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Can't hear myself. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, the host of Cooking Issues, coming with you every Tuesday live from 12 to 1245 on the Heritage Radio Network. Here in the studio today with Nastasha the Hammer Lopez, bringing the hammer to all of you that step out of line, although they never do, do they? No, they never do.
No, it's crazy. Alright, call in all of your questions to 718497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. By the way, today's show brought to you by the Burger House, some of our favorite people in wine distribution. Something I'm sure all of our listeners know, but probably don't, is that um I'm extremely lazy, so I find it difficult to memorize the names of any kind of wines that I like, or you go into a store and you find a wine and you don't uh you know you don't really know what to get.
All you need to do, seriously, is memorize the name of like five or ten distributors that you like that you know bring in uh interesting products, and then you can look on the bottom uh back of the bottles, find a distributor you enjoy, and uh odds are you might have a winner. Anyway, uh a little tip from me to you on how to buy wine when you don't know what you're doing. Alright, our first question comes in from Paul Peterson, who is a researcher at the Humane Society of the United States. I Googled him. Uh, and uh he had a comment on last week's uh gelatin uh issue where we we were talking last week about uh the possibility of using recombinant DNA technology to produce gelatin without having to kill a bunch of animals.
And the reason to do this is because gelatin is awesome. Uh and it's also used in things like uh gel capsules, it has very a lot of very good properties. Uh gelatin's great. Anyway, uh he has a comment on it. He says um uh the whether or not a vegan would uh use the question is would a vegan use this?
Uh and he says the answer he thinks is it depends on the individual. Uh there's a similar though much more vexing project uh to harvest meat cells from an animal and grow them in a bioreactor, thus to create meat without harming the animal, uh, with other potential side benefits like it might cause less pollution uh than conventional farming, etc. Uh and uh he points me to uh I forget the name of it, it's called like meatharvest.org or something like that, harvesting meat dot whatever. Anyway, uh, because for some reason, hey, iPad people, uh, figure out a reason why they the uh URLs get stripped out of my stuff when I put it on my iPad anyway. Uh there are some vegans who are fine with and prefer this technology, this artificial, well, this cultured meat technology, while others uh would abhor such a thing.
Basically, uh Paul thinks it comes down to whether uh why one is truly vegan. What some simply want to create the least suffering, in which case they probably use the cultured meat, and some just uh detest animal products uh a priori and they would uh object to the technology. I think uh I basically agree. I would object to the technology because uh straight up I doubt that it would be delicious. I mean, unless you could literally cut culture the muscle uh exactly as it appears in my favorite piece of beef, you know what I mean?
I doubt that I would like meat that's made in a bioreactor the same way that I like meat that's made on an animal. Do you know what I mean? It's like we think about it this way. Um how much of a difference is there between the most delicious piece of beef that you've ever had, right, and crap hole, you know, third rate beef that you get in a uh in you know, in like a low rent supermarket. There's a big difference, right?
Mustafa, what do you think? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Uh so I mean, my my point is is that you know, I'm always shooting for ultimate delicious on a product. And so, uh, and I think this is my problem with mo most meat substitutes in general, is that what they're substituting for is kind of the chewy texture of meat, right?
And when I say that, I mean overcooked meat. They're usually shooting at overcooked meat, right? Kind of like, you know, tough, uh, you know, a little bit chewy. And then they try to substitute in meat-esque flavors, and by that I mean usually protein breakdown products. So you're putting in uh like nutritional yeasts, you're putting in uh broken down soy uh compounds, anything like uh compounds like soy sauce, things like that.
Anything that are gonna contain um you know free amino acids that are gonna give some of that umami nature, and then also they typically substitute in some sort of browning or some sort of smoking to mimic uh those kind of flavors that we get out of meats. But really, these are kind of only the externalities of meat. You know, I mean, meat is so many other things. It's the different muscles, it's the way the grains are uh align, different muscles, it's the way the fat is placed within them, it's the particular characteristics of the fat based on what the animal was eating. It's it's many, many things.
I mean the uh the the flavor of meat isn't some sort of monotonic thing that can be uh recreated in a uh bioreactor. Now I mean that said, I mean if it that I I'm gonna assume the technology could some point get so sophisticated that it could literally grow uh you know a a ribeye. I just don't see that happening anytime soon. I see uh perhaps some sort of actual meat meat analog that uh functions better than many meat replacers on the market today but I just don't see you know my most delicious um you know aged pea aged uh ribeye steak uh that you know that I cook sous vide and sear over like a f you know fiercely hot charcoal fire and then uh and then drizzle it with uh mull uh with uh you know my favorite uh Tuscan or Sicilian olive oil and sprinkle it with salt I just don't see that coming out of a bioreactor anytime soon. What about you, Nastasha?
I agree. Yeah you're talking to the microphone your face towards the window I agree. Yeah there you go. She's only been doing the radio show for a year and a half folks don't don't mind her that she can't face into a microphone when she's talking. Anyway Paul has a question he says he was a uh curious whether I uh what experience I have with cooking Satan which is basically Satan's uh wheat uh wheat gluten that is then formed into a dough and is uh typically cooked in a liquid where it absorbs the flavor from the liquid uh and then is uh sliced and then either sauteed, fried, stewed, whatnot as a as a meat substitute.
And it's a traditional meat substitute in uh in you know parts of Asia. Hasn't uh really caught on here to the extent that uh I think it should. Many people use it instead, like they're saying, well, Satan's a much better meat replacer than tofu. I say you're both wrong. Uh tofu is tofu and it's delicious and should be used like tofu is, and you shouldn't buy crappy supermarket tofu that's had all of its flavor leached out and it's been sitting there for a billion years in uh in a whole crap load of water.
I think that stuff's you know vile and useless, except as a flavor carrier. And seitan, I think also needs to be explored for its own sort of properties instead of just being a straight up uh meat substitute. Uh anyway, Paul says, uh, do I have any preferred cooking method, boiling versus brazing? Uh I would add pressure cooking is a good uh cooking technique for it. Unfortunately, I have not uh and you also wants to know whether I've experimented with it cooking a sous-vid, i.e.
in a vacuum bag. Uh uh I unfortunately haven't experimented with Ceyton in many, many years. I've only played with making it a couple of times, uh, and it was you know years before I really got into cooking sous- vide. It's an interesting idea. Uh I don't know that you get a benefit from uh cooking sous vide though, because you're cooking typically at a high uh temperature anyway.
I don't know that you'd get a benefit from cooking the wheat gluten at a lower temperature uh below uh boiling point or substantially below boiling point. Uh I think you might get some textural benefits from, like I say, cooking in a pressure cooker because then you could get some expansion when you release the pressure. Um you might be able to get some infusion by going sous vide, but you can fuse anyway with the stock. The stock permeates the Ceyton as it's cooking. One advantage to cooking sous vide that I could think of off the top of my head is if you had a very expensive ingredient that you wanted to infuse into the Ceyton and cook it that way, you could cook it in a very, very small amount of uh liquid.
So if you had some expensive flavor or something you didn't have very much of, you could probably bag the Ceyton in the thing uh and then cook it that way. But I would not use a high vacuum because then you're gonna be compressing it and just and uh altering and/or destroying the texture of the Satan. If you use a very high vacuum, it's gonna be dense and rubbery. So I would almost do it in a ziploc bag rather than sous vide. I would I probably would never do it uh sous vide.
Uh and are there any other vegetarian proteins that benefit from sous vide? Uh again, if you you know you can compress things, uh, you know, get rid of the air cells in in things with sous vide, which might be uh, you know, to firm up tofu or whatnot, but that's really more of a water expelling issue. So I can't think off my head of any vegetarian proteins that would benefit from sous vide, other than possible textural changes and infusion uh techniques because uh the low temperature aspect of sous vide is not really necessary for vegetarian proteins. Anyone who thinks I'm a jerk and wants to call me out on that, please do, because I'd like to know some good applications. What do you think, Nastasha?
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. All right. Into the microphone at time. Nice, nice.
Okay. Ross McGuire from Dublin, Ireland writes in again about green vegetables. Ross says, I recently came across a Spanish vegetable uh stew type dish, minestra, made from fresh vegetables, artichoke, broad beans, w runner beans, and white asparagus thickened with flour, is a fantastic shade of green. From what I managed, the gr uh from what I managed to glean the artichoke when cooked in water changes to a strong Viridian green, nice call, Veridi. Only only an Irish dude could come out with like the awesome shade of green, right?
Viridian green color, uh, along with the water, which is interesting, which is what gives the soup its strong pigmentation. Do you know what the cause of this color change is and how one might go about achieving it? Also, are there any other examples of that kind of natural color change which could be used to good effect in the kitchen? Cheers. Okay, uh cheer, cheers, Ross.
Anyway, uh well, that's interesting. Uh as far as you know, I'm used to minestra is like soup in uh Italian, where it's the same word for soup as for as zupa. So you could use zippa, you can use minestra, I guess as opposed to like broto, which is more of a broth, right, Nastasha? Yeah. Okay.
So uh I don't know of any uh Spanish recipe that goes by the name uh minestra, but this uh coming from an idiot who hasn't researched it. Uh but uh so I can't say it. But uh also uh you know you can make then let's just say minestra is a soup, you can make it from uh any sort of mix of anything you want. So we're so what we're dealing here with is a soup or stew of artichoke, broad bean, runner bean, and white asparagus that's then thickened with with uh flour. And it comes out uh green.
Now, typically when you cook a green here, here's what happens with green things in general when you cook them, right? First of all, the interesting thing you say is that uh the water turns really green. Uh chlorophyll is not water soluble. So typically, right, and what what's happening is is uh the majority of chlorophyll is not gonna leach out into the water. And chlorophyll is what makes these things green, okay.
So what what happens is if we the reason why chlorophyll is not soluble in water is that it's got this long kind of hydrocarbon chain that comes off off that's uh hydrophobic. It wants to be soluble in oil, which is why things like uh you know uh uh basil oil and and things like that are such nice bright green, because we can extract a lot of the chlorophyll into the oil because it's water soluble, uh oil soluble soluble rather. So here's what happens when you cook. You stick stuff in boiling water, if there's any acid, uh, and I guess also McGee says alkali can make it happen, you can uh break off uh that hydrocarbon chain, and now the the residual part, which is still green, is leached into the water. Okay.
Now in the center of the of the main part of chlorophyll, the really the business center is a magnesium ion. And uh in in water, uh, with the action of heat, and especially in if there's acid, right, that magnesium ion gets kicked out and uh replaced with hydrogen, and what you get is that kind of dark uh greeny, almost olive uh drabier bluish, a bluish color uh of the chlorophyll after that's been happening. So that's the major color change that happens in most uh in most vegetables as they cook, or as I should say as they overcook. Which is why we say you can add a little bit of baking soda to uh something, and your vegetables will turn mushy, but they'll go bright green, right? Bright green.
Uh because you're you're basically what happens is when you put the vegetable in, all of a sudden you know, uh the the light couldn't come out of the vegetable very well because there's air sacs, the chlorophyll might be contained and stuff. So that there's basically the the color is muted. You throw it into water, and boom, you know what I mean? It um it it the cells are broken, the water penetrates, and now all of a sudden the green really pops, it really pops out. So I don't know whether or not uh the color you're describing is some mixture of cooked and I mean otherwise uh you know, chlorophyll that has magnesium taken out and some that hasn't, some that's become water soluble due to the action of cooking.
I just can't tell. You'd have to send me a picture of your soup so I can uh see what's what's going on. Uh another thing you can do, uh it could be toxic, so please don't poison your guests, uh, other than baking soda, which actually Nastasha baking soda would work really well in a soup, because what you could do is you could add baking soda, cook your soup uh down until it's to death, it'll go bright freaking green, stay bright green on you, and then at the last minute, correct it with acidity, which will take out kind of the baking soda flavor and bring the soup back, you know, and once the temperature is a little bit lower, so it's not going to color change on you. Might be an interesting thing for you to try if you haven't tried it before. The other thing you can do is you instead of replacing the magnesium with copper, you can place uh I mean sorry with hydrogen, you can replace it with copper, and it gets a crazy ass.
You know those olives that are like that hyper bright green? Yeah. Like not the olives like manzanilla, but the hyper bright, like cherry, some chariolas are hyper bright like that. I think, not sure, could be making this up, could be lying. I think that they add a little, probably lying.
For those of you listening, probably a lie. Uh that's the same color that's produced by uh uh taking the chlorophyll and replacing the magnesium with copper. And so uh you can do that, but too much copper is uh what's the word I'm looking for? Poisonous! Poisonous, but uh small amounts of it aren't.
So anyway. Uh and so what are some other things that you can do uh to change colors? Well, another one, going back to McGee, uh who uh we were hanging out with at Tales of the Cocktail last week. If I get time to talk about it, I'll talk about it. Probably won't get time.
Uh especially if some of you suckers call in to 718-497-2128 with a question at 747288. Um garlic and onions can turn interesting shades of blue and green uh when they're cooked very slowly. Uh and the very first uh curious cook column that uh Harold McGee put into the uh New York Times, it's gotta be like four years ago now, three or four years ago, uh one of the things he treated was this fact that sometimes uh if you puree onions and garlic or just cut up garlic and uh cook it very slowly, uh it can turn green and blue. And what's happening is is that uh some some molecules, in fact, some of the ones that make make it pungent, you know, some of these uh sulfur compounds can uh get altered by enzymes that are native to the onions in the garlic, and uh then combine together into larger molecules, because typically larger molecules are pigmented, you know, or you can see them as opposed to smaller molecules, which are usually uh colorless. Anyways, uh so the uh not always, usually.
Uh so what happens is they combine and they get these kind of like shocking blue and greens. And so anyone out there who's done any low temperature cooking, let's say you were to put a steak with garlic and butter in a bag and cook it at 55 Celsius for two hours, you'll notice the uh some of the garlic is going to turn kind of uh bluish or greenish. And this is something that you can do. And I've done actually, we've made uh blue garlic soup using uh I think it was blue, blue or green. I can for I can't forget, like onions turn green and garlic turn blue, or the other way around, and you can sh and you can alter the color by combining the different amounts of onion and garlic.
Anyway, if you take a puree or even just slices of onion and garlic, you stick them in a bag, and you cook it at like 55 degrees for uh like an hour. The stuff's gonna turn bright colors on you. You can then uh pressure cook it to neutralize uh some of those flavors so it's not too strong, and then you can use it in large quantities and still have the color changed item to uh serve. Uh if you don't cook it uh in a pressure cooker afterwards, and the color does stay by the way, I've done it, uh, then you're in for a world of freaking hurt because if you can see that color, if it's a brightly colored puree, please don't go anywhere near your family or friends for the next week and a half. The other one that I could think of off the top of my head is that you can uh use uh if you have a blood-based thing, and Nathan Miravold, Chris Young, and Maxime Bilet all in the modernist cuisine uh cookbook cookbooks, the mega opus.
Uh and when is he coming on by the way? When's Miravold coming on? The third week of August. All right, in the third week of August, Nathan Miravold's gonna call into the show. So none of you chumps miss that stuff.
Call in to Nathan Miravold in the third week. What country am I gonna be in? You'll be here. I'll be here. Awesome.
Call in to here, and you, our cooking issues listeners, are gonna get the opportunity to personally ask Nathan Mirvold a question. Now, bear in mind, Nathan Mirabol, he might he might tear into it. Depends on what you ask. I mean, you know, you know. Yeah, he's he's an opinionated guy.
It should be interesting. Uh, I'm excited, I'm super excited, super looking forward to it. So get your questions ready for the Mirvold thing. And I think, hey Jack, we can go an hour on mil uh an hour on Mirvold Day, right? Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah, okay. Uh the other one I was thinking of from their cookbook is you can take blood and hit it with carbon monoxide, the same stuff that you use if you're gonna suck a tailpipe, the sad stuff, carbon monoxide. If you take carbon monoxide and hit it to um to meat, it's it goes incredibly bright red. There's there are two uh there are two small children looking in the studio window right now who are incredibly curious about the radio thing. Trust me, kids, it's not that interesting.
Anyway, uh so uh and this is how they make their uh rare beef jus, where they cook uh beef in a bag and they can optionally hit it with carbon monoxide to get a really, really right bread, uh bread color. Uh you can also use this to rip off consumers by hitting meat with carbon monoxide to make it look bright red even though it's spoiled. And Ken Kirshenbaum bought a piece of meat. Ken Kirshenbaum uh the polymer chemist and our buddy from the experimental cuisine collective at NYU bought a piece of meat and basically kept it out of a fridge, uh turning uh, you know, awful uh for weeks and stayed a nice bright red color because of the carbon monoxide they so nicely put into the container for it. He hates that.
He thinks it should be outlawed. Let's take a break. Not yet. Uh because that goes into this one question Aaron Smith called in on blood basting. How Nastash, you know, only you could ruin such an awesome segue from going from changing the color of blood by adding carbon monoxide into a blood based basting question.
You y this Nastash will always do this. You know what? If you're about to buy Nastasha a Christmas present or birthday present, don't. Because what's gonna happen is is five seconds, literally five seconds before you try to buy her something or get her something, like a glass of water if she's thirsty, she will ask you for it and ruin the opportunity for you to get it for her. That is a lot of information you're giving away, right?
Yes, it's a lot of information, but it's true, and it might be helpful to some of our listeners should they ever meet you. Anyway, uh Aaron Smith writes in with a blood basting question. Hi, uh love the show, and I'm thrilled that you're back from your break. I was looking through an old French cookbook, uh, the uh Lavarins Cuisinaire Frossay uh and from 1653, and notice an interesting instruction when roasting a pig like a boar. The recipe is you may disguise the boar, uh you may disguise the pig uh near to a boar.
That is, after you have beaten it well, you shall endure it with blood. I don't know whether it's endor or endure. For me, uh well, we'll get into this. And uh and after a while, stick it, spit it, and not forgetting to uh I think I say endure, even though I don't know. Uh feet with blood before it's roasted, serve it as a boar with sauce or without it.
Uh and then uh Aaron puts down that the definition of uh endure is to wet daub uh some liquor as one doth a pie or cake before it's put into the oven. So basically a pig is basted with blood before it's roasted on a spit, and um Aaron was interested in what the blood might be doing. It has uh and I'm saying I'm keep saying your name a lot because I'm not sure if this is Guy Aaron or girl Aaron. Aaron. With an E or an A?
E. Oh. Can't tell. Can't tell. Don't know.
Anyway, um sorry about my lack of knowledge on that. Anyway, so uh I was curious about what's going on. It has sugars and amino acids, so it could be acting as a browning agent. I know a touch of glucose in picking duck can lead to beautiful browning because glucose is a reducing sugar, which you use to generate the myard reaction, uh along with proteins and amino acids. Uh the Google search led to Julia Child's description of pressed duck, where the duck is basted in blood sauce while it's being roasted.
Uh and so is this a standard method that's fallen out of flavor? Have I ever basted with blood or done uh in my pressed duck adventures? And want to know what was going on. Um okay. Well, uh, and this is and Aaron's from San Diego.
Um so listen. As far as I know, uh I'm gonna say endure, even though it might be endour, is a technique not just for basting blood or going on pies, was a standard technique for coating things with different colors in uh medieval times. So as a presentation trick, for instance, if you're making a cock and trice, which is a bird, uh, you know, the back end of a bird glued under the front of a pig, right? You would take the seams and whatnot on the outside and you would endure it with different mixtures that would kind of form a crust and also color it to make it look more fanciful, right? Um and then tip you know, typically you would set that by then baking it uh or roasting it.
Now uh when I make a pressed duck, I don't uh what you know what we what I always did in the recipes I have, and I think this is the way Tour d'Arjon, the restaurant does it, is they they take the duck uh that's been strangled so the blood doesn't go out or suffocated, and then they press the blood and juices out, then the blood becomes uh a thickening agent for the sauce that you use. Then when you cut the and the the meat's already been par roasted, then you cut off the breast slices and you reheat them in the sauce, uh, and then the sauce thickens up, etc. etc. So I don't know of any recipe where you then baste it and roast it again. It's more kind of just a reheat uh with the slices.
There's famous recipes uh for like civet, like or civet, I guess I don't know how you pronounce it in French, of uh rabbit or jugged hair, which is the way uh US person would say it that uses the blood of the hair as a thicking agent but the last at the last part of the sauce because it will then uh thicken up and can curdle and break. Nils Norren says in Sweden they have a famous blood soup that's made from gooseblood that uh is cooked for a long time, I think with acid to stop it from coagulating too much. Um, so there is a long history of this, but the idea of using it as an outer coating, I would think that it would set and then uh and then congeal with the heat and then maybe crust up as it dries out, but I don't know what it would uh taste like. Uh it doesn't gross me out. I mean, blood, meat, it's all part of the animal.
If the animal, unless you look, unless you're kosher, in which case, you know, don't eat the blood because the blood is the life, and uh, if you do, you know, a curse on your people, you shall be cut off from your people, etc. etc. But unless it's like religiously uh barred for from you, uh, for you from having it, I think it's a waste to throw it away because you know, the you done killed the animal anyway, uh, might as well use everything you can. I mean, I think that's more modern way of looking at it. So I, you know, but I this other thing.
Why is it inherently more gross, Nastasha, to eat the blood or any weird part of the of the animal? Why is it more inherently gross than any other part? Like, why is like couldn't we culturally be raised, be like, oh my god, the loin? Gross. Right?
I mean, why is it inherently is it because when we cut ourselves, we're like crap, that's blood, and we're freaked out by it. Yeah, I think it's uh it's a yeah. Same reason why people think that like they're making a sexual statement by eating like you know, deer testicles and stuff like that. Yeah. You know, when a guy eats a deer testicle, people are like, yeah.
You know what I mean? Like, is it because of some sort of weird like sexual connotation? Yeah, right. So it's so like things that are gross of things that like we don't want to eat, like, you know, things that any whatever. Very strange.
Anyway, all right. So now we will go to our first commercial break. Call it all your questions 2, 718, 497, 21828. 7184972128 cooking issues. And I'm coming from a brand new place.
I'm feeling quick and I don't miss the link. And a better note that no trace. Hey, take it out. Check it out. Check out the new lick.
What about my new trick? And believe me, the capital sweet was dealing hard. The cats don't speak dealing hard. Some cat's a bad for his hard. Check me out.
That's where the bust will start. Taking place. So keep our light when you got some light and the balls can't fit no case. Following is a public service announcement from Heritage Radio Network. Join Linda Palacio for a taste of the past every Thursday at 12 p.m.
As she indulges her curiosities about food, cooking, drinking, and dining of the past by taking a journey through culinary history. Linda interviews authors, scholars, friends, and chroniclers to learn about what was eaten, where and how. From as long ago as ancient Mesopotamia and Rome, right up to the grazing tables and deli counters of today. The show underscores food as a lively link between present and past cultures. Again, that's Thursday at 12 p.m.
on the Heritage Radio Network. So nice. So nice that is true. Welcome back to Cooking Issues. By the way, Jack has managed to find, and I really like it, one of the old must be one of the only James Brown songs that I don't know.
Oh, wow. You know, like I I don't know how many thousands of hours I've listened to James Brown and managed to get one of the ones I don't know. Great tune, though. It's called Cold Blooded, and it's from the record called Hell. Oh, yeah.
Guess what I'm gonna go out and download today? No offense, James. I spent many well, you're dead, but no, I've spent many, many hundreds of dollars on your products. I think I'm gonna go steal this one on the internet. So what do you think, Nastasha?
I don't know. Cold blooded hell. Anyway, uh, by the way, I think Linda Palacio might be a good person to ask that last question on blood and history. Linda Palacio is uh, I think I think she wants to be involved somehow with the Museum of Food and Drink. And uh we'd we love to have her involved.
So if I see her, which I uh I very rarely do, but if I see her, I'll ask her that that blood question because that might be right up for alley. Okay. Naveen Sinha writes in, and by the way, Naveen is the head TA for was last year, I don't know if he is this year, uh, for the class that uh Faran uh Adria headlined uh in Harvard. And he's a vegetarian. Okay, Nastasha, why don't you bust on the guy for being a vegetarian on on the radio?
The guy already listen, this poor guy, all right. Listen, this poor guy, Naveen, right? He he goes to this event uh and he and he's now hanging out with all these chefs, right? Because he was involved with this uh class at Harvard where they had some of the world's greatest chefs go in, like Wiley, my brother-in-law, all these guys go in. And the like all chefs invariably bust on this guy for being a vegetarian.
Leave the guy alone. No, he's a TA at Harvard in the food food studies program. He's not a TA in Harvard of the Food Studies program. He's in the physics and material science program, and they're teaching a study of they're teaching a class on how to learn about that subject through the lens of food. Yes.
Yes. Leave the man alone on his vegetarianists. Please. He's a nice guy. I hope he calls in.
Yeah, well, if you if he does, I recommend he calls in 2718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. Anyway. Naveen uh writes in he says, he recently read about the Uzo effect, in which uh anis-flavored spirits and liqueurs become opaque, white usually, unless it's been colored beforehand, when diluted with water. I was wondering if you have seen this effect occur with other types of spirits.
And also, do I know of any other examples of color-changing beverages? Thanks. Alright, so uh what's happening with um with uh uzo or I don't know why the hell they call it the uzo effect. Seriously, like like I they they say that uzo is drunk more in in the US than uh pastis, recard, or absinthe. But since Absinthe uh you know went through that surge in popularity after the uzo effect had been characterized.
Uh maybe we should rename it the absinthe effect. How many by show of hands out in the world on the internet? How many of you have had a glass of uzo this year? Anyone? Um anyone, right?
Uh some sort of absinthe beverage? There's two people in here raising their hands, you know what I mean? Or pastis or perno uh based uh substance. Anyways, so uh I'm gonna forget the name because for some reason I forgot to paste it into my iPad. But um I believe the uh the oil involved the chemical is called Anatole.
I think it's what it's called. Anatol, and it's at the end. So someone will call in and say, I can't believe you forgot the name of it, but there it is. I did. Uh and what happens is is that it's a very s interesting effect.
When you're when you're making um, usually when you make an emulsion, you have to provide energy, usually uh mechanical energy, to uh create uh the little droplets of oil inside of uh a liquid. And the reason is is because uh it's takes a lot less energy for because there's a lot more surface area and there's actual energy associated with keeping two um emissible, i.e. don't mix together liquids next to each other. So that's why usually you have to beat things with whisks and blenders to get them to emulsify. Another thing you can do to lower the amount of energy you could put in is to add an emulsifier, which takes away some of the energy required to make that emulsion.
But the way the uzo effect works is entirely different. Instead of using mechanical energy, an emulsion is made basically almost spontaneously. It's called spontaneous emulsion. And what's going on is that uh the oil is soluble in in ethanol in in alcohol, but not in water. So uh what happens as you dilute uh, you know, I'm gonna say uh absinthe or perno, right?
Because I don't drink oozo. Uh, you know, why not other things like that? Why not like uh why not like aguardiente or like any other anis-flavored thing, like why ozo? No offense to the Greeks. No offense.
You know what I mean? Uh anyway. So uh you when you dilute it with water, um, you have the entire solution is basically uh evenly and homogeneously saturated with uh with this oil, and all of a sudden becomes super saturated. And it and it does it in a way that that many, many, many, many, many millions of tiny, tiny droplets are instantly formed, right? And because that's super fast nucleation, you get these small, small droplets that are stabilized, right?
Uh for hours and hours and hours, sometimes even days, depending on on how it works. And so it's this like instant like super saturation and massive nucleation that causes the oozo effect. And yes, it is uh visible in many other spirits. I don't know of any commercial spirits uh other than the anise flavored ones where it happens, uh, because that's famous. But many of the fl uh spirits that we make in the rotary evaporator will uh show the the uh oozo effect when they're diluted.
So some of our Thai basal spirits will uh if you add uh water to them, they will go white on you when you mix. Uh and then later on, if you let it sit for days and days, the oil will float to the top. Um and just tons of them. I've had caraway go white on me when I when I've done it, and I don't know what the components are in it that's doing it, but I've had some of our carrier, although maybe it was the caraway that we put phenyl into, which would make more sense maybe. Maybe maybe possible.
Um but uh so the answer is Naveen, yes. There are other oils that are uh you know soluble in ethanol and weakly are insoluble soluble in uh water and have this effect. The other thing that liquors can do to change colors is you can shift uh acid-base equilibria. So you can have a liquor that's neutral that has uh anthocyanins in it, and they'll start out uh in the bluish range, and then uh like blue corn, uh, and then as you acidify it with uh lemon juice or whatnot, it'll turn red uh or reddish purple. That's another thing you can do, although I don't know of any com there's some teas in Thailand that are flower-based.
There's a blue flower-based tea in Thailand, I believe it's Thailand, because Nastasha wasn't. Yeah, that we researched. And um, and that one, you make the tea and it's blue, you add the lemon, it turns red. Uh so that's something you can do. Another thing you can do is you can do kind of a re reverse uzo where you can suspend a weekly soluble uh like calcium or magnesium salt in, and then when you acidify it, it'll go clear.
Uh Nastasha and I have had uh we had to do we tr it's interesting you should ask this because we tried those things for this event we had to do. We didn't try that flower. What was it called? We couldn't find the flower. I forget the name of it.
It's similar to like a blue cornflower or something. It looked it was that color of blue. Uh um anyway, but it was very rare here in the US. Uh anyway, so we tried it and uh not to much uh good effect, especially because we needed to do the opposite of what was easy. We needed it to go not from red to uh not from blue to red but from red to blue and basic drinks.
Let me just tell you, what's the word we're looking for here? Gross. Gross. Um Brian Oaks writes in uh on iPads and fruits. I know from the radio show that you have an iPad.
Any recommendations on food-related apps? No, I don't really I don't really have any food-related apps. Yeah, you do. What? Chang's thing.
What? Chang's zap. I don't have that on here. Is that released yet? Yeah, I think so.
But listeners, if you're interested in developing an app for heritage radio network, email us at info at heritage radio network.com. Wow. Nice, huh? I've heard some people like the ratio thing, but I've never used it. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I know people that like that. Yeah? Yeah. And I hear that uh I don't I don't uh you know who uh you know, Jerry Lavish, our uh our web guru, he would know because he he does that kind of stuff. I look, I use my uh iPad as basically a book.
It's basically like, you know, I have like uh, you know, you know, probably a hundred thousand pages or something of uh of science related uh books and articles uh in my iPad, and that's mainly what I what I use it for. Um but then people write in. Tell us what they think their best uh their best food apps are. Uh also uh Brian just got back from a trip to Florida and stop by the fruit and spice park. Good job.
Everyone should go to the fruit and spice park. Uh I think we talked about it last week a little bit, right? Our trip to the fruit and spice park. But he has a recommendation that I might have forgotten to make, uh, which is I would recommend bringing something to rinse your hands and face with because you are going to be covered with sweet, drippy, sticky mango juice. Not that there's anything wrong with that, he adds.
I saved at least 15 different mangoes and could have tried at least a dozen more. Why not? Why didn't you? I don't have to go to dinner. Maybe.
Or maybe they were maybe because maybe he didn't get the super like treatment and they they chased him out of there. Mm-hmm. Uh I'm thinking rapid infusion with mango puree and rum. Keep up the great show Brian Oaks. Although, you know what I really want to do is I want to take some of those mangoes and fuse the mango chunks in a vacuum with uh booze, because that's be delicious.
But we couldn't, when we went, harvest enough of these mangoes to um to do that to. It's an excellent recommendation, by the way, bringing something to uh wash your hands and face with. Uh what I used when I was out was the incessant rainstorm that was pounding us with buckets of water every 10 seconds. Right? So we had a we had a separate problem in that we couldn't like keep our cameras out because none of us had like you know, diving cameras, because we were basically tasting mangoes in like three feet of water.
Like we needed like snorkel gear to do our tasting. Um, you know what I'm I've had this problem so many times. You want to take fruit out of a tasting and you don't know what to do. So anyone out there who's has this, and we need a way to label fruits. Sharpie's don't write on f on waxy fruits, especially when it's raining, and the Sharpie comes off and then the Sharpie starts writing.
So Sharpie, I know I love Sharpie. Sharpie, all love to you, and for all of the all of the good times that we've had together, but it is ineffective for writing the names on fruits if the weather is at all messed up. They need to make a fruit sharpie. Yeah. Thank you, Nastasha.
They need to make a fruit sharpie. Are you listening out there, people? Someone either tell me look, I don't want it to be horribly toxic. Like I'm not willing to die to label my fruit. But I need some sort of like fruit label so I can write on it.
The other idea I had is like, what if they had like a special like little like needle thing where you could like almost like you remember those old Dymo like label makers that would punch that tape? But like you could just like quickly like type the letter and it would stencil into the fruit skin. We should just bring uh whatever that thing is called. It'll take on any tape you put on will come come right the heck off if it's raining. And like the like McGee and I were out there the second day when when uh you were driving to Miami.
We were trying to write, and the pa as we were writing the paper was bleeding off into the uh in into the earth. It was a freaking nightmare, which m which A meant that we could taste fewer fruits, and B is making our job of figuring out what the heck we ate a lot, lot harder. Um anyway, I'm glad someone's going to the fruit and spice park. Everyone should go to Miami. If look, if any of you guys plan a trip to Miami, you need to uh go down to South Day to the homestead area to the fruit and spice park.
Uh and and then when they tell you that you can't eat the fruit, I don't know, punch them in the face. Uh don't do that. Don't do that. Uh, and uh do whatever you can to get a hold of some of the fruit. They usually let you eat the fruit that's fallen on the ground.
The problem with the fruit, two things I've noticed. One, the problem with the fruit spice park uh is that they allow the public in a lot, and so they have to be careful about the fruits because otherwise they'd be stripped bare instantaneously. Um the other problem is is that tropical fruit people are more covetous of their fruit. This has been my experience, my relatively small experience, as opposed to temperate fruit people. Like you have someone with an orchard fruit, uh or uh like a a pear or apple orchard, you know, whatever, you're like, can I have this fruit?
They're like, yeah, take it. Take it. Otherwise it's gonna fall on the ground and rot. You know what I mean? If they're not commercial.
If they're commercial, it's a different story. But these guys are like, they know every remember, these guys knew every single mango that was on that tree, and if you took one, they're like, where'd that mango go? You know what I mean? It's like they're they it's a different it's a different kind of crew. I still haven't figured it quite out yet.
Anyway, we're gonna take one more commercial break and then come back and slam through these last couple questions. Call your questions to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128 cooking issues. We live in Brooklyn, baby. We try to make it, baby.
We wanna make it, baby. We're gonna make it, baby. Living in Brooklyn, baby. We live in Brooklyn, baby. Wow.
Anyway, yeah, and Nastasha, by the way, even though we're we're are we on? Yeah, we're on. Even though we're in Brooklyn, uh a lot of the time, Nastasha is like an old school Brooklyn hater. So anyone out there, anyone out there who's a Brooklyn patriot, please call in and give Nustacha serious ribbing. You also I hate the roads in Brooklyn.
Like someday for this, we're gonna do the entire session on Neil uh Neil Diamond's Brooklyn Roads. And it must be some sort of like crazy sarcastic song because the roads here in Brooklyn. Brooklyn Roads, yeah. You know the song Brooklyn Roads. Rambling Rose?
Brooklyn Roads. No, it's cracking, you're thinking Crackling Rose. Crackling Rose. Yeah, Brooklyn Roads. Yeah, yeah.
Get up on your Neil Diamond, alright? Anyway. Uh, so because the roads here are some of the worst dang things in the world. It's like, you know, it's it's like you someone's sitting there and throwing hand grenades into the pavement and blowing holes in it for no apparent reason. And then and then they or the or like somehow like meteorites made of asphalt are falling into the into the road and just leaving giant, like, or volcanoes of asphalt are coming out of the road at different points.
And if you're a biker, the roads of Brooklyn are um what's the word? Crap. Right? Crap. Anyway.
Uh, but Brooklyn itself I enjoy. I enjoy Brooklyn itself, just not their roads. Okay. Uh James T. Ray writes in about popcorn.
Normally I eat with reckless abandon. However, I love to snack and I wanted a low calorie option. I like popcorn as a snack, and reach recently purchased an air popper to pop my corn, and I love it. So the question can I get salt to adhere to the popcorn without a lipid or making a soggy mess? And by the way, I've tried the cooking spray with mixed results.
I love the show, James T. Ray. Hmm. Um, well, the first thing you can do is to get uh popcorn salt. So uh Morton makes many different kinds of salt, and uh one of them is popcorn salt.
I just dropped mine out. And popcorn salt is uh very, very, very fine. And so it adheres to popcorn much better than even their uh iodized salt, and definitely better than uh kosher salt and things like that. So and it's super super fine, easy to distribute. So if you've had mixed results with the cooking spray, which is what I was gonna recommend before I read the last line of uh of your thing, um, you know, spread it out, spray a little cooking spray, and then a fine dusting of this popcorn salt.
I think you're gonna get better adhesion. Um aside from that, I did a primary search. There are, I mean, you could do I mean all the other things make it such a pain in the butt that I don't know that you'd do it. You can make like a uh uh like an alcohol dispersion, like a like a like a vodka dispersion of salt, spray it over the popcorn, throw it in an oven and dry it back out with a pain in the butt. I mean, you want to make popcorn, presumably you want to eat it at some point, right?
You don't want to sit there and re wet it, redry it out, right? It doesn't make any sense, right, Nastasha. That's too much trouble, right? Yeah. I just put salt and sugar on mine.
Air popped? Did you listen to the question at all? What's it air popped is like in the in the popper? Again, Nastasha's sitting there thinking about I'm sure she's thinking about lunch, which we're gonna have delicious Roberta's lunch instead of what's going on. Air popper means that it's basically like a hair dryer that that's contained, and it and by the way, your air popper makes a good coffee roaster.
I don't know whether you knew that, James. You can roast coffee in your air popper. Uh you have to be careful because the chaff flies all over your uh your room. You have to contain it, make sure it doesn't catch on fire. Fire's a problem.
Anyway, um I used to do it for years. I used an air air popcorn maker before I bought a uh coffee roaster and then moved to whirly pop, which is actually my favorite popcorn making technique. So in air popping, Nastasha, there is no added oil. Okay. Yeah.
Uh I wonder whether you could add just a small amount of oil to the popcorn kernels as you're popping them in the air popper and then um maybe then increase adhesion. I don't know. That might because if the spray problem was that maybe it wasn't getting all over it, maybe a small amount of oil on the popcorn kernels themselves. But the problem with uh doing that, and this is probably why it won't work, is that it's what's that technology, air popping is what's called a fluid bed kind of technology where the popcorn kernels are all separated from each other and kept agitated by the uh air that's blowing in them. And then when a popcorn kernel pops, it immediately becomes less dense and it's unpopped cousins and then floats to the surface and then it's pushed out so it doesn't burn at the bottom.
And so I wonder whether adding a small amount of oil would kind of ruin that effect uh or get into it or just ruin everything in general. But I know that you can have oil in a popcorn popper because that's how I uh when you roast coffee, the oils are in there, and the oil uh gets on the inside of the air popcorn popper, and it does foul it a little bit, but it doesn't like ruin it in any way. So that could be another thing to do. But my first step would be to get the actual popcorn salt, and you can buy it on you could buy it on the Amazon.com. Anyway, uh Garth writes in about vanilla.
We grow vanilla in the South Pacific Island of Tonga and process the beans into different products in New Zealand. Uh, how would we produce a vanilla foam that we could use at food shows for attendees to scoop some foam from a bowl to taste our vanilla? I visualize a nice glass fish bowl without any fish with an aeration. He actually says fish removed. Get a new one.
Don't just remove the fish from the fish bowl because then you're killing the fish. No, I don't see the case. I don't I don't think he was saying that. Anyway, all right. Just without a fish.
I'd buy a new one. Anyway. With an aeration pump, causing the liquid in the bowl to foam up so people can just scoop some on a tasting stick. Not sure what type of base would be best as it uh as it ideally would just suit our vanilla flavor without too much else competing. Could taste like a custard, a panicata, ice cream, jelly, citrus, etc.
We have carrageen in, but no other high-tech ingredients. Okay. Foam done with a aquarium pump in a bowl uh or in any sort of vessel was something uh that a bunch of chefs were working on and was first cracked and pioneered by uh Andoni Adoriz uh from uh when you know at Mugaritz in like uh years ago. And uh his recipe, which is uh on the internets, I think uh if you just search it the the famous dish he made with it was called Vanity, and it had a chocolate foam. Uh and the what he the basic recipe is two percent uh powdered egg whites by weight uh of the mixture, which you know he then lets uh uh what's the word hydrate and 0.1, i.e.
uh is that right? One gram in a liter? Can't be that low. Look it up, but it's something like that. One gram in a liter of Xanthan gum.
If you can get carrageen in, I'm pretty sure you can get Xanthan uh where you are. If not, it's easy to male order Xanthan and you only have to use a tiny tiny bit of it so you can get a hold of it. And that's the basic recipe that he uses to make the big air bubble foams, and then you just put it in the bottom and do it out. Now, the downside is is they have very little uh flavor in them because they are like 99.99% air with only a little bit of bubbles and they pop almost instantaneously. I mean, that's the idea of it.
I think that for what you're doing, you're gonna want a more dense, stable foam, uh, in which case you could probably just use powdered egg whites and vanilla uh and uh and your vanilla extract and water um or or something. I'm not trying to think of what the best foam would be. You could use if you have agar, you can make a fluid gel and then and then shoot it out of an ISI canister. The problem with foams is I think that they're they're going to reduce the flavor of your vanilla by introducing a lot of air into it. The other problem is is you might want to look at an article uh brought to my attention also by McGee uh uh from 1997 called The Effect of Milk Fat on the Flavor Perception of Vanilla Ice Cream.
Uh basically, the more fat you have, the uh more muted your perception of the vanilla flavor is. So I would stay away from anything that contained fat because uh if you're gonna want to highlight this, and I and I sense why you want to have it in a foam because you want the air, and then you first of all you probably don't want to use that much of it, and you probably want to have the flavor come out. You also don't want to use a lot of heat because heat is gonna alter the uh flavor of your uh of your vanilla. It's too bad you can't get something like VersaWhip, which you can then just whip it up into a foam with a little maltodextrin, or something like uh, you know, what else? Like VersaWhip or methyl methyl cell F50.
I mean, you could try just a stable uh egg white foam. Um you could probably get pasteurized egg whites and then do it that way and do it uncooked, but I don't want you to have that eggy flavor. But I I don't A, I don't want you to heat it because I don't want you to alter the flavor of the vanilla through the heat. And B, I don't want you uh I don't want you to add any fat because then um you're adding fat. You know what?
Maybe a minimum amount of heat, like almost like uh an Italian meringue where you whip the egg white and then you pour the hot sugar in to set it a little bit, but it's not really cooking it for a long time. That might get it. And then you could just basically have this like meringue almost meringue icing that people could scoop up and then just go sugar and vanilla, it's gonna have the air, you'll get a good delivery. What do you think? Yeah.
It's low tech. Yeah. Low tech, delicious. Good job. Delicious and low tech.
Also, you can maybe stir some vanilla in after you cook it so that you uh so that you uh have some totally uncooked vanilla in it if it if you go a little over stiff. These are my recommendations, Garth. Use them for what they're worth, which is probably nothing. Uh lastly, uh Jason writes in about Nixtimol. Hi Dave, I love the post about nyxtimalization, thank you.
But uh I'm having trouble doing it here in the UK because field corn is not common. I have two questions. Do you need to use intact kernels or can you use broken cracked kernels? Most field corn here is sold as bird feed, a lot of it cracked. Also, can I use a grain mill like the one that would connect to my kitchen aid mixer to grind the grain after treatment?
Thanks, Jason. Unfortunately, Jason, cracked corn won't work because uh it doesn't uh hydrate the same way basically um the the outside, the pericarp is what's stopping the water from going instantly into the corn kernel and overcooking it. And so if you treat it with lye and it's already been broken, it's just it no, it just won't work. It won't it won't be the same. Uh what I would recommend if you can't get field corn is use even though I said in the post not to use popcorn.
Popcorn will work, right? It's just not quite as um. It's just it's just harder. It's not ideal for it, but it's better than bracked uh cracked or broken. So I would try to use uh I would get popcorn.
You'll get the largest uh kernel ones, not the small kernel variety that you can. And is it the best? No, because it's hard to grind, right? Uh I would not use the KitchenAid. That thing's gonna gum up.
I have one, a grain mill, Kitchen A grain mill. Things gonna gum up lickety lickety lickety split. I would then, you know, if you have to, I would use a food processor, um, and you know, and then maybe even mortar and uh pestle some of it to get the texture down. The problem with the food processor is you're gonna have to add more water. I have done it.
It's a sticky, awful mess, but I I I have done it. Um so you you can you can do it. Um it's just you know, it's not ideal, but it definitely is possible for experimentation. The people ate the my my uh tortillas that I made with uh with popcorn uh and a food processor, and they didn't, you know, they didn't punch me in the face. I didn't also I didn't have those looks of well, this was good, but me, me, me, me, me.
You know what I'm talking about? You know those looks? Yeah, yeah. Anyway, so give it a try, and I'd appreciate anyone from the UK, because I've had a couple people maybe have this problem, write in with their solutions to finding uh good ways to do nixamalization in the UK. Anyway, come back next week and get another episode of Cooking Issues Vision.
Oh, you did crap me on this corner and I don't know where I'm at. 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, Wald Baums, 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. 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 May's, Van Dag, Momo Fuco Mo Bar, Imperial No. 9, Myeland, Mexico, Craft, Dizzy's Club, Coca-Cola, The Meatball Shop, and Dose Torres.
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