanese have been cooking with coal indoors for a long time. Uh every bag of coal that you purchase will say right on it that you're not allowed to cook it inside. And the reason is they don't want to generate a a lot of smoke and b a lot of carbon monoxide.
So, you know, um one, I would say that if you're gonna burn coal inside of your kitchen, you better have some good ventilation. That's one. Please have some have some good ventilation. Uh but that said, places that do have good ventilations do do it inside. Although no one in the United States will tell you it's safe.
Okay. Secondly, he's using binshoton charcoal, which is an extremely expensive form of Japanese charcoal, which theoretically they say gives off less smoke than our standard ordinary charcoal here in the US. However, if you buy real hardwood charcoal that you open it up and the thing looks like it was a piece of wood back in the day and is now a piece of charcoal, I mean, I don't know how much better the binchoton can be than that stuff. It burns fairly clean for uh a charcoal you can get here and isn't that expensive. They carry it at home depot, they carry it at some stores.
So you you could do that. Now, uh it's gonna like I don't bencheton or whatever, you know, Kingsford briquettes, don't use Kingford's briquettes in your oven. But any of these things, nothing against the Kingsford Corporation. But any of these things, no matter what, are gonna generate some carbon monoxide, so you need to be aware of that and you need to to ventilate it properly. The third thing is are you gonna damage the oven?
Uh well, it's possible. I don't depends on what your oven is made out of. I mean, I would elevate the stuff on a grate. You're gonna need to make sure that air can you have a sufficient air supply in your oven to get it uh started. Uh and I would also put uh a heat shield uh above it, like a a piece of steel or something above the direct uh flame.
So if you were to build the uh the put your pizza stone in the bottom of the oven, then build the binshoton on top of that, then have some sort of like a a deflector shield above in case you get a roaring fire up. And I please try not to get a roaring fire. Uh it it I think theoretically is possible. Also don't overload it, don't go crazy. You're you're basically just trying to get an extra hundred or two degrees out of it because your oven's probably gonna make it up to five fifty and you're only looking for an extra couple hundred degrees out of it.
So it's I think the idea is just to not go uh super crazy with the amount of uh of coal that you put in, right? Yeah, but uh he lives in New York, so he's right. He does? Yeah. Ugh, well, if it's a rental, then go ahead.
Do it. Uh then when your landlord comes, be like, huh? What? Yeah. Uh yeah.
If you're if you're in New York, uh, I doubt you have decent ventilation. I'll tell you a little story. I might have told this on the radio once already. I did. Yeah.
Uh I once lit enough coal in my house. I have a good hood. I once lit enough coal in my house to ignite the small hibachi that I had uh uh put into it and uh yeah, almost got me divorced. You know, not yeah. Anyway, so be careful.
Be careful. Although I have seen people light bins uh charcoal inside our amphitheater at the school and not have uh basically any smoke at all. Because you know, they would light it on top of the uh gas burners. They would ignite it and then they'd pull it off, and it is fairly clean burning, more clean burning than most of most of our charcoals. Uh, but again, only use it for that extra couple uh hundred degrees to pump up.
Alright, so listen, uh we're gonna have you call in all your questions too. 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. We're gonna go to our first commercial break, cooking issues. Hello!
How you feel, brother? Feeling good? You feel good? So much bone bell. How you feel, man?
I'm feeling nice. I don't want all people to know you're in here. How you feel, bellow? Sure getting down. Look at him!
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All right. We gotta take you high. Now I won't have a body. Let red blow up you call us a big. Welcome back to Cooking Issues on the Heritage Radio Network.
Calling your questions to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. I hear we have a caller. Hello, caller, you're on the air. Hey, I was listening to the first part of the show, and uh I also find that things are bad when they're put in the fridge.
What is why is that? What is the chemical reaction happening that takes taste away from like vegetables and cheeses and meats and like cured meats when they're actually put in a cold space? That's a very interesting question. Uh, I think you know the w everything's different with different uh with different products. So, you know, uh in tomatoes, it's it's the texture that gets ruined of the tomato, never to come back.
Uh cheese, a lot of it is reversible. Uh, we did a study once uh where we took uh balls of mozzarella, uh fresh ones, all from the same batch, and we refrigerated some uh and then let them chamber for a long time back, and we and uh it's posted on the blog, but a long time ago, and um we did, you know, it most of it actually does come back. We think there is some effect that putting it in the in the fridge ever hurts its texture irrevocably, but it's not as much as we generally think because uh the texture of cheeses is so dependent on temperature that even a couple of degrees in the center of like a ball of mozzarella or something like that means the difference between it being, you know, uh delicious and you know oo oozy, you know, awesome and and being rubbery, right? So it's like part of it is the fact that I think we never do allow something enough time to uh to chamber up. But I mean also like like something like cured meats also uh haven't run a side by side clearly out of the like you know, everyone says when you're tasting cured meats when they're cold, you know, put 'em on your tongue, let them warm up.
But it's not I mean, look, it's not the same thing as having a piece of meat served to you at the right temperature and not having to like lay it on your tongue for thirty seconds to try and warm it up. Do you know what I'm saying? So um with that I don't know what the actual uh problem is. I mean th like certain effects like this, like with cheese, the the question is uh or tomatoes. This happens just from the the temperature change.
And then there's problems with the refrigerator itself. So uh, you know, like uh or freezer, right, which could be desiccating, it could be removing moisture, it could be uh adding really bad aromas. Most fridges, like you know, for most fridges have awful aromas on the inside of them. Just turn off the fridge, which allows the volatiles to become, you know, kind of uh you know better for your nose, and you can see kind of the nasty things that are going on in your fridge. But um I'd have to research kind of other like which rich which vegetables do you have in mind as being never as good when they're in the fridge.
Some by the way, are never as good uh after they're stored, period, because you change their metabolism. Most of these vegetables a lot of vegetables are basically still alive when they're being pulled, right? And so uh, you know, you you alter their metabolism rate, you change their metabolism rate, and they just are turning to crap anyway. So the fact that you're putting it in the fridge and storing it for longer means you're reducing its quality. Does that make sense?
Absolutely. Alright. Well, I'll look into this more. Maybe we'll talk about it, right, Nastasha? Right.
We'll look at we'll look into this more. And we'll talk about it more. All right. Did I hear another ring? Do we have someone in or out?
No. Okay. So I have another question then from John. And this is a this is a doozy. This is going to take a while.
So dig yourself in, Nastasha. Nastasha's gonna actually have to pay attention instead of I don't know, doing whatever she normally does. Drift off into sleep while I'm speaking. And uh the question is, uh, and this was actually posed to me by several people uh in the past couple of days. Why is it or how is it that we use ice, we use salt to melt ice on the roads, right?
Although we're usually using calcium chloride, not sodium chloride, but principle's the same. Uh why do we do that? Uh and at the same time, when we're in a kitchen, if we want to make something really, really cold, we want to keep our stuff cold, we dump salt onto ice. So in one case, uh it seems like we're using it to melt it, which seems like we're warming it up, and in the other case, we're using it to actually cool it down to make it you know colder. And so what's going on?
Seems like a contradiction, right? Right. It's not. It's not a contradiction. Uh and this is something that is actually uh poorly explained by uh most high school teachers when when uh you're learning it, not by my high school teacher, Mrs.
Zook, my chemistry teacher was awesome, but and maybe that's where the reason why where I am today. But uh, but uh well there's a lot of things. I never had snow in California, so I think Oh, nanny nanny, nanny nanny poo-poo. All right. So uh, you know, I come from a place where we have seasons where I don't have to drive to see snow.
Uh so uh no offense, California. Uh okay, so here's what's going on. Uh when you add uh it's it's all it it's actually kind of complicated, but you know, bear with me. It it's all about a fight between uh uh heat, enthalpy, and entropy, right? So here's what happens.
In order to melt ice, uh you need heat. That makes sense, right, Nastasha? Yes. You need heat to m to melt ice, right? And the reason why is because ice is at a lower energy uh than water at the same temperature.
So in order to make it from ice into water, you have to add energy. And that that's called the the heat of fusion, right? And that that takes about 80 calories, uh, 80 calories per per mole, right? So every uh every gram no per gram. Uh whatever.
Anyway, 80 cal melting one gram of water is enough. I'll put it this way melting one gram of water, I believe, is enough uh energy uh to raise that same gram of water 80 degrees again. That's how much energy it is. So it's not insubstantial, right? It's a lot of energy.
It's called the heat effusion. Um it requires energy uh to melt to melt the ice. Now, uh which means right that that things want to be at a lower energy, so at you know, in general, uh things want to turn into ice to go into that lower, lower energy state to give off that uh, you know, that heat and become ice. Now, uh there's a competing principle here, which is things like to be disordered. Entropy, right, is basically uh how much uh disorder there is in a system and the s and the universe wants to be disordered, chaotic, have uh, you know, lots of different states available for everything, maximum chaos, you know, like our lives.
And um and and so what happens is is that um at zero degrees where ice normally melts, it's the point at which the amount of uh the amount of entropy, right? The the the the amount of heat that you have to um that you have to add to to melt the ice is balanced by the amount of entropy uh gain you get from from melting it. It's not making any sense to people. Read it on our blog, it'll make make more sense. But it's this fight between enthalpy and entropy, and it's all balanced on uh temperature.
When you add salt to the system, right, what happens is is that now there's it's it's more states of disorder that water can be in when it's in um when it's in the solution with the salt. So therefore, right, uh the entropy win is greater and the temperature at which the stuff freezes drops. So now you can forget everything I said for the last three minutes because I'm sure it didn't make any sense. Read it on our blog and keep this in your head. When you add w uh ice to uh add salt to ice, what you're doing is making it so that uh everything wants to freeze at a lower temperature.
And we all know that you know salt water freezes at a lower temperature than ice, right? So here's what goes on. In order for the ice to melt into salt water, you need to have heat. Heat needs to go into the system to do it. But where's the heat going to come from, Nastasha?
Where's the heat going to come from? No. The heat's gonna come from the ice. The heat's gonna come from the ice. So when you take a big block of salt uh ice and you add salt on it, right?
Like the ice is gonna start to melt into the salt, it's gonna form a brine, but in order to do it, it's gonna require heat. That heat has to come from the block of ice because that's the easiest way for it to get. It's not gonna suck it out of the air because that's not fast enough. And so the entire block of ice along with the salt brine is gonna get colder. And that's what happening when you're making your Mizon Place, right?
Now, if there's not enough ice there, right, to all get colder and not melt, you melt it all out, right? Furthermore, if you let it sit there for a long time, energy is gonna go into the air and then it's gonna keep remelting more. So it's basically uh the same thing happens. When you put salt on ice on a road, initially the whole block of ice is gonna get colder, right? And then it's eventually going to uh to melt off alonging you as long as you've depressed the freezing point uh long enough uh h low enough such that it uh it can't freeze in your ambient atmosphere.
And that temperature where it's gonna freeze right in ambient atmosphere in a fully saturated salt solution is quite low, like you know, in the minus tens. Uh so it's uh so the system all works and it's not a contradiction, and that didn't make a damn bit of sense. No one's gonna understand what the hell I was talking about. You should have your old chemistry teacher on. Mrs.
Hook? We should have Mrs. Hook on. Uh, but you can go on the blog and look up cocktail science, the very first cocktail science we uh post, I posted about a year and a half ago, has a much more lucid and easier to follow, easier to reread uh explanation of it, and I apologize for uh kind of going all over the place. What do you think?
Did it make any damn sense at all? We have a caller. We have a caller, even though that made no damn sense at all. All right, caller, you're on the air. Hopefully I'll make more sense.
Oh, hi, sorry, this is Antonette. Um I have a question that's completely off topic. So I don't know if uh if you want to wait for me a few more minutes to go through the ice. Well, no, no, no, well how how off topic? Let's hear it.
Like really, like something about cars? No, I was wondering, have you read uh Andrew Bear's Mark Twain's feast? Uh no, I haven't. Tell me a little bit about it. It's he c he goes through Twain's A Tramp Abroad, and Twain went through how he loved all these American foods that no longer exist, and uh he tries to recreate all these dishes from the eighteen hundreds.
Oh, how is it? It's all it's it's I recommend it. I I I do recommend it. I love I love Twain. I mean I love Twain, he's one of the great kind of you know funny misanthropic writers, you know, of America, wouldn't you think?
I no, I definitely I I agree. That's why I I think you'll like this book. I definitely recommend you get it. And um what I was calling about is Twain apparently liked his coffee, American coffee much more than coffee abroad because of our milk and they're guessing it's because it was raw milk and I wanted to know your thoughts on the raw milk debate. Raw milk debate.
Uh well okay I mean uh so wait so their theory was that the milk in uh in Europe was pasteurized before the milk is was here? I don't know. I don't know the actual I don't know the truth or falsity of that. Um I know that the the milk we used to get was alternately the milk back in the day, back in the day like pre for instance pre-Eerie Canal, pre-railroad into New York City, the milk we used to get was alternately was horrible here but could be much better in the country where now we kind of get a uh a kind of broadband mediocre milk uh no offense to the milk people. Um my d my feeling on on the raw milk is that I'm sure that there is both good milk uh good raw milk and bad raw milk.
I have had some fantastic raw milk and I'm sure you're aware that you know uh here in in the United States you have to buy it directly from the farm. So for instance we have a farm in uh at the green market here in New York that sells raw milk when you buy it in upstate New York at the farm and it has warning labels all over it but they can't ship it into New York to sell it at the farmers market here. Um you mean my debate on its taste or my debate on the law? I mean the law is absurd. But I mean okay the law's ridiculous.
The law was originally put in place because they thought that you could get tuberculosis from cows and so they started pasteurizing uh the the milk. Uh I'm sure pasteurization has done um a lot of good uh you know, in keeping milk for a longer period of time, but there's no question that um I mean you can have really good cheeses that are made with pa pasturized milk. Obviously I've had many, many, but uh, you know, that said, you know, most of the great cheeses of the world outside of the US are made with unpasteurized milk. So it would be interesting to do a a side by side test, which I've never done, of the same exact company, same exact process, pasteurized versus not, same milk, same cow. Uh I've never I've never had that happen.
I had great experience with the raw milk that I've purchased at farms here, but it's because they're great farmers and they make great milk. Do you know what I'm saying? And the milk and and and th a lot more happens to our milk other than just pasteurization. You know, it's broken up, it's homogenized. So, um you know, I think uh there's a there's a lot wrong with uh there's a lot wrong with our milk supply based on what it could be.
I mean it's really only I only ideal in the sense of it's relatively cheap compared to what it actually you know probably should cost if it was done right and it lasts a relatively long time. But that's about all I can say kind of good about it. What do you think? Well, I I think um I think it's a little absurd the law again, like I as you said before, but also I think it's almost impossible to really recreate the milk that uh Twain is talking about as Andrew Bears is trying to do in the book. I don't know how we would possibly be able to recreate it exactly.
Uh yeah, I mean there are people that have the same kind of breeds of cows, they're treating them in the same kind of way. It's just not mass I mean I'm sure in a micro way you could go reproduce it because you know, you could go to someone who's pasturing a very similar cow. The the breeds of cow that were uh you know around back then are still extant. And you know, you could get them, you could find someone milking them uh and you know and you could get it directly from the cow, you know, uh this is all possible, it's just not feasible in New York, for instance. Uh do you know what I mean?
Um I've talked to a bunch of food scientists who say that I'm a jerk for saying that the that the law is absurd because they point to the fact that you know indeed there are diseases you can get from uh raw milk cheeses that haven't been pasteurized, and and it is true that there are a certain number of people who uh you know can I guess contract uh diseases from raw milk. However, I'm willing to take that I'm more than willing to take that risk. And nine times out of ten nowadays in the US when someone gets a disease off of a cheese, for instance, or a dairy product, it's off of pasteurized product that's just been stored incorrectly. So I mean the the big uh the big you know problems in the past, I think in the 70s and 80s were queso blanco, queso fresco that were just uh you know not uh that didn't have any back because you know having a bacteriological, you know, having a bacteria component, a culture in the milk protects it against certain pathogens. So I think it's actually kind of these uh pasteurized and then stored in properly recontaminated products can sometimes be less safe.
But you know, again, I've had uh dairy scientists, you know, just tell me that I was a complete jackass for saying that, but I I mean I look, I think we should just slap a label on it. I'm allowed to smoke if I want. You know what I mean? Uh for instance, and I think that's a lot more dangerous than you know eating the cheese that I want. Uh and I think and their point is yes, but the consumer doesn't know that there's a risk to eating cheese, whereas they know there's a risk to smoking.
So I say, hey, why don't we just slap a warning label on it? And they're like, well, a producer wouldn't want to do that and be like, I would love that. You kidding me? Like, you think that the people that I know that I hang out with that are paying a bazillion dollars a pound for a block of cheese anyway, right? And I used to cheese was always my favorite thing in the world because uh you know, my theory was I could afford the best cheese in the world.
I can't afford the best wine. It's no longer really the case because cheeses have gotten so expensive. But you know, you know, we can afford to have at least a little bit of the best cheese in i in the world, and I think that we would flock to a cheese that had a big old warning label on it saying it was made with raw meat. We'd look for it. It wouldn't be that it would frighten us, we would actually seek it out.
You know, um but anyway, that's just my my feeling on it. But I'm definitely gonna check out that book as a fan of Twain and as a fan of 19th century American uh cooking. And you know, an interesting, you know, the the take on 19th century American cooking, I guess it most sticks in my head was uh uh uh what was her name? Oh my god, Hess. The the couple, what was their name?
Oh my god. My my head's gone. He was the she was a famous food historian, and he was a uh he was a New York Times critic for a while, and they they wrote a book called uh Taste of America. She just passed away recently. She's real curmudgeon.
Like her main gripe was that American food used to be great before the invention of baking powder. You know, and then that baking powder ruined everything. That was her basic uh that was her basic tenet. And she was a real kind of like uh, I think a tough, you know, a tough individual, but she was hanging out with the likes of William Moyce Weaver, uh and you know, writers like that, people who really have kept uh you know, William Voice Weaver is big on uh Pennsylvania Dutch and food saving and heirloom vegetables. And these guys have really um brought back a lot of the old the old recipes, and I think there's a lot of value there.
So I'm definitely gonna check out that book and thanks for bringing it to our attention. No problem. Alrighty. Let's go to another break. Uh oh, uh commercial break time?
All right, we're going to a commercial break. Please call in all your questions too. 718 uh whatever it is, four nine seven two one two eight. That's seven one eight four nine seven two one two eight. Cooking issues.
You feel good? Thanks so much, Bone brother. How do you feel, man? Call your name. I don't want to people to know you're in, yeah.
How you feel, fella? Sure getting down. 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, Bread. We gotta take you high. Yeah, that's the one. We gotta take you high.
Now I won't have a body. Let's bread blow by two cords. Welcome back to cooking issues. Still got a couple minutes left here in the studio, although I'm told we will have to get off the air at uh 745 fairly promptly. Uh 745.
Oh my god, 1245. My brain. My brain is fried. We're talking about frying in a minute. Call your questions to 718-497-2128.
That's 718-497-2128. And we have a question about a registry, huh, Nastasha? What do we got? Same fried chicken guy. So which one do you want to go?
I want to that's very nice. We I apologize, uh uh Clayton, for you being referred to as same fried chicken guy. So uh let's uh Nestal that's why we call her the hammer. No tact, no tact, just a hammer, big blunt instrument. Anyway, give us the uh give us the registration question and then we'll deal with fried chicken later.
All right. One more question if he has time. I'm getting married soon and would like to use my wedding registry to beef up my kitchen. What are a few items that any modern cook shouldn't be without? Okay, I would recommend you get some rich friends.
That's the first thing. And uh register for an immersion circulator. If you do not already own an immersion circulator, you should register for an immersion circulator. If you throw three parties this year, you will be happy that you have an immersion circulator. Um let me think about this for a minute, because I'm just thinking about this, and then we're gonna take a call and we'll come we'll come back to it along with along with the fried chicken question.
Caller, you're on the air. Hi, this is Hannah. Um I'm just calling because I like to buy kind of chicken and fish, and I'm always looking for a new healthy sauce to cook with them. Right. Do you have any recommendation?
A new healthy uh what? Sauce? Sauce to cook with chicken or fish. Wow. Uh I I in general so you want a thick sauce or a thin sauce?
You want something to serve or you want uh something something separate? Like what are you what are you what are you looking for? Well I I tend to I'm just getting bored of my ones I'm ready open. I tend to just do kind of um a tomato base like a pisata with um just onions and some spices. Um anything different already.
All right. So here's what I would recommend. Anytime you're looking to uh to change your your sauce repertoire. What what first of all there's a very good uh very, very good book on sauces. I highly recommend it uh by James James Peterson called Sauces.
It won like the a beard award like maybe maybe about twelve years ago. It's available kind of very cheaply, I think, on Amazon now. Uh or you know, y you use. It's a fantastic book, and what I like about it is it is it teaches like basically f fundamentals of sauce making and um how to build on sauces starting with certain bases. So what I would do is I would I would come up with a couple of techniques that you like that you can then build a bunch of uh flavors off of.
So for instance, whenever I have a vegetarian now, now you're talking about chicken, so it's you know it's different, but you can use this sauce. Whenever I whenever I have a vegetarians coming over, I do one of it, which is a lot, uh actually. I have um various uh variations of fundamental coconut milk sauce that that we make. And it you have a good blender. Uh yeah.
Yeah. So it's you know, uh we'll do you know, it's use so it's a variant on Indian, but you could switch it to Asian or Thai if you want. It's just you know, uh pre-cook your your uh your your um your onions, your shallots or whatever you want, your garlic, then put in your spices, you know, hit them with the heat a little bit, then uh usually put in cashews, sometimes tomato paste, if if I want it red, sometimes not. Then your to you know, your coconut milk, you know, you heat, blend, correct with lime uh and or soy and or and or whatever. But I have like maybe 15, 16 sauces that I can build out of the simple idea that I'm gonna start with frying my ingredients, toasting the spices, uh throwing in probably a nut to beef it up, and then um and then um coconut milk and blend.
Similarly, I have you know, 13 or 14 different variants of uh you know, fry frying up that I can say I'll start with frying the onions and uh and garlic, uh frying that, and then uh you know, some form of cheese, cheese uh, you know, and herb and oil blended. Or so they all work that way. And you know, these are all basically separate sauces that you can make in advance. I mean, then of course the the obvious is you know the pan sauce, whatever based on what's in the pan, which is you know, usually some form of deglazing. So it all it all depends on kind of like uh building up building up your your repertoire.
I would choose a taste flavor that you like. Like if you like an Indian profile, I would get like you know, a couple of the base spices in your kitchen that you need to do it, coriander, cardamom, uh, cumin, you know, things like this, uh, and have them just ready. And then, and then you know, whenever you want to make a sauce, you know, it's it's whatever wherever your heart takes you that night, and you and you you blend it. But it's just having you know, if you if to bait tomatoes your only base to start with now, then you know there's only so far you can go with that. So then you you just you know stock out your pantry and uh get a couple of different get an emulsified sauce in there, like so start building on uh on like Hollandaise slash Bernays base differences, and those are delicious.
Everyone likes them. And they're really they're really quite simple. You don't need to have clarified butter. You know, you can uh look up Harold McGee, I think, wrote about it. We and we might have it on the blog, uh very, very fast uh Hollandaise or Bernays or any one of those sauces, and those sauces form a fantastic base for for other things.
It's just a question of changing the flavors, and so you can really kind of alleviate boredom by just picking one or two of these sauce families, right, and then working with it from uh from there and really really expand out. And that's how I think all good cooks expand their repertoires by like taking some new basic nugget and then building on it again and again and again through repetition. Is that helpful at all or no? That is. And what do you say using uh frying the herbs before you then um add in the sauce?
Uh it depends. So like uh the you know the c the classic, the a lot of the dry spices and things like uh ginger, things like nuts, uh I tend to fry before I add uh the liquids because uh, you know, the I've never done a side by side though. It's interesting, but uh theoretically uh, you know, that's how it's done in those cuisines, and so I just I tend to do it. And uh, you know, they say that it releases the aromas. I don't know if that's actually true.
Uh well it probably if there's a high heat involved, it actually does probably do some sort of toasting, frying and changing the uh the base notes that are involved, because I know that for instance, toasted caraway tastes very different from untoasted caraway, not better, not worse, different. Uh and so it's just it tends to be something that I do. I don't ever pre-cook uh green herbs. Uh and you know, uh always like the the dried spices, not dried herbs, more dried spices that you tend to hit. Um, you know, just make sure you don't scorch the garlic, etc.
etc. But then throw it all in the blender, brr and it goes. I mean the blender is like you know, especially I have a vita prep at home that'll take a pound of bacon and and uh emulsify it into a sauce, and no one will even know it's there other than the flavor. No one will know from a texture standpoint. So a good blender is a definite sauce maker's friend in the kitchen these days because it definitely saves me a lot of uh a lot of heartache.
Um anyway. Yeah. So uh so helpful, thank you. All right, thank you. Uh thanks for the call.
All right, now I'm gonna uh blend. No, why don't you just finish the wedding one? You can't get to the chip. I uh watch me. Four minutes?
Watch me. Jack, you really're taking a portion of my four minutes to to tell me that I can't answer this question in four minutes. This is the lady who who berates me for my Martha Stewart uh position where I was supposed to do three cocktails and did three quarters of a cocktail. Here we go. Uh all right, listen, I'm gonna think more about your registry problem.
A vita prep. Oh, vita pre yeah, but you can't register. Where can you register for a vita prep? If you can find a place here's what I here's what I would want. Get yourself a vita prep, get yourself an immersion circulator, buy your own vacuum machine, or get, you know, a you know a cheap one, whatever.
Um obviously if you don't already own a decent set of knives, get have them buy you a good set of pots. For Christ's sakes, get a good set of pots. I mean, I when I registered, I had like a mismatch of different pots, and now I have like kind of the standard uh pots, and even though I got them, you know, 18 years ago, whatever it is, you know, 15 years ago uh when I was registered, I'm still loving them today. They're fine. I have the you know, standard kind of all clads, but definitely hit all those big ticket items uh that yeah, ditch the China and get all that of this.
Yeah, forget China. Who wants China? It's gonna break anyway. Get the vita prep, get the immersion circulator, get some decent pots, get some decent knives, right? And then if Nastasha thinks of anything while I'm talking, we'll go for that.
Okay, now uh on your fried chicken question, you make fried chicken only about once a month. That's a reasonable amount, although you know you can make it more. Keeping the oil, how do you keep the oil after you're done? Because the oil can be expensive. Is it worthwhile to keep the oil?
Okay, listen. The enemies to oil are uh basically oxidation and uh and breakdown when you're cooking and when you're storing. What causes uh that breakdown to happen, first of all, fresh oil is kind of bad anyway. You should always fry a little bit with your oil, it really picks up quick, especially at home because you're probably pretty brutal on the oil. But um uh you know, fresh oil actually isn't the best.
Like you want to use it a little bit uh because what happens is the oil breaks down somewhat, and um when it breaks down, it becomes it has more polar uh components, so it actually can attack the food and fry it a lot faster. So a little bit of oil breakdown is actually helpful, but in general, don't worry about your oil being too fresh at home because it ain't gonna be fresh for long. Anyway, so uh uh the main things that are gonna kill your oil is if you're uh overheating it. If you overheat your oil, which you tend to do on not you, but one tends to do on a stove, uh the temperature cycles up and down, up and down and and way high, that's gonna ruin oil very quickly. And and if it gets really dark in color, it's not gonna be worthwhile and you probably won't keep it.
The other thing is if you get a lot of uh particles uh floating in the bottom that burn, those will cause uh your oil to go down really fast. And the second is if you're frying a lot of high uh liquid stuff, it stuff sprays out into it or lots of salts, you're gonna notice the oil is gonna start foaming a lot more uh and the oil's gonna go go south fast. So, a lot of how long you can keep the oil is how you treated it when you were frying. We use an oil, if you can go to a commercial supplier and get a five gallon, you know, wherever it is, a 30-pound or five gallon pail of oil, uh the professional fry oil that we use is eight times better than the fry oil you can get uh in a supermarket because it has antioxidants in it, which means the oil is gonna last a lot longer. Okay, that's one.
Two, when you store it, you want to let it cool down, and then right away that night you want to uh pour it, uh filter it through first like a strainer and then through uh something finer, like some napkins or cloth, to get all the particles out of it, because those are really going to make your oil turn to crap. Then when you store it, you want to store it uh outside of the light, because if it's stored in the light, you're gonna get more oxidation. So you want to store it in a dark, cool place, you want it to be filtered and you want it to stay, you know, in in a cool area. You want to make sure you don't do too much temple temperature cycling on it. And here is the best way to find out if your oil is uh crappy, right?
Take a little bit of your oil, heat it up in a pan, and fry a piece of white bread in it, and then eat the white bread. White bread is extremely neutral, it soaks up a lot of oil, and it's the best way, other than just dipping your finger in and tasting it, to figure out whether you're gonna get any off notes in your fried products from the oil that you're using. And that's my standard technique in the kitchen to determine if an oil has gone too far to keep using, is I do a bread fry test. Alright, now I have 30 seconds. So on the way out, Jarrett called in and or wrote in and he said, Hey, when I make my dashi, right, uh I eat a huge bowl of it, and I get all buzzed, and I have to sit down and watch comedy programs because I get a buzz.
Is this from the uh glutamic acid? Uh and uh I don't know whether this key to you know, you know, keys in with uh the kind of pot questions we had before, but I definitely I though you gave us our recipe. I want to know kind of what secret ingredient you're putting in to get buzzed. I've never noticed this. I've never heard uh I couldn't find any reputable cases of uh monosodium glutamate intoxication.
But uh the last time I got drunk without drinking was uh an ice cream party at random. I found an ice cream machine. I'll look more, Jared, by the way, if I'm about to go on a tangent on the way out of here. Uh I found an ice cream machine on the side of the street, a soft serve ice cream machine. It was all broken and beat and battered, weighed 900 pounds.
I wheeled it into my apartment, wired it into three separate circuits because it took three phase power and it was all demented, finally got it to work. The refrigeration didn't work, so I had to throw dry ice into it, all these nightmare problems. I had a giant soft serve party where I actually went up to the Bronx to Mr. Softy, which is our local ice cream, soft serve ice cream here, and bought a bunch of gallons of uh Mr. Softy ice cream mix and threw the most disgusting party in the world.
It was sh all it was was champagne and all you could eat soft serve ice cream out of an ice cream tap, you know, because we had the big soft serve machine with all the toppings. And I didn't even have anything to drink that night, but I must have eaten, I don't know, like a half gallon of ice cream, and I felt completely looped drunk crazy. And so that's the only similar experience I've had to a non-alcohol-based buzz on a food I uh I've done, and it wasn't related to MSG uh or to Dashi. But I definitely want your Dashi recipe if you can get a if you get buzzed off of it, Jared. So I'll look into it some more.
And for this week, it's cooking issues. Come back next week, this uh next Tuesday, 12 12 noon.
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