Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. I'm Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues here with Nastasha the Hammer Lopez in our studio in Bushwood, Brooklyn, behind Roberta's Pizzeria. Coming to you live today, as we should be doing every Tuesday from 12 to 1245. Call in all of your questions to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128.
Today's show is brought to you by the Hearst Ranch. Hearst Ranch is the nation's large sorry. Hearst Ranch is the nation's largest single source supplier of free range, all natural, grass-fed and grass finished beef. Since 1865, the Hearst family has raised cattle on their 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 one word dot com. We've had their beef, right, Nastasha? We enjoy it. Later on, I'm gonna give a shout out to some of our other uh sponsors on previous shows because they were also sponsors of the amazing event for the Museum of Food and Drink that we just finished on Sunday.
Nastash and I are still recovering. Uh but we'll uh we'll get to that probably a little later in the show. We'll take some questions first. It came in on the emails. Um okay.
Uh Chris Beer writes in and says, I was hoping you could help with a question. When I'm making breads, pizza doughs, etc. I sometimes like to replace about half the white flour with whole wheat flour, but the dough tends to be dry. Is there a standard ratio of extra fat or liquid that need uh needs to be used when using whole wheat flour? Thanks for the help, Chris Speer.
Okay, now this is a problem I think that we all run into uh a lot when we're using whole grain items. There's actually several problems that happen. One, uh the dough t the uh breads tend to be drier. That's true. Uh same with uh things like pancakes and muffins, things tend to be drier.
Uh the second problem is you tend to have reduced uh volume, so they're they're denser, so they're denser and drier, and also more crumbly. These are three things that we in general don't enjoy in our breads and pizza doughs, correct? Correct. Correct. So um so what's the problem here?
The problem is in whole wheat flour uh you get the uh bran and also the germ actually in whole wheat flour. Now the germ actually helps out a bit in some ways because it provides oil. The reason a lot of oil is added to whole wheat uh recipes, oils and fats, is because it tends to soften uh fats in general, tend to soften the texture of uh breads so it they feel softer, they don't feel as dry just by adding oil. So you can add that stuff at your discretion, but um the other really good thing you can do to make up for uh two things that you can do to make up for lack of volume and also for dryness is to take the whole wheat portion because he's gonna take about half and half whole wheat and white, well, you know, white flour, uh, is to take the whole wheat flour and hydrate it in all the liquid first and let it sit there for a long time. Um what happens is is that even though the a good chunk of the bran of the fiber in bran is uh not soluble, i.e.
the wall it's not going to dissolve in water. Um there is a bunch of stuff in there that is soluble in water, will hydrate, but need some time to do it. And um, the more other stuff you have, the more like the rest of the white flour is there when the liquid is present, the less water is going to be available to soak into the whole wheat portion. So what you should always do with whole wheat products, and and I do this with pancakes. For instance, I my pancakes at home are uh well over half non uh non-white flour.
I I throw in wheat germ, I throw in a good bit of like uh oatmeal, and I throw in uh a bunch of cornmeal and a bunch of other things like this, and uh whole whole whole green. And um I add all of the buttermilk uh at at the very outset, along with the eggs, because they're liquid ingredients, and then I let them soak for minutes at a time in a very high liquid environment. And this helps hydrate them and prevents it from being dry. Um that you know, it that should also improve your um it should improve the the the the not only the moistness but also the the volume somewhat. The other thing is is that you're gonna tend to want to add a little bit more liquid when you have a high fiber uh uh product because the the dough is gonna probably take on more liquid.
Uh one source I read, which is the wheat flour and the high fiber uh ingredient handbooks from the Egan Press series, and I highly recommend the Egan Press series uh to all of the people out there. It's a very very easy to read, very short, not so expensive books on technical issues such as hydrocolloids, starches, uh high fiber ingredients, wheat flour, emulsifiers, very good stuff. I mean, you can skip the colorance book because most of us aren't adding a lot of food coloring to things, at least I don't. Um but you can you can either buy these books for like 68 bucks or something a pop, or it used to be, and I'm sure there probably still is. If you go to the American Association of Cereal Chemists website, you can sniff around there, it takes a while because they bury it.
You can buy a subscription to get online versions of all of these books, which you can then download. And back when I did it, it was 99 bucks, it's probably more. You get a year subscription to their website, and I downloaded all of their books. So I own them all on PDF and they're they're chilling happily on my uh iPad where I can peruse them at my leisure. Anyway, those are the sources I went to.
So you should um pre-soak, um, add a little more water. Um, and if you're dealing with a bread and and you've gotten rid of the dryness problem by the pre-soaking, add a little more water, adding oil at your discretion, you can uh further increase the volume of it, which is gonna decrease your perception of it being crumbly and whatnot, uh, by adding uh a little bit of vital wheat gluten. If you add a little bit of that, it'll counteract some of the problems you have. There's two things that go on when you add uh high fiber um brand laden things to breads. One uh in terms of gluten.
One, uh there's less overall gluten because the flour that you've added, instead of adding flour that has whatever percentage gluten it is, you've added a bunch of bran, which has zero percent gluten. Second thing that happens is that the uh brand and the fibers actually inhibit the formation of the gluten network. So what gluten is there is actually weakened. Um so you end up with a with a very low uh air holding capacity compared to white flour. And one of the ways to counteract that is to um you're gonna probably have to develop it longer, that means mix it more.
And you're probably also gonna have to uh add a little bit of uh weak gluten if you want to jack that that loaf back up to where where it used to be. All right, how's that? What was that? How's that was that okay? That was good, dude.
All right, see? Back on track after last week's non live. Although I, you know, I s last week we did the uh we did a Nathan Mirvold, uh, you know, Nathan Mirvold's amazing uh you know, eight million page book that weighs 35,000 pounds and costs like 600 bucks, so you get it on Amazon for 450. Um anyway, so he's doing his like little he's doing his press junket thing, and so we had to do one on Tuesday where we basically did uh we did uh what was it, proseco and uh clarified grapefruit juice that was carbonated, and then we'd show the glasses of liquid nitrogen. So that's why we couldn't be here uh last week on Tuesday.
So unfortunately, even though we had like our heavy hitting guest Harold McGee on the line, it was on Monday, so not a lot of you I think got to call in, so I'm I'm sad about that. Um but anyway, so we're back on our normal time today, thank goodness. Okay. Got a question in uh saying, I saw this uh, hey Nastashian David starts. I saw this pig uh stuffed pig trotter on Ideas and Food blog.
It looks incredible. And uh I'll I will read the description of the night. Ideas and food, by the way, there they're our friends, Alex Talbot Nacke, uh uh over at Ideas and Food, and they're probably the best known blog on kind of modern techniques and high-tech uh cooking, right? Wouldn't you say so? Yeah.
I saw him last week at an event also, another one of these Nathan Miravold events at uh Jean Georges restaurant, and uh it was funny. Uh Ideas and Food also has a cookbook out now. Um I think it's doing doing fairly well. But it's a the funny part was this. I think it retails for like 20 bucks, and it's on Amazon for like 14 bucks, right?
So I see Alex, I'm like, hey, how's the cookbook doing? And he was upset that I didn't have a copy yet. So I think I think he's sending us one, which is nice. But he said, yeah, on if you go to buy the modernist cuisine cookbook, the 450 cookbook, they uh they give you his book for like five bucks. Like if you if you buy it together, it's like five bucks extra to get Alex Talbot's book.
So here's a word out to you guys. Anyone out there buying uh the modernist cuisine, please do Alex Talbot a favor and click in the extra five bucks to to get his book uh along with it. So uh Alex Nathan Miravald and I had a good long laugh about this, and uh Alex and I were joking that we're just gonna take a Sharpie to his entire stock of books and write seven as like the seventh volume of the Modernist Cuisine book and just ship it along with it. Way! It's only five bucks extra.
You know, that's really a drop in the bucket. Let's like pissing in the ocean to raise the tide, you know, an extra five bucks. Anyways, go out and buy Alex's book. So uh here's what they Alex Nacke's book, I should say. I'm apologize.
Here's what it says. Pictured here is the rear trotter from the pig. The force meat is flavored with Ross Alhun and an exotic morotic maraudic spice blend. We added meat from the shoulder, knuckles, and ankles, and just for that extra uh special something, a few foie gras pieces. We added a touch of activa, that's meat glue for all of you non-meat glue people out there, as insurance to bind everything together.
Unfortunately, our finished trotter was too large for our vacuum bag, so we divide it into two pieces. This allowed us to present the whole foot and fortuitously gave us another piece to enjoy as seconds. Okay, so uh stuffed pig strotter, right? The most famous uh oh, sorry. And and the question about this was he saw it and he wants to know how long to cook it and at what temperature if he's gonna do it low temperature.
Uh and he says somewhere in the area of 60 to 65 degrees Celsius for 48 to 72 hours. And do I have any advice? I think your numbers are good. Uh I don't think you're gonna 60 to 65 Celsius, in other words, I think are good. I I would do something between 60 and 63 Celsius myself, 62, 63.
Uh I don't think you're gonna need to cook it for 48 to 72 hours. And here's why. I think a lot depends on on what size pieces of meat you put into it. The classic uh pig shrotter that you know I grew up knowing about is uh a delicacy, a New Year's E uh New Year's Eve delicacy from Modena, Italy, called Zampone. And zimpone, what they do is they uh they take a pig's trotter and you bone it completely out, take out all the meat and and take off the toenails, and you do it by slowly turning the skin of the pig's foot inside out and removing the uh the the bones, meat, and you know, all of the connected tissue stuff as you go, so that you basically have the pig's foot as a glove almost, right?
Uh you then take that zampone, they the the pig's foot that's you know been to totally denuded, right? Do that raw, by the way, otherwise the pig skin's gonna be too fragile, it's gonna break apart on you. And um take that raw and then uh stuff it with a mix that's uh that the sausage is called cotequino. If you just have the the meat by itself without the pig's foot, it's called cotequino. And then you uh that's typically cooked, uh boiled, and then served with lentils on New Year's uh lentils for luck, because it represents money.
So uh the problem with doing this in the US is that the pig's uh trotters are slit typically when they when they get the pigs, the pig's trotters are slit, and so they don't hold uh the filling as well. But if you have meat glue, you can kind of fix all these problems. And if you look in a Chinese butcher shop, you can get pigs' feet that haven't been slit like the regular American style, and you can make a good zamponi. As long as the um meat is finely divided, you don't need to cook it that long. The length of cooking time really is to gelatinize the starch in the in the pig's foot.
And so you can do it by feeling how long it's taking the this the uh gelat and the collagen and the pig's foot to break down because the meat on the inside is finely chopped and it's not going to be that much of a problem. So I don't think it should take as long as uh 72 hours, but you know, you you can give it a try. I would just, as a test before you went through the whole thing, just throw a piece of pig skin into a bag and test how long it takes for it to get to the texture you want. Um, and that's gonna give you uh a good idea. But uh go research.
Zamponi is cooked for a long time, like they boil for like like two to four hours, so um at at simmering temperatures. So give it a shot. Um and I think it would be delicious in a bag because you wouldn't be leaching the flavor out to the broth. Anyway, I hear we have a caller. Caller, you are on the air.
Hi, Dave. Howdy. This is Michael Natkin. Um I have a question for you about caramelization in a pressure cooker. Alrighty.
So I got to see Nathan Mirvold speak a few times lately, and I haven't gotten to look at the book yet, but he gave sort of a partial recipe for making a caramelized root vegetable soup in the pressure cooker where you don't add any water at all. Right. So you chop up some carrots, you throw them in the pressure cooker or cook at high pressure for thirty minutes and they come out uh very uh smooth, easy to puree, and caramelized. And it it works great, it's delicious. But I don't understand why it's working.
Um he refers to it as caramelized, right? Not as myard. That's right. He refers to it as caramelized, and I wouldn't think there's enough protein in carrots to do myard reactions, but maybe I'm wrong about that. That's interesting.
Uh I saw him speak a couple of times. I had the dish. Um and uh were you at the Jean George? Which event were you at? No, I was at the book launch in Seattle and also he came to speak of my work a couple of times.
Right. Um that's an interesting question, because uh uh like you, I wouldn't consider I've done some experiments with uh caramelization in pressure cookers, but most of them were done in very high concentration sugar syrups. Right. So I would throw uh fruits into high concentration sugar syrups and then pressure cook those and got definite caramel like caramel flavors. Like uh and and this and it in the I did this because I did some experiments with durian, removing kind of the stench from durian, and one time uh a bunch of the juices went to the bottom of the of the pressure cooker and were at the exact proper temperature to form a caramel without burning.
And then was never never ever able to reproduce it, unfortunately. But then I started doing like caramelized bananas and other caramelized fruits and high sugar syrups. I don't know why you would get uh caramelized flavor in a non i you need look t w as we both know you need a high enough temperature to um unl unless unless caramelization happens at lower temperatures under pressure, which is possible. Right. So I was wondering if that could be the case.
And then the other thing I had noticed is that fructose caramelizes at a lower temperature, and there is some fructose in carrots, so that could be a possibility. Right, and you don't uh and I don't know, does he add acid to the recipe? In which case you would get inversion. No, you don't add anything at all. Yeah.
And and it really, you know, it definitely has a clear caramelized flavor. And then the other the other question I had about that, because I I put this recipe on my website, you know, with the various things that I put in it to make it a nice little moose boosh, and people are concerned about the safety. Now I didn't have any problems at all in my electric cooker. But that's temperature regulated. And I got a little concerned.
Well, if I tell somebody to do this on a stove top pressure cooker without any liquid added, is there is there any risk that's being created there? Well, okay, I s oh you know what? That's also maybe true. You're gonna get localized much higher temperatures. Yeah, right.
That's another possibility. Yeah. I mean, you won't in an electric, but in a uh in a gas, you will. I asked him I was in one of the dinners in Seattle, and I personally asked him about this. I said, Will this work in a gas-fired pressure cooker on the stove?
And he said, Yes. Uh I I looked around at the pressure cookers that he uses. Uh he has uh an American canner, one of the big ones, although I doubt he uses this for that recipe because it takes so longer for the flong for those to get up to pressure. I think he has uh he has a bunch lying around. I'm sure he's got some coon recons because they're awesome.
Uh and he can afford it. You know, um it's a it's an interesting question. Uh I don't think it's gonna be a safety issue because I mean there's no there's no safety issue because the the worst that's gonna happen is you're gonna scorch the heck out of your um out of your vegetables. Right. Right.
And because what'll happen is is that uh the only danger really in a pressure cooker is that you're gonna build up pressure and the pressure relief valves are gonna continue to work no matter what. And there's three different overpressures on that thing. Right. The the the gaskets themselves are good up to about five hundred and so degrees, and so the plastic will be melting off of the unit before the uh gaskets go on you. And even if the gaskets were gonna melt, like they're not made out of vitamin or something that's gonna decompose into a toxic deadly gas.
So uh yeah, if we if any one of those things weren't true, like if for some reason someone decided to move to Viton SEALs, you know, I don't know if they had an excess of money and a lack of good sense, like there might be a safety issue, but I think you could basically just melt the pot down on the stove without without too much of a safety issue. Okay. Um but I I'm uh you've now I don't know why I wasn't observant enough to uh ask that question at the time. Uh I I myself don't own a copy of the book. There is one in the school, so I can go go look at it.
Unfortunately, right now, as I'm sure if you heard him speak, there's a dearth of the books in the country. You know, they're you know, he likes to say they're literally uh like they're literally on a boat, uh, you know, on a slow boat from China, like quite literally. I know. I have my my my order, uh I keep looking at Amazon waiting for the you know, my date keeps moving out. So I mean he donated he donated a book to uh the museum's auction that we had, and uh he's like, but you know, I'll donate it, but you're not gonna have it there live because they just don't they don't exist.
You know, it's kind of like uh it's unbelievable. I think he's actually gonna make money off this thing. I know, I know. Well, they've already you know started a second printing, so that's pretty incredible. Yeah, second printing of 25,000.
That many. Yeah. Unfortunately, the paper they're printing on, the first paper was Japanese, and they were not able to reach the company on the phone after the uh tsunami, and so they're they went with a Chinese paper the second time around. Yeah. Yeah.
Uh anyway, uh th thanks for calling in. We hope to hear from you again soon. Okay, thanks, Dave. All right. So I guess we should go to our first commercial break.
This is cooking issues. Call in all of your questions to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128 cooking issues. One that's done are the big two sent out to bear. Things to go to if you are going anywhere.
It's the truth that the truth makes us so alive. Stand all the things you want all real. You have you to complete, and that is the deal. Stand. There's a midget standing tall.
And the giant beside him about the fall. Tune in to Burning Down the House. Architecture is the laser focus of burning down the house. A weekly discourse on all things built, destroyed, admired, and despised. Each week, Curtis B.
Wayne, your host, invites a posse of authors, critics, builders, designers, and other architecture themes to reflect on various topics related to perhaps the most functional of all art forms. Again, that's every Sunday at 4 30 p.m. on the Heritage Radio Network. Oh, welcome back to Cooking Issues. Calling your questions to 718-497-2128.
That's 718-497-2128. Stand. There's a midget standing tall and a giant beside him about to fall. I have not heard that song in a long time. But that is one hardcore butt-kicking tune.
It's kind of a in my head, there's a race between at their funkiest, kind of who's the funkiest human of all times. And sometimes I think it's Sly and the Family Stone. Sometimes I think it's James Brown. And sometimes I think it's Stevie Wonder. And then every once in a while, when I'm in a special weird mood, I'll crank up the house quake and think Prince might be one of the funkiest human beings of all time.
I'm my brain's my brain's all messed up today. Anyway, I appreciate the Sly and the Family Stone. Uh before I leave the um Pig Trotter entirely, I didn't completely answer the question. Uh they the there was more stuff. Any other things to keep in mind?
Do you think I need transglutaminase or will the trotter hold together well enough on its own? Uh thank you. And we rock apparently, Stasi, which I did not know, which I'm glad to hear. And he was also digging the Hall Notes, but Nastasha decided they're going to switch it up. So we had two weeks of Hall Notes, and now we're gonna we're going to Sly and the Family Stone this week.
Um, I don't think you're gonna need the transglutaminase if you use a ground meat that's been bound by mixing it with salt, like you would a traditional sausage, unless there's a lot of damage to the actual skin of the pig's trotter itself. If you're using large chunks of meat, as they did in the ideas and food uh picture, then I think a little activa meat glue would help bind the thing together. I think uh just the fact that you're gonna put it into a vacuum bag, or if you don't have a vacuum bag, roll it in plastic is gonna also help keep it together while it's poaching. Uh and so I don't think you're you're gonna have too much of a problem, but hey, it couldn't hoit, especially if you're going to do any sort of post-searing to it uh to you know that it to crisp up the outside skin, which I don't think is actually traditional, is it? You don't tr uh the Zamponi?
I don't know. I don't know whether you traditionally would uh do it because I've only ever done it in my house. I've never had it out. You know what I mean? I've only ever made it myself.
Um anyway, so uh hope that I've almost forgot to finish asking that question. Okay. Now, uh we have another question. Uh and I probably should have saved this one uh for for last because it's in c it's got some gross stuff in it. So me and my answer has some gross stuff in it.
Uh I work for a French Chef who says uh you cannot digest tomato skins. He claims they pass undigested through your digestive tract. Can you please look into this, Mike? PS, you may this is referring to the blog now. PS, you may as well remove the forums that has been taken over by Spam Bots and you ignore the posted questions.
Okay. I'm first gonna answer the the the PS on that. Mike, we are aware of the problem of the spam bots, and I am personally aware of my non-responsiveness problem. Uh as for the spam bots, we are we are basically uh trying to get to position where we can have our webmaster give control of the forums to a few of our trusted members like Barzelay and whatnot. Uh and I want them to clean it up.
I want the forums to stay alive. It's uh hard for me to check uh all that stuff. It's recently because of all the stuff I've been working on, hard enough for me to uh time in a timely fashion answer all the blog questions, which I'm pledged to do. I will eventually answer every single question posted on the blog. But the forums are getting tough to me.
I hope to keep them useful and eradicate the spam bots, and to that end, we are going to give control of those forums to some of the loyal forum folks. We're just waiting for our webmaster to get back from his vacation with his vacation. Not vacation from work. Uh plus he's got a new baby. And uh and so anyway, we're we're on it and we apologize.
Um as for the second question, I think we might have a call in, so I might answer the second part of the question later. Is that true, Jack? Do we have a call? No. No?
Okay. So I will answer that question. Um it is true that tomato skins can pass uh undigested through your digestive tract. There's two main kinds of fiber that we have, right? There's insoluble fiber and soluble fiber.
Soluble fiber, things like pectin, they go through uh they go through, you know, the a lot of your digestive tract un undigested, but then get digested by bacteria because they're water soluble in your in your large intestine, uh, and that's things like pectin, right? Then there's uh insoluble fiber that's basically not water soluble at all and doesn't get damaged by bacteria and basically pass through your intestine un un undigested, we'll say, right? And there's a lot of insoluble fiber in tomatoes, like so. Some things that are insoluble fiber are hemicellulose and lignin. So tomato skins have a lot of that in it.
And I was I was checking basically what we have a caller now? Alright, I'll come back and finish this question because it's gonna take a while. Caller, you're on the air. Hi, Dave. Uh, just a quick question.
I I just recently learned about uh salt risen bread. Salt rising bread. Yeah, apparently it's uh bacterial action that leavens it or something. But it made me think about I had a another question. What how come there's such a difference between like soda breads, you know, uh chemically leavened breads and yeast breads?
Like yeast breads are more Is that just the gluten formation? From the yeast, or I mean gluten. They're fun, they're fundamentally different, right? So a uh a a yeast a yeast one, the volume is is provided by the uh the aeration uh of the yeast that it happens uh inside of an already formed uh network with gluten, right? Whereas a quick whereas a quick bread you could it is not gluten dependent.
It's not relying on on gluten um for its uh structure. I mean it helps, obviously, right? Uh and and toughens it. But yeah, they're fundamentally different. So f finish out your finish out your question there.
I was just that was just a uh a musing in my head. So there's just less gluten formation with uh the chemically leavened or I mean, because I mean yeast breads, it's like almost stringy and chewy, you know, when you pull them apart. But uh soda breads, they just crumble. You know, there's not that uh Right. I don't know.
Right. I mean look, it's certainly possible to do yeast uh so for instance, it's not the yeast itself. So when you take um Okay Well All right, there's there's a bunch of stuff going on. If it's only yeast, you're not gonna probably get that much of a pH change. If you if you're yeast plus bacteria, you're gonna get uh a radical pH shift, which is gonna also affect the gluten, make it slacky with that sourdough y kind of texture, right?
So have you ever made have you ever made overnight yeast pancakes? Uh no. Yeah. So you'd make like a regular pancake battery you add yeast and you let the thing go overnight, and then in the morning you also usually add a secondary leavener and you make it, and it's got that great yeasty taste, but it still basically has the texture of a pancake, but it is more like a crumpet at that point. Like it's got that weird kind of bubbly, airy thing in it.
Um they're fundamentally different in that a quick uh uh uh a yeast leavened bread, right, relies on either a gluten formation, gluten network, or some sort of other air trapping network like pentazans and a rye bread, something like that, right? It's relying on a structure to hold the air because the air is being produced, well the or the not the air, the CO2 really is being produced over a long period of time before pre-baking. Uh whereas the chemically leavened breads are relying on it on a quick source of aeration that happens at or close to the time of baking. Um either through an acid base reaction or through the heat decomposition of uh the product into you know salts and CO2. So uh for instance, you could probably add a uh chemical leavener to a I've never done it though, to a gluten raised, I mean to a to a high gluten thing to see what happens.
But I think it's just fundamentally a difference in dose structure. Okay. Does that make sense? Very cool. You think you think I'm right?
Someone will call in. If I'm not right, someone will call in. And I've never made uh salt salt rising bread. Uh have you ever have you ever tried it? I I tried it, yeah.
That's and it was also kind of crumbly like um, you know, soda bread and stuff. That's but uh yeah, I was just wondering if you had any knowledge or experience on that. What was the technique? Was it was it was it needed a lot or no? No idea.
I just I mean, I saw it at this festival and I got a loaf and I tried it, and I'm like, well, that's interesting. And I Wikipedia'd it and that's about it. Alright, so uh so Nastasha, put that on our list of things to uh you know, that's something I wish McGee, I'm sure has tried that a bunch of times. Anyway, so we'll we'll we'll try to look into it. If my memory serves me, which it's doing less and less these days, I will uh you know, yeah, because tomorrow's my fortieth birthday, so my brain is starting to to fester.
Happy birthday. Oh, thanks, thanks. So uh yeah, so uh uh next time I speak to McGee, I'm gonna try and get him on that, and we'll try to include that on our list of things to research. Yeah, I meant to call you uh last week. Sorry about that.
Yeah, no problem, no problem. Oh yeah, because you know what? We actually get a lot of a lot of our interesting ideas come out of questions like this. So we're definitely gonna look into it. Thanks, thanks so much for the call.
No problem. All right. Now, back to tomato skins. Um I forget where I left off, so there might be some overlap. So uh there's a lot of uh hemicellulose and things like that, hemicellulose and lignin being two of the primary insoluble fibers.
And they pass through your system relatively unscathed, especially if they're not masticated, i.e. chewed or blended, right? So, yes, you can see tomato skins in in um your poop. But um they uh they're not in any way, they're not in any way harmful. Uh I looked up uh unfortunately my uh the person who's uh internet access to all of the good scientific journals that I've been stealing for years, their password changed, and I haven't been able to get the new password yet.
So I'm I'm uh I'm kind of out in the dark as regards my usual ability to research things on the internet. It's kind of pathetic. I'm f I'm 40 years old and I'm stealing somebody's password to get to uh to scholarly articles. It's kind of like the equivalent of of living in my mom's basement. But uh no offense to anyone you know living in their mom's basement.
What? Offense. Well, Nastash says offense. I don't. Anyway, so but one of the articles I was able to find was change in the bioability, vi bioavailability of the proteins and tomato processing wastes from 1996 that point to the fact that the tomato uh pro tomato pulp uh tomato skin and seeds are relatively undigestible.
And a relatively new one um by uh in came out in 2010 uh by uh Garcia Herrera, that where they measured it and they said there's a relatively high percentage of insoluble fibers in uh tomato uh peel tomato skin. And so yeah, it's gonna pass through. Uh now here's the problem. There's a bunch of people out there, and this is what you if you search tomato skin, you're gonna come up along on this website called Cure Zone. And uh what a good chunk of these people on cure, and I don't know anything about the Cure Zone people, so if you guys are cure zone people, you want to call and tell me what it's all about, tell me.
But it seems like a bunch of people that I saw who are obsessed with their poop. So what they do is is they'll take some sort of like colon blow, you know, cleanse situation, and then they'll uh examine their poop in detail to see what kind of went through it. And uh a lot of these guys are uh petrified of this parasite called uh echinostoma uh r uh recurva recurvatrum, which apparently looks it's a it's a a fluke, a worm, and it looks a whole hell of a lot like a tomato skin. But everyone thinks that they have this, and and and they're backed up by a lot of research amongst the same people, but not a whole lot of medical doctors calling in, right? So it's like people like Nastasha here who have what have you self-diagnosed yourself with recently?
Everything, right? I don't remember. Well, yeah, you don't remember because it's like every day she comes in, she's like, my nose is gonna fall off in the next week, I'm sure of it. Anyway, uh there seems to be a whole lot of uh self diagnosis of this uh echinostoma fluke. And uh, but most of the people I think who are saying it like don't live anywhere near a place where you would get it, for instance, in certain places in Asia and things like that.
So I would assume that if you're looking at your poops, it's tomato skins and not uh and not worms. Um, because there's a whole lot of things that can pass through your your system on digestive, especially if you're taking something like colon blow, which incre which decreases transit time. That's just a polite way of saying all this stuff. If you decrease transit time, by the way, there's an incredibly cute little girl who's like putting her face into the window as we're uh as we're uh speaking here. Anything that you can do to uh decrease the transit time means you're gonna digest this stuff even less and it's gonna come out looking more and more whole.
Gross, gross. Let's take another break. All right, we're gonna go to our second commercial break. Call in your questions to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128.
Sorry to gross you out. Cooking issues. It is interesting. I'm a bad man, my bag my thing. Oh yeah.
Welcome back to Cooking Issues. Boom Laca Lacalaka, boom, laka lockalaka. That is a good song. I wish the listeners could have seen Dave bouncing on the chair and uh Nastasia standing still there. I'll tell you what, to go back to to go back to yes, you you know, yes, that's true, bouncing up and down, but uh it goes back to the gross stuff we were talking about just before the break.
That song, uh uh the reason I like that song so much, besides from the the s severe butt kicking that it gives everyone, is the bass trombone in that thing, which uh just really fills out the bottom end of that song, and like uh you know, that kind of a song, when you play it loud enough, it's like it's uh a butt rumbling thing. So it fits with it fits with the with the theme. Why? Stand. Oh, the midget standing tall, giant about beside him about the fall.
I think so. The great one of the greatest lines of all time. I wonder what Sly and the fan. I wonder what Sly is up to these days. I hear he's a producer now.
He was in prison for a while and very. Really? Mm-hmm. Nastasha just having seen Elton John in concert. Uh okay.
So here's an update. We talked about uh radiating corn with uh atomic weapons uh and also the uh corn mutations and shrunken corn. So uh uh a friend actually of Nastasha's from childhood named Dev wrote in and said uh he hopes is all is well, which it is. Uh he just stumbled onto our uh podcast last week, uh and he's a biochemistry nerd, and he thinks he has a partial answer for my corn question about using radiation to get sweet corn. Radiation treatment is a common way to do a mutagenic screen, and this was one of the methods that Nobel laureate Barbara McClintock was able uh to discover, uh use to discover mobile genetic elements, transposons.
These transposons are why corn kernels have such heterogeneous, uh heterogeneous kernel coat colorings. Not each kernel is an exact genetic copy of the entire plant. As far as whether it was used for shrunken too, which is the the gene that helps super sweet corn be super sweet in particular, I don't know. It is possible. That strain seems to have been around since the 40s.
I think late, late 40s, early 50s, might have to re re-re-research my uh stuff. But it may have been an existing strain and was just first described in the literature that way. The biochemistry of that strain is pretty interesting too, but I can tell you about that later, uh, which I hope you do. He does have a question for us, not so much a question, but a dare. You've done inhibitors of sweetness and sour uh turning into sweet, that's miraculin, and the uh sweetness inhibitor is genemic acid, which you can actually buy if it turns out in uh Ayurvedic shops.
You don't need to go to uh herb like online herb shops. You can go into Calustean's or the dual spice specialty shop here in New York and buy genemia silvestri and uh take it and obliterate your sweetness. Uh you can look it up on our blog. We have a post on it. Um you should do bitter inhibitors, bitter blockers.
I know these are additives to some medicines to make them go down better. Give it a try. Uh and he hopes to hear from us. Well, we actually have tried it, but we tried it as part of someone else's experiment. Uh Francis Lamb on uh it was a salon.com, right?
The thing was on? Yeah, on Salon.com. That's hilarious. You should everyone should go right now, after they listen to us, don't leave right now, to uh Francis Lamb, uh who's uh we like him a lot, good writer on Salon.com, and he was uh doing a bitter blocker test, uh adenosine monophosphate, and he brought it in and we tested it with a bunch of different uh products that were bitter to see how they affected it. And they were all affected to uh they were affected to greater or lesser degrees.
And I think part of the problem with bitter blockers is that um unlike sour and sweet, where we have uh basically, you know, uh one or a few receptors, right? There are like over fifty kinds of receptors for bitterness. And so I doubt that there's necessarily going to be a broadband bitter blocker that's gonna knock everything down. The way that you can literally obliterate your sense of sweetness with genemic acid. Uh we were not able to completely obliterate the bitterness of things like coffee.
Uh what else do we test? Chocolate, although we beer. Although we were able to affect them. Uh it also, the bitter blocker that we use, the uh Dennis monophosphate, seemed to be much more dose and time dependent and also seemed to increase as you took more and more of it than uh we took much more than the recommended uh daily allowance of that stuff. Uh but it seemed much more dependent on those kind of factors than gymnemic acid, which just it's it's like bonehead simple.
You take it, everything's gone. Or miraculin, uh, you know, the where you take it, and you know, it definitely has an effect no matter what the sour thing is that you're adding, it has an effect. So we have experimented with it, but I didn't feel it was right to write about it since it was Francis' thing, and his article is far more hilarious than anything I could have um said about it. Uh Brasky writes in, I'm not smart enough to actually make this into a question. I'm sure you are, you know, he's being humble, I guess.
Uh but and this came in what I think it's a girl. She it's a she? I think it's a she. Well, I'm sure she's smart enough. Uh Brasky sounds like I I was thinking of it as a first name, it sounds like a first name.
Yeah, right? Yeah. Okay, it's a last name. Okay. Uh came in yesterday, but too late for Harold and I to get uh a hold of.
Um do you have any suggestions for improving beef at home? Is there a way to uncork beef that's gone flabby and purple? My friend is a grass-fed beef farmer, uh getaway farm in Nova Scotia. And while the beef is quite good, I often think it would be best if grain finished, but he says it's really hard on the cow's stomachs and removes most of the healthiness of grass-fed beef. Uh and there uh sh she or he is it she?
Oh, hey. He's a huge fan of our work. Good. Uh here's here's the deal. Uh it is hard on the cow's stomach uh over long periods, but there's no question that it does uh fatten them up quickly, which tenderizes them.
As for the healthiness, I'm not sure um I'm not sure I'm a believer in any health claim on uh beef, either pro or anti. I eat beef because I really like it a lot. Uh grain-fed beef tends not to need as much aging to get it to be tender because usually it's more inherently tender uh because it's just been fattened up with grain. Um, if it's gone uh flabby and purple, I'm assuming that it's being aged in a uh in a cryo bag, and you should be able wet aged if it's going purple, in which case you should be able to get it back in fairly good shape just by getting it out of the bag and letting it uh dry out. Because regular dry aging, right, has two different processes.
One, the purpleness is probably coming from a lack of oxygen from being inside of the bag, right? That's what purple comes from usually. Um so uh the flabbyness could be because the moisture has been staying in there too long, you know, it's too much moisture in there. So dry aging does two things. One, it tenderizes the meat by uh having enzymes continue to act on the meat and thereby break down the proteins, right?
And two, uh it tends to dry out the meat uh uh slightly, which increases the flavor because what's being removed is water, which is relatively flavorless. So in general, I think grass-fed beef, in order to be really delicious, um, should be aged, dry aged, preferably. Uh, and then the the challenge becomes with dry aging grass-fed beef that it typically doesn't have a large fat cap on the outside because it hasn't been finished with grain. And if you age something that doesn't have a large fat cap on the outside, it tends to lose moisture too quickly and you lose a lot of the meat on the outside, which then uh is a is a problem with cost and also a problem with um well, it's mainly a problem with cost. Because the fat keeps the moisture in and allows the enzymes to work for a long time without a radical amount of uh of moisture loss.
Um that said, um, you know, that whether you want grass-fed or you want grain-fed is largely a matter of taste. I know some people who really just love the taste of grain-fed beef, and you know, they're not too concerned about what it's gonna do to the cow's stomach since they're about to take a captive bolt gun and shoot it in the head anyway. Was that callus? What? That's the truth.
You know, people need to realize we're killing animals when we're eating meat. Anyway, I hope that at least somewhat answers the question. Okay, and I think we've taken care of all the mailing questions, which means we can use the last portion of this uh show to unless there's a caller at 718 4972128, 7184972128, unless there's a question, we can spend the rest of the time talking about our awesome fundraiser that we had on Sunday, right? Yeah. It was awesome.
We kicked ass. Yeah well you know I don't think you're allowed to say that on the air but yes we did. No I realized if eater can use it we can right. Oh if eater can use it yeah so if look don't take our word for how awesome it was go on eater.com go to uh timeout new youth did food and wine uh put anything up on their blog yet so Daniel Gritzer anyway um so Heritage Foods right our parent here was one of the sponsors as was Pernot Ricard who gave us all the booze and the Barterhouse which is one of our uh you know the the the fine people behind the wine booza which you should all go buy they gave us a bunch of good wine Pat Lafrida gave us the meat uh we was at Del Posto the French culinary um you're gonna go to our website soon and see all of the all of the sponsors and like a complete rundown of what we did but basically I'm gonna give you uh the rundown on what the what the food and drink was. I'm not gonna talk about the mummy powder because I already talked about the mummy powder last week and you can go to the blog uh for more but Cesare came in with a whole passel of uh awesome cured meats, so you know, uh mainly prosciutto, parmigiano, and and some really really good salumi.
Uh I didn't even ask the name, I was too busy shoveling it in my face to kind of ask the name for it. Um we then had uh um coming in after that, we had Nils did hit I gave him fad diets, and he he did something called the real South Beach diet, which was a cabbage soup and a Cuban sandwich, because South Beach di diet has cabbage soup, but he says in South Beach what they're really eating is Cuban sandwiches. So it was like the flavors of Cuban sandwich, and then a shot of like a pure cabbage soup that was was delicious. And then um then next uh Damon Bolti came out with uh martell and orange, basically like an old oldie fashion kind of thing, which was freaking delicious. They had a bunch of that, and we served with that was uh was uh Carlo Morachi came out with his lamb and mint, which was like a like a ch like mint jelly and yogurt.
This was based on New York circa like 1780s, and like a little piece of lamb that uh breast that was uh seared on all sides, great stuff, right? Then uh after that, Evan Clem, bartender, came out with um his ketzicato drink. That was good. So he grew his own corn. I don't know where the hell he grew his own corn, but he grew his own corn and made sort of a corn like orchata thing and uh put a little bit of licorice in it by using absinthe and then uh with vodka to booze it up because that's Evan.
You know, Evan can't do anything without boozing it up. So he served that uh as as a foil to Dave Chang's dish, which was called It's a Shame We Know More About Dinosaurs and About What Native Americans Ate. And he called up a guy, he wanted it to be actually Hudson, like what they ate here in Manhattan. And his thing, he spent like hours and hours researching. He called every uh Native American tribe leader from here to here to hell, and called up like you know um uh anthropologists and uh archaeologists and everything, and turns out that we know Jack Squat about how this stuff was prepared and eaten.
We just know what they ate. And so he called up, we all we know that the oysters were bigger because we have the shell mittens, middens. So we called up a friend of his who's an oyster producer in uh up in Long Island, like old school blue point oysters, and he's like, keep some growing for a lot longer. And so, because we told him early what what he was gonna do. And these oysters were some big oysters.
They're the biggest oysters from this coast I've ever seen, ever. And he cooked them because the Native Americans cooked them. And he served them with acorns and uh dried berries, uh, with like some some like uh greenery on top. And that was very interesting. He took it like he was the most kind of literal interpretation.
I think my Carlo Carlo as well, what was going on, but you know, fascinating, fascinating stuff. After that, we had an auction where we auctioned off like a Nathan Miravold, Chris Young book, a polycycient circulator. Uh I lost my voice during the auction because I went crazy. What? Where is it?
Which circulator. Uh I don't know. Uh I don't we apparently we've lost the circulator. I hope not. We'll have to find it.
But the um uh we auctioned off a signed chef jacket for 900 bucks, which was awesome. Uh we then did uh caveman food and Thomas Wall from Def and Co did uh Pierre Jouet champagne and Lindemann's pech lambic beer because he's like, I don't know, it was fermented. It's delicious, delicious. Uh you gotta know Thomas for that to be funny, but uh anyway. And then uh Wiley came out with uh like a crazy plating contraction that looked amazing.
He made fake, he wanted to do bone marrow because it was like cavemen like eating bones. So he made a fake bone marrow out of uh out of uh like a both fake bone out of potato, uh, which you know he said basically they used tubers, they didn't use potatoes, but since we don't know what tubers they ate, it might as well be a potato. Uh and then it looked just like the outside of a bone, and then he filled it with bone with a bone marrow mix that he made. Uh and then he had like instead of like blood from the animal, he had like a beet puree because they would have had roots and things they would have ate as well. He then took a Noki mushrooms and dehydrated them to look like twigs, like they were like lying around on the ground.
They looked freaking amazing. And then he had some sort of like edible grass on top of that. So it looked pretty damn cool, right? Yeah. Yeah.
Then came ancient Rome. Uh, and uh Audrey Saunders came on board with uh her Madeira Martinez, which was uh like uh it was basically Madeira and uh and bay leaf infused uh gin. That was some delicious, delicious business. Uh I drank a little much of that one. And uh and then Mark came out, Ladner from Del Posto, the home chef, with I swear to God, a whole ostrich.
Showed up with a whole ostrich, and then we had another one cooked and served uh, you know, with spice like Roman style on bread, like almost like on trenchers. Like uh I didn't know they did that in Rome, but I get yeah, I did know that. But kind of like trenchers in medieval times. So that was that was amazing. The dish was called Big Bird.
Uh and then after that came the desserts. And uh the first thing that went out was uh an espresso martini to kind of reinvigorate everyone, the Kentucky put out. That was also delicious. It was espresso martini with uh with uh Sinar, China, I think it's China, which is an artichoke uh liqueur that was absolutely great, and that was paired with uh with Brooks Headley, who did uh an uh basically a sweet dessert made of uh fried artichokes because his was uh Hebrew food in Italy, so he was taking that's basically an old uh it's like uh what is it, carciofiala juda, which is a Jewish like a recipe, and then sweetened it with a matz and made a mazzo uh matza ricotta ice cream, and apparently it was delicious. But since no one saved me any, I didn't get to try it.
Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Then I served uh a martell cognac mark cordon blue with uh mana, that's mana from heaven.
You can find it on our blog. It's some real business. You know, it's like dried up, you know, dried up plant sap that God sent to save the Israelites, if you believe in that sort of thing. And Tozi sent out Space Food, which was uh she did an uh her take on uh Neapol astronaut ice cream, Neapolitan uh ice cream. And everything was delicious, everything was amazing, and a big uh big thanks.
We had actually some people from the listeners from the radio show who came. Uh Ken Ingbert came, Colin Gore came. We thank you very much. Uh Ariel from UC Davis came. The other guy was Brian Corio.
Brian Corio came. Uh uh or his dad came. They both came. He didn't say hello, did it? The whole family came.
Anyway, amazing. Thank you so much. Uh we hope to do it again in six months on the West Coast for anyone that listens on on the West Coast. Listeners can't see, but I'm crying in the booth. No, yeah, because Jack didn't get to go.
He was here busy doing radio because he didn't he that's so he didn't get to go, even though he was obviously we wanted him to come, so he missed out on what turned out to be one of the most epic lunches of all time. And this is big as pizza, though. What? Ida Roberta's pizza. No, Roberta's pizza also delicious, also can be epic.
Anyway, that is this week's Cooking Issues. Come back 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. 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. And I guess can't get it straight. Vicious Vicious Fotco. Oh, you daddy rat.
The following is a public service announcement from Heritage Radio Network. The Snacky Tunes compilation has arrived and is available for free on our website, Heritage Radio Network.com. This compilation features live performances from some of the hottest acts around today, including Midnight Magic, Surfer Blood, Overhopper, and more. Again, you can download this compilation for free on our website, Heritage Radio Network.com, and make sure to listen to Snacky Tunes every Monday at 2 p.m. on Heritage Radio Network.
Timestamps may be off due to dynamic ad insertion.