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Hello, and welcome to Cooking Issues. It's Dave Arnold, your host of Cookie Issue coming to you live from Bogota, Columbia. Calling all of your questions to the studio of Brooklyn at 718-497-2128 at 718 Born at 72128. Uh I was supposed to be doing cookie shoes today from Brooklyn, but uh due to the hurricane, which Nastasha apparently wasn't much of a big thing in our area anyway, my flight was canceled, and here I am in Bogota. Right.
Nothing happened down there, right? Nothing. You have a caller. I know you want to do it. Oh, and caller, you're on the air.
Hey Dave, how are you doing? It's Kevin from Virginia Beach. Hey. I got a question about um I got some calcium hydroxide flaked lime, and I was thinking about um different ways to use it since I got a lot of it. And I was thinking maybe you could use it for spherification, but I'm concerned about it interacting with sodium alginate and producing lye and if that would be a problem.
I was wondering if you have any experience with that. Uh well let me think here. No, I don't think it'll do that because um no, I don't think it'll do that. Because you know, you uh you add salt all of this all all the time to uh uh you know you add salt all the time to uh to things that have calcium hydroxide in them in it. I mean cal um yeah, calcium hydroxide in it's not a problem.
So, you know, in order to form the lye you'd need to you need to start with sodium and then have the uh hydroxide already attached to it and and then put it in. You're starting with calcium hydroxide, which is much weaker, so it's not it's not gonna be not gonna be an issue. Think about it this way. If you add um pure lye and pure uh hydrochloric acid, right? You don't retain the powers of those two things, you just end up with salt and water.
You know what I mean? Right, yeah. And do you think it would taste okay? Uh okay, so those are two separate questions. Uh uh, you know, look, it can't it look, it can't taste worse than calcium uh calcium chloride does.
Calcium chloride's horrible. But I think the real problem with it is that calcium uh hydroxide has a a very low solubility. So I don't think that you would uh necessarily get enough calcium in there to have it uh set properly. I mean it's interesting, I've never tried it. Um you you know, calcium hydroxide um saturates very quickly.
So typically you act if you're gonna make something like a soaking solution for uh bananas like Thai style, you can like s mix it with uh, you know, water, let it settle out to the bottom, pour the stuff off up the top, and that's basically saturated uh calcium hydroxide. Yeah, that's what I think. Water and what? And what and it tastes like it tastes like uh cement to me. Um I don't know whether that will set algern it or not.
Um you know you can have to see you just have to drop a couple it'd be easy to test. You just have to drop a couple of uh pearls into it uh and see whether it sets it. Um but you know you could try it'd be interesting. Let us know it let us know what happens. I mean we use it for uh obviously for niximalizing corn it's the primary thing we use it for.
Uh if you were here in Columbia you could chew it with cocoa leaves to release the uh alkaloids although I'm not necessarily advocating that um you can use it to harden vegetables. Uh you can use it to uh well keep things uh firm while preserving the color when you're cooking them. It's really it's good stuff, you know. Yep, okay, awesome. I'll give this out and I'll let you know.
Alright thanks a lot. Alright thank you. Uh uh so Columbia is Columbia has some amazing fruits, Nastasha. I think any we're gonna say that. Yeah, amazing fruits.
In fact one of the reasons I wanted to come down here was to taste all the fruits and uh we went out partying after one of the events with uh the ambassador to Columbia from the United States and uh I was like, hey come on, you know, any week slip some of those fruits in the bag, you know and no he's like no way. There's no way. There's no way we can get the fruits uh up in uh up in New York and shipped into the United States and it's a shame. They got the one of the main fruits over here that they got that I really like it called uh Lulo and l it it's hard to describe these damn things, but let me put it this way. If you were gonna come open a cocktail bar down here in Bogota, uh you could do some pretty serious drinks.
This Lulo drink like has some natural hydrocolor in it. I don't know, and it forms a it forms a head almost like you were shaking with an egg white. Pretty cool stuff. Pretty cool stuff. Uh, if we have time later, I'll just go down some of the crazier uh fruits uh that we had uh so let us get to some email questions.
Boop boop boop. Okay. Andrew writes in and he says, uh Andrew Switzer, dear Dave, as a former career barista uh espresso, this is a question about espresso, uh career uh Barista. I'm wondering if you can share more info on your home espresso setup. I know some of the various requirements to have a professional home machine, but I need help with the practical how to and set up.
Also, if it seems to be too big a job for my apartment, do you have any advice for achieving foaming milk for coffee lattes at home? My wish is a stove top steaming device capable of achieving microfoam at 140 with a traditional metal steam one. Thanks a bunch. Alright, uh, Andrew, here's the deal. I've had uh in my life two professional espresso machines uh and two different weird kind of home uh machines.
Um the professional machine is the way to go. If you're independently wealthy, then and you have a lot of space, then uh purchase like a two-group uh espresso machine uh and install it in your house. Here are the problems. Uh two group espresso machine, and I bought one used at an auction. Uh, you know, I went into it was a uh uh this place was shut down as a result of uh drug activity in um in you know, like in the upper hundreds in Manhattan on Broadway.
It was a restaurant. And they locked the restaurant shut. And uh when they reopened it a year later, all the food was rotting, and so no one else wanted to be in that auction but me. I was the only person who was willing to stomach the stench of this place to go in and purchase equipment. So I got a um a fairly you know nice two group ranchillo espresso machine uh for almost nothing.
Of course I then had to disassemble it and boil all the parts to get out all the nasty stuff that had accumulated and like animals and made their houses whatever anyway. So I got it to work. Uh problem with these larger machines is the larger machines uh take a lot of electricity. So that one required like a big uh 220 circuit. Um the good news is is well that makes better espresso than the equivalent one group machine and the reason is is that in traditional uh espresso machines they use the the mass of the equipment to provide um the stability the temperature stability and also the ability to have like huge amounts of steam on demand.
So that machine even you know made better espresso than the single group professional machine that I have now which is a La San Marco. The problem is I didn't have two twenty, I wasn't able to install it. So if you don't have two twenty or if you don't have a lot of electricity you can get a commercial one group machine that'll run off of one ten. And if you have a lot of money you can buy very temperature stable one group machines uh that run off of one ten uh but they're very expensive uh the professional ones like the dual boiler or any of these ones have very accurate temperature control. Very expensive.
Um so you have to make a choice of how much electricity you're gonna have. Secondly you have to make sure that the coffee machine can live near a sink. Uh so what you do is is you put it near a sink um you put a uh I'll go under where the where your sink line is, the line in, go to your cold water tap, install a filter on your cold water, you know, unscrew it, put in a T where the uh water comes in, install uh another branch off of that, which is very simple. This is all Home Depot, like, you know, one hour problems, no big deal. Install a water filter on it.
Make sure you put a shut off valve beforehand so you can change the water filter without everything going wrong. You then under the sink there, place the pump for your espresso machine if you have an external pump and most Pro machines have an external pump, you put it down there, and then you run um you run the power wire to the uh to the pump and the uh drain and the um sorry the uh the input line in right up and then what's really good is to drill an extra large hole by the way you're drilling a hole in your counter uh did I mention this you're drilling a hole in your counter uh behind the espresso machine that can make it into uh underneath your sink uh then you want to install a drain hose which they're not very big uh and then tap that into um you know it the equivalent of a uh of a uh basically a like a disposal or washing machine a washing machine drain uh that goes into the thing you want to plug it into another one of those so that your machine uh so your espresso machine can drain uh and make sure that your espresso machine is always above the level of your sink so you can't uh you know have backups uh um on onto the floor out of your espresso machine if your drain clogs up uh and that's basically it I mean uh it's it you know it sounds like it's a lot but you know if you have a drill and you can go uh drill in uh you're set uh you know then you want to make sure you have a place that you can knock out espresso grounds so you're gonna want to uh you know, either to take a a small you know you can buy one or you can make a knock a knockout knockbox uh and it's helpful to have a trash can nearby. Uh but that's it it. It's pretty simple. Um they um you know as as regards if you're not going to get a professional machine uh you know I haven't used anything that does a very good steaming job uh that wasn't a uh pro machine um because you know it's just you it can be done.
I mean if you go to coffee geek dot com those people will sit around and make amazing uh foam with uh home machines but it's just you know they I think they they're always sucking wind a little bit because they don't have as much of a steam capacity as let's say even a single group uh one ten machine. Uh but that said you can do this all very cheaply uh if you scrounge around and you can have and let me tell you this it is extreme pleasure to just be able to use a freaking espresso machine like nature intended it which is having it plumbed into your water supply and um having it you know drain into your uh into your drain. Even if you don't have a commercial espresso machine you can usually plumb them by putting a uh a level sensor and a and a and a solenoid valve to uh allow you to put high pressure from your mean on mains uh which is like forty fifty psi put that into a gravity fed container and espresso machine. So there you have it. Hey Nastasha did you know that Bogota is over eight thousand feet high and I haven't had to do this much talking in a row on a phone and I'm actually feeling winded from the altitude.
Wow wow more than more than when you ride your bike here and come in. What'd you say? I said you feel more out of breath than when you arrive here after you've ridden your bike in Brooklyn. Uh well I guess that's true, but you can't let yourself mellow out when you're uh when you're in Bogota, there's no there's no mellowing out. The weird thing is that I didn't feel I haven't felt that windy the whole week.
It's just uh I guess it's just uh because of uh the the talking high speed because when I was doing my demonstration here, it's the first time like I said it had to be uh done in Spanish. And so it's weird having to constantly stop and like give like three cents, his weight give three cents, his late give three sentences. Doesn't it's uh very strange. Yeah. Very very, very strange.
All right. Uh Jason Yi writes in a question on eggs. So I know Dave's done quite a bit on low temperature egg cooking, including the chart recently published in uh David Chang's Lucky Peace magazine, which that we've used that chart. How many times have we used that chart, Nastasha? Many.
Harvard uses it too. Who? Harvard. Yeah, Harvard's using it. There's some popular science one.
That that chart is like all over all over the place. Anyway. But I was wondering if you guys had any tips for other eggs, quail, ducks, etcetera. I'm assuming times would need to be adjusted for different egg sizes, but what about the composition of eggs? Are substances and different eggs different?
And if they're the same as chicken eggs, is the ratio of substances the same? All right. Well, Jason, unfortunately I don't have uh or didn't until right before this happen uh have enough Wi Fi time to research the exact composition of what's going on in these eggs. I will say this. Chicken eggs and duck eggs are uh and quail eggs for that matter are different.
Um the the proteins in them are different. They're fairly similar, right? But they are uh different. And the reason I know this is because when you treat uh eggs with uh lye and salt, which is something we do for the Harold McGee class, uh and I really like him. I think we we have it on the blog 'cause Nastasha remember it's on the blog from a couple of years ago.
Uh you can just look up lye and eggs. And um that lye basically um denatures the protein slightly or makes it uh less able to bond with itself uh which makes it such that it stays clear even when it's cooked. Uh so that's pretty cool. And you know the um doesn't work as well in chicken eggs as it does in duck eggs and quail eggs. So you know that there's fundamentally a difference between uh those two those three eggs.
Um quail interestingly and duck work better than uh chicken. Now I haven't done uh a lot as far as cooking them goes, I haven't done a lot of experimentation to figure out what temperature uh whether there's a temperature difference. I know that a duck egg and a quail egg are going to be runny at 62 uh because I've done them. Uh and I know that a quail egg will still get slightly you know that creaminess that you would normally get at 63 Celsius, right? Which is weird but quail eggs cook much faster and I think they also uh can drift into overcooks much faster.
A quail egg is done in like you know under fifteen uh way under fifteen minutes. You know what I mean? It's like it's gets done quick. And quail eggs though, when you do a quail egg in a circulator, they're difficult to uh to get out the way you would get out of a chicken egg. So what I normally do is you get like one of those uh to one of those like cigar cutting things that are not for cigar they're for quail eggs and you chop the top and the bottom, not just the top to get the egg out the top and the bottom and then you can shake the egg out and you can get like you know um you know most of the eggs will come out uh properly whereas if you try to do it via cracking, uh you're gonna lose, you know, like half of your eggs.
So if you're gonna low temperature circulate a quail egg, you're gonna want to get something that can chop the top and the bottom of the um shell off. Um duck eggs I haven't had a lot of experience with. I mean I know they're still creamy at 62, but I don't know whether they'll set ex you know exactly at 64 and be creamy at 63. They're obviously gonna have to cook longer because they're um because they're bigger. Um but you know you know more interesting thing on eggs is uh and and relating to uh the proteins and basicity is uh and I I think we put this in eater last week is uh you need to add a little bit of uh if you if you're having problems peeling your eggs if you add a little bit of baking soda to the water apparently it helps and um and uh that's Harold McGee trick uh because it makes it more alkaline it makes it so the proteins in the eggs bond less strongly to the membrane in the shell when you peel it which is kind of cool.
Uh I asked uh Wiley whether they do that at the restaurant and that with the restaurant being WD fifty N and D they do but they say that peeling eggs is still a uh a pain in the butt. Um all right so uh by the way uh before I forget I said on the blog a couple of weeks ago that uh that dragon fruit is uh uh you know a gross awful uh tropical fruit and I got a couple people telling me that I was wrong and I was like well look I'm willing to be proven wrong. Well I came down here to Columbia and I had uh a fruit called pataya. Pataya is another basically word for a type of dragon fruit. The ones they get down here are yellow and lo and behold um it tastes good.
I like it. So I found a dragon fruit that I like. Also, you know Nastasha you remember how I hate pot papaya? Yeah. Yeah I hate it, right?
I mean I I I like a green papaya like a crunch papaya, but I hate myself a uh uh a ripe papaya in the States. It smells like like nothing you'd want. Like alternately hey sometimes it smells like a diaper, sometimes it smells like a vomit. You know this smell good. Do you like 'em no no I don't.
No, they're awful, right? Here they're actually good. In fact, in Columbia, right, you're not supposed to you're not supposed to walk around the streets of Columbia showing off that you have a lot of bling. This is not a bling oriented society when you're walking around on the streets, you know what I'm saying? Mm-hmm.
Uh you know for obvious and the security here is is intense. You know what I mean? There's still 'cause they're still I guess you know worried about um I guess problems. Anyway, so uh the the local phrase is to show you how good the papayas are here compared to where they are in the States if the local phrase here is uh don't give papaya out. In other words if you show if you have this papaya out that you're giving out that the people are gonna come take it and intake more you know what I mean so it's like that papayas are so ingrained that like the the kind of national statement for like you know don't flash your bling is basically don't flash your papayas.
Cute. Yeah anyway uh okay going up I have a question from Chris about uh bloom strength of you have a collar in case you want to do that first. Oh I alright caller you're on the air. Yeah hi um my name is Jesse I I have a question about uh juice extractors. And I was wondering um for under three hundred bucks is there one that you recommend highly okay well what kind of juice?
I'm juicing vegetables and fruits. Okay but not citrus no not citrus no and not sugar cane? And not sugar cane, no. And not um wheatgrass. No, not wheatgras either.
Okay. Uh because those are those are tough. Um so the one that we typically use uh in the school and that almost every chef has, and they can be had for well under three hundred dollars, uh, is the uh champion juicer. Okay. The champion.
And the champion juicer, basically the way it works is it's got an auger and then little teeth, and it just, you know, you you push the stuff through and pulp shoots out the front and juice goes down the bottom. Um and you can even put the pulp through a second time if you want to. It can also grind peanuts and it can grind cocoa nibs to make chocolate. You know it it it's good. It's a good machine.
Um it you know, it tends to heat your juice up a little bit. Do you know what I mean? Um so if you're having a problem with your juice overheating, and and especially when I make it, I tend to force the stuff down the throat of the machine so quickly that like it tends to overheat. I have had um I have had the base of the champion, the motor, like almost catch on fire and and like uh, you know, I've ha I've melted the internal component tree of it. But that's after like, you know, like an over an hour of continuous heavy, like, you know, basically I when I juice like that, I juice as if I was going to the gym and working out.
You know what I'm saying? So it's uh it's uh you know, that's not gonna happen that much. For more money, um some people like the green star juicer, which is basically a set of gears that mashes the stuff. However, from I've never used one. People that I know that have used it say that the yield is not nearly as high with um the green star as it is with the champion.
Now, there are a bunch of other juices that I've seen um on the web and even seen kind of in person that seem to they work on different principles, right? That work uh like centrifugal, so they grind it and then and then centrifically separate it out. Um and some of these purportedly make very good juice. The problem is is that they a lot of them don't have a lot of capacity. So if you're making a little bit of juice, right, they're okay.
But if you want to make a boatload of juice, like if you're doing a party or if you have you know a lot of people coming over or whatever, then you're not going to want to sit around and and burn out a smaller juicer. You're going to want something that maybe is um a little bit less uh maybe has a little bit less um yield on extraction, maybe warms up a little bit but is kind of a a robo monster, right? Which is what the champion is. So I actually don't have a lot of information on the other kind, on the kind that is like a little bit uh slower, maybe a little bit more gentle, but can't handle a lot because I can't personally use a piece of equipment that can't pump out a you know a gallon of juice in a reasonable amount of time. Do you know what I mean?
Yeah. Yeah yeah. Yeah. Okay. So um and you know it I although I have to say you know on the o other end of the spectrum if you have a bajillion dollars if all of a sudden you win the lottery, go out and buy a neutrafaster like the professional ones that you see that look like uh that look like a uh uh a tower at an airport and have a tube coming out of 'em.
Yeah I went to a uh I never used one before because I you know I've never worked in like you know one of these places that juices for living but and by the way none of these juicers will do wheatgrass sugar cane and they're not for citrus which is why I asked you those questions. Um but you put you know you when you put an apple in a champion juicer you have to push on it to get it to come out right and that's just what it is. When you uh you know, when I put an apple into the neutrafaster thing, I felt like it was going to suck my arm down into it. That's how thirsty it was to eat these apples, you know what I mean? So I'll respect to that machine.
The other machine that some people like, it's very expensive, is the Norwalk, which is basically a press. But again, I've never used it. I don't know how concerned you are about um keep changing it versus just you want it easy to clean, can pump out a whole bunch of juice. Um, I'm more in work fairly well and pump out a boatload of juice when you need it, but not necessarily need to do that much. Exactly.
Yeah. Yeah. So I'd use a champion. Have you used it before? Um, I think I've used it once in a restaurant, yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Most people have them. You know, um, and most people we're we're usually fairly fairly happy with them. Uh I if you know, I don't know how much more it costs to get the commercial one.
The commercial one basically uh has a stainless shaft and better bearings on the motor uh versus the home machine. Um otherwise I think they're fairly similar. And it's easy to get replacement parts for it. And uh I don't know anyone that doesn't like their champion, let me put it that way. Okay.
Well, great. All right, well, thanks a lot, cool. Good luck with it. Bye. Let's take a break.
So Nastash, you think we should go to the first break? Yeah. All right, call in all your questions to 718497-2128, 718-497-2128 cooking issues. Dave. Yep.
You're back on. Hey, welcome back. You're on the air. Cooking issues coming to you live from Brooklyn and Bogota, Colombia, where the weather is always like fall. It's crazy.
It's like fall here all the time. I actually like the weather a lot. Oh. Pretty good. Yeah.
You know, you 'cause even though we're on the equator, it's it's like so high up in the mountains that it's always kind of like uh it's like basically fall weather, like early fall weather, which I enjoy. If you go to uh Medellin, which is uh you know, it's also in the mountains, but like slightly lower. They call that one eternal spring because it's like ten degrees warmer than here, so it's always springtime there. Always. Like literally nothing changes weather wise.
They have a rainy season where maybe it rains more, but like weather wise, the temperature, it's it's always the same. It's crazy, right? Cool, yeah. Then I went we went down to Cartagena, which is like on the water, and that is freaking humid. Freaking humid.
Anyway. Uh call on our questions. Still time to call on your questions too. 7184972128. That's 718 497 2128.
By the way, more on Columbia. Uh guys down here incredibly nice. Incredibly nice. Uh I should probably do a uh blog post on by the way, I haven't had blog posts. I've been internet challenged, uh uh often when I'm down here, and telephone challenge and cash challenge.
Do you know that they I came down here uh and uh my bank, Chase, uh g you know, decided that they when I asked them for replacement cards that they would give me a temporary card. You know what temporary cards don't do? Give money. They don't take money out of banks internationally. So we've been I've been like basically mooching off of my new friends here in Columbia uh you know for the last week.
Uh I don't I don't understand how it works. I don't even anyway, whatever. What we would do with a little all I'm just saying is that travelers who are going abroad, please get your financial crud straightened out before you go, or you could be a moron like Dave Arnold. That's basically the point, right? Yeah.
Anyway. So uh Chris writes in about the bloom strength of gelatin. Can you explain how to convert between different bloom strengths of sheet gelatin? I have a recipe that calls for silver strength uh at 160 bloom, but only have gold strength, 200 bloom handy. Thanks.
Okay. Uh first of all, uh bloom force, bloom is an ar is kind of uh a weird definition of the strength of gelatin. And literally what it is is you they take uh uh gelatin that's been cured, you know, for like you know, 17 hours at a very specific temperature, like 10 Celsius, right? Uh at a very specific concentration, like uh six six and two thirds, six point six six six percent, right? Uh and they push a um they push a little plunger that they make standard into it, and they figure out how much force it takes to push that plunger four millimeters into the surface of the gel, right?
And they give you that force in grams, and that's what bloom is. And by the way, most of the measures used in foods are weird, crazy lunatic things like this, where some dude in a factory was sitting around saying, hey listen, I gotta figure out how to measure this correctly. So he makes this like we like now this is the standard for all time. So you like, I don't know, he uses whatever he wants, a ball, a cone, a pen, whatever, but he makes the standard for all time. It's named after him, Bloom, and he pushes it in and he writes the stuff down.
So this is how the food industry works. So the question is how do you convert it? So you can't just simply and I uh you know other places that published you can't just simply exchange like say hey I have one that's a a 200 bloom I'm making these up to make math easier for me. I have one that's a 200 bloom and one that's a 100 bloom so I'm just gonna use twice of the 100 bloom. Right?
That doesn't make it doesn't make sense. Here's another thing. People like to use uh number of sheets of gelatin when they use sheet gelatin to kind of figure out what's going on. But the fact of the matter is is that typically you buy sheet gelatin uh in grades right platinum, silver, bronze, gold, right? Uh and the thing is is that as it goes down the line, platinum is the strongest gel, it it's has usually has the highest bloom strength.
It's usually the clearest gel that doesn't have any brown, right? Some of the lower strength gels uh have undergone some hydrolysis there can be some browning in them it's like they're not as you know not as good looking, not as clear. Anyways, the lower the strength the gel typically like uh the higher uh the higher the weight of each sheet is because they're attempting to um keep uh the gelling power per sheet similar is that makes sense but if you're gonna substitute uh a weight uh then you have to do some sort of conversion. Now uh a as you change the concentration of gelatin, right? You're not uh it doesn't scale.
So in other words, if you double the concentration, you don't get exactly twice the uh you don't get twice the strength of the gel. Typically, uh you get much more than twice the strength of the gel, right? So you you can't do a straight conversion. A very good uh uh thing to look at on the webs is something called uh gelatin summary and conversion. And it's a really useful, like four-page word document that you can download right off the thing by uh A UI.
There's uh Alb Albert Uster imports, and they're Nastash, you'll be happy to know that they're Swiss, right? And uh they provide uh the formula uh where you take uh and you multiply uh by the square root of the ratio of the bloom strength. So it doesn't it's not gonna make much sense, but I'll put it to you this way. If you have a 200 bloom strength gel, right, and you want to figure out how much to use of 140 bloom, you do 200 divided by 140, right? And then you take the square root of that.
And so if you needed uh and this is an example right off their sheet. I'm reading it off their sheet, so don't say I'm plagiarizing it, it's right there. Uh if you have 10 grams of 200 bloom gelatin, and but you you know the recipe calls for 10 grams of 200 bloom, but you want to use one that's 140 bloom, you take 10 times the square root of 200 over 140, and uh that is uh how many grams of the uh lower bloom strength gelatin you want to use. And the reason for the square root there is as I say that it's not a linear, it's not a linear thing. Um anyway, I hope that helps, and you should read that, uh read that little paper because it's kind of cool anyway.
It's got lots of kind of cool pictures, and uh it's titled gelatin summary, and that's what she is. It also gives, interestingly, stuff that you don't uh it has a bunch of actual conversions uh for known things, like how to convert uh platinum sheed weight to Knox powder weight, how to convert uh Nox powder weight to gold weight, and by the way, Nox powder, which is the one Nastasha that we use uh when we're doing uh our gelatin work is actually pretty darn good. It's got like uh it's it's between uh platinum and and gold, and actually closer to platinum, so that's pretty good, right? Yeah, that's really good. Bueno, yeah.
So Nox Gelatin, even though it's in the supermarket, turns out to be a serious uh butt kicker, right? Nice. Yeah, nice, nice. All right, so uh uh I tried coca tea, by the way. How was it?
It was fine. It's like, you know, uh it's uh yeah, uh we went to the like highest point in Bogota, which is uh Monserate, which is like you have to take up this like crazy tram up to the top and it's you know it's way up there, and they have this like little uh market over there, and uh so they sell all kinds of local Colombian products, and one of which is uh uh coca tea, which is basically just the coca leaves. And I tried it, and you know, I didn't I didn't feel uh I didn't feel anything really. It didn't, you know, didn't uh do anything to me as far as I know. And someone got me a bag of the leaves, but I'm pretty sure they're illegal to bring back to the United States.
And since I'm flying around from here to Panama and Panama to the United States with a bag loaded with knives and uh and white powders loaded in Ziploc bags, I don't think I'm gonna take the chance of actually having any coca products on me. What do you think? Yeah, I think that's smart. It's wise, right? Uh y yeah, I mean uh I I I'm not exactly sure how the law goes.
I should have researched it before I before I came in, but uh I'm thinking that this is gonna have to stay with some friends in c in Columbia. There's no way I'm gonna try and bring this back on you. Can you imagine? Can you imagine like they find the coca bags and then they find like all the bags of like Xanthan gum and and uh you know, it's be crazy, crazy. Yeah.
Bad news. Horrible. Horrible idea. I mean I've had some bad ideas before, but I think that might be the most horrible of all. It's interesting.
Uh in terms of coca, you know, uh there's uh a lot of obviously controversy uh about the growing of cocoa because it's used to make cocaine, which is then shipped to the United States and causes many problems, etcetera, etcetera. But what's interesting is that we went to a museum called the Gold Museum down here, uh, and it's all about pre-Columbian gold. And this, you know, the coca as a product has been used by uh the people around here for like ten bazillion years. You know what I mean? Like a lot of the gold implements that they had way way you know, way before anyone uh showed up, uh you know, demonstrate that this is they they use this.
Not I'm not talking about refined cocaine, but like this as a um as basically a normal part of their daily life. They had you know, they would have uh pouches that they're like beautiful gold if you were rich. Most people would use just hollowed out gorge, but like gold pouches to carry the uh lime, they would burn shells of calcium hydroxide to use to activate the uh coca leaf strongest. So it's it's interesting. It's really, you know, part of the historical culture here, which makes it a little bit more difficult um to say that we should try to stop people from growing it.
It's kind of uh interesting little question. Yeah. Anyway. All right. So Brian writes in uh with uh several questions, and so we'll try to uh hit some.
I'm gonna go in reverse order. All right, Brian. Brian bought some malic acid and some citric acid at the homebrew store. Good news. I want to use them in cocktails and other stuff, such as jams, pat teta flea, uh any other acids I should get.
Any thoughts on the best applications? Well, yes, in fact, uh you can get some tartaric acid. Although if you have citric and malic, citric and malic are the two baller acids. If you have citric and mal citric acid and malic acid, uh you can do a lot, right? Malic acid is the acid that is typical in apples, right?
Apples malice. Uh, and citric acid is the acid that's typical in lemons. Now, um, and if you taste them by themselves in small quantities, like they taste like the warhead that they're that they're, you know, the apple warhead, and the other one tastes like the lemon warhead, warhead is a candy, if you you know, or the sour patches. If you uh buy tartaric acid, like that's one of the main acids in grapes, and so that provides uh a grapey note. Uh if you mix two parts of citric acid to one part malic acid, you get the acidic flavor of uh lime, which is the one that I use most.
And I use it as a corrective, right? So if you don't want to add limes, or you know, if you just want to correct the acidity of a juice slightly, um we use these acids all the time. If you jack them too much, you tend to throw the juice out of balance. Wouldn't you say so, Nastasha? Yeah.
Some other acids I would get are uh lactic acid in powder form, which can give alternately like a sour crowdy or a sausagey taste, depending on the application, because it's you know what happens when lactic acid um uh you know interacts. Uh that's a good one. Uh I use one called uh sixinic, but I don't recommend getting it. It just makes very, very authentic uh lime juice, but it's very hard to get. The lactic lactic use tiny amounts of it.
The lactic acid, the um and the malic acid, the citric acid, tartaric acid, uh are all pretty much available, I think from homebrew and wine shops. The other one obviously you should get is ascorbic acid, which is vitamin C, which is a very good uh antioxidant if you're making apple juice uh and whatnot. Um but uh there you know, there's some acids I want to get a hold of that I don't have, like Quinic, which is a strinic, astringent and is is a part of the characteristic stuff, and things like apples, um, but I don't have a source for it yet. Uh I want to try, you know, tiny quantities of other bizarre acids, but uh until I find I won't I can't talk much about them until I find a a source for them. Uh but it's good news, you're gonna love that.
We always love having that stuff around, um, just to like I say, correct acidity. If you're gonna make a soda and it has to last a long time, then you can use a malic citric blend with simple syrup to approximate lime. And then if you squeeze a little fresh lime or peel in at the end, you get a good lime back out. But I mean nothing beats the real thing, right, Nastasha? That is right.
Nothing like the real thing. Anyway, okay. Second question. Uh as Brian's speaking again. I have made my own vinegar.
It is a snap, except for the damn vinegar flies, and the vinegar is tasty as well. What exactly is the vinegar mother, and is there any culinary application for it other than for making more vinegar? That's an excellent question. Um, one of the uh uh uh Harris Radio hosts is an expert vinegar maker, but I don't know if he talks about it on the air, so I won't call them out. Uh the uh when you make vinegar, what happens is is you take uh you basically take alcohol, right?
That's you know somewhere around 10% alcohol, and you expose it to oxygen. When you expose it to oxygen, uh acetyl acetobacter um grow on acetic acid bacteria, grow on the top, uh well, they grow all throughout it, right? And they're turning the ethanol into uh into acetic acid. Okay. Now uh like I say they require oxygen to survive.
So what ends up happening is that uh they tend to form uh a bunch of what's called bacterial cellulose, right? And then they float that stuff floats to the top and forms a layer. Now the bacteria then after they use up the initial uh oxygen that's in the acetic uh in in the in the stuff that you're turning into vinegar, after they use the initial oxygen up, they tend to only exist in large quantities, actively in large quantities, in the top of the forming vinegar right where the oxygen is. And so they sit there chilling on the top of the of the vinegar uh making acetic acid from the ethanol and at the same time uh producing bacterial cellulose. And so that layer is basically uh living bacteria and bacterial cellulose.
So yes you can lift it off and use it to make more vinegar, right? Uh or uh there's a uh it's I've never heard of it done with uh with vinegar cultures before with vinegar mothers, but there's kind of a well known uh Asian Filipino dessert called uh what is it called Nata Nata de Coco, right? And what that is is it is the gel produced basically vinegar mother, right? And what they do is is instead of having it in a jar that's tall, uh, right, or a jug and where they're trying to prevent, I guess, excess um moisture loss and whatnot, they spread coconut water in uh like in like a several inch thick layer in large sheets and they use a very specific uh acetobacter, but this works with you know any any uh uh acetic acid bacteria and it grows a thick layer uh of uh bacterial cellulose on top which is the same thing as vinegar mother. There's you know this one it just happens to produce a lot more of it so it makes it a lot thicker.
So what they then do is they take uh off the uh the top layer and they soak it uh and then they I think they might even boil it and they get rid of the acetic acid flavor and they have the this basically gel produced from the thing and then they infuse it with syrups and make it sweet and stuff like that. So that's uh I believe not not that to cocoa I think but it's basically vinegar mother. So you could take the vinegar mother, soak it uh if you're gentle with it because it's probably not going to be as strong. Uh and then maybe boil it in a syrup and make a a gel out of it and you know tell us what happens compare it to uh compare it to the one from Asia. Anyway, uh that's a interesting question.
The third question that Brian has is uh oh by the way he used one of my favorite terms. He's like I have uh a lot of questions and he said I I hope I'm not bogarding the radio show. Don't you I l I haven't heard bogarding in a long time. You like that one, right? Anyway.
Um okay black garlic is all the rage. How is it made and can I make it at home? Alright so for those of you that uh haven't been paying attention to like hip new ingredients over the past couple of years, uh black garlic is a kind of garlic that uh is uh you know originated in Korea uh and people bring it over here and it's black, uh and what kind of brown, it's not really black, it's kind of brownish black, right? Nastash not really it's not really not black. Right.
Yeah. It's kind of like dark, dark, dark brown. Uh and it's kind of oohy, it's still in its uh in the cloves, and it's uh ooey gooey, and you spread it on things, uh or do whatever you want with it, and it's very, very sweet. Uh and it's uh has like uh sugary, like some people say like balsamic, but I don't really get I don't really get that. Anyway, but like it's it's what it is.
It tastes like what it is. Uh and it's pretty good. People like it. It also doesn't make your breath stink the way that uh regular uh garlic does. And if I have time more more on that later, well, let's do it now.
So, you know, we pressure cook garlic to do the uh same thing. And uh we're working on um we're working on trying to get some funding to get uh uh a garlic specialist to run some tests for us to verify why pressure cooked garlic doesn't make your breath stick because the stuff that's in garlic that um stuff that's in garlic that does make your breath stink and is extremely punchy and shouldn't be broken down by the temperatures of a pressure cooker, but apparently is. And uh he has some theories, but we have to run some tests, so more on that when we when we do it. But uh the way black garlic is made, if people I and by the way, uh I did some uh a little bit of research and I haven't been able to uh find anyone who definitively says what's going on, but people uh say that it's fermented and it's not fermented in the traditional sense, right? Uh because the temperatures are here are too high.
Here's how it's made. You uh you basically keep the uh the garlic uh whole. Uh some people apparently soak it and some don't beforehand. You keep it in and by the way, some people say soy sauce is in it, soy sauce is unnecessary, not needed in it, blah blah blah. Okay.
You take the garlic and you keep it above uh 140 degrees Fahrenheit above 60 degrees Celsius right and uh but it you can go all the way up right according to some of these uh sites all the way up to like eighty or ninety degrees Celsius and still have it have it age. I wouldn't do that. I would never take it uh out you know above the the softening temperature of the garlic which is going to be um you know in the 70s or 80s uh uh Celsius so you know I I would keep it down lower where people recommend like forty fifty Celsius which is in the hundred and like 140 and a little above range. Don't go any below that because if you go below that you can have bacteria growing on it, right? So they keep it hot and they keep it uh basically from drying out so it doesn't desiccate uh over time and they keep it for a long time.
So on the order of 30 days. The higher the temperature probably the the uh the less time it's gonna take. But that's how they make it. So it's done hot uh for a long time and then allowed to cool down and and and there you have it. Some people uh in a in a patent late online some people put charcoal in with it to try to absorb some of the odor odors as it's being made.
I don't know that that's truly necessary but the easiest way to do it uh is to use a dehydrator. So if you're lucky enough to have an excalibur style dehydrator then you can um so the sheet style dehydrators are tough because you don't want it to actually dehydrate. So you want to kind of like like put plastic wrap put like put the garlic in a container that's non-reactive. Put plastic wrap or whatever over that container so that it doesn't lose all of its moisture. Now it's basically a controlled humidity environment.
And then you put that into a dehydrator and you you set it at like I'm going to make up a number like 150 and you let that Fahrenheit and you let it run for like 30 days and and there you have it. And so um so that's it. So it doesn't appear to be an enzyme reaction that's going on because at those temperatures I'm pretty sure you're going to at least it maybe it initially it is, but you're going to break down uh broken down a lot of the enzymes over that period of time at those temperatures, I would guess, right? And it's not uh a fermentation in the sense that it's not bacterial or uh yeast derived. Uh and this is why in the science literature it's just referred to as aged garlic.
I think what's happening is is that a lot of the compounds in garlic are pretty unstable and if they're just held at these temperatures for very long periods of time can produce these kind of crazy things like uh like a aged garlic. Uh what do you think? Pretty interesting rightas? Yeah. Yeah.
Alright so uh anyway, I was supposed to like I say be in Brooklyn I am flying out tomorrow to Panama where I'm doing a demo uh in Panama City for a bunch of cooking school people and I'm going to do an Ikime demo there maybe using some of the new IKime stuff that I learned when I was working with Dave Chang's uh on his iPad app after which I will be in Harvard next Tuesday giving a lecture to uh bright you know bushy whatever it's bush bright eyed bushy tailed college students uh about uh the wonders of science in uh in cooking with uh Harold McGee, which should be a blast. Unfortunately, that means I will not be doing a live show because it's during the actual uh cooking issues time that we'll be uh doing the lecture. So I look forward to speaking to you all in two weeks. Send us your questions, cooking issues. The following is a message from Nova and Y.
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