Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues back from Columbia, Panama, and the Harvard, where I was lecturing last year. We're back in Bushwick today with Nastasha the Hammer Lopez. Calling all of your questions to 718-497-2128. At 718-497-2128, still can't remember the dang number.
Anyway, today, last week was our 52nd episode. We were supposed to celebrate it, but because the fake hurricane stopped us from being together in the studio, we're celebrating our 53rd episode with a delicious bottle of wine from our friends at the Barter House. So uh anywho, uh we're gonna have that, uh, which we shouldn't be drinking because we're gonna be shooting an episode of uh no reservations, uh what's it called? No reservations required. No reservations.
I think it's just another one. With uh Anthony Bourdain later on today. Uh maybe we'll talk about it, maybe we won't. I don't know. Today's cooking issues is sponsored by Modernist Pantry.
Supplying modernist ingredients for the home cook. Modernist Pantry offers modern ingredients and packages that make sense for the home cook, and most only cost around five bucks per unit. Unit? Yeah. Five per pat per thingamajake.
Yeah. Uh and you know what this is one of the main problems when you're buying um I'll finish I'll finish the thing. Okay. Whether you are looking for hydrocolloids, pH modifiers, or even meat glue, eat glue, eat glue. You should get meat glue, by the way.
You should all have meat glue in your pantry. You'll find it at Modernist Pantry. But by the way, when you buy meat glue from these guys, uh, you should remember to always store it in the freezer after you're done with it, or it's gonna go bad fairly quickly. Remember that. Store it in the freezer, tightly sealed in a ziploc in the freezer.
Um if you need something that they don't carry at Modernist Pantry, just ask. Chris Anderson and his team will be happy to source it for you. With worldwide shipping, hey guys, source, okay. If you're gonna source anything, source uh PectineX SPL. Uh I'm talking specifically to Chris Anderson in Modern Pantry Modern Pantry.
You're gonna have to order a 25 liter pail, because we're sick of selling it to people because we're that's not what we're very good at, although the school is still selling that stuff. Uh I tried to get Terra Spice to carry it and they they weren't able to. So maybe you guys can carry that, which is a fantastic enzyme that you can use for clarification, auto suppreming, uh getting the pith off of peels, making delicious French fries, etc. etc. Buy it.
Anyway, uh Chris Anderson and his team will be happy to source it for you. With worldwide shipping, Modernist Pantry is your one stop shop for innovative cooking ingredients. Fans of cooking issues that order today, during today's show, go on there right now because I want to prove that we actually have some fans. We'll get a free sample of transglutaminase, aka meat glue, with their first order, but only while supplies last. Simply use the promo code CI, which I guess stands for cooking issues, 53, CI 53, when placing your order online at Modernist Pantry.com.
Uh, this please uh do so so that so that it proves that we're you know useful in some way, right? Okay. Um visit modernistpantry.com today for all of your modernist ingredient needs. Uh and it is true that one of the hardest things that people uh have when they're sourcing these ingredients is purchasing them. Uh and then if they want to purchase five, six, seven hydrocolloids, even from the suppliers that uh we use for restaurant supply, they're usually buying more than you need, a lot more than you need, because you're typically only using a few grams of these things, and you're paying uh 15, 16, 17 dollars per unit of the for these things, and you don't need that much of it, so it's a real barrier to experimentation.
So, this is a really good concept where you go, you can order smaller quantities of these things that are gonna be useful to you, uh, and then you can play around with them. They they also, I think they said that they'll get bulk if you need bulk, and I'm sure their pricing is different for both. So uh go on, check them out. Cheers, modernist pantry. Nastasha full pulling the Cesare Casella and throwing some some ice cubes in her wine.
Uh what are we drinking today, Nastasha? You gonna give us a little spiel? Oh, I don't know. It's a jewels cote de Provence. Great pronunciation.
Really? No. Sweet. I'm not mean. By the Barter House.
The Barter House, our good buddies. Okay, on to oh, by the way, remember to call in your questions. We're very excited for your questions today, although we do have a lot of email questions to answer. If I can only find them, I gotta put I put them on my iPad. Okay.
Huh. Kevin writes in uh hi Dave and Nastasha. I've been working on a blog post listing ingredients commonly seen in scientific cooking, and I'm stuck on sodium hexametaphosphate, SHMP, known in the parlance as shimp. Um I know you've talked about its role as a calcium sequestrant uh for spherification before. By the way, calcium sequestrant means that basically that it has the ability to bind calcium molecules, and calcium is one of the things that causes certain gels to set.
Uh so if you're making something with uh alginate, uh, for instance, and you want to stop it from prematurely setting, we add a little bit of sodium hexametophosphate to bind up all the calcium that's available that would otherwise uh shaft your um shaft your your gel. And so that's you know, that's what a sequestering is. Anyway, uh but I've also seen many claims it can be used as an acidity regulator, an emulsifier, a humectant, a raising agent, uh sequestrant we already said, stabilizer and a thickener. I think I figured out how acidity regulation and emulsification work, but the rest are a mystery to me. My question is in two parts.
Could you shed any more light on novel uses for shimp, sodium hexametophosphate? Uh and two, can you recommend any books, sites, journals, or other resources for doing research on scientific cooking? I have access to academic journals, but I sometimes still can't find the basic details of certain things. Well, uh, I'll answer the second one first. Uh the problem uh with uh scientific journals uh is unless you know exactly what you're looking for, it can be uh very difficult to search for kind of general industrial knowledge on those journals.
So, for instance, if you're saying, hey, look, I want to look up um the production, or I want to look up you know how to do ecogemia, how to spinal cord ablation. If you know exactly what you're searching for, you can find the information. But otherwise, it's very difficult. I usually look for industrial sites. Uh like corporations usually put out lots of white papers on how their products are uh work.
For instance, um, if you want to know about methyl, the best place to go is DAO for methyl cellulose, uh, you know, the for alginates, it used to be ISP, which is which is a company now owned by FMC Biopolymer. So for these industrial applications where it's not a trade secret, where they're trying to get you to use the product, a lot of the information is available online, or if you call the company, they'll send it to you. This is the case with enzymes and hydrocolloids primarily. If you want to know how a weird industrial cooking procedure works, patent searches are often a good way to go. Uh or there are specific, if you have access to scientific journals, you might also have access to uh food processing books, which are usually on different websites within the same kind of an area.
Like for instance, Canovell has a long list of books on actual food processing. For instance, the book Frying, Improving Quality, where I learned a lot about uh oil degradation, things like that. Another good source is Egan Press, which is put out by the American Association of Serial Chemists. Good places to look for this for this sort of thing. When it comes specifically to sodium hexametophosphate, the problem with uh that is that it's usually an ins uh um not very specific, it's not one thing.
There's usually an impure bunch of uh polyphosphate salts, some of which are sodium hexametophosphate and some of which aren't. There's also uh the phosphate salts, like they react very, very differently depending on which one they are. Two really good resources uh on the internets to look up uh one is the polyphosphates, chemistry effect and importance, which you can get as a uh uh word document online. It's easy to search for, and it has a very good discussion of kind of the chemistry of what's going on uh in you know fairly layperson's terms, thank goodness. Uh and another one is search for ICL underscore meat.pdf, which specifically is how to use different kinds of polyphosphates in meat.
Now, um uh shorter chain uh phosphate salts are typically basic, whereas the longer ones, uh encyclical ones like sodium hexametophosphate are typically not basic. So, for instance, more basic polyphosphates are added to things like meat glue, a specific kind of meat glue to make it basic so that the enzymes don't react when they're when they're being uh you know when they're sitting there on your desk before you paint them on on meat. Um larger ones that they act as a sequestrant, and the way they act as an emulsifier is by uh basically solubilizing the proteins. It's the proteins that are acting as an emulsifier when you're adding something like sodium hexametophosphate to not you wouldn't add sodium hexametophosphate to meat for that, you'd add a shorter chain polyphosphate. But anywho, that's what it's basically doing.
The protein itself is the emulsifier, and the polyphosphates are basically making that protein more uh available. Uh they can act as buffers in different kinds of uh regimes depending on which one you use. They're very, very versatile, but the actual usage of them are very specific, almost the way they are with hydrocolloids. You have to know exactly why you're using it, which one you're using. So I recommend you look at those two sources and you'll get a much better handle for what's going on.
What do you think, Sus? Yes. Yes. Okay, uh, we got a call uh calling from Michael. Michael wants to know about potatoes and uh meat glue.
Two separate questions. I will do the second question first. Uh I'd like to know if I can use transglutaminase to glue my drunk and passed out friend's hand to his face. If I wet his hand and apply it to his face and he didn't move until morning, would it bond? Also, if it did work successfully, would I be putting him in any serious medical danger by doing this?
What if I just glue his hand to his torso? Okay. Uh I'm not gonna I'm not gonna go ahead and recommend that you glue uh the hand to the face, but uh let's take it from a theoretical standpoint. One of the problems with gluing your hand to your face is that uh the like your epidermis is pretty much kind of a dead kind of a protein, so I don't know how much is going to be available for gluing. That said, you know, I can easily glue chicken skin.
I know that works, you know. Uh so it probably would work to an extent. I think you'd get a much, much, much, much, much better bond if you sanded his hand first to make it kind of rough. Like kind of like you like if you skinned your knee, that kind of thing, like if you fell off of a bike and you hit your hand on gravel, that kind of a thing. And then did a similar thing to his forehead.
I think you'd get a much better bond. Not recommending this. Please don't do this. Um you'd also need to keep it very immobile. Uh it wouldn't actually take four hours because you remember human body temperature is around 98 degrees.
So it probably the enzyme would set fairly quickly. I'm guessing fairly quickly. Um now the strength of the glue uh with with the transglutaminase is it's not on the order of making a whole muscle again. So if you use transglutaminase, you know that it's much more like two pieces of uh muscle that are separated by a membrane or the the junction between two different muscles. So that's the kind of level of bonding you're gonna get.
Um so you could pull it apart, but uh this would cause probably nasty disfiguration and scarring. Uh so I'm gonna go ahead and not recommend it. But if he wants to, he can go to modernistpantry.com. Yeah, yeah, yes. But if you want a sample of meat glue to not test on your friend, I recommend that you go to the Monitor's pantry and enter the code of CI, what was it, 53?
CI 53, purchase some meat glue, and go ahead and do not try this on your friend. And and this is not look, uh many times I'll like nod, nod, wink, wink, don't try. Please don't actually try this, right? I mean, like Nastasha, look at my face. I'm serious this time.
Yeah, don't try it. I'll tell you, I can't tell you when I'm not serious, but I am serious this time. Don't try this. Now we're gonna try the delicious butterfly. We need a Dave's serious sound effect.
Yeah, but yeah, what like what could it be like maybe the Willem Scream. Yeah, yeah, right. For those of you that don't know, there's a scream called like the Willem Scream that is in every movie, and Spielberg's used it like eight billion times. So and every time I hear it, I'm like, awesome! So it's used uh, I guess one of the more famous usages is in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
When they're walking across the bridge and uh Indiana Jones cuts the bridge and the guy falls down into where the alligators or crocodiles are eating people alive. That's that's a use of the screen. But it's if it once you know the screen, that particular scream, maybe Jack can find it before the end of the uh episode, and you can you can you can hear it. Yeah, I'll just fill my pipe. I like that he already has it.
The original use. Alright, now you guys know it. You guys know it now, that scream? It's in every movie. That's green.
That's green. Uh yeah, okay. Yes, it's in every scream. Oh yeah, yeah, every scream. Once you hear that, it's not like it's not that's the not the natural human scream, it's just the Wilhelm scream that's being used in every movie.
Weird. And the wine is delicious. Okay. Uh so second question on potatoes. Uh by the way, Michael is a recent FCI grad.
That's good. Um, and he's uh developing shack is playing the Wilhelm screen. No, I just played. Oh, you did it? Oh, come on.
Uh we're off the wheel. All right. She see this is what Nastasha does during the show. Instead of paying attention to what we're doing and try to help me get ingredients, she's like, I'll research the screen. She's great with sponsors, though.
Yeah, yeah. Thank you. Yeah, yeah, the sponsors like sponsors like anyone other than me. Anyway. Uh okay.
When my school uh instructor, chef instructor, so one of ours at the FCI, told me that we shouldn't use potatoes that are sprouting because once they sprout, they release poison into the potato. I'd like to know what's going on there. Would the potatoes be fine if I cut off the sprouts and a large portion of the potato from where the sprout came? And are there any ways I can cook the tainted potatoes to make them safer? I'm the family chef at the executive dining room where I work, and so I get quite a few sprouting potatoes to work with.
Okay, here's the dealie. Potatoes, uh, when they're exposed to light or or otherwise after a certain length of time, uh go out of dormancy. When they go out of dormancy, they start to sprout. They also start to turn green. Uh, and that's a sign of when that this uh chemical called solanine is developing.
So solanine is a very, very bitter and also poisonous chemical. There are actually have been some deaths attributed to solanine ingestion from uh potatoes, typically during famine times. Um the good news about uh solanine is it's extremely bitter. So if your potatoes taste bitter, don't eat them, right? Um also the the greening, when you see potatoes that are stored improperly in supermarkets, I see it all the time.
The skin's turning green. The green is not actually the solanine forming, it's chlorophyll that's forming in the potato. But uh chlorophyll and uh solanine develop at roughly the same time. So greening in a potato is indication that there's also a high solanine content in the potato. Sprouts have a large, large potato sprouts, which you should never eat, have a large amount of solanine in them.
So in a potato that's otherwise okay, that doesn't show like a lot of greening, uh, you can cut out the sprout areas because the here's the order. Sprouts have the most solanine, the skin area that's turned green has the second most solanine, and uh the inside of the potato has the least amount of solanine. That said, the worse off a potato gets in terms of once it's gone out of dormancy or started to sprout, uh the more solanine is going to be found throughout. So you want to peel the heck out of a potato that has uh that in it, and you want to cut out uh a lot of the sprouty areas, right? Um now uh the question is can you get rid of it by cooking?
You're not gonna get rid of it by boiling or by steaming. If you deep fry uh potatoes, you can extract some of it because I believe it's oil soluble. The problem is it doesn't go away, it just gets extracted into the oil. So what you're doing is uh spreading the poison out over time. So the more you use the oil, the more you're spreading the uh the po the poison out.
Uh also again, never eat potato foliage. So here's this. I was uh I was researching this. This is from the article Solanine Glycoalkaloids in potatoes in food uh magazine Food and Chemical Toxicology 1990. Uh the highest total um content of solanine in the potato plant are in the foliage, the blossoms, and the sprouts, followed by the peel and the tuber flesh.
Um within the tuber, the concentrations are greatest in the layer under the peel and in the eyes. Another interesting fact about solanine is that it's very small amounts of it are considered necessary to the taste of it. So without it, the potato wouldn't taste like a potato, but uh large amounts of it uh not only will kill you, but will add a distinctly bitter taste followed by a longer lasting burning sensation in the throat. Break? Oh, all right.
So uh there it is with your potatoes, and we're gonna go into our first commercial break. Cooking issues. Morning slaving for bread. So that every mouth can be fed. Means rise.
Get stuff in the morning, flaving the buttons. And welcome back to Cooking Issues. Calling all your questions to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. And no, I didn't memorize it.
Nastasha wrote down the number during the break. Listen, the Israelites, great tune. I'm not used to that version. Have you ever heard that? I've never heard that version before, but I like it.
It's more rock and I'm used to the uh, what is it? Desmond Desmond Decker? Uh, yeah, I'm used to that, but uh Nastasha picked that because if I have time about it later on today, we'll talk about it. Uh uh we're doing a shoot today for the Bourdain thing I mentioned, but the subject of the shoot is they wanted us to do a Christmas feast, and I was an ancient Christmas feast. Uh so it's not a technical technological problem, it's more of my history interest problem.
And I was like, well, you know, Christmas wasn't a big feast until kind of recently, you know, it's kind of like a Victorian area thing when we started having these giant Christmas feasts, you know, usually not really a very religious holiday. Easter is the more important one, you know what I'm saying? You should tell them about your Jersey Bible sometime. Oh, yeah, well, I want to I want to do a spoken uh I want to do a spoken word Bible completely in Jersey. Anyway, um it's one of my later life goals after I retire from anything else, from everything else that I've done.
Okay, so uh, like that's ever gonna happen. Okay, so um, so I said, listen, uh, a much more interesting problem is what might they have been eating eating uh around Jesus' actual birthday. Right? That was the thing. And so I've been researching um recently uh food uh that the Israelites would be eating uh basically throughout the history of Palestine, but more specifically trying to figure out what would be going on in the Roman period uh right around the time of the birth of Christ.
And so if I have time, we'll talk about some of that stuff uh later on in the program. Okay. Now, la I think it was last week. By the way, I'll tell you some stories about Panama real quick. Panama.
Uh since I haven't spoken to you guys since I've been from Panama or the Harvard where I was uh teaching uh late last week. Um Panama is interesting. Uh but as far as a food person, I'll tell you two quick quick things about Panama. Uh one, if you go to the fruit market at Panama, like bring some sort of moist towelette, because it's not super clean. I'm not saying anything negative about it, right?
I know, you know, but check this out. I purchased a sack, a sack of 100 fresh mango steeds, right? Fresh mango steens uh for $17. All right. Now that is an absurdly low price.
And uh sat up on the roof, a bunch of us sat up on the roof, uh, including, by the way, someone who should be an expert in uh mango steens, Andy Ricker, famous uh you know, chef in Portland area who does amazing work with Thai food. Well, he and it's the first time I met him actually in Panama, great guy. Uh we were hanging out. Uh, and uh amazing, amazing. So he said they were very good.
I mean, they were the best that I've ever had, and so he said they were good too, and he's had them a lot in Southeast Asia, so he should know what's up. 100 mangastines, 17 bucks. I later heard on from a local that I got ripped off that he can get them for fifteen dollars a sack. So, so you know, I got ripped off by two bucks. Here's another one for you.
I saw a pickup truck, a pickup truck full of Rambutans, and they were basically free. The Rambutans were basically free. Rambo, what's a Rambutan? It's kind of like a lychee, but it's kind of furry and red. Do you know what I'm talking about?
Furry looking in red. They call them Mamonchino, not like Chinese mammon instead of Mamanchillo, which is basically their word for Spanish lime or gneps. Anyway, which are also delicious and lychee like. Okay. So those are two.
Oh, here's the other story from Panama. Panama comes from a word that means many fish, and they got fish all up and down the block because they're they're bordered by two oceans that are only an hour apart. Here's the sad part for you. This is where Panama really needs to break out the shine. Their uh mechanism for selling fish at the fish market.
I visited the Panama City fish market is kind of abysmal. The lobsters, the spiny lobsters, which are flown in from the Caribbean, only are trucked in from the Caribbean only an hour away from the market, are already all dead. All of the local crabs that they call king crabs, but they're different from our king crabs, which look great, and everyone says they're delicious, all dead. Like the fish is kind of being stored in a hor horrible condition. So like they have an amazing natural resource there, but um the way it gets to market, it gets kind of shafted.
So I mean, one thing I'd like to see in Panama is for them to for chefs to basically say, hey, look, let's spend a couple of extra bucks and pay fish fishermen an extra couple of bucks to try and get the fish in top quality to the market. It'd be better for the people that are fishing, and it'd be better for the chefs, and it would definitely do a lot to help um high end food, which I think they're working a lot on on food on food there now. I think it's becoming more popular. Anyway, enough on Panama for now. Jason had an egg question, which I know, yeah, you answered.
I answered part of it, and then I said we're gonna research more. Okay. So you had a question about uh different kinds of eggs, and I didn't have the chance because I had only one hour of internet time for like $8,000 when I was in Colombia to look stuff up, uh, about the different kinds of eggs and whether they're whether they're different. Um and in my research this morning I found a horrifying but kind of like couldn't look away article, which has nothing to do with eggs. It's called interspecific, which I think they mean interspecies, interspecific duck, chicken uh chimera, uh avian uh if it's from avian biological research in 2011.
These guys took quails, ducks, and chickens, and made like ch like ch quucks, like quail chickens, quail ducks, like chuck, chick chucks, like mixtures where they took they took the the they injected duck uh like duck d DNA into like a quail egg or quail and they have pictures of these kind of insane uh chimerical like uh bird creations. So if you want to see some crazy freaking birds, go look up that article. But anyway. Um but uh I looked up and there is in fact a big difference. It took me a while to find it, but there is uh a difference in the proteins that are available in different eggs.
Uh no one I think has done the study of how it uh affects cooking yet, because I wasn't able to find that. But the kind of holy grail of articles on this subject is from 2005. Uh uh Martha Miguel uh has the article called Comparative Study of Egg White Proteins from Different Species by chromatographic and electrophoretic methods. Uh and they tested hen, quail, duck, pheasant, and ostrich. And they showed that uh they all have uh the protein content in them ranges from 71 to 82 percent.
Um ostrich uh having actually the lowest protein concentration, uh, which is lower than 71%, and the highest is in quail and duck. Uh but then they go on to talk about the various differences, but they don't really say how it affects cooking. So I can't really go into it there. But if you want to look at the specific protein differences between them, look up that study, the comparative study of egg white proteins from different species by chromatographic and electrophretic methods. Yeah?
Mm-hmm. Ganoog? Mm-hmm. Done? All right.
Okay. Uh Colin writes in, Colin, longtime listener uh and writer in of things. Uh I just snagged a rotor stator homogenizer off of eBay for a song. Uh yes, and after bleaching out the prions, which by the way, prions, uh, so a rotor stator homogenizer, have we talked about this on the show? I feel like you did.
Yeah. You did. A little bit? Anyway. Uh basically what it is is uh imagine uh a blender when you're s when you're blending something, right?
The blades hitting the uh hitting the product are what breaks apart your uh your part your food. So how small a particle that you can make is basically dependent on how fast the blade uh hits a particle or the relative speed between a particle and the blade hitting it, right? So obviously faster blenders uh with faster tip speeds make for smaller particles. But the stuff moves around in a blender, right? So you're not getting because the particles are moving and because they can move out of the way of the blades, you're limited in kind of how much energy you can smash into it and how small a particle you can make.
In a rotor stator homogenizer, right, it's the equivalent of uh putting the particle up against a wall and then because it's got a stationary part, and then the other the other part that's the so the stator is standing still, the rotor is spinning, bam, goes right next to it, and there's such a small clearance that it just obliterates the particles. So if you if you're gonna turn it into a fighting analogy, it's the difference between punching someone in the face and putting their head on the curb and stomping on it. In terms of the amount of what? I'm trying to give someone an analogy that they can like quickly understand in terms of force involved. And so that's the kind of force difference that we're talking about uh in a wreck in a rotor stator homogenizer versus a standard uh blender.
Now uh oh, I didn't finish this question. Uh okay, so he bought one of these suckers uh and he set to work creating an aeoli with a stiff whippy texture of uh egg white of egg emulsified iolis, but using only gall uh garlic, olive oil, and salt. Uh it's always proved impossible with a blender, mortar, and pestle. It just turns to soupy goo, which he doesn't enjoy. I like soupy goose sometimes.
You like a soupy goo? Mm-hmm. Yeah, Nastasha likes a soupy goo. Unlike biscuits, which I someone commented on, but I gotta find it. Okay.
Um Did we ever follow up with the biscuits? Oh, Nastasha, in fact, did not like the biscuits even here. I had two different styles of biscuits here, right? Or no, they made one style for me here, and they were quite good. They were a good biscuit.
They're they're inner I would call I would call uh Roberta's biscuits intermediate flaky, right? Would you call it with that? Yeah, I would agree. Yeah, intermediate flaky. Roberta's by the way, have we talked about their review on the New York Times?
No. Roberta got a stellar two-star review that basically said the food deserves uh three stars, but it's kind of like a homey atmosphere because of all the hipsters. So they got like a two-star review. Is that pretty accurate, Jack? They said the uh tasting menu deserved three stars, the regular menu is two stars, and the pizza and beer was one, so that's six by my count.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. By the way, one star, by the way, it doesn't mean that the pizza is bad, it just means it's like kind of it's pe it's pizza, it's delicious pizza, it's good pizza. It's not trying to downrate the pizza, right? So, anyway, very good review. And uh I don't think we said it, but congratulations.
We're gonna chink our glasses here. Congrat congratulations to uh Robert's and the whole team here. Uh well, I've been talking so much, I can't drink, I can only drink during the break. There, I just drank on air. Are you happy?
Okay. Oh, Bourdain's gonna love us. Okay. Um see you made me forget what the heck I was talking about. I was reading Colin's question.
Um, so he bought this rotor stator homogenizer and he's making some ioli with it. The problem was, because I gotta find his his thing here on my iPad. The problem with it was it turned green. Um and I believe we've talked about garlic uh turning green green before. Harold McGee uh wrote uh an article on it, and basically what happens is is that if you slice garlic, it's very rarely gonna turn green, or whole garlic will turn very rarely turn green unless it's cooked under very low temperatures or pickled in very specific things.
But when you puree it um as in a and a rotor stator homogenizer is gonna puree the heck out of it, right? There's an enzymatic process that goes on uh whereby you create these c uh colorless precursors that then over time or under certain cooking regimes or in certain uh pH regimes, it's acidic, go uh green. And is there any in he wants to know what causes it to go green? I just said so. Uh and uh I you know, and there's there's an article I forgot to write it down, but if you go on the on the uh on the internet, you can look up uh the the article on it.
Uh most of the research came out in the early 2000s on uh what was going on, and it's it's basically a three like a two or three-step process, enzymes and then those things interconverting later. Uh the question is is there a way to prevent this color change other than by cooking? Uh you well, no, because he wants to maintain like the flavor, he wants to retain Colin wants to retain the flavor of a fresh uncooked garlic, but he wants uh it to not turn green. Yeah, I don't think it's gonna happen. Here's what I suggest.
Uh especially because with a rotor stator, you're making such fine particle size that you're really just getting all of that stuff together. So if if ever there was a way to make something turn green, like that's the that's the way to do it. Um I don't think there's a way to to to do it, to change it. Maybe if you put it maybe extremely basic, because if acidic conditions help it, maybe basic conditions stop it. But uh again, I'm just talking right out of my uh nether regions here.
I have no idea. I have no idea. Uh I would I would do this. I would say add another flavor, let's say a green herb, blanch the green herb so it's not gonna turn brown, and then like if it has some parsley in it, then it's supposed to be green, then no one's gonna balk, right? Right.
Right? Right. Right? Okay. Uh uh I'll try and think more about that, and I'll talk to McGee because McGee, who wrote the article on it in the New York Times, is um, you know, he you know he knows a lot about that.
He's probably thought about it more than I have. The other question Colin had was uh, what is it in garlic that acts as an emulsifier? I did a quick search on this and wasn't able to find anything that specifically acts as an emulsifier. However, uh garlics do have a category of compound in them called saponins. And saponins are uh they're plant-based materials that have all kinds of different effects, but that one of them is that they're uh surfactants and they can act as emulsif emultifiers.
They're they're basically they have both a hydrophobic and a hydrophilic component on them, so they can emulsify things. So this is a straight up guess. Oh, here's here's uh here's crapopedia's definition. Uh saponins, glycosides, widely distributed in the plant kingdom, include a diverse group of components characterized by their structure containing a steroidal or uh triterpenoid uh a glycone in one or more sugar chains. Thank you, Wikipedia.
Uh anyway, uh they're in garlic and uh they can cause foaming and uh emulsification. So I'm gonna go ahead and make the straight-up guess that that is uh what's causing it. Colin also wants to know: is there any other uh good uses for the rotor state or homogenizer? Because Nathan Miravold says it's one of his favorite things that he uh has in the kitchen. Okay.
All right. Here's some things. Uh and he he calls out our uh our oyster feeding thing that uh I did back on the blog years and years ago. The oyster feeding thing is oysters die if or they their their gills clog up and they die if you try to feed them particle sizes much larger than about 10 microns, right, in size. And a vita prep blender can only really get down to about uh 20 microns or a little greater than 20 microns in size.
And so uh if you just use a blender, uh you're gonna choke out the uh the oysters if you're making something like a like a juice or something. So I basically put uh put all the juice through a rotor stator homogenizer to get the particle size small enough so I wouldn't choke out the oysters, right? Uh another use is is that the finer you emulsify something the the whiter it's gonna get and also the more stable it's gonna be. So you can use a rotor stator homogenizer to uh make a category of things that I guess Mirvold, and it makes sense because I you know I've made these things before too, called milks, where you take a small amount of fat and you'll emulsify it into a liquid in kind of the ratios that you would have in milk. So roughly like four percent fat, let's say, into uh uh into a broth, but you can do it with something like duck stock and duck fat to make duck milk, right?
That's another application for the rotor stator homogenizer. Anytime you have something that's going to uh settle out over time, you're gonna be able to make a more stable emulsion using a rotor stator homogenizer. That said, uh you can stabilize stuff with emulsifiers that we use every day, like the Arabic Xanthan mixture that we use for everything. You can stabilize pretty dang well without without using hardly anything better than a stick blender, you know, uh an immersion blender. But the flavor is gonna change somewhat based on the uh ultimate particle size.
And I believe we talked about this when Miravold was on the show a couple weeks ago, right? A little bit, because Mirvold does does like that. Um I have not done too much cool business. What did I bust that out for recently? I had to bust it out what the heck were we doing?
Oh, oh. So Tony Kanoyara, one of our good friends, uh, the uh proprietor of 69 Colbrook Row, our favorite bar in London, uses a rotor stator homogenizer to homogenize lime juice and says that it improves the flavor because he's keeping the particles in there. Also uh improves supposedly it's emulsifying ability, right? Because you're keeping all the particles in uh all the stuff in there instead of straining it out. Uh also increases his yield because he's not getting rid of that stuff that he's strained out.
Nastasha and I did some triangle tests at the Pegu Club. I haven't written it up on the blog yet. We weren't a triangle test, is when we make three things, two of which are the same and one of which are different, and we you know do the old Sesame Street, one of these kids is doing his own thing, and you try to figure out which one is different. It's a triangle test. I haven't written about it, even though we did it months ago.
Just come to jerk, I just haven't had time to write it up yet. But um we weren't able in triangle tests to distinguish them, although I'm a little bit dubious of the straight triangle test because I didn't t tell people what they were looking for, like what kind of different flavors and nuances they might be looking for, but it it might make a difference in the lime juice itself, but it's hard to tell in the drink whether that helps. But you can experiment with doing rotor stator on juices to put the pulp in and make them a little bit um a little bit, you know, different. So you can give that a try. Uh okay.
Michael Natkin writes in from Herbivoracious, which is his blog, and he says, Hey Nastasha, because he doesn't like me, so he doesn't ask me, he just wants to talk to you. Uh hey Nastasha, I've been working on how to make the most Umami packed vegetable broth possible, using a lot of ideas from both cooking issues and modernist cuisine. Uh, would you would you pass this link on to Dave? I'd love to hear any comments or suggestions he has, either by email or on the air. Well, here you are on the air.
Okay. So uh he writes uh in his blog, I looked up some stuff. Uh I'll just mention some of them. So he quotes this thing, and I've heard it before, of Heston Blumenthal saying that there's some research that Star Anis, when cooked with sulfur compounds present in onions and other alliums, released a host of new flavor chemicals that enhance umami flavors. Alright, I've heard this a couple of times, Michael.
I've not seen the research. I would love for someone to send me in the research because I wasn't able to find it and I don't know about it, although I have heard it. So please uh please send that in. So Michael further writes, uh, because he wants me to comment on it on his recipe here. Uh the vegetarian ingredients, this is Michael writing, uh, best known for high concentration of glutamates or tomatoes, dried shiitake mushrooms, marmeat, combu seaweed, and parmesan cheese.
He included the first four but omitted the parmesan because he wants to keep it vegan, uh, you know, because you know that way it's more all purpose. You know what I mean? More all purpose vegan. Uh the challenge was to find a balance for these ingredients that wouldn't allow anyone to dominate. I didn't want to taste it and say, wow, nice mushroom broth or mmm dashi.
Now, this is a huge problem, actually. Because anytime you boost uh glutamate levels to a very high level, uh, or glutamate IMP levels to a high level, you get uh a dashi like flavor. So Nastasha and I were tasting the foods of a major uh food manufacturer who was trying to re decrease the amount of sodium that they were using in their products. And the way that they uh increased uh the the palatability of these things, but at the same time decreasing the sodium, was to add potassium uh monophosphate. Uh sorry, uh potassium uh glutamate to it, right?
Uh and instead of uh instead of uh sodium uh MSG, monosodium glutamate, you add monopotassium glutamate, and you aren't adding the sodium, but you're adding the glutamate, which is the thing that's increasing the umami, right? So you can make stuff that people think is okay, even though it has less salt in it. I have two problems with this. One, salt, there's no problem with it, unless you are a very specific person that has hypertensive as a result of salt, you can have salt. Our great grandpappies and grandmammies ate so much salt that it would put us to shame because they had to preserve so many more foods than we had to because they didn't have refrigeration, right?
I have done detailed reading of as much salt literature as possible on the on the supposed deleterious effects of salt on our health. And as far as I can tell by my careful, careful, careful reading of it, they are bunk, right? They are crap. So like I I and I've had discussions with this with many scientists, and I have yet to find someone uh who has been able, and and I'm not saying I'm not a scientist, I'm just reading the stuff that's there, and by through careful reading of it, you can see that most of this information is complete bunk. Um but hey, call me and call me out on it.
Tell me I'm a jerk, but uh I'm pretty sure that uh stand okay as far as the literature is concerned. I'm not saying it's true or false, I'm saying with the literature what the literature is, and most of it's crap. Okay, so uh uh don't reduce the salt. But the other problem is that um when they do that, when they reduce the sodium and increase basically the umami by jacking up uh glutamate levels, everything tastes like dashi. So you'll have a fettuccine alfredo that tastes like dashi.
Now it's not necessarily bad. I mean, I love dashi, right? But uh, you know, I wouldn't uh you know, I don't want my fettuccine alfredo to taste like dashi, do you? No. And and and the other problem with this kind of technology, this technique of of uh reducing salt and increasing glutamate levels and things, is that everything just tastes the freaking same.
It all tastes the freaking same, like some sort of weird dashi. It's just a huge I hope, I sincerely hope that people get off this kick of trying to reduce uh salt across the board and just focus on how things taste. The reason they don't is because there's a bunch of wingdings out there who not only they think that you that people add salt to processed foods to somehow make them, I don't know, more addictive or to preserve them. People add salt to processed foods because salt makes the stuff taste better. You know what I mean?
And what happens when you when someone doesn't add enough salt to a food and you eat it, you dump freaking salt on it anyway. You know what I mean? Um I'm not gonna get into like the the thing is cooking issues position, insofar as cooking issues position is Dave Arnold's position, which I guess it is. Uh you salt to make the stuff taste good. There are situations where we salt for safety, like when we're preserving meats or or other reasons, but uh you know, when you're trying to get a bind and a sausage, salt is adding a functional thing, or salt and bread is not only taste, it's also but um you salt to make stuff taste good.
So if you don't like the tasted salt, go ahead and don't salt it. But if you like the taste, which means that you're almost all of us, salt in normal in normal amounts. Okay. Um so yes, you Michael, you do not want to make a broth that tastes uh like dashi unless you're shooting for a dashi. Okay, so his method is using a pressure cooker because uh a lot of us advocate pressure cooked stocks.
Uh so he put he uh takes a pressure cooker uh and he cooks the stuff um, including the onions and the combu and all of the other ingredients. Now I'm gonna say this. Here's my here's my uh critique of of the recipe uh insofar as it stands, uh, because he's pressure cooking everything. One, the flavor of onions is gonna be increased in sweetness but decreased in uh onion flavor by pressure cooking. So if you really want to onion up the thing and have more of a traditional onion taste, I would saute uh some onions while you're pressure cooking.
I would pressure cook the onions as well because that's delicious. But I would saute some of the onions and I would put them into the um I would put them into the broth after you pressure cook it for a couple of minutes to let some of the fresher onion flavor marry just to increase or radically increase the amount of onion that you add to your broth so it has more of a more of a direct onion profile. The second thing is um I'd be a little cautious in pressure cooking the combu. If you like the flavor of the combu pressure cooked, go ahead. I haven't done a lot of research on pressure cooking combo.
But uh combu in general, uh they tend not to like it boiled, so I would do a pre-steep of the combu in kind of uh I would do 60, uh 60 to 70 degrees Celsius water, and then remove the combu before going on to the pressure cook step. Uh I haven't, you know, done a lot of you know experiments on pressure cooking combu, but in general, that's been my experience that the higher cooked combu is, the less I like the flavor of it. Um, although I haven't done it in conjunction with all of those other ingredients, so I I don't know. I don't know exactly how it works. But anyway, those are my basic critiques on the stock.
Alright, so Nastash is telling me that we are running out of time, but I have one more question that I will get to, but I'm unfortunately gonna have to do it very quickly. Curtis writes in on ramen. I've recently been on the hunt. Good afternoon, Dave. Uh I've been uh on the hunt for recipes and tips for making Japanese ramen from scratch, both noodles and broth.
I'm having trouble finding English language resources for both the noodle and the broth, but the noodles are a bigger problem. There isn't much out there showing how the noodles are made. I've heard you can hand pull ramen noodles or you can send them through a pasta machine or even slice them with the night knife. Yet I've also heard that the dough is very dry and difficult to come together. How could you hand pull a dough of this consistency?
I also know the noodles require a product called Kansui or a mixture of potassium carbonate and sodium bicarbonate mixture. Is there any way to make this cant sue uh as it's difficult to find? Okay, you can get cansway or potassium carbonate bicarbonate at most Asian grocery stores if they're larger stocked, right? Because they have this stuff. It's basically just a base.
If you don't have that, you can use uh baking soda or you can bake out baking soda in the oven to make sodium carbonate, which McGee talks about. Uh and the base in um in it with does two things. One, it makes the noodles yellow. So you should search for yellow alkaline noodles, Y-A-N, on the web, and it'll give you a lot of information and resources on cansway and how it's used. Other than just turning the noodles yellow, it also uh makes the gluten stronger uh because in basic conditions gluten is stronger, and in acidic conditions, gluten is weaker.
This is why sourdough breads are slack, right? And uh and the yellow alkaline noodles are very toothy and have a lot of bite because you're shifting the pH. So there's two main functions. It increases the bite of the noodle by increasing the pH, and it also turns them yellow uh by the way it affects uh wheat protein. Certain wheats turn more yellow than others.
So those are the two main functions of can sue. You can substitute any base you want. They do add base to hand pulled noodles a little bit, and I don't know why. The whole way, and I've had this argument with many people, including Dave Chang, who was interested in doing hand-pulled noodles uh at the same time who's interested in doing ramen. Uh, hand-pulled noodles are all about kneading for such a long time that you obliterate the gluten.
You obliterate its ability to uh basically be snappy because you need it to pull without snapping. Gluten, you pull it and it forms that sheet, that window, but it does have a bit of a short texture, it'll pull apart. So uh I don't know why you would uh I don't know why the addition of cansway is written in all the recipes. It must have something where you develop the gluten more quickly with the cansway, and then it breaks apart when you hand pull them. But as far as I can tell, and someone call me in and tell me I'm a jerk, but uh can sway um ramen is not a hand pulled uh situation.
Hand pulled noodles don't have the bite of a ramen noodle. Hand pulled noodles, I'm not gonna go so far as to say they're mushy, but they're definitely don't have the same tooth that a uh cansway uh you know yellow alkaline noodle is gonna have, which is all about the tooth and the bite. Now, as for ramen, the way it's typically made industrially is it's extruded through dyes into uh thin strips, it's then steamed, right? Uh and after it's steamed, it's fried. So the main characteristics of a of a noodle, no matter what shape you make them, ramen, you could make them in a pasta machine if you want them, or hand cut them.
If you want to know how to be a really baller hand cutter of noodles, go to a different technology, soba. Uh and when you're hand cutting noodles in soba, the whole trick with cutting soba, other than buying the really expensive, awesome soba knife, which looks insane, like an executioner's it looks like an executioner's ax axe with instead of a handle, you hold it at the top, is uh they put a board on top of the noodles exactly flat. You stick the knife down, and you never the the blade never leaves contact with the board. You angle the blade ever so slightly, which pushes the board over exactly one noodle length, and then with a width rather, and without removing the knife from the board, you pull up the blade, put it perpendicular and slice down and keep going. That's how you slice butt-kicking hand hand butt kicking hand uh cut soba noodles.
You could do the same with a yellow alkaline noodle, but I don't think it's very traditional. You could also put it through a pasta machine. Um but the key thing is steam, then fry to finish the dehydration out, and there you have ramen. Uh uh, if you need more information or if you want a specific thing, I can look more into it for you, but that's the way she goes. And this has been the fifty third episode of Cooking Issues.
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