You're listening to the Heritage Radio Network. Cooking issues will be live shortly. Dave's held up and he'll be here as soon as he can. And it's late. You got my head all twisted.
And I guess can't get it straight. You're listening to the Heritage Radio Network. I'm Sam Edwards. I'm third generation Cure Master from S. Wallace Edwards and Sons in Surrey, Virginia.
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Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues here with Nastasha the Hammer Lopez, coming to you live from the studio behind Roberta's Pizzeria in Brooklyn on this rainy, rainy day. I just biked here in the rain, so I'm thoroughly soaked, negating any morning shower that I took. How are you doing, Nastasha? I'm doing okay, Dave.
Yeah? Mm-hmm. So last week, a big uh a big week for us. We moved all of our stuff, junk, crap, from the French Culinary Institute to the new company headquarters in Brooklyn. Can't believe I'm actually a Brooklyn guy now.
I still live in Manhattan, though, for all you keeping track of this kind of stuff. But our new offices are in Williamsburg in the uh in the milk bar commissary in the back. They have a little extra storage space. So we've moved up from a trash room at the French culinary, which was our former lab, reverted back to a trash room several weeks ago. We've moved up in the world to back of the warehouse space.
Right? So anyway. We haven't set up yet. All of our crap is literally in the pile in the middle of the in the middle of the space. I'm waiting for a couple of weeks to see whether uh see what I can do to build it out so we can actually have a sink and uh start cooking again.
But it should be exciting, right, Nastasha? Yes, it should. We haven't thought of a name for the new company yet. Uh we plan on making kitchen equipment, both for professionals and for home people. And we're gonna keep our hand in the cooking biz, right?
Mm-hmm. Yeah. So uh any names would be uh appreciated for the company. Any we've had only terrible ideas, right? Yeah.
Like it's like not even like many of them like not even able to be mentioned on the air, the ideas, right? Yeah. Yeah. Hor horrible, horrible, horrible, offensive, offensive stuff. Okay, so uh call in all of your questions to 718-497-2128.
That's 718-497-2128. We're gonna be here for the next 40 minutes or so. So please call in with all of your questions, cooking related or not. Mostly they're cooking related. Yeah, mostly unfortunately, right.
Okay, uh, by the way, Nastasha, are you keeping the surprise? What do you have for the uh the middle music, the uh break music? Did you mention that? I didn't even think of anything. Well, you have a couple minutes.
You can scroll around on your iPod for some for some good business. Nastasha's been messing with the with the music. We had two weeks of Hollow Notes and what do we have? Good morning, gents, uh, writes uh Urike Sterling. Uh I have recently become very interested in high pressure molding without binders, no egg, etc., of certain starches, namely different potatoes, uh tubers, I guess, yucca, melanga, etc.
I was wondering if any of you had any experience in this, and if not, where to look within the food manufacturing bids for such a request. Okay, well, I'm gonna make some assumptions. I encourage you to write in with more uh details about exactly what you're trying to do, but I'm assuming if you're gonna high pressure mold starch without uh you know binders such as egg, that you're talking about uh tablet formation, uh, you know, compressing into tablet form. There are other things, obviously, that you can do under under very high pressures, you can mold starches into plastics, but I'm just gonna, for the purposes of this and discussion, assume that you mean tablets. Uh so uh we've actually discussed this a little bit on one of the programs a long time ago, right?
Tablet making. It's actually something that uh we haven't done, or I haven't done, but uh am extremely interested in. I need to buy a uh tablet maker. Is it's it's on my list of things to do because we want to make our own uh tablets and mints. In fact, I almost got a consulting gig a while ago where we would have had to make a bunch of pills, but that what happened with that?
We just fell through whatever. Anyway. Um, so the deal is right that uh the different types uh uh I encourage you to look at this paper from 1987 by C. E. Boz, B O S, uh entitled Native Starch in Tablet Formations Properties on Compaction.
And it's a good first it's even though it's old, it's a good first starting for uh compression of uh of starches, specifically starches and native starches, because a lot of times when they're gonna make uh tablets, they don't use native starches. They use starches either that have been pre gelatinized or they use starches that have been um uh modified in some way, acid modified, or did different modifications to alter the uh properties of the finished tablet to make them harder, to make them break up either easier or or or or harder, things like that. But I will say this the actual type of starch that you use makes a huge difference in how the tablet is formed. So the way the tablet is formed is usually mix up the starch with and it's in the in the business, this is called uh an excipient. It's basically the non-active ingredient.
So you would be adding in whatever the active ingredient is, flavor or you know, aspirin, you know, uh whatever it is, a celsi acidic acid, whatever the heck aspirin is, I can never remember. Mix it in, and then you put it into a metal dye that's shaped however you want it, and you compress it. Now the compression is quite severe. Um I don't know exactly, but it's on the order of like 18,000 psi, like on in that order of magnitude, 18,000 psi. So it's easier for you to use much smaller dyes so that you don't need as much physical tons of pressure pushing down to make a make a tablet, right?
Now, uh typically also they'll add other things to it like lubricants so that it doesn't heat up and so that it flows well in the dye when it's compressing, right? So you'd think that you're not adding um any binders, but in fact, moisture, the amount of moisture that's in the starch is very important. So it it turns out that you want about 10% moisture, uh total moisture in the starch, which is kind of normal in a relatively humid uh environment out in the world. So even though you're not adding things like water, there are things like water present. Also, aside from the type of starch being very important, the um the way the starch is milled, right?
Whether it's in fine granules or in larger pieces makes a big difference on how the uh on how the finished tablet's gonna be. So it's a very complicated subject, one I'm very interested in, uh, but unfortunately don't know a lot about, but hopefully I've given you uh a good place to start, right, Nastasha? Mm-hmm. Yeah? Anyway, okay.
So, let's go to our next question. We just got something in interestingly. Uh listeners will know that we are interested in uh the uh irradiation of corn to make different genetic mutations. Uh turns out, uh we you know we'll call it nuclear corn. Turns out we got a uh a write-in from trying to find out who sent us the who sent us the post.
Here it is. J.R. Nelson sent us some interesting stuff uh this morning on uh mutation breeding. So that's the technical term the for you know new you know, radiating stuff until she mutates and forms new stuff. Anyway, so the technical term is mutation breeding, which sounds a lot a lot better.
But um J.R. writes in and says he came across a news bit today where the uh University of California Riverside, which is the uh people who handle a lot of the citrus for for our country, the germplasm for citrus, they basically I think I think they run the uh the United States' uh our federal citrus program, pretty sure, for germplasm. Anyway, I have to look it up. But UC Davis uh and I guess at New C Riverside just announced they created a new mandarin uh called uh the Kinno L S. Now Kinno is actually a very it's an old uh venerated uh mandarin.
Delicious. Nastasha and I had it when we visited uh uh when we visited uh uh Gene Lester's citrus uh ranch out in uh in Watlow. It's great. Uh problem is Kinno has a whole boatload of seeds. So what they did was is they just nuked a whole bunch of I guess budwood of uh kinnow.
They just nuked it uh and then you know, propagated it, and they got a kinno that had uh that had a lower sea count. Now they don't necessarily actually have to use irradiation, they just most of the time do. Uh they can use other sorts of chemical things, mugens, teratogens, things like this, to do it. But uh he sent that in and there's a picture of this new uh breed, Kino uh L S for l for low seed or less seeds. Uh so go take a look at another fine example nuclear oranges of better fruit through radiation right you know what the thing is uh I think a lot of people probably are freaked out by this kind of thing and it's the same kind of uh un you know unthinking uh fear of things that um that brought us the term uh NMR right so you're familiar with uh well you're not familiar with MRI feel familiar with MRIs when you go to the hospital you get an MRI Nastasha me yeah yeah MRI yeah magnetic resonance imaging yes you go and they take a picture of your body yeah well actually that's a phenomenon called NMR nuclear magnetic resonance and in fact they changed the name from NMR nuclear magnetic resonance to MRI magnetic resonance imaging because patients were literally afraid to get in a machine with the word nuclear attached to it.
It's crazy right and it's the other thing is that a lot of people are against uh irradiated uh foodstuffs for preservation right now there are several reasons to be against irradiated foodstuffs for preservation so basically you can take food fruits whatever expose them to very high levels of uh of gamma radiation right you know x-rays and and such things and kill all the bacteria in them right make them pretty much uh sterile as a preservation technique and you don't have to heat it right which is great and you can do it when it's already packaged with without heat so it's fan you know can be fantastic. Now there are some reasons to be against this uh to be against irradiating food one is it can destroy the texture of the food right then that's valid. Really think Nastasha that's a thought yes uh uh but there are uh are other reasons that are not valid for instance people think that somehow they are going to get uh uh cancer from eating irradiated food or somehow the food itself becomes radioactive. This is not a fair characterization of what happens. But it's another situation where uh you know adding the word radiation or nuclear makes something all of a sudden horrible in people's eyes.
So hopefully they don't get that feeling with uh with our nuclear corn and our nuclear uh and our nuclear mandarins, although apparently they're not gonna advertise that fact. Anyway, we have a caller there, Jack? Or are they just ordering a pizza? I think they're just ordering a pizza. Yeah.
You got a caller? All right, caller, you are on the air. Are there any studies that have proven that GM foods are bad? I can recognize this voice from through the radio. This is uh Patrick Martins, uh uh the person who's working with us on the Museum of Food and Drink Fundraiser, the founder of this radio network and the founder of Slow Foods USA and Heritage Foods.
How are you doing today, Patrick? Good, thanks for having me. All right, so um the question was uh uh are there any references on uh uh GMOs saying that they're actually bad? Well, I just read this quote from Bill Gates that says, I hate that all these sustainable food groups keep saying that our work is bad, you know, through the Gates Foundation, and that keep falsely accusing you know GM foods of being bad. So of course I'm being like, well, there's gotta be a study somewhere, but I haven't ever found one, and I've asked people, and no one can think of a study that proves that it's bad.
Yeah, it's because there isn't one. Yeah, I mean, but here's the problem. I think a lot of people, uh, you know, way back in the day in the uh in the 80s, right? You know, if you're familiar with Jeremy Rifkin, right? I mean, he would come out against any of these uh kind of genetic things, and basically, in in his mind, all things trace to some some form of awful Armageddon at the hands of people that are doing genetic um genetic modifications.
Now, there are arguments, I don't really I don't really know them well enough to uh to give them to you in any sort of form that doesn't seem derogatory to them, if that you know gives you an idea of where I am. There are arguments uh that there are things that can possibly go wrong. So one of the problems with GMO, one of the problems with GMO crops, right, is uh here's one. This is a real one. One of the problems with GMO crops is that you could you're Monsanto, let's say, or someone else, and you own a GMO crop, you now have a patent on that crop, right?
You own it. So then um one of your seeds, some of your genetics can get uh float over uh you know into somebody else's field, right, and contaminate their field with your uh genetics. And then um, you know, you're selling your product because you're a normal farmer, and then Monsanto comes and sues you for stealing their uh genetics, and all you've done is save your seeds year after year, and some of Monsanto's seeds have gotten mixed in, not because you've bought it or stole it, but because their seeds have fallen onto your property, right? And so there are some legal ramifications of GMO that have put some farmers in some pretty tough spots uh as a result of uh uh of of that kind of uh transfer, right? I mean, there's also the possibility that someone could release a some sort of uh gene into the environment that turns out to be harmful 10, 15 years down the road, but the same could be said of um breeding a plant, you know, nor normally or any sort of normal thing.
There's always the possibility with new with new breeding. So the the real question is aside from patent infringement and you know and the legal issues that are involved in there, the question is is how is genetically how are genetically modified uh products fundamentally different from um the breeding that's been going on for hundreds of years, and in fact, is espoused by the same people as being great, as that that hate the GMO, right? Those same people love the fact that we have thousands of cultivars that have been bred over hundreds of years and are being preserved generation after generation. That's considered an absolute good by almost everyone in the field. Everyone, including the people who are doing GMOs, because it gives them a base of gene plasm to work from and to and to add with you know to things with.
But um, you know, most of my criticism of it just comes from the fact that the GMO stuff is usually shooting at stuff that I don't care about. It's the other uh problem is is that it can add to monoculture uh problems. If they come up with something that basically, if there's fire blight out there, let's say, and they come up with a product that is resistant to fire blight and it becomes the only product out there, well then when the next disease comes, they'll get wiped out, right? So there's there's all of these kind of arguments of how it can be bad, but I I don't know of any fundamental reason why they're why they're bad. Does that make sense?
Yeah, well, thanks for your time. I mean, do you agree or disagree? Yeah, no, I mean uh well, I mean, I I wouldn't I'm of course instinctively I always think that I want to find something that, you know, maybe that at least to say the jury's not out yet as to whether or not a lifetime of GMO consumption is bad. And you know, but right now, you know, uh other than that, it's true, you know, it's to say like if we don't own our seeds, then you know, is that bad? But it relates to the patent infringement.
Um I mean, would you go so far as to say the jury's not out? Well whether or not it's healthy or not? I'm always I'm always willing to be proved wrong on anything. I'll say that I haven't heard any uh argument um that that shows that it's that it's detrimental to us from a health standpoint. Right.
And you know, and and people say, well, if you don't know, then you can't do it. But there's plenty of things like that in the world where we we've wait weighed the risks and and we do it, you know. Um I think um, you know, I sure I'm willing to be I'm willing to be proven wrong, but I think it's like everything else in this field. The GMO is a tool. It's a tool.
And it's um it and it's been used incorrectly by a lot of people to do a lot of awful stuff, you know. And I think that what we need to do is not focus our enmity on the tool. Don't don't look at the at the hammer as the as the bad thing. Look at the carpenter swinging the hammer as the bad thing. You know, it's so it's like look at the way these tools are used and get angry about that and not about the tool itself.
Exactly. Okay, interesting. Well, I agree. All right. All right, and and Patrick and Nastash and I are gonna be working very soon.
If anyone out there is listening, we're gonna be doing a search very soon for an administrative fundraiser for the Museum of Food and Drink, right, Patrick? Yep. And uh, and then in about what do you think, Nastasha? Six months' time? Yeah.
Six months' time, we're gonna be doing a fundraiser much like the one we did here in New York at Del Posto several weeks ago. We're gonna be doing one in uh the Bay Area. Am I right? Do we have the location hammered down, Patrick? Uh no, but we have a few people who would like to do it.
Um, you know, we've expressed uh time uh interest from Shea Banese, although they're dealing with their 40th anniversary. So when is there 40th? Yeah, 40th anniversary. Um so anyway, you know, it's gonna be interesting, and I think there's about 10 or 12 chefs that have already want to participate. So it's gonna be pretty kick-ass.
Yeah, so for those of you lunatics who missed out, you know what? Well, I was thinking about this. If we had just told people on the air that, you know, you're gonna have like one of the greatest meals ever, it cost 250 dollars and it and it didn't have anything to do with fundraising, it's it should have it it would have it should have sold sold out, right? It's like it's like we don't even basically even need to tell them that it's going for a good cause because the meal is was is that good. Am I right, Patrick?
Yeah, it was really one of a kind. I mean, everyone was saying that. No one had ever had a meal like that, especially with all that talent. Right. So when we do it on the West Coast, you fools better not miss it.
Am I right? You're right. Alrighty, all right. We're gonna go to our first break. Call in all of your questions to 718-497-2128.
That's 718-497-2128 cooking issues. Oh, Al Green. I'm so in love with you. Whatever you want to do. So brand.
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So Rick Richard uh uh Kokovich called uh wrote in a comment on an ongoing discussion on the Aero Press Coffee Maker here. And it's gotta be the most embarrassing thing for me in the world that it's like a $30 item that we've discussed multiple times on this dang show, and we've had multiple questions about it. It's so easy to get. I could literally go on Amazon. One would show up at my doorstep tomorrow morning, and I can know from first hand experience how the dang thing is working.
And instead, through laziness and uh inertia, we have not done it. So let's make a pact that today, even we've even been offered to given one by some of our listeners, and we're just too lazy and stupid to take them up on it. So when this show is over, one of the first things I do before I order a delicious pizza from Roberta's and salad, which is what we always get as our post-show uh meal here. Uh I'm going to go on Amazon and uh Amazon Prime order us a an Aeropress coffee. Yes?
Yes. Okay. Richard writes in and says, Hi, I've been using my Aero Press for all my coffee needs, and he switched from the French press. And the comments that we've had on the show about the uh about the Aero Press's filter and flat taste are in his experience accurate. A couple of months ago, he had some guests for breakfast and whipped out the 51 ounce uh French press and the Aero Press, and the difference in flavor profile was noticeable.
The French press tasted brighter than the Aero Press with the same beans. Uh uh one of our listeners also mentioned that he thinks the filter is to blame because the paper is basically absorbing uh the coffee oils, right, and absorbing some of the flavor. And uh Richard uses the uh this filter uh several times to try and uh I guess saturate it with flavor so it doesn't uh uh uh suck any more out. But uh he thinks that's the reason that the taste is flat, and so he suggests that all the listeners out there, and we'll get one of these too is maybe is the Coava Disc, C-O-A-V-A, metal uh adapter filter disc for the Aero Press Coffee. So go check that one out.
Uh and check out the forums on coffee geek.com, which is uh, you know, I think probably one of the best websites for coffee that there is. I mean, I I used to go to it um all the time. Uh so anyway, good good to look at. But that brings us to coffee. Last week, what what day was it, Nastasha?
Tuesday. No, the coffee thing we did. Saturday. Saturday. Saturday.
Oh, yeah, Saturday. So Saturday night uh I judged along with uh um you know a couple other people the the latte a a latte art championship. So for those of you, I don't know, who've been buried under a rock for the last you know four years or so, latte art is where you uh draw pretty pictures in a in a latte uh and there's two different with milk, and there's two different ways of doing it. There's what's called free pour, where basically you just take a cup with espresso in it and you're uh pouring it, uh pour the milk into it. The milk has to be foamed in a very specific way to create something called a micro foam that doesn't have any big bubbles in it, right?
And the coffee has to be perfect with a nice crema, and you do what's called a free pour where you pour and you can make swans and and rosettas and tulips and hearts and all this. And you know, i i we judged on a various criteria like how good the contrast was between the darks and the lights, how symmetric they were, how much of the cup was being used. These guys are pretty good. They can they mean like I can't do it. I'm gonna be honest with you, I can't do it.
But uh what's really interesting is um is I was talking, and one of the judges is was the three-time uh Brazil all-time champion Barista. Her name just went out of my head, but I'll look it up. And she was uh she she was telling me we're talking about coffee, and I haven't really been involved uh with hardcore coffee espresso research in a long time. And one of the things that's happened in the past uh four years is um for those of you who don't drink espresso, start drinking espresso, but you know the what used to be a shot of espresso was a little under an ounce uh per shot, right? And so if you were gonna use like you would use like a 13 or 14 grams of coffee, ground coffee, to make like an ounce and a half to an ounce and three-quarter double, right?
That used to be kind of standard. Now people have upped it, it's like crept, and now it's gone up to like 16 grams of coffee, and they're pulling like an ounce out of it or less. And so that's you know, a ristretto, but rostretos have gotten preposterous over the past couple of years. Like you just get these tiny like little wisps of coffee on the bottom of your cup, and they're delicious, right? They can be delicious.
Um, but I'm just interested if any of our listeners, if they want to chime in, what they think about this creep towards hyper ristretos and uh what that's doing. It's definitely making us plow through a whole boatload of coffee. And so I started playing with it home, and I kind of I kind of like these like like super ristretto, but I'm trying to find a good middle balance. Anyway, that that's just a that's just amusing. Okay, Roy from Chicago, and I was supposed to talk about this at the top of the program.
Roy from Chicago uh wrote in, what happened to the blog? Are you still doing posts? A couple of things have happened to the blog, Roy. One, we were hacked uh about a week ago, and our site periodically keeps going down because uh of the hacking. So I know and I apologize to all of our listeners out there that um sometimes it's difficult uh to get into this site, and we're we're looking at it, we're we're we're trying to h uh hire a contract killer to go find out uh who it was that messed with our blog and uh execute them in a in a slow and painful fashion.
Yes? Yeah. Yes. He's still doing posts. Well, yeah.
The second thing is is that uh is that there has been, let's just say, a dearth of posts recently. Um I I am working to remedy that. Uh I have a post up right now that is uh still in draft phase about how uh about the museum, and I have at least five, six, seven posts in the wings waiting to be posted. Part of the reason that we haven't been posting, and these are just lame excuses, is because uh we're working we were working before very hard on the museum uh fundraiser, and then for the past two weeks we've been working very, very hard on on trying to figure out our new company and how we're actually gonna make a living and not uh, you know, leave our our f you know homeless, become homeless. Like that's kind of the main thing right now.
Um so uh yes, we will be we will be ramping up. As I said before, uh I will be contractually obliged to do for a month. We're gonna stick to that starting next week. I make it my pledge. Uh I'm also gonna try to start doing a lot of shorter posts.
I've kind of been uh slammed into these like two, three thousand, four thousand word posts, and it makes it very hard, especially because I like uh trying to get them as uh accurate as possible, and so it's uh difficult. These are just all stupid excuses. So, Roy, my apologies to you. And we will be uh up and running, hopefully hacker-free and also uh um more regular in the near future. Nistacha?
Uh yes. Any any comments? Uh no. You said it all. Yeah.
That that sounds like me. Alright. Uh, long time uh listener and actually person who went to our uh fundraiser, Colin uh wrote in, and he says, Dear flavor uh Dava Flav. I like that Dave of Flav. I always have to read his things relatively uh word for word so you get a feeling for his question, although sometimes I have to excise curses from them.
Anyway, egg yolks are kick-ass. I think I can say that. Right? Egg yolks are kick-ass, low temp egg yolks, especially kick ass. I have a few questions surrounding the gooey uh gooey golden orbs of goodness.
I want to end up with sheets of duck egg yolk that can be handled and drape over goose breast. For chicken eggs, I saw Alex and Aki, that's Alex Nackey of Ideas and Food, friends of ours, recommend uh 63.8 degrees Celsius, and my chart says more like 66 C. I haven't tried either with chicken eggs, but I tested them with duck eggs and found that 63.8 didn't seem firm enough. Uh I took them to 655 instead of 66 since it was preset into his old analog circulator. That yolk was still a bit gooey.
I thought, but don't have any examples to compare to other than the photos. The duck egg yolk seems a bit fattier to me, which might explain why it didn't seem as firm. Freezing after rolling out the yolk did help make it possible to cut and handle for about 10 seconds, but the whole sheet quickly got soft and goopy again. Strong enough to hold its shape when draped, but still a saucier consistency than I was expecting. Here are my questions.
That wasn't the question that was the prating. I've seen eggs cooked whole and then egg yolks removed for sheet rolling. Will egg yolks cooked to the same consistency as separated with raw, put in a ziploc and circulated to the desired temperature. This is what I did since I had other plans for the whites. Did I throw off the pH perhaps?
I don't know. I've never had a satisfactory answer for this, Colin, but I'll tell you this. Egg yolks cooked separately from uh egg whites do not have the same texture as ones that are cooked in the whole egg and then the whites uh used for some other purpose but removed after cooking. I don't know why this is. Wiley Dufrain asked me this, I don't know, maybe five years ago, and I didn't know why then.
I uh four years ago maybe I don't know why now. I've asked Harold, we don't know why, but when I'm doing a lot of these things, I will cook the, we will cook the yolks um in the egg and then remove them and use the whites as like uh as a uh cooked whites as an ingredient. There are dishes that I've done with egg yolks where I've mixed egg yolks with transglutaminase and salt and then put them into a zip and then uh and then cook them to create a sauce, but I've never done it for sheets. You can if you want to cook them separately, you can firm them up a bit by adding transglutaminase uh activa to it. It'll firm it up, especially if you cook it to the higher temperatures.
But if you add salt, that's gonna make them uh hold less. So you're not gonna want to add salt before you cook them. You can add salt after you cook them. It does make them look cool, it makes them look like icing when you add the salt. Okay.
Uh second question. If putting separated but intact raw eggs in the bag is okay, will the yolks also achieve the desired consistency if they're broken mixed together first? I've tried uh holding them whole versus splitting them. I haven't seen that much of a difference, but I think it might make a difference. So if you're gonna try and do it in the bag, I would hold them whole.
Um three, what procedure do you use when you make yolk sheets? Uh what I do is I cook them to about 66 degrees uh or or thereabouts uh for an hour, chill them, break out the yolks, smash the yolks together, uh, roll them uh between two sheets of plastic wrap and then uh and then and then cook them out. Yeah, I agree that Alex and Aki's 63.8 is too low. That's gonna be just barely set and not really good for sheeting unless you kind of freeze it out first. And fourthly, uh, last question on the eggs.
What are the differences between duck egg yolk and chicken egg yolk and how may this be affecting the texture I'm seeing? I don't know. They are slightly different. We've been keep cooking them the same temperature at the school, but I haven't done enough textures w uh tests with duck egg yolk to know for certain. Uh same with quail.
I do know that the proteins are slightly different, which is why it's easier to make uh transparent uh eggs with lye with duck eggs than with chicken. But uh uh come back to us when you get uh some more experience and see whether you agree. Caller, do we have a caller? Yeah. Caller, you are on the air.
Hi, this is hi, this is Brian. How are you guys? Doing all right, how you doing? Great. Um got a question.
I don't have a smoker. Thought about uh buying those Bradley smokers. Um, but I'm interested in doing some hacks uh at at home. Right. Um uh in either my Weber uh or in my oven or in indoors.
So I'm wondering if I want to do a DIY smoker setup, both both for um cold smoking and hot smoking. Um any suggestions? So you want to do it without um without buying the Bradley. Basically you want like as as as inexpensive as is humanly possible, right? Um but safe relatively.
I like relatively safe. Assuming you have an outdoor space, it's not gonna catch on fire. Um I have a little balcony. Right. So okay.
So you're live in an apartment, you know. Oh yeah, not a lot of space. I know. I know how that is. I know how that is.
All right, so the so hot smoking. Right. Hot smoking is relatively easy. So with that, you could probably modify the Weber just by putting like a hot plate that you get at, you know, uh the CVS or the right aid, whatever cheapest, like find one on the street, whatever. Modify a hot plate to use as your heat generator, and you could generate smoke that way in and it'd probably work in a Weber.
You know, they used to sell, and they I'm sure they still do, basically just cylinders, which were, you know, modified drums, like 30 gallon drums, and they and they had a uh you know just a crappy electric heating element in the bottom of them that you could adjust the temperature of so that your heat wouldn't go either too low or too high. Soak the chips and put them in uh in uh aluminum foil or something like that, put it on the on the heating element and go, right? And so then you know the next level on that is if do you want to temperature control that on the hot smoke side, right? Then you could do stuff like um add a PID controller uh that instead of adjusting the smoking temperature would adjust probably the draft the vents right and like turn on a fan and extract smoke out to adjust the temperature something like that, right? Uh so like you know that is you know relatively cheap and easy.
Now the question is if you want to do legitimate cold smoke, what you have to do is separate the smoke generator from the uh from the actual cabinet where you're where you're smoking. And so typically what people will do is they'll they'll build a box fireproof preferably that uh but you could use almost anything and put the that as long as it's not going to melt and then put the uh the heat generator in the smoke generator rather in that and then just take pipe like cheap uh uh cheap you know galvanized duct pipe that you could get at uh you know home depot or any one of these places and then connect the duct pipe from the smoke generator to whatever you're gonna smoke in and again that what you're gonna smoke in can be anything that is kind of food grade that's gonna take the heat so people use refrigerators people use uh whatever you know uh what as long as it contains the as long as it contains the the smoke then you um then basically you know if the smoke's not cold enough you either extend the length of the pipe or I know some people have like put water over the pipe or packed ice around to try and get the temperature down so now you can get a really nice cold cold smoke um but uh then if you want to actually then increase the heat in the smoking cabinet you have to put in a separate element to provide heat to the cabinet. Does that make sense? What do you mean by the separate al element because you've you well once the smoke is cold once the smoke is is cold smoke then if you actually want to cook at the same time with the smoke you actually have to heat the cabinet. Or I you know or you could just reduce the length of the pipe to a thing I guess to jack the heat up um or vent it less it'll eventually will accumulate uh will accumulate uh this stuff there's a whole bunch and I haven't built one uh in since literally since I was in high school was the last time I built which is you know a long long time ago I built one for my mom but um uh it's been a long time since I've built one just because I've been in the city this whole time and I and I don't even have a balcony which is pathetic.
Uh you know on the cheap side for a smoker if you want to get buy one that's a hot smoker that works fairly well and I know Wiley used it but it doesn't have anywhere near good temperature control is uh the uh I think Little Chief is the name of the smoker and it's basically a box with the heating element in the bottom. And that thing works great and I know people have customized that one. I think there's little chief and it might be a big chief. They've customized that one to get um to get lower temperatures. I know Nils did some work with that and like I say Wiley's been using that for a long time.
So that's a good entry level just do you s could buy that and then have the pipe set up as well. And then hack it. Yeah buy that one and you can start with hot smoking and it works great and is small and is like relatively friendly, like sits out and plugs in. It's not huge. It's like you know, can fit on a tabletop.
And uh and and that, like I said, that's the one that Wiley used for a long time, and and we got one at the school and Nills used it. And then um and then you can start hacking with that to try and get the temperature down by adding uh adding different controls or venting it more, or trying to remove the smoke generator from the cabinet. Mm-hmm. Got it. Um I I I have another barbecue related question, if I can ask it now.
All right. Um I've been reading about this Japanese charcoal, the binsoton charcoal. What's the what's the deal with that? It it seems like it's kind of smokeless, it lasts a long time. Um it looks really cool, it's an extremely expensive stuff, you know.
And so what they'll do is like they'll cook with it inside. I mean, look, Japanese they're cooking inside with charcoal and have for a long time. I guess they're not as culturally worried about the carbon monoxide poisoning as we are. Like, if you open look at any bag of charcoal produced in the US, it has warnings all over it never to ever even think of lighting it indoors, right? Uh and so uh those guys, uh the binshoton guys, I mean they they cook inside all the time with it.
And in fact, they did a demo at the school a couple of years back that had a really awesome uh they they built a sand pit that the binsoton was cooked in, they built the fire with the binshoton uh charcoal in the sandpit, and then we're cooking over that. Um and I I got to play with the charcoal with the binsoton and and look at it, and indeed it does have very low smoke output, right? Uh but here's the de here's the deal, right? Uh it's I can't dis I could not discern the difference between binshoton and high quality uh American produced hardwood charcoal, right? So if you go and you look at the bag of charcoal that you bought and it looks like chunks of wood that are black, right?
You were gonna be able to get the same results. This is my opinion talking here. This is not that I've done a side by side, but uh having lit a whole bunch of uh of like good old fashioned like hardwood charcoal, like it does to my mind the same kind of job that the bintroton does. It's just not nearly as expensive, right? They the the one that's not gonna work the same way as the bintroton are the compressed briquettes, right?
Those are gonna but it doesn't look like wood. Right, doesn't look like wood. And those things have usually been treated with uh often have been treated with something, right? So they're they operate fundamentally differently than these ones that look like chunks of wood. Now, the other reason why the Japanese system is theoretically smokeless, right, is because the way that they cook in it is they'll stick their food on the end of a skewer, embed the skewer in the sand, uh not over the bintroton, but next to the bintroton, right?
So the the heat the heat from the from the bintoton charcoal is radiating out and cooking it such that the fat from the meat is not dripping onto the the bintroton. As soon as fat and liquid start dripping onto the charcoal, I don't care what you're using, you're gonna get smoke, right? Right? Flare up. Right there's yeah, there's but but you know the the good news for flare-ups, and I've said this forever, and Nathan Mirvold and Chris Young have basically now are all you know, they say it in their book, so I feel like vindicated, is that uh that's where the flavor comes from, is the flare-ups.
You know what I mean? Like that, like or at least part of the flavor that I really like comes from this combustion that happens during the flare-ups. Uh and so if you don't have things dripping on the charcoal, you might get some sort of smokiness, and if you did, that would kind of negate any sort of theory they have that it's absolutely smokeless because you've got some sort of flavor off the fact that you've combusted something, right? But uh, but in fact, uh I like a little bit of that s that smoke and and combustion and all that stuff because I think that's where a lot of the good uh flavor comes from. But if you want to experiment with bintroton, I think you could build a like a sand thing and use uh uh like a high quality American hardwood charcoal.
It's not maybe as long as the Binchoton because they're very careful about the shape and the way it looks, because a lot of that is aesthetic in nature, right? I mean, a lot of the Binchoton has to do with uh aesthetics, right? Another interesting thing, it might get me in trouble about Jap the Japanese like the Binchoton thing is is that I don't know that they've uh that the people who are advocates of binsoton have done a lot of experiments with the American product. I think they just see the charcoal briquettes say, you know, Americans don't know jack doodley about uh charcoal, and therefore like this one has to be the best, not saying, hey, here's an American product that might perform the same way. That's just not usually how those demonstrations and discussions happen.
Do you know what I mean? Got it. Got it. Um so with the Bentoton charcoal, I might as well be putting something in the broiler because it's essentially smokeless. It doesn't seem to really uh it's it's not quite the same in terms of barbecue as what you're saying.
Right. Doesn't get those same flavors. I've never done a side-by-side, so I'm gonna I'm hesitant to to to say, yes, that's the case, but you know, for for me, I think that if you're not generating a lot of smoke, you're probably not getting a lot of extra flavor, except for the fact that the way that heat is being delivered is different, right? So assuming that you can get a lot higher uh heat radiation out of co uh coal than you can out of your broiler, especially your average broiler, then yes, maybe it's gonna give a better product, but insofar as it's smokeless, I don't think you're getting an any extra added uh flavor, you know? Great.
Yeah. Thanks. It's really helpful. I really appreciate it, Dave. Thank you.
All right, and on Okay, bye bye. Bye bye. On the way out, we got uh one last question from Colin. Does he do we have any suggestions for how to prepare a wild Canada goose? He wants to jug it in the form of jugged hairs.
Jugging is a technique where you cook meat, usually in a in a container, uh, with that, you know, it basically braises in it in a in a enclosed container and jugged hair and civets and things like that. Uh not civic cats, but civet meaning blood uh sauce with hair is the classic thing. Uh, do we have any suggestions? He tested his sliver at 60 degrees Celsius for 45 minutes, uh, and he didn't like it. And he tried seven hours at 58 uh degrees, and it was also too tough.
Uh couple things on this. I've never cooked Canadian geese, so it's hard for me to say exactly how to cook it. I will say this anything that kills those vicious bastards that Canadian geese are is a good thing. Canadian geese are the most vicious, evil uh creatures. If you've ever had them like land in your area and attack you as you're walking towards uh a pond or a lake, you know how evil they are.
Plus, they poop all over everything. So I encourage the legal bagging and cooking of Canada geese. So we have to come up with a recipe, Canadian geese, though. We have to come up with a recipe. I like them.
You like them? I think they're so pretty. You're from the West Coast, right? I know. That's why.
That's why. I was attacked by one as a kid. Yeah, they're evil, vicious, vicious creatures, as opposed to ducks, which are nice, and yet we eat them all the time. Geese are evil, evil. So that was Jack, by the way, our intrepid uh our intrepid uh engineer.
Okay. So here's my here's the the problem you're gonna have. Uh uh Canadian geese, the breast meat doesn't have a lot of uh connective tissue. So cooking it for a long time isn't going to uh tenderize it very much, in my in my this is my opinion. Now I haven't tried it.
I would try doing around 60 uh three degrees. It depends on how dark the meat is. I would try doing anywhere between 57 and 63 uh for uh 45 minutes. Sounds about right. 58 is gonna be too low.
I'm assuming it's gonna cook more like a chicken, you're gonna want to jack it up. I don't think seven he tried it for seven hours at 58. I don't think that's gonna work. I'm gonna I'm gonna have to Colin get back to you on this one. I'm gonna do some more research on old tough game meets.
I think it's an incredibly important thing for all of us to uh to pay attention to because I'm trying to encourage every hunter in the world to buy a circulator to cook their game meats, right? Every if you are a hunter and you are listening to this and you do not own a circulator, you are doing your meat a disservice. So we gotta figure out how to cook this, Colin, and uh so so give us a call, give us a right, and uh let's figure this out together. This has been Cooking Issues. We're coming back next week on Tuesday.
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