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Hello, and welcome to Cooking Issues. I'm Dave Arnold, the host of Cooking Issues coming to you live on the Heritage Radio Network every Tuesday from 12 to 1245. Joined as always in the studio with Nastasha De Hammer Lopez. Call all of your cooking or non-cooking related. We'll take anything, right?
Yeah. Do you have any subjects you want them to talk about today? No. No, no random questions you want? No.
No? What stores maybe Nastasha likes to shop in? Things of this material. And return things too. Return.
I wasn't gonna bring it up. No, no, we're not going. I wasn't gonna go. I wasn't gonna go there. But if anyone wants to call in and go there, please go there.
Call in all of your questions too. 718497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. I still haven't memorized that thing, you know, Nastasha. I still have to have you write it out every single time.
I know. And if you're not here, I have to have Jack Sane on the air. Wow. Good stuff, huh? Yeah.
Jack, I think uh we're gonna leave the uh the uh break music in your hands today. Maybe you can nice pick some good stuff. He seems to be coming up with some good stuff recently, right? He does. I'm on a roll.
Oh, he is, he totally is. What was the one you came up with last time? That was really good. Some uh training. Oh, the L train song, yeah.
Nastash was the late one last week. Usually I'm the late one. Well, good news is you beat Nastasha here again today. I know, it's because we're we're reversing roles. How awful would that be?
Oh my god. Anyway, glad to say that Cooking Issues the Blog is back on a roll with a uh we finally I finally got the fruit post out. Looks good. It's good, right? Mm-hmm.
Now all I have to do is write the second part of the fruit post. The centrifuge post, the lime juice post, the uh how many of the sous videos. TV primer post, the uh how many other posts do I have that I have not yet written? Knots. Well, the knots, that's from like years ago.
I have posts from like years ago I haven't written. Not only that, before we get on to the uh actual topics of the day. Oh, Nastasha says, why am I sweating profusely? Oh, I said wipe your face. Oh, wipe my face.
Yes, well, I biked here in the beautiful Brooklyn weather today, which is um it's it's like it's raining up from the ground. It's like the ground is raining up into the sky. That's how humid it is. And what's awesome about biking in that kind of weather, when it's really hot, is your body can't cool it off from science. It's awesome.
But I am I am uh I'm collecting all of my sweat in a pool here on the floor. Maybe we can make a small swimming pool out of it. Hopefully I don't jack short out all of your equipment. Uh anyways, uh what were we talking about before that? Posts you have to write the blogs back.
Yeah, but oh uh I have a not that I have time for this because I don't, but I have a new, I have a new blog that I'm also not gonna update. I bought I ain't messing around.com. And what else? Uh I ain't fling around.com. I bought that too, although that one's not safe for work.
But so like I had this idea that the problem with cooking issues, right? Many problems with cooking issues, but one of the problems of cooking issues is is that I can't uh seem to do anything short, and I have to spend like 15 hours of research every time I even write three words because I'm a jerk. I'm an idiot. You know what I mean? Like my my sister-in-law Miley Carpenter, who's married to uh my so my wife's sister Miley, wife is also a badass.
Miley runs the Food Network magazine. I mean, she's I mean she's the editor in chief. She started it, she founded it. Total badass. Uh, you know, anyways, she's married to Wiley Dufrain, so it's pretty hardcore, hardcore family I got.
Miley has always been able to just research what she needs to know and write a great article. Why can't we all be like Miley? I guess if we were all like Miley, we'd all be extremely successful journalists and editors. Guess that's why we're not like Miley. Anyway, so the whole point of this new thing was that it wouldn't be food related, and I can write anything I want.
For instance, how much I want you to wear your damn helmet when you're biking across the Williamsburg Bridge, or how you should keep your hands on the handlebars when you're biking in the street, and there's lots of pedestrians walking around. Things like that, right? Yeah. Have you seen the jerk going across the Williamsburg Bridge on his fixed gear bike, and he takes his feet off the freaking pedals when he's going downhill? Where does he put them?
He puts them on the top tube. For those of you who don't know what a fixed gear bike is, it's a bike where the the pedals are actually linked to the gear such that every time the wheel moves, the pedal moves. There's no freewheeling, there's no coasting. And so the idea is you're supposed to stay in touch with the road because your feet keep moving, and this guy's like, hey, I'm too lazy, and I want to go faster down the bridge, so I'm gonna take my feet off the pedals. Moron.
There are people walking down that thing, even on the bike side with baby carriages. Now they're morons too. But I mean, seriously. Anyway, so that's the kind of stuff you have to look forward to. The guy with the fixed gear probably ends up here.
Little Robertus hipster joke for you. Anyway, so uh hey, no offense to the fixies out there. I ride a fixed gear bike, but I keep my feet on the pedals and I have both brakes, alright? Because I'm not in it for the first of all, I have the least sexy bike on earth. Anyway, okay, sorry, sorry, sorry.
We're gonna we're gonna run out of time if I don't. Oh, one more thing. Next week is the uh is the year. Next week, Nathan Mirval live on Cooking Issues Radio. You're gonna call in your questions for Nathan Mirvold.
What? Is that you? Oh my god. You know what happens, folks? This is first and last time you'll hear my telephone go off during the broadcast.
The uh deal is my kids turn uh play angry birds on my iPad iPhone and they turn the sound back on. Anywho, I apologize for that seven minute rant uh uh uh of nothing. But uh I would hope you would call in your questions right now to 7184972128, that's 7184972128. But if not, at least call in. Make me look good for Miraval, will you, people?
Will you call in? And there's free giveaways. Oh, yeah, free giveaways. Like maybe, I don't know, like a modernist cuisine apron that's signed by those guys. What else we give in, are we giving me?
Maybe the book. No. Nastasha says maybe the book's what they're gonna call in. Listen, please don't get your hopes out. This is what I love about Nastasha and Hate, is that she'll sit here and lie.
It's not really a lie, it's her hope. But it's just not gonna happen. But she has this way in her head of turning hope, trying to turn hope into reality. Yes. Like when we got uh Merle Haggard to skull, she's like, Well, uh, we want him to school, maybe he will.
And he did, but in this case, I don't think so. I th you know I think the modernist cuisine. If Jesus came down and said, Nathan, can I have a free copy of the book? Nathan would say, You're Jesus, you can afford it. Am I right about this?
We have an autographed apron here. We have the autographed apron. It's gonna be awesome. By the way, that's not a slight to Mirvold. Did that seem like a slight to Mirvold?
It's not a slight, that's just the way I talk. Right. When I'm not in the air, probably I I'll go back to my professional tone. All right. Talk so long with my iPad shut off.
Okay. Ben Bennett writes in, says, Why not twist tie something to the fruit? We're talking about the tattooing fruit from last week and the week before. Uh it was, I believe his name, I forget, Rolf Wind, I think was the person who uh Rolf, right? Yeah.
Wind who uh came in. And I tried to Google him. I think he's a like a a pharmacy uh like a pharmacy researcher and a cyclist, an avid cyclist. I bet he wears a helmet. Mm-hmm.
Anyway, um, I was told in the Netherlands they don't wear helmets, and I was like, it's because their bikes weigh eight thousand pounds and they do two miles an hour on those flat roads. Yeah, I mean it's like anyway, whatever. Okay, uh instead of using a tattoo gun, which is what Rolf said, I would get a bunch of plastic twit twist ties, twist, twist ties in a bunch uh of colors, write numbers down on them with a sharpie before you go out in the field, and then tag a fruit with a numbered twist tie, and then that way you have to keep track of what's going on with my right in the rain notebook, which we all agree right in the rain notebooks are good things. Uh I have one in my bag right now. Or do the same thing with pre-numbered plastic bags.
That's a good idea, like Ziplocks or whatever, uh, rather than twist ties. All right, seems less complex than a tattoo gun, but less cool. Definitely less cool. I've tried various things like bags and whatnot. Here's what happens.
Whenever you're out in the field, everything turns to crap. This is what I've noticed. Like you're out there, you're tasting things, you're sticky, you have fruit paste all over you because Nastasha's blown some sort of nasty fruit out of her mouth, and she hasn't looked where she's spitting and it gets all over your shirt. You know, juices are dripping down your hands, you're like it's raining, there's bugs everywhere, and you're trying to get the fruit into your bag. Correct, this is true, right?
Yeah. This is how it works. And so, you know, we tried many things. The last time, uh, and you'll see the post, uh, you know, the mango thing, you know, if should I ever write it, uh, that comes up is uh the one thing that ended up working at the end was c literally carving the name of the fruit into the fruit with a pen knife, which is a pain in the butt. Uh, but uh I'll tell you this.
We will we will try these various things because how are you gonna get the twist tie to stay around the fruit? Depends on the fruit. I thought about that. Depends on the fruit. It has a stem or something.
I mean, you can shove something through the fruit, but then it's gonna damage it. Anyway, listen to this, uh, Ben and Rolf. I purchased uh a rabbit tattoo gun called the Easy Tat. There's a competitor, I think, made by the same company called the Rabbit Cat. And uh I purchased one for 50 bucks, and uh, it's a little tattoo gun, and it works.
I this I got it last night, I tried it this morning on some lemons. I have to try some other fruits. On lemons, it's really hard to see the tattoo without ink. And I think filling up with ink is a pain in the butt. But what you can do is tattoo it and then like rub an ink stamp over it real quick and rub it and the tattoo stays there.
I'm trying to think of real simple, real waterproof. I don't want to have to carry a liquid ink with me because that's not gonna work. I have a feeling on more delicate fruits like mangoes or fruits that oxidize like apples, that I'll be able to read it fine without ink. The lemon, if you let it sit around for a while and the skin starts drying off, and you hold a shine of light on it, you can see where the tattoo was even without ink. So I am working on it, but I think for 50 bucks, I'm going to Colombia soon, and I hope to pick up some crazy fruits in the markets at Columbia.
I'm gonna carry my easy tat uh on the uh trip with me and see whether or not I can label some fruits. So we'll get some real world world tests of this and we'll see if we can get a good uh test for uh fruit heads in, right? Mm-hmm. What do you think? On a similar note, uh there is I'm trying to find it because I'm a moron.
Hold on. Uh uh uh uh Joshua Rosenwasser just moved from Tampa, Florida to Antigua, and he wants to know whether there's any kind of wild edibles he can forage for down there in Antigua. Well, uh, oh well, Joshua, uh the here's the one problem. I've never been to the Caribbean in my whole life, and one of the reasons is is because I think I mentioned uh several times I hate paradise. Uh I hate it.
Like, you know, like really nice beaches uh and sun. It's horrible, horrible. But I'm sure if you go out into the forest, it's gonna be, you know, or the you know, whatever they have there, it's gonna be nice. I did some preliminary research for you, and there's one of the problems is is that Antigua appears to be one of the driest of those islands. So even though they have some tropical fruits growing on those islands, they tend to import a lot of them from kind of wetter uh neighbors where they have a wider range of stuff that they can grow.
So I wish I could be more of help. But I remember that a couple weeks ago, somebody asked a question. I answered the first half of their question and then spun off into a tangent, and their question was very rightly so. Where are other places that you can go forage, not forage, but go to to taste things other than the fruit and spice park? Well, uh, I forget who asked it, but I'm glad you asked, I'm gonna lump in with the question here.
Uh I'll just tell you first the places that I've already gone, uh, some with most with Nastasha, uh, went to the Geneva, uh, the Geneva, New York, uh, the Agricultural Extension Geneva York, which is an extension of Cornell, but it's also linked up with the federal government. That has all of uh the the largest collection of apples in the world. Uh it also has a decent collection of other things like uh grapes uh and whatnot, and it's fairly easy to get in there and run rampant like a lunatic, like pretty easy, right? Uh another one uh that uh Nastasha and I went to that we uh blogged about was the uh Brogdale collection. Uh it's the uh it's in Kent in Faversham, and uh it is amazing.
It has the largest culinary apple collection as opposed to just apple collection, has a huge collection of pears, has a huge collection of currants and other small fruits, has an amazing selection of cherries, also of plums, and I believe uh filberts, filbert nuts, and a smattering of other of other things. And it's also that one is open to the public, you just go, they don't want you to go in there and take the fruit off the trees. I think for insurance reasons, but just do it anyway. Just go steal all the fruits anyway. That's where I would go.
Uh then uh if you're friends with uh a guy named Gene Lester in um in uh in California in Watsonville, that's the best citrus collection we've ever been to. You can if you join the California Flu Fruit Explorers, I think is the name of it, or California Rare Fruits, one of those. If you join them, you get invited to the yearly thing at Gene Lester's uh ranch, and you can eat as much as you want there. Uh I want to go to Corvalis, which is uh in um Portland, and that's where our collection of pears and berries is. Apparently, one of the greatest collections of pears and berries in the world.
I want to go there. Uh there's a couple of places I know uh Nastasha wants to go. There's a couple of great botanical gardens, I think, in the Ukraine, right? In Kiev, I want to go to. Uh you know, I want to go to Kazakhstan where it's natural.
Where else am I forgetting? There's tons of places I want to go. Anyway, if any of you guys can think of some good places that we haven't gone, I want to go. I want to go to the New York Botanical Garden, which I go to all the time. They have one of the world's largest collect uh collection of alliums, onions and garlic.
Can you can you eat them? I doubt you can eat them there. Well, you take them and you cook them. I mean you wouldn't eat them raw. No, no, no, but they let you take them.
Well, I don't know. You gotta get the right, it's all about getting the right person on the phone. You know what I mean? It's like, you know, it's just if you get the right person on the phone, everything's good. If you get the wrong person on the phone, life is terrible.
Anyway, uh, second part of uh second part of Joshua's question was uh they have a lot of uh callaloo, callow is a big recipe uh recipe, you know, slash green down in the Caribbean, which are the tops of tarot plants, but also known locally as spinach and is abundant and cheap. Are there any recipes besides a standard long simmer with thyme and onions? Uh, you know, look I don't have a lot of experience uh with it, but it's not only tarot they use for that, that you can use like a bunch of different greens. And basically, I wish I could help you here, but I want someone else to call in and give us some good recipes. Basically, it's just greens simmered for a whole hell of a long time with uh usually with some sort of allium and spices, and then either blended to make the smooth soup.
You can also add some salt pork or bacon or whatever, or or seafood or crab, or you can keep it like a stew and keep it chunky. I mean, I think anything that you could do with greens with a soup, you could do with that, or with like nettle, because the thing with if you do use taro uh leaves, which is you know dashin, if you use that, you need to cook it because uh it's otherwise toxic. Which leads me to another awesome toxic plant, which was first brought I forget who told me about it. Crap. Anyway, called Mayan spinach.
We saw that in the fruit and spice park in the poisonous plant section. It it has uh it'll kill you. Cyanide poisoning if you eat it raw, but if you cook it, it apparently is one of the most nutritious greens in the world. Chaya. Love to try it.
We should have stolen like you know what the problem is when we were down there, we had no kitchen, we couldn't cook anything. Yeah, we did. No, we no, we didn't, not not after that day. Yeah, yeah, we did after that first day. So I should have stolen, I should have stolen a bunch of that stuff and cooked it.
That was the next cooked. I'm an idiot. Next time, next time. Well, you know, it was just raining like cats and dogs, and we were doing that event with uh with uh Jeremiah Bullfrog at the from Gastropod down in Miami, so we were much more worried about what we're gonna do for that event than what we were gonna have for dinner that night, which is stupid. You should always worry about what you're gonna have for dinner that night.
We had a good dinner. We cooked fish. We had an oak, yeah, we had an okay dinner. I would say it was a great dinner. Remember, it took us eight years to get the charcoal lift.
Because it was like, you know, the charcoal was basically like soaking wet. Anyways, let's go to our first commercial break. Call in your questions to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128 cooking issues. Here I come.
You can have on a couple. Hello and welcome back to Cooking Issues. Calling all your questions to 718 497 2128. That's 718 497 2128. Chris Gibb from Toronto, Canada.
For some reason I wrote Toronto, California on my on my iPad, but it's not Toronto's not in California, it's in Canada. About fixing vacuum machines. Hey Dave, I've come across a vacuum machine that isn't working properly, and I want to buy it cheaply and fix it. It runs through a cycle normally until it's about to release the vacuum. This is when it makes a loud noise and starts again from the beginning and just keeps going through this cycle until you turn it off.
I was wondering if you had any ideas or if you think it's hopeless. Any thoughts on this would be awesome. Thanks. Huh, that's an interesting problem. Um it sounds like it's probably uh fairly easy to fix.
The good thing is that the important part of a vacuum machine is the motor, right? Is the vacuum pump. That's expensive. So if it's a real vacuum machine, we're talking by the way, folks, about a chamber vacuum machine, I assume, a professional vacuum machine, and they start, the smallest ones start at like 1500, 2000 bucks. They go up to about four grand for ones you normally get in a restaurant, right?
So they're they're not cheap. And if the pump is working and sucking a vacuum, if it's actually sucking a vacuum, right, you've won most of the battle, right? Now here's what I would check out first. I can't tell exactly what's going on because it's not like a normal situation of uh troubleshooting wise, it's not normal. I wouldn't expect it to do exactly that.
I would expect it to um make a loud noise and then not start again unless there's something weird going on. I wouldn't expect it to start again until it had evacuated. Here's what sounds like might be happening. There's a when what happens in a vacuum machine is you close the lid, the vacuum cycle starts, it sucks out all the air. After it sucks out the air and it's done sucking the vacuum, it stops sucking the vacuum, it puts the seal bar up and seals your bag.
After which it lets the air back into the machine, and or sometimes it has gas flush, right, which puts gas back in, right? Uh, and and then and then there you go. So any one of those things could be wrong. If it's sucking a vacuum, you know you're good, right? Then if it seals the bag, you know it at least makes it to that part in the cycle.
It sounds if it's making a loud noise, either sh maybe it's trying to do a gas flush and it can't because the gas flush is plugged if it has a gas flush. The other thing that could be going wrong is that the uh air release valve could be broken, right? In which case it's not releasing the air properly. Any one of those things could be going wrong. Assuming that it's not one of those things, uh, and it's a problem with the electronics board, the electronics board is is a lot harder to fix.
You can get new electronics boards, but even if you have like minor electrical skills and you don't want to actually fix the electronics, you can just hardwire the thing to basically turn it on and then press stop and just bypass all the circuitry and run all the stuff manually, right? Because it's all basically just solenoid valves that you can run off the thing. So I would say either one of the solenoids that's venting the thing is broken, or you have an electronics problem, or you have a blockage in one of the lines. Any one of those things seems a lot easier than fixing the pump. What do you think, Nastasha?
Yes, I think that's right. Because we have a machine that was given to Nastasha by Mark Ladner from Del Posto. That's really nice. And the pump starts up, but the sucker doesn't start a vacuum, which means they need to rebuild the whole vacuum pump. Now that's a pain in the patoot, right?
What'd the guy say was gonna cost us? Like 250 labor. Yeah, no, you see, that's the thing. This is Nastasha hoping against hope. 250 to show up.
It's 250 to hang his hat on the inside of our door, right? That's 250 bucks. Then another like whatever, an hour to sit there and go, Yeah, that's broken. Yeah, it's broken, right? And then, and then here's the other one.
Oh, I don't have those pots right now. I don't have those. No. I gotta order those pots. Right?
And then another charge when he comes back with the parts, plus taking the thing apart. Right? I mean, come on, we all know how this stuff goes. Anyway, uh no offense to the vacuum repair people out there. All right.
And I want to hear someone saying that Dave is prejudiced against vacuum machine repair people. Yeah, you know what maybe did. Maybe pooped his pants. Maybe, maybe. Old old expression, please don't ask.
Okay. Hey, we got a thank you from uh Mike who wrote in a couple weeks ago. We were talking about marshmallows. He was having problems with his marshmallow sticking, and says that what we said on the air actually helped him out. That's awesome.
Yeah, hey, right? Jack's happy, we're like a happy customer. We have at least one. We have one person that we have helped. Right, yeah.
Everything's finally worth it. Good, good. All right. Uh Henry Schwartz writes in with some sous-vide and uh low temperature questions. In case there's anyone who happened to just tune in and was trying to tune in to the wrong radio station but listened to us and doesn't know what low temperature cooking is.
Low temperature in Sous vide is any time. Sous vide is any time you have something packaged in a vacuum bag, right? No matter what temperature you use. Could be boiling bag, could be uh could be low temperature, could just be in your refrigerator. That's Sous vide.
Low temperature is when you're instead of using a high temperature like an oven uh at like 300 degrees to cook something, you use something like a water bath that's almost exactly the same temperature you want to cook to. So I want to cook a steak to 130 degrees Fahrenheit, I set my water bath to 130 degrees Fahrenheit, and I usually cook inside of a bag, plastic bag or something like that. That's that's low temperature cooking. So here's what uh Harry Schwartz has to say. I'm an amateur cook who love to try new techniques.
I did a summer cooking camp for kids in the neighborhood, and the parents pitched in to buy me a Sous vide Supreme machine. Nice parents, good job. Uh home version of what you guys use. The Sous vide Supreme is the one that doesn't circulate. It's basically a uh a temperature controlled water bath.
I think it's about 500 bucks. I've never used them. Someone suggested your site uh and listened to a few episodes on your radio show. Uh I think it's great, but the more I listen and read up on Sous vide, the more I confused I get. You're not alone, my friend.
You're not alone. My question is why is there such a great difference in suggested cooking times and temperatures for Sous vide cooking? I wanted to do short ribs as my first Sous vide experiment and saw recipes for two to three days of cooking. It didn't make sense. So I called one of my favorite restaurants in Philadelphia, LaCroix, and Chef Adam there suggested 130 degrees Fahrenheit for eight hours, which worked perfectly.
I see you see uh well, let's just start right there before we go on. The reason why there are different times and temperatures is because different people want different effects when they're cooking. Okay. So uh I know you said that it doesn't make sense that you're cooking something for two or three days. And in fact, when you're learning low temperature in Sous vide, the hardest thing to wrap your head around, honestly, is that meat is not going to overcook when you cook it for that long.
I like uh Wiley Dufrein, my current brother-in-law, was the first person to tell me that years and years and years ago. And I was like, you're cracked, you're crazy. There's no way you can cook a piece of meat for three days and not have it overcooked. Once you get over that hurdle, right, then all these recipes are going to start making sense to you. Okay.
Recipes overcook in the traditional sense of becoming well done, overcook, because um you're cooking at a higher temperature than you want to cook the meat to. So as you cook longer, the more and more overdone it's gonna get, the more and more dry it's gonna get, because you're basically cooking all the water out of the meat, right? Uh that's not what happens low temperature. When you're cooking low temperature or sous vide low temperature, um, you cook the meat to exactly the temperature you want it to cook to, and then it just stays there. The meat no longer overcooks in the sense of it doesn't squeeze all of its water out anymore, doesn't turn gray, doesn't have any of those traditional overcooked things happen to it, right?
It doesn't turn tough. What happens instead is you hold it at a particular level of doneess, and then over a long period of time, the connective tissue breaks down, right? And it starts getting softer and more and more tender. Okay. So if you take a piece of meat that doesn't have very much connective tissue in it, let's say a tenderloin, right, and you cook it for a long time, it starts losing what little texture it has and it turns mushy.
When you have something like a short rib and you're cooking it to 130, which is like a hundred, which is like 55, I think, or 50 55 Celsius, something like that, which is pretty rare, right? It takes a long time, uh like three days, to break down the connective tissue in that rib and have it get tender again, right? If you started out with a fairly tender short rib that didn't have a lot of connective tissue, maybe after eight hours it's gonna be okay. Usually the short ribs that I cook, if I'm gonna cook them down at that temperature, like 55, like by by 24 hours, it still has the texture of like a skirt steak, which I think is delicious. And I think Carlo here at Roberta sells what he calls a short rib skirt steak or something like that.
Uh he does something like that, like 24 hours at roughly 55, 57 degrees uh Celsius, um, which is 130 to 135, somewhere in that range Fahrenheit. And so you can do that, right? But the the so basically these long cooking times at different temperatures are uh because they're holding the meat at a certain level of doneness and then uh and then basically waiting for the texture to turn to what they want. If you cook it too long, it goes to mush. If you don't cook it long enough, it's just not tender enough, okay?
Uh and the higher the and there's a range of temperatures that'll work. So a short rib, you can make a short rib that's rare, like 150, 100 and uh sorry, 55 Celsius, like 130 or so. Most people prefer it a little bit higher, like 60 degrees Celsius or so, which is 140, right? And and the even that five degrees more radically chops the cooking time down from three days to two days, right? 63 degrees Celsius, which is a little high for me, uh, if you're gonna do low temperature work, now you're down to like a day, a little over a day.
So basically it's getting a feeling for how the cooking times and the temperatures interact. There's no right or wrong answer. There's a question of is it tender enough for you? Okay. Is this making any sense, Nastasha?
Yes. Okay. So the other question is uh uh I suggest, I being me, uh chicken breasts for 45 to 90 minutes at 63 degrees Celsius, which is uh I do, and the Sou V cookbook cookbook, which came with the unit, suggests two hours, the same sixty-three Celsius. Don't understand why there's a difference there. Um I just don't think it needs the full two hours.
It definitely doesn't need the full two hours from a pasteurization standpoint. Um and I think that chicken breast, once it's done, doesn't get any better. I think it starts losing its texture. Uh and so as soon as it's done, I like to pull it. I don't think it there it's not gonna break down on you right away, but when we ran a test where we cooked the chicken breast for a long time and then ate it by itself with no sauce, with nothing added, no searing, anything.
Just what does the meat taste like? The meat didn't taste as good the longer we cooked it on chicken breast. Uh but you know, if you're gonna sauce it up or if you're gonna serve it cold or any one of these things, I think it might not make as much of a difference, right? Um, so that's that's that. Uh he has a second question, so we're gonna these are these are great actual questions.
So by the way, at the end he said uh uh he would appreciate a quick answer on these uh if possible. He doesn't think these questions are interesting enough for the show, uh, which I disagree. I think these are things people really want to know about low temperature and sous vide cooking. And he says, besides, this is a good one. I'm a year behind in listening, so it might take a while to find the answer to my question.
Well, listen up, because uh, you know, the odds that I'll write the answer are roughly what? Zero, right? Basically zero. Um second question is vacuuming liquids. Uh the vac where do you find a vacuum uh machine that lets you add liquids?
The one that came with the machine and the one I have at home don't work with liquids. You're right. I wouldn't even use a vacuum machine, frankly. Uh I would bag everything in ziplocks. Uh I find that the tech the temp you know the texture is sometimes better.
It's easier because you don't need to chill the items before you put them in. Most people, when they're vacuuming liquids in those bags, they have to freeze the liquids before they put them in the bags, which is a huge pain in the butt. And just I I never use it. I had a vacuum machine at home. I have an impulse sealer now, which I use to uh seal things like you know, you know, potato chip bags and stuff like that.
But I don't do uh I don't use vacuum at home. At home I use almost exclusively Ziploc. Now you won't be able to do vacuum um infusion techniques with that, but you can't really do that with one of those home units anyway. So I would just learn to seal in Ziploc. It's a lot faster, and there's instructions for it on my uh on the blog.
And he says he downloaded the Sous vide, such as it is. Don't get me started. I know I need to write more of it. Uh but are there any cookbooks on Sue V you would recommend for the home cook? No, not really, right?
There's there's a Keller Sous vide cookbook, but if you don't have a vacuum machine, I mean you I would get it. The pictures are pretty, but it doesn't explain a lot of the how and the why. Juan Roka's book, uh you know, Sous vide cuisine is great, but it's 158 dollars and it's all restaurant recipes. I haven't read the recent installation of Doug uh Doug Baldwin's uh sous vide. Um I haven't uh obviously Victor Stanford has a book that I do not buy that book.
I think his temperatures are all out of whack. And then if you have 500 bucks, buy the monitor's cuisine cookbook because that's gonna have a lot of good stuff in it. But that's you know, 500 bucks, right? But they might win it next week. Nastashi, will you not please do not tell people that they're gonna win a copy of that book next week because then people are gonna say they said I'll be like, no, Nastasha said that you might win a copy of the book.
You're not gonna win a copy of the book next week, but you're gonna have a very rare opportunity to call in and personally ask Nathan Dirable the question. What? And get an apron. And get an apron. Alright, listen, uh, we're gonna do another break.
Call in all your questions. Two 718497-2128 7184972128 cooking issues. Following is a public service announcement from Heritage Radio Network. Tune in to the Speakeasy every Wednesday at three PM, where host Damon Volti will discuss cocktails, spirits, wine, beer, tea, coffee, and all things in the liquid universe. With guests ranging from bartenders and brewers, alchemists and ambassadors, roasters and regulars, and every expert and enthusiast in between.
Learn from some of the world's leading experts in mixology, bar history, distillation, and brewing about how we enjoy imbibing today. Again, that's every Wednesday at 3 p.m. on the Heritage Radio Network. Welcome back to Cookie Issues. Damon Bolti, one of our tall, thin bartending friends with a tall, thin, identical twin.
Yeah. You think he ever has his identical twin go into the bar instead of him? No, they look pretty different. Really? Mm-hmm.
I've seen mainly the name and I haven't really seen the uh identical twins so much. I have. He makes delicious drinks, though. We've never had his drinks at the at the bar. Have you?
He's out here, isn't he? Yeah, I think so, yeah, but we've never been. We've only had his drinks at events. I like how Nastasi says out here for anything in in Brooklyn. Yeah, well, you know, she's uh she's a Manhattan chauvinist.
You know what? I want some please, can we get some angry hipsters calling in here and shouting Nastasha down? That's what we need. We need a little bit of what I am back here. Anyway, yeah, Nastasha, Nastasha and Hipsters, like, you know, don't get along so well.
You know, she's like the the anti-hipster machine, which is weird because she spends most of her time out here and spends most of her time with hipsters. No, I don't. That is not Oh, Jack. I could say one horrible thing is right now. Uh wait, so all of a sudden that's a horror.
You literally insult, like literally, like I could go into the restaurant, which is I can look at it from here. And if I were to say this lady hates hipster, she would get a beatdown. Because there's enough women hipsters in there that can hit her, they'll give her a beatdown. Fair point. Yeah.
Alright. Uh got oh, got a an email uh questioning during the show from Paul Peterson. And by the way, we won't bite. You can call live unless you're. Well, he said it didn't work when he called.
Oh, is it work? No, it did not work. Oh, calling didn't work? Yeah. Am I reading the number wrong?
7184972128. Am I reading it wrong? Anyway. Instead of uh, instead of using ink with my tattoo gun, he says, perhaps I could use a leaf off the tree and drive little particles of leaf into the fruit. That's a genius idea.
I like that a lot because you're always gonna have a leaf when you're picking fruit. Right? Right? I'm gonna give that a try. I don't have any leaves.
But I'll just rip a leaf off a tree outside, and I'll see whether I can shoot it into something like a lemon or I'll try to get some waxy leaves too, some thicker waxy leaves to see what's going on. That's a very good idea, because you always have a leaf. Oh, I know No, he's saying tattoo the damn leaf and keep it with the fruit. He's saying through a leaf into the skin. Yeah, but also if we keep if we steal some of the fruit with it.
Just imagine. See, this I love Nastasha. She's like, you always gotta keep someone around who thinks nothing's ever gonna work. Here's the weird thing about Nastasha, right? Seven modernists because she she yeah, like anything that somebody else says, she's like, oh, that's gonna be terrible.
It's not gonna work, it's gonna suck. And yet if she gets it in her head that she wants it, she believe it happened no matter what. Right? No, but imagine the leaf and the keeping it today. Imagine the leaf.
Oh my god, it's gonna come off. Right? Crazy. Crazy. Anyway.
So uh Chris writes in about uh MSG. Hi, Dave and Nastasha. Apparently, Nastasia uh hates the way I pronounce it. Even though we've been working together for you can't say it like that. It's too weird.
Yeah, okay. So now she wants me to say it the mispronounced way. Anyway, uh I thought I was good as long as I didn't say Natasha. Yeah, yeah, basically. All right, okay.
Uh I was hoping you could help with a question. I have a recent customer uh uh I've had a recent customer questions about products we use that contain MSG. Monosodium glutamate. Taking a step further, I had a customer tell me that hydrolyzed protein and MSG are the same thing, and that if you have a sensitivity to one, then you have a sensitivity to both. Most of our bases have one or the other, as well as a few other products that we frequently use.
Could you help me sort this out? Thanks, Chris. Alright, I'm gonna go out on a limb here and probably get myself in trouble. But I would say, since you don't have a sensitivity to one, you don't have a sensitivity to the other. Boom!
Boom! Alright, here's the thing. Like there's all sorts of products out there that have look, MSG, okay. Let's just get this straight. I'm gonna get some angry callers in, and you know, eventually, or someone's gonna write it, or someone's gonna say that Dave, he's a jerk.
Listen, listen, here's the thing. Glutamic acid is a an amino acid. You can't get around it, right? Okay. Now, the the sodium salt of that is monosodium glutamate, right?
Okay. Uh it's also a neurotransmitter. You need it. Without glutamic acid, you die. You don't you don't live without it.
You need it, right? Uh you need to have it in your body, that is. But here's the other funny thing, right? Um you make a crap load of it. You know what I mean?
Like it you make more of it and then convert it in your head and extreme excrete it, then you're then you're gonna eat. Right? Furthermore, if you can take uh basically we sense MSG is uh free amino acids, right? And a couple other things break down, or will give you that sense of umami savoriness that we taste. We have a taste receptor for, right?
Plenty of things have free amino acids in them, like tomatoes, like mushrooms, like parmesan cheese, like uh fish, right? Which is why sushi tastes good, because they have a lot of free amino acids in them. Uh, like uh kelp, dashi, all these things, even if you add no MSG, external MSG to them, right, they contain free amino acids. So hydrolyzed vegetable protein is where they break down a natural protein into amino acids, some of which are glutamic acid, right, and therefore have the same effect as MSG. So, yes, they are the same.
However, they are equally non-reactive, right? If you do an extensive research of the uh history of studies on MSG sensitivity, what you will find is that um that all of the studies that show that there's a problem are fundamentally flawed. Nastasha, by the way, so don't get insulted. Nastasha thinks that she's sensitive to MSG. I black out.
She blacks out. What the hell does that even mean? I black out. When did you black out? Twice, like eight years ago.
When you had what? Chinese food. Oh, so it's Chinese food. So it's only MSG and Chinese food that causes this uh reaction, not all the other things that contain glutamic acid. Right.
Yeah, that's crazy. Yeah, that's nuts. You see what I'm saying? Listen, people, listen to what just happened. Nastasha eats things all the time that have MSG in them.
She ate Chinese food, assumed it was MSG, and blacked out because of all the liquor she was drinking. No, I know, I know. Oh my god! I swear I wasn't drinking anything. My heart started beating slow, and I went into a spiral, and I went into white light.
White light? What is this? This is not a known. Here's a study that works, right? Take a gelatin capsule, right, pack it with MSG, randomize it with a bunch of other uh gelatin capsules that contain sugar, right?
With an equal amount of sodium mixed in so that the sodium levels are the same, randomly distributed into people and see whether anyone has a reaction. You know what? They don't. All the studies that appear to to uh show reactions, use things like a strongly, I'm making quote marks with my fingers, strongly flavored citrus beverage to try and cover up the flavor of MSG, which is detectable, right? They also uh use incredibly high levels of MSG, which uh cause you to be able to taste it better.
The studies that show there are problems, physical problems with MSG, are where things like neonatal rats are dosed with the equivalent of you eating like like uh a half a kilo of straight MSG, which is nothing close to what you're gonna use. Okay, like there are no studies. They tried to gork out monkey brains like neonatal like you know, newborn monkeys. They tried to zap their brains with MSG and were unable to. It's pathetic.
I that I don't applaud those studies, but I'm just saying this is a study that was run. Um, like this is a classic thing. Nastasha has Chinese food. Nastasha has heard about this thing, which was basically posited as a joke in the literature a long time ago, this thing called Chinese restaurant syndrome, and then snowballed into this nightmare. There's a lot of different interesting theories about why people think this is an actual phenomenon.
One being that you have something unfamiliar or something you don't like and that you have a reaction to it, and then your brain thinks you hone in on it. There's another theory that perhaps it's uh hypernutrient, a lot of sodium, right? Because you these diets are also high in um in salt. For instance, uh when I eat large quantities of cheese and have red wine and don't drink water and eat a lot of bread and then eat oil based stuff, which I do on a regular basis because I like having cheese for dinner, I get a horrible headache. Am I allergic to cheese?
No, I'm freaking dehydrated. Maybe I was dehydrated. Yeah, maybe you were dehydrated. I've had two friends in college black out from Chinese food and blame it on MSG. Really?
Yeah, and what were they smoking along with the. Oh my god! This is my point. It's like, why is it always Chinese food? It's in everything.
You never like here's what doesn't happen. I I I had a slim gym and I passed out. Slim gym is like 100% MSG. You know what I mean? It's like, get get look, people need to get their stories straight.
Here's here's a little something. If you didn't learn this in logic school, logic school, which I did because I was a philosophy major, post hoc ergo propter hoc. Common fallacy, right? After this, therefore because of this. Just because you had a reaction to Chinese food does not mean that MSG was the causality of it.
Did you go back and ask those guys how much MSG they used? Do you even know they used MSG? No. Okay. That's absurd as well.
It's like you had a re you had a reaction. Everyone needs to break this post hoc ergo propter hoc thing, right? It's not just because something happened after something doesn't mean you've established a causal relationship. The actual studies that have been done show that there is no problem. But theoretically, if you were allergic to MSG, meaning if you had no neurotransmitters and you were already therefore dead, so you couldn't have any MSG in your system, then yes, you also could not have hydrolyzed vegetable protein.
Is that is that a reasonable answer? Yeah. Okay. Had a question in from Pete on a similar thing. What's the deal with nitrates and nitrites?
Uh there are two what's the deals, right? One possible what's the deal is what's the deal, i.e., is there a problem with them? I think of the difference. Yeah? Here's what's hilarious about I'm gonna do it anyway.
So uh turns out that uh like a lot of natural curing salts have nitrates and nitrites in them, which is why they're so good for curing things. Turns out if you don't add them to quick-cured products like bacon, and then you backpack them and put them in the store, you have a good chance that you're gonna give someone botulism because they prevent botulism growth, right? So uh to me they're a they're a good thing. Well, here's what's most hilarious to me. Whole Foods, sponsor of this show, not this mean this radio station, and also by the way, a place I shop on a regular basis, pisses me off for this reason.
They will sell something called uncured bacon, where what they do is they buy things like celery, which naturally accumulate nitrites in them, uh, and nitrates and nitrites in them, and then reduce it down to like, you know, so that like eight, like eight acres of celery fit into like you know, like a plastic cup, then take the flavor out of it and use that to cure instead, and say they haven't added any nitrates, they've just added natural celery. To me, this is like the worst form of bull crappery that you can pull on someone because you're giving them the same exact product with the same exact functionality with a with a fake pseudo-healthy label on it, and nothing pisses me off more than that sort of mendacious crap that people pull on the back of labels. Okay. Now, back to the difference between nitrate and nitrite. When you use nitrates, which is what they used to use, nowadays nitrates are only used on long-cured products like hams.
When uh when you apply nitrates to meat, nitrates are broken down to nitrites, right? Which are then broken down further and then eventually cause the cured color and and and exert their uh antimicrobial properties. Okay. If you are going to do a short-term product, like a bacon, you're gonna, or you're pumping or you're using a brine, you're gonna want to use nitrite with an eye, right? Almost all things that you make, you should use nitrite nowadays, right?
If you're doing a long-cured ham, then you're gonna want to use nitrite. But most of the time you want to use nitrite. And you and the easiest way to do it is to buy a product called Morton's Tender Quick Salt, which has it mixed in, so you don't need to worry about it. You don't need to worry about getting your salt and your uh and having you know pink salt lying around in case your kids, because you really shouldn't eat, you shouldn't eat it by the bushel. But it's it's something that's been used in uh in cooking since time immemorial, even before it was uh isolated on its own and used because there was those impurities in natural salts.
Okay, so let's end on a non-diatribe note, shall we? Yeah. Nastash is like, yeah. Nastash doesn't like to get caught. See, I wish like you should never tell me stuff like that MSG stuff.
If you know I'm gonna go off on it. I mean, you I can't help it. It's like in my blood. It's like I s it's like I'm a shark and I smell blood. You know what I mean?
It's like it's like I can't help it. Yeah, it's in my nature. Yeah, don't blame me out there. Don't I don't want anyone writing in and saying I'm mean or anything like this because you because she saves what the vicious stuff she does to me for off-air. Like I'm the same all the time.
No, you're not. Should I get you guys separate tables for the floor? From now on, we need a glass wall in between us on the thing. Anyway, Brian writes in with a friendly question. Hello, hello, Nastasha.
These are all friendly questions, by the way. Hello, Nastasha and Dave. Can you tell me how I can make my own chewing gum? And is there any way to make bubblegum? Hey, good question.
I don't know whether he read the post before he sent that in. I don't think so. I got it before the post. Well, chewing gum, the original chewing gum comes from the sap of the uh, well, the the latex from the sapodilla tree, and sapadilla is one of the fruits that we had at the fruit and spice park. I wrote about it in the in the most recent blog blog post.
You can go on and look at it. And you can still buy it. And that that latex is when it's processed, it's called Chicle. Right? And uh, and uh it's very easy to to use.
Um Chiclay, by the way, I'll give you the short story because uh one of the guys at the Fruit and Spice Park gave us a story. It's a crazy story. I don't know if I believe it, but it's repeated a couple times. And if you really care care about chicle and gum bases, you can read Jennifer Matthews' book, The Chewing Gum Chicle, The Chewing Gum of America from Ancient Maya to William Wrigley. And the story is this uh Santa Anna, the Mexican general who handed us our behinds at uh at the Alamo and wiped out the Alamo and David Bowie and all those guys.
David Bowie. That David Bowie, sorry. Bo what's his name? Bowie the Bowie knife guy. I don't know.
Now, David Bowie's almost old enough to have gotten wiped out. Anyway, so wipes out David Bowie. Uh what's his name? Bowie, the Bowie Knife Guy. Anyway, and like a buck Davy Crockett.
Didn't he get wiped out there? I don't know. A bunch of people got wiped out at the Alamo. If you really want to hear the story, go read, go listen to uh Johnny uh Horton's uh Remember the Alamo song. And um I'm gonna get a lot of people mad that I don't know the Alamo story.
Anyway, so like he later goes back to Mexico, loses the war, uh, gets his behind handed to him. Uh, you know, we go murder a bunch of uh of like you know, basically teenagers at a place called Triple Topek Heights, win the war. We get a whole bunch of uh territory ceded from Mexico. Santa Anna is trying to make some money now because he's no longer the president, XYZ. Uh that was late, this is later.
Ends up in stat exiled in Staten Island with a pile of chicle. They're trying to turn Chiclay, which is a stuff, this latex, into vulcanized rubber, and they can't do it. So he sells it to a guy named uh Thomas Adams, who's like, hey, listen, kids like to chew on things. And so instead of trying to make vulcanized rubber out of it, he makes chiclets, which are the first kind of uh chiclay-based common chewing gum available in the United States. Believe it or not, there it is, right?
And so chiclay was the main gum that people use for gum base for years and years, and they got hit with a kind of like triple whammy. One, uh, they started running out of chic lay. During World War II, Wrigley was sending chiclay to uh you know, gum to uh all the soldiers to try and get him hooked on it while they were abroad, right? Which was successful. So they were really running out.
Uh it was harder to get because it was wartime, and they started synthesizing uh synthetic ones. Most chewing gum now is synthetic uh made, it's no longer a natural thing from the tree. Uh so that was a you know a big whammy, and then after the war, uh a bunch of uh you know, people in like you know, Guatemala and Mexico were like, hey, how's come we're so oppressed? What the hell's going on here? And they started to have some uh reforms uh down there which further put a dent in uh us basically you know holding the holding the chicleros and the other peasants there down under our thumbs, and so they basically moved away from using chick-lay entirely.
Uh you might remember that era from when United Fruit convinced the CIA to overthrow a bunch of governments down there so that we could have cheap bananas. Uh one of the one of the least cool sections of our history. Anyway, um, so you can get uh chicle still, you can buy it. I think Terra Spice sells gum base, but I think it's chicle, that's what they told me. I put that in our blog.
But I know you can buy guaranteed chicle base from uh glee gum. The people who make glee gum, they'll sell you a pound. Fit a pound is fifteen dollars. Uh and you you buy it, uh you can't make really bubble gum with it. Bubble gum is always a synthetic base, I think, because it's it has a different composition.
The cheek late one is not gonna blow bubbles that well. So what you do is uh and everyone has the same recipe, so I'll just give it to you. Like I searched like every website. This is the one we used, and everyone uses the same thing. One third cup gum base, half cup powdered sugar, two tablespoons corn syrup, the regular stuff, doesn't have not high fructose, it's just do it, it's there as a plasticizer, right?
One teaspoon glycerin, you can get that, I think at uh pharmacies. We have it for pastry supply stuff. Then acid of your choice. Everyone uses citric acid because they're lazy. We use many kinds of acid, malic, tartaric, but you want a powdered acid.
Uh, flavoring of your choice, uh, and then and then some extra powdered sugar. And what you do is you microwave it, uh, you microwave the gum base, a little bit of the sugar, uh the corn syrup and the glycerin and the acid if you want, and you stir it. It's sticky as all heck, it forms a little little, you can put it in a core container and microwave it. You stir it up, and then you start stirring in powdered sugar until it forms a ball, and then you can just use excess powdered sugar like it's flour, like you're kneading it. And then you just knead in flavor until you get a flavor you like, right?
And it takes a lot more than you think. And you can knead in extra acid, and you can even sprinkle with extra acid at the end. When you're uh so what flavors have we done? Oil-based flavors tend to work best and they tend to last longest. Uh, we've used uh all kinds of weird oils from Mandy Aftel.
We've used natural things like port wine, uh that we did port wine reduction gum that was good, but those water-based flavors tend to fade very, very quickly. Uh so you make sure to make sure you add extra acid. Um, you can add a pinch of salt. When you're done, you can uh dust it with powdered sugar, roll it out with a rolling pin like it's uh like it's a dough. Um you can roll it between acetate sheets and then roll it out and keep it flat.
You can roll it into balls and cut it. You can nuke the sheets slightly and then form them into raviolis and they'll stick to each other after they've been nuked, and you could dust it with powdered sugar again. Uh so you could put like you can make little gum raviolis, they were good, right? We made those, but you have to use like uh like an oil, like a solid on the inside or something that's like frozen oil-based, not water-based. Okay, listen.
You were gonna be tempted, Brian, to use your pasta machine to roll out the gum. Nastacia's shaking her head, no. Awful. Horrible, right? Yeah.
Yeah. And if you must, if you are compelled to try to use a pasta machine to roll out your gum, use somebody else's. We did. Oh delicious. Oh, that thing was never the same, right?
Oh my god. Anyway, so uh it's fun, it's easy, it's fifteen dollars a pound. Cooking issues. There is a Toronto, California? We stand corrected.
Jamming good with weather and gilly and the spiders from moss. They've played in left hand, but made it too far. It came the special math. This is behind the scenes food news with Katie Kiefer. This is behind the scenes boo-to-s with Katie Keefer.
There's a lot of posturing and talking around raw milk these days and how great it is. But if you really want to get a full-on investigation into the pros and cons, the risks and benefits of raw milk consumption, here's a nifty website.com. It has a laundry list of FAQs, along with information from studies and reports from American and European science communities. If you flirt with raw milk consumption, this is definitely worth taking a look at.com to learn more and to reserve your goat this coming October. Yeah.
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