Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues on the Heritage Radio Network. I am the host of Cooking Issues, Dave Arnold here with Nastasha, the Hammer Lopez, coming to you live from Roberta's Pizzeria in Brooklyn, New York. Coming to you every Tuesday from approximately 12 to 1245. Call in all of your cookie related questions to 718 497-2128. That's 718-497-2128.
Actually, Nastasha prefers the non-cookie related questions, right? I do, I prefer issues. Yeah, she he she prefers just straight up issues, and if you knew her better, uh you'd see why. Today's come on now, right? Today's episode is brought to you by the Hearst Ranch.
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Hey, Nastasha, anything uh interesting happened this week? Yeah. What? I can't. Well, you can't devolve it?
No. Really? Yeah. Wow. I'm intrigued.
Do I know this stuff? Yeah. Oh, really? I feel like I feel like I'm being left uh hanging. I'm gonna hear I'm gonna Well, for all of you out there in internet land, I'm gonna get the real skinny when it comes to be pizza time.
By the way, the payment we get for doing this fabulous show every week is a pizza and a salad, correct? Yes. Yes, anyway. Uh not that we not that that's not good enough payment, Jack. Just talking about here.
Oh, uh diet? No, not diet. Regular doctor's pepper for you. Yeah, yeah, okay. Okay, here come the questions from Andrew Cummings.
Hi, Dave and Nastasha. I really like all the stuff you do, apart from providing me with tons of ideas. I think he must be from England. Oh, Australia, I guess he said, right? Because he spells tons in the British fashion.
Hmm. Reading your articles and listening to your radio show, uh, keep my passion for food going. Well, thank you. He's a food technologist. A an honorable profession when done right.
When done right. An honor very honorable profession when done right. Uh he's wondering if I can tell him anything about cinnamon and its gelling effects. A couple of years ago, he was working for a chocolatier uh at a small boutique store and saw that the liquid comp uh component of some panforte, which is a delicious kind of it's weird kind of candy dense sweet from Siena. I actually like it.
Do you like it? I don't know it. You know, it's that really dense, dark with all the nuts and the candy fruit in it. It's got the it's got the wafer paper on the bottom and it it stays good forever, and you slice it into discs into wedges. Is it like uh caramelli?
No, it's not. Imagine like a fruit cake without the cake. Hmm. Anyway, um, but it's it's real dense. Anyway, uh sorry.
Sorry for interrupting the middle of your question there, uh, Andrew. Um so he was making some panforte, and uh the stuff had turned into a thick slime, and he asked his boss about it, and he said it happens whenever he adds a cinnamon, and he looked around on the internet for some explanation as why cinnamon would cause this kind of gelling effect, but could find no academic papers on it. I'm guessing it's probably some polysaccharide uh similar to what's in gum arabic, but he'd like to know uh if it can be extracted and used as a future gelling agent. Well, I was not uh able to find uh any information on that, although there is a polysaccharide in cinnamon that some nut job has named uh cinnamon AX polysaccharide that has some sort of BS health benefit or something like that, but it doesn't say anything about its gelling properties. I doubt it's um exactly similar to gum arabic, because gum arabic isn't just it's not a bark phenomenon, it's a uh it's a sap phenomenon.
So gum arabic is a mix of protein, uh small amount of protein, and gum sap. Um, although there could be some residual stuff in the bark, and clearly there are many barks that are used for thickening. For instance, uh, you know, philae powder, uh, which is that the leaves or the bark? I always forget. Anyways, so yeah, yes, obviously there's probably some sort of um some sort of gelling agent in it.
Another thing is panforte is very, very thick and usually uses uh a boiled sugar component. So it's probably close to gumming up on you anyway. So the addition of anything that's gonna absorb water and have any sort of polysaccharide or water binding effect might cause it to gum up. But um, I'm interested in this. I'm gonna ask Maggie if I have m-naggy.
Niggy. I'm gonna ask uh McGee next time I speak to him if I can remember. An interesting thing is that um cassia, not regular cinnamon, but cassia, uh, has in it uh coomarin, which is an anticoagulant. So the exact opposite of making things thick, making things thin. Anyway, I was not able to find anything, but uh I'm gonna keep my uh ears out for that.
And anyone else, if you hear anything about it or have had experience, please write in and tell us because we're interested in that sort of thing. Okay. I'm gonna go on to Hello from Adam. Adam has a bacon-related question that he hopes we can help him with. You think so?
Baking. Baking. You think we can help? Yeah. I don't know.
Uh, okay. Uh this is actually a pretty complicated one, so I'm just gonna read it straight out. He said, you know, there are plenty of situations where you need to hydrate a dough to work uh to work it, but where uh the gluten formation is the enemy. For instance, pie dough, biscuits, scones, cakes, cookies, etc. To keep the gluten under control, you usually use low-protein flour, avoid overworking, uh, and then add a lot of a fat.
And the fat basically is uh is coating the uh the flour particles and preventing uh the water from forming gluten. Okay. So, and recently he's read about uh experimenting replacing water in a pastry crispy, uh in a pastry crust recipe with vodka, since apparently alcohol doesn't have the gluten-activating properties that water does, uh producing hypothetically producing a crust with even less chewiness than usual. This is true. Uh this is not only for pie crusts, this is also for batters.
So, I mean, the famous examples uh in pie crust land would probably be America's test kitchen. Uh Chris Kimball's um, you know, his show that he's Cook's Illustrated guy, where they have their uh pastry, uh their their pie crust recipe that includes a good portion of vodka in it, uh, does two things. One allows you to add more uh liquid so that you can make it a little more, it's not as uh it's not as flaky, it doesn't come apart in your hands, it volatilizes off and doesn't form a lot of gluten, so it can be rolled without it getting tough, right? So that's one application. Uh the second famous one is probably Heston Blumenthal's uh fish and chips batter, where he will add vodka to the batter to prevent sort of gluten formation to make it stay crisp without it getting tough at all, without the batter getting tough at all, and without having to add a lot of extra uh, you know, uh starch binders other than flour to get it to be uh where he wants.
So these are two very well-known applications of uh alcohol being used as the well, hydrates the wrong word because it's not water, but you know what I'm saying, to give the dough some sort of plasticity. So uh anyway, so uh he goes on and he says, it sounds like the holy grail of pastry crust is a dough with no gluten formation whatsoever. I wonder what would happen if you inhibit uh gluten formation entirely with the starch still being in granular form. I think you still want the granules to be hydrated to some extent, even if they're just swelling and setting uh together in an extremely delicate array with little uh intergranule entanglements so that you're not eating something that's gonna turn it to dust when you uh bite down on it. Well, okay.
Zero gluten formation, uh 100% zero gluten formation is actually quite problematic because it means the dough is extremely hard to work. This is why uh it's very difficult to work many gluten-free recipes, right? So if you're gonna make a I mean, people do make uh pie crusts and whatnot exclusively out of things like potato flour and rice flour for gluten-free recipes, uh, but these doughs are typically extremely hard to handle. The same way that non-flour dumpling wrappers are hard to handle. And the way that those are usually solved is that you will pre-cook, pre-boil uh a portion of your starch so that the starch will entangle itself a little bit to give you a little bit of structure so that you can then uh form it into a workable dough.
So a little bit of gluten formation uh can be helpful for or is always helpful usually in in formation of dough, not so much in batters. Uh so in batters it's not as as big a deal. But anyway, so he so he goes on, and his his last thing is positive, he's saying, a while ago I was talking about the free sauce stability of gelling agents, and this came to mind. What if we had a gel that had poor heat stability so that uh the gel is holding on to most of the water when you're forming the dough, but when it's heated, the gel loses uh its hold on the water and allows it to seep into the flour, um, and that would control the shape of baked goods and make it so that it had a fairly high water content uh without it for having a lot of gluten formation. Well, I'm not sure if that would actually be uh useful or not, but if you want to experiment with it, uh, because you know, in general, like very, very low water formation things still are delicious.
The classic example is shortbread, which is basically, you know, you take uh uh butter and sugar and a tiny bit of flour and just barely get it to hold together and you bake it. And is there anything more delicious than shortbread? No. No? You like it?
I know. Do you like you don't like it? I don't really like it. You don't like shortbread? No.
What? It's like hard tech. Are you nuts? Who made your shortbread? Who made your shortbread?
Jeez, my god. Shortbread like hard tech? My god! Anyway, I'm sorry for that outburst. Uh all right, listen, we have a collarbot.
I'm gonna tell you uh first, try an agar fluid gel. If you want to get something that's going to hold onto water, but at the closer to boiling point, we'll melt out. Capacarogene won't form a fluid gel, so you can't use it even though it's going to melt at a lower temperature. Hard tech indeed. Caller, you're on the air.
Hi, Dave. I love the show, by the way. Lots and lots of useful hints. I have a couple questions about hydrocolides. Alright.
Specifically, I've been using agar and uh guargum together. Sorry, Xantham and Guaragum to stabilize emulsions. Right. And I was wondering, do you have any tips for making them heat resistant? Particularly like a Hollandaise or a Verblon.
Okay. What guar are you using? Uh it's just just as guar gum on it, I got it from Will Powder. Okay, I don't know which um Will's a good guy. Taste it.
If it has a bad taste to it, it means he's sourcing, and it's no offense to him because I don't know what he's sourcing, but he's sourcing an inexpensive guar. Uh and if that has a beanie taste to it, this is before I answer your question. If it has a beanie kind of off taste to it, you're gonna want to call a company called T I C gums uh and get their theirs, which is called uh guar flavor, it's flavor-free guar NT 2000 or some crap like that, but it's flavor-free guar. And that stuff's awesome, right? That stuff's really good.
Now, Will might be sourcing that. So if you taste his guar and it and it tastes okay, then I'd I'd stick stick with it. Uh but if it does have kind of an off taste to you, then um I'd look into getting other guar. Now, what specific problems are you having with stability using that system? Well, what it is is it's uh uh a a reasonable temperature.
It's uh it's very, very stable, more stable than any Hollandaise or Burblan making. But I want something that I can pour onto the plate, like at the same heat that I would pour, like a demiglass or any other typical hot sauce. But when I get up to those temperatures, you know, like the 60 neighborhood, they uh the guard uh won't help it and it just splits eventually. So even at sixty, even at sixty, did you? Well, no, no, I wasn't I wasn't being that precise with my with my measurements because I'm not keeping it in circulators.
I was keeping it trying to keep it just in the traditional steam table where you don't have that c sort of control. So I was wondering like I have methyl cellulose, is there any other products that or or combinations or percentages that that will increase the uh the heat resistance? Well, methyl cell is m the problem with methyl cell is methyl cell gels when it gets hot, so it's gonna get firm is and it's not gonna stay portable. I'm surprised so when you heat guar, what happens is um guar loses some of its thickening power. It doesn't get damaged in any way.
When it cools down, it will come back to its thickness. But guar loses uh a bit of its thickness as it gets heated up. Uh unlike Xanthan, which loses its uh which only loses a very little bit of its uh um abilities when it when it's heated up. Now uh yeah, I wouldn't want to thicken the uh the guar at all because I mean add more guar because A, you're gonna start tasting guar and and B, it's gonna get too thick when it gets cold. Um I'm wondering whether the heat that the damage is actually happening to the egg proteins in it, right?
In which case it's like I'm to keep it as as more like a traditional Holland well, first I was doing Hollandaise uh that style, then I I tried doing Burblan and I had good results of both. But I'm trying to keep that uh uh original uh Hollandaise Burblan texture, and I thought if I if I brought my percentages too high, it it became a bit too well gummy, you know what I mean? Right. So I was wondering if if 'cause already I found that doing the Xanthan and the Guar together made good results. I was wondering if there was a third guy to bring in there that might bring some of that heat resistance without bringing my percentages too high.
Triple gum systems can be difficult because uh you can have multiple interactions with things. So what what you like you basically you don't have an emulsifier in there. What you the only emulsifier you have are the uh well the egg in the one and the and the milk solids in the other. So um you know both the guar and the xanthan, the guar is acting basically as uh as a thickening agent to prevent the the particles from glomming together, and the and the xanthan is acting as a weak gelling agent when it's not being stirred, right? And so that's basically your stabilization system.
You might want to move to an added emulsifier. So uh a good one in this choice might be gum arabic, right? So instead of using xanthan, we use a mix of gum arabic and xanthan called ticoloi, they're they're also from TIC gums, ticoloid 310s and ticoloid 210s, and it's a basically it's a mix of xanthan and gum arabic. Gum arabic is gonna act as your as your emulsifier, right? And then um the and the and the xanthan is gonna act as your stabilizer as a weak gelling agent when you're not stirring and sitting on the scene table.
I've made butter syrups, just butter syrups with that, that will sit on your bench or get heated indefinitely without breaking. So then if you're having further problems with breaking, you can add something like guar or even a starch to something like egg yolk to prevent the egg yolk proteins from being able to to to uh to coagulate and uh um you know and turn crappy on you. So you I would move to I would try a system of of gum arabic and xanthan, and an easy pre-mix one is a ticoloi uh 210 or 310 S, which they'll sell to you or sample out to you, uh, and or just get commercially available gum arabic and add it into that. Because I think what you need is to add an actual emulsifier. And the r the good the good news about the gum arabic is it's fairly stable over a wide range of heats, and it's also fairly stable over a wide range of dilution.
So if you were to then suddenly use a uh like f like like you could even fortify liquid into that Bur Blanc to to uh thin it out a little bit and it would still hold its sauce consistency. So it acts uh it's a lot more friendly than a traditional Bur Blanc, and it could make you could have like a base there that would be useful for a lot of different recipes. Right, right, great. So uh gum arabic definitely sounds like the uh the next thing I need to try. Uh can I hit you with one more quick one before I go?
Sure. The uh I heard you talking about uh gum uh like candies just a second ago, and I was actually planning on doing a wedding where I was gonna have candies at the end. What product is the best one to use to get that that sour patch kids kind of stretchy uh jellies. Well, so like the classic American ones, you want an American sour patch kid, those are gelatin. That's just straight up gelatin.
Uh and then I was I was using that now, it was getting like more kind of solid cuttable before it was getting stretchy. What uh what am I doing wrong? Um, I mean, I haven't I haven't uh it's been a long time since I've worked with anything like that. I've never gotten really good results. They but the from everything I've read, like the the the gummy bears are starch molded, and so it's all about getting uh you know that's why they have that poured looking back because they're molded into starch, right?
So it's like it's it's all about getting your moisture levels right and just not rushing it. Like those gummy bears take a couple days to make. So they're you know what I mean, and so it's it's all about getting the moisture level right and having them dry at exactly the right rate. That's why gummy bears, they don't last in the bag, right? You could tell if you got an old one because they turn hard and the and the young ones that are just right have the right texture.
So, I mean, I would look at you can look in some of the old books, like uh like that one I mentioned a bunch of weeks back, I don't have the name in my head, it's by Kirkland called Professional Petisserie from like the 1800s like early 1900s, because they have all the cornstarch recipes, but there are some modern books that also talk about that. I don't know whether Tora Blanca's book talks about that, but he talks a lot about cornstarch and molding, and it's interesting, interesting stuff. European based jellies are more based on pectin, but that's more of those fruit slice textures that your teeth sink into, and they're not the same as a gummy bear. Also good, and I think probably easier and faster to make. Yeah, all right.
What do you mean, bleeding? You mean from your tongue after you ate it? I hadn't dry them properly, but they uh they uh are the other thing I was I was doing half citric acid, half sugar, because I didn't want to cut it with pure citric acid. I think it was the sugar when it contacted the jelly, it started uh leaching water. Hmm.
That's interesting. It probably just wasn't I mean I it I've never done a coating of a candy like that. I I they probably make the candy first and then spray it with something so they can pan it. Do you know what I'm saying? So they probably have a I don't know that for certain.
I'm saying that I'm saying that out loud, just saying it, but uh that's how I would do it. Rather than try to control the uh the the powder and and the candy making at the same time. But uh in cornstarch or something like that. Uh well they mold them in cornstarch and then they probably they probably have something that they paint paint on to pan it. I'm not sure what, like maybe an alcoholic, and then get it to adhere.
But I I don't know. I'd have to look into it. But the citric acid shouldn't cause you any problems. But go ahead and get some other acids too. Get malic acid, get tartaric acid.
All right, uh well when I go and find my uh gum arabic, I'll uh I'll look for those two as well. Alright, give us a holler. Thanks a lot. Alright, thanks a lot, Dave. All right, bye.
We're going on to our first commercial break on cooking issues. Well, I know it's kinda late. I hope I didn't wake you. What I've gotta say can't wait. I know you'd understand.
Every time I try to tell you, the words just came out wrong. So I have to say hello in a song. Every time I'm near you, I just brought out of things to say. I know you'd understand. Every time I try to tell you the words just came out wrong.
Welcome back to Cooking Issues. So that was Jim Croce. We haven't had Jim Croce as our uh as our middle music before, right, Nastasha. Yeah, we love Jim Croce because I used to listen to it when my mom when I was growing up, used to play it all the time. But like she has this song where he's like, Nastash and I always joke about this.
He has this song where he's like, I know it's kind of late, I hope it didn't wake you. And then he goes on to like have this like like crappy love palm where he's like, I hope I, you know, I just called to say I love you in the song, but like so Nastasha and I always go through it, we're like, you know, it's the phone's ringing at 3 a.m. You pick it up and you're like, Who died? Who died? Who died?
Oh, Jesus. And he's like, I know it's kinda late. You're like, what? What? Jims, snap out of it.
Anyway, okay. We have a question from let's see which one we're gonna take next. We have a question from Johnny Hunter in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi. I have a couple questions about using Activa RM in dry curry meats.
Activa RM, uh, for those of you out there, not in the note is meat glue, the wonderful, wonderful, wonderful product that glues any proteins together. Uh, first, uh, does it work to glue two muscles together and then do a dry cure? He was thinking this might be nice as he was trying to do a dry cured ham without the bone. Uh, it would allow for better uh shape and uh and less air pockets, etc. That's true.
The way they do a boneless uh like a prosciutto is they actually cure it bone in and then they debone it and they have a very high pressure press that presses it into a ham-shaped mold. That's why all prosciuttoes are the same shape, because they've been crushed into that mold, at least the ones that are boneless. Um, so yes, this would work. Um this would definitely work. I mean, make sure that you add some, you know, it might help you because you could salt in that interior portion, and so when you're curing your own ham, a lot of times you'll get taint or lack of cure along the bone line because it's not going in, especially through the fatty areas.
And so this would give you an opportunity to get some of the cure on the inside of the meat, as long as you didn't oversalt it. And then uh you could still glue even over a light salting there, and you're not gonna get a lot of bacterial problems. I mean, the one main problem you're gonna have from doing it is you're going to be uh introducing bacteria into something and then gluing it shut. So you want to make sure that you're killing bacteria right away there. So I would definitely put um some some nitrites, nitrates rather, or trites, I guess ham traits, and some salt.
Enough salt to kill whatever ails you on the surface of that, because otherwise you're gonna be in deep, deep doo-doo. I don't want you to get anybody sick. Uh second question on meat glue was uh about um rolling cured bellies. Uh he mentions Thomas Keller's recipe in under pressure for rabbit bacon. I was like, rabbit bacon, that's crazy.
Rabbit bacon? That's a pain in the butt. Think of how small the belly on a rabbit would be. But he didn't mean that. He meant rabbit with bacon, not bacon made from the bellies of rabbits, because even Keller's not that decadent to like kill a thousand rabbits for one serving.
Although maybe he is, I don't know. Uh, I mean, I don't really know the guy, so uh so basically what Keller does is he layers rabbit up with bacon using um activa, using meat glue. Uh and and uh uh Johnny's tried this with a couple of different animals, including rabbit and goat. And after he cooks the bellies and slice them and roast them in the oven, they come apart. So is there any way to do it since the meat doesn't separate when it's cooked at a high temperature?
Thanks a bunch. So uh here's the problem. You're I read Thomas Keller's recipe in the book, and it's not apparent how much kind of uh meat glue you have to add, and he's laying slices of bacon together with like one layer of meat glue. You need to make sure, first of all, when you're gluing um things that have a lot of fat, you're not actually gluing the fat. What you're doing is gluing the connective tissue, the collagen and the different proteins that form the network of uh of the fat before it's rendered, which is why you can't glue rendered fat.
You can only glue glue what are you calling, native fat? Native fat? Yes. Yeah. Uh so uh basically if it's rendered it it can't be glued.
What you are gluing is the stuff that ends up being a chicharone if you were to cook it long enough. That's that protein residue. Okay. So you want to make sure that it all of it has a thin dusting of meat glue on it, and then even at high temperatures, the stuff won't come apart. If you brutalize it, like you fry it in an oven, sometimes the violence of the frying can make the meat pieces come apart, but the bond itself won't be damaged as long as you have uh enough meat glue such that um connective tissue is always touching uh connective tissue.
So I would make sure that you get both sides of any belly that you were doing. You might even want to switch instead of using uh Activa RM, using Activa GS, which uses gelatin as its bonding agent, it's gonna be a little bit stronger of a bond. And also you can paint it on to make sure you're not missing anything. Just don't add too much liquid or it's gonna be a problem. Uh Keller also recommends an under pressure using a like a like a sieve, like a handheld sieve.
Don't use that. Use like a cocoa duster because it's gonna get a much finer uh coating. So you should be able to get it to work if you if you do it. And on a side note, I had a lot of comments on our blog recently coming from nut job wing dang freak shows who are anti-meat glue because of some knee jerk reaction that they think they're going to the butcher and their butcher is serving them some sort of like hacked up piece of hamburger and selling it to them as a whole steak. And it's all based on some crappy, crappy uh expose in quotes, because it's not an expose, it's an expose of something that's not happening on a show uh in Australia called Today Tonight Show.
The show itself has an oxymoronic freaking name, today tonight. It's a dumb name for a show. Only, only, you know, I don't understand, like, unless you're a listener, in which case, producers, I love you or love your show, have me on. Uh but the basically it's bait it's saying that like some of the quotes that are absurd to anyone who's ever used meat glue before are um even an expert can't tell that something's been glued together with meat glue. And anyone who's ever looked at a piece of meat uh before in their lives can tell the difference between a bunch of scraps glued together and foist it off as a whole cut of meat and uh and one that's been, you know, that it's a real honest to God muscle.
So I think they're making a kind of tempest in a teapot about a problem that doesn't really exist. And they're also saying how it's a bacterial nightmare. Well, because when you're using meat glue, one of the things you have to be really careful of is that you're taking and you're putting um things that are possibly contaminated with bacteria on the inside of your meat, which before you thought was relatively sterile. Uh but the trick with that is is it's not it's not that that's unmanageable, it's just knowing that's what you're doing. And anyone who's properly trained using meat glue knows that they have to kill that bacteria that they put on the inside.
So I encourage all of the listeners of this to go around, find these blog posts with these morons who think they they also say, it's banned in the EU. Well, it's not banned in the EU. Thrombin-based meat glue is banned in the EU, not transglutaminase, which is from an enzyme. Thrombin's a blood clotting factor that's used as a meat was used as a meat glue is banned in the EU. And it was banned in the meat in the EU for dumb, dumb reasons.
It was banned because the morons who are doing the legislation couldn't think of a valid use for it because they're not cooks. This is another problem of a non-cook. And they saw too much of a problem where you might do something fraudulent, and so they banned the use of that, but didn't ban the use of the other one, which is more prevalent. The thing that makes me really angry about this is that it's so easy to bind together meats with crappy binding agents like carrageenin and like the way they make dog food. Everyone, when they see a bound piece of meat, thinks it's been bound with meat glue.
Meat glue is actually an expensive and nice way to bind things together without the use of a lot of fillers and gelling agents, which is how people can rip you off if they really feel like they're gonna rip you off anyway. So go out there and smack these people upside the head with some knowledge because they need it. Okay, sorry. Okay. And from Australia, this is from James.
Hey guys, greetings from Australia. I'm assuming James is not a member of the Australia Today Tonight show. Hopefully. Hopefully not. He's been enjoying the blog for a while, so it's probably not, and getting into the podcast.
So it's he has a question for the show. He's been struggling with oven spring in uh his bread for two years and he's stumped. So far, I'm gonna be him now. So far, I've managed to work my way through every single problem apart from the uh vexatious side bust out. So when he's cooking it uh the oven spring, what's happening is instead of going along where he slices the bread, he's getting a burst in the seam along uh along the bottom of the bread and splitting it on the bottom, which is not what he wants to have happen.
And he's tried uh all the different kinds of uh things you can try, varying his different hydrations from 60 to 85% using autolysis, which is a process where you start the uh the the mixing of the flour, knead it a little bit, let it rest for a while, and then and then meat it again. Uh mixing different batters, making different kinds of starters, different kinds of hydrate uh hydration, different kinds of mixing, different kinds of flowers, etc. etc. different kinds of form uh salt ratios, different kinds of risings, different proofing levels, different baking, yada yada yada. So he's wondering what the heck is going on.
Uh and so he says that sometimes he now uses a different uh steam technique where he it's called steam via ice, where every everyone who bakes bread knows that that steam formation from for many types of bread, steam formation in the very beginning of bread baking is extremely important. And so he's been trying uh one of the ways that you throw ice in, and it gives you a constant rate of steam because the oven can't evapor can't melt and evaporate at all quickly enough, so you have a steam that lasts a little while, whereas if you just throw water in, a very well-vented uh home oven will just obliterate the steam, and you're not gonna get enough steam. So he wants to know uh what to do. Well, uh I was gonna say that most times when you get a bad burst in the bottom, it's actually because you're using um you're not doing a good enough forming technique, assuming that everything else is okay, you're not like giving a good skin to it when you're forming it around. But you say you've tried that.
Um so I would go, I I you know when I have a question, I don't know whether the Brit baking community respects them, but I like going to the fresh loaf, which is a blog, uh, which is pretty interesting. And also there's a kind of a nut, and I appreciate nuts. Um there's a guy um named uh uh Steve B, and I forget what his uh what his uh blog is, but you can find him Steve B, and he he experimented with a lot of crazy stuff, and he found a steamer uh that is I for I also forget the name of the of the company that manufactures the steamer, but it's basically what you do is you take a hotel pan, you drill a hole in it, you put it over your bread as soon as as soon as you put it on your stone, and then you you you take and you rig up a garment steamer with a nozzle and you pipe steam into the hotel pan for like 20 or 30 seconds and then put it in the oven, and then a couple minutes later take it off, and that more closely mimics the steam that you're gonna get out of an oven. And I have never used it, but it looks really interesting, something you might want to try. And so, and there's a couple of people on the web now experimenting with these, like handheld steamers and hotel pants, upturned hotel pans.
So, um, I mean, I wish it was still wintertime. I mean, it kind of still feels like it, but uh, I wish it was because it's hard for me to do a lot of uh baking in the because my oven is gets like mighty hot, mighty, mighty, mighty hot. In addition, though, I'm curious about like what the actual mechanism of steam is because it seems kind of confused. People say multiple things that like I'm gonna have to do more research on the actual everyone knows that steam at the beginning helps the crust formation, everyone. But a lot of the scientific explanation seems kind of bogus, and I started reading some of the documentation this morning, but I didn't have time, so maybe that's something we'll deal with later on on a different uh on a different who's ewats it.
Alright. So, why don't we then take our second commercial break? And while we're going to it, why don't you remember to call in too? 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128 cooking issues.
Oh, could you help me please this call? See the number on the matchbook is old and fade out. Living in LA with my best old exprint rake. Gosh, it's such a new one and sometimes ADL. Isn't it doing these days go?
Let's poke it all up and give me the noble if you can't find it, so I can call it a couple of things. Following is a public service announcement from Heritage Radio Network. Tune in to the Speakeasy every Wednesday at 3 p.m. where host Damon Bolti will discuss cocktails, spirits, wine, beer, tea, coffee, and all things in the liquid universe. With guests ranging from bartenders and brewers, alchemists and ambassadors, roasters and regulars, and every expert and enthusiast in between.
Learn from some of the world's leading experts in mixology, bar history, distillation, and brewing about how we enjoy imbibing today. Again, that's every Wednesday at 3 p.m. on the Heritage Radio Network. You know, Jim Croce is visiting hell on that operator. Operator's just trying to do her job.
You know, and he's talking about his best old ex-friend Ray, who I admit is a jerk for running away with this woman. Or maybe the woman ran away with him. Well, it takes two to tango. Takes two to tango. Dear old best best old ex-friend, what is it?
Best old ex, yeah. Bad man. Jerk. Anyway. So uh so uh I have good news that I actually did something I said I was gonna do, and I ordered an Aero Press coffee, so I can finally say what I personally think about the Aero Press coffee.
We've talked about it a million times on the air. It only costs 24.95, so I ordered it on Amazon. And it makes a perfectly fine cup of coffee. Uh I might use it now as my as my take in my bat bag uh coffee maker, but here's what it doesn't make espresso. That's it.
It doesn't make espresso. But on an interesting note, coffee thing, I learned something recently that there's this thing called Cup of Excellence. Have you heard of this? No. Cup of Excellence.
So what they do is they get all these people from every different country. Every different country has its own cup of excellence. Uh a lot of coffee producing countries. And there's a huge competition where they're they're cupped again and again and again, and then the winner, and they're all these small lots are auctioned off, and someone has to buy the whole auction. So for instance, Dallas Brothers, who is one of the sponsors of the museum thing, we did the Latte uh art judging contest, gave me a bag of Rwanda's 2010 uh Copacama uh co-op Cup of Excellence coffee.
And uh it sells for a lot more than regular coffee. It's like $30 a pound green. Green, green, wholesale green. Uh and uh it was very, very good. Cup of excellence.
Go to to check it out, go to cup of excellence.org. Anyway, uh, so I thought that was interesting. No. No? No.
Yes, that's no. Moderately interesting. All right. You still have about 25 seconds, because I got two more questions to answer. To call in your questions to 718497, 2128.
That's 7184972128. Okay. Colin, good old Colin. Oh boy. What?
This isn't not he said specifically, uh, this has been a cuss-free question. Yeah, but it's also a controversial question. It is? Alright, well, let's read it. No, it's not actually weed, it's seaweed.
Nastasha only I read the first sentence and then I forward it at 6 a.m. today. Yes. That's what happened. That's what happens.
So she's like, oh my god, he's talking about weed. Seaweed. You know, with Colin, nothing is like what it seems. Uh in honor of the this is Colin speaking. In honor of the upcoming 420 holiday, although 420 is a holiday for me, it's my wife's birthday, but Easter is is actually Nastasha's birthday, which is 424.
Well, Jesus when he rose from the dead. Yeah, anyway, so yeah, so this year, Nastasha gets Easter. I've had Easter on my birthday before. Yeah, Jen's had Easter on her birthday before. One of those crazy ones.
Anyway, Colin has a question that pertains to weed. Uh, and of course, is there some sort of uh uh cannabis related holiday? 420 is the Jack, you know more. Wow. Oh.
So it's not Easter, it's some holiday that uh that us old fogies aren't familiar with? It's been around forever. Alright, whatever. Uh Colin has a question about weed. Of course, I'm not really interested in cannabis.
Of course you're not. Uh it's seaweed that catches your fan uh his fancy. Seaweed's uh salad is uh uh is freaking awesome with its Aldante crunch and ubiquitous sesame dressing. Since I don't speak Chinese, I guess or Japanese, I've been able to track I haven't been able to track down good uh weed to use in a salad. I see the fresh stuff in some Asian groceries, but the sections near the sea cucumbers where nobody bothers labeling stuff in English.
A project I've been sitting on for a few years is to try cultivating seaweeds in order to have fresh unlimited supply of weed. I just saw uh on McGee's uh On Food and Cooking that says Wakame Kambu and sea lettuce are commonly used in salads. Uh and so he wants to know if I have any tips uh what you should look for in market or what species make a good salad, any tips on prep, and have I, and since I've used saltwater aquarium before or made them, can do I have any tips on sourcing and growing some hydroponic weed. Okay. The problem is that a lot of the seaweeds that you use are too big to basically uh to basically grow in a normal situation, although things like wakame are and and you know, kelp and all these things are routinely farmed.
I mean, that's how they do it. Like you very rarely get wild anything anymore, but it's just they're so big that it's hard, it's hard to do. You can gather your own on the coast, which I've done a bunch of times with limited success. Unfortunately, I haven't done any research uh recently. Back in the day, the the book that you know that everyone had was called Cooking with Sea Vegetables by Sharon Ann Rhodes.
Unfortunately, it's kind of like, and this is nothing against anyone, it's kind of hippie dip, and I'm much more into like straight up, you know, killer information and like pictures, and this was looks like it was written in the 70s or 80s, and I've had it probably, you know, since forever, and it's like all black and white, and it's not really up to date. Someone needs to tell me if there's an up-to-date new uh new seaweed book. But how you use a seaweed depends a lot on what oh, if you want a good website, it's interesting. Uh the person who made it apparently doesn't want you to find it because it's very hard to find, but it's Seaweeds of the Pacific North Northwest by uh Brianna Gutschmidt, and her the website I don't have here the name of it, but she has uh Pendiva forward slash seaweed or something like that. But she has good pictures of all different seaweeds that you can get in the Pacific Northwest and how they taste because she ate them.
Cool. Which is pretty cool. So she has a good list. I recommend you uh you go to that. But Pendiva.com slash seaweed.
Wow, Jack's the best. Yeah. Anyway, keep it. He's on top, especially because you called him out. I know, I know that's good.
It's not right. It's not right. So not right. Um so anyway, I suggest you collect your own. I've done it.
Some people suggest against collecting your own because once uh seaweeds have been ripped off of their rocks, you don't know how cal long they've been batting around in the ocean, and therefore there might be they might be I don't know, rotting or something like that. But I've never died so far from collecting uh wild seaweed. Oh, by the way, going back, one thing you can raise in your aquarium by the uh is uh certain varieties of uh sea lettuce, green laver you can raise uh raise in an aquarium. Uh it's gonna be an expensive proposition, but you you should try it. And knowing you, you probably will, so you should probably give that give that a shot.
Um I think how you treat it depends on what it is. So, for instance, even something like combo, uh we use it in a salad after we've used it to cure and cook a duck. So, like Nils would have this old recipe where he would wrap a duck breast in combucks combucur current curing that is awesome, right? And then after we cooked it, we'd peel it off and then we'd slice it finely, and then you could eat it, and it was really crunchy. Same thing with makame.
If you don't over soak it, right, it's still got a little bit of crunch, you slice it thin, and then you can have it as a nice as a nice salad. So how you use the seaweed is gonna really depend on what state you get it in. You're gonna have to refresh it. Um and uh you know, you gotta usually it's dried, so you're gonna have to refresh it. If you get it fresh, I would just here's what I would do in general.
If you see something in that in that market, just buy the hell out of everything. Just buy every damn thing and then taste it, and then uh, you know, just try to compare pictures on the internet to what you can find. Because there's a relatively few number of ones that are commercially sold. You know, you know, your rokame, hijiki, uh, Arame, uh you know, lavers, nories, uh, different types of kelps. So you should be able to do a mix and match and then remember the characters' uh names.
I remember once I went to Chinatown looking for pigs bladder, which is legal to get in the US. And what I did is I went on uh I went on Google and translated pig's bladder into uh into Mandarin and then printed the characters out and then drew a picture of a pig with its bladder and then pointed to it. And I think I got my point across because they were laughing their their butts off, but they didn't give it to me, apparently, because it's illegal here. Alright. So, uh since we don't appear to get any more clothes, I will our last story for the day will be what we're gonna do tomorrow.
Yeah. We're gonna tomorrow uh eater. Really early. Yeah, it's a little too early for a burger, frankly. But eater is going to come to my house because I no longer have a kitchen anywhere.
We don't have a kitchen in Brooklyn yet, and I don't have a kitchen in uh the FCI anymore. Uh so since I'm kitchenless, I'll be cooking it in my house, which actually is a pretty I mean I have a sweet kitchen. Mm-hmm. No? Sweet kitchen.
Anyway. Um so uh we're we're supposed to do our version of the ultimate burger. Now the problem is that so many people have done their versions of the ultimate burger, right? You have the modernist cuisine version of the ultimate burger, which involves uh a lot of steps. And you, you know, they they cook their their burger for actually for a long time.
I'm not a fan of cooking a hamburger for as long as as they are. I'm not saying I'm not a fan, but it's not for me, because like certain types of meat can take on a kind of gamey livery note that I don't really that's not for me in a burger. Like for me, like the longest I'm gonna want to cook a burger is probably about four hours. That's about it. Uh not tomorrow because I'm not waking up that early to cook a burger anyway.
Anyway, so like you know, I also don't uh like vacuum packing burgers down because I think they get too kind of smashed. So I'm a fan, the way I like to do it is to take the the meat mixture and give it a quick fry to set it and then put it. I'm gonna grind bacon uh into it though. Okay. That's delicious, right?
I was thinking I'm I was gonna use a combination of short rib, chuck, and bacon, right? Grind it. I like a real loose pack and relatively thick and then uh fried uh quickly just to keep the surface uh intact. Then I'm going to uh put it into probably butter or maybe a maybe like a uh like a butter that's been mounted almost like a burblanc with uh with some some hyper reduced beef stock. I haven't decided yet.
Uh and then, because my wife, right? My my wife's birthday tomorrow, so I really shouldn't be doing this. It's my wife's birthday. Because you already did this. On her birthday.
Yeah, yeah, but listen, she's not gonna be there, it's gonna be in the morning. My wife is flying to Boston tomorrow, so I have all day to fix whatever I do, right? Get a new place. I'm not gonna get a come on, the place is fireproof. Anyways, I'm gonna get uh I'm gonna light uh because this is the best way to finish a burger off, right?
I'm gonna cook it in butter in a bag at about 55 degrees for a couple of hours. Then I'm gonna pull this sucker out, and then I'm gonna build a small bed of hardwood coals on the inside of my house under my hood in the mini Weber that I have. I'm gonna build the temperature up till it's about the temperature of the surface of the sun such that it's basically melting the Weber into my into my stove. I thought that's my Weber. Uh well, I let you have it.
You never took it home. It I bought it and was never reimbursed for it. So yes, I gave it to you, and I'm gonna use it one more time before you take it. You've had a year and a half or more to take it to your house, and you never have. I've moved it like three times.
Yeah, yes, you definitely have cooking issues. So anyway, I'm gonna fire it up in my in my house, and I'm gonna grill uh like hyper-grill it basically on the surface of the coal to put a nice crust on it. And then I'm gonna do my favorite bun. And here's my favorite bun. It's it's uh um sesame?
No, uh close. Uh beef on wheck style from Buffalo. It's gonna be caraway seed and salt on English muffin, homemade English muffin, and I think just regular cheese. I think just regular cheese. What?
Like American cheese? Uh something. I don't know. Maybe gre like grier. Mm-hmm.
I think grière. And then uh, and then I'm probably like uh the modernist cuisine do a really cool thing where they they take and they they flash infuse a uh uh tomato with uh like a vinaigrette or something like that, which is a really good idea. But since it's not tomato season, I can't get a decent tomato, I might just use pickled green tomatoes. Do the pickle and the tomato at the same time. I like fresh onions, so I'm gonna put some fresh onion on it.
Nastasha giving me the give me the stink face. I like grilled onions. Grilled onions, but this I have a freaking grill there. But I don't like uh I don't like to me, okay. This is a matter of personal opinion.
We can grill some onions for you, but the to me, a grilled onion is in between. It's not a sauteed uh onion, and it's not uh any it's this in-between crap. Raw onions give me nightmares. What do you mean? Like really?
Like how so? Why? I don't know. My mom told me. Well, wow.
Okay, well, the I'm gonna leave everyone out there with the image of Nastasha having onion nightmares, and uh come back next week for cooking issues where hopefully we can discuss some of these onion nightmares. Cooking issues! Thanks for listening to this program on the Heritage Radio Network. You can find all of our archived programs on Heritage Radio Network.com, as well as a schedule of upcoming live shows. You can also podcast all of our programs on iTunes by searching Heritage Radio Network in the iTunes store.
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