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Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. I'm Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues, coming to you live on the Heritage Radio Network. Approximately 12 to 1245 every Tuesday. I'm joined here in the station today with uh, of course, Nastasha De Hammer Lopez and Cooking Issues' own webmaster and friend Jerry Lavish. Hello, Jerry.
Hey Dave. How are you doing? Hey Nastasha. Hi David. Busy texting your buddies?
Too busy to do a radio show, are you, Nastasha? Alright. Call in all of your questions to 718 497-2128. That's 718-497-2128 with any and all of your cooking or non related cooking questions. So before we start, I'm gonna address a little blog business for those of you that go read the blog and I encourage it, even though I haven't been posting as regularly as I should have.
I have like 15 posts that I I need to write. And I need to uh get the ability to just jot off like a couple hundred words uh hit and hit post, but so far I haven't been able to to do that as much as everyone in the world tells me I should, right? Right. I for some reason I just can't do it. Anyway, uh so one of the things is Cooking Issues has a forum section that has apparently been overrun.
I'm putting Jerry on the spot here, but uh has been overrun by spam, and we are actually attempting to solve this problem, right, Jerry? It's actually solved. It's solved. See how little I know? It's been solved.
So Barzellet and all the rest out there, please come back. We love you, and we want that stuff to survive and flourish. So we have uh I guess who's running it now? You are running it and uh and also Vicky is running it, Victoria, or it's just it's just Jerry. Jerry's the man.
Jerry is uh a new father, a uh computer consultant extraordinaire, and we force him to do our blog work on the side. Uh Jack, is that a caller I heard coming in? Hello, caller, you're on the air. Hi. Hey.
Uh my question is uh fairly simple. I make pizza dough, and every time I do it, it seems to shrink when I try to roll it out. Hmm. Me well give me your exact procedure. I just make a regular dough, use a uh Kitchen aid usually.
Right. Um, food processor with the dough hook and uh a little rest and stuff arise. How long is the rest of it? And then when I go to roll it out, it uh you know, rolls out pretty good, but as soon as you I pull back with the uh rolling pin, it sort of snakes back into a smaller piece. Yeah, the first thing I'd look at is uh your the dough is probably fairly stiff.
I would move to a uh higher hydration, more more water in the dough probably is gonna help you. And I don't know like I'll give I'll I'll tell you this. I'll give you another thing is I would move away if you can from using a rolling pin. I find that to me it negatively affects the texture of uh of the pizza. It's g uh uh to me the texture is much better when it's kind of you don't have to be able to t flip it in the air like you know, like uh like a but you know, basically using your fist and stretching it uh is helpful to me.
I always liberally flower it before I um before I start, you know, pulling it out. Uh but I'll tell you my procedure in it in a nutshell and see if this helps. I use a fairly I don't use as high a hydration dough as the as the Naples sty style guys. I'm somewhere usually in the in the area of like uh 70, 75%, which is too stiff for real p pizza aficionados, but that's kind of what I do. I use a fairly high protein flour.
And so for every thousand grams of flour, I'll have in it roughly 700 grams of uh of water or seven hundred and fifty grams of water in that range, uh seven, seven fifty. And uh a little bit of yeast, and I allow it to do a very, very long initial rise. And another another thing, it's even more important than the kneading is is if uh to really good way to get texture is to make the dough uh the night before, break it into your pizza size uh chunks and then throw them into quart containers covered in your fridge. It's called retarding the dough. That's also going to improve your dough texture and flavor by allowing the yeast to act on it longer, but you have to use a smaller amount of yeast.
So for your t your texture rolling back, I would say one of the main things is is if you stretch it out, it won't pull back as much. There's always going to be a certain amount of snap back, but when you roll it, I think it's gonna snap back even more. Is this making any sense or is this not useful at all? Well, until I try it. Uh no, parts of it makes sense.
Um my general procedure, I start off with uh you know the sponge is pretty wet and as I'm uh kneading it, I I continue to add flour until basically it's sticky but it's not um or it's tacky but not sticky. Right. That sounds like a posted note sort of stickiness. Yeah, that sounds pretty good. By endpoint.
All right. Uh when I try to do it, uh I mean I'm not sure what it was uh you know, just try to push it on the board to sort of make a disc and let it hang and thin it out that way. Uh I find that works pretty good until I lay it down flat and then it, you know, it's like you know, elastic on uh your underwear sort of shrinks back in real fast. I mean I uh maybe you're not proofing it out uh enough. Uh maybe you gotta let it rise a little longer.
You always are gonna get a little bit of a little bit of uh a snap back. Have you done you can you pull a window on it? Have you done the window test? Is it stretched really well or is it? I can get a gluten window without any problems.
Yeah, so it sounds like your dough is is okay. It's maybe, you know, o over stretch it uh a little bit, a little bit thinner before you drop it, because uh invariably I get some snapback, but I don't get like rubber bandy snapbacks. Is the dough warm or cold? When you rest it, do you rest it at room temperature or do you resting it in the fridge? It's at room temperature, yeah.
Yeah. I mean, um and like I usually make enough so that I wind up uh dividing it up and and freezing parts of it. And then I thawed out in the refrigerator next day I let it come to room temperature uh in the room and it does it's does the same stuff. You let it do its actual second like it's it's proof out in the room, so it's actually rising and it's and it's dead at room temperature, not cold at all when you when you do it. Because if it's if it's cold at all, it will snap back.
Uh this is interesting. You know, if you here's a technique that no one no one say I do this, all right? No one's gonna say I do this. But um when I make pizza, I usually am making eight fairly large ones at a time, and I don't want to make them to order. So what I'll do is I'll actually I'll use a very minimal amount of flour just enough to get it on my fist so I can pull it out into shape, and then I throw it onto a piece of parchment paper.
It'll semi the pizza will semi-stick to the parchment paper because it's it it's you know, I haven't floured the parchment at all. So the dough will kind of stick to the parchment a little bit, which prevents any contraction. I'll then make my pizza on the parchment and I'll shove the parchment entirely with the pizza onto the stone for the first thirty-five, forty seconds up to a minute of baking, depending on how hot my oven is. Just until the bottom forms a crust and releases from the parchment. Then I'll quickly shove my peel and pull the parchment out and finish the bake out on it.
A couple of advantages of this. One, I think I'll solve your snap back problem with it. Two, um you can make a bunch of pizzas and put them on sheet trays and stack them up in your kitchen ready to bake, so you're not making pizzas every time you have to throw them into the oven. Um and so to me, those are huge advantages. The one thing you have to be careful of, especially because my oven goes up to 850 degrees, is the burning of the paper.
So what you have to do is after you put the pizza down, uh even after you do the sauce and and whatever, is to trim around the dough with scissors such that there's very little pizza overhanging the edge, and that'll prevent you from getting a lot of scorching or or uh or or burn marks on the on the paper. And then remember to just get it out of the oven, you know, after after it unsticks. So in my oven that's 45 seconds or so. Uh in your oven, maybe longer. I don't know how hot your oven gets.
Yeah, I I I it's about 525, you know, when I'm using it. Yeah, so you could let it go a little longer, but maybe that would help too, and also solve the problem of uh having to stand around in the kitchen the entire time your family's eating pizzas. Well, it's only two of us, so it's not a problem there. Yeah, yeah. For me, it's like always like 14 people, and so I mean, you know, it's it's a nightmare to make them, you know, as they go in, it just it just crunches me up.
But anyway, give that a shot, see if that helps out. Yeah, I'm just using AP flour, is that okay? Or should I be changing my flour? I mean, uh look, I've heard people make with all different uh hardnesses of flour, and I think obviously your hydration is gonna change a little bit, but I you know the my favorite pizzas uh that I make are made with uh surgalahad, which is a fairly high protein, like but really good, other than just the protein quality, just a really well milled nice flour from King Arthur, but it's not unfortunately generally available. When I'm making it at home, I you use uh heckers, which is a fairly their AP is a fairly high protein AP.
I wouldn't use like a southern style really soft AP if you're using like a good northern style AP um yeah that's a little bit harder uh I think it's okay or you can use the better for bread stuff that uh but I never use the the King Arthur's better for bread I either use their surgala hat or I use heckers. What about like Capanata Zero double zero? I've never used it I've never bought it. Um do you like it for pizza? Yeah.
Yeah I mean a lot of people are very particular on it but like you know uh I I'm I'm lazier than I seem and I seem pretty lazy. Coast where we have different flowers. Yeah you don't well see you're on the West Coast? Yeah yeah I mean I'm sure you have some really really good flowers out there. You have that real that artisanal mill whose name is flown out of my head for some reason in San Francisco.
You can also go to King Arthur the website. Yeah no they'll sell gr Sergalahat over the website and that makes a great great dough but it might be prohibitively expensive to ship it you know on a batch per batch basis. But if you make a lot of if you make a lot of pizza I know they sell 50 pound sacks that's how we get it but anyway I hope that how about the the the paper sounds like a good idea though right give that a shot next time around. Great thanks. Remember parchment not wax.
Alright thanks a lot for calling in okay bye all right uh okay we had an interesting comment in on the uh I'm extremely fascinated with this uh uh irradiation of seeds thing and it turns out there are other people fashioned uh fascinated with too so it turns out that after we dropped uh the you know the bomb um in World War II I think horribly especially the second one uh we then went on to do a whole series of nuclear weapons tests in uh in the air atmosphere underground underwater in the uh 50s and 60s, uh, which make for some amazing viewing, by the way. If you've ever seen the videos of them, it's just I mean a completely compelling awesome spectacle. Horrible idea, but completely compelling, awesome spectacle. So one of the things they did was they irradiated uh seeds, and the the reason they irradiated them was to see whether or not we could re germinate our seeds after we had been hit with a nuclear weapon, right? Now are our seed store stores gonna be obliterated, or the three people that survived the war, if they happen to have some corn with them, can they grow it again?
Okay. So that's uh, you know, that that was kind of the testing, but they found out they got some interesting mutations from this, and they started purposely irradiating uh seeds in an attempt to find seeds and uh shoots and and leaves and plants in general, because you can also get mutations on the branch of things, so called sports, right? And fruits. So um they were trying to get new varieties to find a peaceful way to use uh nuclear radiation. Uh and this spawned an entire movement.
Now I'm fascinated with it, but I don't really know that much about it. And we got a tip off from uh Tom Metcalf, our listener Tom Metcalf, who uh tipped us off to another person who seems extremely interesting. I've never met her, Paige Johnson, who's a a garden historian, and she has a blog called Garden History Girl dot blogspot.com. I never liked that blog dot blog spot sounds so weird. Black black black spot.
Anyway, she is apparently, and apparently from reading it, like one of the world's experts on nuclear uh on atomic gardens. She calls them atomic gardens. So I encourage you to read everything she's written on it. She's gonna write a book on it, and if you happen to be in London on the 7th of June, she's gonna give a speech on it at some uh like Royal Horticultural Society who ha thing of a day. And I wish I was in London because I'd love to go.
It turns out we used to do we used to have these things called atomic gardens. Here's what they would do, right? They would stick a uh a pipe into the ground uh full of like, you know, some some horrible, you know, gamma radiation, uh, you know, some radioactive element with again to cobalt something, I think. Uh they would sink it into the earth, um uh into a lead enclosure so that you could go look at the garden, and the garden was arranged in concentric circles around the radiation source, and then as soon as you walked out with your Geiger counters after you collected your irradiated stuff, they would raise the radiation source back up and start nuking out the uh the produce again. And there's pictures of them online, amazing stuff.
Anyway, so uh thanks Tom for that up update, and we're sure to hear more about atomic gardens. Man, I wish I could go see that speech. And you could also uh go to the wedding. In uh oh the well is that the seventh? Is that the same time?
He doesn't care. Yeah, you know, people keep saying though the wedding. I'm like, I know someone that's getting married. No, it's like but does it but do people really care about this royal wedding? Unfortunately, yes.
More so than the than the die and uh Charles thing? No, come on, right? Anyway. It's a natural extension. This is not the this is not the Royal Wedding show.
If you're this is the Royal Wedding version 2.0. If you if you tuned in to listen to uh to information about the Royal Wedding and whether or not What's her fang has gone into an anorexic friendly frenzy as a result of all the cameras on her, you've turned it in the wrong place. I'm I'm I'm saying this like this is like what people tell me. I don't, you know, I wish that my television was in good working order, but I no longer have cable because I told my wife she could cancel cable if I could do X, Y, and Z, never thinking she would actually pick up the phone and cancel cable. So I am cabless, I know nothing.
Thank goodness about any of this. It's gonna be on regular. But wait, you have an iPad. Yeah, but I don't you can't stream the news that I can. Not the news that I used to watch.
No, no. Anyway, but this is also not the does Dave Arnold know what's going on in the world program? This is only about well, not only about cooking. Anyway, call in all of your questions to 718-497-2128 committed. Wow, 718-497-2128 cooking issues.
Very superstitious. Right hand on the wall. The following is a public service announcement from Heritage Radio Network. Tune into Hot Grease every Monday at 3 30 p.m. Hot Grease strives to bring sustainability, localized sourcing, and other forward-thinking schools of culinary thought to the minds and kitchens of everyday folk.
Each week, Nicole Taylor's conversations cover the entire spectrum of food enthusiasts, from internationally renowned culinary masters to moms on a budget looking to impress their tiniest critics. Again, that's every Monday at 330 p.m. Hot Grease on the Heritage Radio Network. My favorite title of any program here on the Heritage Radio Network, Hot Grease. Love it.
Isn't that the best title ever? Mm-hmm. I wish we could come up with a company name as good as Hot Grease. Awesome. Hot Grease.
Anyway, call in all your questions to 718497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. Alright, so we have an interesting question in from Paul. Paul says, uh, hi. Hi.
I'm Jewish, and we're currently celebrating Passover. The first night of Passover com um comprises a Seder night, a big family meal with many readings, songs, and central to this question, symbolic foods. Yes, this is a this is true. Uh one of the many symbolic foods that appears uh on the central Seder plate is a roasted slash burned egg in its shell, which represents the Passover sacrifice from thousands of years ago. Preparing it is a royal pain in the blank blank blank as it has a tendency to explode and create a smelly mess.
In the past I've roasted it in the oven raw, and this year I first boiled it, then roasted it. Both times it exploded. I then tried making a s which is a nightmare. I then tried making a small crack in the shell, and this did not work either. Do you have any suggestions as to how one could do this reliably without having a huge cleanup job afterwards?
Cheers, Paul. Interesting question. Uh for me, especially for several reasons. One, I used to uh when you're in college, I found a microwave, and uh they threw it away because uh the cord had been uh you know broken and they didn't know how to fix it. So I just fixed the cord.
It was a zero dollar fix, and I had that's how I had my microwave in college, right? I didn't really use it to cook food. We used it to see what we could blow up in a microwave, right? So of course we did all the stuff that's now since become commonplace, marshmallows, CDs, which are awesome for about like one like half a second, and they form like like lightning fingers like the emperor is zapping you from uh Star Wars. Uh, you know, the the grape trick, uh light bulbs were always the best.
I'm we found a a case and a half of light bulbs, and I must have blown up the entire case and a half. 300 watt light bulbs are freaking amazing because they light up for a long time before they uh heat up the envelope of the glass and then explode. One time actually I had one blow up such that it didn't shatter, it just blew a hole in the side of a glass so it looked like one of those high speed photographs. Can't believe I lost that. Anyway, uh one of the fun things to blow up in a microwave is an egg.
The problem with an egg is that it doesn't reliably explode in the microwave when you nuke it. And you can nuke it for like like three or four minutes, and just when you think it's not gonna blow up, you walk up to turn off the microwave and bam, she blows up. And I have to tell you, it is extremely impressive, and there's no piece in there bigger than your pinky. And yes, Paul, it picky pinky, you know, nail that is. And yes, Paul, it does smell god awful.
So I feel for you. However, I have roasted eggs in the oven many times without them exploding. Uh, and I haven't done any particular prep work on them. And I'll I'll I'll tell you what w w why and what. So um uh Hervé Tees, uh, you know, uh a person that we like to make fun of here uh on in on cooking issues, he's a French dude uh who you know talks about he's the guy who keeps saying molecular gastronomy is a good term, no matter how much we tell him that that term is kind of disgusting sounding.
Anyway, it's his philosophy, his feeling anyway, that a 60 uh five degrees Celsius uh egg has a perfect runny yolk in it because he cooks them in the oven. Uh right. Anyone who has a circulator out there, anyone out there in circulator land knows that a 62 degree egg is runny and a 63 degree egg is set. Uh a 65 degree egg is most certainly not runny in the center. And is this may sound like a crazy like angels dancing on the head of a pin for people who don't cook using circulators and low temperature, but this is this is like I don't know, I don't know what it's the equivalent of.
It's uh I don't know, it's it's crazy. It's just nuts. Yeah, bingo. It's like yeah, no, it's like cooking a cake in like a pizza oven at like eight eight hundred or like or like uh or like deep frying water. The only person I know who does that is Alexander Tat Talbot using uh methyl cellules.
Anywho, so uh it's crazy. But uh to the reason why it doesn't work is because you get evaporative cooling off of the egg when he puts it into his because he does it in an oven at 65, and as it's evaporating off, the temperature in the egg drops and it's actually only 62 inside the egg, which is why it works for him, even though it's theoretically flawed technique. So to prove and test this, I cooked a bunch of eggs in the oven at a fairly low temperature though, at like, you know, uh 250, 300, 325 in that range. Fahrenheit now. We're back on Fahrenheit.
God's God's way to bake. Anyway, so excuse me, all you Celsius people. Anyway, uh don't worry, I cook meat in Celsius. So uh it's interesting is you can look at the eggs. If the eggs don't have marks on the shell from where uh water is evaporating out, and you can see them because they'll develop little brown spots uh on the egg where the stuff's evaporating off.
Because as water evaporates out of the uh out of the shell, out of the egg itself, it undergoes myard reactions at a very low temperature, like similar to the way they would if you cook them in a pressure cooker, or if you did Hamean eggs by putting them in a pot and letting them cook overnight in a bread oven to eat uh you know for your uh for your Sabbath meal on Saturday night, right? So they should turn brown, right, in the shell, even without burning, right? Which is amazing. And uh but if you don't notice little um little bits of water or pinhole brown marks all around the egg shell, it means that that egg shell is sealed. So maybe your eggs are coated with something like wax, or maybe you have a really I use typically use crappy supermarket eggs that break really easily.
Maybe you have uh like a free-range egg that is really like has a really good shell. Like I know uh Wiley Dufresne right now is doing an egg and he's using some really fancy eggs with really happy chickens. Those happy chickens have very thick shells, so he's having a really pain in the butt problem uh shelling them all. Um so I don't know what temperature you're running at, Paul, but try running at a sl a lower temperature, it's still gonna turn brown even at 350 or 325 because the Myard reaction is going to be happening at those low temperatures. So don't worry about having those temperatures not be that high.
Uh roast it lower, and I've never had one blow on me using uh that technique. If you roast it higher, you you might be able to build up pressure fast enough to have it explode. Apparently you can because you've told me you do. Um so anyway, Paul, give that a shot and let us know how how it works out. How does that sound?
Sounds good, Dave. Good advice. We have. I think if you're not getting the little brown marks, that that the evaporative release is also release of pressure. Yes, yeah, exactly.
So if you're if you're if you get those little pinholes, it means you're releasing pressure, you're not gonna blow it. If you're not getting pinholes, you're building pressure, she she's gonna blow. Right. Right. And just put cracking the shell in one place, especially here's another thing.
If you if you actually if you boil it beforehand, you might be having some water trapped inside, might be harder actually to get the water out of the center. I wouldn't I I put them in raw. And you might be plugging the plugging the shell as well. I put them in raw, uh uncovered, uh, like you know, on the directly on the rack, which I shouldn't do because they might break. Uh and and that's uh that's how I do it.
And I haven't had one blow yet. But maybe we should well, next time it's somebody else's house, by the way, I'll I'll try it at a higher temperature. And I thoroughly recommend that if you are gonna blow up an egg in the microwave, if you if at first you don't succeed, try again. It takes longer than you think. If every four eggs, maybe one of them will blow up, and please do it in somebody else's microwave, right?
Uh you know, someone that you don't like. Like next time you get invited to someone's house to a party that you hate and there's a million people there, and you can't believe you got invited there, just toss a couple eggs in the microwave and walk away. Don't really do that. Don't don't do that. I'm getting the look like I can't believe you're recommending this.
I'm not, I'm not, I'm just kidding. When you're getting ready to replace your microwave, the last thing to do in the current microwave would be to blow up an egg. You would not believe what my microwave looked like. It had all kinds of scorch marks on the inside. Uh I mean, you know, I I've done every awful thing you can do to a microwave.
Well, I want to repeat that I could probably make the statement that no animals were harmed during the process of this testing. No, everyone always asked me to like, you know, have you put a live X, Y, or Z into No, no, no. Like, especially vacuum machines. Everyone, every s every class I've taught in sous vide, not the you know the one for professionals who come in because they they got a lot to worry about anyway. But like every class I would teach on it, they ever someone would ask me, have I put a live XY or Z in the vacuum machine?
I'm like, no, no, no. No. Uh although I do have a friend of mine, and this isn't one of those a friend of mine, but it's really me, a friend of mine, who um threw a cockroach infested piece of kitchen equipment into the microwave because he just didn't know what to do. He's like, ah, like this, threw it in the microwave, turn it on, they pop like popcorn, is what I'm told. Yeah.
I haven't done that in the microwave, but apparently that that is a true enough fact story. Okay. Uh Rolf Wind writes in. He says, Hello, Nastasha. Doesn't care for me, likes you better.
Well, he's writing to me. Alright, fair. Uh I have a non tech question for the show sometime. It's not today. Today is a tech question.
I've read widely disparate opinions on the suitability of previously frozen meat for making cured pork products. Specifically, I want to cure pork belly, which is a very good idea for bacon and panchetta and jowl for guanchali. Guanchali is one of the world's great products. Nastash's giving me a squinky face. How the heck could you give me a squinky face on guanchali?
I overate guanchali. So? I don't like it anymore. I've over eaten lots of things. Yeah, I just don't like it.
You don't what does that mean you don't like it? You like bacon? Mm-hmm. And you like panchetta? Yes.
And you don't like guanchali. No, not really. It has like a sock flavor. No. That wasn't that was like moldy guanchali.
Yeah, I'm here to say no. That is not the case. I prefer um there's a bunch of the artisanal guanchalis out there, I think a bit too dry. I like a little uh I like a moisture guanchali. For those of you not hip to the fact, guan chale is cured pork jowl.
You can cure it either flat or you can cure it uh rolled up or you can cure it flat and then roll it up. Um I I like them all. I I I the one I use is rolled up. It has a higher fat percent. And they make something similar in the South called jowl bacon, but um it's not it doesn't taste the same to me because it doesn't have the same spice mixture on that that I usually get from guanchali.
Uh in my to my taste, there is no finer topping for pizza in the world than guanchali. Guan chali might be the best thing you can put on a pizza, if going back to pizza. And what I like to do is um if you just throw it on there, it doesn't need a lot of heat. You can just throw it on there raw and it'll it'll crisp up in chunks. I slice it really thin um because it's mostly the fat and I like the texture of the fat when it's real thin, and basically just the the heat looks at it and and kind of shrivels it up a little bit, but doesn't make it hard and doesn't take away from the uncuousness of it.
Have you done a lardo in pizza yet? Uh I have, yes, I have. Uh I I like Lardo is also a good product. Do you like Lardo, Nastasha? So you like bacon, panchetta, and lardo, but not guanchale.
Folks, now you know what I have to deal with on a daily basis. I guess you don't like carbonara. No, I do like carbonara, but I use pancetta instead of panchala. Which by the way, on carbonara, please, now look, I'm all for authenticity, right? But we are in the U.S.
of A here. And the smokiness accentuates the dish very nicely, thank you. And I think bacon tastes delicious in a carbonate. No. Yes, it don't know.
You're wrong. I am not wrong. I'm not saying it's authentic, right? Authentic, like, you know, okay, authentic uh uh uh carts don't have motors in them, and yet I enjoy a cart with a motor on it to help me carry the stuff around. Authenticity isn't everything.
Dave, I'm gonna tell you that you may like bacon cream and noodles. That's a good thing, but it's not carbonara. Well, no, but I'm saying it's not authentic, but it's delicious. So for everyone out there saying that you that like somehow, you know, your taste buds are shot, or you know, it's just because you're an American or just because X, Y, and Z, hello, smokiness tastes good in that dish. It's just not Carbonara.
It's delicious. Yes, see, Jack? That's for last week's comment that I made here. Look, I'm here to say I'm look I also I'm a firm believer in having the authentic dish the way it's supposed to be prepared without any embellishments, without any changes, preferably in the location and by the people who make it. So you know, because a lot of times it isn't just the preparation, it's the specific ingredients that someone has in a particular place cook differently, they taste differently, the environment's different, their cooking utensils are different, the way they handle ingredients is different.
So if possible, you should go taste the uh taste the dish made by the people who are supposed to make it. However, once you've tasted that and you have a target in your head, feel free to do anything you want to it, including using bacon, which is straight up delicious. Um, I can't believe we've totally we've totally sidestepped poor Rolf's question. Okay, so he wants to cure pork belly for bacon and panchetta and jowl for guanchali. But the heritage breed meats that he likes to use are available to him only in the frozen form.
Does freezing alter the muscles in such a way as to change the salt curing process? And does the method of freezing make a difference? Aside from these specific specific questions, any insight on meats or cuts or applications that are especially freezing friendly or unfriendly, thanks. He like likes the show in the blog, regards Rolf. Well, thank you for liking the show in the blog.
We appreciate it. Here here's the story. First of all, it used to be in the United States that all the cuts of meat that you were gonna use for curing, uh, all the pork was frozen for a deep freeze, actually, for a while, to to cure any trichonella in advance of curing it, which also is going to kill Trichonella, you know, the parasite. Very few, uh, you know, the worm. I love a disease that's measured in worms per cubic centimeter muscle mass, right?
Anyway, so uh previously uh most, if not all the meat that we uh cured is uh frozen, right? Now it it turns out that um wait, there's a collar? Yep. Uh this is gonna take a while. So Rolf, I'm gonna come back to your question.
I'm gonna take the collar and come back and we'll talk about freezing and uh and meats. Caller, you're on the air. Hi, Dave. It's Brian in San Francisco. How are you?
I'm all right, how are you doing? Good. Um so I got a bunch of gift certificates to like Amazon and Creighton Barrel and stuff, because I got I got married pretty recently. Congratulations. And uh thank you.
Um look into get some new pots and pans and just kind of upgrade from the the crappy um mishmash uh that that I have. And um I'm having some trouble trying to figure out exactly what to invest in. I I want to get stuff that's gonna last. And um what what are your recommendations? So you're looking for a like a standard pot and pan set.
I don't necessarily need it need a set, but um, you know, I ha particularly I have some pots that aren't aren't very good. I have uh w one pan that I like. I have some that are um non stick that are kind of old and and decrepit and and uh they're not so nonstick any l any longer. Um I have thought about cast iron, but I'm not sure that that's the way I want to go for for everything. Right.
Um okay, here here are my thoughts, and then you can bounce stuff off me. One, ditch the old uh ditch the old uh uh nonstick, get a new you should everyone should have at least one nonstick lying around. I have a fairly big one and a fairly small one. Assume that they will get obliterated over the course of a couple years and that you have to throw them away. 12, 14?
It's like 14. I have like a four but I have big burners. 14 and an eight, right? Yeah. And so I so I get those and and then I assume that those things are going to be uh gone after a couple of years of use.
Still I'm not saying to get a cheap one. Uh I don't know whether scan pan fix the problems that they used to have. Scan pan used to have some problems but they're fairly easy and they actually have a warranty on them so if you break them or you know ruin the coating you can send them back, right? Invest in one invest in one good pressure cooker. If you get a good pressure cooker like Coon Recon, even though it's a very expensive the pot itself is quite a good pot.
And so you can cook with it without scorching on the bottom if you're gonna do onions or something before you're gonna add liquids to it to do uh a braise or or a pressure cooker right get one piece of cast iron uh prev uh I have a whole bunch of cast iron but get like well I would not get a new piece of cast iron I would get I would go to seriously go to a thrift store and find a piece of cast iron that has a polished face on it. Cur current cast iron has a pebbly surface it's called as cast whereas they used to sometimes do a machine surface finish or sanding on the inside surface of the pan and those ones when they're seasoned are like glass and they're awesome right but they can't find a manufacturer enamel coated cast iron you want we want one that's well no enamel's fine metal enamel's fine for enamel coated cast iron I would only get a Dutch oven. That's what I have I have like the La Crusade Dutch oven but any one of those cat enameled staub, any one of those guys is going to be fine. But I mean is like I would get one uh I would for everything else. I think the cast iron's gonna be a pain in your butt unless you want to get a muffin pan or something because they're really heavy to lug around.
Um I would get um but I would I like having a cast iron uh skillet for biscuits and things like that, and and just because I every once in a while I just feel like it, I feel like having cast iron because you can put it on the stove and crank the heat really high and walk away from it and not worry about it because it's not gonna warp out on you and it's in and it's gonna be good. But I would get one from a thrift store or from a uh a used source, so long as it's not been scrubbed, it's not too rusty, and the surface is glassy smooth. And you it's hard to get nowadays because they're they're rough and pebbly, but I would get separately from your enameled one, right? Uh I wouldn't subject an enameled one to the super high heat that I would suggest a black, you know, put a black cast iron skillet on, right? Now for your standard pots and pans, I would go for any high quality pan that uh you like the that you like the look of.
Uh I use all clad at home, and they stood up to years of constant abuse. I don't have any fancy all clad, but I'm not shilling out for all clad either. It's just this is what I I use at home. And I get uh a fairly wide variety, you're gonna need a couple sizes of sauce, pan, uh, and you know, at least one small like uh like a skillet uh and then uh you know a larger stock style pot. It I wouldn't spend a lot of money on a giant stock pot.
The giant stock pot is the thing you should have that's cheap because you're only gonna cook liquids in it, and it does not matter the quality of the pot if all you're gonna be doing is boiling water in it, unless it looks so ugly that you can't stand, you know, uh looking at it in your house, right? So all of like I tend to go cheap on my huge pots that are only gonna have water boiling in them. Is this making any sense what I'm saying? Yeah, um what do you what what do you think? Um I'm sort of like uh I understand what you're saying about the every everyday pan.
And are those what are those made of? Like the Alcladd all clad are they steel what are they uh they have an aluminum core what's the yeah, they haven't they have an aluminum core and they have stainless steel uh um and a lot of them I think na now the a lot of the Alclads have uh um the ability to to go on induction fairly efficiently they have like I guess it's either magnetic stainless or or the stainless itself is good enough with induction that they can run induction or they can run uh or they can run off of gas or electric but you need that aluminum slug in the center for uh rapid and even heat conduction. Also the Alclad has an insane warranty. Really? I've sent I've sent two brands back.
I've never had two I've actually sent my sta my uh my non stick back twice and they sent me a brand new one. My one gripe with Alclad is that it the inside of the pan you can see where the handle is riveted on. Now I've seen in in the school I've seen those fail from is extreme abuse. But at home they've never failed but the one problem with them is is they are difficult to clean out around the rivets. But that's my only real that's my only real gripe.
Every other handle what'd you say? Little blow torch will help yeah yeah I the only uh the only time uh the uh only pans I've had that have had welded handles on I've broken those welds off so the rivets I've never broken. Um barkeeper's friend is also something that uh makes it easy to clean. Yeah get rid of the stuff so spend your money on the stuff that is gonna see a lot of high heat you're gonna be frying sauteing with don't spend the money on something that's gonna see mainly water the exception being uh I would spend the money on on like a coon recon uh pressure cooker if you can if you can afford it. They're expensive.
They're like they're like two, three hundred dollars right? Yeah for one pop that's expensive. That's like the cost of microphoney for a pot. Yeah, but but he's got to sp look he's gotta also buy all these other pots and pans. You know, but you for price of one uh uh you know coon recon and get the big one by the way, you know, you you could get a whole set of all uh a starter set of all clats, you know?
But the pressure cleaner is so. What do you think about copper? Um I you know I've seen some like copper lining. Do you enjoy cleaning things a lot? I mean just interior copper lining.
Usually the copper slugs aren't big enough to have that much of an advantage. Copper is a better heat conductor than aluminum. Copper is the ultimate material from a heat transmission standpoint, and they have a nice hefty weight to them. They're extremely expensive. If the copper is showing, they're very hard to clean and keep clean.
And uh the other problem is is usually a lot of the people that have copper pants, they don't have enough copper in them, so you're not really getting the advantage. Whereas the aluminum slug pans have a real thick slug of aluminum on the bottom of them. And you can look look at the bottom of your pan before you buy it. You should see it's gonna have like a little basically shelf of aluminum underneath that you can see it in m in many pans. The bottom of the pan should be like a quarter inch thick.
Yeah, they're thick, and that's what you really really want. So I wouldn't spend I wouldn't go the extra money on copper unless you like to polish things. Like Thomas Keller's like that, he likes to polish things. Well uh, you know, but that's the only reason I think the What I bought my copper slug eight years ago, ten years ago. That was when the aluminum slug really wasn't a big deal, and it was either copper or nothing.
Oh now I think that with the aluminum slugs, you don't it's not a big deal anymore. Yeah, I have all you know, and you know, uh then there's a question of for your cheap big stock pot, is it okay to go all aluminum? You know, do you believe that aluminum touching the food is bad? Um I don't. And uh one of my big stock pot is aluminum because it's very lightweight and it's very tough and big.
But uh like six gallons. I use my giant stock pot is a turkey fryer stock pot. Six, you know, uh, and that's really the cheapest way to get one of those things, but you have to be willing to have it's ugly, and you have to be willing to cook in aluminum. The only the only downside of that is I like to take that thing and stick it on an induction burner. Yeah.
Well, it depends on if you have induction or not. What do you have out there in San Francisco? Do you have induction, gas? What do you have? I have gas.
Nice. I like gas, although induction's awesome. If I if I, you know, but gases. Unfortunately, from an energy usage standpoint, still the way to go here in the US. Has this been helpful at all?
Yeah, this is a this has been really great. Um I also read something that like many restaurants basically they buy like uh cheaper pans um just because like they get so beat up, like you were saying, like at the school that they get really beat up and they just like go through them like every six months. It depends on the restaurant. So and it depends on the philosophy of the restaurant. I mean, I think like the finer restaurants, the philosophy is you treat all your equipment nicely, you treat all your food nicely, and you have decent stuff.
Now, if you know you're going to abuse something on purpose, right, or there's a uh a process that obl that obliterates things as a matter of course. The reason like why we use settle p sizzle platters and whatnot, those things are made of something that's not that expensive. But in general, the very high-end restaurants, they have respect for the food and the thing that touches the food, right? It's like a top-down respect for food that trickles down onto the plate and to the customer. In a less expensive restaurant where you're hiring someone who you do not trust, you know, there's no reason to hand that person a good piece of equipment because you don't think that they're gonna respect it.
You know you see what I'm saying? I mean, I'm a firm believer in not spending a lot of money if there's no use to it. But if if there's a use to it, right, if the heat is more even and therefore the food is gonna be better, then get a better piece of equipment and treat it nicely. You know what I mean? I I I do.
Um, and I I have some opportunity to get some nice stuff, which is why I why I called in. Um do most restaurants use like the all clad, or do they end up using like you know, fancy fancy French brands and stuff like that? It just that aren't accessible to um it's it's chef to chef, but I I see a lot of all clad out there. Well, a lot of restaurants they they exploit that uh that lifetime warranty. You know, after they've scrubbed it, they s they because they get scrubbed with a you know with a brillow pad, and when they get really thin and the you see it start to develop cracks, they just send it back to all clad all cats that's another one.
That's great. Great. Okay. It sounds like that's the way to go with the warranty. Okay, thanks a lot, guys.
Have fun outfitting your kitchen. Nothing's more fun than buying stuff. All right, bye. All right. So uh back to uh Rolf's question here.
So he's uh gonna cure pork belly to refresh you what's going on and the freezing what happens. When you freeze meat, uh what's going on is that uh especially if you freeze it slowly, is that you're not freezing the water on the inside of the cells. You're actually the water is extracted from the cells and the cells get somewhat dehydrated, the crystals form on the outside of the of the cells, right? Uh there's also a certain amount of the the fact that those crystals, then as you store them in the freezer, they grow and they shrink, they grow and they shrink, and they puncture the cells, right? Then as it uh thaws, the water needs to reabsorb into the meat, but but because you've ruptured some of the cells and because it's impossible to get all of the water back into the meat, you lose some liquid, right?
And that's what's called drip loss. Now things that are very fragile, like berries, you notice they just turn into a watery mess because all the shell uh the cells get kind of hurt, right? And that's really what's going on, is that you've perforated some of the cells and you've lost some of the moisture. So in theory, what happens in terms of actual penetration is that because you've ruptured some of the cells and there's a lot of liquid movement on the inside, you should be able to cure it faster, right? It would it will take the cure uh even faster.
So it's not gonna hurt um, it's not gonna hurt it from a curing standpoint to have uh frozen it. Now uh you there are some people I read on the on the internet because uh I didn't even know it was an issue. There's some people on the internet who think that it's gonna have more of a bacterial problem if you thaw it and then cure it, because I guess they're presuming that it's gonna take a while to thaw it out. Uh, but presuming that you have a good purveyor who froze it right, you know, when it when it was ready, shipped it to you frozen, and then you're thawing it and then quickly curing it. I don't think any extra bacteria from the time it takes to thaw is going to be a big deal.
In fact, you don't I'm not saying this, but you could probably start the curing process as it's thawing, even because the salt will uh help accept uh you know accelerate the um the thaw down. Now the one thing I will say is that you probably should not cure the bacon and then freeze it, because what happens is unless you have a vacuum packing machine, um cured meats, uh especially pork, because it believe it or not, that the fat in pork uh has a good degree of unsaturation to it, it's very unstable uh once it's been cured in salt and exposed to oxygen, has a tendency to go rancid. So if you freeze bacon and it's not in a very, very good um uh vacuum pack along with some other antioxidants like for instance smoke or maybe even some like you know, some uh add I wouldn't add ascorbic acid, but like uh something like sodium metabisulfide or something like that as an antioxidant along with vacuum. You'll notice that even in the freezer, uh your uh bacon will get rancid very quickly and start developing the off-flavors of fat rancidity. So I would definitely, if you were gonna deal with a frozen thing, uh not freeze it after it's uh cured.
I would cu uh freeze it fresh, thaw it, cure it, and then use it. Unless you're doing a super long cure when it's gonna stick out, stay out for a long time anyway, in which case the water levels are lower correspondingly your rancidity will be less. And believe it or not, the flavor that we like in a lot of old cured meats actually is partially fat rancidity, kind of in a way that makes it taste good, right? So it's not always necessarily bad. Like one person's rancidity is another person's delicious two-year-old ibirico uh bayota fed uh uh jamone.
So, let me see whether I've answered all of your questions. I th I think so. I would go ahead and cure and cure those uh cure those things. Now, one last question I have in from Brian uh Heslop. Uh he says the recent museum fundraiser sounds like it was incredible.
Uh and it was, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah. I'm very upset I missed it. Yeah, I know.
It was it was it was quite good. He has a question about Wiley's dish. Now, for those of you that didn't see the blog, Wiley's dish was it was called Bone Appetit Bone Appetite, and because I gave him caveman food. Uh and one of the things in it, you can go on the blog and look at it. One of the things was uh Inoki mushrooms that were uh looked like twigs, and he says, How did he make it?
And I forget. I think he soaked them in um in some sort of like flavorful broth like soy and then uh dehydrated them. And they they that's the only part of the dish I got to taste, and they tasted really good. Did you taste that dish? Yeah, but Nastash and I were actually running dishes.
No, you were, but yeah. Anyway, I was running dishes, and by the time I came back to try and taste the like the leftovers, uh they were all gone. Uh he had another question have I ever looked at importing gear from uh manufacturers in China? I've looked at it, but the problem is I never have enough of a minimum quantity order. And the other problem is that unless you know a specific manufacturer, I'll tell you some stories from Philip Preston, good friend Philip Preston from Poly Science, and it tries to import Chinese gear all the time, and he's had some things that he's had really good luck with and some things that he's had really bad luck with.
If you uh imp if you if you go over there and have someone build something to spec, then they will build it to your spec, and it will probably be good. I mean, a lot of really amazing stuff is built. For instance, modernist cuisine Jerry is looking at is was printed in China because the printers over there were so good. They were the only printers that uh Mirvold and Chris Young could get that would print the quality they wanted. Yeah.
Um so and I'm sure there's millions of blog posts out there on on uh how awesome the printing is on Mirvold's book, and it is. Uh and you know, Chris knows anyway. But um what were we're talking about before that? Since Nastashi interrupted me by by doing the watch point. Chinese.
Chinese, yes. So, but the problem is if you if you buy something over there that was built to somebody else's spec, it might not be your spec. So I know he tried uh a couple of uh um Chinese model import vacuum machines, and the problem was is that they look I mean they they weren't as robo as the ones that we get because that wasn't part of the QC process. But also if you vacuumed a lot of liquids in them, it fried some piece of componentry in there, it caused smoke and almost a fire, right? So unless you know something works, like for instance, like if you go online, look on on blogs for whatever people are doing, and people will have tried X, Y, and Z cheap Chinese stuff.
So, for instance, everyone I know who buys the miniature mills and lathes buys the Sieg ones that come in and they're all made by one or two manufacturers in China, and they work with some known problems, but everyone knows what those problems are and they fix them. Ditto with laser cutters, ditto with um, you know, certain like uh plasma cutting tools, things like that. So it's just look online and don't be the first person in the US to try it out. Anyway, so uh that's my that's my send it to Dave, and he'll try it out. Yeah, right.
If anyone if anyone wants to send me some crap for free, I'm happy to test it, right? Right? Sure, we have time. Yeah, yeah, right. Like we have we're made of time.
Anyway, this has been this week's cooking issues. Come back next week. Thank you. 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.
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