Hello and welcome to an on-time edition of Cooking Issues on the Heritage Radio Network, coming to you every Tuesday from 12 to 1245. I'm Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues, here again with Nastasha the Hammer Lopez, back from her Florida trip. Calling all of your questions, cooking related or otherwise, to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. Today's show is brought to you by Hearst Ranch.
Hearst Ranch is the nation's largest single source supplier of free-range, all natural, grass-fed and grass-finished beef. Since 1865, which is a long time. The Hearst family has raised cattle on the rich, sustainable native grasslands of the central California coast. The result is beef with extraordinary flavor that's as memorable and natural as the surrounding landscape. For more information, go to www.hearstranch.com.
That's www.hearstranch.com. They actually supplied the uh the ribeye for the uh Heritage Radio fundraiser that was uh a couple months back, the one where we did the banana soustino drink. Delicious. Right? Delicious.
Delicious. Good product. Anyway. Uh so yesterday was Valentine's Day. And uh What did you do for your wife?
Uh I bought flowers because I'm lazy. But the uh that's not the point. The point is is that uh I was reminded by my uh I was reminded by my uh third grade son the horrors that used to be Valentine's Day. I was that kid uh who, you know, when everyone was buying carnations for everyone, you know, they would buy carnations for their friend for like a dollar. Like I was the one that got the mystery admirer carnation.
Like they would they didn't think I understood it, that meant that no one bought me a damn carnation. And that's so they they just give one to you because no one's purchased one for you. You know what I mean? You know that kid? That kid was me.
Right. I mean it's like Valentine's. I didn't have that sympathy. Oh, geez. Oh, really?
Well, it's California. See, everyone thinks New York people aren't sympathetic, but in fact, you know, like they give out the sympathy carnation. We're actually good people over here in New York, for those of you that don't know us. Uh anywho, so you know, Valentine's Day was, you know, basically a yearly uh living nightmare horror story for me. Actually, up until uh, you know, uh 1990, uh 1991, no, 1992, right, when I was 20, uh, was the first year I had a good Valentine's, and it was the day I started dating uh a actual, you know, cracker jack, smart, badass, verifiable hot chick, uh who whom I eventually married and who's my currently my wife.
So um anyway, so Valentine's Day ended up being good for me, but was horrible for the first 20 years. And my son had this happen. Uh he was uh, you know, gave a Valentine to uh a girl in the third grade, and uh which he would never do, he's not that kind of a kid. He gives it to her and completely rebuffed. No, like, yeah, Valentine on the floor, I don't want this.
Complete horror. I felt felt awful, and my and my my younger son, his brother, basically, who's an equal mix of really sensitive, sweet kid and gun-loving, crazy, rough and tumble boy monster, uh, goes. Alright, we're either gonna kick her in the face or dip her in poop. And then uh like, you know, no one's saying anything because they don't know what to say because it's this crazy thing to say. And then after a couple seconds, he's like, So which is it?
Kick in the face or dip and poop. Anyway, that was Valentine's Day. So yeah. Hey, yeah, no nah, no nah. Anyway, I wasn't calling him out too bad.
I guess everyone knows him knows my son. Anyway, so uh another thing, we're announcing we just sent out the press release for the uh Museum of Food and Drink a fundraiser. Uh and the Museum of Food. Do we have a call in? Yeah.
Alright, so I'll take the call first so I can spend the adequate amount of time on the Museum of Food and Drink. Hello, caller, you are on the air. Hi. I've been working a lot lately with preserved lemons and Indian lime pickles and Yuzu Kosho. And um I realized recently that I didn't actually understand kind of the mechanism of what's going on with salt, cure, and citrus like that.
It's the affinity, acidity and the salinity are too high for any sort of microbial or bacterial mechanism. So it's just gotta be sort of the salt, the sort of controlled rot. But I don't really know what's going on. The whole thing gets darker and the gets thicker and the texture changes. I wonder if you could explain a little bit about what's going on there.
Wow, that's actually an excellent question. I haven't really I haven't really thought about it. I'm sure that there's gotta be some sort of there's gotta be some sort of bacterial growth, right? Uh otherwise it would be purely an enzymatic reaction that's causing it to happen, which I don't think it is. Because it the thing definitely changes over time, right?
So if it changes so if it changes over time, either you're dealing with an enzymatic process, or you're dealing with a uh bacterial slash enzymatic process, or it's probably not a yeast-based or uh any sort of fungal-based thing. I know that you know who's an expert in this is Harold McGee. Um I'm gonna s I'm gonna speak to him relatively soon. I should ask him. You've caught me completely off guard on something that I haven't studied.
I do know that if you that certain things do happen in them that look like they're uh like they're bacteria based. For instance, it you can get you can get situations when you're curing them uh with certain kinds of lemons where you get like ropey substance forming in the in the cured lemon thing, which is probably some sort of polysaccharide, which I would guess, which I would guess is formed by uh bacteria, but could be just some sort of wonky thing happening to the pectin over time. I don't know. I wish I did. I'm sorry that do you have a question?
I might have an answer to this. This is like the first time I've been completely hundred percent stumped on what the correct answer is, right? Right, Nastashi for the Science Center. Yeah. Um I can't think of I think I've listened to all the episodes, and I've never heard you miss one before.
So you know, I should give you some sort of prize for a complete for complete stump out. But what I can do uh is go I'll go online and uh I'll go into like the actual literature search, not just like the regular internet. I'll go into like uh I'll go into Columbia's database of uh of uh science literature and I'll see if I can't find the stuff and barring that um I will I will ask McGee and he will tell me what's going on. And we did have a question where I did follow up next week. So Nastasha is now being very good about making sure I follow up.
So listen in next week for the answer to the question, alright? Alright, and I'll uh I'll post something to the forum to remind you. Cool, thanks a lot. Okay, bye. Oh, depressing first call.
Stumped. Stumped stumped. Well, that's me, big jerk. Anyway. So um Museum.
Museum. So the Museum of Food and Drink uh is it you know a museum that uh tried to start uh a long time ago, like six five, six years ago, six I guess, and uh, you know, Patrick Martins and I are now trying to get back off the ground again, and we're having a major fundraiser, and the fundraiser is gonna be on uh Sunday. Sunday Sunday, March 27th. Uh, and it's gonna, you know, it's not cheap. It's what is it?
It's cheap for the for the food it's a good thing. Well, for what you get is cheap two hundred and fifty dollars. It's it's it's not inexpensive, but it's a bug in the right. It's a five hour extravaganza. Well, we don't know.
We up to five hours extravaganza. Anyway, so we're we're putting it on, and here's the current, and what we're doing is we're getting a bunch of chefs and bartenders to come in to Del Posto, which is a fabulous, you know, restaurant in uh in uh New York, four stars. Our friend Mark Ladner is the is the chef there. Uh, and we're getting a bunch of chefs and bartenders to come in and cook things based on specific themes, right? So we're giving them a theme, and their dish is gonna be inspired by it.
So here is the list in no particular order. Dave Chang, his uh theme is American food circa 1491. So that's gonna be all foods that don't have uh, you know, all foods from the Americas prior to uh the Colombian Exchange. So that should be interesting. I'm thinking he's probably gonna do something with acorns, which was a big native uh, you know, Native American uh food stuff, but also a big Korean food stuff, so he could probably pull in like you know different levels of uh of work there.
So I'm assuming he's gonna do something with acorns, but who knows? Uh Wiley Dufrein, uh, you know, from uh WD 50, my brother-in-law. I gave him, because he's well-known tech guy, I gave him caveman food. He was kind of mad at me, but you know, what are you gonna do? Caveman food.
Paleolithic. Uh Mark Ladner, uh the host chef from Del Posto. I gave him Ancient Rome. Uh and so uh Wiley actually texted me and was like, hey, you gave uh you gave Mark a softball there with the ancient Rome, but not really. Ancient Roman cuisine is extr extraordinarily different from uh modern Italian cuisine, has a completely different basis, uh like you know, spice and and ingredient basis, you know, based more on uh on uh s um uh lovage seed and uh fish sauce and uh you know just a whole different ingredient base than than what's known.
So it's not really a softball. Uh that's what he's gonna be doing. Nils, Nils Norrin, uh uh, you know, uh kind of of the French culinary one, right? I gave him, just to be a jerk, I gave him fad diets. See what he does with that.
Fad diets. Uh Cesare Casella, who's coming at the beginning, gonna uh give us a whole bunch of delicious salumi uh to fit in with the fact that we knew he was gonna bring saluvi. We gave him shriveled meat as his category. Uh and then, okay, Carlo from Robert's, whose last name I've I've never been able to pronounce, so I'm gonna try the way well, Mirachi. But you gotta say like Mirachi.
Anyway, I don't know how you're supposed to pronounce it. Anyway, he's gonna do New York food circa the uh early 1900s, or is that late 1800s, early 1900s? 1900s. Early 1900s, okay. Brooks Headley, the uh pastry chef from Del Posto, is going to be doing Hebrew food in Italy, because there's a big group of uh of uh people that basically had to leave Spain during the uh Inquisitions, settled in uh Italy and brought some very interesting uh dessert things with them, uh, you know, some of which uh are kind of big in my family.
And uh Christina Tozi, also of Momafuku Milk Bar, or from Momafuku, but a milk bar, we're giving her, this is a tough one, space food. Here's why we're giving her space food. She's like, space food, why are you giving me space food? I was like, well, Christina Tozi, other than being, you know, the fantabulous Christina Tozi that she is, little known fact, she writes a lot of the Hasset plans uh for the sous vide programs here in the city that chefs have. And HACSIP was uh originally developed by large food corporations like Pillsbury uh and for the space program.
The idea being that they needed uh they need a zero tolerance food system because if an astronaut gets the poops in the in the space, it's a big problem. So, anyway, so is uh Hasset was developed uh in part for the space program and uh and is now used in basically in all industries for food. And so I gave her that as a as a as a tip of the hat to uh her uh HACCP skills. Audrey Saunders from the Pegu Club will be making drinks. Thomas Waugh from Death Co.
uh. also Simon Ford, the uh head, uh I guess head bartender bartender for Pronot Ricard, uh Damian Bolti from Prime Meats, and Evan Clem from BR Guest Restaurants and fellow techie related bartend dude will be doing it. Uh all proceeds will go to the Museum of Food and Drink. Please go to H T T P colon forward forward mofad dot that's M O F A D like Museum of Food and Drink. Event Bright.
Spell it improperly. B-R-I-T-E dot com. That's HTTP forward forward mofad.eventbrite.com for more info. All right. That was a long plug.
Anyway, because we want you to come. It's going to be a great, great time. All right. Now, on to real questions. Uh I have a question about tempering chocolate in the microwave.
Most of the instructions I've seen are very complicated, requiring a good candy thermometer and often instructions to use a microwave multiple times or add additional cold chocolate to the microwave chocolate, stirring, etc. etc. I've tried about three or four times simply putting two cups of chocolate chips into the microwave until they turn glossy and removing them, stirring them until they melt. Each time this two-step process has worked just fine. Are the additional steps and temperature precision really necessary?
Have I just been getting lucky or is something else at work? Kurt Kastorf. Well, uh, I think you're just lucky, Kurt. Anyway, uh, but but uh the point is uh is that if you that recipe works for you, like you'll you will be repeatably lucky. If you do the same thing and it's and it's working, then it should be able to repeat itself.
Because here here's what's actually uh what's actually going on and what why the recipes are are so complicated. And by the way, you have to make sure that the chocolate is actually uh tempering, right? Like so uh you know, you have to make sure it's actually getting a good temper. I mean, obviously anyone can just melt chocolate in the microwave. The question is, are you getting a good temper?
If you are getting a good temper, and by the way, for those of you well, you'll hear. Anyway, so chocolate has basically the cocoa butter in it, has roughly six ways of uh of crystallizing, right? The the the cocoa butter can form six different crystal structures, and those crystal structures have different uh different properties, right? So uh you know most uh and and those crystals have different uh melting points, right? So what happens is uh badly tempered chocolate is mostly in uh form four, which is also known as uh beta prime, and good tempered chocolate is in form five, which is beta crystals, right?
So what happens is if you uh heat chocolate up, melt out all the crystals, and then cool it down too rapidly, which is basically any kind of cooling that you're gonna do to it is too rapid, uh it will form mostly uh type four beta prime crystals. And what what what those are is they're soft, right? They because they have a lower melting point, so they're very soft, they have a lot of uh they don't they're not hard, they don't have a snap, and they're dull looking, they're not glossy. All in all, they're kind of crappy. And even if even if you didn't care about all the fact that it did, you know, it didn't have good texture and it melted too low, if you store those for a long time, they will convert from beta prime to beta.
And that sounds like it's a good thing, right, Nastasha? Because the beta is what you want. Yes. Yeah, but it's a bad thing. You know why?
No. No. Well, it's because uh all of the forms of uh of as they get more and more hard and more and more stable, when they go from beta prime to beta, they contract. And when they contract from beta prime to beta, they squeeze fat out of the uh cocoa part and you get that white fat bloom on the top. So poor poorly uh poorly uh tempered chocolate will get fat bloom very quickly, even if you didn't care about the snap and all the rest of that stuff, right?
Okay. So and and so that's why the typical old school uh hardcore tempering technique is you melt out all of the crystals by taking it up to you know like a 115 or so Fahrenheit, sorry, Celsius heads, we're gonna do this one in Fahrenheit. And then uh you rapidly cool it down uh to you know in the in the eighties somewhere, and then crystals start forming, and then you reheat it up to about ninety-four or so to melt out all the crappy beta prime crystals, right? Now all you have in there is beta crystals. Now when you cool it again, she'll be tempered because those beta crystals will act like little seeds that everything kind of hooks on to, right?
It's all about seeding it, right? The easy way, and that's if you're starting from all you have, you're on a desert island, you have a pot, a thermometer, and a bunch of untempered chocolate, right? That's how you would do it. Most of the time, what we do is we just melt the chocolate, right? We take it up, melt it, bring it down into the range where uh beta crystals want to form in the nineties, right, and then stir in chopped up tempered chocolate that already have the good seeds in the good crystal form, and then all of a sudden, all of the chocolate as it cools will form those nice stable uh beta crystals, right?
And but you need at least um you know about you know one to three percent of uh beta crystals mixed all throughout it, so you're stirring it right to cause it to happen, to uh to seed it to seed it properly. Now, when you're doing it in the nuke, right, you're starting with uh hopefully with tempered chocolate. If you start with tempered chocolate, right, and you nuke it so it's like you say just glossy on the outside, and then you stir it so long as the temperature of that thing is in the beta zone, right, in the like nineties, and not a low temperature where you're gonna be forming uh bad beta prime crystals, right? So as long as as soon as that last piece of chocolate melts, you're still in that like you know, ninety ninety, ninety two, ninety three, ninety four Fahrenheit range in there, ninety five in that zone, right? Then you will uh seed properly with uh beta crystals and it'll work.
But the reason they have it like taking it all the time and stirring it and then sometimes throwing in seed chocolate is because they're assuming that you're gonna overheat the mass of chocolate so that when it's all melted, it's not gonna be in the right temperature range. So, yes, you got lucky, but maybe you'll get repeatably lucky. If I were you, I would save some seed chocolate to stir in after it's all melted, just in case, and you can take the temperature when it's done, and that should give you the answer. So long-winded, but I mean chocolate tempering is an interesting uh subject. The good reference book to get on chocolate that's small is uh The Science of Chocolate by Stephen T.
Beckett. It's expensive but small and fairly easy to read. Uh I think probably a smaller investment and faster to read than uh the other book that people use now, chocolate science and technology by Emmanuel Apho Aqua, right? And I don't know that anyone uses the old chocolate reference. This is one I started using back in the day, which is Minaphy.
Minifee's big old chocolate book. Right? And with that, we will go to our first commercial break. Call in all your questions to 718-497-2128, 718-497-2128 cooking issues. Alright.
Gotta take high brother! Now I won't have a body. Let Red blow up by two cores. And then I want to wave you and let'm gonna get that belly within a fella with a low horn over there. No, James, get it take us higher.
Take us higher. Red. Give a big arm about the bread. Hello. You know what?
When I hear a groove like this groove. Oh, they got it. Yeah, baby. Well, welcome back to Cooking Issues. Calling your questions to 718-497-2128.
That's 718-497-2128. And although that's the longest we've played that song during the intermission, we still have not made it to Funky D. He's gonna make it to Funky D in a little while, but we'd be here all day if we waited for James to go down to Funky D. Although it is well worth the wait. I encourage you all to go out and do it to death, as James.
I guess I actually did since he's now dead. Anyway. Right? Dumb. Really dumb.
I'm a dumb man. What do you want out of me? Okay. Um Jason writes in from England, and I think he was listening actually to two weeks ago, saying that uh he was listening to me answer the question about cookie texture using hydrocolloids, and he says more conventionally, you just use high high gluten uh flour, uh, and you he won't get a bready uh bready cookie, he'll just uh limit the spread, which uh you know I actually got confirmed and said last week from Christina Tozy, but here's uh you know, further confirmation that what you want to do to get your cookie to not spread so much is use a high gluten flour. Jason adds a secondary uh thing, which is also uh let the uh let the cookie rest in the fridge uh for uh 24 hours.
I guess that will I guess develop the the I don't know, maybe well the cold will limit the spread as we said, but also maybe developing some of the some of the flour more. I don't know. But anyway, uh thank you, Jason, for for that tip. Uh now, we had a question and it sent me off on like a uh on a bunch of research. So you're gonna have to hear another one of my long-winded nonsense things.
Uh but Chris Anderson writes in the way you get to your long-winded call. Oh, we have a caller? All right, caller, you are on the air. Hey, how are you doing, David? Doing all right.
See if we get a double stump this week. What do you got? My name is Matt. I'm actually calling from Chicago. Hey, Chicago.
Hey Matt from Chicago. Actually, I used to work in New York with Wiley and Mark and all those guys. Um, you're not you're not at uh you're not at uh you're not out there with uh Mike Sheeran, are you? Where are you cooking out in Chicago? No, I'm I'm actually a few chef at a steakhouse, but uh that just opened it's crazy busy, but it's a whole different story.
Yeah. Um my question is, um I'm really interested in the uh nitrous infusion using the uh ISI cream whipper. Right. And um I was wondering if you tried it with any viscous liquids like say honey or some kind of uh scented syrup. All right, I haven't, but if I if okay, so here's the thing, right?
Honey has uh honey is just extremely thick, right? So if I was gonna do it, I'm uh I it would I'm assuming it would work, but I think you'd want to keep the whole thing like f war like warmer than we normally keep it, right? So I would I I would put the whole ISI in or EC which is it that they like now? I would put the I would I would put the uh no no no it I do it. Oh it's not you, it's me.
I can't because in in here it was one and in Europe it was the other, and they're trying to make it both the same now, but like no one can keep it straight. And when I say no one, me, no one else seems to have a problem. Anyway, EC. Um so I would put the whole thing into a uh into a uh warm bane marie for a while. And the reason is you just need it to be uh thin enough to to get accurate you know, to get punched into the pores of your product, right?
So if you if it's if it you get it nice and liquidy uh by warming it, then I think it should uh work. You know, and but you have to keep you have to keep it liquid, like warm during the whole process down to the time when you're venting it so that it can also bubble back out again. I I've never tested it, but I I have uh I have high hopes that it will work. Let me put it that way. Outstanding, sounds cool.
But give it a shot and then let us know how it works. Oh yeah, they will. And I got another thing on the Uzo effect. Um I was listening to the old shows on the way into work the other day and I was like I honestly I didn't believe that you could cloudy the water. I used to drink pastices a lot, and I didn't think that the water uh that the liquor would get cloudy just by dilution.
And so I had to try it, and the the interesting thing is is that it does obviously get cloudy by dilution, but if you put it in a microwave for less than ten seconds, the cloudiness goes away. And then by adding more ice cubes to it, the cloudiness comes back. So I tried it with with bo boiling hot water. I tried it with water tea water, and I still gets the cloudiness still comes in from dilution, but it goes away much faster with heat. Huh.
So it's an interesting interesting thing. Yeah, so huh? So when you're heating that actually makes sense to me, right? So what's happening is you're adding water, and uh as you add water, you reach a point at any given temperature where the oil is no longer soluble in that percentage of ethanol, right? And so it it it forms instantly forms little uh micro uh you know droplets of oil, and that's what makes it look cloudy.
If you let it sit at that temperature for a long time, uh sometimes depending, I don't know with pastisted but with some of the stuff that I make, uh, that that cloudiness, the oil will actually float to the top, and then it won't be cloudy anymore, right? Uh but what you're saying is is you heat it, and when you heat it, you're re-increasing the solubility of the oil into the remaining ethanol fraction, right? 'Cause presumably you're not boiling. If you boiled it, you'd probably make the problem worse. But by heating it, you're increasing the solubility uh of the product and causing it to go clear again, and then when you drop the temperature again by adding ice, you're doing two things.
One you're watering it down more, which is going to increase the uh the dropout, and you're also uh decreasing the temperature, which increases the drop. But that makes sense, but that's interesting, but I've never experimented with it before. Yeah, yeah, it was just a weird thing. I thought I had to try it out. So I'd lets you know.
Alright, cool. Thanks a lot. Thanks, man, and I'll let you know how the honey goes, okay? Very good. Thanks so much.
Give me another call. Sure, take it easy. Oh, we have another caller. Caller, you were on the air. Hi, Dave.
I was uh messing around with some Nepalese the other day, and I cut them into cubes and I was uh just soaking them in some water and I noticed this gelatinous substance was forming. And I guess that's the s the uh the substance that the cacti used to like uh retain moisture in the desert, right? Uh right. It's like well, like a hydrocolloid similar to like what uh aloe vera has, right. Okay.
So is it like a mucilage like okra or like philae or is that a completely different like uh you know that's interesting. I haven't researched whether or not it can be used as a thickener. It is sure is slimy. Interestingly enough, on Sunday I was cooking uh nopolis, and you know how well I mean, uh when I when I cook 'em, I always, you know, I I try to get the um I try to get the spines off with the minimum of damage because I know they're gonna ooze out a lot, you know, and so I usually grill them first and then let them cool down a bit before I slice them so they don't get too slimy on me. But I've never tried to actively uh actively extract the slime.
So did did you then did you decant the slime off that was in the in the water and then try to use it for something or no? I did not, but uh I probably will try it in the future. But uh the first thing I thought of was like okra and other you know other thickness, and I wonder how it would uh compare and if I mean I'm sure it's probably e look, I mean all different hydrocolloids have different um actions, and we're used to thinking of hydrocolloids as being these things that come in powdered form. But in reality, hydrocolloids are all uh not all most uh are f are just like what you say. They come from natural sources and they've been discovered in natural ways.
Like most of the seaweed, uh seaweed, like you know, you can extract carrageeninan from uh Irish moss by boiling it, right? Or you can uh and so okra basically is uh has this kind of uh snotty, slimy stuff that is actually a natural hydrocolloid just not one that's used uh industrially so it doesn't get lumped in but m you know many products have um you know the these things so there's a chef from Spain I forget who it was who did it but you know made uh made a lot of demos basically using the natural hydrocolloids in aloe vera right although I guess if you if you do that that wrong it can give you the poops because of the latex but yeah but the um uh so to you know to answer your question I I don't know I don't know of any commercially uh used uh cactus based thickening things but I you know it it it is it it is some polysaccharide right so it is some hydrocolloid and then the question is what are its uh what are its properties it doesn't seem like it's a gelling hydrocolloid right it seems more like a thickener if you if you ask me but the question is like will it thicken without making too sl making things too slimy. It's a fairly slimy stuff you know what I mean it's it's more on the order like you say of okra. And so when you overthicken with okra as opposed to filet like like those those uh those things can take on a bit of a slippery nature right which I actually kind of like for those dishes but some people don't you know what I mean like some people don't some people don't get down with the okra. I I happen to think that okra is one of God's gifts to you know humanity.
I love okra but um a lot of people a lot of people do not I don't know why it's fried okra is one of the great things in the world anyway um uh so I think again uh I have noticed this effect um but I haven't seen whether there's any you know what I'll do again uh I'm not gonna count this as a complete stump by the way because I I do know what you're talking about. Uh but what I'll do is I'll try and see whether anyone has characterized what the uh polysaccharides are in the nopolis. And by the way, for those of you don't know what the hell we're talking about, I realize napolis are like uh prickly pear cactus leaves. You can buy them in uh Latin stores. Be careful because uh some of them are relatively innocuous, but some of them the spines can be pretty nasty and can get in your fingers when you're working with them.
Scrape the uh scrape off the uh spines with uh with a knife. I cut off usually the very uh tip end, which is the only part I cut off because it's hard to scrape that thing accurately, brush with oil, salt, pepper grill. Uh enjoy it because they're delicious. They're also kind of sour, they're s slimy and kind of tart and kind of delicious. Don't you think so?
I think so. I agree. Yeah. Anyway, so I'll I'll try and see whether anyone has characterized what the polysaccharide is in there. And meanwhile, you see whether you can thicken up a uh stew with them and uh give us a holler back.
All right, thanks, dude. All right, very good, thank you. Let's take a break. All right, we will take our Nastasha's telling me we will take our second commercial break, even though that was a short segment because I took the long one too last. Anyway, 718, what is it?
718497-2128. That's 718-497-2128 cooking issues. You know what? We're not here, groove like this. Oh yeah.
Black way up young man. Look at you. Someone got a groove like this. You know? No.
No. I need to grip. Need to grip the bit no bread. You know. I've a three.
Hey, bread time. Bravo. I'm getting ready to wave y'all in. You know what? I feel so down.
I need to get down. And all the vomiting gets down. I got to get in D. And all the Bomita get down. I got to get in D.
Need to get in D. Dog the D. Here we go. Down D. Funky D.
Thank you D. Down D. Ow! Oh yeah. Down D.
That's the balls. Goes down to D. Everyone else goes up. James goes down. Back here, cooking issues, calling your questions too.
718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. Alright, Chris Anderson writes in and he says, I've tried making authentic French macaroons a few times. Macaron a few times. Uh, and while they taste great, I don't seem to be able to achieve the polished flat look of uh La Dre, La Durée, which is you know the famous uh French macaroon shop in Paris.
Mine tend to crack and collapse as they are baking. Would it help to use an Italian meringue instead of a French? Could the meringue be too stiff? Is the open temperature too high at 180 Celsius? Are there any modern ingredients I could add to improve the result?
I'd really appreciate your uh advice. So, first of all, when we're talking about these, these uh you know, macaroon macaron, whatever you want to call them, uh what we're referring to here, the La Dure style is basically a sandwich style with uh either a ganache or a jelly filling in between two soft uh almond and egg white based delicious things. They come in various colors, and they like fried okra are one of God's great creations. Uh and I I love them. So, okay, so here's the thing.
I have a lot of things to say on this subject, right? But I will I will tell you that the first and foremost, I just walked up to one of our pastry chefs today and was like, all right, you know, this guy's having this problem. What do you think? Here's what here's what uh Chef Jurgen, one of our lead pastry instructors, said. One, what kind of sugar are you using?
If you're using a coarse sugar to make your uh meringue or to fold in with the sugar with the almonds, try going to a uh try going to a um my brain's gone, a finer grade of sugar. He also said that if you're if your things are cracking and collapsing, perhaps you aren't deflating your uh perhaps you aren't deflating your uh your your egg whites enough before they go in. So there's too much air left in the mix and they're it's puffing up too much and cracking and collapsing. I thought that was really interesting. Because most of the time when you try to do a recipe with an egg white, you you want to make sure not to deflate it.
And he's saying, well, maybe you're not deflating it enough. I thought that was very interesting. Um the other thing is uh I'm not sure I didn't do the the conversion uh from uh Celsius to Fahrenheit, but if your oven is too hot, it can puff up too fast and collapse. Also remember most recipes tell you to leave the door ajar when you're cooking uh these things because I guess they want the uh steam to escape. So th those are all those are all things, things to look at.
Uh but uh in the course of researching your uh problem, uh I came across these things which you may or may not find find interesting. One is just a book that I think everyone should own, but nobody does. It's almost completely unavailable. It's called Perfect Bakery and Confectionary by the Richemont Craft School, and Nastasha's gonna be gloating because I'm uh you know pumping a Swiss group and she's like she's Queen Switzerland. But uh this craft school in s in Switzerland puts out uh this series of books, but this one, Perfect Bakery Confectionary, is unavailable except through them, and it's like $99.
It really makes me angry. And uh I can't find it on BookFinder or anything, but it's one of the great pastry books because what it does is it has pictures side by side of hey, what happens when the flour is too fine, too coarse, just right. And it'll show you a picture of all the bakery stuff. So they're they have a like a four-page section on macarons, but they're unfortunately they're not the kind you're talking about. They're the old school Italian um, you know, denser, not sandwich-based uh cookies.
All right. Uh secondly, um I will go through a a a s a short history on on the macarons. The macaroon, obviously, uh originally an Italian product, uh, and apparently derived from the same word as uh as uh macaroni because it's ground. It's basically any form of kind of ground almond paste and sugar uh that is then has egg whites added to it, right? The French ones uh you know are are beaten egg white, but they don't have to be beaten.
They can just be mixed in for a denser, denser macaroon. That was the original one uh taken to uh taken to France with the medicese when they went over, right? The coconut stuff is a later uh is a later addition where uh almond was in whole or in part substituted with uh shredded coconut. Uh and so that you know that's how the coconut macaroon. So most Americans you ask them about a macaroon and they're thinking about a coconut product, but that was actually derived from the the almond-based one.
Now, the mac the macaron that we're talking about, this sandwich, everyone credits everyone credits uh, you know, uh the uh this guy at La Dere in the early part of the 20th century with uh inventing it, right? And the guy's name, I forget what it is. I have it here. Pierre uh Defontaine, right? Uh that it was the grandson of the original La Dere, right?
He they say he invented this idea of of making a double decker macaroon uh uh putting ganache in uh in the middle. And uh I don't think that's I mean that's what everyone says, that's what everyone on the internet says. Uh but I was researching this and I went to one of the great, one of my favorite, other favorite pastry books, which uh you can actually get for free on the internets because it's old. Uh it was written in 1904, and it's called uh Modern Baker Confectioner and Caterer, printed in 1907, rather, by John Kirkland. It's a four-volume set, and you can actually get them.
It was published in England, and you can still get it cheap, and these are a fantastic, fantastic set of books. State-of-the-art baking from 1907. And actually, I think they were kept revising it up till 1930. And copies are still cheap. It's four volumes, and you can get each one for like, you know, 13 bucks if you're in England.
But it's shipped over here, it's like 20 bucks because that no one in the US has them. It's an English only thing, which is where I bought my copy. Um But uh I was researching macaroons then, and prior to when La Dere was supposed to have invented it, right? They had uh they had something where b basically uh they would always sandwich the macaroons together to form a nice appearance, and that's why if you read recipes, and this is only for macaroon heads out there, they'll tell you to put it on parchment on a uh and when you pull it off the baking sheet to put some water between the parchment and the thing to make the macaroons come off easier. In fact, they were on wafer paper before and put on water which would dissolve the wafer paper and you could pull it off and the bottom will be tacky, and you could stick the two macaroons together to make a macaroon on macaroon sandwich.
Now, one of the recommendations that this book makes, I think is very interesting, is if you uh have problems sticking these two things together, right? Then because maybe they're not wet enough or they're just not sticking, then you can take some all uh some apricot jelly they recommend and wipe it between, forming what up a standard La Dere style macaroon. So maybe this dude at La Dere humped up a bunch of macaroons one day and was like these things aren't sticking together, and then put a ganache instead of a jelly in between them all and sold that as like you know, the the cool thing because they definitely popularize them. You know what I'm saying? Anyway, so those are my thoughts on macaroons, and you should definitely go out and uh look on the internet for uh Kirkland's uh modern baker and confectionery or buy a hard copy like I have, has a really good section on molding and cornstarch, and has a lot of I mean, even though it's very old, has a lot of um a lot of if this goes wrong, do this, if that goes wrong, do this, etc.
etc. etc. Really uh great uh set of books. And they also have an interesting thing to say about macaroons. If you're making macaroons in the US, and old school, they're talking about old school Italian macaroons here, right?
Uh if it is that they're very influenced by the amount of oil in the almonds. So if you're making it from scratch with a California almond, you're gonna get a very different result from if you're making a macaroon with uh like a European or Marcona, something like that, it has very high fat content. Because a lot of the California almonds we get have a lower fat content. And what they're saying is is if your almonds don't flow well enough, if they're too pinched up, you're probably using an almond uh with not enough fat. And if they flow too freely, maybe you're using one with too much fat.
They were talking about uh buying almond pastes that were adulterated, either with nonfat products or with or with extra fat, but it's something that I never thought about. I thought was very uh very, very uh interesting anyway uh so uh so that's that for the the macaroon I love macaroons don't you love macarons I would like one right now I would like one right now as well anyway okay so uh now on to the last question I have to excuse me I have to reach over and get the paper we are a paper based show today instead of an iPad based show today which is very interesting uh okay Joe Blute who is a uh at Dallas where is he Dallas College right? I don't know the first page of it. Dallas? Dallas.
Dallas Dallas. Dallas? Yes Dallas. Anyway, uh he writes in and says some uh very kind words uh about about us and uh he said uh he had a couple couple questions right so one he was he he's by the way thinking of building his own uh rotary evaporator and uh he's a chem oh chemistry major at the University of Dallas. He's trying to he's good thinking about building his own rotary evaporator.
So am I so am I Joe but unfortunately I haven't had the time to do it. Hopefully sometime very soon I will have the opportunity to do that more on that in a couple minutes. But he also uh is looking for a budget centrifuge and I think we posted on that a couple times trying to find a budget centrifuge. Don't go too budget right make sure that the centrifuge is safe. That's uh that's what I'm gonna what I'm gonna say.
Um but he has a question that uh I want to get to and he says uh uh I really love uh the multifaceted aspect of the culinary arts that you get to deal with and what you do is something I am interested in uh the mixture of organic surfact and kinetic chemistry is fascinating. How do you come to have such a great job and what do you recommend I do to move towards such a position? Okay, here's what I say. One you know, f food science is we we don't do food science, right? We use science to make food, which is kind of a fundamental difference.
Like I don't really I don't have like a big uh you know uh I can't do quantitative chemistry, I can't do anything like that. All the stuff we do, there's no real analytical work. It's all using principles and ideas with either standard uh kitchen cooking wear or things that we've repurposed as standard kitchen cooking wear. So when I'm using a centrifuge, I'm not using a centrifuge to do uh to analyze uh something. I'm using it to try and create a delicious product, right?
When I use a rotary evaporator, I mean, although I am purifying and distilling, I'm not doing it for the same reasons that a chemist does. It's not part of an analytical uh study, right? Or even a production uh uh of uh like a drug or something like that. So what I do is very specialized, and it's in and we read a lot of science, and I love science, and I do it and you know I I love it, but what we what I'm actually doing day to day is uh cooking. And so we're you know, we're what you have to do to kind of get to do the kind of stuff that I get to do is cook a lot.
You know, and so um, and not just with science and and and and tech stuff, just do a lot of cooking. You need to have a lot of cooking under under your belt. You need to love cooking, you need to love tasting, you need to taste everyone else's uh stuff, you need to be uh curious about um all different ingredients and uh what they do and and how they interact. You know, I think McGee said it best when he when he you know he wrote a book called The Curious Cook, and that's the name of his uh that's the name of his second book, sadly, out of print. Hopefully he brings it back into print.
It's a very personal book, uh, and it basically just shows that you know what you need to be McGee is to well, what you need to be McGee is to be like a real sweetheart and also smart, uh, you know, very smart and also read a lot, but be very curious and be very observant about food. And that's you know what you really what you really need to do. The second part of it is you have to make friends in the food world. That's the sad truth. You know, you could sit around and be, you know, know a lot uh and do a lot, and if you don't have uh friends, it's hard to network and um get an actual job where someone will pay you.
Uh and so luckily nowadays it's a lot easier with the internet to get to know people and to become more known in these kinds of subjects because the subject matter, people it's a very s small group who you know care about uh technology cooking, but it's uh you know, you can kind of get in touch with them more than you used to. But of course the bar is higher than it was, you know, let's say six uh six years ago when I started uh you know doing this or five years ago when I started working at the French culinary, there were fewer people who were known for doing it, and the the bar to entry was lower. Um so anyway, that's what I recommend. Cook a lot, uh get to know some people in the food world uh and you know, eat a lot and cook a lot. That's basically the answer.
And while we get to it, uh he says, Thank you for putting your experimentation online. It's been a pleasure reading about them, and hopefully I can try some of them eventually. Uh again, thank you for the compliment. And I will say we apologize uh yet again for the lack of posting we've had recently uh recently. We've been uh very busy, very, very, very busy, and uh working on some new ventures.
So I am now officially March 1st going to basically be starting my own consulting company, uh, which is we've been working on, which is why we haven't been posting so much. I'm still gonna be the director of culinary technology at the French Culinary Institute. I'm still gonna be teaching classes, and I am still going to be uh maintaining uh cooking issues as the French Culinary Institute's uh cooking blog. Uh and you'll be happy to note people who bother me about not posting that I will be contractually obliged to write one post a week or at least four a month. Uh but uh it allows us to do some other fun stuff, like we can take on outside people if they want to work, do stuff for cooking issues.
So if there's someone out there who is uh doesn't mind getting beaten down, because we'll beat you down, doesn't mind uh you know, who's a complete perfectionist uh when it comes to like thinking about things, right? Who you know what I mean, right, Nastasha? I mean I'm I'm a pain in the butt. You are a pain in the butt. Yeah, but you know, if you like the style, right?
And if you and if you if you think the way that that we think, uh, you know, then maybe you know if if it doesn't bother you spending you know a zillion years worried about what what's going on inside of a corn kernel during nixtimalization, well, you know, maybe maybe and you want to do this for little to no remuneration, maybe you too could work with cooking issues. And that's this week's cooking issues. Uh we hope to hear from you next week. Thanks for listening to this program on the Heritage Radio Network. You can find all of our archived programs on Heritage Radio Network.com, as well as a schedule of upcoming live shows.
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