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Find more information at the DOT's website, keyword Summer Streets. Oh, you dead. Hello and welcome to Live Cooking Issues. I'm Dave Arnold, the host of Cooking Issues here on the Heritage Radio Network, coming to you every Tuesday, except the last three ones from 12 to 1245. I am in Robert's, uh, but uh Nastasha, the Hammer Lopez, uh, you know, the motor of the Cooking Issues bus, is uh actually gonna call in from North Carolina from the Outer Banks, but I think she's having some technical issues.
We'll get her when she comes in. Uh, let me call in all your questions, by the way, all your live cooking questions too. 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. So I'll take the first question first, and that's from Ross McGuire from Dublin.
I'm excited to have a uh someone who listens in Dublin. I've only uh managed to go to Ireland once, and I only got to spend a couple hours in Dublin, which is preposterous because from all accounts it's a great city. Uh, and I'm anxious to go back. So uh very excited. Um getting a question from Dublin and was wondering, are we still on?
I was wondering if you and Dave are still doing cooking issues. Uh though Nastasha and Dave are still doing cooking issues on Heritage Radio. I pick it up as a podcast and it's become a huge favorite of mine every week. Uh and it's David, we have been a source of inspiration, which we appreciate. Uh Ross thinks he's stuck in Dublin.
I would say you're lucky to be in Dublin. Uh and anyway, he's hoping that uh we're coming back sometime soon. Well, here we are. Uh and uh I'll tell you why, Ross, that we haven't been on for the past three weeks. Uh the past three Tuesdays in a row, I have been in transit uh from one place to the other.
Three Tuesdays ago, I was flying back from California because uh I was uh lucky enough to go shoot a uh pilot for uh ABC. God knows if it'll ever get get aired. Um but it was a a cooking-based thing where I was a judge. Unfortunately, I'm not allowed to talk about it, except for I will tell you that I have tasted peacock now, whereas I hadn't tasted it before. Peacock, as you might know, was one of the uh animals that was highly prized uh as a foodstuff from the Roman times, perhaps before, but I I know from the Roman times uh up through um the mid you know middle ages, primarily because it's a really amazing looking bird.
Because by all accounts, uh it didn't taste very good. It was kind of dry and stringy, especially using the cooking uh techniques of the time. And I have to say, it you know has the ability to become a very tough, stringy bird, but it um from my experience over the past couple weeks can be cooked properly. And then the last two weeks I've been en route uh from and to Florida, where the main uh business I did down there, I did uh actually, if you guys have uh are familiar with the uh truck, you know, the food truck uh explosion that's been going on, one of the best ones uh around is uh gastropod in Miami done by uh Chef Barrum uh Jeremiah Bullfrog, and we did a uh, you know, uh um an event together in Miami where I did cocktails along with uh Chadzilla Croof, if you know that blog, uh, and it was a really good time. Uh but I also went down there with Harold McGee and Nastasha to taste uh exotic fruits and mangoes, and we had some of the most amazing mangoes.
We unfortunately, because we were caught in a torrential torrential downpour both days in a row, only got to sample maybe I haven't really counted yet, but maybe sixty to eighty types of mangoes. I usually I like to do at least a hundred uh in a one or two-day tasting, just so you can get the f kind of a full uh variety of different kinds of flavors that a particular fruit can can do. So, you know, when we did citrus, we did a one-day citrus that was over a hundred varieties, we did a two-day apple that was over two hundred varieties, a pear day that was a hundred varieties. You know, I just it's a nice round number because then you could say that you know you've exhaustively tasted at least that many, and you really do get uh you really after the first 40 or 50 get an idea of the range of flavors that can go on. But I had no idea how good a mango can be, because the mangoes that are shipped up to New York uh all go through a process, no matter where they come from, even if they come from Florida, of uh going through a heat treatment to kill fruit flies and any other insects that might be nesting uh in the you know, or you know, whatever they do inside of the mangoes.
So they're immersed in hot water, and that hot water can uh kill some of the aromas and also prevent uh the natural ripening process from taking place exactly as it otherwise would have. Um so basically, the mangoes we get can be okay, but they're never gonna be the world's greatest mangoes. So, you know, went to Florida, got them off the tree, and I can in various ripenesses and various flavors. There's there's a couple of different styles of mango, right? They roughly break down into ones that have derived from the Indians uh Indian mangoes, ones that are derived from Southeast Asian, like Thai style mangoes, uh, and then there's a bunch of Florida mangoes that are kind of their own thing that are are are hybrids of those that have been brought in.
But also Egyptian mangoes, delicious. So there's uh a wide variety of mangoes, and I hope to have a a blog post on that soon. But I you know, I was amazed at the kind of different flavors that could come out of a mango. There's one that tastes like a creamsickle, many, many that have a like a coconut. I mean, just amazing, amazing stuff.
Anyway, oh Nastash is on like hey Nastasha, how you doing? Good, how are you? How are the outer banks? Uh it's actually not that humid down here. I'll give me a break.
I'll have you know I've been there. I have I'll have you know I've been there before. But you you you know I would tell you the truth. It's actually not that human. So it's it's not humid.
No, I mean not right now. It's it's about eighty-five right now. Yeah, but nothing feels humid when it's eighty-five. Tell me when it gets up to ninety-five degrees. I will I'll check back in and here's what I don't want to know.
I don't want to know is it comfortable? That is a useless piece of information to me. I want to know the exact temperature and the humidity because you know, eighty-five degrees, even when it's like a zillion percent humidity, especially because I know you're stepping into an air conditioned uh house when you step into it. So you're like, man, it feels great this air-conditioned house. No, I'm outside right now, I'm on a porch.
You're on a porch right now. Yeah, and it's not humid. I mean, there's a little bit of moisture in the air, but not what I was expecting. Well, it's not ninety-five degrees yet. When's it gonna get up to be like nine?
Like three, like two o'clock, three o'clock? Alright. So at two o'clock, three o'clock, you know. I wish that everyone could be on the air, so you can call me back. I could hear you gasping for breath while you tell me how not humid it is in the outer banks up there.
Okay. Yeah. Super. I mean, look, uh like I say, I've been there and maybe like I happen to be there on the only summer that is so hot and humid that you want to die. In fact, like even the green flies, which suck half of your blood in the thirty seconds that you're outside, if you're out near sunset, we're too tired and lazy to come kill me.
But uh I somehow doubt that. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Anyway. I'll check back with you.
Yeah. You have a lot of questions to answer. Yeah, well, I just answered Ross McGuire's question on uh do we still exist? And happily for us we still we still do exist. Okay.
So uh by the way, I will re-give you the number in case someone just realized that we are live again. 718 497-2128. That's 718497-2128. But I do have a lot of questions that came in in the interim while we were away. So I'll go right to it.
Howard writes in with a question about papayas. I have a question about papayas. I've been eating a lot of papaya lately, which I can't get down with you on this because Howard, because I uh some reason papaya is the one of the fruits that I haven't learned to love. I just I can't it's something about it that's not not me. I love love like like an un unripe papaya as a crunchy element and a salad, things like that, but I haven't uh figured out how to love I don't hate 'em, but I haven't figured out how to love a ripe papaya.
What about you, Nastasha? Yeah, I feel the same. But I do I do like the fact that they're good for stomach uh ailments. So well, okay. I mean, you know how I feel about taking things for uh uh food as medicine, you know how I feel about it.
But maybe it works, who knows? God only knows, I certainly don't. Okay. I've been eating a lot of papaya lately, and usually uh this is Howard, by the way, not me. And usually I peel and cut up the whole fruit and store it in the fridge.
I've noticed that when I get to the bottom of my container, there's always a papaya jelly, presumably made from the papaya juices. Do you know what's going on there? Is there any way this phenomenon can be put to good use, i.e., in a cake, a jello, etc.? Alright, Howard. Because I don't eat a lot of papayas, I didn't have a lot of experience with this, so I had to do myself some research.
My first uh thing, you know, theory was you know, that one of the main things in uh papaya that is useful is a a protein, uh protein breaking down enzyme, a protease called papaye, which is used as a meat tenderizer. Now, usually when you break down proteins, um what what happens is is they break gels. You break proteins down and they lose their strength. Except in certain situations, you can partially break down a protein and as actually cause it to gel. And actually, papayene is used in certain tests for that for gelling soy, soy proteins.
So uh at first I thought maybe that was what's going on, but then I was like, nah, there's not that much protein in the papaya, and I don't really know how that would work. Then I was thinking perhaps you were getting a low temperature yeast or bacteria in there, and then I was like, meh, no. But then I came across an article that you are going to enjoy called Stability Studies of Papaya pectinac uh pectin esterase. Alright. It is a known fact in uh that papaya has extremely active pectinesterase enzyme in it.
I only known about I'd only known about the protein breaking down enzyme, the the papayaine, but and to Nastasha's point, a lot of people take papaya because of it has lots of bioactive molecules in it, more than many fruits, okay? And pectinesterase is a is and a lot of fruits have it, but I guess not in the same quantity and not the same activity. What pectinesterase does is actually joins pectins together, making them bigger, and uh actually, does it do that? No. Does it join them?
No, it just strengthens them. I don't think it actually polymerizes them. Ah, who knows? I don't know. But it makes them stronger.
And uh what happens is is that um papaya can self-gel based on the activity of this pectin pectinesterase once the uh once the juice has been released from it. I will redo the first paragraph of this. Papaya pectinesterase is a pectic enzyme which has important influence on the quality and stability of processed papaya products. A short period after papaya is pulped into puree, a gel is formed. This gel formation has been attributed to the enzymatic action of pectinesterase by uh Yamamoto and Inue in 1963.
Pectinesterase is also of great concern to the citrus industry since it has definitely been established that it can cause clarification of citrus juices and gelation of concentrates, which is interesting to me. I've never thought of using it as a as a way to clarify. Of course, I have I I use the opposite enzyme. I use um I use a uh wait, shoot, pectinesterase. Anyway, yeah, I use I use one that breaks down, I use one that breaks down pectins uh to uh clarify things.
But anyway, so that seems to me to be your answer. I don't what it's basically doing is making a stronger pectin uh out of it, a pectin gel. So I don't know that you could use it in cake or jello, but maybe you can make up a pie of juice and have it gel on its own as as a good jelly. I don't know what the texture of uh of it is. But Howard, hopefully this answers your question, and it's very intriguing, something that I might uh study more.
Maybe I'll even learn to like papaya. What do you think, uh Nastasha? Maybe. Maybe if we tried a lot of papayas, we'd find one that we like. That's possible.
Try a couple hundred papayas. There were a couple down in Florida when we tried that, but you know, I just didn't even look at them. I didn't even bother. You know? You know what's another one?
You know what's another one? Here's one that that ticks me off. Guava, right? But people just say people just say guava. I mean, what the hell does that mean?
Like the different guavas taste so stupidly different that to just say guava, I mean, it doesn't really make any any sense. Because I'd never been a huge guava person as a fresh fruit. I've had lots of guava juices that I like, but I've you know, I have never been a huge kind of fresh guava person. But then the last two times we visited Florida a taste, we had really kind of interesting guavas, right? Yeah.
But like unrelated in taste to each other, right? I mean, some were very acidic, like the cast that we had, some were kind of you know, so lacking in acidity that I found them kind of sweet and insipid. I really hate fruit that just has sweet with no acidity. Do you know what I mean, don't you? Yes, I know.
I know you do. Oh, I detest it. Hate it. I would much rather yeah, yeah. Anyway, yeah.
I mean I'm that guy walking around eating the unripe berries off of trees and uh hoping I don't die. I don't actually do that. I only do it if I know what the berries are. And getting poison ivy. Getting poison ivy, yes, yes.
That's a story for story for later. Okay. Uh Aaron Oster, uh, formerly a salumeria, where is he now? Oh gosh, I don't remember. Another salumi place.
Good job, good job. Good job remembering. Anyway, Aaron Oster writes in about round cambros and coffee. I hope all's well. I was seeing you the other day.
I'm writing because I have a question for Dave, I think only he can answer, although it's probably not true. Uh is there any advantage for making ice coffee via the 12 to 16 hour steep method in a round cambro versus a square one? A cambro, for all of these who don't use cambros, is basically just either square or round plastic food containers that have marks of like quartz and liters on the side, and they're very common in professional kitchens. Uh, you know, we typically use the four, the seven, and the twenty-two-liter, uh 22 quart cambros uh the most. Uh but they, you know, that's what that's what he's talking about.
Anyway, uh wants to know whether there's a difference in using the round or the square. The steep method is the here's the steep method method he uses. Add ground coffee to room temperature, uh add ground coffee to room temperature water stir uh and let it sit overnight at room temperature. Next morning filter the coffee through a super fine mesh, and what you're left with is super rich in deep coffee with all the top notes of the coffee and supposedly less bitterness. This is a study that's been, this is by the way, a type of coffee that's become extremely popular uh over the past you know several years, and a lot of really high powered people are uh investigating it.
I know Harold McGee is investigating it, Don Lee is investigating, a bunch of people are investigating it. Uh you want all of the recipes, they all seem to say that they use circular containers. So he's wondering whether the circular versus the round makes a difference. I don't think that it makes a difference in terms of the steep, but I haven't done it myself, so I don't know whether or not the actual filtration becomes uh more or less difficult. And I'll give you a story.
When we're using an enzyme to break down the pectin in juices like apple juice and then letting it set down in the bottom of the uh container, what ends up happening is we always use round containers because when you pick up the container and move it to start, you know, decanting the clearer stuff with that doesn't have the particles off of the top. If you have a square container and you pick it up, the corners start mixing the fluid as you turn it. It acts almost like a mixer because the fluid's in a square shape, and as you turn it, right, the corners kind of start moving the fluid. Whereas if you use a round container and pick it up, you can pick it up and spin it, and basically you don't end up stirring the product. You move it very little.
So the grounds don't get kicked up, the the particles don't get kicked up off of the bottom. So if you're getting an advantage with this coffee in terms of your filtration by being able to dump relatively clear stuff off of the top before all the particles go into your fine mesh strainer, right, if that's going to increase your filtration efficiently, or perhaps even change the taste of it, right? Then I would definitely recommend going round. Uh, but if you're, you know, stirring it right before you're gonna pour it anyway, right? You haven't let it settle for a long time, and you're not extremely careful to just decant just the top liquid off the top before you start, then I would say it doesn't matter whether it's square around.
I don't think it's gonna actually make a difference in terms of how it infuses. It's just a question of how you're gonna pour the liquid off the top. That makes sense. What do you think, Nastasha? Yeah, that makes sense.
All right. Now, I have many more questions, but I'm gonna go to my first commercial break and we'll come back and answer them. Calling all your questions to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128 cooking issues. And you'll let's feel it, but confusion.
And the world around is coming down. We don't have to be. Yeah. Were you dancing? Oh, you yeah, I was, you know, feet pounding, fist pumping.
Was that was that Jack or was that you, Nastash who picked that? No, no, I that was Jack. Nah, nice. Good call. We should let him pick it always.
Anyway. Chris Anderson writes in with a vacuum sealing question. Hey Dave, I have a mini pack 31 uh, I guess MVs. He just writes 31X chamber uh vacuum sealer with gas flush. Wow, that's nice.
Uh the 31, by the way, is the small unit, which uh, you know, I'm not saying that I'd like to get one for free, but I'd love to get one for free. It's uh I think it's the best uh unit of that size that's available right now because it's very compact, but it has a much larger chamber size uh for its size than the equivalent other small, small units that I've had. I think it's like the best home vacuum unit. Uh you know, or small, small commercial. I mean most restaurants I think would um kind of outgrow it pretty quickly because of its limited size, but for you know, a house it would be perfect hint hint, right, Nastasha?
Yeah. Yeah. Uh anyway, uh what gas flush means, by the way, is that um after you seal a vacuum on it, you pull a vacuum on it and you seal it, uh the air comes back in. If you have gas flush, you can fill that bag with an inert gas, usually nitrogen or depending on what you're doing, CO2, whatever, mix different mixes of gas. Uh you know, if you're doing fish and you want to be uh, you know, you want to really ruin everybody, you can put carbon monoxide in there to make it keep red, or if you want to do that to meet, if you want to rip off your customer, you can do that too.
Anyway, uh don't do that. Um so but with the gas flush, you can do that, and the cool thing is you can then package things like potato chips, and they don't get crushed because you know, there's extra uh gas in there, but it's totally dry gas. So you're not it's not gonna go stale, it's not gonna oxidize. I mean, it's it's good stuff. Uh anyway, uh I have some uh he has some bulk flour and a few other powder like ingredients that he wants to vacuum seal to prevent oxidation.
Uh his concern is that fine particles are going to disperse throughout the chamber, either during the vacuum or during the nitrogen back backfill. Any tips for preventing this? Well, uh you're not gonna have a problem with the powder during the vacuum cycle. I've never uh the only thing I've had even minor problems with was some spray-dried vinegar powder, which is extremely fine and really wants to fly all over the room. Like you can't if you pour it into a container, it like you know, it comes out of the container and chokes you, you know.
Uh like uh it's cra crazy stuff. And I vacuum sealed that with only minimal kind of dust issues, uh like hardly any problems uh at all because the vacuum isn't getting like first of all, the the bag is there, the vacuum isn't sucking directly out of the bag, it's sucking uh you know through a hole, which then is dispersed over the entire chamber. So you get very little actual movement of uh particles out of the bag, and it hasn't been in my experience a problem. Here's where the problem happens. When you take a very fine powder and you vacuum it on a high vacuum, uh when you when you let the air back in, the um the stuff gets squashed really flat.
Uh and so you can have caking and pelleting problems with the powder, like it forms clumps when you uncut the bag to use it later. And that's been my main problem uh with things like uh transglutaminase or with the vinegar powder is that I get clumping after I've vacuumed. Now, I'm trying to think of a decent way to because what happens when you do a gas flush is the gas comes in via like depending on your unit, like one, two, or three little tubes that are in the bag, and they come in with enough force to really kind of like I've had bags that weren't like uh you know held on properly rocket across the machine uh and you know spray their contents everywhere. So you're gonna want to, and I don't know whether you're gonna be able to get around uh this problem. What I would do is because you need it to go in the bag and not just fill the entire chamber, right?
You need the gas to go directly in the bag. You could try to put little diffusers over the front of the gas jets, turn the flow way down and the pressure way down so that you don't get a lot of spray. But you might have a problem doing um doing a gas flush. Now that said, you're only gonna need a tiny bit of gas in there to prevent it from compacting and therefore causing clumps. So you might not need that much gas, but you're definitely gonna need to put uh kind of diffuser plates on it or it's gonna kind of fire across and gonna cause uh problems.
Um but you're not gonna have a problem if you don't use any any gas flush on it. He writes on a related note, do you have any experience oh my iPad just turned off? Uh on a related note, do you have any experience with oxygen absorbers that are sold in little packets like desiccants? Do they actually work and are they food safe? All right, uh a couple.
I don't have he's talking about oxygen scavengers that act like physically prevent oxidation by being in the package and just having a stronger affinity for the oxygen than your food does. And uh they I don't know whether the particular ones you're looking at are food safe. I've never used them, but they clearly definitely make food safe uh oxygen um, you know, scavenging packets. And I will tell you a story that I probably shouldn't tell you because it was told to me by someone who must have had too much to drink who works for an oxygen scavenging package uh company uh a couple of years ago. Um when I say a couple like eight years ago.
They once uh were doing an oxygen scavenging uh package, right? A little paper insert that's that sucked up oxygen for a major candy manufacturer that worked with peanut butter. Let's say Reese's peanut butter cups. Let's just say they were that. I'm not saying they were, but let's just say it was that.
Uh and what happened was is they would put these things in to prevent the peanut butter from going rancid, and nobody liked the taste of these Reese's peanut butter cups because uh, you know, they just didn't taste right. You know, they tasted not like Reese's peanut butter cups. And what it turns out is is that the characteristic taste of a Reese's peanut butter cup is due to a certain amount of rancidity in the peanut butter. And so, you know, one person's rancid is another person's Reesus. Now, y I love Reesus peanut butter cups, and I'm sure a lot of uh you out there do as well.
You wouldn't necessarily love it if I told you that what you were liking is rancid peanut butter because rancid has a negative connotation. However, um, you know, if you didn't know it was rancid and you just said there was there was like some selective oxidation and aging of the peanut butter to make delicious Reese's peanut butter cups, maybe you'd like it better, but the term rancid is so loaded that uh that has a problem. So, anyway, long story short, they didn't use the oxygen scavenging packaging in the Reese's peanut butter cups anymore because people didn't like it. Um so yes, they are food safe. No, I don't have any uh experience with them.
Um from Anonymous. Hello, Anonymous, about sealing vegetables. I recently got an immersion circulator and I'm cooking a lot of vegetables and they're floating to the top. Is there any way to safely keep vegetables under the water so I can get the most out of my machine? I'm assuming uh they mean the vacuum machine, because when you're cooking uh I I don't know ex here's the problem.
When you take a vegetable and you put it in a vacuum bag, or even if you try to do it in a Ziploc or whatever, um vegetables have a lot of air on the inside of them naturally, right? So things like carrots, they float in water because there's air. What happens when you seal them in a bag and then cook them and heat them, the air that's in them expands and escapes and inflates the bag. And then the bag floats to the top and does two things. One, it makes it very difficult to have it cook uh evenly because the top of the bag's out of the water and it doesn't get hot.
Uh and they also take up a lot of space and they're ungainly on you know, they're pain their pain in the butt. So there's a couple things you can do. If you have a vacuum machine, I recommend sucking a hard, hardcore vacuum on those things. Super hardcore vacuum. If you suck a really hardcore vacuum on it, you might be able to get an and when I say that means whatever the full vacuum is plus an extra 30 seconds, you'll be able to get enough of the air out to uh get them to s sink down to the bottom and stay somewhat near the bottom.
They're still going to inflate a little bit when they get really hot. Um another technique you can use, and by the way, when you suck that kind of a hardcore vacuum on it, also any flavor you put into the bag, whether it be oil or with carrots, something like orange juice, will get injected further into the carrot and you'll get more of that flavor uh transfer. Another thing you can do, and this is from Hervé Molivaire, our friend at the French Culinary Institute, is you can take some stainless steel knives and throw them in, you know, or you know, butter knives, uh and throw that that because they're not sharp, uh or s you know, and they're heavier than spoons, and uh throw them into the bag and seal them with the bag and that'll drop your thing to the bottom like a stone, even though it's filling with air if you have enough knives, and he does that all the time. If you don't want it in with your vegetables, you can even seal the knives in like a bottom section of your bag and then seal uh the vegetables on top of it so the knives aren't directly touching. And he does this also when he's wrapping um things like um like uh when we do uh like roulades of meat and we hand roll them in in uh plastic wrap and drop them, those rolls sometimes have a tendency to float.
So what he'll do is he'll take uh the roll and he'll roll it in plastic wrap, and then he'll take like five, six butter knives, and depending on the size of the item, and then he'll put those and then he'll roll another layer of plastic wrap around that and around the knives, and bang, those things drop right to the bottom. So it's a really good solution. When you're um but that means that's basically what I recommend. You gotta weigh the thing down. Even with a very high seal on something, uh you're still gonna get some air coming out of the bag at high temperatures, and and you have to cook vegetables at high temperatures, 85 Celsius and above.
So it it really it it's a tough problem, but not insurmountable. So you know. Also, you have to cook vegetables if you don't add a lot of liquid to the bag, which you're probably not because otherwise, why are you cooking them in a vacuum bag anyway? Uh you're you know, you're probably trying to concentrate the flavor of the of the vegetable and/or add another one. You have to cook it for a lot longer because uh it takes longer for the um the vegetable to break down even at high temperature in the absence of excess water.
Uh okay, so uh Victoria Sen writes in about dehydrated fruit sheets. Hi, Nastashian Dave. I'm planning on making sheets of dehydrated fruits, spices, and seeds. I'd like it not to be uh fruit leather, but to be crispy. I think the recipe I have is going to change the colors.
I want to keep the color of the mixes, but also have it uh dehydrated so it's flexible when it's baked, but then shaped and gets hard, similar to a fortune cookie. The base uh that she's using is similar to a twel base, but the problem is the color changes to a dark brown. Is there a recipe or ingredient I can use to keep the color of these mixes after they're dehydrated or baked yet still maintain a crispy textured end product, thanks Victoria? Okay. Uh here's the main problem.
Fruit leathers are done at a low temperature, and they always have uh a lot of sugar in them that haven't had all the water driven off because they're done at low temperature. That is why they are always flexible. Okay. The higher temperature products you're doing their twil batters, right, are based on driving off the uh liquid and almost you know turning the sugar into you know, almost like caramelizing the sugar, which is why they're brown, right? Uh along with, you know, if there's any other things that turn brown in it, like milk solids and whatever.
And when they are heated, you're basically melting it, and then you can form it, and then you let it cool and it gets hard again, right? That's how fortune cookies work. But that's why they turn brown. So uh one thing I would do uh to change it and still have it be crispy is switch from sugar to isomalt. If you use isomalt, isomalt browns a lot less uh than sugar when it gets cooked up uh to those high higher temperatures.
I'd also say you could switch to a non-tual, like almost like uh some of these dehydrated maltodextrin things. Problem is they might not be as flexible when they when they when they dry down. Um what I would like you to do is send me the actual recipe you're using, because I looked up some uh there are some crunchy fruit um fruit sheet recipes out there uh based on you know fruit, isomalt, and maltodextrin. Uh but I don't know exactly the recipe you're using, so I don't I can't really troubleshoot it. But my guess is is that your unf your flexible recipes that don't get too hard aren't cooked to a high enough temperature, and your other ones you're getting browning of the sugar from cooking at a high temperature, and you might be able to solve it by moving to an isomalt, although it will make it less sweet.
Uh anyway, so hopefully that helps. And uh give us a call, uh give us uh an email with the recipe you're using, and maybe we can help you even more. Uh in a similar vein, Mike writes in and says, Hello, uh, has cooking issues been taken off the air? No, I have not been uh taking off the air. He misses it.
We appreciate that. We're back, don't worry. My question is, how can I help keeping my homemade marshmallows from sticking together after I've cut them and cover them with cornstarch and powdered sugar? He uses a one-to-one ratio of cornstarch and powdered sugar to cover the marshmallows after they're set. Uh he's been using a recipe that he found uh online, and I I wish I could I had it with me.
Some reason when I pasted it in the the URL didn't show up, or I'd tell you whose recipe he used. Uh I've increased the size of the recipe 30% to fill a half sheet pen, and I always use a scale to measure, uh, thereby saying he doesn't think it's a problem with the recipe. Do we have any uh help? Okay, the recipe that uh he's following online, which I apologize I don't have the s uh site for because it didn't show up on my on my iPad, um, uses uh as you know most of these do, and it's an egg white and gelatin mixture with uh sugar that you cook up, you know, to candy stage and then you you beat it in the gelatin, the egg white, the sugar, it sets up uh as a foam and then it's cut and or dolloped or whatever, and then put into a cornstarch and sugar uh mixture. Now, if you're if your marshmallows are too wet, right, and you need more structure, you can up the gelatin one, you can, or you can uh increase the cooking temperature of the sugar to a certain point, right?
But if you like the texture that you're getting and all you want to do is make it less sticky, right, then what you need to do is work on the coating problem. Now, all marshmallows are too uh syrupy on the inside, really, you know, too um sticky on the inside, uh, you know, to have them not stick if you're actually gonna touch the inside of a marshmallow. Otherwise, it would be the same as the marshmallows that are in, you know, cereal boxes, which are 100% desiccated, right? Although I like those. Do you like those, Nastasha?
Yes. Yeah, yeah, me too. Uh I mean they're not really marshmallows. And by the way, I mean, they kind of are. I mean, they're marshmallow-like things, but they're kind of more like little meringue with marshmallow tasting.
But some I got addicted to those suckers when I was a kid. And I once called one of those uh cereal companies to see whether I could buy just the marshmallows for a project I was working on. I was trying to make the world's first meat-based breakfast cereal with uh pork rinds. It was called Piggles and Beanies. It was it was sweetened uh pork rinds with uh little pork rind pieces with with bean-shaped marshmallows.
And this was, you know, back, you know, I don't know, high school or college or something like that, you know, nineties, early nineties. And uh and uh they would not ship me uh or or let me buy any marshmallows from them. This is before I had enough technical knowledge to do it on my own. Isn't that mean? It's really mean.
So mean. I was like, listen, I'll choose whatever the closest marshmallow you have in your like line of like cereal marshmallows to a kidney bean shaped. And uh, you know, this is before I even knew how to make my own pork rinds. I mean, I'm literally like either in college or like right around, you know what I mean? Is like they could have helped me out a little bit.
I used to save all the the marshmallows to last in the milk so I could enjoy them. But did you ever like open the box and then break it down into marshmallows and not marshmallows? No, no, no, no, no. Because it was a sandwich for the family, the whole cereal. Oh, well, you know what though, you uh how many people in the family there?
Five? Five. Five? They couldn't have bought you your own box of cereal. I mean, look.
Okay, okay, look, here's my point. My point is this you have people in the family, they're gonna eat the cereal anyway, right? Right? So if you're gonna eat the cereal anyway, there's gonna be another box of cereal in a week anyway, right? Yeah.
Right? So if the total quantity of cereal eaten is the same over a six month period, what does it matter whether each person has their own box or not? It's not like the stuff goes bad in a s in in in a short amount of time. It's not like you're gonna be able to not finish that box of blueberry within like, you know, the six months that it stays good. Yeah, yeah, that's true.
Yeah, I'm just saying, you know, in your next life you can bring up that argument. See, that's what I'm good for, Nastasha. I'm good for that kind of logical based argument. That's that's what I'm good at. Okay.
So back to the marshmallow problem. Marshmallows are sticky on the inside. So what they are is a problem in control dehydration. You want to just have the outside be dry so they don't stick together. The problem with using a one-to-one powdered sugar and uh cornstarch mixture, and and I read the the the person's recipe online, and the reason they use a mixture is they thought the cornstarch by itself was too chalky on the outside, especially because it's there in a large quantity, right?
But the problem with powdered sugar is that powdered sugar is uh gonna suck up moisture from the atmosphere and from the marshmallow, and it's gonna be get tacky on the outside. I just there's no way around it. Like short term it's gonna work, but long term it's gonna cause problems with things getting sticky. That is my feeling. Now, you could try it with uh a straight up cornstarch, but then you might think it's too chalky.
I did some research on industrial marshmallow production, uh, Mike, and I have the answer for you. Here's what you're gonna do the next time. I have not tested this, but I am so confident that I'm gonna tell you on the air that this is gonna work because I felt so confident that I uh I can't in fact I might make it sometime soon. Here's what you do you take the marshmallows, right? And you make sure you follow all the recipes.
Like another way marshmallows can go bad is if you don't beat them until they're cool, all that, you know, all that nonsense, right? Whatever. Whatever the recipe says, just do it. If because if the recipe works, the recipe probably works. Now, instead of putting it into a mixture of cornstarch and sugar, right?
Like a day before you do it, or like a couple hours before you know, day before you do it, bake out some cornstarch in the oven to make sure it's really dry, seal it in quart containers and let it cool down. Right? Now you have dry cornstarch. Take your uh marshmallows, right, and then dust them into pure um into pure powdered sugar, right? Now shake off the extra powdered sugar dust.
Now throw them into cornstarch and then let them sit there with the cornstarch on them, right, for like four or five hours up to a day, depending on how much you want to dehydrate the mar the outside layer of the marshmallow. Now, what you're doing is is you're letting the sugar still be the taste thing on the outside, but you're using the cornstarch as a desiccant to desiccate the outside of the marshmallow a little bit so they won't be tacky, but you're not gonna pick up as much cornstarch into the marshmallow itself proper because it already has that protective layer of powder sugar. Huh? Huh? Huh?
What do you think? That's good. Apparently that's how the big folks do it. You know, what they do is they they they uh basically do it all under pressure and eject the marshmallow from uh from a tube, it expands automatically, is cut, dropped into powdered sugar, and then uh put into a cornstarch mixture to dehydrate as as it comes out. So I'm thinking that that mic is the way to get your marshmallow problem solved.
Uh okay. Paul, hey, should we do one more commercial break? Yeah, we can do a break. All right, one more commercial break. Call in all your questions to 7184972128.
That's 784972128 cooking issues. And don't crap. Yo folks mad on the span. Bye and bye. Just move on up.
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Tune in to 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. So 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 3 30 p.m.
Hot Grease on the Heritage Radio Network. Hey, welcome back. Hey Jack, that was uh move on up. That's Curtis Mayfield, right? Yeah, move on up, Curtis Mayfield.
Good tune. And I like the mixture of the Curtis Mayfield with the hot grease. The song seems to work with the hot grease, right? Yes. Yeah.
And I'll tell you something else. I don't care whether you're a mom on a budget or not. Like pick like like pleasing your kids, they are the pickiest little uh pickiest little critics, aren't they? Pain's in that's a that's a tough problem. Anyway, back to the questions.
Nastash, are you still with us? Yeah. Awesome. Uh we got a question from Paul K uh earlier today. This is the last question in that we got.
Uh and it's not really a question so much as a comment. Uh it's kind of funny. Uh hi, Nastasha. I thought I'd bring this article about human-derived gelatin to Dave's attention, perhaps for the radio show. I'd like to hear his thoughts.
Uh and basically what it is, it's a it's a new article called New Strategy for Expression of Recombinant uh hydroxylated human-derived gelatin. Um just came out. Uh so basically it's it's they what they do is they take uh the our genes, human genes for producing uh gelatin, you know, collagen, I guess, or gelatin, and they uh inject it into a yeast. Uh, you know, they they put it into a yeast, and then they grow the yeast, and the yeast then just makes a hyperabundance of uh you know, human-style gelatin, but you know, obviously it hasn't come out of a human. No humans were killed for the gelatin.
Uh, you know, anyway. So it's like that's that's what they're doing. Uh I'd like to hear his thoughts. My first thought is if recombinant technology allows greater quality control, why not use animal gene derived recommon gelatin to avoid the controversy and creepiness. I think the allergy thing is a bit of a red herring.
So the reason uh the the point here is that the reason they're using human-derived gelatin for this is they're trying to think of uh they're they're now looking at food applications for it, but originally this is for things like gel caps for medicine, and the idea being that there is less poly uh less of a possibility of a human um immune response to gelatin that's derived from human tissue than from um then from animal tissue. I think it's probably a red herring. I think that if it's actually a pure gelatin protein, you know, you know, pure gelatin, that it's not gonna have a lot of other extraneous stuff on it that I I mean maybe there's a difference, but maybe there's not. I haven't read any studies on how many people are allergic to gelatin. Maybe there's a lot, but I don't know.
Uh I I haven't really uh I didn't really have the the chance to look into it. Um but the idea that we can have because gelatin is is freaking fantastic, right? And there's a whole uh there's a whole group of people, vegetarians, uh you know, who won't eat gelatin. So you know whether like the idea of a recombinant gelatin, whether it be you know bovine derived or human derived, uh, you know, the strain of it, uh I think would be awesome because there's certain things that gelatin does better than anything else. Marshmallows, for instance.
Now you can use carrageenin, uh mixture of carragenin and uh you know uh locust bean and or other things gum to produce a marshmallow. Uh but gelatin is really, really good. Also for jello. Gelatin is really, really good. And now can you approximate jello using things like carragenin?
Yeah. But you know you know is gelat gelatin is still kind of the reigning monarch of uh taste in you know hydrocolloids. Like we maybe it's because it's traditional and has been for so long that we just grew up loving it. But it's um it's good stuff. So if they could make one uh that was price competitive uh and also had very consistent quality 'cause another problem with uh regular gelatin is it's of differing qualities depending on the source where it was derived from how basically hydrolyzed, how broken down the proteins are.
And that's why you have different bloom strengths of gelatin, because they're a naturally derived product, and gelatin from a fish doesn't work the same as gelatin from a you know a pig skin or you know, animal you know, cow bones or whatever. So they're all different. And the processing uh makes them all different. And so this is you know gives the possibility of having a very consistent uh gelatin product where no animals are harmed. And I think it'd be interesting.
A real question is, would a vegan use it? What do you think, Nastasha? Would a vegan use it? I mean, like question is like what is like why like what in other words, like what would be the if you were a vegan, would you use it? I mean, I would think you could, but I don't I don't know, right?
What do you think? I don't know. I really don't know. I don't I can't think like a vegan, you know. I think that's that's the the issue.
Yeah. Uh anyway, I'd like to hear from some vegans and see whether or not they would be willing to use uh, you know, so because you wouldn't have to harm the animal to get the the DNA for it, right? You could just take a blood sample from a human or from whatever, get the gene, uh, you know, and do it. I mean, I think that um be interesting problem. I don't know.
Um but uh definitely I think has a lot more commercial application than the poop derived meat analog. Uh I knew you were gonna go there. Well, didn't we bring this up on the radio a couple weeks ago? Somebody asked about it. Didn't we talk about it?
You didn't talk about it. I'm pretty sure you didn't talk about it. At least and I've done every show with you. We didn't talk about the well, it was a big thing on the internet, so I'm sure a lot of you guys have uh heard about this. Uh his crew in Japan was recycling sewage into uh meat analogs, and uh people are making much hay out of it on the internet, but I don't really know enough to comment other than it's fun to say poop meat, right?
I mean uh okay. So uh as some of you might know, um I do uh a you know a a little thing for eater, like you know, once every week or once every two weeks or something uh and the recently they've had uh some they've started getting chefs to ask me some questions but Nastasha I don't know at this point whether they're gonna let me answer the rest of Michael Iskonis's the Yes they they want to know they wanted to know today when you're gonna answer the rest but that's for after the show. But the question is should I just answer one now online and then and then and then because there's really only one that I really want to answer more than the ones I've already answered. I could just answer that one now and and then talk to Michael about it and then do a new chef for for them. What do you think?
I think they're kind of waiting for the the answers to be answered online. Alright so I'm gonna answer Michael Iskonus's questions on malt which I think are very very interesting. So you take barley. I'll talk about it a little bit now and then I'll write about it. You take barley uh and you grow it you germinate it right and then you kill the uh you kill the growing uh germ the kill the growing sprout on the inside before it pops out of the actual barley and what you're doing there is activating all of the enzymes the alpha and beta amylases being the primary ones and and those enzymes then you when you kill it you gotta make sure that you kill it in such a way that you leave the enzymes in there.
And then what you do is you grind it up and you steep it you know at different temperatures and the temperature of the mash that you do the way you steep it is what makes different kind of beers different along with how the malt is made and how it's kilned and how you know what flavors are derived there. But anyway, it's the active enzymes in it that uh allow you to convert the starch from barley, or if you're you know adding other things to it like rice or whatever, that allow you to convert that starch to alcohol, right? Uh sorry, to sugar, which then you use east yeast to convert to alcohol. So the primary function of malt is uh the function of it is to produce these enzymes that can break break starch into sugar. Uh now how the malt is treated it is makes it widely diff, you know, different in how much enzyme there is and also in the flavor of the malt itself.
It's a really tricky process. And and m most beer people, many beer people I used to do all grain, meaning I don't I used all my own grains and everything, but very few people make their own malt because it's uh I don't know why, very few people do it. Uh so malt is a very interesting subject. Now, when most people are baking with malt, they're either using uh like diastatic malt, which they're adding to uh bakery products, and what that is is malt that still has the active uh stuff in it, but it still has the active enzymes in it, and they do that to break some extra starch into sugars for yeast as a yeast food or a bacteria food in a starter. Um but when you when I say malt to someone as an ingredient, what I'm thinking of is dry malt extract.
And what that is is you take the malt and you then uh convert all the starch to sugar using it with all the great flavors of malt. Like think Malta, the beverage malta, malt beverage, like that malty flavor, and then uh they before they let it ferment, they dry it out into a powder. And so if you're if you're doing what's called extract brewing, you take dry malt extract or still a liquid version of that extract, and they have amazing tastes. Malt tastes amazing. Uh and that powder is an incredible, incredible ingredient.
Uh, which, you know, you can use not just to make beer, but you can use it as a sweetening multi-agent in things that's great in mashed potatoes. Like I I've all used to make malt mashed potatoes all the time, not with like the malted milk ball stuff, but with dry malt extract direct from a brewing shop. Uh, and you can get these if you have a homebrew shop anywhere. Our Whole Foods here in New York City and Manhattan and Lower Manhattan uh Bowery has dry malt extract, but it's a fantastic ingredient. So I'll write a little more and probably a little less stream of consciously uh consciousness uh about malt when I answer Michael Scottness's other questions.
Uh we we will be back next week. We hope not to have another three-week period where I'm flying around like a lunatic from place to place, and we apologize for any inconvenience we may have caused. Cooking issues vision all you did. Got me on this corner and I don't know where I'm at. Thanks for listening to this program on the Heritage Radio Network.
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Finger on the Pole and City Winery are proud to present the Summer Barbecue Blowout Festival, August 6th, from noon to 4 p.m. The barbecue is happening at City Winery, located at 155 Varrick Street in New York City. Restaurants featured at this event are Empire Mayonnaise, Van Dag, Momo Fuco Mo Bar, Imperial Number Nine, My Land, Mexico, Craft, Dizzy's Club, Coca-Cola, The Meatball Shop, and Dose Torres. Providing the soundtrack for the day are Midnight Magic, Pewter Magic, New Villager, Punches, Ducky, DJ Autobot, and the Snacky Tune DJ. VIP and general admission tickets are available at CityWinery.com.
Finger in the pole for City Wine, we'd like to thank our sponsors, Heritage Foods USA, New York Magazine, Rake of vodka, Sonar, Smile, Guilt City, Sub Zero and Wolf. Please come out and join us for a day of fun, food, and dancing. For more information, go to www.fotpnyc.com. This is behind the scenes food news with Katie Kiefer. AMP goes local.
The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, commonly known as the AMP, that grocery chain you've seen all your life, has glommed onto the concept of local and sustainable and has just introduced a new consortium of producers known as the Mid Atlantic Country Farms, from which they will source beef and poultry. The animals are antibiotic and hormone-free, raised on vegetarian feed. There is no mention of certified humane or animal welfare approved uh status, however. Maybe they haven't gotten that far in the marketing department. But what makes this of interest is that AMP supplies all AMP supermarkets, Pathmark, Food Emporium, Waldbaums, and Super Fresh.
These are not particularly high-end supermarkets, so this is good news for the average consumer. If you want to read more about this, you can go to the AMP website, which is www.apt.com slash pressroom. This has been behind the scenes food news with Katie Kiefer.
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