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Go to Rackiton.com or get the app. That's R A K-U-T-E-N. Broadcasting live from Robertas in Bushwick, Brooklyn. You're listening to Heritage Radio Network.com. I'm Sam Edwards.
I'm third generation CureMaster from S. Wallace Edwards and Sons in Surrey, Virginia. We support the Heritage Radio Network because we believe in the cause and what they're doing. They're supporting family raised uh livestock, small family farms, uh certified humane, pasture raised, antibiotic free. Basically, we take the products from Heritage Food USA and make them into uh Serrano style hands, prosciutto style hands, bacon, sausage like my grandfather did.
You can find us at SurreyFarms.com or Virginia Traditions.com. Ah, Joe Pepper. Ah, buggy. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live on the Heritage Radio Network every Tuesday from 12 to 1245 approximately in the studio today in Bushwick with Nastasha the Hammer Lopez, who's looking up some last minute questions that you guys have sent in.
How are you doing, Nastasha? I'm fine. It's a c yeah, right, you sound really fine. I'm fine. Anyway, it's a crappy day out here in Bushwick, and I had a crappy bike ride, but I won't talk about it.
I won't bore you with it. Uh call in all of your questions to 718 497 2128. That's 718497-2128 for all of your questions. Cooking or not really, uh tech or not. Any questions, we'll take 'em.
Anyway, first question in on the email is from Mike Anonymous. Oh shoot. I should talk about uh today's sponsor. Today's sponsor uh is the same sponsor as last week, which is the Modernist Pantry. I'll read their little blurb uh because I'm obliged, and then I'm gonna talk about it a little bit.
Um whether you're looking for hydrocolloids, pH modifiers, or even meat glue, you'll find it at Modernist Pantry. And if you need something that they don't carry, just ask. 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 oh, uh by the way.
So this is last week we ran a promotion, and so rather than read the little same blurb because it's the same thing as that. I'm gonna give a follow-up. Uh Chris wrote in to us and said, We got a good response from last week's show. Uh he says we have a group of avid fans from around the world following us. That's very gratifying, right, Nastasha?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, she's she doesn't care. She's doing something else. Uh, since a bunch of people didn't hear the podcast in time to take advantage of the free meat glue, Modernist Pantry is gonna run the special again this week and leave it opening until leave it open until next week's show.
So all of you that call in for this entire week until next Tuesday's podcast can get uh the free sample of meat glue from Modernist Pantry. And the code that you need to enter, the promo code is CI, as in cooking issues, 54. That's CI 54. Uh and please let uh let them know that you uh oh also tell them, you know, obviously they know that you listen to the show if you put in CI 54. Tell your buddies too.
It's gonna make it seem like we have a lot of listeners. Um, in addition, we mentioned last week we were hoping that they were gonna be able to get Pectanex SPL, which is the miracle enzyme that we use for almost everything. We use it for clarification, either with or without a centrifuge. Although it really only clarifies uh thinner juices like apple juice without a centrifuge. Uh we use it for French fries, make them really crispy, and we use it for uh auto-suppremming citrus and things like that.
Uh they're gonna be carrying that uh in a week or so. They don't have a pre-order page yet up, but keep your eyes peeled because they're gonna start carrying it, which is really great because we hate uh carrying that stuff, right, Nastasha? Yeah, we do. You can still get it uh for the current time being through uh through the FCI through the French Culinary contact uh Airvay Malavare, but I'm looking forward to a worldwide supply in small quantities from Chris Anderson at the Modernist Pantry. So thanks, guys, and make sure to go to www.modernpantry.com, modernist pantry.com, and type in cooking issues, CI 54.
54? Yes. 54 for your free meat glue sample. Anyway, uh first question in is from Mike Anonymous. We've gotten stuff from Mike Anonymous before, right?
Yes. It's a good name. Wouldn't it be awesome if that was his actual name, Mike Anonymous? That would suck growing up, right? No, that's my name.
Anyway, okay. Uh Mike says, I would like to hear your thoughts on what new technologies we can expect to find in the home kitchen in the near future. I'm particularly interested in your thoughts on induction burners as I hope to update my stove in the near future. Sincerely, Mike Anonymous. Okay, interesting question.
I get this question actually quite a bit. Uh I'm, you know, for a living, I'm mainly concerned with what goes on in restaurant kitchens, but I also am interested in what's going on in home kitchens. Here's what I think. Here's what here's what I think. Regarding induction burners, they're awesome.
Uh they are really, really awesome. They had there's a number of problems with induction burners that have stopped them from becoming kind of uh, you know, set from saturating the market. If you currently own an electric stove, if you don't have gas, the very next thing you should do after listening to this podcast is go home, tear out your electric range, whether it be a ceramic top or you know, one of those little curly, curly resistance heater jobs, tear it out of the wall and throw it away and buy an induction unit. Right now. I mean, like before you do anything else, because if you're already running electric for your range, you have no excuse.
Electric is expensive. It uh it's very inefficient compared to an induction burner, and it heats up your kitchen, and it also takes a long time to heat up and cool down. It has a weird porpoise effect. I detest cooking with normal uh electric ranges. And if you've never used an induction burner before, they're kind of miraculous.
They um they heat up almost instantly and they cool off almost instantly. Uh and you know, everyone's like, me, well, maybe my pots won't work. Me, me, me. You can buy a little slug of iron, uh Kuhn Recon sells one, for instance, that you could put right on top of an induction burner and turn any pot, a clay pot, an aluminum pot, whatever, into an induction friendly pot. And uh, if you factor in the cost of uh a range and the kind of electrical savings and the fact that you won't be air conditioned in your house to make up for the fact that you're dumping all the extra heat into the house, um, it really saves money in the long run, even if you have to get rid of a few pots and pans.
So if you're already electric, please go get an induction right now. If you run gas, there's a couple of problems with induction. One, we are kind of the Saudi Arabia of natural gas. We have natural gas leaking out of our pipelines. Like we have so much natural gas that you know your local utility can't even tell if there's an appreciable amount leaking just because it's dribbling everywhere.
It's preposterously cheap natural gas in this country. If you live outside of this country in Europe, for instance, or I don't know what the situation is elsewhere where natural gas is a lot more expensive and electric is more competitive from a from a uh you know, from an energy standpoint, energy uses standpoint, also you should move to induction right away. In the US, um gas is so cheap uh that it's kind of hard from an economic standpoint to make the jump right away. Now, induction is faster, as fast as gas. Let's put it that way.
Uh, and in some cases, faster, because you're directly heating the uh the pot instead of having gas heat the pot. Um, it's incredibly more efficient than gas. So for a smaller amount of energy usage, you're getting uh a lot more heat on the pot. So we we have a standard kind of commercial style uh range in our amphitheater at school, and we put uh like kind of a standard home induction unit next to uh the commercial range, and the home induction unit boils water faster than the range does. So you really can't compare BTUs of gas output to how many watts are going into your induction burner.
You need to compare how fast they boil water. And a decent sized induction burner is usually faster than a decent sized gas burner, and typically doesn't heat up your house a lot. So it's fantastic that way. But it has a disadvantage that gas is a lot cheaper. Also, people aren't used to using an induction burner and they can't see kind of how much power they're putting into it, so there's a little bit of a learning curve.
And the other problem is inductions are a lot more fragile. A gas unit is never going to break. And you might have to remount the gas jets or whatever, but basically that sucker is going to work from now until your kids are old. Do you know what I mean? And so those are the two main things.
But I really, really like induction. Was that call for us? No. Just a random call. You forgot to turn off your phone?
Yeah. Really? All right. In terms of other things that are uh good for uh home kitchen, I sincerely hope that um sous vide is going to become more popular, actually, low temperature cooking. I can't believe I made that mistake of all people.
Uh low temperature cooking is going to be more important. And I'm hoping that a lot of people have circulators. I'm hoping circulators, immersion circulators come down in price simply because when you throw a party, they make you look like a complete rock star because you don't have to spend a lot of time in a kitchen while your guests are there. The food comes out always perfect, always good. I love them.
I use them all the time. I used one last night, I used one this weekend. At home, I'm talking. I use my circulator all the time. For reheating, also, it's very good because it's not going to ruin your food on a reheat.
The problem with it is not only the $800 price tag. The uh problem is that you know, there's not that many cookbooks and sources out there. I mean, our blog, I'm supposed to write more on this subject, but it's not as many recipes out there as there could be, and not as much knowledge as there could be. And part of the problem is that it's hard to get a major publisher to put out kind of a simpler book because not that many people have the unit yet. It's kind of a catch 22.
So you know, you don't want to come out with a book that then requires you to buy an 800 piece of dollar piece of equipment to own the book, and you know, so it's one of these like chicken egg problems. Uh, but you know, I think there's enough information there on the internet, enough early adopters and people who are willing to experiment that within 10 years you're gonna see circulators drop in price again and also become a lot more common in home kitchens because they're really good in home kitchens for the same reason they're good in a restaurant kitchen. You're gonna mess up your food less often, you're gonna have more control, delicious results, uh without a lot of time when you wanna be eating with your family. So I think that's gonna be uh a huge thing. As for other innovations in the in the home, I mean, I don't know.
I mean, I hope that our refrigerators and freezers get better, right? Although, I have you know, for those of you that have never been in a professional kitchen before, commercial fridges and freezers typically, there's a couple exceptions. Like I like the guys at Randall's, they're the worst. They break all the time, they're loud and they're completely inefficient. So home fridges and freezers are actually uh already quite good compared to commercial ones, but I think they have a long way to go.
I'm hoping more people have really butt-kicking blenders in their house, which we're gonna talk more about blenders in a minute. Anything else you can think of that we usually harp on, Nastasha? No, I think you covered it. Yeah? Yeah, nothing else.
I mean, I really you know, you guys like in the home, no one's gonna go. I mean, look, should should you get liquid nitrogen if you have uh a lot of parties in an outdoor space? I mean, yeah, I mean, you need to follow the safety rules. But I like liquid nitrogen a lot. Do I think it's gonna be in everybody's house?
No. Uh everyone who drinks seltzer should have a professional carbonation rig right now. Like if look, if let me put it this way: if you carry more than one case of seltzer home a week, you should get a professional seltzer rig or at least one of those soda streams tomorrow. First do the induction. After you get the induction squared away, tomorrow go out and get the uh carbonation rig.
I'm trying to think of what else I have. Most people aren't gonna get commercial units, uh uh you know, restaurant units in their home like I have. Most people aren't gonna get a large deep fryer at home, although I love mine, I have a 35-pound deep fryer and a fry like a mammogramma much better than a home fryer, but I don't think people are gonna get that. I don't think most people are gonna get the $400 blender, although I advocate it, right? Um in the future, there might be a one-stop machine that can be a really good rice cooker and a pressure cooker.
That might be good. Save some countertop space. But you know, people aren't gonna get freeze dryers and homogenizers and all that stuff at home just because there's not as many applications. There's not a um, they don't warrant the counter space and the time uh and you know the energy involved. You know what I mean?
Yes. Yes, now my iPad turned off, so I have to go find the next question. Uh okay. Well, I do have a question on blenders. Should I take the question on blenders or should we go to the first commercial break, you think?
I'll take the question on blenders, and if I have to run long, I'll run long. Okay. So uh a big hello from James in Australia to the entire cooking issues team. And by the way, James wrote in a question and then answered the question and then asked a separate question. So I'm just gonna go over the question.
We'll see how see how it works out. James is after a new blender, but down in Australia, Vitapeps, which are the blenders that we use up here in New York and all of the US, really. Vitapeps are insanely expensive, like more than 1,200 bucks, uh, which is slightly less than the uh polyscience uh immersion circulators cost over there. And um there is no secondhand market, which there really isn't. People don't tend to give up their Vitapeps unless they're dead, unless they're broken.
Um a home style model is uh a Vitapep because Vitapep makes a home version and a and a commercial version. You know what the difference is? Almost nothing except the warranty. They give you a crappier warranty on the commercial unit because they know that you're gonna beat the ever-loving crap out of it. Anyway, uh the home unit is just under $1,000.
My other options are a home grade uh blend Tech, which is another good blender, uh, that comes in around $800. But there's a locally made option, a Breville, that's about $250, which is also available in the U.S. It's $2,000 watts, 500 watts more powerful than the Blend Tech and the Consumer Vitamixes. And so the question is basically and it's the hemisphere model of Breville. I'm gonna have a lot to say about this.
And then he basically. So he comes up with another one later called a uh Samic. Uh is that what it called? You gotta find it for me, Nastasha. It's called a C Mac, which is from Australia, C Mac Blender, which looks like a really professional kind of butt-kicking unit, which is I think what he's gonna go after.
And his question is basically what's the difference between all these blenders? What the hell is the deal with blenders anyway? How to choose a blender, etc., etc., etc. Okay. So the reason we like Vitapeps in this country is twofold.
One, uh they are strong, they're very powerful, especially the new Vitapep 3s, and they have an even more monster one that's that's very very powerful. You can't go on wattage rating alone. The wattage is kind of a BS unit, uh, a B a BS unit of measure of how that's basically just saying how much energy is it sucking out of the wall. If you put uh you know, a thousand watt light bulb on uh on a wire and then attached a 200 watt motor to it and hooked that up to a blender, you know what you have there? A 1200 watt blender, even though you're throwing away a thousand watts of that as light and heat.
You get what I'm saying? So don't take the wattage as the as the rating. What you really care about is how much power is the blender delivering to your food. Um, and you know, that basically translates into how fast is the tip of the blade moving relative to the food that you're blending. And we talked a little bit about this last week when we were talking about rotor state or homogenizers, and they put so much more energy into your food because they can uh stop your food from moving so that you can smack it with a moving blade, right?
So we talked a little bit about why a rotor state or homogenizer for a given amount of uh wattage energy you're putting into it can deliver more uh shearing power onto onto your food. So don't go directly on um, don't go directly on the wattage. What you have to figure out is what the speed of the blade is going to be under load, right? That's really the important thing. And Vitapep does very, very well at that.
Uh blend tech does very, very well at that as well, which is another unit you can get in the US. It actually has a slightly wider blade than most Vitapeps, and I think it's a better tip speed, so theoretically gets a better uh better product. But here's where Vitapep really wins uh over all other blenders in the US that I've used so far, and that is the user interface. If you're making smoothies all day, right, you want to press a button and you want to have that smoothie just get made, and it's gonna go through a bunch of profiles to make sure that thing gets blended properly, and you don't want to have to scoop and mix around with all kinds of things. Um, blend techs are great at that because they're designed for juice bars, and that's why they have a lock on a lot of the juice bar market in the US, because any monkey can throw a bunch of bananas into a blend tech along with some protein powder and a bunch of other crap, press a button and walk away, and you get a smoothie that's smooth that doesn't have a lot of chunks and particles in it, right?
Vitapeps, on the other hand, typically they used to have a kind of a bad uh blender pitcher style that required you to use a tamper to kind of move things around, otherwise it tends to choke up at the base, right? Uh and which is kind of unfortunate. Um, the benefit of that choked up base on a blender at the bottom of a Vitaprep that people don't talk about is that you can get a smaller amount of liquid to blend properly in a Vitapep than you can in the equivalent blend Tech because you have to fill the blend Tech up above the blade level before it starts blending properly, and it's a much wider area down there than it is in the Vitapep. But that said, if you're gonna blend a whole bunch, the Vita uh the Blend Tech has a better geometry at the bottom of its uh uh the bottom of its picture to get the stuff going. Vitapep has a new uh pitcher that is that has a similar geometry.
Anyway, that's you know a little bit here or there. But where the Vitapep really wins is on that interface. It's got two flap switches and a knob. When you're a cook, you don't wanna have to have your boss come in and program I'm gonna make a pesto into your freaking blender. You wanna have a switch so that you can ring and then go in high and spin it high when you're going.
That's what you really want. And Vitapep is the best at giving you immediate feedback with uh you know a potentiometer knob that tells you uh you know that lets you set exactly how fast you want it to be at this minute. Flip it between high and low with big old-style goofy paddle switches with very minimal electronics, right? And that's really where the Vita prep is awesome. Even though that uh that little potentiometer thing goes crappy a lot, and you have to replace them after a couple of years, they start getting all wonky on you, and then you'll turn it on and it'll bring without you turning it.
Everybody hates that, and you'll eventually spray stuff all over your ceiling. The user interface is so good that people love it. And this is why, and I called the guys at Blentec, frankly, uh maybe five years ago, four years ago, and I was like, look, you have an awesome piece of equipment, your user interface sucks. What you need to do is build a unit for chefs that just has a knob and a and you know, and two buttons like the Vitaprep has. And they said, Yeah, but this really gives control to I was like, listen, shut up.
I'm telling you, a cook wants two flip switches and a knob to change the speed. So anyway, uh the C Mac unit looks very good. Uh it is also completely electronically controlled, so I'm sure it does really well in the juice market. You know, uh James said that he's, you know, he said that basically all of the reviews he gets off of are raw on vegan like websites and kind of you know impugns their their taste a little bit because they've already made such a poor life choice and being a raw vegan, does his words not mine. Uh and while that might be true, James, they are like raw vegan people know a boatload about juicing because they have a whole subculture that basically turns everything they eat into a liquid and drinks their food in liquid form.
So whether or not you agree with their life choices, they know from juicing and blending. And the Australian website that uh he sent me to, which is uh uh battle of the blenders pumpkin, if you want to look it up on the uh on the internets and the YouTube. And the Australian dude in that actually has a really nice term for instead of high speed blenders, he calls them power blenders, which I really like because it makes it makes it seem like your blender is a puny blender, unless it's a power blender, right? So he re has this one, this Australian one called C Mac. And if there's anyone in Australia, I would love to try a C Mac.
Like, I don't know if I ever get to Australia or if anyone ever wants to send one to us, I'd love to try it. It basically electronically senses uh whether or not you're blending properly and adjusts the speed automatically. And while that sounds great, I still want the control. I want the flap doodle and the control. So I'd love to be able to have that electronic BS, but I'd love to also be able to shoot it in the head and be able to run my blender like a normal blender.
The other one, uh also from down under, but available here that he mentions, is Breville. Breville makes a good quality blender. I'll tell you a little story about this. I was doing a demo with Chris Young in Florida for the Miami uh food and what's it called? South Beach Food and Winefest.
South Beach Food and Winefest with Chris Young from the Myers Cuisine. And this lady, we were we were fluffing, we were f you know, fluffing for uh a bunch of food network stars like Giata and stuff. This little kid comes up and he's like, he they she raises her hand. I think she's got a question from me or for Chris. We're like, yes, little girl, what's going on?
She's saying, I made this pasta necklace for Giada. And I'm like, oh geez. And then so I so I had to save the pasta necklace. And I mean, I I couldn't tell the kid, listen, I've never met Giotta, and they're gonna hustle my butt out of here and like you know, basically flush me down the toilet before they bring Giotto on with her entourage. But I was like, look, kid, I'll leave the pasta necklace around this thing, and I'm sure Giada will see it.
So hopefully Giada got her pasta necklace. Anyway, that's aside the point. Breville was sponsoring one of the things there, and they had the rep there, and they show me the blender pitcher, and she says to me, 'You can't break it. Go ahead, try to break it.' I said, Really? She's like, Yeah, and this lady had never met me before.
So I said, Okay, all right then. So I put it on the ground and I jumped up as high as I could and stomped on the blender like three and four times. Uh, and I was able to shave a portion of the blender off because it was on concrete. So I was able to shave a corner off of the blender pitcher, but the blender pitcher did in fact not break. So, one of their marketing claims is that the blender pitcher is very strong, and indeed it is.
Whether or not the blender itself it can get close to a vita prep, I don't know. I've seen some favorable reviews, but I've never actually blended with it because we didn't have the stuff on hand to uh blend. And those are my feelings on blending. Oh, by the way, one more thing. Do not read any any magazine out there, whether or not they're my friends, like popular mechanics, they're a friend of mine.
Uh, you know, I've worked with them. Um, you know, Cooks Illustrated, I'm fine with those guys. Never believe anyone's blender ratings. They don't know what the hell they're talking about. They give you stupid reasons to like or dislike a blender.
The only thing that matters is can it take can it take uh a sauce that you would have had to strain through a Tammy and make it so that it's silky, smooth and delicious? Can it get the particle size down below or close to about 20 microns so that you taste this stuff as being smooth? And very few blenders can do that. The blend tech can do it, the Vitaprep can do it. I'm assuming that this C Mac uh can do it.
I don't know if the Brevel can do it, but it's not whether or not it can make a margarita because in a kitchen that's not really the test we care about. It's can it make a sauce smooth? So we'll take a commercial break break, think about blenders, and we'll be back. Freaks fly together. All right, turn it up now.
Turn it up now. What up to the camping? She's always collapse. I just want to watch your dance. Alright.
Turn it up now. Turn it up now. Do you want to ride on the clouds and see? I'll be a mistress C O D. Cold the hell be that you'd say to me.
Or shell me on the honey beat. She can bring it to me. She can really do me. She can look back through me. And make all the baby boss screen.
And welcome back to Cooking Issues. Call all of your questions to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. That song goes out to Colin because uh Nastasha has broken some secret code in Colin's messages when he comes in that he likes that song. Is that true or false?
You know, Nastasha's good at those secret codes. But here is uh longtime listener Colin's questions. On the ultrasonic homogenizer, by the way, an ultrasonic homogenizer is something that vibrates uh very rapidly. It uses a piezo, uh like a pisotransducer, vibrate very rapidly. And uh you can use it for a couple of things.
One, you can make an ultrasonic fog with it, which is how humidifiers work. You can um you can clean jewelry with it by shaking with it. That's how an ultrasonic jewelry uh thing works. A homogenizer uses very focused, high power sonic energy to uh cavitate, make little bubbles, and actually rupture things. So that's what an ultrasonic homogenizer is.
I have one, and when you run them, people run screaming from the kitchen because they make horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible noise. Yeah? Horrible. Nustacha's nodding, yes. Okay.
Colin wants to know could one use an ultrasonic homogenizer such as a Branson uh or the new poly science sonic prep, which I'm sure is a relabeled Branson, uh, because not very many people make these things, uh, as a highly effective toothbrush. As the only rigid bodies in the mouth uh full of soft matter, the tooth uh as the only rigid bodies in a mouthful of soft matter, the two services would likely get the most cavitation action. You can safely immerse your hand into an ultrasonic bath, so I was wondering if the more sensitive skin on the mouth might fare as well. Obviously, you'd reduce the wattage, uh, so it acts more of uh of a cleaner than a dismembrator, which is something that takes the membranes off of cells, which is another thing they call them sonic dismembrators. Uh I would certainly work better than those tongue scrapers and would cavitate the bits, bits of mixed business from between uh one's teeth better than floss.
Modernist chefs would have no more excuses for halatosis, praise the day. Uh, and he's wondering if this is true or false. Don't do that, Colin. Don't do that. Colin, don't do that.
Um, look, I have uh one, and you know, I ha I had for a while until it broke an ultrasonic toothbrush, but they're basically vibrating very softly. If you take an ultrasonic homogenizer, and and it's a demo I used to do to show not to mess around with them, uh, I would take the probe and stick it into a dish towel and fire it up, and it would catch the dish towel on fire from the friction of it going back and forth. So, I mean, you could theoretically hook a rubber toothbrush sucker up to it and uh turn the power way down, but then you're dealing with like a two thousand dollar piece of equipment that you're turning into a um, you know, into a uh, you know, a $50 toothbrush. They make, like you can buy like a $50 or an $80 ultrasonic toothbrush. And I would definitely go that way.
Never stick an ultrasonic homogenizer in your mouth for any reason under any circumstance. And this is again not one of those Jack, we were supposed to have like a noise that meant Dave is serious this time or something like that, but we never got it. Dave is serious this time, never stick an ultrasonic homogenizer in your mouth. Uh okay. H.
Montaire writes in about uh whipped cream. Is there a way to make heat-resistant whipped cream that will hold its shape when put into something hot, like a canal or a soup? Yes. You like that, Nastasha? Yes.
One of my famous one-word answers. Okay, here's the issues. Um this is the typical thing that that you have to do. When you're using a hydrocolloid, which is new aid thickener or gelling agent, right? You you're looking for right now the thing to keep it keep it hot.
Whipped cream itself doesn't stay when you put it into hot things. So what you need to do is make the flavor of whipped cream using an entirely different technology. So the question is, and this is basically so when Wiley's doing his fried mayonnaise, what does he do? He makes something that's not mayonnaise that tastes like mayonnaise, that has the texture of mayonnaise, right? But is in fact a fluid gel made out of gel-an that's heat stable.
So it's texture of mayonnaise in a heat stable form, right? And he can flavor it however he wants. So he does the same thing with Hollandaise. He has flavor of Hollandaise in a heat-stable form, which happens to be a fluid gel. Now, you could make a cream-flavored fluid gel out of gel-an, for instance.
You could then whip that in an ISI maker, right? And you could have a very creamy mousse, or you uh, you know, something like that. So you would make a mousse that's whipped with a whipped cream kind of a texture to it, that's either a fluid gel or even like a set mousse using a gel, uh, and you and and make it heat stable. But without actually running the tests, I don't know what's gonna make the most whipped cream texture. So you might be best off with uh like a gel-an fluid gel stabilized whipped cream, right?
So you could take a gel-an fluid gel, mix it into regular whipped cream, whip it, and then see whether it'll hold when it's hot or whether the fat will bleed out. You might have to um actually whip cream, uh like over whip, like you have to the problem is you have to stabilize it so it doesn't over whip. So you'd have to use like a light cream, maybe whip it with a Versa whip and set it with another gel that sets when it's hot, like you could set it almost like a mousse with like a with uh with gel in or with something else and that's heat stable, agar maybe, and set it and see what's going on. Uh so there's a number of different um things you can do, but whipped cream itself isn't gonna stabilize. You're gonna basically have the flavor and texture of whipped cream using an entirely different method of setting.
Um so you'd have to run a whole bunch of different tests, but that's how I'd go about uh kind of setting up the experiment if you're gonna do it. Is that making any sense, Nastasha? Yes. Well, it does because she has to listen to me talk about this crap all the time. So I'm sure this stuff makes some sort of sense to her anyway.
Uh okay. Um so uh we have when is it Nastasha? When's our museum event? Thursday, September 29th, from 7 to the 10 p.m. Right.
At Ma Pesh. At Mopesh at the uh at the restaurant Mapesh, which is on We're basically taking it over. It's on uh 50 six. Is there a party going on in our background? Do you hear that on the headphones?
It's really loud. 50 15 West 56th Street between 5th and 6. Alright, so Mapesh, we're taking over. There's a bar uh at the mesmine level when you walk in, and we have an upper story at the hotel. Apparently the hotel is called the Hotel Chambers, it's not called the Mapesh Hotel, although you could have fooled me.
Anyway, so uh we're gonna have an event there. There's gonna be five uh bartenders. And do we have the fifth one yet or no? No, it might be you, it might be Don Lee. It might be me.
Don, if you're listening, we want it to be you because I want to try and get out of one of these events without actually having to make a cocktail. But we have uh so maybe Don Lee, right? Who else we have? We have Evan Clem. Uh-huh.
We have Kenta. Kent Agotha from uh from uh he's actually the the best bartender in the world. He won that last universe, actually, right. Assuming that there's no other good mixed drinks anywhere, you know, wherever there's intelligent life, assuming they don't have mixed drinks there. You know, which is a fair shot.
Uh the best bartender in the universe won that at the uh at the tails of the cocktail this year. Uh who else we have? We have Um Chad and Christy. Oh, yeah, Chad, uh Chad Solomon, Christy Pope. And Jason.
Jason Latrell, right? Uh is that five? Yeah. You sure I'm not missing anyone? And the gimmick on this one, get the gimmick is uh if cocktails were street food from X, right?
So we have uh absolute vodka, so that would be if cocktails are street food from Sweden. And where what else we have? We have we have uh Bombay East, that's I don't know whether Jason's gonna choose Vietnam or Thailand because they the thing they add to Bombay East is either Vietnamese peppercorn or Thai uh lemongrass. And what are the other ones we have? We have uh Hendrix, Hendrix, which we're doing England because gin, right?
And we couldn't do two gin from anyway. Anyway, whatever. Next 901. 901 Mexico. Uh-huh.
What did you say absolute? It's absolute. But we didn't get all five. I know we're missing one. Someone's gonna get mad at us.
Yeah, I know. Someone's gonna oh uh makers. Makers mark from the United States of America. Giving that one to Chad and Christy because of their southern heritage. Anyway, there are still slots available if you want to go next week, and you should go to what website to do that.
HTTP uh colon backslash backslash mofed membership.eventbrite.com. But I guess you could just do mofad membership.eventbrite.com, right? Right. And come prepared to spend some freaking money because we're gonna have a donation bucket and we're also gonna have an auction. And what we're trying to do is keep the museum of food and drink afloat.
Uh you can go look at the last post we have for the last fundraiser, which was a serious, serious event. This one's gonna be just cocktails, but we hope it's gonna be a lot of fun. I don't hope it's gonna be a lot of fun. Do we have an do we know anyone that's gonna show up? I'm not gonna give away.
We're gonna try to get some nice special guests that you can mingle with if you come to the event, correct? Yes. All right. Uh so uh a note of what I am doing today. Uh well, actually, we didn't talk about uh Bordain chute, right?
You didn't talk about Harvard, you didn't talk about Bordane shoot, yeah. We allow to talk about the Bourdain shoot? Mm-hmm. Is half of your earphone broken? Folks out there, half of my earphones broken, so it feels really weird.
I feel like I'm about to I'm constantly turning around my microphone like uh oh, there we go. Um so uh last week we did the Tony Bourdain shoot, and the theory of this was for no reservations was this Christmas show. And so I said I didn't want to do an ancient Christmas dinner because really I didn't think Christmas was so important as an ancient dinner source, so I wanted to do what what would Jesus have eaten or what would Mary and Joseph is what I was thinking eaten around their birthday. And the research we did was pretty uh was pretty I thought pretty interesting. We found out that they used an oven in the in that in that era in that zone in Palestine, very similar to an Indian tandoor oven of today.
And in fact, that style of oven uh was widespread all the way from India where it's popular today, up through uh, you know, like where you know Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, all that stuff is, all the way over through the Middle East and all the way over into Africa. So they had this huge range where this oven, and it's basically a like a conical vessel that you fire from the bottom and you load from the top uh was uh was basically used throughout this region. So I thought that was awesome. And I've always wanted a tandoor. So Cliff and Piper uh and I, two, you know, two of my ex-interns, uh, built a tandoor like in like three hours from crap that we could find at the hardware store.
First, we called all these places, can you get us a tandoor? Can you get us a tandoor? And they're like, it was a thousand bucks in like two weeks to wait. So I was like, crap on that. We build it from flower pots and sand, and actually, you can find on the internets, uh, if you just look up flower pot tandoor and any of the make sites, you'll can figure out how to make a flower pot tandoor.
And that thing worked straight up great. We used a uh I you know, frankly, it was delicious, right? We also made uh we we made pigeon, because one of the things that uh Mary when you know when when Jesus was born, did I go through this last week? I think you did. When G okay, so anyway, when Jesus shoot.
Uh well when anyway, so we cooking this pigeon because you know, when Jesus was born, they gave pigeons to sacrifice to the priests, you know, etc. Uh so we cooked pigeon and we boiled the pigeon in chicken stock first. And uh, which was typical for what they would have done. We didn't boil it, we did it about a hundred and hundred and forty degrees or so just to kind of like start the cook off in the chicken stock. And uh we then rubbed it with cumin and fennel, which are two spices they would have had.
We koshered it beforehand so it was nice and salty. We did the official koshering technique, which is soak it in water, like rub salt all over it, let it sit for an hour, and then rinse it three times and pat it dry, poach it off uh for a little bit, and then we stuck it in the tandoor. I put a coat hanger through it and put it down in the tandoor and spun it. First, I caught the string on fire and burnt my hand getting the thing out, but you know, whatever, you know, we can't have everything. So the but when we did it, that pigeon was straight up delicious.
So if you make yourself a flower pot tandoor uh with a you know a garbage can, sand, if you can get vermiculite, get it, and cook yourself some pigeon in your flower pot tandoor, because that was straight up good, right? Yeah. Also, I was really worried because uh, you know, I I spoke to uh a chef a long time ago about tandoors and he would always laughing that his favorite part of a new cook coming into the kitchen was putting him on tandoor station and watching the flesh peel off the back of his hands from putting his hand into the hot tandoor all the time because it's hot as the devil, and you have to put your hand in and literally slapped the bread onto the side of the unit. And so I was a little more than a little bit nervous that this was gonna totally fry me out. So but it wasn't so bad.
I mean I I burnt the hair off my arm, right? But it wasn't such a big deal. Like I didn't I didn't run around screaming too much, right? So go ahead and build yourself a flower pot tandor. What else do we make?
The bread was really good that we made that. We made like an old school flatbread with like really crappily ground uh wheat and also with barley, but the wheat was a lot better, right? Yes. Yeah, and did we do anything else that was fun? Rizzotto.
No, we didn't do lentils. She like Nastasha has risotto on our mind. She must want risotto for dinner because she's just thinking risotto, risotto, risotto, you made risotto. That dude Bourdain is a tall dude, too, by the way. Did you know how tall that sucker was?
Probably like six four. I don't know. He's a huge man, tall. Also drops a lot of F-bombs while he's shooting. Did they cut that out during the show or no?
I don't think so. Anyway, so look for that to air on December the 15th or something like that. Something like that. Uh all right. So what I'm doing today, so when I went to Colombia, uh, I don't know if I mentioned this.
When I went to Colombia, uh, I wasn't able to get any money. Uh so you mentioned this. I mentioned I did so Chris Costau, the you know, three-star Michelin chef, uh, you know, out in Napa, gave me a hundred and fifty bucks uh in Colombian cash money so that I wouldn't die, basically. Um, and we had a discussion, and he said that he is very interested in the flavors of tomato plant, right? So I you know, I said, well, I've done that before.
You know, I I took a I've roto vaped, uh, and also you know who used to be interested in that years ago is David Kinch out at Manresa, also in California. It must be something about Californians and tomato plants. Even though we straight up, I'm sorry, California, we straight up have the best tomatoes I've ever had in my life. Crap on anyone else's tomatoes over the best tomatoes I've ever had are from New Jersey. Uh Aunt Ruby's German Greens and the German stripes from uh Stokes Farms in in New Jersey.
And I can say that they don't give me a break on anything. They don't give me anything. But these are, and in fact, I can't get them anymore hardly because New Yorker or New York magazine or New York or one of those wrote them up like a two years ago, and now they've sell as the best tomato, and they sell out now, so I have a tough time getting them. Hurricane came through here and it didn't do any damage to New York City, but it did a lot of damage to parts of Jersey and up in Vermont, and all of their tomato plants' roots were underwater, and so a lot of the tomatoes kind of blew up and exploded. So the the season is over early this year.
Anyway, that's an aside, a sad aside. I had the last of the great uh Aunt Ruby's, I am told, uh, on Saturday. They're delicious. Anyway, um, and by the way, Aunt Ruby who came up with this, the heirloom state, you know her last name? Tuesday.
Arnold. Oh. Aunt Ruby Arnold, no relation. I wish it was. I wish she was my relative.
Anyway, she died in like 1997. So uh tomato plant vodka, I made it a bunch of years ago in a rotary evaporator, and so I'm gonna make it again today. I'm gonna make a whole bunch of it, but I'm gonna do it legally. For the first time, I'm gonna do a legal uh roto evap of tomato plant vodka, and I'm gonna ship it off to Chris Costau as a thank you for uh giving us giving me the ability to not be dead in Columbia. Yes?
Yeah. Anyway, uh I'm going back. Uh did I did you ever taste that tomato plant vodka? Mm-hmm. I had still had some left?
Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's weird. It's green, it tastes so green, so bizarre. I love I like it a lot. I mean, but you could never make a mixed drink with it.
Um, because if you made a mixed drink with it, people were like, what the hell is that flavor? And you say tomato plant vodka. Um, when am I going back to Columbia? Do you have any idea? Yeah.
Second, third, and fourth. Soon. Anyway, I love Columbia. I've talked enough about Columbia, but I love it there. I actually have two Colombian friends visiting me right after right after this program.
Um, what is it? Yeah. Um, so and the last thing I'm gonna talk about before I go is the Harvard. Uh, because we didn't talk about it or we did. No.
So uh I'm going back to Harvard sometime in November to do a uh public lecture on drinks. I hope to have some sort of like whiz-bang cran craziness. I'm also doing a lecture at the Beverage Alcohol Resource Program, David Wendrich's thing, which is when, next week? Uh yeah. Yeah.
So if uh I don't know if there's still slots available for that, but it's kind of the greatest bar program ever, ever made. It's Dave Wondrich, Dale de Groff, uh, Steve uh Olsen, Paul Packelt. Um I'm sure I'm missing, I'm sure I'm missing a bunch of other things, but it's kind of the craziest bar program in the world because you have some of the biggest spirit nuts on the planet going out and bringing like personal bottles of weird crap, and you spend, I believe, the morning tasting every damned uh every damned liquor you can, so you can identify it later, and then there's lectures on theory, there's lectures on so I'm gonna go give uh lecture probably on clarification, rotary evaporation, and my general thoughts about high-tech stuff next week. Uh and then a drinks lecture, a lecture in um November. Um but at the Harvard, it's kind of uh I we didn't do it last year, but it's kind of a strange course, right?
I mean, Nastasha, you went. What do you think? I mean it's kind of an it's an interesting idea. They get a whole bunch of chefs and they do a demo and then they try and turn it into a class about uh about science, right? But it's kind of like it's physics for poets, is basically what it is, right?
Taught through the lens of cooking. Right. Now, most of the chefs who go, uh, last week was Juan Roca. I don't know who's gonna be this week. You know, Juan Rock, if you don't know him, is kind of like super duper badass mofo badass, you know, guy with low temperature cooking and also with rotary evaporation.
So, you know, very big influence on me. Uh very big influence, I think, on all the chefs kind of of you know, Wiley's generation, my generation in terms of sous vide and low temperature and whatnot. Uh they're they're getting like a whole bunch of uh of people going up, but it's kind of weird to have to beat those chefs into kind of a science mold, right? It's kind of an interesting problem. Me, because I'm a schmuck, instead, I was like, I was just like, I'll just do some demos around the science because you know, whatever.
But do you think they went all right in my lecture? It was all right. It's all right, it's available on the web so you can see. I listened to it, I said um a lot. Apparently, I don't know, Nastash, you said I don't say um too much on the radio, but I said um every other word when I was at when I was at Harvard.
But let me tell you something. They have a vacuum pump at Harvard. One of the demos we did uh at Harvard was uh a demo Johnny had told me about that he saw it at Nathan Mirvold's joint with Chris Young. You take liquid nitrogen, you put liquid nitrogen into a vacuum machine, and a regular commercial vacuum machine will work, and you suck a vacuum on it, and as you suck a vacuum on it, the temperature starts dropping. Uh uh because you're evaporatively cooling.
Think about it. As you're boiling off liquid nitrogen, you're evaporatively cooling it. So when you put a vacuum on it, you boil it off so quickly that the temperature drops about two, three degrees, and that's enough to turn liquid nitrogen from a liquid to a solid. Now, Harvard's vacuum machine is so freaking awesome that we needed to literally let bleed air out of it because it was sucking of all too hard of a vacuum too fast, and it just exploded into the solid bunch of uh nitrogen foam. That was kind of the most fun thing I did, right?
That was I mean, in my feeling, that was pretty badass. And that brings me to my last question also from James in Australia on vacuum equipment. I've just managed James says to get a large chamber sealer a vacuum sealer cheap on eBay. Well congratulations to you I've had a look at Modernist cuisine and online but uh all the information out there is sort of stick it in the bag and vac it. What are my tips on maintenance, bag size to food ratio, how to tell when you have uh crazy over vacuum your food and any other ideas on what to use it for apart from packaging for sous vide and stuffing alcohol into fruit.
Well you can freeze liquid nitrogen into a solid but that's pretty useless because as soon as you let the air back in the thing melts and it and it goes back to being a liquid again. Here's uh the maintenance maintenance is fairly easy on a vacuum machine. You need to do two things regularly you need to replace the Teflon tape over the seal bar. You need to do that as soon as it starts burning through otherwise your bags are going to be sealed improperly. You just have to buy the tape you can buy it from a second hand uh from a third party like McMaster car I don't know what they call it in Australia but I'm sure you have an industrial supply place that sells it Teflon tape or you know not the stuff for plumbing it's an adhesive uh heat proof Teflon tape or just get it directly from the vacuum manufacturer uh from the thing but that's something to do regularly but the most important thing the heart and soul the literally the heart of the vacuum machine is the uh vacuum pump and the vacuum pump needs one thing to work properly and that's clean oil.
When you vacuum something uh as you vacuum it liquid is be evaporating off of your product and it's contaminating your oil with water and it's reducing the uh the the level of vacuum you can get to and also making it take longer and longer for you to get down to that vacuum. So the key is to keep the pump clean. And the way to keep the pump clean is to run it till it gets hot. Most commercial vacuum machines have a have a pump in it made by a company called Busch out of Germany. And they're designed to run hot.
So what you do is you leave the lid open and you run it for minutes until it gets really hot with air streaming through it, and it's gonna boil all the liquid out and keep your pump oil nice and clear. If you do that regularly, you shouldn't have to change your pump oil more than about depends on how heavy your usage is, but every six months to a year you should be able to keep it before you have to change it, okay? That's the prime thing in maintenance. Obviously, keep the unit clean. Your unit might have an acrylic lid, so don't wash the lid with alcohol or it could get hazy depending on the unit you have.
But that's basically it. Every morning uh or whenever, whenever you see that it's not working right, I would rip the there. Usually there's a metal plate for some unknown reason covering up the window on the pump, showing you what the condition of the oil is. And the first thing I do when I get a vacuum machine is rip that plate off so that I can see the condition of the oil at all times. And I guarantee you, if it's been used, it's gonna look like salad dressing.
So putting you know, put new oil in, obviously, because you don't know what happened before, and then clean your pump oil out. So that's the main uh thing. Also, bag size to food ratio is important, but people don't think about it. If you're sucking a complete vacuum on something, the bag size isn't very important. If you use a bag that's too small, what happens is is you're gonna get smashed the bag around the corners of your food and you're gonna get crazy portions that look like pillows, they look insane, and nobody thinks those are appetizing if you see little bag marks in your food, right?
Um, but assuming you have uh enough liquid like oil or whatever in the bag such that uh you know that the bag can seal around the liquid and not deform your product, right? Then having a bag that's you know much bigger if you're sucking a full vacuum doesn't make that much of a difference. But uh, two things. You don't want a big bag because a big bag takes up extra room in your circulator, right? You're spending extra money on the plastic, although that's not the primary thing.
But the main thing is that a lot of times we're gonna suck an incomplete vacuum on our product, and then the bag size does matter because if you have kind of a loose seal and a big bag, it gets really loose, right? So you want to try and have the bag be uh about you know uh just extend enough around your food to uh allow it to close around your your sauce without or oil or whatever without it crunching your food. That said it's not hyper hypercritical. But uh the reason you're gonna want to not suck a complete vacuum on stuff is that the vacuum the vacuum level that you use radically affects the texture of certain products. For instance, chicken.
If you uh you know, if you vacuum chicken really hard, it tastes like canned chicken after you cook it. If you vacuum fish really hard, it it ruins the texture, makes it kind of stringy. And you can look on cookingissues.com and look for uh you look under I think it's called boring but useful technical post on vacuum machine or something like that. You can look it up and you can see our tests that we ran on that. Uh and um, you know, the Chris and uh and Nathan have a theory on that in Modernist Cuisine about why that's the case.
They think it has something to do with boiling. I kind of I disagree with that. I'm I'd love to have that debate with them, but I kind of disagree with it. Um but that said, you know, if you if you over compress something for storage, it's usually not a big deal. It's when you cook something under a high vacuum.
That's my feeling is that you're gonna have a uh a problem with it. Um anyway, as for other ideas, you're gonna have to wait for our next installation, which I promise I will start working on. And I'll tell you what, Nastasha's been beating on me to do some of these sous vide primers, and I have more incentive. I'll give you a little hint because I know the French Culinary Institute does not listen to our webcasts. I believe the cooking issues blog is going to be switched to my personal ownership soon.
With you know, they'll they'll still have they'll still be the French Culinary's tech and stuff blog. But I believe what happened is uh I wrote uh a post a couple weeks back, right before I went to Columbia on how to mess with pressure cookers. Um, and uh their lawyer and their lawyers freaked out, right? Mustacha, true or false. Should I be talking about this?
Their lawyers freaked out. And so I think they think it might be easier for it to just be my personal blog that's called the French Culinaries Tech and Stuff blog. So, anyway, that's that, and that's cooking issues. Fishers fish. Oh, thanks for listening to this program on the Heritage Radio Network.
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