Broadcasting live from Robertas in Bushwick, Brooklyn. You're listening to Heritage Radio Network.com. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues, coming to you live from the Heritage Radio Network every Tuesday from 12 to 1245. Joined to you with you us today in the studio by Nastasha the Hammer Locals.
Hello, Nastasha. Hi. She just got back uh from uh California. She was visiting home uh in the LA region because her sister was on the homecoming court at her high school homecoming thingamajig, correct? Yeah.
Didn't win though, right? No. But you're you feel glad that she didn't win. Yeah, I'm happy. You're happy that she didn't win?
You care to tell us why? Because you have to go back home and crown the new princess. Yeah, which is weak, right? It's weak. It's weak.
Who wants to go back to high school after they've already graduated? It's lame. Well, unless you're robbing the cradle. But that wasn't me. I never did that.
Anyway, um, right or wrong. Phil Bravo. Wow. Friend of ours, Phil Bravo, well-known cradle robber, folks. Well known cradle cradle rubber.
Can you hear me? Yes. That was working. Uh I was nominated for Homecoming King. You were?
Wow. That's awesome. Where did you where where were you in the I lost? It was in Long Island. Are you also glad that you lost?
You didn't have to go back to uh high school and crown the next one. I don't think I had to do that. That sounds crazy. That's like an LA thing, maybe. Sounds like it.
You know what I heard? I heard from Nastasha that the Queen did get to ride down the boulevard in a low rider with the hydraulics pancaking the whole way down the down the tarmac. How awesome is that. I've always wanted to get into a lowrider with the hydraulics. They are sweet.
Was it green? Was it green paint with green with the sparkly green? Yes. Oh, geez. There's another lifelong dream.
I still have time, folks. I'm not dead yet. Uh okay. So call in all of your questions, cooking or otherwise, to 718 497 2128. Memorize 718 497 2128.
Today's episode is brought to you again. They must love us, Dust. They do. They do. By the Modernist Pantry.
Today's show is I'm just gonna read it. They write they they wrote what I just said, which is today's show is sponsored by the Modernist Pantry. You gotta see you know, it's a pain that when you're reading, you can't actually pay attention to what you're saying as you're reading it. That's why sometimes I'll stop my reading voice and start making comments. Which is dumb.
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I have no idea. What does it mean inexpensive? I don't know. I'd like to know. Someone just some someone from another country order from these guys and tell me tell me.
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We'll get a free package of high viscosity methylcellulose. Simply use the pro uh promo code CI59 when pricing your order online at modernistpantry.com. Visit it visit modernistpantry.com today for all of your modernist cooking needs. Okay, listen, methylcellulous, interesting. Uh first of all, it's the only hydrocolloid that I use that isn't actually all natural.
Methylcellulose doesn't is not a naturally occurring product. What they do is they take cellulose from like, you know, cotton or whatever, wood pulp, whatever it is, and uh they modify it uh to have certain properties. Now, what I would like the modernist pantry guys to do is specify not a viscosity necessarily, but exactly what type of methylcellulose we're talking about. Most chefs use uh methylcellulose, and here's one for you hydroxypropol methylcellulose from uh Dow. Uh, you know, the you know, Dow, like big, the big company DAO.
And their brand name is methocel, right? M-E-T-H-O-C-E-L, methyl cell. And the viscosity is only one of the things you actually need to know about methylcel. It's also the type uh that it is, because they have uh kind of widely differing properties depending on whether it's methylcellulose, hydroxypropo methylcellulose, what the chain length is, etc., exactly what series it is. Now, uh the the super high viscosity ones are often used uh because the interesting about methyl cells, methyl cell uh gels when it heats and melts when it when it cools down.
So this is the the hydrocolloid of choice. If you've ever been to a restaurant or seen an application on the on the on the television set, uh where someone uh takes a liquid and squeezes it into a broth and it sets up into like a noodle or a gel right away into a hot broth. Typically that's a methyl cellulose is what they're what they're doing there, methocell, a Dow methyl cell, and typically a high viscosity one so that it doesn't bleed out. However, I don't ever do that. What my favorite methyl cell is not actually a high viscosity methyl cell, it's methylcel F like Franc 50.
Methylcel F50. And aside from sounding like a like an expensive Ferrari, it does sound like a Ferrari, right? Methylcel F50. Anyway, um, it's not. What it is, is it's a low to medium viscosity methyl cell that has uh amazing whipping properties.
So you add like eight grams per liter of this stuff to whatever, you know, fruit, puree, juice, whatever. And then you uh in a blender, and then you put it into like a kitchen aid with a balloon uh whisk on it, and you whip it just like egg whites, and the stuff whips up just like a meringue. This is what I believe this is what Sam Mason way back in the day used to use to make his uh he used to make like uh like foams that had like the texture of like a Guinness head. He was looking for the texture that was on top of a Guinness beer, was what he was shooting for. He used to get it with this.
I forget whether he actually used Guinness as the foam with F50 or not. I can't remember. Anyway, so it makes up into a nice, almost like an egg white meringue. And here's the cool part. If you pipe it onto uh a silpat or whatever, a piece of acetate, stick it in a dehydrator or in an oven that's set to dehydrate, uh they don't fall.
They gel up a little bit and solidify, and they turn into these amazing meringues that disappear in your mouth. They're not like a regular meringue and have a little bit of a proteiness, they boom disappear in your mouth, and they're amazing. They can be made with any flavor, and they're uh they're vegan, not that you know I don't know, they they can be vegan. Nastasha made a vegan face. I wish you could see her vegan face.
It's like the equivalent of like, you know, the nose crinkles up a little bit, and it's like someone made an off smell or something in the room, which is unfortunate because I don't feel that way about other human beings the way Nastasha does. That's why we call her the hammer. Louise. What? You don't like vegans very much.
What? I don't have anything against. I think V, look, it's like it's like I don't it's unfair. It's unfair. I uh it's difficult for me to cook for vegans, right?
So it's it makes it it's very hard for me to cook for vegans. And you're upset with their life choices. I wish they hadn't made that life choice. Yes, I do wish they hadn't made that life choice. But it's nothing against them personally, you know.
Um you know, I have how many vegan recipes do I have that I actually make that are vegan? Like two. Two. I have two. So if you come to my house and you're a vegan, please let me know in advance, and I'll make one of my two recipes that's vegan.
One of them is actually a delay. You know, you can you could take a lot of uh good Indian food and substitute out olive oil for ghee and get a passable result. I mean, I guess that's what a lot of people do. I don't know, who knows? Why why the hell are we talking about this?
This has nothing to do with anything. Metacellulose. Metalcellulose, vegan. It just happens to be the one thing I use, it's not all natural. Uh the other the other one I don't use that a lot of chefs use, uh, is propylene glycol allogenate.
It's not natural. Not unholy, just not natural. Doesn't exist in nature, right? Being the definition of natural. All right.
So, call in all of your questions to 718-497-2128. Okay. Uh Dave and Company, hi again. My hunting friend wants to make a country ham out of venison. Would the hanging time be comparable to pork?
Or would you use it and would you use a different cure? Uh I told him you might want to incorporate juniper berries or gin into the cure. Am I full of crap? Thanks, Derek Bodkin. Well, I wouldn't put well, that depends.
I mean, I guess you could put gin in. Um I mean, I I typically for a country ham kind of an application wouldn't be using any liquid, so it wouldn't be kind of brined in. But I mean it's not gonna hurt, it's gonna evaporate fairly quickly. But I would, you know, I would use you could add whatever spices you want. I mean, um, you know, so delicious, uh, delicious something with juniper in it that you might want to taste would be speck.
Speck's delicious, right? Mm-hmm. You like Speck, right? You know what though, it's one of those things. I enjoy the Speck for which is basically what they'll do is they'll take a ham leg, they'll roll it out flat, they'll cure it flat, which means it cures a lot faster than it would if it was left in a whole roll.
Uh, and they typically smoke it, and it's uh typically I believe juniper, right? Is the flavor in it? Yes. And there's there's one, there's a whole, you know, from Alto Latigi up in the north of Italy, and then also across the border in the in the kind of uh Austrian-Germanic kind of creation, their Speck. And I happen to prefer the Italian one because the one that's typically uh north of the border is a little bit drier, the ones we get, at least the ones that I've had.
And so uh Speck is delicious, and that's got juniper in it. The trick with curing venison is venison is not uh it doesn't have typically as much fat in the meat as would something like pork. Um I would assume that it would cure closer to beef in terms of uh like a presala. I think it would cure closer to that kind of a situation. So you know, if you want it to cure for the length of time that a ham would cure for, you're gonna need to protect it from drying out too much, right?
So uh, you know, what you could do is salt it down uh and get the salt level kind of the the way you want. It's gonna take some practice. I'd have to look up uh exactly what's what's going on. Um but uh I would after it after it starts to dehydrate a bit, I would cover it with fat, uh like with a layer of fat, or maybe you could go uh maybe you could go um what's the word I'm looking for? Like, you know, parma style, where after it ages for a certain bit, they'll put the face of the meat, which is the part of the meat that shows it doesn't have fat, they'll take lard and I forget, like is it rice flour or something?
They'll take lard and something like rice flour and work it over the face of the ham there so to stop the drying out. So I would do that so that way you get the the moisture level that you want, and then you'd cover it up and let it dry out uh, you know, it so it wouldn't dry out too much. And I think it should work. I think that would be great. I mean, juniper sounds great.
I might even smoke it a little bit with new sauce. Yes. It'd be delicious. And it sounds like a very good alternative to uh, you know, the venison jerky that everyone makes. Of course, also, if your friend is a hunter, and I don't know whether we've already discussed this because I can't remember which questions you sent in, please go buy an immersion circulator.
If you're gonna take the trouble to buy a weapon, get a hunting license, go sit in a tree for like a day and a half, waiting for a deer to come by that's big enough that you want to shoot it in the in the neck and take it home. Spend the 800 bucks on an immersion circulator so that you don't have to turn everything into sausage and chili, all right? Because uh venison cooked in an immersion circulator, not for too long necessarily. If you cook it too long, sometimes it can get gamey. But venison cooked in an immersion circulator, even like an older one, is gonna be freaking delicious.
And I know this not from theory, but from actual practice, not of my own stuff, because I wish I could hunt, but I don't have a hunting license. I don't I want one kind of pretty badly. I want you know, I'd like to I don't really want to sh I don't really necessarily want to shoot a deer. I really want to get uh things that you can't buy otherwise. I mean, I want to get like grouse and woodcock and all those things.
Anyway, Nastasha once saw me eat a grouse and a woodcock and a teal in uh in uh England because they can serve them in the restaurants in England, and it had like the little babies in it and everything, and I thought she was gonna quit working for cooking issues because I was literally like like there was blood there's blood all over my face, like cooked semi-cooked innards, guts and blood all over my face because I was like kind of burying my I was burying my face in the carcass of the verge, trying to eat them out and and spitting the p think pink p think spitting out the the the babies on the plate. The head on the plate, and I thought that was the end of it until the waitress came over and said, You're not gonna eat the head. Well, she knows what's up. Uh anyway, so as we've said on the show many times, immersion circulator should be uh Hunter's best friend. Like, it should basically, when they give you the license, they should say, Do you have an immersion circulator?
Would you like to buy one? Do you know what I mean? Oh, speaking of which, before we go to the break, uh, a couple of weeks ago, somebody called in and was like, I have an immersion circulator, but what the hell am I gonna do with it? Basically, remember that? It was like, why like what am I gonna do with it for normal family meal that's not like uh you know not competent?
Yeah. Well, I did another one over the weekend. Uh, so uh local, no offense in case you're the owner of a fine fair out there, but the local crappy like grocery store, key food sea town style thing is fine, called fine fair where I live. You know, it's just like the local, you know, grocery store. And uh so I went in there and I bought your regular run-of-the-mill sausage, and I cooked it for family dinner because you know, a couple weeks ago we went to Cesare Cosella's farm, the Thanksgiving farm, where they, you know, they help um multiply disabled and autistic uh kids and adults uh through therapy, including working on a farm and whatnot.
Anyway, uh so they gave us they have this kabbocha squat, which are s preposterously delicious. I mean, just absurdly delicious. And so I cooked those because they gave us a whole bunch along with uh some Brussels sprouts, very good. And they told us to cook the leaves on the top of the Brussels sprout stalk, which were surprisingly good. They take a long time to cook, kind of like collards, uh, but incredibly uh delicious.
So we had those along with potatoes that they so we had a we had a Thanksgiving farm meal, except for the nostage. So I took the sausage and uh I threw it in a Ziploc bag with a little bit of oil, threw that sucker in the immersion circulator at 60 degrees uh Celsius, which is 140. You should all remember that, by the way. I don't care whether you cook in Fahrenheit or Celsius, you should remember that 60 is 140 and vice versa. Anyway, cook it, threw it onto my salamander.
If you're not on the salamander, you can I don't know, grill it, do whatever, for like you know, a minute on a side, and they were like the best dang sausages in the world. And people were like, Oh my god, where'd you get that sausage? I was like, I bought it at the fine fanfare for nothing. But because I cooked it right, it was delicious because typically you overcook a sausage and you're relying on the extra fat on the inside of a sausage to make it taste good. What you should do is just not overcook it from the beginning.
Now, when Philip Preston from Polyscience, our good buddy, was putting together the cookbook that we gave him recipes for for uh his immersion circulator, he uh we we gave him that recipe. We're like sausage. You should have sausage in there. And he's like, Well, why? I don't understand.
Like, why do you need to cook a sausage in an immersion circulator? And it's because I can go by the cheapest my mouth, not the curse. Anyway, and uh, you know, it's not bad quality. I would never buy bad quality for my family, but it's like you know, inexpensive stuff, and you treat it right as a big thing. Did you do it in beer?
What? Why didn't you do it in beer? Uh oh, I told him he could do like brats, sprats and beer, but I just did it in olive oil. I didn't want to like poach these things out. I just did them in a ziplock in olive oil at 60, uh, you know, for like, you know, whatever.
I wasn't even paying attention to it, and I threw it. And then you know what I did? Uh I didn't want to fire up my circulator for the leftovers. So I took uh a Ziploc bag and I threw, and this is an AirVay special, I threw mashed potatoes into the Ziploc, squished it flat, sealed it. So you s I here's the trick.
You squished the mashed potatoes in the Ziploc bag down to a layer like maybe like three-eighths of an inch thick. And then I threw it into a pan of simmering water, like a frying pan of simmering water, and they heated up like lickety split without uh without you know having any burn spots on the bottom. They were hot all the way through, and I didn't lose any moisture off of them, so it was perfectly reheated mashed potatoes, which are a pain. It's a pain to reheat mashed potatoes and not have them turned to crap. Uh so I did that.
So anyway, and you could do that in the immersion circulator if you already had it running. In fact, what we do now in classes is we make our mashed potatoes uh, you know, in advance, like in the morning, pack them into zips or into into uh uh vacuum bags, but not without the vacuum meat, guess you could vacuum them, and then uh at the last you know, a couple of minutes, we squish it real thin, throw it into the circulator bath and reheat it, and they're perfect. Because don't you hate when you're making mashed potatoes and do you ever make mashed potatoes? Yeah, yeah. Don't you hate it when you're always worried about getting them done at the last minute?
You're like, oh my god, the mashed potatoes, either they're gonna get cold, or then you have to stick them over a water bath to keep them hot, and the water bath boils over. It's always a pain. Mashed potatoes are always a pain to finish off when you're finishing off the rest of your food. At least if you care about them the way I do. I don't know, maybe Nastasha's one of those people that beats the hell out of them in the kitchen aid until they turn into a soupy gloop.
Are you one of those people? My mom hand mashes them, so there's all the the leftover chunks of potato that didn't get mashed. She's making the vegan face, so you don't like the leftover chunks of uh no, not at all. I mean I look because I am who I am, and people like my chef friends would make fun of me if I didn't. I use the food mill to make the mashed potatoes.
But honestly, I think one of the easiest things if you don't have a food mill, the potato ricers work really, really well. The problem is I always burn my hand when I use them. You know what I'm talking about? The potato ricers? They don't leave any little chunklets, they're pretty good.
Um I also uh diverge from most of my chef friends who use all they use only butter. But I don't necessarily like I don't want to look, people are gonna call me and tell me I'm a jerk, but I'm not one of these guys. I feel like I need to put so much freaking butter in that I can actually lubricate the potatoes entirely with butter alone. So I actually add cream and butter. What about you, Stuzz?
Yeah, we add milk. That's for suckers. But like I add cream and butter, but people are like, why do you want to add cream? Why do you want to add all that water? It's just gonna ruin it.
Just add more butter. But I don't really want like, you know, like the Robichon potatoes that are like half butter. And I don't really necessarily I don't need that. You know what I mean? I don't know.
It's not my thing. So I add a mixture of cream and butter. Uh throw it in the ziploc and keep it hot. So those are some more things to do with your immersion circulators, and I spent hardly any time talking about the venison, but that's life in the big city. Let's go to our first commercial break, cooking issues.
And welcome back to Cooking Issues. Calling all your questions to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. So let the record show that vegan face was originated on this show. Yeah when everybody else starts using that.
Hey, you made your vegan face. You think that's gonna be that one's gonna be a good idea. If Jack has anything to do with it, he will, he's gonna get all he'll get all the hosts, all the hosts of all the shows. By the way, uh today is a it's literally Roberta's is a one-man Jack Insley show today. Jack Insley being our our intrepid engineer here.
Roberta's is shut down for the day. Yeah uh because the entire staff is off racing go-karts in New Jersey. Is this true or false? Correct. I spoke to the chef of Robert's Carlo a couple weeks ago when I was at the farm.
And he told me this is going to happen. He didn't tell me it was going to be on a Tuesday. And here's the thing. They have a no they have a no drinking while on the go-kart policy, which is very wise. Very wise.
Do you think that's wise, Jack? With them, yeah. Yeah, yeah. No drinking and go-karting. So, but they have apparently, and I don't know how this shook out, uh, they have a no, it's close track, by the way, folks.
Close track. They have no uh getting on the go-kart drunk policy. So the Roberta's idea was to get everyone shellacked on the bus ride down. So my that makes sense. Yes.
So my prediction for the fight is pain, as uh clever lang would say for all of you Rocky 3 fans out in the audience. Well, I'll be making your Morigand uh salad, so hopefully it's good. Yeah, Jack went and fired up the pizza oven so that uh I've never seen his place this empty. It's crazy, right? Spooky.
Yeah, I was like slamming on the door because I I can't be bothered to read things that are around me, like signage. And so, like the door said, you know, uh call Jack if you need to get in, but I didn't see it. Okay. This, by the way, you know what sucks? This is our Halloween episode, and we didn't think about anything to do for Halloween.
I forgot that Halloween's on the Monday. It's a little late to celebrate for Halloween on on a Tuesday. No one gives a crap about Halloween after it's over. By the way, my son says I say crap too much. You do.
Anyway. Uh speaking up of my younger son. Uh my older son, who's obsessed with the MTA uh and all things trained, stuff he doesn't want to be on them, wants to be an uh he wants to be a Metro North ticket taker, i.e. conductor this year. Try to go buy a Metro North hat, folks.
Metro North is our commuter railroad. Try to. Please. Nastasha, who's a genius at this sort of thing. So, like, if I want to find by the way, if I want to find you, whoever you are, like she will find you, get your personal number and or your assistant's number and start hounding them.
So please don't like ask me to get her on your case because she will track you down. Found a uh found a conductor hat, and I have a little miniature conductor's hat. I think it might even be too small for my ten year old, though. I don't I didn't think there were human beings this small. I don't think they're supposed to fit on your head.
Don't they just wear it like perched? They're not freaks. They're they're human beings who are taking tickets. They wear this as their as their hat. Does it fit around?
Yes, it's a hat. Like it oh my god. Oh my god. All right, anyway. So uh I guess we will tell you stories of Halloween, but I wish we could get a Halloween.
Please, someone call in with a Halloween question to 7184972128. All right. Okay. Hey, Nastasha and Dave. Thanks for answering our question on bagel cocktails.
Sam and I worked together, so it was just one group of people trying to work bake make bagel cocktails. Not that the entire world is suddenly interested in bagel cocktails, which would be quite strange. And we talked about sending in a question, uh, and we both ended up sending in the question. Anyway, we enjoy the show, and it's been hugely helpful in exploring new ideas and techniques. Best Johnny Hunter from the Underground Food Collective.
Well, that's great, but did the bagel cocktail work? Well, they sent that the day after. So they didn't have time to try it. Maybe. All right.
Okay, another follow-up. Hi, Nastasha and Dave. This is from Andrew. Does someone else write in this or is just Andrew wrote this in? Just Andrew.
Okay. Uh in episode 58. I like that. People know what episode it is, because I have no idea. It's all iTunes.
Yeah, iTunes. By the way, check this, check this out. iTunes, right? You apparently they will not tell you. I'm trying to figure out like whether or not anyone's listening to this program or not, right?
So I'm like, Jack, can you call up the iTunes people and figure out like whether anyone is downloading this? And iTunes won't give out that information. Isn't that crazy? Does that make any dang sense? No.
It makes no dang sense, right? Nothing. Makes no sense. Okay. In episode 58, they've wondered what t uh what temperature modernist cuisine calls for for cooking gooey duck uh low temperature.
And they list it as barely cooked. According to their best bet chart, they prefer 50 degrees Celsius for 30 minutes. Okay. Uh in that same episode, low temp snails are mentioned, and the same chart in Modernist Cuisine recommends 68 degrees C for five hours for a tender braised snail. I hope this helps, and thanks for the great show.
I've learned a great deal from listening. Thanks. Um Andrew, uh, before I get let me finish this before I finish out what Andrew said. Okay, I like I said last week, I think I've had uh m um Miravold and Young's and you know Maxim's and Grants, that's the whole crew there, or some of the whole crew there. I've had their gooey duck, gooey duck being the very manly clam, we'll say.
Is that fair? It's a very it's a very, very manly clam. Anyway, uh yes. Uh and so um it's the most suggestive food, I think that we'd like a penis. It would be a good time to press pause and Google gooey duck.
Yeah, spell geoduck. Pronounce gooey duck. Anywho, like the the good folks at the end Hoda had one on their show the other day. They did not. By the way, Nastasha just admits on the air that she is a regular I don't know where she finds the time, because you know, I don't know, but she watched the first 15 minutes.
What do you have against the rest of their program? It's crap. Wow. Calling out Hoda and Kathy Lee. They don't care what we think.
Anyway, uh, I used to watch Kathy Lee by back in the day when she was with the Regis. Regis and Kathy Lee. That's bringing it back. I used to be, man. The summer before I, the summer I graduated college, I did exactly three things.
I worked on my 1976 Pontiac Bonneville, right? Bondoing the quarter panel so that I could get it past inspection and making sure that it worked. Paid $400 for that car. Best $400 I ever spent. Car got exactly 10 miles to the gallon, whether it was on the city or the highway.
Like a couple of months into owning it, a James Brown tape got got jammed into the tape deck, and I couldn't ever get it out again. So like whenever the car was running, James Brown was playing. We eventually spray painted it gold and zip tied uh bull horns on the front of that thing. Thing was amazing. I love that car.
Really good pickup. Anyway, so I did that. Uh I deep fried uh potatoes and habanero chili rhinos because I was training myself for heat eating at the time. And I watched Regis and Kathy Lee. Uh oh, and ABC's daytime soaps.
And that was basically it. That was the whole summer. My wife was like, what the hell? I mean, she wasn't my wife at the time. She was my girlfriend at the time, but you know, she was almost like, man, what the hell's wrong with this guy?
What am I gotten into? Anyway. So uh their gooey duck is incredibly delicious. They cut it into like kind of long noodles and they cook it in a CVAP oven, I guess at 50 degrees C, which is just warming it, really, uh, for 30 minutes, and it's just fantastic. Very, very tender.
But they cook their snails at a much higher temperature. So 68. Once you go to 68, I mean, I don't see why you don't just take it all the way up to 85. I don't really see what the big many, man. I'd like to try it.
I'd like to try the difference between a 68 Celsius snail for five hours and just like a regular simmer in a bag, let's say, for, you know, for like two hours, see what the difference is. But if that's what they say works, I'm sure they tried it. I'm sure they had one of the 15 cooks that was working on that thing sitting there with like snail after snail for days figuring it out. Uh right? Mm-hmm.
Isn't that pathetic that we don't own a copy of Modernist Cuisine? Don't even. It's pathetic. It's pathetic. Okay.
Andrew is also wondering if uh we are still interested in some help uh for blog posts. And I would gladly lend my time and effort. Okay, here's the thing. I have come to a realization, people, and that is I have look, I have roughly 15 to 20 blog posts in my head that need to get written. Right?
Roughly 15 to 20. That I just don't have time. I'm just being pulled in all kinds of different directions. Uh I think at this point, if there are people out there, and they would have to go through Nastasha and give a sample of their writing or whatnot. But if there are other people who think that they want to write cooking issues style posts, meaning pedantic.
Uh, you know, but like, you know, kind of, you know, the style. If you've ever been on the blog, cookingissues.com, you know, you know the style. The style is what it is. It's cooking issue style stuff. I think at this point we could probably open it, open it up.
What do you think? This is the first I've heard of this. I know. So we would have guest writers? Yeah.
I mean, what do you think? I mean, now that we we we're gonna own it. That's it. Like we own it. We can do whatever we want.
The people who are writing for it no longer have to be working for the French culinary. That's true. I mean, uh I'm just considering between between me. Look, look, you want to does anyone care about this? Here's the post.
Here's the post that like the school gonna say. What are they gonna say? They don't read it anyway. Yeah. Alright.
So, like, look, I have a I have a bunch of clarification posts on uh Kisel Sol and Kaisan, which are two new clarification aids that I use. I have a way to clarify now uh things like uh lime juice to get pretty good yields without a centrifuge even. I've worked on it without a centrifuge. But grapefruit juice, it's no problem. I'll be very close to getting centrifugeless uh clarification for lime juice.
Gotta write about this. I have to write, there's a bunch of uh like book review things I have to write on um there's just a whole boatload of stuff on more infusion techniques I have to write about. I mean, there's just a bunch of stuff that I have to write about. I just don't have time. And you know what?
Maybe this. Maybe it's not even stuff that I necessarily want to write about. If someone else can come up with a cooking issue style post on their own thing, right? And by the way, I'm not if you have an idea and you can write it up in a cooking issues kind of a way, I'm not gonna take credit for your idea. I just don't feel that that's appropriate.
Do you? No, yeah, no, you're right. But yeah. It needs to be appropriate posts. I don't want some dummy writing something, you know.
Hey, Nastashia just called all of you guys dummies. No, but I I'm just imagining this stuff will get is she making the vegan face? She's making the vegan face. I'll tell you something. Like, uh, well, that's why we call you the hammer, Nastash.
Hey, you you know, you are the you're the hammer. You get to decide like whether or not this stuff. Okay, what I would do before you go bother writing it is I would propose to Nastasha what it is you think is an interesting. Look at Francis Lamb's writing. We really like him.
I love him. That style of writing. Francis Lamb, who now he's at guilt. He's at his new company Guilt. He's not at the he's not at Salon anymore.
Guilt the the blog. Oh. Anyway. Anyway, so I'm I'm I'm open, Andrew. So and we had someone else calling the same thing.
Okay. Uh another question. I just had a disaster occur, and I'm trying to backtrack my steps to where I screwed up. And this is coming in from Marty and Eagle Rock. What?
We have a caller? I'll come back. Oh, we lost him! We didn't, we got him. Hello, caller, you're on the air.
Hey, Dave. I just had a question. Um, so you know it's pumpkin carving season. Oh, Halloween question, yes. All right, go ahead.
Yeah, Halloween question. Anyway, um, I was just wondering if you had anything special that you do with all the inside of the nuts that you just scoop out and then you just kind of throw it away. Is there anything you could use that for, food-wise? I mean, other than the seeds? Yeah.
Or even the seeds, I don't know. Maybe you couldn't eat the seeds. Oh, the seeds. No, the seeds are incredibly delicious. Now, I wish I had the recipe for it.
Uh the my kid's babysitter makes the best pumpkin seeds I've ever had. We're just talking about this yesterday. And um, and you know, when she said she was gonna make pumpkin seeds, I was like, yeah, whatever. Come on, like you're gonna make a pumpkin seed that I think is delicious. Come on, what she doesn't normally cook that much, you know what I mean?
But her pumpkin teeds are freaking delicious. And she she removes the pulp from the pumpkin seeds, like washes them clean, and then squeezes uh uh lemon or lime juice over them, lets them sit for a little while, and then roasts them off in an oven with salt. And they are freaking good on a regular pumpkin. They're delicious. I've tried them with the kabocha squash, and the seeds are a little bit thicker, so they're not as good, but uh my but I'll try to get my babysitter's recipe for the seeds for later for next week, but they're they're fantastic.
Now, the pulp, I don't know whether you can use the pulp for anything. You ever use the pulp for anything? I mean, I'm sure you could cook it. I'm sure you could cook it and like make like a kind of a brothy thing out of it and then like press it out. The strings themselves, I don't know how well they break down.
But uh the seeds by far and away, you should never throw away those pumpkin seeds because they're incredibly delicious. All right. Well, thank you so much. Hey, thank you, and happy Halloween. Nice Halloween question.
I wish I had a spooky sound effect to play out. I know. You can you make one? I'll try. How's that?
It was good. Spooky? I just had a disaster occur. This is Marty and Eagle Rock. I just had a disaster occur and I'm trying to backtrack my steps to where I screwed up.
I love questions like this. Right? Because I like because I screw up all the time and I'm always having to backtrack. Blowtorch. I'm not a big fan.
He hasn't gotten to the mistake yet. But I'm not a big fan of uh blowtorches. Um unless look, I mean I'm assuming, Marty, that you maybe you have one of the Iwatanis, which is one of the little uh the little butane powered uh blowtorches. But I find that like the average torch that we use, which are the big old propane ones that are used for uh uh when you're you know, I don't know, what's the word I'm looking for? Doing plumbing, like a plumbing torch, right?
Uh they leave what I call a propane taste. And we talked about this recently on the air, a propane taste. And I think it has to do with the chemical that they add to the propane such that you can smell it when it's leaking, right? Because you don't want it to leak and explode and all that stuff. Uh and there are butane torches that don't have that smell because either they do a better job at combusting that smell or because there's less of the adulterance in the butane because you use the butane that you use for pipelighters and cigar lighters, and those customers are very sensitive about that smell, ruining their cigar, which is why old school suckers don't use lighters, they use matches to light their cigars, right?
Mm-hmm. Right? Okay, I don't smoke cigars, but I'm just making this up. Anyway, um I'm not a huge fan of torches in general, especially on fat, because fat tends to pick up that flavor more than uh lean parts, which I've done the test on. Uh I'm a bigger fan of just you know, putting a sear on that thing in a frying pan.
If you can't do that, fine, go ahead and blowtorch, it's gonna work. But that's just my thoughts on on blowtorching. I recently bought a blowtorch at the home depot that is a propane torch that has a much bigger flame on it. It's a real monster. It's called like a wide angle, like a wide flame.
Uh I'm in the process, another blog post. I'm in the process of working on it to see whether or not that thing has less of a torch taste, whether it has a better combustion, and also whether it can do a better job browning because it's not as much of a point source of heat. It's much wider. So I'm looking into that. Anyway, okay.
This wasn't the question. We're back on Marty's question now. Uh so he bagged them with olive oil, garlic, and fresh rosemary, and sealed them up with a home vacuum sealer. So far, so good. One I cooked for my parents uh two days at 130 degrees, uh, which is 54-4 or rare.
The other I tossed it in the freezer. The first one turned out great. I salted it and seared it off. Perfect meat. By the way, good job not salting it beforehand.
The recent blog post we had is that if you salt the meat beforehand, it's gonna taste cured, uh, especially on a long cook like that. It's not gonna taste like a fresh steak. So uh good job salting it afterwards and searing it off. Uh perfect meat. Good.
I'm glad. A couple of weeks later, I default defrosted the other hunk and tossed it into the souvi into the um uh immersion circulator into the or whatever he's using to cook at 130 degrees uh and cooked it for 36 hours. At 36 hours, he noticed an air pocket growing in the bag. He was worried there was some anaerobic nastiness happening, and sure enough, when I opened it up, it smelled like rancid zombie vomit. There's some Halloween for you.
Rancid zombie vomit. So, rancid zombie vomit. Zombie vomit zombie zombies eat only human brains, right? I don't know. Yeah, zom Jack, correct?
I'll have to do some fact checking on that first. Yeah, fact-check. I believe, well, maybe not exclusively, but their favorite thing to eat is Yeah, it seems like Google says they eat brains. Yeah, human brains. And then the reason they don't just eat other zombie brains, the reason they need human brains, is because the way you become a zombie is to have a zombie eat your brain.
Therefore, therefore, you don't have the brain to be eaten by the once you're a zombie, so they need to search out fresh humans for their brains. So see, this is why it works. Anyway. So Rancy's rancid zombie vomit would be uh like several day old human brains that have been digested by zombies is what we're talking about for a smell. So I eat bad.
Uh I dumped it and served leftover lasagna instead. That's a good call. Uh what uh question is where did I go wrong? Could I have killed guests had I served it? And what should I do differently next time?
Uh thanks, Marty. I don't think that uh look, obviously, you did the right thing. Anytime a bag uh blows up with air and you don't know why, you should throw it away. Uh because there's probably clearly bacteria growing in there that are c uh causing uh the bag to inflate. The fact that it smelled like rancid zombie vomit, right, and usually um it, and it does smell freaking awful because I've had it happen before.
Uh it's like um to me, it's not zombie vomit as much as it is kind of blue cheese mixed with zombie vomit, right? Kind of a blue cheese sauerkraut, socks, feet, zombie vomit mix, right? But it's um it's off putting. Let's put it that way. Uh certain, like uh, you know how some cheeses taste delicious if it's smell of death?
It's kind of like that, too. Anyway, uh, what's happening in there is it's not gonna kill anyone, most likely, but what that is uh is uh there are different lactic acid uh bacteria, lactobacilli, and other bacteria like that that are growing in that bag. And what happened is this you had a large piece of meat. Uh you might have had a uh portion of the interior of the meat that had gotten contaminated, like a knife or something got stuck into it, or it's just the stuff on the outside, and maybe the meat was resting against the bottom of the circulator, right? And you put something in frozen.
Or you you thawed it, and as you thaw it, let's say you thawed it before you put it in the circulator. Uh remember, freezing doesn't kill bacteria. It kills maybe a certain portion of them, but it's not uh a method to kill bacteria. So the bacteria are basically in suspended animation. It takes a long time to thaw out a piece of meat.
This is why they have you thaw meat in the refrigerator typically, even though it takes a whole hell of a long time, they don't want the meat to uh basically be growing bacteria while it's thawing out. The reason it takes a long time to thaw meat is because uh water is not nearly as good, like bound water inside of meat is not nearly as good a heat conductor as the ice. So once it starts thawing, it actually becomes kind of insulated relative to uh the part that's not thawed. And so it takes a lot longer to thaw something than it does to freeze it, which is why things take forever to thaw, and even though you've had that turkey in the fridge for you know three days, the inside of it's still frozen. You've noticed that, right, Nastasha?
Yeah. So uh one, you don't necessarily have to thaw it, you can thaw it in the circulator um at kind of low cooking temp in that in that area, right? And then you're killing bacteria right from the get go without growing some at the beginning. The other problem is if there's some bacteria in the middle of it and it takes hours for the uh meat to come up to temperature, and it can take hours and hours and hours, especially you're right at the line there. You're at 50, uh, like 130 is like 54 4.
If it's four degrees different, so if you have a big roast and it sits in the bottom of the pan and there's uh stuff underneath that's contaminated that hasn't been uh killed yet, and that part is even four degrees cooler because there's not water circulation underneath of it, you're gonna be growing bacteria in that, and then the gas will come up around, it'll form a bubble and it'll start floating, right? So I'd have to diagnose exactly where you went wrong. Um one, beware that at those close temperatures, you should what you should do is take the bag and probably simmer it like for like a minute just to kill everything that's on the surface layer, and then put it in, and you're not gonna have a problem. You're gonna want to make sure the bag is up off the bottom of your circulator tank so that there's not a place where you're like four degrees different. At four degrees different, you're growing evil bacteria in there, and you don't want that to happen.
Um another thing is making sure that you don't have any contamination on the inside, uh, making sure that your thaw times aren't too long. Uh, but you you you you definitely put yourself in a situation where a chunk of the meat was in the range probably between 40 and 50 Celsius, right? So below 100 and whatever it is, 20 and change, 20, you know, eight or six, seven, whatever it is, and change where bacteria are growing, and you grew lactic acid bacteria. You probably wouldn't have killed anyone, but I guarantee you the entire piece of meat was repulsive, so it's a good job to throw it away. Um right?
Mm-hmm. Yeah? Yeah. Alright. And uh, do you have anything else to say?
Um. No? You have nothing? No. Pubkiss?
All right. Well, uh, this has been the Halloween episode of Cooking Issues. We'll come back with all of our Halloween stories. Happy Halloween and happy trick-or-treating. Oh, you dead wrap.
Got me on this corner. And I don't know where I'm at. Thanks for listening to this program on the Heritage Radio Network. You can find all of our archived programs on HeritageRadio Network.com, as well as a schedule of upcoming live shows. You can also podcast all of our programs on iTunes by searching Heritage Radio Network in the iTunes Store.
You can find us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for up-to-date news and information. Thanks for listening. The following is a public service announcement from Food Karma. To kick off the New York City Meat Week in style, Meet with a Twist will bring together the best chefs and mixologists for a cocktail food pairing party on November 7th from 6 to 10 p.m. at City Winery.
Meet with a Twist features 10 cocktails paired with 10 chef selections highlighting local sustainably grown meats such as duck, lamb, chicken, pork, beef, bison, and ostrich. The party will launch a week's worth of events throughout the city that celebrate the slow food movement bringing sustainable meats to our tables. Again, that's November 7th from 6 to 10 p.m. at City Winery. Updates, tickets, and more information are available at MeatweekNYC.com.
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