Nine times out of ten, when someone is taking the time to break away and do their own thing, it's because they either have a specific point of view or a specific passion that really sort of speaks to maybe not a mass audience, but the customers that I have and the customers at Barterhouse tries to culture and and cultivate, I think are are those type of people who want that story and feel like if they take a an allocation of an 80 case made wine that they've got something special and it's something that only they have or maybe one other person has. So that's kind of what we specialize in. And you know, it may not be business savvy to the nth degree, like we're not making a hundred thousand cases of Pinot Grigio and you know, flogging them all over New York. But the customers that get wine from us are kind of believing the same stuff we do, which is supporting these small farms, supporting these young wine makers who have a passion for doing it, and and we supply them with a market and we allow them to get their product out there to otherwise an untapped uh group of people. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues on the Heritage Radio Network coming to you live every Tuesday from 12 to 1245.
I'm Dave Arnold, your host of Cookie Issues. Nastasha the Hammer Lopez joins us via telephone from sunny Florida, where she's driving around in an RV with Piper and Grace, two of our former interns who are spreading the cooking issues love down there in the sunny state. Are you there, Nastasha? Yeah, I'm yeah. Nice, nice.
Uh call in all of your questions, cooking related otherwise, to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. Um little note on the Barter House, the uh sponsor for today. Uh they are our wine sponsors for the Museum of Food and Drink Fundraiser coming up in about a month and a half. And uh listeners to the show might remember that we'd sample some of their wine.
Booza, uh Tanat uh based wine on the show a couple months back, and we enjoyed it, right, Nastasha? Yes, we did. Yeah, especially with a name like Boozer. Boozer. All right, get out.
Wait, Dave, how can people get tickets to the museum event? I don't know. How do they? Why don't you tell me? Well, first, someone needs to make an invite.
All right. What you're hearing here is uh Nastasha insulting me on uh on the radio internet yet. Yeah, calling me out as a very soon you will be able to sign on and get tickets to the event and uh taste some uh museum-themed uh food by the likes of uh Mark Ladner, Wiley Dufresne, uh Dave Chang, uh who else we got? Give us a whole list, Nastasha. Nel Norrin, Carlo from Roberta's, um Brooks from Del Posto, Christina Tozzi, etc.
etc. Yeah, exactly. And and and a host of amazing bartenders like uh we have Audrey Saunders, we have uh uh Thomas uh Waugh from Death and Co. Uh who else we have? We have uh Simon Ford from Prince Ricard.
Who else we got? We got more people. It's we're thinking about Dale deGroff. There's a lot of people that are i i it's it's gonna be good. Let me just put it this way.
Uh uh, we beat all of our friends over the head with sticks, and they're gonna come in and make some delicious products. So we hope you we hope you come. And the date on that is gonna be Sunday, March 27th. It's gonna be in the afternoon, so we're gonna get your drink on early in the day for a very good cause. Uh okay.
It is an invite. What? Oh, come on, come on. People, people, please. Is it all right she calls me out once, twice?
You need to call me out twice. All right, go on, Dave. Go on with the show. Alright, how was the drink that you guys made in uh in Nastasha? Uh viewers from or listeners from last week will remember that I had to basically become a hypocrite and sell my soul to the devil and create a blue drink with blue food coloring.
How did it come out? It wasn't your best. It was good. People enjoyed it. Yeah, people enjoyed it.
Very good, very good. All right. So uh Dorothy from Heath Glenn Organic Farm and Kitchen, I believe in Minnesota, although I don't know, writes in and said, Oh, it says here, Minnesota. I'm a preserve maker in Minnesota, and I've been working with oils and spices, trying to infuse aroma into the jams and jellies upon completion. Of course, the aroma of the fruit and spices and oils is wonderful as they are warm and cooking, but it is mostly lost when cooled and gelled.
I've tried infusing the jams at different stages of cooking, and have pounded woody herbs to release oils, use commercial aromatic oils, etc. Most of the aroma is lost after they've come to room temperature, however. Any comments or suggestions? Well, uh, a couple of things. Uh we have to figure out whether you're losing the aroma because one, the aroma is flashing off uh into the air.
I doubt that's the case because uh you're cooking and probably sealing it uh to to can it, I would presume. Uh so I wouldn't think they're flashing off. I also wouldn't think they're necessarily being destroyed by the heat uh during the uh during the process of making the the jams or jellies. Uh I would guess the two main culprits are uh as it gels, uh more of the aroma is locked in, and so you're losing some simply based on gel strength. And the second thing I'm I'm thinking is that these aromas probably are a lot less volatile at room temperature.
So what I would do, since the uh pectin is basically uh, you know, it'll it'll it'll melt, but it's not going to totally released when you heat it, I would say heat it and see whether the aroma comes back. It could just be a temperature phenomenon where uh you just need to add more uh of these aromas because they're going to be consumed uh colder, either room temperature or cold out of the fridge. Um so I would think it's probably one of those two things. Either the aromas themselves are being locked up in the pectin network uh as the gels are being uh uh you know, as it's gelling, or two, it's just a temperature-related phenomenon. The temperature-related phenomenon you could actually check quite easily uh just by uh making something and not adding a sufficient uh acid or sugar content for the product to gel and just adding it uh, you know, for the for the aroma, waiting for it to cool but not gel, and see whether or not the aroma is still there.
That'd be a good uh first test. But uh get back to us with more uh details about uh the procedure and everything like that, and we'll try to work on it. Um I was hoping to have Harold McGee call in today, but uh he can't, unfortunately. That would have been a great question for him. That's right up uh Harold's alley, right, Stasi?
Yeah, it is. Yeah, yeah. Oh, and uh another follow-up, I believe on last week's uh show, uh someone called in and their question was they wanted to make cookies, but they didn't want them, they wanted them relatively thick uh without spreading out too much, but they didn't want them to become cakey. And uh I had a and they asked whether they could use hydrocolloids. I had a couple of half-baked suggestions.
Uh I then uh last week uh we spoke to Christina Toze from uh Milk Bar, who's also doing a dessert at the museum event, by the way. Uh and so Tozy and I were talking, and she actually uh says that you can add Xanthan gum, which you can buy at Whole Foods. You can just go into Whole Foods and and buy it, say whate whatever his name is, not Red Rover like Bob Red Mill, something like that, uh bag of Xanthan gum, and uh add some, I don't know percentages. I would add probably on the order of a half a percent by weight of the flour basis or something like this. I don't know.
Uh and she said actually it does help limit spread. But the most interesting thing she said was try using high protein flour in your cookies, uh bread flour or or similar. And and basically she said, look, it will stop this, it will stop the spread and keep it thicker, but as long as you don't uh increase the leaveners, it's not gonna make it cakey. And because there's so much fat in the cookie recipe, butter in the cookie recipe, you're not gonna get significant gluten formation, even though you're using a high protein flour. So it's not gonna make it uh uh chewy in a bad sense in a proteiny way, but will limit spread and it's an easy way without changing a lot of your formulation.
Uh anyway, so I thought that was interesting and a good follow-up. I can at least pretend like we follow up on some of this stuff, right, Nastasha? That's right, yeah. Uh okay. Uh Joseph writes in and says, uh, I've been listening to your show for a long time and I love it.
Well, thank you, Joseph. And he has a question regarding ISI or EC. Nastasha, what's the current thing they like? Do they like ISI? EC.
EC? All right. So uh EC, they're the uh the good folks from Austria that uh make uh seltzer makers, the twist and sparkle machine, you know, uh seltzer making machine, uh they make uh whipped cream uh chargers, etc. etc. whipped cream siphons.
Uh and uh we use it a lot to uh do uh rapid infusions using nitrous and you can look on www.cookingissues.com for more on that. Uh but uh Joseph wants to know he's interested in the thermal whipper so we can create hot or cold foams and was wondering what my recommendations are. Okay. So the thermal whip uh whippers are different from the normal uh EC whippers, and they're basically just whipped cream makers, and that the thermal whip is insulated like a thermos. All right.
Alright? Now, the the good thing about the thermo whip is if you fill the thermal whip with hot water, really hot water, and then dump it out, and then put a hot product in to do a foam, it stays hot for a long time. Similarly, if you want a something cold, if you put ice water into the thermo whip and chill out the inside and then dump it out and put a cold product in, it stays cold for a long time. So it's it acts like a thermos and like a cream whipper to do sauces, creams, or if you want to keep whipped cream out on the counter for a long time in a coffee shop scenario, something like this, it's going to keep the quality high because the temperature is not going to change too much. Right?
Now, the downside of the thermal whipper is that even though it looks relatively big, it holds a relatively small amount of product, right? Because there's so much space for the insulation around. It's also very expensive compared to a normal cream whipper. So you're dealing with a lot more money for a smaller volume of product that you can put in the whipper at any one time. So in fact, it looks like a one-liter whipper, but it actually has the capacity of a half-liter whipper.
Now, uh, I mean, and that's not a foreign or against. I'm just telling you like what the what the reality is of it. Now, the the other thing about it is is that if you are working in a kitchen, right, so you could take one that's not a thermal whip and you could either store it in the fridge or you could store it in a hot water bath to keep it hot for service. Now it's much more convenient, right, to be able to just put a hot thing and have it stay hot or a cold thing and have it stay cold, but you're going to be paying for that luxury by uh, you know, with with reduced capacity, which actually isn't bad if you're only making a small amount. You don't want to put a small amount of stuff into a big whipper, so it can actually help if you're dealing with small quantities, but you're gonna have a s a smaller quantity and and a higher cost.
Now uh it's just something you have to to weigh out. There's nothing that there's nothing that the thermal whip uh will do for you that the other ones can't do. They just make it easier to maintain temperature. All right, Joseph. So I hope uh hope that answers your question.
Hope you decide uh which one you want to buy. Of course, we at the uh cooking issues, fans of the uh of the EC folks, right, Nastasha? Yes. Yes, yes, that's what I thought. Um by the way, we still can get calls even though you're on the phone with us, right?
I think Yeah, don't worry. I would never block that. Oh my god, I would never block that. I like that. Like we have so many people pounding on our doors with calls.
But let me tell you, since we're about to go to our first commercial break, uh, I would like to hear some callers at 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128 cooking issues. Oh, how you feel, brother? Feeling good. You feel good?
Thanks so much, Bone Brother. How you feel, mate? I'll feel all right. How you feel, fella? Sure getting down.
We're gonna have a bump good time. We're gonna have a bump good time. We're gonna have a bump good time. We're gonna have a phone. Welcome back to Cooking Issues.
Call in all of your questions to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. Um here for another half hour or so. And of course, Nastasha's hanging out in Florida driving an RV up and down the coast. So she had to stop the RV so that she could call in.
How's how's the driving going, Nastasha? Uh, we actually just picked it up and I'm in the RV shop. You're you're actually in the shop. So you're I'm in the shop. So you're staring at at the RV.
Is it a sweet ride? Yeah, it's pretty sweet. Mm-hmm. What does it get like half a mile to the gallon? What does that thing get?
About that, yeah. Yeah, and you're packing how many people into that? Five. Five people into an RV? Awesome.
So is is uh our Piper and Grace giving you the uh giving you the the hairy squint to get the hell uh uh off the radio and into the no I'm the one who's who's been uh pushing everyone to go go go. So I made them all go get food and gas while I'm gonna that sounds like you. That's why you're the hammer. Okay. Uh we had someone call in, actually with some uh write-in rather, with some comments on uh our sponsors and my relative either uh enthusiasm or lack thereof for them.
And so I thought I'd share uh some some feelings and you know, maybe make a uh an apology to uh to one. But uh uh a while back we have a sponsor, I think they're still a sponsor, 360 cookware. They don't have me read that one anymore. But basically it's a it's a line of cookware that uh that claims to use a steam technology to enhance the speed at which food is cooked, and also uh I don't know, lock lock in nutrients or something like that. And uh I I was told that I was kind of rude and insulting to them on the air.
In fact, Nastasha told me that afterwards, and then I kind of tried to make up for it the week after. But I just want to say a little bit about what happened with that. Here's the deal, right? So my whole life is based around uh food and food equipment and and things like that. And so I always take with a huge grain of salt any sort of claim made by any sort of corporation that anything can do anything uh outside of my realm realm of normal experience.
And the problem isn't that I the problem is basically is that I I read the I read the sponsorship thing without uh actually ha ever having evaluated the the equipment, and so it's hard for it's hard for someone like me to straight read something that somebody claims is true, have it come out of my mouth without me being able to verify or no, and and I'm also inherently skeptical of any claims, right? So you know it it seems that and that's probably why they don't have me read these things anymore. But uh but uh but I don't it it it doesn't it doesn't like reflect on anything um I I know about that company it reflects on my on my lack of knowledge and it's just it's hard for me sometimes if I get caught off guard and I don't have the the time or the resources to do uh the proper research, it's hard for me to to say to say something uh either good or bad, and so it can come off as snarky, so I apologize. But that same uh reader um uh heard uh we we have a sponsor here, Sam Edwards, and actually was Sam Edwards our sponsor, no Butterhouse was our sponsor today. Uh Sam Edwards uh from uh S.
Wallace Edward Edwards and Son Ham. Uh you know, I've known him for a long time. He makes delicious uh ham products, and this reader actually remembered that and went back and tried the actual ham, the Suriano ham, uh that there was being sold at Murray's cheese on his way through Grand Central, and indeed thought it was a delicious ham. So people, I do not steer you wrong. Uh also I wish it wasn't called Suriano ham.
I wish it was just called delicious uh Virginia ham from the S. Wallace Edwards and Company, but that's another story that I've already uh gone through. Right, Nastasha? Yeah? That is right, yeah.
Yeah. So anyway, uh so I th and seriously, I think that's why they don't have me read these things anymore. I mean, I I don't know. Yeah, I think that's it, Dave. Yeah, yeah.
I'm not a bad I'm not a bad guy. It's just if you catch me when I'm not, you know, when I don't know what's gonna go on, it's just you know, you I never know what even I I don't know what I'm gonna say, you know? Anyway, yeah. Okay. So uh we had a question uh about the Martha Centerfuge story that we talked about, uh Martha, Martha Stewart centerfuge story.
Uh it's not like it's not like Oprah where you you know if you say Martha and you're talking people know what you're talking about, then obviously you can just say Martha, but it's you know there are a bunch of Martha's in the world, whereas there's only one Oprah. Anyway, uh I like the Martha Stewart centrifuge story. And by the way, uh Martha Stewart last week canceled on us because of uh inclement weather, and so Martha Stewart's uh centrifuge is still chilling at the uh at the French Culinary Institute, it's being moved from hallway to hallway because it has no has no home. So uh do you know when we're scheduled to do that again, Nastasha? She hasn't gotten back to me.
And I sent her the videos of the uh coconut and carrot, yeah. One centrifuge, centrifuge for sale, right? It's like like the old like we have just a centrifuge floating around. Anyway, uh so uh uh they he liked the story, and he'd like to see he sent us an eBay link to another centrifuge asking whether we could fix it up and give it to Oprah. And it was hilarious.
I went to the centrifuge link, and it's an old Clay Adams Junior centrifuge. And the most hilarious uh part about it is that uh, you know, for for those of us uh who enjoy a good natured ribbing of our uh Canadian uh northern neighbors, but the canadi it it meets all Canadian Engineering Standards Association uh warrants. Anyway, it but what it basically is is a motor with uh two test tubes that it swings around in the air, like swinging the test tubes around you know in the air with no kind of with no kind of covering. And it was a whopping on eBay, 159.99, which is preposterous for a centrifuge of that type. I mean, ridiculous.
I mean, because it's unit's unusable, basically. It's completely completely dangerous. They still actually make manual centrifuges that are completely open like that, and they come either two or four test tubes and they have a crank on them. And I've considered buying them several times. Kent Kirstenbaum, our buddy from NYU actually enjoys these because they make like you know an awesome kind of pro like helicopter noise and they they look incredibly dangerous, which I assume they are.
But they're currently only used really for petroleum and oil analysis because you can take them out in the middle of nowhere and spin samples down to check, you know, I guess oil levels, and there's a certain, you know, uh in in a in a particular sample or or or you can s or solids levels in dirt samples. But unfortunately, unfortunately, and I believe Paul sent us that one, unfortunately, uh they don't achieve G levels high enough for us to uh use them for juice clarification. Uh you know, in the videos that I've shot of the inside of our centrifuge that I have yet to post because I'm a jerk, um 2,000 G's is about the minimum where the stuff starts uh really clarifying at an appreciable rate. But even even at that uh at that thing at 2,000 G's, it looks like it's clarifying, but it doesn't form a pellet in the bottom of the centrifuge uh buckets that's strong enough to be able to really decant it uh properly without without like becoming hazy, resuspending some of the crap. So really you want like three to four thousand G's, which unfortunately these guys won't do.
I think they'll do just under about a thousand G's. And the other problem is is that four fifty milliliter test tubes isn't really enough to make uh make uh you know uh fruit juice for your even even two close buddies, much less two hundred close buddies. And so uh, you know, although we've considered buying one for uh demonstration purposes, I don't think I will be and although I mean I don't you don't know, I don't know what Oprah wants to do with a centrifuge. If hey listen, if Oprah wants us to fix up that centrifuge, we'll do it. We'll even make it safe, right?
We'll build a box around it, you know, we'll we'll shine it all up. I'll get I'll get our intern Brooke, who's the master cleaner, and she'll make that thing look better than it was new. It'll look like uh I don't know. Anyway, uh it's perfect. But if you really want a dangerous old centrifuge, Paul, may I suggest that you go for the Sorval, or as they were known before they changed their name to Sorval, the Serval SS1 super speed aluminum centrifuge, which is basically just a uh an eight position uh uh you know 50 mil rotor, uh aluminum rotor, like from the 50s.
It looks like a Jetson thing on a motor on a stand. And there is little that has scared me more in my food cooking life than firing up the Sorval SS1 dangerfuge and having that thing going at full speed inside in a kitchen. Uh Nastasha, did we ever throw that away or did we save it for sentimental reasons? We gave it to an intern. Really?
Who? Piper? Yeah. I don't remember who took it, but someone took it. You know, we had to give it away because my in uh my inherent problem is is that if I own it, I will be tempted to run it for some reason or another.
Right? And it's it's just a terrible, terrible idea. An awesome, awesome paperweight and a terrible, terrible idea uh to use. All right. So uh Ken uh Ingber uh sent us some questions, and one of them's on ultra pasteurization milk and uh its cheese making properties and its foam making uh properties.
Uh and so uh he recently uh was working on making mozzarella uh cheese uh from scratch. Although, you know, most people when they're making mozzarella, especially if you haven't done it before, I recommend buying the curd first and then testing your mozzarella skills on just the uh on the you know on the actual pasta filata part on making the the cheese in the in the hot water. That way you can perfect that that portion of it before you go to the actual part of making the curd. Although we all know that I would also do the same thing and go directly from milk to uh to cheese, and there's no way I would buy my curd. So I I obviously think you won't do that, but uh still uh I should just let it say that I rec I should recommend that.
Anyway, uh so one instruction everyone gives uh is to avoid ultra pasteurized milk um because uh it they don't form curds properly. And so he's not using ultra-pasteurized milk for uh for that. Uh and but then I went to look it up and see see why it's actually quite interesting. When you uh pasteurize milk, you denature a certain port of the uh of the whey proteins. Uh uh basically I think it's uh beta-alactoglobulin, right?
And you as they denature, they have a tendency then to uh to adsorb onto or to complex with uh the casein. And what happens when you're um when you make cheese, when you make curds with uh rennet, which is the qu enzyme that's used to make you know most cheeses, is that uh it basically cleaves off a hydrophilic part of the uh casein, casein micelles, and makes it such that they're more hydrophobic, and because of that, they tend to aggregate together and form a cheese curd, right? Now, if you uh pasteurize your milk too much, too high a temperature or for too long, the denatured whey proteins basically glom onto the casein and present prevent them from uh from forming a good gel from aggregating together and forming a good gel. So ultra-pasteurized milk, where you really can't make a good strong uh good strong curd curd out of it. There's been some studies recently, I didn't get a chance to read it too much though, that that's not the only thing going on because they tried to they basically removed all of the whey proteins from milk, so it was just basically a casein suspension.
Then they heated that and they still had uh problems uh with uh getting it to aggregate properly if it had been cooked to higher temperatures. So there's actually more more than one thing uh going going on with it. Uh but a lot of people uh have been there's a couple bunch of reasons why you'd want to pasteurize to uh a higher temperature. One is because uh certain cheeses have uh infection with uh clostridium tyroabutyricum which I've sure I've pronounced in incorrectly but it makes butyric acid later on in the cheese ripening and can make it smell I don't know what's a good word vomit like vomit. And so they try to kill that with ultra high temperature pasteurization but it really stops the cheese from ripening properly later in the uh in the process because it also destroys some native uh milk enzymes that are needed uh for the protein ripening uh further down the line so there that you know that's what I spent my morning reading about that that kind of stuff but he actually wasn't interested necessarily in making cheese but in whether or not ultra pasteurized milk is going to make a difference in frothing for cappuccinos.
And uh I don't know. I assume it would because uh the protein in milk is one of the things that's helping form a stable uh milk foam when you're when you're frothing cappuccinos. Uh and so I would assume and you know as we all know uh milk loses a lot of its uh well not as we all know if you're a cappuccino head or a milk frothing head you you know most people recommend not taking your milk as you're foaming it uh much above I mean they they don't recommend taking it much above one 140 a lot of the times Fahrenheit really 150 uh in that range otherwise if I don't take it up there my wife thinks the drink is too cold. But uh presumably you're inhibiting the fill uh the the formation of foams with a similar reaction where you're basically uh in in inhibiting the ability of the casein uh to act as a as a as a good uh foam stabilizer. This is my assumption.
I don't know. I could be a hundred percent wrong but this is my assumption. So I would assume that ultra high pasteurized uh stuff does not foam as well, although I have not tested it. But what was more interested in is that it turns out that oh, and and he was also asking because he has a little thing called an aerocino. And even though he's the fellow that wrote in about the aero press, apparently the aericino is not related to the aero press.
It's a little thing that foams uh foams milk by having a little squiggle doodle. What do you call it? Spring, squiggle doodle, squiggle doodle, what anyway. It uh whips a little spring around and heats the milk to create a foam. And yeah, you know, you can make a good foam uh just by agitation.
You don't need an arrow squiggle to do it. You know, when I when I'm you know in the wilds, and by that I mean at my mom's house or at my mother-in-law's house, you know, I always foam uh milk by shoving a whisk into a coffee mug, heating the milk and swirling the whisk back and forth between my hands, uh, you know, spinning it almost like a like a chocolate, like a coffee, a chocolate frother, like a Mexican uh chocolate frother. And it works okay. It doesn't work great. And I think uh, you know, it might be possible to get a decent, and the question for any kind of foam head with coffee is not can you produce bubbles?
Because any moron can produce bubbles, it's whether you can produce uh microfoam, right? So like the real coffee heads, if you show them a foam that you made in your cappuccino machine, even if you really like it, right, but it has lots of big bubbles on the top, they're like, that's dishwasher soap, that's crap. You know what I mean? They want like a dense, stable, uh or semi-stable, but very dense kind of microfoam, almost you know, where the bubbles are so small that they're almost you know imperceptible when you look at them. They don't look like a big batch of bubbles, it just looks like a dense uh creamy foam.
And that's what they're looking at. And I have my doubts as to whether or not you could use a spring uh to do it, although I'm probably wrong. I'd like to see someone maybe I haven't had time to go on Coffee Geek, which is a great website for you coffee heads uh to go on to, but um I haven't had a chance chance to go on and see whether or not anyone's created a really nice microfoam with one of these little whip doodles. Uh as I just got it Nastasha, you think of a better name than whip doodles. But even more interesting than that is that Ken is an owner of a uh uh of a La Chimboli uh Liberty lever machine, right?
Now for those of you out there who don't know about lever pulled espresso or you know, don't drink espresso any. If you don't drink espresso, go out and learn to drink espresso. But if you uh if you like espresso as I do, um, you know, you're gonna at some point spend a lot of time researching lever pulled machines. Now uh I myself am an owner of uh microchimboli, which is a small uh lever, lever operated uh chimboli chimbalies uh an espresso machine manufacturer. But I'm I'm an owner of one.
Uh I don't use it anymore because it's a big pain in the rear. But lever pulled espresso machines to my taste make the best espresso that you could possibly have. Now my my relationship to espresso machines goes back to the uh mid to late nineties when I was uh going to uh restaurant auctions in New York City and buying restaurant equipment on the cheap. I realized very early on that you know there's no way I was gonna buy myself a you know a home uh a home espresso machine because you know everyone on the internet, and I was reading the professional, you know, the professional baristas were like, you know, there is no home machine that can make real espresso. And and back in those days, there really wasn't.
I mean, there was the uh there was the uh the Ranchillo uh oh man with this Sylvia was I think around at that point, I'm not I think, and people were modifying it, but no one had modified the machines to the level that they're modifying now. So really the only uh thing you could do was you could uh get a real commercial espresso machine, which is what I did. And went to an auction, and I believe I said this on the air once before, but I you know i the New York Times has auctions in the back of their or they're used to in the back of the help wanted ads. And uh restaurants are closing all the time here in New York. So I went and this one I was super excited because the restaurant had been shut down because of they had been dealing drugs out of the restaurant.
And what that meant was that the whole building had just been padlocked and all the food was still in there, and the stench was enough to like completely like blow your pants off. It was that bad as stench was so awful. And what that meant was is that none of the normal restaurant uh equipment dealers or chefs could stand it, right? Because you know, they had other things to be doing with their lives and dealing with this hard stench for hours. Me, on the other hand, as a just ex-grad student with about two nickels in my pocket and desire, you know, desiring a professional espresso machine that cost thousands and thousands of dollars, was like, this is an awesome opportunity.
So I stuck around, uh, bought uh uh uh you know a two-head ranchillo commercial espresso machine for like a hundred and change dollars, and paid paid a a literal just got out of Riker's ex-crack dealer crackhead to drive it to drive me with it in his station wagon back to my house, my loft at the time. Realized I didn't I knew so little about espresso machines at the time that I didn't realize that the pump was a super uh important part that was separate, and I accidentally left it in this guy's car, and I had to call him and like go to his to his house and retrieve this pump. But anyway, it got me, launched me on my on my love of espresso. But I became interested in lever machines at the time because it another way to generate really good espresso without having like a big pump, is to just basically use your hands to have uh a piston to force the espresso out because espresso is, as I've said on the show before, not possible at the lower pressures that that people are using. You really want somewhere in the area of about and thirty-five or so, a plus or minus a bunch PSI of pressure pushing uh coffee at a very precise temperature through a compressed coffee puck, you know, in 22 to 28 seconds.
That's espresso, right? That's that's it. That's all you got. There is no more. So um, so anywho, so the the lever machines are great, and there's always a fight between true lever heads who say that lever uh lever espresso is better, uh, you know, and the people who use uh the the pumps and say the pumps are better.
Uh now uh there's two basic lever styles. The one that everyone gets, the the La Pav the Pavoni la, you know, Europe piccolo, right? That's the clunk one that you see in the stores, it's all shiny chrome. In that one, when you pull down on the piston, you're applying the pressure to the actual uh coffee puck and putting the uh putting the water through. In all commercial espresso machines, and interestingly, in the chimbely micro uh in the microchimbale lever machine, which is a home machine, uh all the commercial ones, your hand when you pull down is engaging a spring, and then when you release it, it's the actual spring that's providing the pressure.
And for years, many people wrote in their in their blogs and whatnot that the reason that lever pulled machines were better is because, or different anyway, is because lever pulled machines had a constant pressure, whereas the rotary pump that we use in modern espresso machines is not as even a pressure, right? And that's why they say that that's the difference between the two. So basically, then the difference is in a nutshell that you get more crema in a rotary pump machine, but you get a smoother tasting cup in a lever pull machine. And uh, and I I didn't you know think about this, and then uh you know, well, I did a lot of research on it because uh about four or five years ago I went to the National Restaurant Association show and someone was pulling shots out of a lever pull Vittorio Arduino, which is not you know aesthetically not my style, because it's all you know gussied and horred up with brass and all crap like that. But but this guy pulled two shots, one out of the one out of that and one out of uh uh a La Mart Soca, which is a sweet machine sitting right next to it, and same barista, same beans, and the Arduino blew the Lalmart Soco out of the water.
It was one of the best cups of espresso. It was definitely the best cup of espresso I've ever had in Chicago, let's put it that way. But it was one of the better cups of espresso I'd ever had. And uh I I I resolved right there that I was going to figure out uh the lever machine. And here's what it is that makes a lever machine better than a than a pump machine, or to my taste, better.
It's not that it's smoother, it's that the pressure changes, right? Because I had been thinking if I was gonna build one of my own, how do I compensate for the fact that a spring is gonna exert more force when it's at uh when it's compressed more? And didn't Stasha get lost off the thing? It's gonna uh exert more force when it's compressed more and less when it's compressed less, right? So uh it's not that the rotary pump is more uh e is less even, it's that the spring pump actually changes its pressure from the beginning of the shot to the end of the shot, which makes for to my taste a smoother, better cup.
And so one thing I've been working on for the past couple of years, but uh and I haven't finished building yet, although I have done handmade tests of it, is uh espresso machine where you can adjust the pressure during the shot. And uh it the true story is is that if you manually adjust the pressure from uh from high, right, at the at the initial part of the shot, a little bit over 140, and then drop it down uh towards the end of the shot, you can do a lever pull my shot with a uh a lever pull style shot with a rotary pump. Jack is telling me that we're gonna go to our next commercial break, so call in all of your questions to 718 497 2128. That's 718 497 2128. You feel good!
So much bone, brother. How you feel, man? I'm feeling all right. I don't want all people to know you're in here. How you feel, fella?
Hey Jam! Sure getting down. Look at him. We're gonna have a bump good time. We're gonna have a bump good time.
We're gonna have a bump good time. We're gonna have a bump good time. Ow! Alright. You wanna do it again?
Yeah, let's go on there. We gotta take you high. Brother. Yeah. Now I want everybody.
Let's bread blow up by two corps. And then I wanna wave in. Let's go and do that. I'm gonna get that bella with a little horn over there. Brad, can you take us higher?
Yeah. Take us higher. Brad. Bad! Welcome back to Cooking Issues.
Calling your questions too. 718-497-218. That's 718-497-2128. Someday we'll play that song long enough to get to the down D funky D part because, you know, it's all about the down D funky D. Uh oh, one more thing interesting is that uh about uh pasteurization, going back to pasteurize ultra-pasteurized milk.
Jack says he's not been able to uh ever adequately froth uh ultra-high pasteurized milk, you know, even like the the fancy organic stuff. And the reason, of course, that they ultra high pasteurize that stuff is so that you can increase the shelf life, I guess because they have small distribution runs. But another interesting thing on pasteurization in general is we have a new clarification technique in our centrifuge that I haven't uh written about yet, where we use a combination of silicosol, kesel salt, and chitosan, which is a polysaccharide, unfortunately derived from uh shellfish, so you know it's not for vegetarians, uh, where we can now clarify lime juice in our centrifuge in uh you know, with 98% yield or more. It's crazy and it's super fast, it doesn't involve agar or any other nonsense. It's awesome, and it's all stuff you can buy at a homebrew shop, but unfortunately you have to uh own own it on a centrifuge.
But what's funny is it doesn't work on pasteurized tropicana orange juice. And uh so if anyone out there has speculation as to why I can clarify fresh orange juice uh and fresh grapefruit juice, uh, but I can't uh clarify pasteurized uh orange juice, but I can clarify pasteurized uh grapefruit juice, um, please let us know because it's something that uh I can't I can't figure it out, so I don't know don't know what's going on. Got another uh uh question in, uh actually more you know, more of a comment, something to think about, something I hadn't th thought about. Uh a while back someone asked us about different tubers. So we did a kind of tuber of the world uh, you know, uh thing.
And one of the things we mentioned is that while a lot of tum tubers like cassava have uh, you know, can have uh potentially deadly levels of uh cyanide precursors in them, so they need to be uh treated properly. That uh other ones have very high levels of uh oxalic acid. Um and so, you know, which is uh um usually concentrates in the in the leaves and whatnot, but have to be cooked properly. One of those is taro so we were talking about uh taro you know the same stuff that you make uh you know you know tarot putting out of and all that tarot chips all that uh and uh so we were talking about oxalic acid and one of our uh you know listeners brought to our attention the fact that there is a uh probably a more occurring now but uh less known disease called ox oxalosis and so uh and you know it basically causes kidney stones uh well yeah it what if you have kidney stones it means that you're not getting rid of uh your excess uh um oxalate um but uh uh it's something I hadn't I hadn't thought about but what he he said is that there's it the science is crazy because the list of foods doesn't seem to make any sense so you can't you can have all the ingredients in French toast let's say but you can't have French toast and uh you can't have uh you know you there's a whole lot list of things that you can't have uh I would encourage anyone to write in and tell us anything they know about this I'm interested in it. My mom just got over a really really bad bout of uh kidney stones and so uh it's something uh I'm interested in so if anyone uh writes in we'll do a little thing on uh on diet and uh oxalic acid and oxalate uh oxalosis but it's definitely something that we should be more uh probably more more attuned to something that I hadn't really really thought about.
Uh so n Nastasha tells me that I have a bunch of questions that I haven't actually gotten to because I've been yapping about uh stuff that I'm interested in. So uh Nastasha what are those uh what what questions am I missing out on do you know because it's uh I throw them to your email but one guy wants to know how to make great brisket. How to make great brisket? Cook it right. I'm kidding.
No, uh, if you want to make uh great brisket, the question is what kind of technique, uh what kind of technique do you want to use? I mean, you can do low temperature cook on a brisket, but uh it's not going to have the same uh taste uh and texture as you would have like a classic uh Texas style brisket because it's an entirely different cooking technique, both are low and slow. In a classic technique, you're using the the the poor heat transfer of the cook of the medium and plus the f the evaporation off the surface of the meat to ensure that the meat doesn't uh dry out too much during its long cooking period. Although that sounds contradictory, I think it's what I meant. Uh whereas if you do it low temperature, you're typically going to be doing it in a bag.
I would probably cook it on the order of the length of time that I would cook. If you're doing low temperature and you want to uh basically like throw it into a Ziploc bag with a little bit of fat, uh I would I would say uh depending on what you want, between sixty degrees uh Celsius for about uh fifty six hours, or uh I would try uh all all the way up to sixty-three for uh degrees for uh like forty, forty, forty-eight hours, or even as high as sixty-five for um you know, for um for like thirty six hours or so. But uh if you want the brisket to have that cured taste, then obviously you're gonna have to put some tender quick or some nitrite into it to uh to get it to have that cured taste, and then a vacuuming it down would cause that to to penetrate faster. Um but I haven't read the email, so I don't know exactly what what uh is being looked at. I only you know, I uh this is just off the top of my head, like different things you can do to brisket.
Is that does that answer pretty much the question, Nastasha? Having not read it. Yeah, I mean he just said that he saw your um fried chicken recipe and he wanted to know if you had any good recipes for brisket. Yeah. Yeah.
You know, I now when I do fried chicken at at home, uh I I still love that recipe. Carlo here at uh Roberta's has like a crazy recipe that I think is derived from the Pies and Thighs uh franchise which had closed and then reopened uh here in New York. And they have an insane, uh insanely easy recipe that really makes me kind of upset because uh because I liked it, but it was you know goes against all of my knowledge of good chicken making, and that is they they take it directly out of the brine, the chicken. They don't dry off the skin or anything like that. They throw it directly into AP flour, uh, I think with uh maybe some salt and pepper.
I don't know remember if they added baking soda or baking powder, but no egg, no nothing, no milk. And then fry it directly. And I thought it was pretty good. What do you think, Nastasha? Yeah, it was delicious.
Yeah, anyway. So that's something I'm gonna research on fried chicken. But currently, the problem with fried chicken when I make it at home is that uh fried chicken has to be fried at a lower temperature than uh French fries and onion rings. And so uh to the way I always used to do it is I fry off all my chicken, ramp my ch my temperatures, and then and then bust out all my fries, which is fine at at uh at dinner, but at a party it becomes kind of a hassle because you can't throttle your fryer temperatures up and down like that 'cause I have a thirty five pound deep fryer at home, which is a commercial deep fryer. Uh so what I do now is I I do uh cooking for uh what I call low temperature for insurance.
I bag insur cooking insurance that is, not like you know, insurance like for your house, is I bag uh all of the chicken in the mil in a very small amount of the milk brine, very small amount, just enough to get a good seal on on a Ziploc bag. And I cook the uh the breast meat at uh sixty-four for about an hour Celsius, and I cook the leg meat at sixty-five and a half for about an hour, uh and then I pull them out, and when they're hot, I pull them out of the bag and and put them on a grate so that the skin can dry off just from the heat of the uh uh evaporating off the chicken. And that's the crucial step when people do a low temp before they fry that they forget to do on a chicken because they they let it cool in the bag and then they pull off and they get really bad adhesion of the flour and batter to the chicken skin. So the secret is pull it out when it's hot, let it flash off uh in the open. Then I do my traditional uh my traditional uh breading technique on it, which is uh it goes into a buttermilk egg make it goes flour, buttermilk egg, uh baking soda, baking powder, and then back into flour, and then uh and then you fry it.
And then I can fry the chicken at a very high temperature, same temperature as my fries, and I know it's perfect every time. I don't have to worry about it going over or under. I don't have to stick a knife into it and stick it against the my bottom lip to see whether or not I've cooked all the way through, which is what I used to have to do all the time. Uh so it's really a good way of doing chicken if you have an immersion circulator, some access to uh low temperature. Uh otherwise you have to just cut the chicken pieces smaller so that they cook cook through faster.
Um did I have any more questions I didn't answer, Nastasha? Yeah, someone wants to know how to do duck confite sous vide. Ah, so duck confit sous- vide uh or low temperature if you don't have a uh you know an actual vacuum machine is an interesting, interesting uh problem. So we don't do low, low temperature. In other words, we don't cook at any lower temperature than you would normally cook it because um confie, the texture of confie is only achieved at the higher temperatures you'd associate with the normal braising.
However, sous vide is a fantastic technique for doing confie for several reasons. First of all, you still have to cure the duck legs beforehand, right? You have to cure them with uh salt and you know whatever herbs you normally rub in, let it sit overnight. But you don't need a lot of fat. This is the primary thing that's great.
You don't need a lot of fat to do uh to do confi sous-vide. You could basically bag the leg by itself with maybe an extra tablespoon of fat, if that uh seal it, you can seal it really hard uh because uh you you yeah, you have a bulk bone in it, so you need to seal it pretty pretty hard. And normally when you seal poultry on the bone, the problem is the blood is sucked out of the red stuff sucked out of the bone, it can lend pinkness to the meat that doesn't go away even when you cook it. But confis cooked so high that you don't need to worry about it. Then just throw it in the simmering water in the bag for you know three hours or so until you feel that you can feel the bone through the uh through the duck meat, and you know it's done, pull it out, let it cool down uh you know, uh, you know, a little on your counter for 20, 30 minutes, uh, and then you know put it in the in the fridge or in an ice bath and chill it down, and it's perfect.
It's so not messy compared to normal comfy. You can do individual leg portions by themselves, so you can easily if you're a family of two, you can you know cook the breasts for you know one thing and then just comfy just those two legs and then uh serve them whenever you want. Uh and so it's really super easy for someone to comfi, especially at home when you don't have a zillion uh duck legs lying around and you don't have like buckets of duck fat and you haven't been saving duck fat from rendering all the breasts like they do in restaurants. Uh the thing's never gonna overheat, it's never gonna go bad. So it really is a fantastic technique for doing uh duck confie, but I would basically just use simmering water, or if you have a circulator set it to about 85 Celsius and run it run it that way until it's done.
And uh I think it's I think it's great. I mean, uh it's not necessarily better than traditional Konfi. It maybe it's probably a little moister, it's not necessarily better, but it definitely is a great, great way to do uh duck confie, especially at home. Did I have any more that I missed? No, because it's time and your time is up.
Yeah, but did I miss any? No. No. Alright, and here's one more thing on the way out. I am gonna soon write my post on uh UP Hedric's Fruits of New York series, the greatest pomological reference library of all times.
And yesterday I acquired the last two, I'm actually missing one more, but the last two of uh of the series. And so now I am the owner of the greatest pomological reference series of all times. This has been Cooking Issuals. We'll see you next week. Got me on this corner.
And I don't know where I'm at.
Timestamps may be off due to dynamic ad insertion.