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Call in all of your questions today too. That's 718-497-2128 because today is a very special day. We have as our call-in guest, Nathan Mirvold, the brain behind the uh modernist cuisine megabook extravaganza that came out uh I forget whether it's the beginning of this year or the end of the end of last year. Nathan, you there? I'm here.
Oh, great. Very good to have you on. So listen, in case there's like a person out there who's been uh living under a rock or something, uh this book basically Nathan was uh were you the head of like uh GUI design at uh at Microsoft? What was your dealy? I was Chief Technology Officer.
Chief Technology Officer. So, you know, like many of the good things from Microsoft came out of Nathan's brain, fair to say, or your team anyway, right? Yep. Okay. Uh the idea.
So then uh decided that uh didn't necessarily want to be uh in Microsoft anymore, although apparently you're still buddies with that whole crew, right? Starting Well, uh Bill Gates is a great friend of mine, and I I still work with him on a variety of things. Right, like I know I've been out of the uh Microsoft now for 11 years, so it's pretty much their company now, not mine. Yeah, although you know, let's be honest, all their good stuff came out before 11 years ago. Boom!
Boom! Just kidding. Anyway, so uh so uh a number of years ago, or many years ago as far as I know, uh Nathan started traveling um the world, going to the finest restaurants in the world. Uh was also an avid cook, uh, and then amassed what uh by all accounts, although I've never actually been to the one at your house, is possibly the greatest kitchen uh in the world. Uh then after a while, realized there was no real um kind of large-scale encyclopedic book about uh how to cook using all kinds of new techniques and technologies, and so decided uh to write a book on the subject, enlisted some of the greatest minds uh in this field uh to help, and then three or four years later came out with uh the book the books that we all know as the modernist cuisine uh book series.
This uh accurate or no. Yeah, that's you got it, Dave. Yeah. All right, uh wait, Jack. Do we have a call?
All right, we already have a call, Nathan, so I'm gonna I'm gonna go right to it. Caller you're on the air. Hi, Dave. How are you? Doing well.
Uh my name's Alvin. Actually, I uh I met Nathan uh at the beginning of the month uh uh at dinner at the lab. How are you, Nathan? Great. How you doing?
Good, good. I had a question for you guys. Um I'm getting ready to buy a liquid nitrogen dwarf, and I uh I read the I read the primer on cooking issues. Um I live in an apartment, so I don't know that the uh 160 Super Ninja Doire is gonna work for me. A lot of chefs have been telling me to get a 10-liter Jar, but I feel like maybe 2030 is uh is a better size.
You guys have any input on that? What city do you live in? And what city do you live in and what floor do you live on? Uh third floor. What city?
Houston. Uh I I'll gonna defer to Nathan on this. I'd go small, I wouldn't be comfortable having large amounts of uh nitrogen going up and down stairs. Uh what do you think, Nathan? You know, as long as you don't spill it, it's okay.
You have to make sure you have it in a very well ventilated room because if it fell over, uh you want to make sure that the nitrogen doesn't take too much oxygen displace too much oxygen from the room. Um, and by the way, it's pronounced doer. Um James Dewar was the guy who invented it. Uh the same Scottish name as doer whiskey, although perhaps not the same family. Um interesting.
So uh you know, the either the the 10 or the 20 liter would be fine. The larger the doer is, the longer the nitrogen is going to keep. Um because the heat loss is about the same, but the volume is different. So if you have a uh 20-liter uh doer, you're gonna wind up uh having the the nitrogen last a lot longer than a 10-liter. And the and the reason I ask you is carrying it up and down the stairs is gonna be a pain.
Yeah, and and the reason I asked you what city you're in is if you're in New York, it's a pain to go get because you have to go to one of the welding shops in the city. It's not advisable to keep it in the passenger area of a car. If you live out in Houston and you have a car, or better yet, even a truck that you can drive out to the place and pick up refills, it's a lot less of a hassle. Wouldn't you agree, Nathan? Yes, I would.
Uh if you drive with liquid nitrogen in the the car, which I I certainly have been known to do, just have all the windows rolled down. Okay. Yeah, I mean the the reason for this is lit the liquid nitrogen uh when it boils it uh into just nitrogen gas, it creates a lot of it. It goes up by a factor of 500, something like that. So uh you can easily displace all of the volume of the air in your car, and then you pass out.
And you could even die. And people have died from spilling a liquid nitrogen dewer in a small enclosed space. And a car is by definition a small enclosed space, and an accident could do it. Uh even if I had the liquid nitrogen in the trunk, I still can't have the windows rolled down. Okay.
Um although pickup truck is is uh obviously an even better way to go. Yeah, that's uh ideal, but just bungee it down properly so it doesn't rattle about. Got it. Yep, Dave. Um I I noticed when I was looking online at the dwarfs, like there's some some 10 liter Dwarfs that say that they're like 30 pounds empty, and then there was like a 30 liter one that said it was 30 pounds full.
Is there I imagine the heavier one would would be better insulated? Is that correct? I can't imagine a 30-liter doer that's 30 pounds full. I think that's probably an error. Okay.
Yeah. Um in general, larger, as Nathan said, the lar the larger they are, the better they are for storage. I'd be wary of buying used uh used doers um because uh a lot of times their insulation can be can be bad. Um, you know, but if you're willing to take the risk and they're good, then they're good. You know, it's just a matter of can you afford to take the risk on a on a used doer, you're rolling the dice.
Uh a doer is basically a vacuum bottle, it's a like a thermos bottle. And uh they can, if they're if you drop them, for example, you can crack the inside just enough for there to be a vacuum leak, and so uh you wind up having no uh uh no insulation value. Yeah, and you end up finding out overnight when you have no nitrogen when you need it the next day at a demo. Uh sounds like that's happened to you, Dave. Oh, yeah.
Well, yeah, I mean, that's uh another nightmare about renting small format doers from uh welding shops. They give you the crappiest one they have, and it's usually been beaten about. If you're gonna do it on a regular basis, I recommend buying a uh a new one and being nice to it. Uh but I here we have Nathan, I hear we have another caller on the air. Thank you so much for your question, by the way.
Caller, you're on the air. Hi, Dave, hi Nascent. This is Michael Natkin from Seattle. Hey. Hi.
So I was uh reading the Fat Duck cookbook lately, and asked the Blumenthal. He talks about using star anise with onions to increase meaty flavors. And he mentions that it is a combination of anasaldehyde and anicidine from the anus, which combines with sulfur and produces some sort of a sulfur heterocyclic. I've tried it, it definitely works. It's beautiful.
But I'm sort of curious about the mechanism and whether there are other ways to apply it. So I have no knowledge of this. Nathan? Well I'm gonna probably have to pass too. You know, the flavor chemistry is extremely complicated.
And uh whereas you can find things like what you're describing there where some of the sulfurous compounds from from onions will combine with another flavor to make something meaty, i it's hard to generalize. If you took a different uh spice than star anise, it probably will not work because it won't have the uh same uh flavor compounds. Right. And I know Heston's working with or worked with the guys at Ferminich and uh a number of other places, and they've you know have some wacky stuff. A lot of the chemical ba a lot of the chemical arguments for what's going on in cooking in terms of the flavor chemistry, I find them extremely interesting to read, but not necessarily uh as valuable when when you're cooking.
Uh McGee is working on a on a large format book on this on this kind of subject right now. Uh I mean it's extremely interesting. That particular one, I I even though I have the cookbook ahead, I I guess it's obvious I haven't read all the way through it. But I'm gonna I'll investigate that one further and maybe get on the horn with McGee about it because I think he's investigated that. Uh any more thoughts on that one, Nathan?
Because I hear we have another caller on the air. Well, we've got uh you know, as you say, flavor chemistry is extremely complicated, and you can get uh some very specific things that will occur with a very specific flavor uh that you just don't get uh otherwise. Um and uh as an example, uh uh many wines have a vanilla flavor in them that comes from oak because in fact uh oak has got compounds very similar to vanilla and vanilla. Uh now that's idiosyncratic to oak. It doesn't mean all wood does, or it doesn't mean that you can generalize that to other flavors, unfortunately.
Yeah, I made actually a vanilla-like ice cream out of the uh oak from Scotch after roto vaping. It's pretty good. How cool? It's it's good. It tastes really you should I mean I know you have like uh it's easy for you to do uh, you know, Nathan.
Obviously, what I do uh combine the oak with the cream cold so that I can neutralize some of the tannins, but uh and then either heat or don't do it San Mason style with uncooked eggs if you're not worried about the pasteurization. But listen, I promise to look into this Anis onion thing. I'm having Nastasha write down the question now and I promise to look into it more, okay? Cool. You know, we make a thing, Dave, where we uh roto vap whiskey uh to take the alcohol out, which sounds like about the stupidest thing you could possibly do.
Take perfectly good Scotch whiskey and remove the alcohol. But my God, the flavors that are present that are masked by the alcohol because the alcohol is so raw on your tongue and palate that you don't taste the subtlety, it's just amazing. Yeah, I mean I like both uh you know, well, Nathan and I are both big roto vap fans. I like I like both sides of the of this still on this one, but n next time you do it, just make some uh take it down a little further, you know what I mean, so you don't have as much mass, and I I don't uh actually add any uh milk to it. I just used uh straight cream because you're adding so much liquid in the form of oak, but it's a to d to damn good ice cream.
Yeah, it sounds great. All right, uh Jack, is it true we have another caller? Caller, you are on the air. Okay. You're hello, Dave.
Hello. This is Joe. I'm calling from South Carolina. Howdy. In the uh introduction to Modernist Cuisine, uh, I guess Nathan says that he uh really can't address bread for fear that the book will become too large.
I'm curious where bread fits in modernist cuisine from the broader perspective. I'm also curious as to is there going to be a sequel to modernist cuisine, or did you close it down in the kitchen and send everybody home? But Nathan, as long as it's as long as you're gonna answer this, Nathan, I have a very similar question online, so I'll just add those to it, and you can take care of all these at once. This is from Ian Benz, uh, and he's basically saying, would you have done anything differently if you were gonna start over? And uh what's your next project?
Any chance for a pastry book? And someone asked the same thing about cocktails, so you might as well hit all of those, hit all of those at once. Okay. So um it when people ask me what's next, I always say what we're what we're currently doing is still going on with this book. I mean, I'm right in the middle of an interview or uh uh radio show here.
Um we did a lunch for people uh yesterday. We did a dinner last week. So uh the team is all still working um uh uh uh very hard, primarily promoting the existing book. Um and we're doing a l some experimentation that we could use in the future for a future book, but mostly we're working on the existing book. I think that's gonna be true through the first of the year.
So in January, we need to make a decision as to what we do next. Um we didn't cover pastry baking and dessert. It's a world unto itself. We certainly are thinking about doing that as the next book. Um we might instead, however, do a next smaller book before we do that one, because pastry baking dessert would be another two or three year slog for sure.
In terms of the status of uh and cocktails are another thing that people have suggested uh i as something to do plus uh th there's a million different threads we could pick up and so we're gonna look at all of them uh and right now we really have not made a decision uh in terms of the status of bread in modernist cuisine um I I'd say pretty much not uh in the sense that modernist restaurants uh only rarely have a bread service or anything like bread or have done something really modernist with bread. I can only think of a couple of examples. Uh Faron Adria has a dish he calls the air baguette which looks like a perfectly little to sell um uh miniature baguette but in fact is completely hollow inside uh and so that's kind of a cool uh dish um Jose Andres uh serves that at Bazaar where they uh uh make what they call a Philly cheesesteak out of it by putting a very very thin slice of beef on top and they inject um a cheese foam inside of it uh it's really good. But other than that dish it's hard for me to think of any other things where a modernist chef has tried to reinvent bread. D Dave, can you think of any?
Uh not really. I mean it's uh bread is used as a component by many many chefs but they haven't actually reinvented the the bread itself. It's just uh you know you'll get you know different gastronomic article you should have argued that modernism came at different times so it came earlier to paintings than architecture. Is modernism just not reached bread yet well, I think that's that's certainly a possibility. Um you know, the pastry and baking uh have their own sets of traditions, their own things that they follow.
Um aspects of pastry and baking already follow the same approach that modernist uh chefs take. So modern chefs are always weighing things out exactly, and we always have uh a pantry full of little white powders, and so do pastry chefs. You know, you don't add baking soda by taste or by guess and by gosh, you you have to weigh it out if you want a consistent result. Uh so uh but I don't fe I I I've not seen anything that I really could call modernist uh baking or bread. Modernist pastry, yes, pastry chefs uh have been at the forefront of modernist uh cuisine.
Uh at many uh modernist restaurants, the pastry chef is actually out in front of uh uh of the savory guys. Uh at uh many other restaurants that are are still traditional or nouvelle in character, it's the pastry chef that's dragging the rest of the kitchen into the 20th century or 21st century. Sort of like Johnny Azzini at Jean Georges or any one of those Michael Assembly. Or Michael Ascanis of um uh den. Are two great examples.
Yeah. Uh well, let me further on these questions, because we have uh this is again from Ian Benz writing in on similar questions. Knowing what you know now about the whole process of realizing the book, would you have done anything differently if you were to start it over? Well, you know, we obviously we learned lots of things while doing the book. And so some of those things you'd like to have learned a little bit sooner uh, of course.
But really, there wasn't uh I I was pretty happy with the whole process. There's very little I would do differently. Um I originally thought I was gonna write a big book, and I thought big meant 600 pages, and then 800, and then a thousand. And you know, if we'd owned up up front and knew it was gonna be 2400 from the start, maybe I wouldn't have started the thing. It would have seemed too daunting.
Right. Um but I I don't really have a lot of regrets on it, no. Well, well, as as he also said, he hopes you're proud of the accomplishment because he finds it really incredible, as as do I think all of us. Um but he he makes a point here, uh, Ian, when he's asking the questions, he says he's sure you could not be completely satisfied, especially in this age where every week a new technique or discovery seems to come to light that changes one idea of what can be done. But I think it's actually kind of the opposite, because I mean the the the most challenging thing it had to have been for this book is because new things are happening, is to make a statement that's gonna survive the test of time and yet still deal with newness.
And I think that's kind of the whole that's the whole thing behind the book. That's the whole kind of interesting thing about it, right? Yes. And uh, you know, it was a challenge as we were finishing the book up to send to the printer, you know, every day I'd think of one other thing we hadn't included, and I'd I'd call Max up and say, Oh my god, we don't have a recipe for skier. Yeah.
We have a section in the book that covers various fresh cheeses and fermented uh milk products. So we had yogurt, we didn't have skier by God, and skier is sort of halfway between farmers' cheese and yogurt. It's got rennet in it like farmers' cheese is, but also is fermented like yogurt. Now, could we have shipped the book without Skear? Yes.
But we did sneak it in in the 11th hour. Uh and of course, since the we finally shipped the book off, more things like that have piled up. Right. I mean, well, the lucky thing is food is such a huge subject, you know, that you couldn't ever cover all of it. Right.
And uh you know, the the other day I was uh someplace and I s uh I had some pasole and I hit myself in the foreign my God, we never covered hominy. At all? And and the whole process of using lime to treat corn, which is intrinsic to not only hominy, but to making uh uh the masaharina for making tortillas, like god damn it, how did I forget hominy? But you know, I think hopefully the world will forgive me for forgetting hominy. Well, I say there's plenty there's plenty of other stuff, and you know, honestly, the the thing is for the for the rest of us that you know, not writing you know books like this, but do write in this field, it's kind of lucky that it's such a huge subject that you know you guys can't tackle all of it, or what would we do for a living?
Well, you you know, Dave, while we were working on the book, we w we we followed your blog very carefully to make sure that we we had covered all the things you had put out there. Not not always in as much detail because we decided not to cover cocktails, for example, which is a big part of your blog and and your cuisine. But uh we tried to stay on top of new developments, but we knew for a fact new stuff would happen the minute we were done. And that's okay, because what we ha wanted to do was create enough of a foundation and a base that uh we communicate it to everyone, and if you waited for it to be complete, you'd never do it at all. Right, exactly.
Uh we have one more caller and then we're gonna take a break. Caller, you're on the air. Hey, this is Andrew from Minneapolis. Howdy. And I have a question for Nathan.
Um I'm just wondering what's one of the biggest things you and your team learned in making the book about food and cooking that really made you stand back and say, wow, like this is a crazy thing that's happening. Or maybe one of the things that you felt like you learned about food and that your research team learned, that you felt like you were the first ones learning this and you were the first ones kind of making this almost in a pioneering aspect of what you were uh fiddling with. Okay. Well, uh I'll quickly touch on a couple of those. I mean uh uh one which is very controversial with traditional chefs is that uh com fee is a fraud.
Um by confie I mean the traditional cooking technique where you cook meat in uh fat or oil at low temperature for a long period of time. Uh duck confie is of course the classic example. And while working on the meat chapter, I was trying to figure out how cooking the meat in oil or fat could possibly change the meat. And I decided it couldn't possibly. The molecules are too large for them to penetrate the meat.
But every traditional chef, every uh particularly French chef, believes that there's something unique that happens. So we did a bunch of blind taste tests where we took uh both both uh duck leg confid, we also uh did uh pork shoulder. And we tried it b steamed, sous-vide, um and uh and traditional methods, and in a blind taste test we couldn't tell the difference. Oh wow. And when I tell some traditional French chefs this, they get almost angry.
So one guy says, I did not agree. And I said, This isn't about agreeing. Tell me you've tried the blind taste test and you can taste the difference and I'll believe you. But if you haven't tried, um, and and that's sort of an interesting question of attitude there. If in fact you try the experiment and you can't tell the difference in a blind test, that tells you something very profound.
But a lot of folks think that there's an ideology of food that you should believe the stuff without testing it like that. So that's one example. We also learned uh what causes the stall in barbecue. This is when you cook a uh brisket or a big piece of meat uh the people have noticed for many years that the temperature will rise for a while then it will flatten out and stall and not increase for many hours before it increases again. Uh and there's tons of theories on the internet about why that occurs and we finally found out why and the tur the turns out the reason is that the meat is drying out and the temperature is held down by the fact that the evaporation takes a tremendous amount of energy.
The thing that's ironic about it is that some people think the cure for the stall is to slather more sauce onto their meat which of course only makes it wetter which only prevent keeps the stall going longer. Yeah. So there's a couple examples. Although combining those combining those two right I mean traditional confit is a good technique for producing that texture on a duck if you don't have access to vacuum bags or controlled atmosphere cooking. Yeah or a steam oven that's right what we found in those blind taste tests actually is that um what you uh what mattered was the temperature and the time so i if you cooked it at different temperatures, we could totally tell the difference.
Right. You'd have to decide which one you preferred, but there's clearly was a difference if you cooked the duck at say 60 C or 65 C or or 80 C. You could totally tell those. But we couldn't tell whether we steamed it in a combi oven or a CVAP, or we um or cooked it sous vide or or or traditional. And so you're right, Dave, that the original point of Confi was really a a sort of approach to sous vide where you could cook it at a low temperature for a long period of time and exclude air from it so that for storage.
And that's why there's a similarity. And with that, we will go to our first commercial break. Cruising and playing the radio. Riding along in my automobile. So I told her softly and sincere.
And she leaned and whispered in my ear. Cuddling more and driving slow. With no particular place to go. So we parked way out on the Kokomo. The night was young and the moon was cold.
So we both decided to take a stroll. Can you imagine the way I felt? I couldn't unfasten a safety bell. Run along in my caliboos. Still trying to get her belt to loose.
All the way home I held a grudge. For the safety belt that wouldn't burst. Cruising and playing the radio. With no particular place to go. Alright, welcome back to Cooking Issues.
First time we've had Chuck Berry. Uh calling your questions too for Nathan Mirvold. 27184972128. That's 718 497 2128. Next caller gets a modernist cuisine signed apron, signed by uh Nathan uh Chris and Max.
We got who's who's on that apron? Do you know Nathan? I think it's all three of us. Alright, nice. Nice.
Um, so let me follow up again. Uh you mentioned a little bit about cocktails, but uh Kevin Lou wrote in and said, he has a question for you. Cocktail science is a branch of modernist cuisine that you didn't touch upon. We've talked about that. Do you consider mixology cooking?
And how far do you think chefs and bartenders should be able to take their creations? And uh do you have any insights about cocktail science that you can share with us? So uh I'm not an expert on modernist cocktails. I certainly have had them, and many of them draw on the same kinds of science and principles, but I I wouldn't call myself an expert. Um uh Dave, you're much more into this than I am.
Um, yes, I do consider it cooking uh in in a variety of senses, but it's not always practiced that way. You know, that most cocktails are uh mixed by a bartender, most traditional cocktails, and uh they j generally don't have the manpower to do anything very elaborate. Uh they're also the server. Uh and so uh and you typically have a fairly small number of bartenders with a fairly large number of people. You you couldn't actually serve dinner if you had the same number of chefs as bartenders to customers.
The ratio wouldn't work. Right. And that's because most drinks, of course, simple. You splash some scotch and water into a glass. That isn't cooking.
But real modernist mixology that makes the complicated drinks, I I definitely think uh qualifies. Right. And in fact, I mean that's one of the reasons I became interested in it was because uh I thought there was uh a niche that wasn't being adequately explored, you know, and that's kind of one of the reasons I got into plus I like cocktails, you know, so it's kind of a win-win situation. Uh on a similar note, I'll just hit it real quick uh while waiting for the next caller to come in. Uh Colin, longtime listener, writer in, uh, says that cocktail geeks are loving the rainbow's gin fizz.
Bartenders are hating their guts for repopularizing a drink involving a 12 minute shake, although they don't really take 12 minutes to shake. And by the way, bartenders also, I was at the last at the Tales of the Cocktail in July, and bartenders were ordering this drink uh by the bushel. Uh, and basically Colin wants to know is there a better way? So Rainbow's gin fizz is actually a drink that I don't much like. It's got like eggs, dairy, gin, orange flour water, and some other stuff, and you shake the heck out of it, and it gets this creamy, to my taste, underalcoholic kind of thing that apparently is becoming more popular.
I'm not a huge orange flower water person, anyway. The secret common uh is to shake the ingredients dry without ice first to start the emulsification process. That's the old school way to do it. If I were you, I would invest in some uh in a mix of Xanthan and gum arabic and keep it at your bar at all times. Uh TIC Gums makes a good one called Saladizer 301 or 310 or something like that.
And it's uh basically you can use it to make butter syrups or oil syrups, or you can use it to stabilize uh a ramos or anything else. Uh and it's just handy stuff to have around. Uh the gum arabic acts as an emulsifier and a bodying agent, and a xanthan acts as a stabilizer. So I would I would get a hold of that. Any any have any other ideas on that uh Nathan?
Uh I you made the the point I would make. I mean, the other thing is make sure that uh you've got a good uh mixer or homogenizer for uh for making the emulsion. Yeah, well, Nathan has uh a bunch of uh nifty emulsify uh you know different homogenizers. Uh you know, he has uh the rotor stator, which actually is becoming more popular now. Um uh Tony uh our buddy Tony C, Tony Calliaro from uh England's got one in his bar uh and you know we have one, uh you have one, a bunch of people have them now.
But Nathan is the only person that I know who also has a high pressure homogenizer. He can do some serious business with that, right? Yep. Oh, the fantastic. It um it uses very, very high pressure, 30,000 pounds per square inch uh to uh uh create incredibly fine emulsions.
So uh a blender can typically get you down around uh five, 10 to 15 micron droplet size. Uh and with a rotor stouter, you can probably get it down to five uh microns. With uh the high pressure, we can routinely get it down to one micron. Wow. And by the way, when Nathan says blender, he doesn't mean a crappy blender that you buy at Costco, he means a vita prep.
Yeah, a vita prep or blend tech or one of the other really uh uh high-end ones. Uh the the there really is a difference. But a rotor stator homogenizer, which is a piece of laboratory equipment, does a vastly better job even than a vitaprep. Oh, yeah, yeah. For most things.
I mean the the interesting thing about it is um once you get a below about first of all, you know, the the the particle size that you can get uh out of uh out of a blender has to do with a number of things. How uh efficiently the blades can get to the particles, how much mixing there is, etc. etc. How the blade size in relation to the tank size, all that. But at the at the end, the you're limited by the kind of the tip speed, how fast the tip is hitting uh your your products.
And in a rotor stator, there's a rotor that's rotating and a stator that's standing still. So in effect, it's the equivalent of in one you're um you're just slicing a knife through the air, in the other you put someone's head against the wall and then slice the knife through it. It's that kind of a uh of an addition of energy that you're talking about, which is the reason that it can get to such uh smaller uh sizes, right, Nathan? Would you agree with it with that description? Yes, absolutely.
That th that's the the whole what you're trying to do is create shear in the liquid. And uh a ordinary blender is trying to slice the blade faster than the fluid is moving. And the amount of shear depends basically on the relative speed of the liquid and the blade, but of course the liquid is moving and it can m push out of the way, whereas a rotor stator just forces all of the liquid in a very, very fine gap, a hundredth of an inch uh sort of a gap, where one side is stationary, the other side is at super high speed, and that creates just vastly more shear. Right. Now the other interesting thing about blending is that your tongue, okay, in terms of texture, your tongue can't really perceive um texture below about 20 microns.
Thereabout, that order of magnitude, in that range, 20 microns in size. Um, which is why uh liquid nitrogen ice cream isn't perceptively better, perceptibly better than ice cream made in a high-end commercial ice cream machine, even though its ice crystals are theoretically smaller, right? Because your tongue can't perceive it. So what's interesting is that the rotor stator g has two possibilities for use. One, you need a small particle size, like for instance, like uh did this thing with oysters, and you might choke out the oysters if you have large particles.
Two, you want a very stable emulsion, so you want the smaller, smaller things. If you're making milks, which is a big section in uh mi other milks like duck fat milk, which is a big section in modernist cuisine. Or uh, but there apparently, and I haven't done the studies myself, but Nathan I'm sure has uh there are taste perception differences that depend upon the size of the droplets below below your threshold for perceiving texture. Is that true, you'd say, or no? Uh yeah, I think that is true.
Um the other one though is the um is how it looks, the optical properties. Right, sure. Uh we have a photo in the book where we took a uh green liquid, a um uh parsley juice actually, and then emulsified it with oil uh in a bunch of different ways. And the smaller the droplets, the whiter it gets. Uh when put through the uh h high pressure homogenizer, you wind up with something which is uh almost it's like a tiny amount of tint to uh cream.
Uh whereas if you whisk it by hand, you can still make an emulsion, but the emulsion is very, very green. And the reason is that the droplets of oil in the emulsion, they scatter light. The smaller you make them, the more of them there are. And so the more scattering you get, and so the more whiteness you get. Right.
How up are you on pickle technology, Nathan? Um fair amount. We we have quite a few pickles in the book. Um, let's take this question from red then. While I've made good half sours at home with salt and water, so we're talking a fermented pickle, not a quick pickle, and small amounts of alum.
I don't use alum, but I mean I have it, but I don't use it. They are not what I would find in New York. Would add in calcium hydroxide to a half sour brine, keep them bright green and help them prevent them from getting soft. I've done some stuff with this. I would say I wouldn't add it to the brine.
We're talking about uh pickling lime. I would I would soak them before you brine them. Uh that'll stop from getting soft, but I don't think it's going to keep them bright green. Did you ever do any research with cooking in copper to keep things bring green or or uh any of these things with pickles? Uh no, we didn't.
Because it's toxic. We we didn't cover pickles that extensively. Well, I think it's because it's toxic. That's why none of us do it, right? Theoretically toxic.
Well, that would be one of the reasons, yes. Um obviously uh copper does oxidize green, but uh and as a result there are blue dyes that are copper-based and so forth, but they're toxic, and so I I wouldn't do that. Right. I mean, uh the uh in the research I was doing this morning, because this it came in this morning, uh, you know, they used to boil apparently the because you know you can not boil, but you can you can high temp simmer uh for a brief period of time below the uh softening point uh and apparently that was another way to increase firmness. Although m I don't know why, I guess to to get the pectin methylesterase to uh help reinforce the structures below the point at which they uh pectin but below the point at which you break it down.
I don't know. But they apparently they used to do it in copper, and that would lead to a bright green color because you're replacing um the ion and the chlorophyll with copper, which is stable and bright green. But I just would I wouldn't do it. I don't think the green's that important, do you? Uh I agree.
Yeah, I mean, in other words, I don't think it's as big a uh a flavor. So pr preventing oxidation or changes in color in something like an apple, I think is vital because the flavor is also changing at the same time uh as a direct result of what's going on. But uh I don't think uh the same is true with uh with pickles and and them turning a shade of green. I don't think it's gonna affect the the flavor. It's just not my that's not my feeling.
Uh well I think you're probably right. And of course, if you do want to dye something green, there's safe ways to dye green. And I would rather use a safe food coloring than uh some copper thing I'm leaching out of my pot. Right, right. And uh on safety, we have a question, and he has he has a couple questions here, we'll take this one right now.
Uh Mike calls in with uh plastic wrap and he says, Um, I can't recall us discussing plastic wrap on the air before. I mean, it's something I've dealt with a little bit on the blog, but what are the heat effects on plastic wraps, specifically the consumer plastic wraps I might find in the supermarket, or maybe the food service ones I can find at a restaurant supply? What's the safe temperature range to use uh in uh poaching and immersion baths uh in a galotine, for instance, and what should what should they worry about? What's gonna leach in into the food? I would say actually a home one is probably gonna end up they're crappier because they're smaller and they're a pain to deal with, but um and most food service wrap now is is polyethylene like the home ones, but uh I would stay away from PVC wraps, obviously.
Um I mean I'm not you find you do find PVC wraps in restaurant supply places. Uh you find it at Costco in in big uh any of the really big uh containers w of of the plastic wrap are usually PVC. Um at least how often they are, you gotta check. And PVC is considered okay if the stuff isn't hot. Um but I just rather not have it in the kitchen because I don't want to have to remember which plastic wrap should be hot and which plastic wrap should not be hot.
Are they properly are they labeled? I can't remember. I I can't try to remember in my head looking for the label on a box. If you read the box, I've always seen it labeled. Right.
It'll say PVC or polyvinyl chloride somewhere if it's a PVC side. If it's uh it's not always true that the polyethylene ones have uh thing if they have a proprietary thing. I'm not sure that saran wrap says it's polyethylene, because it's this proprietary brand name. Right. Um it is polyethylene, it is safe.
Yeah. I mean, the the interesting thing I find with plastic wraps is I mean, polyethylene is great because it's supposed to not have any um plasticizers that are gonna leach into your food. However, they are made with solvents, and if they're not allowed to flash off properly when they're coming off the rolls at the mill, they can have some solvent aroma left to them. Um I always I uh it's miraculous to me if you wad up plastic wrap and smell it, how many of them have a smell? Um have you noticed that too, Nathan?
I mean, it's just like uh you know, at the school it happens a lot because we have a bunch of different plastic wraps lying around and you can just kind of run around the school and smell them. Um I think also the PVC ones tend to uh look the biggest problem is fat-related things. If there's anything in the plastic solvents or whatnot, they tend to be more lipophilic uh than uh hydrophilic. And so this is why if you have a bad plastic wrap and you go to a cheese shop and they wrap cheese in it, the cheese picks up these horrible aromas from the plastic that basically never come out, and the cheese is ruined from an organ organoleptic standpoint, not necessarily from a safety standpoint. Um that said, I use polyethylene uh all the time, uh all the way up to uh I mean I don't do much m uh protein cooking above uh 62 or or so except for confie, which I like at traditional temperatures.
Uh what about you, Nathan? Do you have any uh upper limits that you'd take the polyethylene to um you know normally the upper limit is sort of enforced on you by the fact that stuff gets really soft? Right. Um so uh it real sous-vide bags uh have are usually multi-layered, they usually have nylon as one of their layers, uh, and they're good for much higher temperatures. And uh they're also safe and tested at much higher temperatures.
So something like a Ziploc bag or a plastic wrap, I would I tend to use it at 60 C or below. Um and there just isn't a whole lot of reason for stuff you'd cook hotter to use the that stuff because there's better ways to do it. Right. I mean, I do we do chicken gala, we do chicken gallantines at like 64 and plastic wrap, and they're fine. You know, but that's basically the highest the highest that will uh that will go up.
And also from Mike, you want to take a non a non-step uh technical question? You want to take a uh a dinner etiquette and um marriage question we have from Mike that uh maybe we can both weigh in on here? Sure. Okay, so uh Mike's question is on dinner parties. When having guests over for a dinner party, eight people or less, would you serve food with a plated presentation, family style at the table, or buffet?
Here's his background. His wife and uh uh and and he are trying to entertain uh smaller uh groups versus going out to large gallery gatherings because of better quality conversation, close friends, etc. Uh and Mike loves to cook, so he takes us on happily. His wife is a wonderful person, he says. He's making this thing.
His wife is wonderful, he's not saying anything negative about her, but a fairly picky eater. Yeah, but but a fairly picky eater, mainly texture over taste, but that's for another day. She never makes a fuss over and has never gone hungry when we're out. But he's worried about if he plates his food, uh he wants to do plated food because he wants to challenge himself and because he thinks uh he'd like to think through the menu for the night, and he thinks out uh he'd like to think about the way everything's gonna show up on a plate. She doesn't want it plated, she wants it family style because it's going to allow her to discreetly choose what to eat and what not to eat and not feel and and also to control portion size and not feel left out, not feel like she's being served something and not eating it and and feel bad.
Um so uh what do you think? Help help help Mike out here. Well, it's it's pretty hard to to recommend to anyone that they do something that will upset their spouse. That's probably not a good idea, just in general in life. Um you know, the the reason to do plated dishes uh is because it gives the chef control, allows you to do fancier, more interesting things uh in general.
Um, you know, almost anything you plate up you could put onto a platter, but then it's harder to transfer, and it doesn't look as nice. Um that said, the food does actually is gonna be uh apart from a very few exceptions, I think the food's gonna be fine either way. So um I would say try to strike a compromise with your wife and uh uh find some uh uh you know you you also can do family style for some things and not for others. You know, you can have your entree, uh the some restaurants do that, you know. The steakhouse typically the steak is individual and the side dishes are all done family style.
Yeah, exactly. I think that's that's excellent advice. Pick some stuff that you know is a slam dunk for your wife, stuff that you know she likes, and work only with those things on the plated stuff and have them come out early in the meal when she's already when she's when she's not full yet, and then she can scale back her portion sizes later in the meal when you go family style, right? Wouldn't that make sense? Makes sense to me.
I mean, for me, I get viciously, viciously angry if I plate something, and I'm not just talking plated, like I'm talking sandwiches. Anytime you construct a food and then you watch someone pick it apart in front of you, I get viciously angry. Even uh and I shouldn't say this on the air because people do it all the time, but like like even when chefs do it, when um when you when I see someone do it to someone else's food, I'm like, look, at least taste it the way that they presented it, because that's the way it was intended, and and then pick it up, pick it apart. I mean, a sandwich doesn't taste the same if it's horribly mangled and then rearranged. It's not intended to be eaten that way.
Do you know what I mean? Yep. I mean, uh d doesn't that make you kind of irritated sometimes, Nathan? I mean, if you actually hate something or you're allergic, fine. You know what I mean?
But you're still not better better to tell the kitchen that beforehand, right? This way they can make adjustments to the sandwich or to the plate such that it's still something that they're proud of. Here's my problem with it. My problem with it is you mangle somebody's plating or somebody's dish, right? And then you judge them based on your mangled version of their dish without giving them the opportunity to make the dish such that you would like it given your uh issues with the food, right?
I mean, does that make sense or no? Yeah, I think it does make sense. Uh there's a uh there's a lot of uh there's a lot to be said for having the chef uh be allowed to make it the best possible way. Uh and uh anyone who is cooking for other people wants to please those people. And so uh i it is always a little uh disappointing if you're not given that opportunity.
Now to be fair, there are some people who uh for whatever reason view it oppositely and they say, Oh, I don't want to bother the chef by telling him that I don't like uh, you know, pickles on my sandwich or or or some other thing, that they they feel that's being too picky, and so they they don't say it up front and then they try to pick it out afterwards. But I agree, in general, you should be up front with with what your um your requests are. Uh obviously if someone's allergic to something, that's a totally different issue. Although if you're really allergic to it, it's too late to pick it up at the time, you know. Yeah, yeah, but if you have a nut allergy, picking the peanuts out of your kung pao chicken is too late.
You're screwed. Um, yeah, but it let's take uh okay. But I'll say this. Uh, pickles is a very good example. If I put pickles on something, um, it's telling me I have to take a break, but probably because that dish desperately needs the acidity from the pickle.
So you remove that pickle and you now you've now you've unbalanced the whole thing. Then if you don't enjoy it, uh I feel bad. That's what it is. Basically, if you don't enjoy it, I feel bad. That's where that's what it comes down to.
Um, all right, listen, the next caller, and we're gonna go take one more break. The next caller is gonna get that apron. What was that song anyway? What is it? The Avalanche?
Not the Avalanche. I don't know that one. This is the first time we've had a song. I have no idea what it is. Anyway, welcome back to Cooking Issues.
Call your questions too. 7184972128. Your questions from Nathan Miraville. That's 7184972128. Well, we have an interesting one in from uh Josh in Antigua.
Uh says, hello. He's been cooking Dave Chang's uh five minute, 10 second eggs and eating them with everything lately. He notices sometimes it's harder to peel them uh without obliterating the white of the egg. Is this due to something in my procedure? I bring the eggs to room temperature before I boil them, let them sit in warm uh by uh by letting them sit in warm water.
After boiling for four minutes and fifty seconds, he thinks 5'10 is uh too set. He places the eggs in an ice bath until they're cool enough to handle. After wrapping a spoon against the shell until it's shattered into small pieces, he then peels the eggs in the ice bath. Uh anyway, blah blah blah. Sometimes the eggs come off with sorry, I didn't mean blah blah blah Josh.
You know what I'm saying? Sometimes it comes off with no problem, other times uh it rips the egg apart. Please explain uh what's going on. Uh I have my feelings on it. Nathan, do you have any feelings on that one?
Well, the uh texture of egg is very critically dependent on the temperature at which it's cooked. And uh the so the first question I would have is how consistent is it if you're boy if you're boiling and and timing it exactly, that's probably okay unless you're varying the number of eggs or the size of the pot or how crowded they are. Uh because that can make a difference if it's i if it the water on the egg is uh is a little cooler because you put too many eggs in, uh, you're gonna wind up with it less cooked, which means it's much easier to rip it. The other possibility is that it it's uh has been established that the age of the egg makes a difference, that uh uh very fresh versus older eggs will have a different texture. Right.
Uh that could be it. I think that's exact exactly what's going on. I mean, Chang's, I think argument there is rapidly boiling large pots and you know, an uh a quantity of eggs that's not going to perceptively uh perceptibly uh you know lower the temperature of the water, that it's gonna be able to recover quickly enough that it's not gonna make that much of a difference. He always uses the same type uh same size rather of egg and always uh uh starting at the same initial temperature, which uh as Nathan said should uh prove fairly accurate. There are some studies that show that uh eggs boiled uh at uh you know uh quickly at high temperature rather than ramped up from cold are easier to shell than ones that are uh ramped up from cold and then and then shelled.
Uh Nathan and I both know that the exact opposite is true of low temperature eggs, ones that are cooked in the 62, 63, 64 Celsius range, because there the thin white just never sets up and it acts as a release agent, and there's nothing easier in the world than breaking out an egg that's been cooked at at 62 degrees uh Celsius. Um but uh the the other thing is as eggs uh age, the uh pH rises, the egg white becomes more alkaline. Uh and as it becomes more alkaline, and this is according to uh egg science and technology by uh William uh Stadleman uh and you know and others, uh as the pH rises, the eggs become easier to shell because uh the proteins in the thin white don't adhere as strongly to the uh to the membrane. And this is a big deal in egg processing technology because people produce for a living uh shelled eggs and the value goes down dramatically. So people try to figure out a way to not have to store eggs, boil them quickly, and then rip the shells off of them.
And so what they do is they actually alkalize the eggs. They they store them above uh a sodium hydroxide bath, not in it, but above it, uh, and that uh increases the pH more rapidly than aging. Uh and McGee actually recommends putting a pinch of baking soda into your water, although I've never tried it to try and alkalize it more and make them easier to uh to shell. And uh another interesting reason to try and take a fresh egg and uh alkalize it so that it can peel easily is because uh even though it becomes easier to peel, the f the taste of eggs uh in the panels I've read on in these uh um technical studies, the taste of egg does deteriorate over time, even though the peelability goes up. Uh anyway, we have a collar on the air.
Here's one other little tip I'll say if you really want to uh make it easier to peel your eggs, uh run a blowtorch very lightly over the egg before peeling. Uh it helps degrade the the shell and it's much easier. It also works to roll the egg in liquid nitrogen very easily before peeling it. That's hilarious. Extreme hot or extreme cold, both uh will make the shell more brittle.
You heard it here first, unless you own modernist cuisine. Uh all right, caller, you're on the air. Hi, my name is Matt. I'm calling from Chicago. Howdy.
Uh Dave, I talked to you a while ago about mattress infusing uh honey, and it didn't really work out, but that's a whole nother story. Lately, um I've been playing around with a little bit of uh baking soda and Chardonnay to make it for um effervescent. Right. Uh I did like a powdered sugar and baking soda rim. And I was wondering if you guys could give me some suggestions on doing a sorbet that has, say, something on top of it.
So when you eat the sorbet and it melts, it becomes effervescent in your mouth. Oh, by the way, you won the apron, so don't hang up when you're done. We'll get you back on the air and we'll figure out how to mail the thing to you because you were the in the next caller. So awesome. Thank you very much.
Well, thank thank Nathan. He donated it to the show for you to have. Uh but Nathan, you have any uh ideas? I wouldn't use baking soda, by the way. I mean, you need an acid plus uh a base.
I wouldn't use bak but anyway, Nathan. Go ahead. Well, um, you know, the the problem with uh having an acid base reaction to make it effervescent is you're gonna get some taste out of it. Um which in some con in some contexts that's okay. You know, baking powder biscuits have a taste that is characteristic that way.
Um unclear whether it's gonna be okay in your Chardonnay. I mean it but that's sort of a personal preference. Uh uh the only other way to make something effervescent is to put in uh something like Pop Rocks that already is effervescent itself and a sort of stored effervescent. Right, and and uh the pop rocks is definitely I think a better way to go, and you can buy unflavored pop rocks. Although to be fair, Nathan, Pop Rocks isn't the same feeling as like effervescence in a uh in a in a drink.
Hey, um why don't we tone we'll t we'll leave him on the air because we need him to get the thing, but we'll tone down as a direct way. Yeah. So take your your um Chardonnay and put it in a seltzer bottle. And infuse it with uh CO2. Yeah, much better.
The the reason that uh soft drinks and champagne are effervescent is that they have carbon dioxide gas dissolved in it. And carbon dioxide happens to be a gas that is will very readily dissolve in a cold liquid. Uh and uh a seltzer bottle is exactly how you do that. So I would say, look, if you really want to have effervescent Chardonnay to make sort of a faux champagne um uh just you know carbonize uh uh carbonate it directly. And the seltzer bottle is the simplest way, there are some other approaches you can do if you put a tiny bit of dry ice into the bottle and seal it up, that'll also work.
You just gotta be careful you don't blow your bottle up. Yes. Uh okay. I would I would Google image uh dry ice soda bottle to to see people's eyes when they when they don't do it properly. Because the bottle will blow.
Uh and then uh my question was I'm trying to do it for a dessert where it's a sorbet, like it's a Chardonnay sorbet, and maybe there's um some kind of chemical on top that as it melts in the mouth or as you put it together it it it's almost effervescent in your mouth. As it the reaction is going on in your mouth. And you think maybe the pop rocks is a good thing. That would work, but it will have its own sort of texture and taste characteristics. Um, I've not tried this, but uh you could if you made your sorbet, you ought to be able to carbonate it.
It's it's tough because the the carbonation only works in the liquid phase, so it's a question of how much liquid phase. Well, you have to spin it first. You can't freeze it. But i if you took uh it and you made a sorbet in a sorbet machine or a Paco Jet or something else, so it's in its state that's semi-liquid. I bet you will get some CO2 in there.
I mean I've awesome. I pressurized a tailor once, and besides spraying ice cream base all over the kitchen, I wasn't able to get as much of an effect as as I wanted. Uh Sam Mason was working on this for a while. I'm I'm I'm sure I mean look, it's obviously it's possible, but the the car the carbonation is only going to be present in the liquid phase. So you're gonna have to the soupier your sorbet is, the better the effect of the carbonation is going to be.
I mean, I think I think I think you might want to go with uh the pop rocks. Don't you think that's the easiest way? Um there all there's a guy uh uh someone on the internet who has a uh a site on dry ice ice cream, where instead of making uh ice cream with liquid nitrogen, which is something Dave and I uh have been known to do, uh he puts powdered dry ice into it and then puts it into the l lets it sit. Well, the interesting thing is the car the carbon dioxide does not get absorbed very much into the uh ice cream base, a little bit it does. But it makes a uh texture that looks almost exactly like white bread.
Huh. Uh because um I've done that before with uh dry ice pellets. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so so that's that's a way to make now that's not quite the same thing as you're describing.
Um, no, no, no, no. But I'm just saying I've made an ice cream before with the base and dry ice pellets. Okay, cool. I mean, I I once made it by mistake, like a many, many years ago, chilled a base with dry ice because I found a soft serve machine on the street and the chilling thing didn't work. And uh I chilled down the base with dry ice and then froze it soft serve, and and it was it was horrible.
First of all, it was the only time I it was the first time in my life many, many years ago that I had made a large amount of base at once in a pot by hand and I curdled the eggs at the bottom and so it tasted like scrambled egg soda ice cream but not in a good kind of Heston Blumenthal way, kind of in a really crappy I messed up the ice cream way. Hello, Dave? Yep. Okay. Hey listen um I appreciate your I appreciate your information that it's been great.
It's getting kinda louder on that sorry. All right I just wanted to tell you uh real quickly I think the conversation with Steve Miller was that the old record executive sent a younger guy in there and the younger guy told him he had to have a hit record so Steve Miller kicked back and said, well how about this Abercadabra I'm gonna reach out and grab you. For real? Alright the Nathan what we're talking about here is Steve Miller's worst song is clearly Abracadabra. Uh I don't know whether Nathan whether you're a Steve Miller fan or not but the worst song Steve Miller ever came up with by far, Abracadabra.
Um I'm I am told that we have uh one more caller on the air true we lost him if they if they come back they come back. Um okay we had a question in uh from Nedward uh via Eater Nathan noted that someone spotted you on an airplane reading the modernist cuisine PDFs do you plan on selling the PDFs to poor cooks who can't buy the book um you know I really don't think anyone spotted me on an airplane doing that. Hey look this is not this is not me this is coming in via the internet. Okay, it's true, but look just let me say I I I have not been in that situation. I can promise you that.
Um, so you're not denying that the PDS exists. In order to um uh to print the book, you know, PDFs are a key part of the whole printing process. Uh that's how the book gets sent over to the printer in China is as PDF, so of course we have PDFs of the book. Um and we have had there was a period where we had some reviewers uh that uh needed to see the book and we didn't have physical books, so we had a uh password protected website where reviewers could go read the PDFs. And the result was kind of interesting.
Uh most people found that it was better than nothing, but only a little bit better than nothing, and that uh the usability was not very good. Uh I think if we really wanted to make a uh online or interactive or um iPad version of the book, we'd have to do something a lot more extensive than simply put the the PDFs up there because navigating around those huge photos, navigating around the the the rest of the book is just too hard. Right. All right, let's take so someday I would like to have an interactive version of the book. Uh you know, we made a decision uh two years before release as to what platform we would target first, and we chose paper books because there was no iPad, and Kindle didn't do color and still doesn't.
Uh so you really couldn't have something that would really show off what we were trying to do. Um at some point in the future we will probably make a uh interactive version, but it's a lot of work. Um, to get the quality the same to get the interaction the same. You mean to get the quality what you want. I mean, you could easily do an online version.
Do you want to have video? Uh do you want to have animations? Do you want to have good navigation? All of those things take some software development effort, or they take a whole bunch more um effort in shooting a video. It's not easy to do.
Right. Exactly. You said it better than I did. Apparently that caller that uh got dropped is back on the air. Let's take one last call.
Hello, caller, you're on the air. Hello, this is Daniel from San Jose, California. Howdy. I had a question about um acidic marinades in the book Um Modernist Cuisine. There's a section on acidic marinade in meat, and um the section talks about how acidic marinades can actually tenderize meat and improve their moisture holding capacities.
I was um interested in um how this how you guys came to this conclusion because um I've noticed that there are others like um Harold McGee who believe that um acidic marinades only um denature protein on the surface of meat. Take it away, Nathan. Well uh I think there's two issues going on here. First of all, marinades only penetrate a certain distance. That's just a fact.
Um and any marinade is only gonna work on the surface if you don't either give it enough time to to go in or you don't do something like injection or tumbling or other things to speed it up. Uh now uh, an acidic marinade, uh if it's there are many cookbooks that will have an acidic marinade where you put the the meat in for a very short period of time, 20 minutes or something like that. That is just a surface flavoring. And that's fine if that's the surface flavor you want to get. You just shouldn't think you're gonna change the interior of a piece of meat in a 10 or 20 minute period.
It isn't gonna happen. It takes too long for the diffusion time. But an acidic marinade certainly will denature proteins um all the way through the meat if you get the marinade all the way through the meat. And either by waiting long enough or by using injection uh or tumbling or all of the above, you certainly can get that to happen. Um the similar things, of course, occur with a uh alkaline marinade.
Uh in either case, what you're trying to do is take the meat proteins into a regime where they're not normally um uh but present in meat. So you either make it much more acidic or much more alkaline, and either one causes some of the proteins to break down. And depending on the context, that could be desirable. But I promise you it'll work all the way through if you inject it or um uh uh or tumble it or simply wait long enough or have your meat be thin enough. All right, thank you.
Well, uh there there you have it. And uh I would like to I'm gonna I'm gonna answer guy named Josh writes in and asks where he can get high proof liquor in England because he wants to do uh like infusions and wants to know if you really need the high proof liquor. Answer Josh, yes. You can't buy Everclear in uh in England, though, they don't sell it. Look for Spiritus vodka out of Poland at the Whiskey Exchange, or look for Stro, rum from Austria, the original 80%.
That'll float your infusion boat. I have many, many thanks. Thank you, Nathan, for spending this last hour with us. I think people really enjoyed it. Uh hopefully you'll come on again sometime.
Modernist Cuisine, the greatest series of cookbooks ever written. Cooking issues. Thank you. Oh, you did rat. Got me on this corner.
And I don't know where I'm at. Supposed to be my baby. Between a minute's late. You got my head all twisted. And I guess can't get it straight.
Fishes, fishes, but you dairy rat. Got me on this corner. And I don't know where I'm at. I had a chance to swap you. For a little.
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