Hi, I'm Steve Jenkins. I work for Fairway Markets in the New York area. And we're awfully proud to support Heritage Radio. And we care so much about everything that goes on out here at Roberta's and their studio because they talk to people who are serious about food. And that's what we are at Fairway, is we're serious about food.
We we just care very deeply about you as a as a customer and how you cook and what you cook with and how you entertain. And that's why we love to support Heritage Radio because it it's pretty much the same thing. It's wanting to to find happiness through serious food and people who are serious about it and care about learning everything there is to learn about it. And that's that's we're kindred spirits. If it's something worth having in your kitchen, you're gonna find it at Fairway.
And if there's somebody worth talking to about food, you're gonna find them on Heritage Radio, and we will be supporting you guys for a long, long time. At Fairway, I'm your personal grocer, Steve Jenkins, Fairway Mark. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues, the show where you call us with all of your cooking related questions, technical or none. I'm Dave Arnold. You're a host of Cooking Issues uh here with uh Nastasha the Lopez.
My brain's a little frazzled because I'm actually here on time today, which doesn't usually happen. So I'm not used to having any time before we go on air, so it's you know a little bit different from normal. But calling all of your questions live to the studio at 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128 here on a Sleedy Brooklyn Tuesday. Although it's not as bad as the everyone's supposed to get really bad.
Yeah, sure. Yeah, I was. I don't believe that. Yeah, I don't believe it. Yeah, it's it's uh it's a load a load of malarkey, right?
Mm-hmm. All right. Uh did I already give the number? Yes. I did, I did give the number.
Okay. So we have a question uh from Paul. Uh Paul writes in, Hi Dave. My one-year-old kids love eating with uh their hands. Who doesn't like you know, my nine year old after breaking them with eating with his hands, I'm like, this one's a hand, this one's a four.
Oh, really? Oh, he's nine. Yeah, my oldest one. I have a nine and a six. Anyway.
Uh my one-year-old kids love eating uh with their hands and uh jello jelly or jello to us Americans uh is a particular favorite. I don't want to give them too much sugar, so I wanted to turn fruit juice into jelly using gelatin. Uh we get locally produced orange juice delivered weekly, so that seemed like a good start. I used 1.7% fish gelatin. This is the key here, fish gelatin, um, which is should be more than enough to set, by the way.
And then uh letting the granules bloom in one third of the juice, heating the other two thirds to boiling, mixing the two parts and stirring until dissolved. It's only been in the fridge three hours now, but I'm not convinced it's going to solidify. Do you have any tips? I'd prefer to stick with fish gelatin if possible. Okay, a couple of things.
One, I don't think you need to boil uh all of it. I think you could probably um I think you could probably, you know, do it in a s in a in a smaller amount because uh I think you're gonna be altering the flavor of the juice by boiling um boiling so much of it. Um I think the main issue you're having here is with the fish gelatin. Fish gelatin, I think we spoke about gelatin a bit last week, right? Or the week before.
Yeah. Uh fish gelatin uh usually uh isn't as strong as uh regular gelatin. It's a lot lighter of a jelly, uh, you know, on a on a per weight basis. Also, fish gelatin tends to set at a uh much lower temperature than regular gelatin. So uh it is gonna take uh quite a bit longer um uh to cool off and set in your fridge.
So it might be that you just need to uh wait longer because your percentages should be enough. It's never probably gonna get as hard as a regular gelatin. The other problem with fish gelatin is I don't know what brand you're using, but unlike um beef gelatin or uh pig-derived gelatin, uh fish gelatin is extremely variable in terms of its qualities. So for instance, like a uh cold water fish gelatin, it sets at a ridiculously low temperature. It's like you know, it's not really I mean, I don't know.
I don't have that much experience with it, but from what I read, fish cold water fish gelatin is tough to work with. So you're probably using a warmer water fish gelatin. Um fish gelatin is also more sensitive to acid than um some of the other gelatins we use, but it shouldn't be an issue with orange juice, because orange juice isn't that uh acidic. So I would just say uh wait longer, or perhaps you might think of moving to a different product other than gelatin. So you could use uh a gel if if I don't know why you want to use fish gelatin, whether it's because you're worried about uh whether it's because you don't eat red meat or whether it's because you're worried about maybe BSE in a in a in a in a beef gelatin.
BSC is bun uh bovine spongiform encephalopathy for all of you people. Although they ha they've done research where they they've taken, and I used to not eat gelatin actually for a while because I was a little paranoid way back in the day about mad cow, that's what bovine spongiform encephalopathy is, uh or Jakob's Kreuzfeld uh new variant, whatever, BSE. So the um so uh what what what I would do is um what I mean what they did, they did a study where they they took a cow, they injected its brain with uh mad cow, right, and then they turned it into gelatin, and then they were testing to see whether they could get any prions, because it's a prion-based disease out of the gelatin, and uh they couldn't. Um trust that or don't trust that uh as the case may be because it was paid for by the gelatin people. But um the so anyway, so I don't know why you want to use fish gelatin specifically.
Um if it's because uh of the red meat issue, you might want to switch away from fish gelatin and go to an entirely uh vegetable-based product, seaweed-based, in which case I would use uh a mixture of kappa carrageenin uh and locust bean gum, which is a commercially available uh gelatin replacer. It has the advantage of setting much faster. Uh, has a texture fairly similar to gelatin, although it doesn't melt in your mouth the same way gelatin does, because let's face it, nothing does. Uh but if you're just making jellies, it should work for you. Um you can get that from uh CP Kelco, uh, but I you know I don't know that there's some couple names in the uh supermarket that you can get that work.
I think maybe some of the kosher gelatins are actually carragenin-based. So you might want to uh move to that uh if you want to. Uh also I was researching this and I found out something interesting I did not know. And that is uh people have made a uh microbial based gelatin now. So there's now certain strains of yeast and bacteria that can produce gelatin.
Now they're not commercially available yet, but this could open the door to a completely vegetarian, like actual straight up gelatin being produced down the road. So uh we'll all be looking forward to to that, right, Nastasha? Right, yeah. Okay. Uh so we have a caller.
Caller, you are on the air. Hi, thanks for taking my call. Um, I have a question about the perfect chocolate chip cookie. Uh my perfect chocolate chip cookie is kind of on the thicker side, it'd be a little bit chewy. I know some people like it thin and crispy, but you know, I I go for the thick and chewy.
Right. And uh I was wondering if hot hydrocolloids could help me perfect the chocolate chip cookie that I'm looking for. All right. Well, this is an excellent question. And uh first of all, I like the way you're phrasing the question in that you say you say my perfect chocolate chip cookie.
So, one of my problems with a lot of recipes that people give is they'll say the perfect chocolate chip cookie, and there is no such thing as the perfect chocolate chip cookie. Um so you want it a little bit thicker. What problem are you having now? Like what what how how is it that you're doing it now? How are they coming out, and then how do you hope hydrocolloids will help you?
Um, I also like uh kind of a really buttery taste, so I think maybe uh I'm using a lot of butter and they come out thick, but they're not very chewy. They they have a rich buttery taste, but they're very soft. And uh I've never cooked with he hydrocolloids and you know, so I don't really have any experience with them, but I hear you talk about them a lot. I was just wondering if maybe I should try that. Okay.
Well, here's here's some uh some pointers with it. Um the butter, I'm surprised that they still stay thick with a lot of butter unless you reduce the sugar content on them because the butter should help the spread more. They should spread more with a higher butter content. Uh but I could be wrong because it's been a while since I've read there's a book out there that you can get online uh called uh uh crackers and cookies, uh cracker and cookie technology, but it's been about eight years since I've read it, so I'm a little behind uh in my in my reading, but let's let's go ahead with it. Now, there's um there's a group of people who uh their feeling is it's possible to make the perfect X, Y, or Z in chocolate chip cookie is usually one of them without using anything other than the traditional ingredients.
Uh and those people are against using things like hydrocolloids in a chocolate chip cookie just because they say it's not necessary. These are the same people who say don't use anything fancy in your tempura batters because the top end Japanese chefs don't use them. Now I don't I don't necessarily believe that. I'm just mentioning that off the you know off the top. Um but it sounds like what you want is something that's gonna reduce spread during um reduce spread during baking, am I right?
Keep it thicker? Yeah. Right. Yeah, keep it thicker, not necessarily like a cakey texture. I've I've had some turnout where they're really thick but they're kind of cakey, and I that wasn't really what I was going for either.
Right. Uh well I would you I would try um I mean, so for instance, off the top of my head, and any sort of the any sort of the uh uh products that add viscosity to the to this stuff would increase um would increase you know decrease the spread. The problem is is that um there's not much of a water phase in uh chocolate chip cookies, right? And so to you to use a hydrocolloid uh sorry, to use a hydrocolloid accurately, you're gonna need to uh have something that you can put into the water phase. So if you look at if you look at um basically scanning electron uh microscopy pictures of uh starch granules in uh cookie systems after they've been cooked, you'll see that a lot of the starch granules are still pretty much un uh un messed with, and that's because there's not enough water present in the system, even at the high oven temperatures to really make them fully swell and break.
So it you you you're basically gonna need to find something that can cause a thickening uh action in you know in an extremely low water situation because basically what do you have in there that's liquid? Probably just the egg, right? Yeah. Right. So um I mean w one thing you could do, I mean the th the the pr this is the problem with hydrocolloids in cookies.
Now I'm not saying it can't be done, but like you could, for instance, clarify the butter, add the twenty percent water back as butter with a hydrocolloid in it, in which case I would use something like Xanthan gum, or perhaps something like methyl cellulose, right? Uh or you know, it's gonna be hard to hydrate a hydrocolloid into the egg, although you could. Right. In which case I would use something like Xanthan, uh, which you know has a what's called a yield point, so it basically but it's not gonna really affect the cookie when it's done because um you know you just won't taste it when you're chewing on the on the on the cookie, but it should, you know, decrease the spread a little bit. Um but y you know the spread in cookies is something that has been studied quite quite a lot.
Um and so you can usually decrease the spread by adjusting the butter sugar uh ratio, right because both of those things as they heat are going to tend to increase spread. So increase sugar recipes increase the spread and uh increase butter I think should probably increase the spread. Increase whereas increased flour decreases the spread but increases cakiness, right? Especially especially when combined with uh leaveners. So um could is there a leavener in your recipe?
Right? There is, right? Yeah there is. Right. So if you so aside from just using hydrocolloids, if you wanted to decrease cakiness, when you when they do an increase flour they probably also increase the leavener.
You could go the other way and decrease the leavener a little bit and that might help. I don't know. You know also adjusting oven temperature can adjust the spread as it goes and the temperature of the batter as it goes in can adjust the spread somewhat. So you might want to go in with a very very cold a cold battery like drop them real cold, throw them in the oven you know and then set it before they spread. But it it should be possible I don't think you're going to get that much of a result out of uh out of hydrocolloids unless they are uh unless they are you kind of pre-functionalized.
But I could be totally wrong about this because you know I've never tried it. But things like Xanthan, things um like methyl methyl cellulose I mentioned that one right because methellulose has the the property that it gels when it gets hot. So if you can get the methylcellulose to get into the egg white or the egg somehow when it heats up it the methyl cell will set and actually form a gel and prevent spread but then when the cookie cools off again the cookie uh the methyl cell will go back to its normal non gelling form. So that you know that could that could be interesting. Um and it might actually be interesting you can add that you could probably add a little bit of extra water phase uh that the cookie doesn't call for because it's not going to increase the spread a little bit and might make it might make it chewyer.
I'm not I'm not sure. I have not tested it. Uh but Yeah, that that was my next question. Could I mix the uh hydrocolloid with a little bit of water pre incorporating it into the batter and then uh see what that does. You can, but cookies are such low mean except except for cake style cookies, like for instance like uh a traditional New York black and white cookie or things like that that have like a lot of water because a black and white cookie is essentially a cake that's made uh flat, right?
And so we all know what those cakey cookies are like, but in general, like a traditional cookie like we're talking about, very low water formulation. You know what I mean? Basically just the w water from the eggs and the roughly twenty percent by weight water that the butter is that you put into it, you know. Um now again it i it would be possible to to do it, it would take a lot of uh take a lot of dorking uh with but um i it's a problem I actually haven't thought about, but it is very interesting. And I'd appreciate it if if you ran some tests or uh that you uh kind of got back to us about what the results were.
Great. I'll do that. Thank you very much for your help. All right, no problem. Good luck.
All right. What did you say, Nastasha? Yeah, one minute. We have uh Nastash. This is why they call the hammer.
She's supposed to be the hammer on other people, but she ends up just basically like people. What? What do you mean? No, Nastashia likes just to be the hammer on me instead of on instead of on like she's supposed to be like Nastash is supposed to be like my personal hammer, like someone comes, gives me the beat down. And you flip me off.
That's this is this is an exaggeration. This is this is an exaggeration. Ex I would like to say this is exaggeration. Alright, so next week, uh actually, will I be here on Tuesday? Yeah, okay.
So I'm gonna right after the radio show next week, I'm flying out to Florida, and it's the first time I'm extremely excited. I'm going to the North American Food equipment manufacturer Show in Orlando. I was gonna have my wife and kids fly down so that we could do the whole Disney World thing, but my wife had a project come up, so she can't do it, which is unfortunate because my kids never been to Disney World. Uh anyway, uh that's aside the point. But uh, not next week, but the week after, I will regale you all with uh stories of the latest greatest developments in North American food equipment manufacturing.
Which listen, Nastasha's laughing because to her this sounds boring, but there's nothing I enjoy more than looking at new equipment. Seriously, like walking around, and I usually go to the uh National Restaurant Association show that with the NRA, everyone's like that NRA? I'm like, no, the other NRA in Chicago every year, and um they have some equipment there, but this is apparently like the great the great grandma of all equipment shows in the US. So I'm gonna go down and uh I'm gonna report back on what I think the future of uh restaurant food equipment is gonna be as according to the restaurant uh social if I get to actually walk the show at all, because Nils and I are going down there to uh shill out basically for the unified brands uh who make a piece of equipment that we use at the school called um the Randall the Randall FX. It's a pretty cool uh fridge.
Anyway, so we're going down there, and so Nils and I have to do a dog and pony uh like every hour on the hour for a couple of days uh uh talking about the merits of accurate refrigeration. So uh anyway, I'm excited uh next week to go out and we'll give you the report uh when I get back. Right now we're gonna go to our first commercial break. Call in all your questions to 718-497-2128, 718-497-2128 cooking issues. How are you feeling, bro?
Feeling good. You feel good? Thanks so much, Bone Brother. How you feel, mate? I'll feel all right.
I don't want to know if people don't know you in, yeah. How you feel, fellas? Sure gonna have a bump good time. We're gonna have a bunk good time. We're gonna have a bump good time.
We're gonna have a bump good time. Gotta take you high. Alright. Yeah, let's go on. Gotta take the 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 into it.
Now alright. All right, all right. I'm gonna get that fella with a little horn over there. Welcome back to Cooking Issues. Calling all of your cooking related questions to 718-497-2128.
That's 718-497-2128. They don't have to be cooking, actually, it can be alcohol related. Yeah. Yeah, it can be alcohol related. Uh what?
Like making alcohol stuff. Well, yeah. Making drinking, like tips on drinking or making making alcohol, making drinks with alcohol. Uh okay, we have a caller. Caller, you are on the air.
Hi, Dave. Quick question. Sure. Um, I noticed when you pour champagne into an empty glass, the the uh effervescence is pretty quick and it you know, it bubbles over if you don't pour carefully. But if you got another liquid in there, like say like orange juice for a mimosa or something, you can pour it a lot faster.
Is that like a lack of nucleation sites, or is the carbonation getting diluted, or something? I think probably I think probably both. I mean, certain things that you pour into cause an instant foaming because they have uh foam forming abilities. So, for instance, like you'll notice if you squeeze a lime into uh into uh drink and then pour it with celsier, you get that big scum of bubbles on the top of it, right? Yeah.
But you're not gonna necessarily get the the little bubbles, but actually you will because they're gonna nucleate off the off of the off the thing. So the the first pro problem you're gonna have not problem, but the first issue you're gonna deal with is like what is the actual uh what are the properties of the liquid you're pouring into, and are they gonna increase foaming or not? Now there's a difference between fo like foaming, which is the head that's gonna form on the top, and then um actual bubbles that are gonna form in the liquid. So I think you're probably right that um that if you dilute something, you're gonna have less bubbles coming out because the amount of bubbles coming out are related to the a actual percentage dissolved CO2 that are in the in the product, and because you've diluted it down, um you're gonna have less total CO2 per, you know, per gram. And so assuming that your orange juice is cold and everything, um all of a sudden the amount of CO2 coming out is going to be a lot lower than if you poured in straight champagne, right?
Ah so uh I mean there's that effect, and there's also something you mentioned when you pour it into a uh you know a a new glass, uh new glasses tend to I mean, this is not what you're talking about, but it's what I th where I thought you were gonna go, so I'll talk about it anyway. Is uh, you know, there's uh nucleation sites on glasses in the form of dust specs and uh little imperfections in it. So you actually if you hyperclean, if you pour like uh, you know, uh uh I what I forget what they're called, like sodium dichromate cleaning solution, the stuff we used to use in orgo, you know, to totally to eat anything that's on the inside of the glass and dump it out, you'll get no you'll get no bubbles. And there's uh there's actually a book you might be interested in uh about the it's the science of champagne. It deals a lot with uh bubbles, and it's uh written by a gentleman uh who's a champagne scientist.
I I think his last name is uh Belloch. His first name might be Hilaire or something like that, Bellak. It's the science of champagne. It's not that expensive. It's a thin book, and it's written, you know, it's equation free, so you don't have to like beat your head against the wall to get through it.
And it's a really interesting study of uh champagne and the physics of champagne and the physics of bubbles. It's definitely a recommended read. Uh I'm pretty sure it's still in print and you can get it, get it through Amazon. I'll caution you though uh everyone always lies about the amount of bubbles that are present in champagne. Like the champagne numbers are always extremely high, and I've never no I've never noticed that they there actually is that much carbonation in a bottle of champagne as the what they quote on in their literature, which is interesting to me.
Whereas like American sparklers are often overcarbonated, which is why they I think you tend to lose some of the um you tend to lose some of like the fruit notes and they tend to seem less complex, and I think it's because they're overcarbonated, which is why, by the way, this ties into your question, believe it or not, that um I think that American sparklers are really good choices sometimes for uh like a mimosa things like a mimosa because they'll have more residual CO2 when you water down the uh when you water down your orange juice. Okay. What do you think? Does this make any sense? Yes.
All right. Awesome. Thanks a lot, Dave. All right, call uh call in again if you have any more questions, especially on champagne because we love it, right, Nastasha? Yes.
Yes, all right. Thank you for calling. Um okay, so interesting. Tomorrow, tomorrow, right? No.
Tomorrow, yeah. Tomorrow we drop off the Martha Fuge. So I think as we talked about uh earlier, right? We talked about this before, right? I was on the Martha Stewart show.
Yeah, I'll run through it again. On the Martha Stewart show, Martha Stewart's like I want a centrifuge, but I only want to pay three hundred dollars. It's not how she talks. Anyway, so we found her a centrifuge for three hundred dollars. And uh the uh what was the problem with this one again?
It had uh this one was oh brushes, the brushes. Yeah, I needed to replace the brushes on the motor. So I replace the brushes on the motor. Thing works fine. Uh I had to um so yeah, it works works great.
In fact, it works better than mine. Works better than mine because mine, the refrigeration unit was broken. And I was secretly I said to Nastasha, I was like, you know, Nastasha, I should give her the one where the refrigerator's broken. But she would have been on you. Well, no, no, no.
You were like, come on, it's Martha, give her the good one. What the heck's wrong with you? Right? Pretty much. But you know, that's not how I talk either.
Well, well, yeah, well, you you're here to defend your speech. But you know, the so anyway, so I'm sure we've all had this, right? Where you get two things, right, and you already have yours and you buy one for somebody else, and you're like, oh my god, it's better than mine, and there's that moment where you want to switch it out. It's just not happened to you? Yeah, yeah, of course.
Anyway, so we're giving her the good one, but it it it it put uh a fire under my butt to go fix uh fix mine. Um so anyway, so I did fix mine, but it was a pain in the butt because to to change out the board, the electronics board, was like a like a thousand dollars to change it. So I just bought uh you can go, you know, it used to be to buy a temperature controller online, like a PID temperature controller that worked, it would cost uh, you know, over a hundred dollars, well over a hundred dollars. Now they're so cheap, there's so many people doing uh DIY, have to do it yourself, uh temperature control stuff that you can buy a temperature controller out there delivered like in two days for like 30 bucks, 30, 40 bucks. So I bought one and uh I just put my own temperature control on my refrigeration unit, and now my refrigeration unit works fine, thank you very much.
So it turns out I've now fixed pretty much every part of uh centrifuge. This could be your new job. Or if anyone has a centrifuge that needs to be fixed. Well, you know, I was thinking about this. Um here's what I here's what I was thinking.
Oh, first of all, you know, Wiley now finally got a centrifuge. Wiley has a three-liter centrifuge, of course, his is new, fancy fancy, uh three-liter centrifuge. And one of our interns, uh former intern, I guess, although he's still working with us, Piper Christensen, who just got hired at WD. Congratulations, Piper. Uh so uh he's running their centrifuge night and day, and they're they're coming up with some new interesting outcomes.
But you know, uh I've been a centrifuge evangelist for a long time now, uh several years probably, and uh I really think people should buy more centrifuges. I really, really do. Um, you know, I I did a bunch of research on it, right? Now I'm not recommending that a restaurant go out and and uh you know buy a hundred dollar centrifuge and have this giant thing sitting in there in their restaurant, and like maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, and who knows what the lifetime of the centrifuge buckets are because I don't know if you guys know centrifuge, by the way, for the people who think what the hell is this guy talking about? Centrifuge, what huh?
If you're thinking that, what it is is basically a machine that has a rotor that spins very quickly and uh creates centripetal force, and that um and that actually separates products based on their density. So we use it typically to separate oil from nuts, for instance, or to uh clarify juices, um, and we can do it very fast with very high yields. Um we can also like do nut milks, things like that, get very, very high yields. Um I don't understand how blood came into play or comes into play in a centrifuge. Well, they typically what they'll do is they'll fill the centrifuge tubes with blood, they'll spin it, they'll get the serum on the top and the red blood cells at the bottom when they're running tests and stuff like that.
Yeah, so when you buy a use centrifuge, you have to assume that it's had really evil, evil, evil stuff in it. And so you have to completely uh, as I said and Ken Kirstenbaum, our friend at uh at uh NYU likes to quote me as bleach the rabies out of it. So you be you bleach the hell out of it and then you and then you uh pressure cook the uh buckets to um to to do it. Anyway, so this this type of centrifuge, three-liter centrifuge, um, you know, although there are perils to buying it used, uh, is extremely good. Uh and so what you can do is um what you what you do is you know you buy it and fix it, but I think restaurants could afford to buy a new one.
I looked at it online, and you can get uh very good quality centrifuge for about seven seven thousand five hundred dollars that does everything that ours does minus the refrigeration okay and um and so and and that thing will will pay for itself if you make juices or you're doing things like that the increase in yield off these expensive ingredients is going to pay for itself I don't know why more people aren't uh getting it because it's not like it's it's not some kind of a crazy presentation tool like no one has to know you're doing it's just all of a sudden you have these amazing clear juices like these amazing uh you know nut nut oils everything it's just such a great tool um so what I was thinking is like what if we started a uh well not started a business but what if we said hey listen uh you buy this centrifuge we'll tell you which one to buy and then we'll come in and train you how to use it we'll show up you know you need like you need like some enzymes they don't cost that much the enzymes uh you need like you know a b a bag of and uh you know a bag of enzymes um and pretty much you're ready to rock and roll right yeah that and maybe some of this uh kind of sand well we're doing one of the things we're and a scale scale is like twenty bucks so you know or like you know not not bad uh in fact uh our new intern brooke we were getting a scale from Martha and it was all messed up she cleaned that thing like it was brand freaking new I was like crap now I don't want to give that to Martha either I've never seen someone clean a scale that way you would not believe people you would not believe this I would uh yeah that that scale is that scale was like hospital quality when she was done with it. Did you say we had yeah we have a caller we have a caller caller you are on the air hi Dave. Hi how you doing doing good this is Michael Natkin. How you doing? Doing great sent you a few email questions and uh now I got a chance to catch you live.
Alright here we go. So what do you what do you what do you got for me? So I got a question about coconut milk. Delicious coconut milk you mean. I love coconut milk.
So I've made a lot of really bad Thai curries over the years. And I finally made a good one and I don't really understand why. I'm hoping you can help me figure it out. So I I always ignored the instructions to cook the coconut milk until it separates. Never could really figure out why that was important.
And my curries always turned out a little bit gelatinous. It's like I would reduce the milk somewhat but not cook it all that all the way down till it's separated. Right. Um and I would get this sort of gelatinous, unpleasant texture in them. And you know, finally I realized, hey, I'm not following that direction.
Because it you know how you follow a recipe, and if you don't know why something's important, you skip it. Exactly. Yeah. So and then I for the other day, you know, I I cooked the curry paste, I cooked the milk down until it's separated, and then I added some more fresh coconut milk to bulk it up before I served it, and it came out great. So so what's going on there?
What's that gelatinous texture about? And why does separating it help? That's extremely interesting. So I'm gonna have to think so for those of you out there, uh presumably if you're cooking it till it breaks, you you're making your own coconut milk? No.
Okay. Right. So um you should well, try m try making your own, by the way. Have you ever you've made your own ever or no? I never have.
Oh my god. You have to try making your own coconut milk. It's okay. It's amazing. It's like fresh coconut milk is a revelation.
But here's and this is how it it it goes, talks to what you're what you're what you're talking about. You know, fresh coconut milk, you make it like you would almost any other you know, you grate the coconut and then you you know blend it high speed with hot water and you squeeze it out. Anyway, uh and it's delicious. You love it. But fresh coconut milk, and this is why I'm asking, breaks extraordinarily quickly when you're cooking it.
Whereas canned coconut milk, and I don't know why. Uh takes a lot longer to break. You know what I mean? You can boil coconut milk for a good long time th before before she breaks on you. And Nastasha's like, why is it always a she?
Anyway, uh so you can you can uh boil it for a long time. So I don't first of all I don't know what it is about the canning process on coconut milk that makes it less sensitive to breaking than um than when you make your own coconut milk. I also have never read the ingredient label on coconut milk to see whether they have some sort of process additive to it when they when they do it. I'm I'm not sure. Um but that but as to exactly what's going on in the milk when it breaks, as opposed to for instance, you know, I can tell you pretty much what's going on in milk milk when it breaks.
You know what I mean? I can tell you pretty much I mean uh somewhat what's going on in uh soy milk when it breaks, when it when you curdle it rather. But uh I don't really know what's going on in coconut milk, but it's a very interesting question. And uh shoot, we don't have any of our Thai interns around, right? We could call up uh it's like a good question for Weepop to to hunt down David uh Thompson and see what he says about it.
But uh it's an interesting question. Hmm. But it w i uh I wish I had an answer for you off the top of my head. I don't, but I am uh I will research it further. You should do it you should do a secondary test.
If you have the time, first of all, we all know, except for Nastasha, everyone in the world thinks that Thai food's delicious, right? So I mean like I think this warrants a side by side. I think this definitely warrants a side by side test to see uh do it do it the same way side by side in a pot, and the only thing checking is the um is the is this breaking thing. Now, could it also be that it was much more reduced and then when you had to add more to bulk it back, you were just adding more coconut solids and flavor or not. Well, you know, definitely I mean I either way I end up with I'm putting in three cans of coconut milk, more or less.
Right. So, you know, one way I'm sort of dumping all the three cans in at once and letting it reduce a little bit. Um, the other way I'm cooking one can down till it breaks and then adding the last two right at the end. And the tech, you know, so the total volume is pretty close to the same. Uh but the one, you know, has a beautiful texture with a little bit of oil floating on top, and the other has this sort of horrible, almost like it was gelled with a little bit of auger kind of you know, flying.
Right. That's very interesting. I'll definitely do more research. I was gonna see McGee in a couple of weeks and I could talk to him about it because I know he's interested in these kinds of things, but I don't think because he had to cancel the event I was gonna do with him. But uh I'm I'm I'm definitely gonna do more do more research.
If you don't hear anything uh from me on it in a in a month within a month or so on the radio, it means that it slipped my mind, and then you should repester us via email. Okay. Uh and but in the meantime, I encourage you to run some more tests and uh because by the way, things do slip my mind all the all the time. But but because I am interested. So I uh but we should we should we should definitely work on it.
So run some tests if you can and get back to us if you get some results, and if not, we'll get back to you, all right? Okay, sounds good. All right, talk to you soon. Okay, take care. Okay, we're going to our second commercial break, says Nastasha the Hammer.
Uh call in all your questions to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128 cooking issues. You feel good? So much bone bell. I feel bellow.
We're gonna have a bump good tax. We're gonna have a bump good tax. We're gonna have a bump good time. Take them up, Brian. We're gonna have a bump good test.
I'll take him up, Brent. Alright. Gotta take a high brother! Now I won't have a body. Let's bread flow about two courses.
Coming back at you with cooking issues. Still time to call in your questions to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. By the way, we're sitting in front of a Z Z Top uh album, an old Z Z Top album, uh TV Dinners, which has like the old school like Swanson style TV dinner on it. So look up the picture to Z Top's.
Oh, isn't that Jack? Jack's heading in front of me. Gorgeous, gorgeous picture of some really poor quality fried chicken, corn, some awful form of brown biscuit, and some horrific mashed potato that's clearly been piped out of a tube. Uh wow, anyway, so grooving on it. Love the Z top.
Anyway, so uh we're giving a uh a shout out to uh Andy Melka who uh called in uh a little while ago with a venison question, or do I don't know if you remember the email and uh then in fact cooked uh the venison with he built he built his own immersion circulator, which we love DIY people and love DIY projects, although we also love that you go to uh Philip Preston and buy his uh circulators. But um so Andy Andy Melka, you can look him up on Facebook. He posted some pictures uh and looked at him and Andy that they look pretty dang good. His venison looks pretty good. Although you didn't say in the in the Facebook thing how it tasted.
You just have a picture of it. So I'm hoping it tasted as good as it looked. All right. So I want to talk a little bit about uh our fundraiser that we're gonna do on March the 27th. 27th, three days before my 40th birthday, by the way.
Oh my god. Yeah, three days before my 40th birthday. Uh we're doing a fundraiser for the Museum of Food and Drink, which is a uh, you know, a uh museum idea I I started, you know, well over five years ago, but then kind of put on the back burner when I took the job at the French culinary because I haven't had time. But the idea is that we want to create a museum, you know, uh of not right away. I mean we're not, you know, we're not, you know, we you know we're grandiose, but not in that way.
Uh starting museum on the order of uh, you know, like the natural history museum, food, right? But started small. Uh and you know, Patrick here at Heritage uh Heritage Foods and Heritage Radio uh heard about this and we're gonna restart it. We're having a f our first fundraiser, and it's a fundraiser to get you know some money to hire someone to start the administrative process and to actually get the ball rolling to get the actual thing rolling. Uh and the fundraiser is looking pretty awesome.
So it's on March 27th at Del Posto. It's a Sunday. Sunday in the afternoon. It's you know, what's what how much is it gonna cost? 250.
That's not the point. The point the point is, right? 200 people, 250 dollars. Museum of food. Anyway, so uh but check out the check out the group of people that so far have agreed to participate, right?
So we have Audrey Saunders from Pegu Club is gonna be doing drinks, and everyone's gonna have a theme. So I don't have a theme for Audrey yet. What food th uh history theme? Something that relates to the museum. So the museum, which so that either means personalized.
Yeah, technology of food, history of food, culture of food, right? And it's personalized to the person. So I haven't figured out what I want to do for Audrey, but she's in. Thomas Wall from Death and Co. is in.
Maybe since De Death and Co. by the way, which is a fantastic bar here in New York, Death and Co. is uh the name of an artist who used to draw uh uh paintings to guide people to speakeasies back during the prohibition. So maybe they want to do something prohibition based. Yeah, maybe to play on the Death and Co.
Alright. Then during the cocktail uh hour, uh Cesare Casella from uh Seller Mario Rossi, and he used to be the Sultan of Beans. What is he now? No, the Emperor of Beans, and now he's a Sultan of Salumi. Yeah.
Yeah, anyway. So he's gonna be bringing some Salumi. I don't know how we're gonna theme it up. He's gonna bring salumi no matter what. No matter what.
And it's gonna be delicious, salumi, but Chesre's gonna bring Salumi. Well, how the hell are we gonna paste a theme on top of that? Whatever. He's Chesare. He's gonna have rosemary everywhere.
Rosemary's gonna be growing out of his ears, sticking out of his hair in the pocket. You know, I love Chesre. Okay. And so then uh on the savory side, we got Mark because it's at Del Posto, so Mark Ladner's gonna be there. I'm giving him Roman, right?
So he's gonna do Roman. So he's busting out his old, his apicious because he's got the Apecious books to do Roman cuisine. But what he doesn't have, this sounds like the guy at the end of Wizard of Oz. But what you don't have is uh no is there's a there's a fish sauce, and I think I've mentioned this on the air before, called Ishiri that comes out of Japan that's made from uh squid guts. They have one made from uh I believe mackerel guts.
The one I have is squid guts. Uh and what's cool about it is that uh it's a dead ringer for the actual ancient Roman fish sauce, uh the high-end fish sauce that was uh around the time that uh Apecia is coming out that was made entirely out of uh fish guts, right? And this is the Garum Sosharum, this like high-end garum. And uh I had an opportunity to taste some that was made by Sally Granger, who's an apicious expert, Roman expert, and is uh probably finished at this point, but is working on her PhD in Roman fish sauces. So she gave me some of hers to taste.
It was three years old, uh two or three years old, and I was like, bang, this stuff tastes like a shiri, which is a very it's a fish sauce, but it doesn't taste anything like a fish sauce. It tastes like fish sauce missed mixed with canned meat, which it's really cool stuff. So anyway, I'm gonna give Mark some of this stuff because it's the closest thing anyone's ever tasted to ancient Roman uh fish sauce that you can actually go out and purchase uh yeah, Ishiri. And there's a bunch of ishiries. There's one in particular that that tastes really good.
It comes from the north of Japan from uh what is it from Ishikawa or something like that? I don't know. Alright. So then we got Dave Chang. Dave Chang, I'm either gonna let we're either gonna put him with country ham, because he and I share this as a bond, country ham.
We both love country ham. So it's either going to be some sort of country ham theme which fits into the museum. In fact the first exhibit the museum did was a an exhibit on country ham that I put together uh you know six years ago now uh where we tasted a bunch of American hams and we ate them um basically in the style of prosciutto but don't call American ham prosciutto it's its own product please please don't call it prosciutto uh anyway uh or I was thinking kind of a like a pre-red pepper Korean dishes so going back to what uh Korean food might have been like not might have been like what it was like uh before the introduction of all of the ingredients that came from North and South America. So we're talking no peppers, which means no spicy peppers of any kind, uh you know tomato any of that stuff. Uh none of that.
So I thought that might be interesting. Can you tell them the joke one that you made for him? Well I was saying you know for those of you Dave Chang is a good friend of mine and you know you know extremely well known chef uh and uh kind famous for having a uh a a you know a little bit of a temper you know Dave's got a little bit of a temper so you know like when he goes ballistic on people in the kitchen they say they've been Chang banged etc. You know so so well known for his temper. So I was saying well he could he could recreate the dinner that Vlad Tepish the impaler gave to uh this group of people that he then locked into a barn and lit the barn on fire and let them all burn to death.
But uh I was kidding and Nastasha actually emailed that to him and he was like hell yeah I'll do that. You know? Some sort of like Romanian impaler theme uh dish. Anyway, we got Wiley Dufrein, my brother-in-law from WD50 is going to come in and do something, but I don't know what we're gonna give him yet as the as the as his theme because I don't want to make him just you know, oh, you're gonna do technology. You're Wiley Dufrey, it's gonna be technology, right?
We gotta come up with something and eggs is easy because it's his w famously is n his favorite thing is eggs, but um, but everyone does that with him. So I need to give a little more thought to what uh and by the way, this is an invitation to give us themes uh for the museum based. Uh we have uh Nils Norrin, right? Yes. Yeah.
Or you know, Nils Norren. Uh he's gonna come in and uh I don't know, should we just do Swedish for him? I don't know. I don't know. No?
No. No. Who who else who else has agreed? Uh Carlo has agreed. From Robertus?
Yeah, great. So we well, what kind of theme should we give him? So it's gonna be some sort of farm to table thing, right? Hipster. Hip hip wow.
You like that? You like that? Calling BS and someone in their own place? Like, wow, he can come out of the kitchen right now and beat us over the head with a lead pipe. What the hell are you doing?
So, what are we gonna do? We're gonna do uh what are you gonna like uh farm the table, maybe? Yeah, yeah. Farm the table? I don't know.
People give us some suggestions for Christ's sakes. Okay. Uh then uh did Johnny agree yet? Johnny Azzini? I've like Johnny Azzini, I think he's I I'm not sure.
I think he might have agreed. I don't know. I don't know what theme I'm gonna give him. Uh uh Christina Tozzi from uh from Milk Bar. I'm thinking cereal.
No. Yeah, maybe. I mean, if she wants to. I mean, she's well known for making kind of cereal milk ice creams and things like that. So if she wants to do it, we'll do it.
She's doing a dessert. Uh and then uh Brooks from Del Posto is also gonna do it. And I'm thinking giving him Italian Jewish because you know, my family comes from Italian uh ex-Jews who were expelled from uh uh ex-Jews who were sp expelled from uh what's what am I thinking? Spain during the Inquisition and had to go to uh to Italy. They then converted and became lamb butchers.
That's the Adenizio family. That's my whole stepfather's family. So and uh there's a lot of really interesting kind of uh Italian desserts of Jewish uh of of Jewish ancestry. So maybe that, maybe something else. I invite you guys to uh call in and uh g give us your uh give us your feedback on that on what on what you think would be good.
Okay. Now uh couple things. One, I've was was realized recently that I've taken on some projects that I probably should not have taken on. So I'm gonna tell you the story about projects that you take that are uh mistakes for you to do. So this person came to us and they're saying said, hey, listen, listen, listen.
We're launching, we're launching this thing, and we need to come up with a drink, and we want a drink that goes starts out cloudy and then turns clear. So I gave it some thought, right? And I was like, you know, it's very difficult. It's very easy to make a drink that starts out clear and then goes cloudy. That's like the oozio effect.
So you have something in a high alcohol, like an oil that's that's uh dissolved in a high alcohol system. You add liquid water to it, and as you add water to it, all of a sudden the oil isn't soluble, and it it basically goes into a suspension, but it does it in such fine droplets that it turns cloudy, right? And so that's oozo, pastis, all of these uh liquors that you uh add water to and they turn cloudy. But that's exactly the opposite of the message that these guys want to portray, right? Yeah.
Like, hey, look, we took the it's an information company. Hey, look, we took something that was clear and we obfuscated it, made it cloudy, right? So they don't want they don't want that. So that was out. So then I was trying to do all these experiments of taking something cloudy, a suspension, and then altering its solubility and making it go clear again.
So we tested a methyl cell from hot to cold, having it go up, but didn't work. We then used, and I don't want to hear anything about it, we used milk of magnesia, right? Which is a suspension, and then we increased the acidity, so it went from cloudy to clear, and we got it to work, but it didn't taste so fantastic, right? And it also the effect wasn't as dramatic as we wanted. We wanted milk white to water clear, and I could get like somewhat turbid to somewhat less turbid.
So then, you know, and and uh and the more I'm thinking about it, the more I'm like, I really shouldn't get into this because you know I really don't like presentation tricks anyway. I really like to focus on stuff that makes things taste better, but this person's asking me, and it's kind of an interesting challenge, but it's you know, it's just not not my normal line of work. Like I really don't like problems that are just presentation-based. So then uh, you know, I tell her the problems we're having with the cloudy, the cloudy to clear, and she comes back and she's like, well, also it could be blue because our logo is blue, and I'm like, of course it's freaking blue, like the the the least natural color on earth, blue, right? So I'm like, all right, I'll work on it.
And I order some blue corn in, and I'm thinking so much that I'm going to be able to do this with the blue corn that we ordered, right? I ordered a 50-pound sack of blue corn. I'm so confident that I could do it, right? Because I figured that in in Peru they have purple corn, chicha morata, but they have blue corn, I can get it to actually blue, and I'm gonna be able to make a blue corn syrup with it, right? So I call her back, stupid, don't ever do this.
I called her back and I said, okay, I can do it. So now I'm locked. Now I'm locked into doing this. So I saw uh basically I say that I'm gonna put uh blue corn syrup, I'm gonna put basically I'm gonna make a uh uh you know a tonic style drink that goes on top of it. We're gonna carbonate, it's gonna mix, it's gonna be blue, we're gonna use liquid nitrogen and chill the glasses, gonna be fantastic, right?
Sounds fantastic, right? No, no. Blue corn comes in, it's freaking purple, right? It's freaking purple. There is no real blue stuff.
Now, then, you know, so you go do some research, and I should have known I couldn't actually get it blue because all of the blues that we're dealing with are based on a group of dyes, uh, you know, a group of chemicals called anthocyanins, right? And these things are uh they're pH dependent, and that's the problem. And all these drinks are fundamentally acidic, and so all of these anticyanins go red in acidic and they go green in ultra basic and can be made to be blue in the right pH range, but that pH range, that basic pH range is not delicious, right? Is not delicious. So we're using an egg white drink with no acid and and blue corn juice, and we got it kind of blue, tasted me.
How bad did that taste and smell? Really bad. And the smell was well, first of all, it's very it's very precisely a specific smell that I cannot describe on air. Uh it's okay, vile. But it's in Russian, so you no one would know.
Yeah, right. That's your that's your mom's theory. Uh vile, vile, awful vile, vile stuff, right? Uh so anyway, so then we tried to nictamalize the the corn because that's gonna add some basicity and make it more blue. And by the way, nixtimalized blue corn is a delicious for tortillas, and which you know if you've had a blue corn tortilla, and B looks fantastic, but we couldn't make a good drink out of it.
All the drinks look terrible, and then we stu you know you start going crazy and you're like, look, here's what I can't do. I can't use blue curacao. Uh which and because I've insult not insulted, but basically insulted a famous Japanese bartender for using blue curacao because uh not because of the blue food coloring, interestingly, but because the quality of the curacao is terrible, right? And so basically using uh like a uh a small amount of a very low quality ingredient to add just a color effect. And I, you know, I said, why don't you just use food coloring?
He's like, Well, that would be too easy. He's like, Well, and then someone else asked, I think I said this before, like, why are you adding why are you adding uh an ingredient that tastes bad? And he's like, Well, I'm only adding a little bit of an ingredient that tastes bad. It's not really acceptable, right? So now I'm I'm I'm now karma came back to bite you.
Yeah, wow, he's over at the thing. So basically, so yeah, so I yeah, karma came back to to bite me, and now I'm gonna have to use blue food coloring. I think. I don't know, someone help me here. This is like this is like the worst nightmare in my world.
Um I'm I'm doing a presentation trick, right? Which is an awful idea. Uh a presentation trick alone, and I've I'm reduced to using blue food coloring. Uh there's a fantastic, beautiful blue flower out of Thailand that's unavailable, but you know what happens when you add acid to it? Turns red.
You know why? Because it's freaking anthocyanin that's making it go. You know what I mean? There's just no real way uh around this problem. I really don't, I don't know what I'm gonna do, but it is a lesson.
Do not say yes unless you know you can deliver. And this has been Cooking Issues. Come back at you next week. Uh Cooking Issues.
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