The following program has been brought to you by Kane Vineyard and Winery. Kane Vineyard and Winery supports heritage radio and the growing movement to change how Americans eat and how we think about our planet. For more information, visit www.cane5.com. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues, the show where you call in with all of your cooking-related questions, technical or not. My name is Dave Arnold.
I'm here at host of Cooking Issues. Here with in the studio with uh Nastasha the Hammer Lopez. Call in all of your questions to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. We'll be here for about the next 45 minutes or so.
So, uh anything anything new, Nastasha, before we get into our daily business? No. No? Alright, well, I'm gonna start with our weekly announcement about the upcoming fundraiser for the Museum of Food and Drink, the Get the Ball Rolling Fundraiser. There are still tickets available to, I think what's gotta be one of the coolest, coolest events, well, it's the coolest event we've ever run, of course.
It's the first event we've ever run. But uh, I mean it really is kind of a special thing. Go to uh www.mofatmofad.org and look it up. But we have Cesare Casella from Silomaria Rossi doing preserved meats. We have Dave Chang, we have Wiley Dufrain, we have Mark Ladner, we have our very own Carlo from Roberta's, Brooks Headley from Del Posto, Nils Norrin, our buddy, Christina Tozi, we have Damon Bolti from Prime Meats, Jamie Gordon from Prono Ricard, Kenta Goto from Pegu Club, along with Audrey Saunders from Pegu Club, Thomas Wall from Death and Company, and Evan Clem from BR Guests, all doing museum-themed cocktails and me.
I'm gonna be doing an Amoose Boosh. I'll have you know that in private I always refer to it as an Amuse Douche, but I'm aware that it's an Amooch Boosh, amusing the mouth. Uh I'll be doing an Amused Boosh myself, uh and lucky lucky people might taste a little bit of mana from heaven dissolved into uh cognac, right? Yes. It's gonna be daraus.
Anyway, uh there are still some tickets available, but buy them while they last. It's on Sunday, uh March 27th at 1 p.m. at Del Posto Restaurant, and it's the must-attend event of the season. Yes or no? Yes.
Yes. Alright. Okay. I'm gonna attend to some of our email questions. Ben wrote in and said that I mentioned I got a cheap PID controller, and a PID controller, for those of you that don't know, is a uh controller.
Usually we control temperature, but you can control anything with it. You can control humidity, you can control anything, pressure, anything with PID. Uh PID is a stands for proportional uh integrative and derivative, and it's a it's a uh control algorithm that uh allows you to very accurately get to a particular thing, let's say a temperature, without overshooting, uh without ever going over, and it just sits rock solid there. And it's become basically the norm for uh high-end temperature control these days. Immersion circulators have it, people uh make their coffee machines have it.
I mean it's just it's the thing to do. It used to be that you couldn't get one for a controller that is for less than a couple hundred dollars, but recently the price has come way down. The cheapest PID controller, Ben that I have seen uh comes from Aubur Instruments, A-U-B-E-R instruments, and they'll sell you a complete PID controller for about 35 bucks. Now I don't know if it's any good or not, but they'll sort send you one for about 35 bucks. I've used uh love controllers from Dwyer Instruments, they're gonna run like $89.
You can get the more uh the higher brand name ones like Fuji or Watlow for a couple hundred bucks, but I mean, from Aubur Instruments for 35 bucks, a couple dollars delivered, it's not such a bad deal. They all uh you can get them all basically so that they plug into uh 110 socket. That's not a that's not a problem. One thing I would look for with them is uh if you can spend a little extra money and get one with a solid state relay as opposed to a regular relay for the output, I think you're gonna be uh a little happier. It's gonna be quieter and it's gonna be longer lasting.
You just want to make sure that whatever you're running, uh you can drive the amount of current that you need. So if you're gonna be making, let's say an immersion circulator, it's not gonna need more than about a thousand watts. So you're really not gonna need more than about 10 amps through it. But you want to make sure that the controller can handle about 10 amps, and then you're gonna be okay. So, Ben, I hope that answers your question.
Um let's go to another question. Uh we have from Ryan writes in about creme de violette, and I know Nastasha detests creme de violette. I'm actually not such a big fan myself of creme de violette, although I have uh had it. Ryan's interested in creme de violette specifically because of the cocktail, uh gin-based cocktail, the aviation that uses it, uh, famously uses it. And so he says, Um, regarding creme de violette, I love the classic cocktail, the aviation, and to be properly remained uh made, this requires creme de violette.
Sadly, my state of Ohio doesn't allow it distributed in the state at the moment. And while I'm sure I could order a bottle online and pay shipping, we're only about a month away from violet season here in Ohio, so why not make it? I've looked for a recipe to make creme de violette and have had no luck. Any pointers would be great, and I also see foresee the issue of the violet infusion eventually browning. So any heads up on how to avoid that would be great.
Well, I looked in uh a bunch of recipes online. I looked at Rothman, which is one of the people that actually distribute creme de violette here in the States, and they claim to actually use violet flowers. But when I looked on uh, and I'm sure you can basically, so then I would just take a boatload of violet flowers, macerate them in the highest proof liquor you can get in the state of Ohio. Uh don't use crappy, like uh most of the one fifty ones that they sell on the market are are pretty pretty crappy. If you can find one that's decent, smell it, um, taste it.
I mean, uh sorry, not 151, uh Everclear, 95 95 proof. Most of these smell pretty bad. If you can find one that's decent, I recommend uh buying that. We buy um from a lab supplier, we buy our straight booze, and it's pretty pretty high proof. Uh but the first thing you're gonna need is very high-proof uh liquor.
Uh I mean 151 really isn't ideal, that's only like 75, 75 and a half uh you know, percent, which isn't really very good. Um you're gonna want at least like 8590. Um but try to find one that's good flavor, and then just basically pack that full of violet flowers, let it macerate probably for several weeks to a month or so, and then uh decant it off, uh mix it with sugar to taste, and then water it down to whatever percentage you want. The recipe that I found in my uh in in my old source, which is a treasis on the manufacture and distillation of alcoholic liquors by Pierre Duplay, uh uh copyright 1871, which I have a hard copy of, but is available on uh Google Books for free to look at, actually doesn't use violet in their creme de violette. They use oris root.
Uh and so orus root is something that apparently uh you know it's it's a flavoring in a lot of liqueurs, but apparently has somewhat of a violet nose, violet, you know, aroma and flavor to it, and was used in the old days uh to make certain creme de viol uh violet if they didn't have the violet flowers lying around. And so these guys basically say take 12 liters of orus root infusion, which I guess you would make the same way that you would make the violet infusion by steeping in the highest proof liquor you can get for a long time. Um then 24 liters of 85% straight uh neutral grain spirits, uh 56 kilograms of sugar, and 26 liters of water, and they actually recommend uh coloring it with cochineal, which is red, and blue food coloring, which they don't specify what to use. Uh, it's probably specified elsewhere in the book. Um, but it's it's interesting that they would uh specify coloring like that because I also found in a 1905 um Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station reference where they they tested five or six different crumbs de violettes and found that they were all adulterated basically with dyes, with um dyes, some of which were not so savory.
So uh I would recommend one. First thing you want to get a hold of is some high-proof spirits. Make sure they're food grade, make sure they smell good, they don't have a real a lot of off-tast because otherwise you're gonna be starting with a bad base. Then if you have the iris flowers, and sorry, iris, don't use irisetal poison. If you have the uh violet flowers, just pack a whole bunch of them into the highest proof liquor you can get and let it sit, taste it every once in a while, see how uh whether it gets the color you want, then add just like I say, add sugar to taste and water it down.
There's a couple uh books available on homemade liqueurs uh that I have at home. I couldn't find them in time to provide a reference, but I'll see if I can find something else and get back to you next week. Um and then if if not, try to order some oris root and see whether you can get uh an interesting flavor that way. So uh Ryan, I hope that helps and let us know how it works out. Um Mick writes in with an interesting Kahlua pig question.
My friend Mel is having a housewarming for her new house. She doesn't have a proper garden yet, which is a shame. If I had a house, I would really want a proper garden. That would be one of the first things. Pizza oven, outside pizza oven, a tandoor buried in the ground, which is similar to the question I'm about to answer, and then a garden.
Those will be my first my first orders of business. Um and maybe someday I will have one, who knows? Um and she's letting me dig a pit in her backyard to cook a whole pig, like an Hawaiian uh emu, I think it's pronounced emu. It's a Hawaiian basically hole in the ground oven that's used to cook Kaluapig, Kalua pig being the buried pig that you would have. Delicious, I should say, buried pig that you have at Aluau.
Not that I've been to Hawaii. Anyone wants to fly us to Hawaii to taste tropical fruits? We are your people. Am I right, Nastasha? Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm. Right? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Never been to Hawaii.
My wife was born in Hawaii, has a Hawaiian middle name. Anyway, uh, anyone in Hawaii wants us, we'll be there. Uh, I've heard that you must use igneous rocks because other types might explode at high temperature. That sounds awesome, and it is, Nick. I've tried it.
Uh that sounds awesome, but probably not a good idea at a crowded party. Also true. I'm planning on using a probe to monitor the internal temperature of the pig while cooking, so food safety shouldn't be an issue. Okay, first of all, um here are my tips. One, it is true that many different types of rocks explode.
Uh I used to do a bunch of experiments on basically heating rocks to throw them into liquids to heat them up. So uh back in my red hot poker experimentation days, uh, which are basically over now because we have it pretty much settled how to do a red-hot poker, right? Yeah. Yeah, pretty much settled. Uh, but you know, uh, other than just using a red-hot poker, one of the things we were using was hot stones.
And so we ended up settling on using these Korean basically stones that are that are used as part of the Korean stoneware cookery, the giant gobdles that you make that you know that you make uh bibembop out of, the toll soat, I should say, that you make gobdul bibembop out of. Um and uh these stone bowls are, by the way, are some of the greatest things in the world. Everyone should go to the local Korean supermarket and purchase at least six of these hot stone bowls. Anyway, those things don't explode. Uh, but I've had very bad luck with regular stones, even ones that I thought were igneous.
Igneous rocks are basically volcanic rocks, the theory being they're heated so high uh when they were made that there's not, first of all, they're not very porous typically, unless it's pumice or something that's been aerated as it sprayed into the air. But they're they're hopefully not porous and don't have any water in them, so they won't explode when they're heated. Now, I have uh the other types of rocks are metamorphic and sedimentary. So sedimentary rocks are laid layered rocks like sandstone and metamorphic are basically then compressed and turn into other kinds of turn into a denser, denser rock. I've had all of these things explode.
Even an igneous rock, when heated very suddenly, if it has inclusions or anything inside of it, can expand in weird ways and explode. I've had rocks explode in the kitchen and fly completely all around over the kitchen. I did it once at the pastry uh in one of the pastry kitchens at the French culinary and completely freaked out a group of pastry chefs. Uh and you know, plus I had to clean up the rock particles everywhere. But the good news is that you're gonna be heating up those rocks well in advance because it's gonna take hours and hours for this pig to cook.
So you're gonna be heating these rocks up well, well in advance of the party people being there. So I wouldn't worry about blowing up too much, especially if it heats fairly uh evenly and it's being heated from above, which is probably how it's gonna happen from the side. I wouldn't worry overly much, like it might blow up a little bit, but you know, you know, just don't stand with your eyeballs over a hot rock because it's warming up. And once it's very hot, once it's been hot for an hour or so, I think mainly your risk of explosions are somewhat over at that point. So you're gonna want to align it really, you know, get it nice and hot, and then they cover it with lots of green vegetation, the idea being to cause steam, similar to the way you would use steam in a in a uh sorry, seaweed and a clam bake in uh in New England.
And but bear in mind, this is all theoretical knowledge, not having done it myself, hands-on. Uh, and then the the last thing obviously is you're gonna want to find some nice leaves to wrap the uh the wrap the pig in. Now, this is something I have done, not in an oven at uh outside, but you know, you wrap, I've wrapped many pork shoulders in uh in leaves to do my own version of uh Kalua Pig at home, and it is delicious. Uh you want to use tea leaves if you can get them, but if you're not in Hawaii, I don't think you are, so you're probably gonna want to use banana leaves, which you can get at any local Asian uh any local Asian market. So I hope this uh helps Nick and I hope you have an excellent pig experience.
But it should take several hours to cook, and like you said, you're gonna have a temperature probe, so you're not too worried about food safety. I wouldn't worry about that either. It's gonna heat up and it's gonna cook to a very high temperature. You just need to keep enough liquid in there so that it doesn't uh dry out on you. Does that sound like a good advice there?
Good job. Alright, so let's go to our first commercial break and want you to call in all your questions too, 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. Cooking issues, only come out at nights leader hug retire. Nothing's new seeing the hair before.
Watching wedding. We should sit with you. The following is a public service announcement from Heritage Radio Network. Tune in to Hot Grease every Monday at 3 30 p.m. Hot Grease strives to bring sustainability, localized sourcing, and other forward-thinking schools of culinary thought to the minds and kitchens of everyday folk.
Each week, Nicole Taylor's conversations cover the entire spectrum of food enthusiasts, from internationally renowned culinary masters to moms on a budget looking to impress their tiniest critics. Again, that's every Monday at 3 30 p.m. Hot Grease on the Heritage Radio Network. Why don't we have a name like that? Hot Grease.
Sounds awesome, right? Hot Grease. I like that a lot. Hot Grease. Alright, back to cooking issues.
Call in all of your questions to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. Dave Arnold back at you with cooking issues. And I see Nastasha has hauled out the Holland Oats as she threatened. Right?
Yeah. Did you ever get to go see them in concert? No, I babysat your kids instead. Oh that sounds probably like a better bet. I mean, I think I want to remember Holland Oates as they once were.
I think in most uh no offense to either Hall or Oates, because they listen not Yeah, avid listeners. But in general, uh, you know, I find that I prefer to remember people not on their comeback tour. What do you think, Nastasha? I would have liked to see. Well, you're gonna go see Elton John, right?
Yeah. Yeah, alright. Like Elton John, whatever. It's not as no no judgment, no judgment. Alright.
Uh Colin Gore writes in with a series of statements and questions, so I'll just go down and we'll take a look at them. Um You mentioned he's talking to me. Uh you mentioned that you occasionally get an oil slick after diluting booze that looshes, like like the aquavite that we make with caraway and fennel. And when we say loose, you know, when you're pouring uh when you when you dilute something that has a lot of uh that's alcoholic that has a lot of dissolved oils in it, you you basically decrease the solubility of those oils as they dilute till they pop out of solution and form a haze, like uzo does. It's called the uzo effect or or you know things that loosh out.
Is there a good way to stabilize that oil in booze? The oil has a lot of flavor, obviously, so I want to incorporate the slick back into the hooch. I suppose I could hold off on diluting the drink strength until right before serving, but I prefer to get the whole bottle balanced in one go. Well, it's fairly rare that I actually have uh something where the oil will separate out on top. Most of the time, what happens is you'll get an enrichment, it won't actually fully separate, but you'll get an enrichment in the oils in the top part of the bottle, but it'll stay somewhat in you know, in suspension, and then you can just shake the whole bottle and get it to come back together again.
If you actually have a bottle that it fully separates out and you get the stuff on top and it won't shake back into a homogenous uh suspension, it's not really a solution anymore, but a suspension, then I recommend uh I mean you could go with an emulsifier, like a gum arabic or something like this, but the problem with that is uh is that you know it's gonna change the body of the drink somewhat. But gum arabic will help to emulsify those oils somewhat and keep them in. And luckily, gum arabic doesn't add that much viscosity to your booze. Uh you could then the next step up from that would be to use something that's a mixture of gum arabic with another stabilizer like xanthan gum. I'd recommend T I C gum saladizer 210S, which sounds gross, but it's basically just Xanthan and um and gum arabic, but it's gonna definitely affect the um texture of the drink, which is why I'd stay away from it unless you absolutely needed it.
That's the product that we use to do our butter syrups and our pecan syrups, and you know, all of our sort of emulsified um all of our emulsified oil syrups that we put into drinks, which are which are delicious. Um anyway, that's my thoughts on that. Secondly, he asks, how far do you typically reduce your rotovaped port syrup? I'm running a simple vac still rig with a stir bar, magnetic stir bar, I'm assuming. And it's tough to estimate the vinyl uh final viscosity of the scissor up, and I appreciate the use of sip it sit simple cesser up.
Anyway, uh for all you 666 fans out there. Uh we all have eaten so much shrimp that we get iodine poisoning. Uh while it's warm and being agitated. Lastly, uh last time I simply vaced it till it would give uh much it wouldn't give it much more H2O without a fight, and ended up with something the consistency of more meat. It was great, but I have a hunch you use something less viscous in the three cheese course.
He's talking about a course where we take three different dessert wines, we break them into a syrup and a brandy in the rotovap, throw away the water water in the middle, and serve these delicious syrups with the cheeses. Yeah, I take them down to the consistency approximately of maple syrup, and it is very hard to uh deal, especially if you're not in a rotovap. When you're dealing with a roto vap, you can stop the spinning and you can watch how it falls down and you get used to judging when it uh when the reduction is done uh based on hot, you can kind of get a feeling for what it's gonna be like when it cools off. It's just by experience though. Um you know, when I do strawberry, I take it down to uh, you know, I I can take it I can get the bricks fairly high, like in the in the in the 50s or 60s even I can get the bricks up to.
Um but the problem when you take port especially down too low, it starts tasting a little uh weird and tannic sometimes when it gets too too reduced. So I like to take it just to the edge. I also often will break the system open and just taste it a little bit and then and then put it, put it back together again and continue running it. So I I cheat just like everyone else, but uh it's experience like anything else, and obviously distillation and reduction under vacuum is a fine art that I wish more and more people would would learn. And speaking of TIC gums, he uh Colin writes, thanks for helping to hook you uh him up with TIC Gums.
Someone at TIC heard him ask for information on the show and uh got in touch with him, and now that the head of uh of TIC Gums, Dr. Marnito, is going to the University of Maryland to talk about the structural properties uh of gum polymers. Um and and Colin and uh Dr. Nito are holding an event uh this Friday uh at 1 p.m. That's uh March 11th, hosted by the University of Maryland's material science department.
And any listeners, apparently, you've you have garnered an invitation, listeners in the Maryland area, to go to room 2108 in the chemical nuclear engineering building. Uh if you're anywhere uh near uh UMD's uh campus there in the DC, Maryland area, uh stop by. It should be a very interesting um should be a very interesting lecture. Uh another, as for Colin's last thing, he he called in a while ago or wrote in, I forget. Uh he was trying to get some of the astringency out of uh walnut liqueur because the astringency comes obviously from the from the skins in the walnut uh and he's trying to remove the astringency by freezing the finished liquor.
The idea being that a lot of times if you take like persimmons or quince, it has a lot of tannin in it, tannic principles that are astringent. If you freeze them, those tannins complex basically and become non astringent anymore, and so it kills the tannin. He was hoping to use liquid nitrogen to do that to a bottle of finished booze. Bad news, it doesn't work. He has to go back to the drawing board and try to get, and I'm gonna have to quote this one.
If listeners or or friends of ours will know that Harold McGee has the world's greatest walnuts. We walked into his place one day, and you know, Nastasha and I, because we'll snack on anyone's crap if it's just laying out, right? We start taking these his walnuts off the table, and we're like, Jesus God, this is the best walnut in the world. Of course, McGee has the best damn walnuts in the world. And I we mentioned this on a radio show before, and so uh I will leave Collins with this.
He says, uh I gotta find I gotta find his his exact quotes. He says, he's gonna try again if he can get a hold of McGee's sweet, sweet nuts. It's the exact exact quote. Get a hold of McGee's sweet, sweet nuts. And wouldn't we all like to, right?
No. Uh love it. Anyway, okay. Uh thanks for writing in. And Colin, uh, tell us any of your any of your adventures and tell us how the uh TIC Gums lecture goes.
Uh Seth writes in with an egg tempering question. Hi, I've got a question for the cooking issue show. My question is about tempering eggs when making custard and gelato and etc. Is it really necessary? Basically, I've learned for years to make custard uh by heating the milk and then slowly incorporated the heated milk into egg yolks bit by bit, slowly raising the temperature so they cook but don't coagulate.
I question this because a friend of mine recently made an alfredo sauce, and he simply wicked whisked the egg yolts into the cream beforehand while it was still cold, and then slowly raised the temperature of the complete mixture. He said that this way, uh this is the way his mother always made it, and it never coagulates and it always comes out smooth and delicious. Next time I made gelato at home, I tried it that way, and everything turned out fine. I heated over a double boiler to be extra safe. So did I get lucky both times, or is there any reason to do this whole temperature uh tempering thing in the first place?
I'm becoming convinced that it's an unnecessary, time-consuming step. Alright. Seth, here's the dealy. I don't think there's any technical reason to heat the milk beforehand and pour it into the egg yolks except this. You want to heat, like a lot of times we're dealing with large batches, right?
And so you have a lot of milk that you're gonna be putting into your egg yolks. So the idea is to get the milk hot first, right? So you can heat the milk up fairly quickly. You don't have to sit there, you know, tending it and worrying the whole time, right? Then you can temper it into your egg yolks and then slowly bring it up the last couple of degrees to get it cooked.
So I think in actuality, when you're doing a large batch, the tempering is really a time-saving procedure and not a time-wasting procedure. If you're doing a smaller batch and you're gonna have to take it up s and you're gonna take it up slowly and you can watch the whole thing and keep it stirring as you go, I don't think there's any need to heat the milk first and then temper it into the egg yolks. I think it's it's just a matter of convenience. If you're starting with a completely cold mixture, stirring it together, making sure it's completely mixed, and then slowly heating it, you're not gonna have any any problems. I mean, but I think uh and so I think for smaller batches, things like an Alfredo that you can basically hold or like a like if you're making like something very small, uh then it's probably easier to do it like you say, start from cold and heat up.
But I think when you get to bigger and bigger batches, you're gonna find it's easier to go the other way. To heat the big batch of milk quickly up to temperature and then to temper it into your egg yolks. I hope that makes hope that makes uh sense. I think I think that's the case. Someone's gonna someone's gonna write in who's more of an expert on this, and say, No, I get that all the time, by the way.
You you might not know it because those guys tend not to call the uh call the show. They end up like writing me later and saying that kind of thing over the email. I guess that's my just interpretation of what they say then, since I'm just reading it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Anyway. Joshua calls in with a right saying with a yogurt question. I have made yogurt five times with varying results. My procedure is scalding the milk and letting it cool to around body temperature. I then stir in a couple tablespoonsfuls uh of Greek yogurt and place the whole pot in the oven with only the interior light uh pilot light.
Light or pilot light, you think? Pilot light. Pilot light? Pilot light. Providing heat.
After leaving the pot, sit overnight. I place it in the fridge and strain it uh and uh strain it until it's a little uh less thick than uh leven, which is Greek strained yogurt. Uh and the first two times were quite successful with whole milk, but uh since I haven't been able to uh recreate the results with reduced fat. Probably because reduced fat milk doesn't taste as good as whole milk. Um my question is how does the fat percentage of the milk affect the final yield and thickness of the yogurt?
And also, do I really need to scald the milk if it's pasteurized? Can I just combine the milk and yogurt and let it sit on the countertop for a day or so? I'm not big on checking temperatures. What's the easiest way to make authentic uh thick yogurt uh labness style? Okay, Joshua, here are my feelings on this.
Um I don't frankly know how the texture is gonna be affected, I mean how the thickness of it's gonna be affected by the fat content, but I guarantee you that the whole milk is gonna taste a whole hell of a lot better than the reduced fat stuff. Especially because reduced fat milk is such crud anyway. I mean, I really like if uh it makes me so angry like when I see people they use like the 2% and the 1%. I mean, what are you really saving? You know, like just don't eat as much of this stuff and just use milk that tastes better for for goodness sakes.
Go back to using the whole milk. What do you think, Nastasha? I completely agree. I know it. You know, like you know, you know, seriously.
Instead of having 18 quarts of like 1% or skim, which is vile, disgusting puke, instead of having that in your coffee, just add a little bit less of something delicious and satisfying, like whole milk. And good whole milk at that, if you can get it. Stuff that tastes delicious. Anyway. Uh okay, so that's my feeling on the whole milk.
Now, on the pasteurization. Pasteurized milk has a lot of the uh bacteria wiped out, but uh uh there's always bacteria left in it, which is why, you know, they it just arrives when you're when you when you you know open it and close it, bacteria gets in it. Which is I think why the recipes always recommend heating it uh up to like 180 and then letting it cool down. Uh it also helps because now you're warming it and as it cools down, uh, you know, it's it's ripe for accepting uh the cultures that you're gonna put in the yogurt. Um there's also, and I don't know whether this is affecting it, but it goes back to a question we had before, when you pasteurize milk, you're changing the characteristics of the milk, right?
So you're you're basically pre-agglomerating some of the whey proteins and you're also stopping some of the uh curdling ability that you get on rennet casein from um when you're making cheese. So it might also be, but I I have I didn't have time to research, I apologize, Joshua, but it might also be that the heating of the milk um helps the texture of the yogurt uh aside from any properties of killing bacteria. But I don't know. Uh uh next time I speak to McGee or someone maybe also write in and tell me this. I looked in uh uh you know in McGee's books, and he indeed, even in pasteurized milk, recommends heating it up to 180.
So there might be something there uh from a technical standpoint affecting the milk with the heating. Uh as for then letting it cooling, you want to let it cool down to about 115, give or take, stir in the um, stir in the uh the culture, the live culture, the yogurt that you already have. And then the temperature isn't really crucial, right? Except for the taste is going to change depending on the temperature at which the yogurt's inoculated. And you know, it could be done even in a couple of hours, depending on how much you stir in and how active the cultures are that go into it.
But I think you are gonna get varying results depending on the temperature that you uh that you use. Now, if you find some stable place in uh in your kitchen, like the oven with the with uh just a pilot on, although my oven's too hot uh for that, or a particular place in the kitchen, and you do it once there, right? Then it should be the same every time you do it in that location, as long as that location stays the same. So you as long as you keep all of your variables the same from time to time, even if you don't have a lot of control, right, uh, or you don't measure a lot of temperatures, you should be able to get very fairly consistent results. But it's never gonna be as thick as you want it, in real Greek style, unless after it's made, you put the yogurt over uh, you know, over a cheesecloth or over a piece of muslin, then let it strain in a colander uh overnight in the fridge to let it the extra way drain out.
That's the real key to making a really nice thick uh Greek yogurt. But I hope uh Joshua, I hope that helps. Uh and with that, we will go to our second commercial break. Call in all your questions to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128 cooking issues.
What I want, you got the hard to handle. The candle feels what I got full stop, a thought scream to scatter. And you pull them all together, and I have a candle display. Oh yeah, well by you. Well, well, well you make a mother to who On a night but bad we become a screamer when the men's wind scream laugh at it.
Oh yes. This is uh Cooking Issues coming to me with the Hollow Notes. Nastasha, I have to say that uh much as I was making fun of the Hollow Notes earlier, I definitely appreciate that one. I really do. I appreciate that.
But really making my dreams coming true. Making my dreams coming true every day here on Cooking Issues. Uh you still have about 15 minutes to call your questions in to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. You know what, you guys?
Another thing, uh, I'm gonna put a uh call out for people to write in with uh guests that they would like to hear appear on the cooking issues. What do you think about that, Nastasha? Within reason, right? Well, I mean, we're not gonna get Barack Obama on if that's what you mean. You know.
But uh, you know, like look, we have a group of friends that if we get a request, I could pester them. Like I could pester McGee, I could pester uh You're supposed to have Tony. Yeah, Tony Canigliaro, and you know, any any one of like our known, our known friends and and associates in the cooking world, Wiley, you know, anyone. Request them and we'll see whether we can uh whether we can pester them with it with a live request to or you know, the request to come in to get to get them on. Uh but you know don't ask me for Barack Obama, you know, we can't we can't get that, right?
Okay. Um Joseph writes in and he says, Dave, I've been researching various methods of crystallizing flower petals so that I can use them to make a syrup, which will then be made into a caramel. Why would you crystallize the flower petals to make a syrup with them? Hmm. Anyway.
The question I have is that some formulas say use egg whites, and others say use a combination of egg whites and gum arabic. And uh Joseph writes in with a fun note that gum arabic was used in the mummification process. And I I too appreciate mummies. Nastasha's rolling her eyes because she's sick of hearing me talk about mummies. But I love a mummy and any kind of a mummy story.
And I was uh I was wondering why, uh I was wondering why they would use these two things and is there a difference. In addition, what added benefit does the gum arabic provide besides increasing the viscosity of the egg white solution, and why would it be called crystallization when there's technically no crystals being formed? Well, I think the procedure you're talking about is either dipping uh a flower petal in egg white or gum arabic and then um basically brushing it with uh super fine uh sugar to uh and then letting it dry out. So assuming we're talking about the same thing, there's they're basically two different um two different things. Gum arabic is obviously a hydrocolloid, it's a it's a tree exudate, and it's one of the very few hydrocolloids that instead of being a uh basically a linear chain with very short branches, is a highly branched molecule.
So they look like big ping pong balls, like a millipectin almost. They're like big. But what that means is is that it's extremely soluble. You can have very high percentage of gum arabic uh syrups, right? So if you look at something like gum syrup, old school gum syrup is basically a simple syrup with a lot of gum arabic added.
So the the re the one of the great things it's used for is this adhesive um or uh or coating because you can have something that's still fairly liquid, right, but has a high percentage of solids in it, and then when it dries out, it dries uh to you know a clear, crystalline, uh not clear crystal, but a clear, like you know, hard or you know, glue thing, dries back to gum arabic fairly quickly. So, uh if you use a lot of gum arabic, uh, you know, it can it can do that. And a lot of the recipes I looked at use only gum arabic to do it. I don't know why you would use egg whites and gum arabic together. I have to do more research, frankly, I didn't get a chance to to look at it very closely.
But uh I would guess that if you are using a lot of gum arabic and had it sitting around, that you would just have that syrup and you could um and you could just go and it wouldn't go bad kind of because you'd have a very high solids in it, and you probably wouldn't get a lot of bacterial growth in it because it would have you know such a high solids uh content, and it'd probably be easier to keep around than eggs. It's also probably more sanitary than eggs. In the house, I'd probably just use egg whites because it's so fast, and in general, once it's dried out, I'm not so worried about contamination. Um and I don't know why they call it that if there's no actual crystals uh crystals being formed, but the when I've done it, you are brushing it with crystal, so the flour itself ends up being crystallized, even if you don't actually form your own crystals. Umstasha, you said we had another question come in.
Okay. Uh this comes in from red. And said you answered my question about the red staining of chicken thighs due to pulling a hard vacuum on them. Lowering the vacuum has been a complete success. Thank you.
But who heck is from red. Interesting. Uh I have uh I've been now switched to bone-in chicken breasts uh from boneless, and I don't know why, but I have. The thing I noticed after cooking for three hours at 60 C, depending on the thickness, is after they sit in the fridge, they tend to weep blood. Do I need to cook longer?
Is this part of the staining from the bones? Um not sure. 60 C is uh low is low for that uh for chicken breasts. I mean, they're cooked, but most uh people are gonna want them up around 64, 63, 64. Um it's still gonna retain it, might not be pink at 60, but it's still gonna retain a lot of those juices, and they probably will weep, especially out of the bones.
I mean, even at three hours, I think you're gonna be better uh for 64 degrees for like an hour uh uh rather than sixty for three, using the extra hours to the two hours to try and get the color into it at that low temperature. I would switch up to to sixty-four for uh sixty-three or sixty-four for an hour, but you're gonna have a really tough time with the with the bone um and and the stuff coming out in a vacuum, even in a lower vacuum. I don't know. Please speak to whoever it is and tell them that you would really like to take the bone out of it because I really have a there's just a lot of problems with uh putting chicken in in the bone uh in the vacuum. You could try to switch to a Ziploc situation where there's no vacuum at all and that might help it, but I'm not sure.
But please give some give some of those things a try and then um you know write back or call back and tell us how it worked. We'll try to do some more troubleshooting right? Yes. Because chicken's a problem. Right?
Chicken's a problem in the bag. First of all the the more vacuum you suck on a chicken aside from the fact that it it it sucks the um but bones are hollow. Chicken bones are hollow and they're filled with with red red crap. And when you vacuum it the red crap comes out and then uh you know you can't really get rid of it unless you cook it to a really really high temperature like in the 80s, 80s somewhere, 70s or 70s or 80s. So I tend not to like the and also I think the vacuum affects the texture of the chicken.
So as is as much as you can I I think you should suck a very mild vacuum if you suck a vacuum at all on a piece of chicken. Alright now uh one last thing Colin ribbed us on by the way that I forgot to mention is uh the contractual post. I'll have you know that I I'm a day person, right? So I said that a week ago and in fact the post is already up in draft form. I'm adding the pictures it'll be up by end of day today.
It is a 4,000 word mega mega post mega post on um on nickalization. So keep a lookout for that. Wait we got a call and I'll take that real quick. Hello? Caller on the air hi Dave.
Howdy. Um in a Linea and a couple other cookbooks I've seen, they talk about uh blanching garlic and milk a couple times. Does that take away the bite? Huh. Well, you know, it's funny you should say that because when I cook milk in the pressure cooker, sorry, milk, duh.
When I cook garlic in the pressure cooker, I also cook it in milk, and I don't know why. How about that? Um I don't know. But I have the book on garlic and alliums. So um I'll look I'll look it up.
I I uh it's like uh it's also I blanch horseradish in milk, and I don't know why, uh, as opposed to water, right? I mean, don't we we all kind of do that. We're trained to do that, but I don't it's kind of natural for me to do it, but uh I really don't know why, if there's any sort of chemical chemical reason. I mean, the stuff that gives garlic its bite are groups of uh sulfur compounds and th you know, thiols and things like that. Um and I wonder whether there's something in milk that tames those.
This this sounds like uh this sounds like an area for for further further research. Um I mean when I you can cook garlic, obviously in a pressure cooker, and when you do it, you blast the you blast the pungency away even without milk. Um but there's a host of things that we blanch in milk and no one really says why. I'm trying to think. I'm thinking in my head, the silence is me thinking in my head.
Can you think of any reason? Uh off the top of my head, no, I cannot. Alright, well, this is uh like the like the yeast question. I mean, even though this is something we do, this is obviously needs some further uh investigation. So what I think I'll do is uh next time I pester McGee, I'll try put it basically what I do is I call McGee, I don't know, what once every two weeks or so, and then I sit there and I just pepper him with absurd questions for like 45 minutes, and then he maybe says hello.
And then the conversation's over. Nastasha thinks I'm a low quality human being for the way I pepper him with questions. But I'm gonna add this to my list, and plus I'll do some research and I'll go read the. I think the name of the author of the garlic book is Block, I think is the guy's name. And uh he it's actually a really interesting book, but I I read it kind of very quickly.
It's got a it's got a forew by a Nobel laureate. Pretty cool book on garlic. But um I'll definitely look that up and I'll try and think about it. And and I'll I'm gonna try and think about the problem of milk blanching in general. Because I think it is interesting, because it's quite expensive, really, when you think about it, to blanch everything in milk.
Right, Steve? Yeah, yeah. So it is expensive. So we'll look into it and we'll and we'll we'll definitely talk about that next week. Alrighty?
Great. Hey, you gonna have him on your show again? Uh who, McGee? Yeah. All right, is this a request?
Yes. Uh we'll we'll uh we'll call him in and have him on maybe we'll try to get him for next week. Well, actually, actually, you know what? I'm calling I'm calling in next week because I'm gonna be in Vancouver at Tales of the Cocktail. Maybe the week after that I'll try to get I'll try to get McGee.
Great. Alrighty, cool. Thanks a lot for the question. Thank you. Alright, so back to the Nickstabilization Mega Post.
So the um it one section of it that I'll talk about now on on the air, is uh I pretty badly burnt my tongue last stupidly. Uh I pretty badly burnt my tongue last week on what day of the week was that? Friday. Thursday? Thursday.
Thursday. It was Thursday. Wednesday. Wednesday, whatever, last week. I burnt my tongue with Lie.
So here's how it happened. We use lie in cooking uh for a lot of things, for pretzels. We use it in the Harold McGee class for our eggs. I'm I have a use for it in the Nyx to Mile post that you're gonna read uh hopefully if you're a reader of the blog, which I hope you are. Um and somehow a bunch of lye, sodium hydroxide, got put into a quart container with no label on it.
And uh we're moving a lot of stuff around, and someone puts this container in front of my hand, and I'm not uh in front of my face, and it's like, what is it? I'm not used to thinking about something in my kitchen being so dangerous, so I stupidly put my finger in it, because I have literally dozens of different quart containers with powders in them sitting around. And most of them are hydrocolloids, uh simple acids like tartaric, citric, and malik, um, you know, uh what I desire to say hydrocolloids, sugar, salt, things like that. And so you can just go boom and taste it and it's done. So I go, boop, taste it, lie.
Uh it's the most violent reaction I've ever had on my tongue. It's the equivalent of eating a handful of those Seshouan buttons. Um, and I instantly knew something was horribly, horribly wrong. And so I spat out, ran into the kitchen, and started washing my mouth out. You know, thankfully I didn't swallow it, or I'd be in really, really, really, really big trouble.
Start washing my mouth out uh for you know several minutes, look in the mirror, my tongue is bleeding, the roof of my mouth is bleeding, it's eaten away all of the taste buds on one half of my tongue. And uh so I'm like, well, I better go to the ER. So I go to the ER and had to you know stay there for hours while they made sure that I didn't ingest any and I have to take steroids and all this other stuff, but uh the tongue heals miraculously, and uh my taste is is mostly back, uh although there's still a swath where I have my taste buds burned away, but it's it's coming back. Um I'm here to tell you lye is dangerous. I had it in my house, right?
And so I I threw it all away because God forbid my kids should get a hold of it. So it's reasonable to cook with lye. It's like you know, a good ingredient for for what it's for, but just be extremely careful. If you have anything like that, uh and you have kids around, it doesn't take much for them to really, really, really, really damage themselves. I, you know, I've known for years how dangerous it is, and I've always been paranoid about it getting on my hands, but I never knew how fast the damage happens uh, you know, than when it happened to me last week.
So just be extremely careful when you have it around. Make sure that everyone who cooks with it in your kitchen is extremely careful about it, and make sure that there's no possible way on God's earth that any child could ever, ever get their hands on it, or you're gonna be in big, big trouble, right? So, to round out cooking issues for this week, I'm gonna say uh a little story and uh and a hope and a help. I need a help from our listeners for for more research. So I've been researching a lot about corn for various reasons, mostly because I'm a dork, and uh I came across uh something that basically said there was a lot of corn research and genetic corn research that was brought about by the atomic nuclear testing at the bikini A toll in the 40s after World War II, because what they did was they took a uh whole bunch of corn and they exposed it to an atomic blast, several atomic blasts, and then they uh would plant it to see whether the seeds, presumably to see whether the seeds germinated or not.
But they noticed that there was a good bit of mutation in the uh in the in the corn that that that was new, right? And so then it be then the Atomic Energy Commission started sponsoring a lot of research on corn and corn cultivars and corn mutations. So if you look at a lot of the research on corn in the in the 40s and 50s, it's. It's sponsored by the Atomic Energy Commission. And they would actually create radiation sources with you know various forms of radioactive cobalt and whatnot to purposely irradiate seeds to try and get genetic mutation.
So it caused this explosion in um in genetic research and different kinds of corn uh mutations. Now, one of the main corn mutations that was discovered, discovered in 1949, I believe, was uh a gene called Shrunken2. And shrunken two is the precursor to all super sweet corn that we eat today. And before that, corn was relatively sweet or not, but not the super sweet that we have today. So there's a researcher who just happened to be chewing on a bunch of mutant corn while he was sorting through it, and noticed that this one shriveled uh dried piece of corn was super sweet.
Isolated that gene, re-grew it, and that is the genesis of all the super sweet corn today. So here's what I need to find out. And I've got a bunch of calls in. I want to find out the exact chain that leads from the atomic testing in bikini atoll to super sweet corn, because there's some sort of link there, right? You know, whether, and I'm hoping that all super sweet corn is a result of um of irradiation by uh cobalt as a result of the initial experiments done with the atomic testing.
Because I just love the idea of nuclear sweet corn, don't you? And this has been cooking issues. 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. You can also podcast all of our programs on iTunes by searching Heritage Radio Network in the iTunes Store.
You can find us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for up-to-date news and information. Thanks for listening. You got my hair ball twisted. The following is a public service announcement from Heritage Foods USA. In late March, Dan, Andrea Patrick and the Heritage team are traveling to the coldest reaches of the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont to help the Cantor family tap sugar maple trees.
Then the maple sap will flow down to the sugar house where it is boiled gently over a wood fire, just as it has been for generations. Just a few days later, this Great A amber syrup will be poured into the beautiful glass jugs and sent to you for pancakes, waffles, desserts, glazing hams, or just drinking by the spoonful. There's only a limited supply, so order today. Each one-liter bottle is $45, including delivery. Delivery will be at the end of March, and we will notify you of the exact shipping date.
Each shipment will include a CD explaining the whole process. You can also follow us on YouTube while we work and bottle. In the meantime, you can head over to the Heritage Radio Network archives and listen to Linda Palacio talk about maple syrup on her show A Taste of the Past, episode 12. For more information, visit www.heritagefoods USA.com. The following is a public service announcement from Heritage Radio Network.
Join Wine and Presarios Erin Fitzpatrick and Brian DeMarco as they dish out on the latest industry news with winemakers and tastemakers on Heritage Radio Network's revamped wine show, Unfiltered. Erin Fitzpatrick, one of the first hosts on HRN with her program at the root of it, amps up the volume and unfiltered content with co-host Brian DeMarco in this 2011 Redux. True to the original format, Aaron and Brian will keep you abreast of current happenings and break down the news and global events, distilling complex into anecdotal stories that inspire. From media and political events to hailstorms in Argentina, no topic is out of bounds. Tune in every week to hear them chat up the industry's biggest personalities and host on air tastings with visiting ventors and the country's hottest smoliers.
Whether you're an expert or an enthusiast, Unfiltered demystifies wine and lets you know what it really takes to get a bottle from the vineyard to your neighborhood wine shop. Unfiltered broadcasts live every Tuesday at 4 p.m. on Heritage Radio Network. The following is a public service announcement from the Museum of Food and Drink. Dave Arnold and Patrick Martins have gathered a team of New York's most innovative chefs and bartenders to create a nine-course fundraiser lunch at Del Posto, Sunday, March 27th.
Their intent to kick start the greatest food museum in the world. The menu for this unprecedented event is derived from educational themes of the museum. Chefs will draw inspiration from sources outside their normal sphere. How will a cutting edge chef handle the Paleolithic or a dish only using pre-Columbian ingredients? What will a modern Italian chef do with ancient Rome?
The chefs include David Chang of Omofuku, Wiley Dufrain of WD50, Mark Ladner of Del Posto, Nils Norrin of the French Culinary Institute, Cesare Casella of Salumaria Rossi, Carlo Moraci of Robert's, Brooks Headley of Del Posto, and Christina Tozzi of Momofuku Milk Bar. Bartenders include Audrey Sanders of Pegu Club, Thomas Waugh of Death and Company, Simon Ford of Perno Ricard, Damon Bolti of Prime Meats, and Evan Clem of BR Guest Restaurants. Proceeds from the event will directly support the Museum of Food and Drink. Tickets are very limited and two hundred and fifty dollars per person. To purchase tickets, please visit Mofad.eventbright.com.
That's M-O-F-A-D.eventbright.com. Once again, M-O-F-A-D.E-V-E-N-T-V-R-I-T-E dot com. Sponsored by Fernau Ricard, Heritage Foods USA, Pat LaFreda Meats, Barter House Wines, Del Posto Restaurant.
Timestamps may be off due to dynamic ad insertion.