Hello and welcome to another late session of Cooking Issues on the Heritage Radio Network. I'm Dave Arnold, you're a host of Cooking Issues here with Nastasha the Hammer Lopez, fresh back from her trip to California to visit her parents for her birthday, almost a month prior to her birthday. How was that trip, Nastasha? Good. Yeah, good?
Yeah. So uh please call in all of your cooking-related questions or non if you have non-cooking related questions to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. So uh last week we had a question uh from actually a telephone question from I forget who's who what their name was, but they had a question about salt rising bread. And uh salt rising bread is a unique kind of bread uh that dates at least back in in this country anyway, uh at least to the 1840s, 1850s, and it's basically died out almost everywhere, except for in certain places like Western New York.
So uh I said, which was truthful, I don't know anything about it, right? So I made some, which is the reason why I'm late, by the way. That's why I'm late today. Now, uh in fact, I didn't get to make it 100% like it was supposed to. Um I didn't get a chance to go all the way through the proofing.
I kept waiting for it to finish its proofing, and the proofing time of this kind of bread is very variable, so anyways, I had to throw it in the oven too early. Also, I didn't add any crush treatment like an egg wash or anything to it, so the top is rather sallow. And I pulled it out of the oven and literally put it into a metal box and ran to the studio. So that's why I'm late. So Nastasha and I are gonna try it.
It's still hot, but it's uh cool enough to touch. Ow. And I brought some butter. Yeah, well, it looks okay, right? Right, Nastasha?
Yeah. Looks alright. Put some butter on some of this and break off a piece and let's try it. Then we'll after you try it, we'll talk about it, okay? Meanwhile, uh this is the first week that I'm doing the radio show as a 40-year-old.
Right. Happy birthday. Yeah, right. Uh so uh auspicious beginning to my fifth decade on this planet. On the way biking home from work on my birthday, I got doored by a uh by an SUV and flipped over into the street and all mangled and bruised.
It's a good way to start, right? Yes. It's a good start to your fifth decade. I think so. More of the same, right?
Like, why should why should life change just because you get older? Anyhow, uh and uh another thing, this is the first show where Nastasha actually currently is no longer an employee of the French Culinary Institute. Thank God. Uh-huh. And I am uh I am now uh an independent contractor.
So I'm officially in business for myself now, as well as still a director of culinary technology. So it's uh it's a good day, right? Yes. By the way who's cooking issues being brought to us by today, Jack? Hearst Ranch.
Hearst Ranch. I don't have the words to read about Hearst Ranch, but Hearst Ranch is uh, I believe one of the oldest uh privately owned uh kind of uh meat farms in the in the country, right? And they have a a a huge range uh of uh of delicious uh grass-fed uh cow that I've eaten. And uh this stuff's really good, right? And they've been a long time sponsor and friend of the show.
And uh their um their website is www.hurstranch.com. My correct, Jack? Yes. Yes, okay. So now we're tasting our salt risen bread.
What do you think, Nastasha? Good. It needs more salt. Well, interesting. We'll get into that.
Um we'll get into that. Excuse me, I'm eating. So one of the peculiar things about salt resin bread is it has, if you smell it, a cheesy aroma. A very, very particular cheesy aroma. This particular one's under risen.
Oh, I think we we might have a collar, in which case I will describe the the bread in a moment. Jack, do we have a collar? Yep, caller, you're on the air. Hey Dave. Um my name's Norm from Seattle, Washington.
And um I have got myself a brawn thermal mixer that I was able to get working again. Wow. And um I was uh gonna try my first uh chance at 2 eat. Be very careful, of course. Right.
And um I've got myself a brisket here, actually. It's a corned beef that I was gonna try. And I was just um hoping you might give me a couple pointers to uh get me out of my way. Sure. Now for uh for those of you out there, uh brawn thermal mixer is not this not nearly the same thing as a thermal mix, as the Europeans know it.
A thermal mix is a European piece of equipment that's a blenderslash heater, slash mixers, slash scale. They're not really that popular in this country because they're very expensive here in the US, but they're extremely popular in Europe, um, where they don't have vita preps, which are extremely popular here. Anyway, um the Braun Thermomix, or more properly, the B bron thermal mix is an old style uh it's an old company that made B Brawn, made circulators back in the day, and they haven't been made for a long time. I'm assuming yours is the is the classic B bron green, right? Yep, it's uh 1419 B bron green, yeah.
Yeah, yeah. So uh yeah, they're like a cool green color. Uh I had a couple of those that uh actually were harvested from uh from the nate naval labs at uh Pearl Harbor, which was kind of interesting. Uh mine yeah, mine were built in the I believe early, early eighties, and they they lasted a good long time. Do you is yours have a digital readout or the click the the one where you click it in uh with uh with a thumb dial?
Uh it's got yeah, it's got the knob dial. Yeah. So yeah, that's what my one of my questions was. It didn't look like I was able to get a a really good uh tenth of a degree uh control. It's maybe maybe point five degrees plus or minus, you know, kind of thing.
Yeah. Good news is that's good enough. It's probably I mean uh uh these things uh as they age, they might have some drift in um you know uh in their calibration, not for probably from the instrument itself, but maybe from the electronics, because I don't know how they're calibrated. So I would take it before you do anything and do an ice water uh bath, uh, you know, and just make sure that it registers at zero. Um in general, what goes bad on those uh circulators, the motor will eventually wear bad.
Now, if you had one that was used for uh not very much and then was mothballed relatively early in its lifetime, it could still have many good years of life ahead of it. But to the bushings are loud. Yeah, duh. Well, so I had one that I kept alive. Don't tell anyone this, of course.
I'm telling everyone this. Uh I had one that I kept alive for a long time with uh little squirts of uh of uh I mean I didn't have any food grade lubricant on me, so I used WD40 just to kill the bearing squeal. But that that is how those things typically when they die, that's how they die. They die through loss of a bearing because the bearings that were used back in those days weren't sealed the same way that they that the new ones are. So the new ones very rarely have bearing faults.
Um, you know, or at least I've used them for many years without having uh bearing faults unless you do something really nasty to them. Okay. So that's how much did you pay for it, if you mind my asking? Oh, I I got it out of the garbage. Ah, pfft.
Awesome. Alright. So, so like anything you get's gravy out of it, in other words. Yeah. Beautiful.
Okay. Uh was it really encrusted with oil? One of mine had been uh running oil for a long time and was a real pain to clean out. No, no. Actually, it cleaned up really well.
Um little bit of water scaling is pretty much all I had. Um so it um this was, you know, um from a laboratory. So um I'm thinking it was didn't have yeah, I didn't see any oil on it at all. Nice. Okay.
Yeah, but no, some of our some of our labs ones I got were running oil baths, and that's why they had the oil on them. So it looks like you're in good shape. And as long as the bearings are they squealing, or are they just you can hear the motor turn? Um it's um it's kind of uh a little bit of a grindy squeal. Uh not not squeal, but more kind of a kind of a grind.
Um, why don't I just do this? Um yeah. You hear that? Yeah, and then it smooths out after a minute. Yeah.
So what's gonna happen eventually is your bearing is gonna fail there. I would try to grease it a little bit, which is gonna make it last for a while. But I even I've even had one once run in restaurants for a little while like that, but that's gonna be the mode of failure of that guy. Uh but you know, he's you know, it's probably lived a long and honorable life, that guy. Okay, so back to your other question of the brisket.
The brisket's already been cured, right? Yeah. Okay, now how you do this depends a lot on what you want the texture of it to be. Do you want it to be more like a traditional brisket texture, or do you want to achieve kind of one of these real low low temperature textures that people are uh are doing? So typically what I'll tell you what I do.
I don't cook a lot of brisket, but I'm gonna equate it to a short rib for you. How about that? Okay. So in a in a short rib, right, you're gonna wanna it you can I I don't do any temperatures below about fifty-seven because I find that nobody wants this stuff really rare, bloody rare, right? So no one wants it in like the fifty five uh I'm in Celsius, by the way.
55 uh Celsius range. You can cook the stuff down there, but here are two problems you might have. You're gonna if you're gonna cook at a very, very low temp, I would suggest uh initially uh doing a quick dunk into uh simmering water, like you know, maybe like 15 to 30 seconds or something like that. And that is to um that's to kill the bacteria on the outside. Now, if you're only doing one, that's not a big deal.
But if you're doing more than one and you don't do that, and the bags are touching each other, the uh lactic acid bacteria that are alive on the inside of the bag can get a chance to grow before the temperature gets high enough to kill them. And I especially see this in people that cook long-term things below about 57 degrees Celsius. So uh like if you're gonna go below 57, I would do like a quick uh like a quick dip in simmering water, or else um, you know, pre-searing helps, but you know, the stuff's still in the uh in the you know in the sauce, right? So um don't overcrowd it and and and I typically go above fifty-seven anyway. So fifty-seven is about the lowest that I'll do uh like a short rib.
And a brisket might be around the same thing. For 57 degrees, you're gonna wanna shoot anywhere between uh 48 and probably 60 hours in that range. So you're you're gonna have to get a feel for it. You can feel it in the bag as it goes. So at 48 hours, it will st at that temperature.
It will still have quite a bit of toothy bite to it. By the time you get to the upper range of that, and definitely by the time you get to 72 hours, it's gonna in my taste be kind of mushy. It will have lost its texture, which I don't find pleasant. Some people like it, right? I don't find it pleasant.
Um in general, I find people like the slightly beefier flavor you get out of uh something that's like 60 degrees. So it's 60 degrees Celsius, which is a hundred and forty, I would cook it for about two days. And then uh progressively as you go higher, you you can cook it less and less. I wouldn't cook it much above sixty-three or sixty-four because anything above that, I would just assume cook it traditionally. Does that make sense?
Hello? Yeah. Yeah, I'm here. Yeah. All right.
So I would try I would try those, uh I would try those ranges and see how they work. I think uh about sixty degrees for for 48 hours, and um, yeah, that sounds good now. Um you're if I do uh that uh blanching, the the dip, um gonna re uh remove anything. Do you uh uh think I should make up any kind of sauce, like with uh the uh spice packet that's uh comes with it uh to put around it in the bag or just just dip it, throw it in the bag and it's a good thing. Yeah, uh you can put this I would put the spices on it.
Uh maybe cut it back a little bit if you're gonna vacuum it down uh a little bit back from normal. Make sure that you don't put a lot of liquid in the bag or it's gonna taste really poached, right? Reduce any liquid that goes in and reduce it because uh if you're gonna cook traditionally, you're gonna be evaporating liquid off, and in the bag you won't. Yeah. Wonderful.
All right, well, give it a shot give it a shot. Tell me how it happens. Good luck with your thermal mix. Okay, thanks. Alrighty.
Oh, we're going to our first commercial break. This has been cooking issues. Call back. Oh, still are cooking issues going to our first break. What?
Oh, there's a collar, all right. Caller, you're on the air. Hey Dave. Howdy. This is uh Mike.
Um uh I'm a brewer in a commercial brewery, and uh been listening to your podcast a lot and was in uh intrigued by the uh the raw food discussions you're having. And as a thought experiment here at the brewery, we were just kind of thinking, would it be possible to brew a raw beer? I know the the main problem I was thinking, you know, the alpha amylase and beta amylase to convert the mash is normally done pretty high, you know, 150, 160. Right. But then I was thinking, you know, with the like chicha and these uh early primitive beers where people would just chew on, you know, the starch, the corn or whatever, that the alpha amylase and the saliva would break it down.
So I was thinking you might be able to get conversion of a mash at 118. What do you think? Uh it's yeah, I I you know the the profiles might be different, right? I mean I don't think you'd get what I mean here are the problems as I see it. And and uh you know I'm love to hear what you have to say about it.
First of all, uh I think the both of us find it hilarious I find it hilarious. I'm sure you do too that um you're not that you would typically use temperatures that are higher than than raw food would allow in order to activate an enzyme and the whole purpose of raw food is to keep enzymes alive. So I find that amusing but yeah. Um and by the way uh for those of you listening we're not welching we just had to post but we're still doing the raw food uh the raw food thing that's going to come up very soon. Okay.
Um I would assume that yes those enzymes are gonna are gonna work. It's just you know you're gonna be you're gonna be thrown off your your times and the uh you know and and obviously you might not get the you know you know you're shooting for uh the mash temperatures that are going to get the right balance of the alpha and the beta amylases working for you so you can get the right um the the right breakdown products that you want um aside from me mashing I'm sure you could get to work right uh at a hundred and a hundred and twelve or whatever it is that they want you to eventually I don't know that you're gonna get complete conversion but the real problem is is you're not gonna be able to boil the the uh the boil it afterwards. Well I was thinking you could sterile filter the work. Right. And then add maybe a CO2 hop extract.
Do you know if uh when they do those, do you know if they uh get above one eighteen for those? I assume it's all cold side, right, with the liquid CO2? Yeah, they they are right. I mean that's from from my experien from my knowledge of the of the system it's all done um it's all done cold. And did they sell that?
They sell the um they sell the the Uh-huh yeah huh. Now the only thing I was worried about is you know the lacto, lactobacillus is really gonna be rocking at one one fifteen, one eighteen. You know, is there any way to that you would inhibit that to let the uh you know the alpha and beta do what they can at that temperature because otherwise it's just gonna be sour with it you know long before I think the starch is converted. Right. Uh I'm I'm thinking now as as we're as we're talking, I'm thinking about it and um I'm trying to think of something that's not going to also later inhibit yeast or that you can remove that is going to um prevent lactic acid uh uh from appearing in there.
Hmm have you thought of anything or no? No really you know that chemical side of things we're not really involved with at all. Um so I don't know it's more of a thought experiment of you know could we do it if we wanted to obviously we wouldn't you know be able to make a great beer but I just thought it would be not that I even want to encourage that kind of uh behavior from these raw foodies because like you say it's just ridiculous. You know all the enzymes that we use in brewing don't even start till above one eighteen except for maybe you know some beta glucanase or something. Right.
I mean, but it's a really interesting uh problem, and you could actually, I mean, you know, w whether or not you personally are interested, you could open up a seg uh uh a a separate market segment off if it's possible because you know you go to these places and they have basically wines. Uh they don't have any liquors because they haven't picked up on rotary evaporation yet, so none of them have done that that I know of. You know what I mean? So I'll definitely be drinking homemade liquor off done off of uh raw approved wines when I'm when I'm doing the raw food diet. But beer is an interesting an interesting problem.
I think you've kind of hit the nail on the head that you're gonna have the the main problems are gonna be during the the the mashing. Um I don't have filters that I would trust to to filter it out afterwards that weren't gonna clog like a lunatic, but if you have them, you could definitely definitely do it. Um have you ever just had like uh you you ever just like uh also your the other problem is your barley is gonna be kiln to too high a temperature. Uh that's yeah, possibly, yeah. I think they do kill uh kiln at about one thirty.
So I'm gonna have to look into that. Yeah, because I was thinking about doing doing something uh for you know, but they s they sprout all the stuff, but then they don't I mean it would be possible maybe to do a mash that wasn't kilned if you used it uh uh as soon as the thing uh you know reached the proper stage of malting, would you malted your own and didn't kiln it to dry it off. Right. I mean, wouldn't it be possible to then directly go to the mash stage? Uh yeah, yeah, it's it's not required.
Though the drying uh part of of uh malting is just as, you know, so it's storable. Right. And I'm I've never done my own malting, but I hear that that's as much of an art or more so as anything else. Yeah, I malted some corn to do some uh heirloom variety corn uh moonshine and sprouted the corn and mashed that. Off the record, you mean you did that?
Yeah. Uh yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah. How was it? Uh delicious.
I mean the the the the amount we got out of it was ridiculously small, you know, out of like fifteen pounds of corn, we got a pint of uh finished product. But it was so sweet and the corn flavor just came through so much better than you know, modern moonshine is just corn sugar for the most part. Right. And uh you know, I've never had the the actual fermented cheeses like ch chichidahura and all these things, but um, you know, in their local environment I've only had the you know the um the chicha that you know the non-alcoholic cheaches that they have up here. But you know, assuming that those are boil-free, you also might look at maybe it's easier to get uh the breakdown of the mash in corn rather than in a barley.
Um I don't know. Or I I also don't know if the saliva amylase uh enzymes are qualitatively different from the ones that we use uh from uh barley malt. Um but these are all things uh that I find interesting. So w why don't you why don't you investigate it and I'll look into a little bit and then maybe we'll talk about it again on a future show. Sound good?
Sounds good, Dave. Hey, uh one more thing uh on a food or on a food note. Um I've been really into uh cooking authentic Thai food ever since I ate at this restaurant Pac Park up in uh Portland. Right. And uh I've got all Dave Thompson's books and uh I I've I can't a lot of them call for coriander root.
And I was wondering if you have a source or have you ever seen any coriander roots available anywhere? I mean, if you can get if you can buy so a bunch of cilantro with the roots still attached, I think. Yeah, I mean occasionally I'll get that, but uh I mean you have then the good Thai groceries in that in in your area don't don't have it, or do you not have like a hardcore Thai grocery? Uh we don't have any, but even when I go down to Atlanta and then go to the big ones, I've just never seen it anywhere. So I grow my own, but uh, you know.
Right. Pain in the butt. Yeah. Yeah. Just for the roots.
I have occasionally gotten uh bunch uh cilantro with the root attached, but I I'll uh Nastasha make a note to look into it, and I'll def I'll look into that when I'm looking to the raw food. We'll try to hit two birds with one stone. Alright, Dave, thanks for the help. Uh thank you. See ya.
Alright, and now we are officially going to our first commercial break. Calling your questions to 718 497 2128. That's 7184972128 Cooking Issues, Parliament. I will move out to sleep. Following is a public service announcement from Heritage Radio Network.
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on Heritage Radio Network. But most of all, the funk. Linda Palacio, also the father, uh mother of uh chef Zach Zach Palacio, and attended our fundraiser. Yeah. Right.
So cheers to cheers to the Palaccio crew. All right. So go to back to our salt-risen bread. Salt rising, salt-risen or salt-rising bread actually doesn't contain uh a lot of salt, although sometimes it can. Uh, this one's under salted because I didn't really want to taste it during the fermentation process, and I'll tell you why.
Uh, salt-risen bread does not use yeast, right? Typical breads that we use that we make uh are are leavened with uh yeast, different varieties of yeast. Sourdough breads are are leavened with a basically a symbiotic uh culture that's both lactic acid bacteria and yeast, right? And so it's like that and the specific culture depends on the specific yeast and the specific um you know strain of yeast and the specific uh bacterial culture that you have in it, and and and that's what gives the characteristic uh flavors of sourdough bread. Right?
They're sour and because the lactic acid bacteria are basically I think eating the uh byproducts of the yeast and producing the acid acidity provides a characteristic twang and also makes the dough slacker, which is why sourdough doesn't have the same taste or feeling as as regular, because the gluten is somewhat uh broken down by the acidity. Okay. Now, salt rising bread, on the other hand, is uh leavened purely by bacterial action, and the bacteria involved is uh Clostridium perfringens, which is actually a pathogen, a food pathogen, like one of the the second uh best known uh uh or second probably most prevalent or one of the most prevalent uh food poisoning bacteria that there are. Now, I made Nastasha eat the bread before I said this because I knew that she would not try it afterwards. Now, there's a what's interesting is is it's been it's been very, very thoroughly studied, and there's a study on it called the microbiology of salt rising bread uh for done by the uh West Virginia University School of Medicine uh fairly recently, and uh basically what they did was they they they did a study of the different uh starters.
Now, the way you do a starter, Clostridium porfringens is a uh is is a is an anaerobic it basically can't grow in oxygen. So, what you do is you make a liquid mix with something like cornmeal or something for it to feed on, right? And you can add either salt or uh or sometimes baking soda or uh a Camden tablet, which is basically a yeast inhibitor because you want to stop yeasts from growing in there. You only want this bacteria to grow in it. And you let it sit in a warm place.
I used my Excalibur uh dehydrator, which you can also use as a as a bread proofer to keep it at about a hundred degrees Fahrenheit for hours, like usually overnight, until it gets uh foamy and starts taking on a cheese-like aroma that's characteristic of salt-ridden bread, salt risen bread. Uh, some of that characteristic aroma comes from one of the byproducts of clostridium perfringens, which is butyric acid, which is the smell of rancid butter, or which you can smell now that you have it, Nastasha, you'll see what I mean, or uh it's a characteristic of parmesan cheese, or in very high concentrations, vomit. Okay, so it has a very specific aroma that uh that that devotees of this uh bread really, really, really enjoy. They then add uh usually more water and flour to create a spongy starter, which you then let rise again for many hours, then make the dough, and then let it rise up uh yet again, and you bake it. The texture, it's a lot whiter than regular bread because of the uh for some reason I don't really know why.
They said it's because of the acids involved, but I doubt that. I don't know what it is. But it's a very white crumb, it has a different texture, it uh finer bubbles. The gases produced are not uh carbon dioxide as they are in normal bread. It's a combination of hydrogen and I believe also hydrogen sulfide, although I'm not sure, uh uh gases in the in the bread.
So it's basically a fundamentally different bread making mechanism than you would use normally. Now, when you bake them, right, uh and they do have this like really like once you smell it once, you like you're never gonna like k you mistake the smell for for it and you know, it again, you know what it smells like when it happens. Uh a lot of people have uh failures of getting their thing to rise, but it's very easy for me because I use the X calibration. What? Well, come on, Nastasha, always taking into the gutter.
Always taking it to the gutter. Anyway, some people have a problem getting these things to rise in a in a non-sexual way, you gross. Uh and um and uh I think it's because they don't have adequate temperature control. So uh one of the reasons it's called salt risen bread, some people speculate, is because you add salt to inhibit yeast uh formation. The other thing is that uh apparently the the people who used to make it, they would uh they would take salt and heat it up and use that as as a heat as a warm bed, a warm bed of salt to keep it in to keep the temperature of the starter in the right place while it was heating, because it and that by the way, the crunching here in the back isn't me crumpling paper, it's Nastasha eating the bread.
So thank goodness she's overcome the uh the like the fear of uh of uh perfyngence poisoning. Of course I can hear it. Anyway, uh perfynce poisoning and she's eating it. Uh there's never uh there's never been a reported case of foodborne illness as a result of eating the bread, and uh the microbi the the test they've ran on the bread after it was cooked is that it is has it basically no active uh perfinggens in it. Now, uh Clostrium perfringes is interesting because it's a spore-forming bacteria.
Uh so you don't really kill it. You just kill all the vegetative cells, you don't kill the spores. Ugh. But it's ubiquitous, Nastasha. Obviously, I was able to have some.
You don't like the word spore? What's wrong with the word spore? Spores don't move, they're spores. No, I just don't like it. She's making little like spider movements with her hands.
There it's a spore. Ugh. You like mushrooms, right? You know what they make? Spores.
Spore, spore, spore. Anyway, uh, so uh, so it's a very interesting topic. One um I'm you know, I doubt that I'll actually um blog about it. There's a very good website, or you know, or at least a uh one that's well known, Susan R. Brown Salt Rising Bread Project, uh that you can uh look up if you want to look up more on salt rising bread.
Uh again, the only reason I I don't think that I'll be writing about it is because I have so many things I need to write about already and I haven't done it. But besides that, um it's already been handled pretty well, I think, by these other guys. I don't really have anything to add to it. You know what I mean? Like I we didn't do anything fancy or or different, like I didn't make like a salt-rising chicken.
You know what I mean? Like if I could come up with like a salt-rising chicken, then you know we can do something uh very different. But here we are eating the salt-rising bread, and I definitely will experiment with it more myself because it's interesting and I like I like funky things. And actually, I like the taste. If I could get it to rise a little more, uh, if I proved it longer, I'm I'm gonna add like a crust treatment to it too.
What do you think, Nastasha? Uh, I like the taste. Yeah, I'm gonna try to maybe also do it with alternative grains. It's always usually done with wheat flour. I'm gonna try maybe doing it with uh maybe well, Nastasha's not a big rye person, but I'm gonna maybe add a little bit of rye.
Uh play around with it. We'll see. Anyway, okay. Now, on to the email. By the way, there still is time to call in your questions.
I've wadded up the napkin, so I don't have that. 718-497-2128. Oh, very good. Say it again. 7184972128.
Yes. Anyway, um, that's how we operate in the radio here, by the way. We have crumpled up napkins with it with because for some reason for some reason I can't ever commit the telephone number uh of the radio station to memory, no matter how many times I've said it. It's like literally goes it goes off the paper into my eyes, through my mouth, and it's gone. Never never has any any residence time in my brain.
All right. Hey guys, look forward to your show each week. Thank you. This is from Lee. I've got some pork shanks.
I'm gonna cook low temp, looking for some guidance on time and temperature. I've done lamb shanks at 70 degrees Celsius for 36 hours, then bone in pork shoulder at 61.5 degrees C for 48 hours. Both came out great, but the great variance leaves me lost uh for the pork shanks. Okay. The lamb shanks at 70 C for 36 hours, that's a long well, let me see.
70 for 36 and 61 for 48. Those are what's funny is those are about equivalent, Lee. So in other words, uh you got to choose the temperature and the time. Um if I were gonna do pork shanks, I would do it closer to the second one 61 for 48, or maybe 63 for about 56, 57. Give that a shot.
The two numbers you have are actually fairly equivalent, even though they seem disparate because you have to cook for a lot shorter time as the temperature goes up. Anyway, I hope that hope that helps. And give us a call and tell us how how your pork shank turned up. But hey, we have a caller and caller, you were on the air. Hey now, Dave, how are you doing?
All right, what's up? Uh I'm I was wondering uh about uh beer cooler Sous V. Um I'm currently in the process of building my own immersion circulator, and uh it's just taking a little longer than I expected. Um as far as uh safety goes, is there anything I should really worry about when cooking like whole fish inside of a beer cooler? No.
Nope. Nope. No. Perfect. But yeah, are you uh are you a uh beer brewer?
No. Okay. But so the one thing you should, here's what here's what you need to do. You need to the outside of your product is gonna be cooked a little more than the uh in the inside of your product. It's the nature of the beast when you're doing this kind of work, okay?
The main thing you're gonna have to do is, I mean, are you gonna get the the standard home brew special, the got five-gallon uh cooler? Yeah. Yeah. So for those of you that don't know, like the standard like thing to to start your homebrew mashing in is is, and I don't know why, but the company got is the one that everyone gets. Geo, I think TT, five gallon cooler.
And what you do is is you drill a small hole to fit your whatever it is, uh, whatever thermometer you have, get a long stem thermometer, uh, and drill a hole in the top of the uh of the um cooler to put the thermometer in, pour in water that's close to the temperature you want to cook to. I'll make up a number 57 Celsius, right? And I'm making it up. Pour it in, throw in the thermometer, uh, and then wait. And um take readings every um every little bit, right?
And figure out uh figure out exactly uh how fast the temperature drops. You should be able over the course of a couple of hours to keep it within about five to ten degrees, depending on how good the cooler is, right? So now you know your temperature drop. So what you do is is you say, okay, uh now you the the second thing you need to calculate is the uh weight of the water that you're gonna add and the weight of the meat that you're gonna add, right? Then you calculate the temperature of the meat that you're gonna add, and the uh and then you have to calculate what you want the temperature of the water to be, right?
So let's say you have a 10 degree drop, or let's say you know you're gonna cook it for for an hour and a half, and you know you're gonna get a 10 degree drop over that hour and a half, right? So let's say you're gonna cook at 135, which is about 57, 135, is you want what you want your finished temperature to be. So you start you you want to do your start calculation with the water starting out at 14 uh five degrees, right? Does this make sense so far? Yeah, perfect sense.
Okay. So now you you you know you want a start temperature of 145 degrees. So what you do is is you say, okay, uh, I have let's say uh 30 pounds of water at and you want more water than meat, right? You I have 30 pounds of water at um, you know, at at what what temperature do I have to have that 30 pounds of water to be such that when I add five pounds of meat at you know 40 degrees Celsius, that when you add those things together, the water and the thing average out to being a hundred and um a hundred and fifty um a hundred and fifty, yeah, no, sorry, a hundred and forty-five. Sorry, crap, hundred and six.
It's very hard to do this. You see what I'm saying, right? Do you understand what I'm saying? Absolutely. So, what you want to do is you want to, and here in the easy way for everyone that I've confused with this, is uh it's really hard to do this without a piece of paper in my hands, is look up calculations that brewers use to do strike temperature, right?
And so it's called strike temperature, and that's the the the water that they use when they add uh barley to it, and they want the mash to come out at exactly the right temperature, they do the exact same procedure. So you can use the exact same equation. So I would just go down to any brewing site and uh Brutalheads.com has the strike water temperature calculator. Perfect. So just use that and you should come out all right.
Just make sure that you know what your temperature drop over the course of the intended cooking time is because it's typically gonna be longer than it would be for a brewer on mash out. On mashing, rather. Awesome. Um I have one other question for you, Dave. Just a follow-up from previous show.
Have you have you uh played with an aeropress at all? Played with what no, I haven't. I still haven't gotten one. We have an offer to have uh someone give us theirs. I would I as soon as I get one, which I it's just laziness and stupidity, is the only reason I don't have it.
But um no, uh why do you really like it? Um I've had mixed results. It I find it tends to make a very sort of uh flat cup. Um the biggest problem being that I think you're using paper filters with it, and they're not the greatest paper filters. I think uh you'd have a lot like I've uh a place uh has a clover, like an independent coffee shop has a clover machine.
I brought it in and compared, and they make sort of a similar cup because it's a similar technique. Right. But I think a metal filter would make a huge difference in allowing a little more of the oils and uh flavor to get through. So that that's just my observation. I've only had it for about a month though.
Right. Well, I assume you're on the West Coast if you went to a place with a clover. Um, I'm in uh Halifax actually. Oh, really? Oh well, clover clover's a little bit different because clover doesn't use any pressure, and theoretically there's some pressure in the aeropress, uh which is gonna probably change the coffee quality a little bit.
Um because the the clover is basically just using the piston to extract out of the grounds, it's not using it uh uh uh under any really elevated pressure. Um But yeah, and I need to I'll I need to I need to play with it. Coffee geek is obviously is a good place to go because people have done uh aeropress work, uh a lot of aeropress work. But um anyway, but please get back to us with the results of your of your got cooler uh cooking and tell us what happens. I will, Dave.
Thank you so much, man. All right, thank you. All right. All right, you do. And I we have one last question, I hope to get to.
I have to go fast because Nastasha's giving me that evil look. Um, okay. And unfortunately, this question's a little long. They say, sorry. If I add liquid to a Ziploc bag and then cook a chicken breast sous vide, isn't the flavor going to be leached out into this liquid?
I read in your low temperature primer that the water hot dogs are cooked in uh reaches equilibrium with the hot dogs, and so the flavor's not altered, and that this water is is reused all the time uh and so it's okay for the hot dogs. It doesn't change the flavor. But this uh it seems impractical at home, as I only cook chicken breasts every few weeks or something. Is there a way to safely store the stock uh that you use uh for cooking chicken breasts this way and reuse it? Straining and freezing the stock uh seem uh stock seems an obvious approach, but is that the best way?
Does the repeated freezing and thawing diminish the quality of the stock, or should you always add pre-made stock to it? All right. Um okay, here's my feeling on this. Uh you can freeze stock no problem and rethought. It doesn't hurt the quality of it.
The main problem with quality is uh with with uh with freezing things, as long as you actually contain them tight and you don't have uh oxygen touching them and and there's not a lot of fat in them so that they can go have rancidity problems. The main problem is actually just cells are being uh dehydrated and don't rehigh hydrate properly in freeze thaw cycles or gels break and things like that. You don't care if the gelatin breaks because you're gonna heat it again to the point where the gelatin's gonna melt again anyway. And there's no cells to lose quality. So soup can be and stocks can be repeatedly uh frozen and thawed as long as you're not like damaging them with uh oxygen content or if there's a lot of fat, or if you're having a problem like that.
Um so I wouldn't definitely I would definitely would not worry about reusing straining and reusing the stock again and again and again. You can also poach in a very, very small amount of liquid. Like if you're uh when I do chicken, I basically I will, and this speaks to the later part of the question, which I don't have time to to read. But uh when I do chicken now, typically what I'll do is I'll I'll salt them and actually add a little sugar because I'm a cheater uh instead of brining, and then I'll put it into my into my Ziplocks and I'll add a little bit of milk, but just enough to get a good seal on it. So it's not really sucking that much flavor uh out of the chicken.
Uh but uh that stuff actually is good as a soup base because it's got chicken flavor and you know it's salty already. You don't can't use it straight as is because it's usually too salty. But I I do that and then I use it for a different preparation, right? So you can do that, but that does dilute the chicken flavor somewhat, but not a lot. But you could definitely just reuse it.
Um the other question you had is adding liquid to a steak cook sous vide seems weird to me, especially if pre-seared. Uh, can I apply the principles you teach me on cooking the chicken breast this way to cooking steak or other meats? I would not add water to a steak in the bag or a liquid. I've done tests with stock, and it's okay. And obviously, we do uh super reduction of uh meat juices for when we're doing uh short ribs and stuff like that, but they're very, very, very reduced because they need to be not that much thicker than a braising sauce uh not that much thinner than a braising sauce, even after the meat exudes all its juices as it's cooking.
So I typically actually don't like to use liquids in the bag with a steak, uh liquid water based liquids. I use butter, right? So what I'll do when I'm cooking a steak in a Ziploc bag, and this is what I recommend to you, is I use butter. Uh and I and if you like garlic, a good thing to do is to chop up garlic and throw it in the bag with the melted m molten butter, uh, seal it, cook it that way in the bag, and then that butter is then immediately useful for garlic bread, which guess what? Goes deliciously with steak.
I mean, really deliciously. In fact, what I do is I pour out the butter uh and the juices that came out of the steak, strain out the garlic, because then you don't want that to burn, right? And the garlic flavor is already in the butter. Then I whisk the I whisk the meat uh juices and the butter together a lot, and then pour it directly on the bread, and then fire that bread while I'm searing the steak, and both things come out at the same time, and everybody is happy, even my hyper finicky kids. Um, I'm being told that we are out of time.
Is that correct, Jack? What? That was a yes. That was a yes. All right.
Well, listen, this has been a very fun episode of Cooking Issues, and come back next week and give us all your questions. Whoa! They say the bigger the headache, the bigger the peel, baby. Call me the big peel. Dr.
Funkenstein, the disco thing with the monster sound. The cool gooe with the bone transplant. Hip bone connected to my thigh bone. My thigh bone connected to my leg bone, my leg bone connected to my ankle bone. I get so hung up on bones.
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