Hi, I'm Steve Jenkins. I work for Fairway Markets in the New York area. And we're awfully proud to support Heritage Radio. And we care so much about everything that goes on out here at Roberta's and their studio because they talk to people who are are serious about food. And that's what we are at Fairways.
We're serious about food. We we just care very deeply about you as a as a customer and how you cook and what you cook with and how you entertain. And that's why we love to support Heritage Radio because it it it's pretty much the same thing. It's wanting to to find happiness through serious food and people who are serious about it and care about learning everything there is to learn about it. And that's that's we're kindred spirits.
If it's something worth having in your kitchen, you're gonna find it at Fairway. And if there's somebody worth talking to about food, you're gonna find them on Heritage Radio, and we will be supporting you guys for a long, long time. At Fairway, I'm your personal grocer, Steve Jenkins, Fairway Market. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. I'm Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues, coming to you live from Roberta's Pizzeria on the Heritage Radio Network every Tuesday from about 12 to 1245.
Call in all of your questions, cooking or non cooking or technical related, to 718497 2128. That's 718 497 2128. Sadly, I am not joined in the studio today by Nastasha De Hammer Lopez because she is on vacation in Rhode Island up at uh Watch Hill, but she is calling in, so I think we have her. Nastash, you there? Yeah, hi.
Now how's Rhode Island? Did you say sadly? Did you you say sadly are not in there in the studio? Yeah, sadly. Sadly is that bad.
Oh, thank you. So uh how's uh how's Rhode Island up there? Um the beach is beautiful. Have you had I know you've seen I know you've seen every beach. Yeah, well, I've well I've seen and try to avoid most beaches.
My you know, my wife likes me to go to beaches all the time, but I'm first of all so white that everyone thinks there's a second sun on the beach, even though I'm completely clothed uh head to toe whenever I go to one. I also detest sand. Although I do like foraging for things on the beach. In fact, that's one of my favorite things to do. So that's the basically the only way you can get me to do anything, is if I'm gonna forage for food.
I remember when I was a kid, I used to we used to go to the Cape all the time, and I used to basically all I would do is go around looking for cawhogs and uh clams and mussels, depending on on where I was, because uh that's basically all I like about being outside is finding food. What about you? You used a there's a foraging session at four o'clock. So I'm gonna do that. You're gonna do it where what are you gonna what are you gonna forage for?
For plants or for animals? So a lot of good foraging to be done on the shores as well as in the water close to the beach. Uh I've never done it in Rhode Island, though. I mean, I've done a lot in Maine. They the famous uh, you know, dead for a long time, but famous wild food writer, maybe the first big famous one here in in this in the uh US, Yule Gibbons, wrote a specifically small manual for New England seacoast foraging, but it's more for Maine.
But there's just a wealth of things you can eat on the on the beach from uh like Oric, which is like Lamb's Quarters, which is great for a salad, or a version of sea beans or like wild sea rocket, which is a like a like wild rocket like arugula, but m uh more succulent and like crunchy and also a little more bitter like mustardy green, but the stuff just grows wild along the along the beach, you know, it's crazy. And and depending on I think it's a little early, but like beach plums, you know, you mean there's just fantastic amounts of things you can forage along the beach, and I think one of the reasons is because a lot of it you're not allowed to kind of mess with anymore from you know, from a development standpoint. So if you're in a place that's not built up, it's probably got a lot of that good stuff just lying around, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Oh, I forgot to give you your service berries yesterday. Oh, I know. Nastasha's uh buddies went and um foraged in Brooklyn apparently you said for uh service berries, aka uh there's a million different names from shad berries and whatnot. Uh I've never actually had 'em. Were they good?
Uh they were okay. I mean, it's it's exactly what they said. It was a like blueberry texture with a raspberry uh taste. We made a pie and it was disgusting. Why was the why was the pie disgusting?
I messed up the crust and then the crust infiltrated the berry filling and it was just what? What did you what c what did you do for the crust? What did you let's let's analyze this. This will be our first problem on cooking issues. What did you do for the crust?
I used Cristo. What? Well, it was Pat's mom's recipe, and he was like, Mom makes this, you need to make it like this. And I was like, All right, so it was two cups of flour, three quarter cup of Crisco, and cold water and salt, and that was it. Right, and what happened?
It it wouldn't roll, and when I picked it up, it would crumble apart, so I made a second one, and then that one wouldn't roll. So then instead I took the ball and I put the ball in the center of the pie uh pie tin. And then I spread the ball out with my fingers so that it made a sort of crust around it. And then he insisted that there be a top crust. And so I rolled out a top crust and then carefully placed it on top, but it was all crumbly and gross.
And then yeah, and then that crust broke into the filling and as it was cooking. Well, it's hard. Yeah, you didn't you didn't use enough water. Everyone's petrified about using uh the too much water, and so they make a they make a one that's not bound. If you use uh I don't I can't really in my head calculate, you know, cut measures of uh of uh flour to um to Crisco.
Um but the uh you know you if you use enough of fat, right, and you incorporate it uh correctly into the flour base, um I usually add a little sugar because it colors it up really nicely and salt. Then uh, you know, you s you put the the ice water in and you don't really have to worry about it getting too uh the gluten developing too much and getting tough as long as you are pretty quick about it. Uh I tend to never use Crisco. Um I know I don't stock it. Um I think you know, lard is freaking delicious.
Lard lard's amazing. The problem with lard is that if you you know the hydrogenated lard is not so good, but the hydrogenated lard is good from a a texture standpoint, even though it's extremely soft, whereas uh home rendered lard tends to have a solid fraction and a liquid fraction. The liquid fraction is just too lack liquid to really do it properly, so you want to take the more solid fraction. And if you use lard, you want it to be really, really, really, really chilled, really chilled. But that gives kind of like a little like savory note to pastries that I think is really lacking in most modern pies that don't use lard.
But even and then, you know, barring that, even though the texture theoretically isn't quite as good using butter as using Crisco, butter pie crusts are freaking delicious. I mean they're Yeah, I wanted to use butter, and Pat was insistent that I use Crisco. Well, I didn't even have Crisco in the house, so he had to go buy it. But I had butter, you know? So I mean the the way Crisco, the you know, the the particular uh fat melting characteristics of Crisco, plus the fact that it doesn't have uh any, you know, it doesn't have water in it the way that butter does kind of make it have uh that that kind of unique Crisco texture that some people really really like.
I I don't think it's necessarily worth it. I've never been a big fan. I mean, uh, even prior to trans fat days, I mean, Crisco I thought was good for certain applications, like certain frying applications, donuts, you want a hydrogenated fat because um once they cool down, a donut fried in regular oil is gonna taste uh in liquid fat, liquid oil is gonna taste really greasy, whereas something fried in uh in a hydrogenated fat is going to um taste more like a donut, right? I mean, the flip side of that's also true. So, for instance, you want to fry fly fry potato chips in uh in liquid oil.
If you fry potato chips in a solid fat, they taste not oily, greasy, and they leave like this like grease coating on your tongue when you eat them, similar to what a donut might do, but in a potato chip that's considered extremely bad. In fact, um that is the story behind the whole kind of uh OLE remember OLESC? Wow, remember that? Mm-hmm. Yeah.
So for those of you that don't remember, uh Olestra, basically, there's a um a technique that they applied. They can apply it to any fat uh and it makes it such that you can no longer digest the fat, right? And so this was you know heralded years ago as like this is gonna make it so that you can eat un unlimited quantities of fried foods and it's gonna have the same effect on your waistline as if you ate everything steamed, basically. That was the that was the deal. Uh a couple of problems with it were one, uh when you uh do this uh procedure, you're no longer absorbing the fat, but that those fats still tend to uh the fat soluble vitamins also then tend not to be absorbed, so you're lacking in fat soluble vitamins.
That's the one problem. And two, if it's a liquid fat, right, like if you were to do it to make olestra olive oil, let's say, uh I don't know how I'm gonna put this in a way that's not gross, but it basically runs through your system and out your butt, right? Oh wow. And so that was what led to uh the phenomenon, and there is no polite way, it's the technical term, known as um uh anal leakage, right? Was what they called it, right?
Now, similar phenomenon, by the way, with this new uh new like three years ago product called LI. Remember, you know, you've heard of a lie, it's spelled kind of weird, but that's the diet pill that came out. Yeah. Yeah, it's a diet pill that basically you can eat and it stops you from absorbing fat. And uh I tested it, and the same kind of a thing happens.
You don't want to consume a lot of liquid fats when you're when you're on uh a lot. I don't even know if they sell it anymore, that stuff a lot. Anyway, so uh so back to where we're going. So what what happened was is they were frying potato chips in uh in liquid um in in an oil, liquid oil based uh OLESTR product, and basically it just ran straight through the test subjects, right? And that's where it picked up the really bad uh bad, bad uh press that if you ate this you were gonna have all kinds of you know gastrointestinal problems and it's gonna, you know, you're gonna set yourself on spray and whatnot.
So the but the the manufacturer w uh I forget who it was who did it with the Proctor and Gamble, whoever, that they basically were like, okay, uh no, it's free to lay actually. It's free to lay. Uh they uh they were like, okay, look, here's what we have to do. We have to use a hydrogenated fat so that um it's gonna be a solid in your body and it's not just gonna dribble through you like you're one long pipe. Do you know what I'm saying?
So so then they started frying um potato chips in solid olestra and they no longer had the underwear problem, but no one liked the taste of the potato chips, right? Because you don't want solid fat. You don't want your potato chips fried in solid fat. Okay. So what did they do?
They invented this new system, this air curtain, this hot air curtain, where they would fry the potato chips in this solid olestra and then they would put it on a conveyor and blast it with hot air. And the hot air would uh would would you know nuke the surface coating of the uh of fat right off the top of the chip so that when you ate it, you wouldn't perceive as much the fact that it had been fried with a solid fat, all right? Um and it wouldn't leak anymore, right? But the problem was is that you could always kind of tell that the thing had been fried in a solid fat, and most people then assumed that they could, well, I could taste OLESCR, you know, it doesn't taste good, I could taste no you can't. It's like the fact that they fried it in a uh solid fat is the problem.
If they had fried it in um you know, in a liquid OLESCRA, you would never have been able to taste the difference, except for, you know, you'd have to change your clothes a bunch. I mean, at one time I thought that I thought that uh Olestra was going to be the wave of the future and that there would be, you know, uh you know, in the in the in the dining room of the future, every chair would be its own chamber pot. But that has not come to pass. And instead, we have we have shied away from that, even as a, you know, I assume that culturally we would uh embrace anything that allowed us to um you know eat uh one thing constantly without it having an effect on our system, but for for some reason the the bad press surrounding it still prevented us from from uh embracing it wholeheartedly. Anyways, OLestra.
Back to, and by the way, for a very good account of O Lestra, you should read uh Jeffrey Steingarden's first book, The Man. I always get it wrong. I always confuse, and I've I think I said this on the air before, Jeff Jeffrey Steingarten, our good friend, uh Vogue food writer, uh, you know, renowned author, television personality, uh lunatic. Um he wrote a book called uh The Man Who Ate Everything, and I always confuse it with the Oliver Sachs book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. And so I always like I'm like the man who mistook his wife for someone who ate everything.
I always, for some reason, I don't know why I confuse these two books together, but I always do. Anyway, he has an extremely interesting article in that about uh and early, by the way, article on uh Olestra, uh, which I recommend that you go read. But the other m well, one of the other must-read articles, if there if there was such a thing in that book as a non-must-read article, I don't know, but uh one of the must-read articles in that book is on uh making pie crusts. And he um basically goes through a million different pie crusts uh and then ends up uh hanging out with Marion Cunningham, who uh was the you know famous, famous cookbook author and editor of uh, I believe of the more recent fanny Farmer, so that's been a long time since I looked it up. Uh and basically learns how to make pie crust from her, and it's extremely simple.
And I use their recipe now whenever I can, which is you put an absurd amount of butter, cut it up, make sure the butter is pretty cold, put it in the flour, uh add the salt or whatever sugar you want, knead it in with your fingers until it resembles like coarse, crumbly crap, like some things as big as peas and other things smaller. Stir in uh water, it doesn't have to be crazy ice water, make sure you have enough for it to bind together quickly, form it into a dough, uh roll it out without much ado, try not to re-roll it and go. And that's like, you know, that's it. You know what I mean? Makes great makes a great crazy.
Can you do it in the kitchen aid when you do it or you do it? Oh hell no. I use my use my hands in a fork. It's so simple. That's the thing.
Like everyone like you know, they they have these recipes, like when you're making puff pastry, people use, for instance, the uh um food processor to cut the cut the the butter in to get flakiness instead of having you make like you know the this the the butter mixture, folding it over and rolling it a bunch of times. With pie crust, there is never a reason to use any piece of mechanical equipment whatsoever. Like, you know, you just get a bowl and uh put in the flour, put in the I would say butter, but or I would say lard, and then barring lard, a mixture of lard and butter, barring a mixture of lard and butter, butter, barring that, I don't know, whatever the hell you have lying around your house. But yeah, Crisco, whatever. Um but uh you know, no offense to the Crisco people, except for the fact that it's because of Crisco and things like it that we no longer use lard because uh there was a big switch away, but that that's a whole separate story.
We'll get into that maybe later. Anyway, so uh uh you just put the the the flour stuff in and quickly with your fingers, like r rub it. And Steingarden has a great uh description of it because if there's anything Steingarden is, is he's extremely anal about not just recording what you say, but what you do. That's why he likes to go into the kitchen and watch people cook. Uh and so if you've ever cooked with him, he'll get something over the over the phone or whatnot.
He'll he wants to show up and examine everything you're doing, and he'll ask you constantly why you're doing X, why you're doing Y, and doing readings. And it's because he knows that um regardless of what you say, right, you almost always do something else, or you really don't understand why you're doing what you're doing anyway, and so he needs to basically decode it. And that's one of the reasons why he's been uh why he's so interesting and why he's been um so successful. Um so he has a very good description of of how to do it, but you basically just stick your hands in and you uh rub your thumb over your fingers like like almost like you were snapping, but across all your fingers, but uh or like you were rubbing, or like you were rubbing through your fingers like your fingers were the tines of a comb or a fork and you're rubbing it through. So you just rub it in and then uh just stir in the water with a fork, gather it into a ball with your hand, and you're good to go.
I mean, really, it's that's it's that freaking simple. There's nothing simpler than making a good pie crust, and yet there's not there's few things that cause as much anxiety among people. Secondly, uh, you know, you know, no offense to uh Nastasha's friend Pat here, but is he is he a known is he a known good cook? Is he what? Known to be a cook?
Yeah, is he a good cook? No. Then you should never listen to him about anything. You should like to go. Here's his mom, his mom.
Was his mom there? No. Then you should not listen to him. It's like saying, you know what? My mom, she's a really good doctor.
My mom knows how to cure uh, you know, X, Y, and Z. Or my mom's a good surgeon, so I'm gonna listen to listen to me about how to chop someone's heart out. Really? No. You know what I mean?
It's like, if the experts in the room with you, then um, you know, then follow the advice. But if it if, you know, if it's just some, you know, if it if it's like, you know, my mom's a good cook, well, you know, so what? You know, especially considering that there are eight million ways to do anything. And so uh, and even perfectly, and that's my that's always been my issue with you know, magazines like the Cooks Illustrated, or even sometimes when, you know, when we, you know, when we write, or when I write, you know, your urge is to say, this is the ultimate X, this is the ultimate Y, or the best, blah, blah, blah. In reality, um, there are a lot and there are a lot of things that are good done a bunch of different ways, and the idea isn't to find the one best way, but to have your way be coherent from beginning to end and to produce a delicious product.
There are many paths, there are many ways. Um but anyway, so I've been blabbering on about the pie crust. Why don't we go to our first commercial break? Call in your questions as 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128 cooking issues.
When black body comes, stand down by the door. Catch the bread and when the guy comes for the fall. When black body comes, I could let them everything alone, and before my friends find out I'll be on the road. When back is old to know it's not too big. Welcome back to Cooking Issues.
Calling all your questions too. 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. Jack choosing the music today. Jack, what is that?
I like that. Steele Dan. Steely Dan. Uh Steely Dan taking their name, I believe, from a uh William Burroughs uh uh quote, right? It's I I believe I uh there's so many like unf family friendly things, but I believe Steely Dan is from a William uh William Burroughs book and it refers to uh a toy used uh in private by women, a specific brand of them, or men, I guess.
I don't know. Is that is that true, Jack? That's true, yeah. Yeah, interesting. Uh Nastash, you still with us?
Mm-hmm. I'm having a frozen virgin lemonade. Well, wait, wh what? Wait, are you having a Dell's lemonade? I don't know.
Some guy handed it to me. Oh, Jesus, is it Dell's? Turn to the guy and say, is this a Dell's lemonade? No, he walked away. He's like it's it just has lots of pieces of lemon right in it.
That's that's Dell's. That's Dell's. That's that is you you have Rhode Island in a cup. All right. So like that's one of the like here's the thing, right?
Everyone says there's no such thing as regional American X, Y, or Z, and they're full of horse manure. Like uh, yeah, Rhode Island's got a couple of classic things. Anyone that's I didn't grow up in Rhode Island, but anyone that's grown up in Rhode Island knows Dell's Lemonade, and Dell's Lemonade is famous for um you got the slight it's a slushy one, right? And it's got little pieces of of of uh like the lemon in it, and it's classic. But they sell a packaged dell's that I've had that's okay, but it's not I don't think it's the same thing that they use if you get it from the real Dell stand in Rhode Island, but I can't be sure.
Any Rhode Island fan should call in and you know, and there's by the way, there's like a uh a Rhode Island kind of uh a New York Rhode Island culinary mafia. Uh you know, rut hello? Yeah, no someone's putting together a table, of course, behind me because it can't be this show without construction going up. So it sounds like a a pig is running around behind you, it's snorting. Right?
Yeah. So yeah, so like uh Wiley Dufrain, my brother-in-law, is Rhode Island. Uh there's a gazillion New York chefs that are Rhode Island. Isn't uh isn't uh Kevin also from Rhode Island? Yeah, yeah.
Who who else? Who else do we know from Rhode Island? Small state, a lot of chefs. Right? Yeah.
Yeah, strange. Okay. Uh let me see. Oh, by the way, did I already say this? Call in your questions to 718-497-2128.
That is uh 718-4972128. Nastasha, you'll be glad to know that I in fact still have not memorized it, and Jack had to give me a card with the uh with the with the number. Sometimes I think you just toy with me. No, I I really have not memorized it. If it's one of those things, like uh don't you have anything that you just have a mental block on that you can't that you can't memorize?
Yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah. You know, I can memorize many things. The number of uh to call into the show is not not one of those things.
Uh but you say it with such a flow that you think that you'd memorize it, you know. You say it the same way every time. Right. Well, you know what it's funny, it's like uh when you're reading something, and maybe this is part of the reason, when you're reading something, it literally just goes uh you know, th from your eyes out your mouth, and it's just that's it, it's gone. And I I had this happen when I was uh doing the ISCP, the uh International Association of Culinary Professionals with uh Chris Young, is the first time in my life we were doing a presentation for the awards for the cookbook awards, and it was the first time in my life I've ever used a teleprompter, and I have no idea what I said.
You know what I mean? It was like uh you know, it's it's it's it's like that's why you you know you ever see those things where like the newscasters are sitting there and they'll like someone will put something crazy in the teleprompter and they'll just start reading it with the same kind of emotion. I you know, I always thought they were dumb, but now I really understand it. It's that you you know, all you're concentrating on is delivering the text that's on the screen, and the mental activity it would take to process it at the same time is just you know too much. Anyway, so maybe that's why.
Maybe if I actually sat there I could memorize it, but because I've never done it and I've just read it off the piece of paper, I'll never memorize it. What do you think? Yeah. Oh, I was gonna tell you, LA is keeps asking about special treats that you like, so I've been sending them information on special things. Oh, Jesus, really?
Honestly? And okay, so uh what Nastasha's referring to is I'm I'm going off to Los Angeles. In fact, uh I have my bags with me now. As soon as the show is over, I'm going to John F. Kennedy International Airport and flying to LA, we're shooting a pilot.
Um, but I can't obviously talk about the pilot because then they would execute me. So apparently they have been emailing Nastasha saying what things that I uh in enjoy eating, but the problem is, um, and this is an interesting fact for those that have never met Nastasha, is that she's vicious. She's a vicious, vicious vi Jack, true or false. Um Thank you, Jack. He's just nervous because he doesn't want to doesn't want to suffer Nastasha's wrath when she gets back.
But um, yeah, Nastasha's uh yeah, yeah. So anyway, so here's the deal. Uh I guarantee you, and I'll find out when I get there. I guarantee you, Nastasha has only said either things that are embarrassing to me or that I actually despise, right? And then the funny thing is there are very few things I actually despise.
She'll she'll say something like this get pretzel sticks, even though everyone on earth knows I detest pretzel sticks because they're not real pretzels. Specifically, I said real pretzels and they have to be in knots. But they don't like it. I like that, but do they even have those in California? I mean, that's an East Coast thing, right?
Do they have real pretzels? We have Snyders. Snyders isn't that bad, right? No, Snyders is okay. Snyders used to be one of the best, but they've been stale now for about 15 years uh or 20 years.
The Snyders that come in a box have been stale, but that's old school. Like I used to eat those. That's what what the the Arnold clan has been. You know, my I I know I've discussed this on the air before, but uh I'm going to Florida soon, uh, not only to taste mangoes, which you know, maybe we'll talk about later if we have enough time, maybe not, with Nastasha and Harold McGee. And uh I'm hoping to get Tony uh Corneliaro out, but I don't think he's gonna be able to go.
But um, you know, anyways, uh right after that I'm visiting my uh 92-year-old uh grandpa and my ninety uh eight-year-old uh great uncle, Uncle Luke. I think I told you this. My kids want to visit him because they think he's Uncle Luke Skywalker. They have no they have no idea. Anyway, um he uh back in the depression worked in a pretzel factory and so back in the because they're all from uh Lancaster County you know uh Pennsylvania and so they uh yeah so I come from a pretzel eating background you are not related to me unless you like eating pretzels and the first thing you learn in my house is that pretzels must be twisted.
So what else did you tell them I like? Did you tell them I but you know uh for those of you out there if you want to send me something I hate the only two foods in the world that I don't like are notto which is I've discussed this uh and Harold McGee says that he has a natto that I'm actually gonna like which is a uh a uh fermented soybean product that to me tastes like uh garbage and the and uh the other is uh melon I don't like melon so did you tell them to get me plenty of cantaloupe even though you know I hate it no I'm not gonna tell you what I told them it'll be surprising you get that it's gonna be some it's gonna be something like really embarrassing. Like make sure you know what here's another I'm gonna go out on a limb like there are things that are people are embarrassed by that I am not embarrassed by I am not embarrassed to have a big pink drink in my hands like a giant pink fruity drink in my hands. If it's delicious I have no I have no problem with it right I mean what do you think like I know that there are certain drinks that if I see a dude with them I'm like really that's what you're gonna have that's what you're gonna drink but like I I I think that if there is a if there's a really good drink then you know you know what it's light beer would embarrass you more than having a drink with a flour garnish in it. I don't yeah I don't I mean I look uh I don't understand light beer I really don't I I don't I just don't I just don't under I don't understand it.
I mean uh uh uh okay okay one caveat. Like right now you're on the beach, right? Yeah. Is it piss hot where you are? Yeah.
Yeah, okay. So I mean, you know, a corona has its place there, which is basically a light beer, right? I mean, because it's basically like I want to have a little bit of alcohol and feel a little bit festive, but what I really want to do is drink seltzer water. Right? Yeah.
Right? So, like, you know, you feel a little bit bad just ordering a seltzer and you feel bad ordering a light beer, so you order a corona, which is essentially a light beer without the light beer label. Anyway. Mm-hmm. Uh, how the hell do we get on this subject?
I have no idea. Things you like and dislike. Oh, yeah, because of California. Anyway, okay. So uh let's get to a uh real question here.
Uh this is uh this is from uh I hope I pronounced this right, Myrica. Uh hi Nastash and Dave. Perhaps hold sec. Oh, we got a call in. So Myrick, I'll cut get back to your one question in a minute.
Caller, you're on the air. Hey, this is Josh and Tampa. How are you doing, Dave? Hey, doing all right. Good.
Got a question. A couple of years ago I bought uh the flavor bible. It's got a lot of good ideas, but uh I wonder if you could elaborate on the actual act of balancing flavors. I know something's too salty, you could add something acidic, and if something's too bitter, you add sweet, but uh I mean, how do you fine-tune a recipe? Huh, that's interesting.
Uh I actually own that, but I always for I always mix it up with different uh books. Who are the authors on that one again? Yeah, I couldn't tell you right off my head. Yeah, uh the idea of balance is really uh it it's it's really interesting. I tend y you know, if you every cook has their own feeling for what they what they do to to balance, and usually when you taste something, um you'll you know why it's flat.
If it you know, if it if it's flat, also by the way, when I'm balancing a dish, what I'll tend to do is take a little bit of that dish out and then play with that little bit of the dish on the side so that I can kind of see which direction my my additions are taking it, so I don't kind of botch the whole thing up. But if something just tastes overall like like low in flavor, dead, I add a pinch of salt to see whether the whole thing wakes up a little bit. And if it does I'll keep adding a little more I mean first of all like getting the salt balance right I think is the is the most important thing. And then the next one is you know almost always m um you know dishes especially braises or any anything like that like big liquid based things tend to be tend to lack acidity unless you specifically added it. But you know typically you'll add those things uh towards the end of cooking so you know first I'll usually first check a salt component and then I'll check a uh and then I'll check uh an acidity and I I personally do a lot of like meaty umami bolstering stuff either with fish sauce or with uh or with soy um so even in um non-western I mean even in western dishes I'll end up hitting it with like a little bit of not like a not a normal uh fish sauce one of the milder more kind of meaty fish sauces like uh like ishiri from Japan or or Ayu which you can get from Japan um because some of the you know some of the more traditional uh Southeast Asian ones can kind of quickly take on that Southeast Asian flavor otherwise or tiny bits of soy and not really so that you know you've done it just so that you kind of like really like like blow something out a little bit it just really changes it and rounds it into more meaty so like even like in like a bechamel sometimes I'll add a uh a pinch of those kind of uh things I tend not to have MSG in my house or I might ex experiment with that.
So in general, I don't do a lot of uh like uh m masking, right? So also I obviously you add sugar to things to round them out. But in general what what I think in terms of balance is that you want to get you you want to get the overall flavor pretty good. Like when you make a stock, right? You don't season the stock from the get-go.
You try to balance meat and vegetable and it's very kind of uh but when you taste it you could tell what it could be but it's very flat because it doesn't have any of the other things that are in it and you want it that way because you're going to reduce it by a lot. And so that's when you you bring out the balancing act. First you pop up all the flavors by adding something like salt which is going to enhance the flavor of everything. And then or you know or if something's too salty you can add sweetness which is going to balance out the saltiness, which was I think kind of the thing you were talking about before. The problem with that is that if you go that route if you I what you don't want to be in a position of is having to uh tone down another flavor by adding another flavor on top of it because then everything just gets kind of overwhelming over time.
I think you do you know what I'm saying? Do you agree or no? No I I agree because I've been trying to make like an Asian foul cedar salad using fish sauce and uh egg yolk and I've been trying to haven't been really going that well. Right. I mean I think what you want to do on that because that sounds actually like a a good idea you should try to source this stuff called IU which is this uh IU sauce it's a sweet fish from Japan and I don't know who's carrying this stuff but it's the most unbelievable fish sauce I've ever had it's crazy because it's a dead cross between fish sauce and like bacon and ham juice.
It's nuts. It's crazy. I you ayu yeah um but the uh I I think it's available now but I I'm I'm not sure it's it's it's amazing stuff. But I think what you're gonna want to do on the on the fish sauce and uh is use it as a very minor component. Do you know what I mean?
Like like one dash of fish sauce in like a Caesar style thing is going to really pop and bring out that that fish sauce essence, especially are you are you doing it in addition to anchovy? No. J instead of anchovy. Yeah. I mean, I'm a huge uh an anchovy fan, but um, you know, there's another way to go if you want to go uh stick with a more Italian kind of flavor set.
There's uh a fish uh product called Colatura, which is basically like uh uh like an anchovy like oil. Doesn't taste like fish sauce, but is kind of in between like an like it's not fermented, but it's got some of the kind of the funkiness of uh of uh uh anchovies. You could take a look at that. That's you can get that from Italian specialty markets, but they they charge an arm and a leg for it. I think like uh if you were to go and use an anchovy, because I always put anchovy in my Caesar salad, you know, you crush crush I'll crush it up um for the flavor and also the emulsifying stuff.
I tend to use salt pack anchovies because I like them a lot. But um I think a dash of fish sauce in that can really work well. The problem, how much were you adding before? Uh about a tablespoon. Yeah, so I would I would just go a lot less.
I mean, fish sauce is one of those things where it's like small amounts, like add this kind of ineffable quality that you know that you it's hard to get any other way, and then you add a little bit more and now it tastes uh Asian on you. Do you know what I mean? Which is good if that's what you're looking for. Yeah, that's what I'm trying to do. The only thing I'm trying to find a substitute for the parmesan or uh aspect of cheese.
Oh yeah. It's not really a cheese thing going on. You mean because you don't want cheese because of the Asian component or because Yeah, and it's it's interesting. Um, you know, the lack of dairy in uh in Asian cuisine is something I've been studying uh recently. Uh but also it's funny is the lack of dairy in uh like Italian classic or a lot of European fish based dishes.
And I think that in the one case of uh dairy in Asia, a lot of um a lot of uh China, for instance, in the north, and then you know, even throughout the middle section used to eat a lot of dairy. And uh I think what happened during the Ming Dynasty, there's a reaction against anything having to do with uh kind of like northern invaders uh that they had just basically thrown off the yolk from and since dairy was considered something that came from kind of Central Asia and then and the north, they were like crap on dairy. We don't want to use it anymore. You know what I mean? And then uh in in Italian and European food, I think the lack of dairy with specifically with fish-based products, uh guess except for things like Caesar salad, which is not Italian, but you know, as a European derivative, is that um fish was eaten on fast days, and on fast days you didn't have dairy.
You only had uh you had no meat and you had no dairy, so you had fish. And I think that's where a lot of the you know, for instance, fish pastas don't have uh cheese on them because of this ancient uh not ancient, but this you know, kind of old idea that you that you know on days that would you're having fish you're not having any dairy. Um anyway, but that that's uh uh aside from the point. So uh it's very hard to substitute for um parme parmesan, very hard. Uh nothing kind of tastes like that.
Uh I mean you can make an entirely different thing. In other words, you could use an egg yolk and then do like fish sauce and some sort of like uh you know, something with a lot of enzyme breakdown products in it, like maybe like a miso and then you know, lime juice, I think it would taste good. It wouldn't taste like a Caesar salad. Do you know what I mean? No, no, no, that sounds great.
Yeah. Oh, and then, you know, if you're gonna want to add some of the the that texture back, you could uh I mean nothing has that texture what has that texture. I mean you could crumple something like very, you know, like what could you crumple? I mean I don't know if is the idea to go vegetarian except for the uh egg. No, there's no vegetarian in this.
Oh right, fish sauce. What the hell what the heck am I talking about? Brainless. Anyway, um the uh yeah I'm trying to think of what what I would add for the texture component of that. But I I would try like a flavor base like that 'cause that's delicious.
Because the acid's really gonna balance out the I mean a fish sauce. I mean that's classic. You know what I mean? Like and and then I think the egg yolk's gonna add some body that you wouldn't normally get in a in a uh anything like that. Bring it closer to uh to a Caesar salad and um you know there's so many different flavors to play with with miso that I think you can really um balance then also not just body but sweetness and uh the amino acid um you know those amino flavors that you get in miso.
So I would try that. Um you wanna talk about uh I mean have you been offered any uh T V jobs? I know like the celebrity chef is huge and you're friends with a lot of the big ones uh want to see if anything come your way. 'Cause I've been reading your article uh what is it on um Food Republic? On uh oh oh on uh or eater eater.
Yeah well it's an interesting thing. I've done a lot of um I've done a lot of uh you know little spots on um y you know the expert for X Y and Z and uh I'm like I say I'm going to shoot a pilot now. If that pilot, you know, takes off I'll be a recurring character on that show. But you know, the T V's really hard because, you know, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. And um uh, you know, the the kind of what I'm interested in is f fairly niche.
You know, so like we have a fair you know, we have a the the people that read the the blog or listen to the show, you know, I really I really um like them because you know they they are dedicated to this kind of weird stuff that uh I'm in general interested in but it's hard to sell on a on a T V it's hard to sell on T V because um it's just I don't think it's mass mass market enough. I mean uh hopefully that that'll change um but that's always been the problem is trying to figure out something that um they could sell as kind of a mass market um show that is something that I'm still interested in. You know what I mean? Yeah I was like another question actually opinion. Do you think uh that modern gastronomy will ever make it to like the chilies or the Fridays level where these dishes that were you know that that have been done so much that nobody does them anymore but you know they could do it over there without anybody scoffing.
You think it'll ever reach there? Just for like the novelty aspect which modern uh cooks try to avoid right well okay I mean there's there's a there's a couple of things I think that there um there's definitely um in those in those realms there's a search for novelty but it's very very um kind of reined in it has to be extremely friendly but novel. So you know they'll spend like a a bazillion dollars to come up with a new flavor that's a tiny bit outside of the box but is so friendly that someone will still order it. So some of the some of the more challenging stuff that's being done in modern cuisine is not going to trickle down anytime soon. Um you know, th there are certain exceptions, like you know, garnishes are uh or or techniques, but the core techniques that are being used in uh in new in new technologies, a lot of them come from um kind of a similar well spring of ideas that that those guys use.
So, you know, I mean one of the major uh one of the major things that Farran really did was say, let let me look at industrial uh food manufacturing and see what it has to teach us about uh cooking. So, you know, and I feel that some of these techniques that are being used to make food better that were just industrial techniques before are gonna be used in in places that are more mass market to make food better eventually. And I think you know one of the key things is low t low temperature cooking. If you know when I go to the um shows where I see the equipment that's being sold to restaurants and food service change now, over the past couple of years there's been a big groundswell movement to move towards better temperature control. And what that means is people are going to care more and more about not overcooking their products or keeping them in top conditions.
And to me that's one of the core things about um kind of this new mode of cooking and like one of the core values is is that and so I think that is definitely moving into uh what's going on. Now are you ever going to see liquid nitrogen at Applebee's? I don't know. I don't think so. Do you know what I mean?
Uh unless it became kind of cost effective where they could get I mean I could see someone like you know I could see Chuck E. Cheese making liquid nitrogen ice cream as part of the uh as part of the you know the the pizza party thing for kids with the video games. I could see that because it's cool. Um but you know, I don't know whether any of the actual dishes are gonna make it. Um, but I think that there is going to be a trickle down of some of these techniques because um they just have legs.
You know, some of some of them don't, some of the some of them do. You know? Right on. Yeah. Alright, well, thanks for calling in.
No problem. All right. And uh uh before we run out of time, I should answer the question that Myrick had, because it's an interesting one, even though we've uh spoken a little bit about something similar before. Nastash, are you still there? Yep, I'm here.
All right, so Myrica writes in, she says, Perhaps my cooking issue is not very high tech, but of course we like all cooking issues, right, Nastasha? Yeah. Yeah. Uh but since she loves our show more than any other show, which we really appreciate, uh, I hope you could share some nuggets of wisdom on the subject of pit roasting a pig. Uh uh, she's she's doing that.
She's pit roasting a pig. Uh we have here this is her talking. We have a hole and a 100 pound Berkshire hog and a ton of banana leaves. We have pretty basic instructions, but absolutely no experience with pit roasting. I'm willing to go to any lengths to get excellent results, any special tips, tools, or references.
Okay. Okay. Uh I like the fact that you said we are willing to go through any lengths to get excellent results. I appreciate that. Um here is your main problem is that uh you have a single 100 pound pig and uh it's very hard to get it right the first time around.
If you're gonna if you're gonna um pit roast uh a pig, the basic the basic procedures are you build a fire uh and you uh you use rocks, you heat rocks with with a wood fire, uh I guess you could use charcoal, but wood fire. Uh and those rocks retain the heat that is then going to cook the animal over a long period of time after you bury it over with dirt, right? The other basic principle is that you um you're gonna wrap the pig in uh in banana leaves in in your case, which is gonna do two things, which is gonna keep the moisture in. Um well, it's gonna keep the moisture in, and it's also gonna stop the dirt from getting getting all over the pig. Uh the key things, one, you want to make sure that your stones aren't going to explode so but what I would do is I would uh find you want to find um stones that uh don't have a lot of contained water in them that don't have uh a lot of fissures that could break apart and then what I would do is build a fire outside and throw a bunch of rocks into it right and see whether and l step away step away from the rocks and then if they explode they explode you know uh I've uh I've had rocks uh you know I've done a lot of work with uh heating rocks and uh indeed they explode and when a rock explodes it's no joke you know what I mean it's like sprays everywhere little little shards of rock and and stuff I uh totally freaked out the pastry uh you know one of the pastry chefs in a in a kitchen at the school because I was heating rocks over over a burner.
So I would preheat the rocks, check it, dig a pit, then you're gonna need to heat the rocks for um for several hours. I would also, if you're gonna be willing to go through any lengths, I would definitely fire up the oven once, get something that is like has a similar weight to the pig, you know, that is cheaper than a pig and then attempt to roast it all the way through in the in the earth as a test for your system, right? So what you're gonna need to do is build up a big enough layer of rock such that it retains heat for long enough to cook the pig all the way through right even though it's not going to be so hot that it's gonna overcook or ruin the pig at any one point. So I would get some uh long ther if you if you can I would get some long thermocouples which aren't that expensive. You can get them for like $15, $20 a piece on Amazon, really long ones, and then a thermocouple thermometer and embed them into the ground in several points along your proposed oven.
Bury it like you were going to make the thing uh you know after it's been fired up, and then take measurements of the temperatures over time. And you're gonna want it to, it can stay up fairly high. So I would uh I would measure it and make sure that it, you know, it stays up in kind of that brazing range for several hours and then maintains a temperature above the cook point of the pork, which is going to be in roughly 60 Celsius or 140 Fahrenheit for a good uh depending on I can't picture how big around a 100-pound pig is, but not that much. I think like a good like six hours or something like that. If it stays around, hovers around there but isn't too high for that range.
I think you're gonna be uh good. I I read a very uh good idea that somebody had, um, and I will get you the website because it's a it seems to be a fairly decent reference on how to build this. It's uh recipe cottage. Oh, recipecottage.com forward slash Hawaiian uh forward slash uh forward slash whole roast pig. Um you know, you can search for that, but it has a good idea that you wrap the pig after you do the banana leaves, you wrap the pig in chicken wire so that you can easily pick it up without the pig totally falling apart.
I think that's a kind of a a genius, a genius uh idea. Um the other thing you're gonna want to do is take care of the meat. The one of the problems with cooking whole animals is that no one portion of the of the uh of the meat is the same, right? So some cuts want to be cooked by brazing over a long period of time to break down the collagen. Those ones are the ones that are gonna taste best using this kind of a technique because they have enough um collagen in them that when they're cooked, they're gonna stay uncuous, even though the meat has technically gone well above the temperature that you would want to cook it uh if you were just cooking it, let's say as a steak or medium rare.
But the the other muscles like the loin, the things that don't have a lot of uh exercise or a lot of movement, these ones, even if they stay juicy because you've wrapped them and they have enough in-trained moisture in it from the thing, they're going to be not prime uh texture because those muscles aren't meant to be cooked that long. Uh and this is the problem I think it's I don't think it's possible to cook a whole animal such that unless you go through crazy lengths like uh like I did with the uh with the turkey that you know I made a uh artificial aluminum skeleton for and pumped you know molten, you know, hot butter through it. I mean, like you know, unless you go through bonkers things, it's very hard to get a whole animal to come together at the same time. So one thing I would do is if you can salt out or get some salt or something in the areas that don't have as much connective tissue uh beforehand, that is going to protect them a little bit by having them keep more moisture by basically uh making the muscles be able to hold on to the water a little bit better. Um so I would definitely do that.
Uh I would uh I wish you could run some tests. It's all about running tests first, since I've never cooked uh one underground. I've done spit roast whole pigs, and the idea there is to basically stretch out the animal so that all meats uh get done at the same amount uh uh uh in the same amount of time. So you're also gonna have a problem with your pig that if you have places in the thigh uh in the leg, especially where the leg meets the body, it's gonna be very thick there, and so that's gonna take the longest to cook, and you'll be ruining the rest of the meat while that's happening. That's why a lot of recipes will tell you to score out the meat so you can get down close to the bone in those areas, but then you have the problem of you're gonna leach a lot of juices out during that procedure, even if you wrap it in in banana leaves.
So, I mean, I don't know whether if I was gonna do it myself, I might stretch it out so it's long and then wrap it, although that goes against what I think most people would tell you to do. But uh I'm gonna try to do a little more research. Um maybe post something. If you post something to eater, to the eater thing, hopefully I'll have some time to do some more research uh later this week, and I can have some more uh definitive answers for you, Marika. But thanks for writing in.
And uh I think I'm I think I might have to either do this from LA next week or I might have I hope I don't have to skip a week, right, Jack? That would be terrible. That would be awful. Uh Nastasha, thanks for joining us from uh Sunny Rhode Island. Hey Nastash, I heard that you found a skate on the uh on the beach, and instead of eating it, you threw it back in the water.
What's up with that? The seagull had already attacked it. Well, which is it? Which is it? The seagull attacked it and it was gonna die anyway, in which case you should have eaten it, or or what?
I threw it back in. I I threw it back in. Don't you like skate? No. Is that the same thing as a stinger?
No. Skate me you skate. Skate's delicious. You don't like skate? Maybe it was a stingray then, because it looked like a stingray.
They don't have no skates look like stingrays, but they're not like a stingray. I mean, they look like like Minnie's stingrays. How am I gonna bring it in, Dave? How am I gonna bring it in? It was on the beach, you said.
Yeah. Well, with my bare hand. Yeah. Anyway, scapes delicious. You know, uh, another one of those things that for years and years and years was a trash fish, they would throw it away because no one realized how delicious it was.
Uh delicious, delicious fish. Anyway, uh, this has been cooking issues. Please come back next week. Thanks for listening to this program on the Heritage Radio Network. You can find all of our archived programs on Heritage Radio Network.com, as well as a schedule of upcoming live shows.
You can also podcast all of our programs on iTunes by searching Heritage Radio Network in the iTunes Store. You can find us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for up-to-date news and information. Thanks for listening. You got my head all twisted. And I guess can't get it straight.
Oh, you daddy rat. Got me on this corner. And I don't know where I'm at. This is behind the scenes food news with Katie Kiefer. In the wake of the massive E.
coli outbreak in Germany, which was finally traced to organic sprouts. The editors of Food Safety News uh published an editorial suggesting that all sprouts should come with a warning label. The CDC or Center for Disease Control is echoing that sentiment, saying sprouts are not healthy food for everyone. Children, the elderly, and persons whose immune systems are not functioning well should not eat raw sprouts, because current treatment of seeds and sprouts cannot get rid of all the bacteria present. Persons who are at high risk for complications from foodborne illness should probably not eat raw sprouts.
According to an article in the current issue of emerging infectious diseases, CDC's peer-reviewed journal, which tracks new and re-emerging infectious diseases worldwide. Although sprouts are often considered a health food, the warm humid conditions needed for growing sprouts from seeds are also ideal for bacteria to flourish. Salmonella, E. coli, and other bacteria can grow to high levels without affecting the appearance of the sprouts. Researchers have treated both seeds and sprouts with heat or washed them in solutions of chlorine, yum, alcohol, and other chemicals.
Some of these disinfectants reduced the levels of bacteria, but a potential hazard remained, especially for persons with weak immune systems, that would be the elderly, children, pregnant women, etc. High temperatures that would kill the bacteria on the seeds would also keep them from sprouting. So until an effective way is found to prevent illness from sprouts, they really should be eaten with caution, if at all. And by the way, it's National Sprout Month. This is behind the scenes food news with Katie Geefer.
Check out a small clip from the food scene hosted by Michael Harlan Turkell, a show where food and art intersect. I think most recently you had a chocolate waterfall that had five tons of chocolate flowing. And you'd put on what a protective suit, walk through a waterfall, make your own chocolates within this kind of contained environment. And most recently, a rabbit cafe. Can you explain that one to me a little bit?
Well, I'm this also slightly comes from jellies as well, because in England, everyone has these uh rabbit jelly molds. It's the most popular mold everyone goes, Oh, I had rabbit jellies as a kid. And we've always been awfully bewildered by why, why rabbit jellies? The only way to get to the bottom of that was to get a whole hard of rabbits out from a cafe with them and have people talk rabbits and these. Yeah.
Um so it kind of has resonance with uh one of one of our favorite cookbooks, which we think an awful lot of uh you know modern chefs have have is the dark secret under that pillow. Um, which the future is. Want to hear more? Well, tune into the food scene live every week, Tuesdays at 3 p.m., or you can find all the archive shows on our website, or subscribe to the podcast and iTunes. Thanks for listening.
The following is a message from Zingerman's. From June 30th to July 3rd, 2011. Come hang out at Camp Bacon, a four-day festival hosted by Zingerman's. The main event is an all-day affair at Zingerman's Roadhouse, featuring plenty of bacon, bacon learning, and such luminaries as Alan Benton, John T. Edge, Molly Stevens, and more.
The event will be taking place in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Proceeds from this event benefit Southern Foodways Alliance. Also, on Friday, July 1st, there'll be a special benefit performance featuring Andre Williams and the Gold Stars and special guest John Langford and Skull Orchard. Visit www.zingerman's campbacon.com for more information and for tickets. Once again, that's www.zingerman's campbacon.com.
The following is a public service announcement from Just Food. Help bring live chickens into food challenge communities through your donations to the Just Food City Chicken Project 2011. The City Chicken Project would not be possible without the volunteer hours, donations large and small, and the vibrant energy and ideas of the communities we work with. Just Food is a nonprofit organization that connects New York City communities and local and urban farmers with the resources and support they need to make fresh, locally grown food accessible to all. To donate, search on Kickstarter.com for Just Food and find their City Chicken Project.
For more information on Just Food, visit JustFood.org or call 212-645-9880. That's 212-645-9880. Let's keep making New York City a better place to live and eat.
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