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Broadcasting live from Roberta's in Bushwood, Brooklyn. You're listening to Heritage Radio Network.com. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. I'm Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live every Tuesday from about 12 to 1245 in the back of Roberta's Pizzeria in Bushwick Brooklyn on the Heritage Radio Network. Joined as always uh with uh my co-host Nastasha the Hammer Lopez.
Hello. Hi. On this fine Tuesday morning, how are you today? Fine. Good, good.
All right. Today's cooking issues, number 61, I might add. Well, by the way, today is a happy birthday to my mom issue. My mom's birthday today. Happy birthday.
Yeah, right. It's not like she listens to it. What's that name? Linda Dr. Linda J.
Adonisio. She runs the heart transplant program at uh Columbia University, the uh Piatric Heart Transplant Program. Yeah, she's badass. Anyway. Today's show is sponsored by Modernist Pantry.
This show should just be sponsored by them. Like all the time. Yeah. Anyway, alright. Today's show is sponsored by Modernist Pantry, supplying innovative ingredients for the modern cook.
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Chris Anderson and his team will be happy to source it for you. With inexpensive shipping to any country in the world, Modernist Pantry is your one-stop shop for innovative cooking ingredients. Modernist Pantry now carries three types of gel and gum, including Calco Gel F, low ASO Gel N, and Calco Gel LT100 high ASL gel. What's the other one? High Low.
That's it. High low and a mix. Farran uh sells something called uh gel an or gelanio or whatever he calls it in the Spanish stuff. And what it is, it's a mix of the high ASO gum and the low acel gel and gum. So for those of you that don't know, well, I'll finish that thing first, then we'll get into it.
Uh fans of cooking issues that place an order of $35 or more before next week's show. We'll get a free package of gel an. Simply use the promo code CI61 when placing your order online at ModernistPantry.com. Visit modernist pantry.com today for all of your modernist cooking needs. Okay.
So uh gel an, right, is interesting because it's uh it's one of the newer hydrocolloids. It's a product of uh microbial fermentation. And it's made by Kelko uh CP Kelko. Piper, our uh old intern Piper now is working for CP Coco because it's a family business. He moved out to California, correct?
Wow. Isn't that true? He was either about to or he just moved out to California. No, he took the job. Anyway, he's working for CP Calco.
So the cool thing about uh gel N is this one, Gel N can be used for certification because it requires calcium to set. So if you have very, very pure water or you use what's called a sequestrant, which binds up to calcium, you can do sterification. I don't really like sturification, so that's now what interests me. But what is cool about gel an is it has a very good mouthfeel, it has very good flavor release, and you use it in very small quantities to get a fairly firm gel, which means that you're not gonna mask uh flavors a lot. The other cool thing about gel an is that once you make the gel, you can boil it and it's not gonna go away.
So, really, really hot gels, people use uh gel an. Also, the cool thing is that the high ASOL gel an is very rubbery and stretchy and bouncy, and the low ASL gel an is very brittle. And by combining the two, you can get any kind of texture in between that you want. Gel An also makes very good fluid gels. Oh, we have a caller?
Oh, caller, you're on the air. Hi there. Um my name's John. I've called in uh once before. Uh I know you uh last couple weeks you've been talking about um hunters and how they should really get an immersion circulator to cook their cook their kills.
Um so I mentioned that to a hunter buddy of mine, and he's actually uh his dad actually got a deer last night. Nice. So I'm wondering if you have any specific recommendations as far as um what uh you know what preparation and stuff. Uh and it sounds like the most likely cut that he's gonna get out of this is uh you said the uh r rear, so it'd be like a ham, I guess, out of the hind quarter area. Right.
Is he is he is he splitting it with other people, you mean the the uh the Yeah, it's like he's splitting it with him and his dad, maybe. Ah, yeah. So he's getting the so his dad's taking the loins and all that, huh? Yes. I think the loin is probably the best part.
So he's getting a ham cut. How old is the deer? Is it very is it young? Uh don't know how old it is. It's a buck though, so they're worried it might be a little bit uh gamey.
Right. And that that's one of the reasons uh I asked, because cooking low temp isn't going to take any of the gaminess out out of the meat, right? So, like for instance, if you get like, you know, a very very young deer, like the liver is good, but it goes incredibly livery in an older deer. Uh but I don't let me see. So for meat that is gamey, tendency is when you cook it, the longer you cook it, the more you accentuate that kind of gaminess.
Right. Right. So then the other question is kind of uh, and how old the animal is is gonna determine roughly how tough the meat is, right? Right. So if you like gaminess.
Right now, in general, the deer is not gonna be very fatty. So even a young tender deer, if you overcook it, it's shot. You know what I'm saying? Because it's gonna dry out. So here are the basic parameters.
Typically, in a gamey animal, the longer you cook it, the uh more gamey it gets. Now, if you like that gamey taste, that's not necessarily a problem. All right. The more connective tissue that's in an animal, the longer you need to cook it to tenderize it at a given temperature. Right?
Right. And the less fat is in an animal, the drier it's gonna get the instant you overcook it. So these are the three things you have to play with. Now for uh low temp, like on a deer loin or something like that, I like low, like 55, 56 Celsius, right? Right.
And you don't need to cook it that long. Now the question is how long if you're going to use those cooking temperatures, how long do you need to cook uh the different muscles in the hind quarter to get them to be tender? It's probably going to be a while, in which case it's going to be gamey. I you know I would recommend um like this Well I know he does cut these things like steaks. Uh I mean he says he basically is cutting he said he's cutting steaks out of the ham area.
So I think he treats them much like he would something from the loin. Right. I mean I'd I had bag I'd bag them in butter. I wouldn't salt them because you might have to cook them for a long time and if you cook them for a long time you're going to lose some of the juiciness if they're pre-salted. I would bag them in butter without any uh or oil whatever but uh you know something that's not gonna affect the flavor in a negative way I would not add salt until uh the secondary process you can sear it beforehand if you want it bag it and then if you want to cook it like a steak he has to in his mind he has to come up with what he thinks the equivalent steak is right so uh I'll give you some examples like uh a skirt steak if you're only gonna cook it for like 30 minutes you want to cook a skirt steak at 57.
If you're gonna cook a skirt steak for four hours low temp right then you're gonna want to go down to 55, 56 Celsius because it's gonna tenderize over that and it's gonna taste better at those lower temperatures. Does make sense? Mm-hmm. Also you're not gonna want to cut it too thin or you're gonna ruin all of your good work when you do the search. See one of the ways that people do game meats a lot even in the hind quarter, right?
Uh, like for instance, I've had lion meat this way and bear meat this way. They'll cut very, very thin steaks, almost like uh you know, pork chops used to be, and then uh and then they'll just high heat pan them real quick. And it'll basically the fact that the meat is tough and overcooked is gonna be ameliorated by the fact that you have the nice taste from the searing and it's cut so thin that your teeth are gonna be able to make it through anyway, but that's not what we're looking for. Right? Right.
We're looking to actually cook the meat properly. So you're gonna want to cut a relatively thick steak. So if he's saying he's steak cutting it, you want to find out kind of what thickness he's going for. I would go on the thicker side, like you would for a regular, like a good beef steak, and then just run a test with a small cube and see how tender it gets if you cook it at let's say fifty-five for eight hours. Do you know what I'm saying?
And then just really okay. Yeah, just see like as a ballpark start. Just take a small cube of it without searing it, because I don't want to know anything about what happens. I want to know what happens to the tenderness and the flavor of the meat itself. Uh do that and see whether it goes.
If it's mushy, it means you cooked it too long. If it's not tender, it means you haven't cooked it long enough. If it's very gamey, try to up the temperature a degree and and chop the time down by a lot. And if it's uh, you know, if it's just not if it's just undercooked for your taste, then obviously uh, you know, raise the tap. And if it's uh similarly, if it's overcooked for your taste, lower it a little bit.
Don't go below about 54 uh 54.4 Celsius if you're gonna cook it for a long time just for safety reasons, uh, and you're not gonna want to go above fifty-seven. So it's like that's your whole range of cooking right there. Perfect. Okay, cool. We'll experiment with that then.
Um can you when you when you're done, uh you can ask another question. When you're done, will you please write or call in, tell us what happened? Sure, yeah. Maybe I'll take some pictures too. Nice.
Um just thinking about uh so I you know, I did uh um a dinner this weekend with some friends, and and um my wife just loves um, you know, uh steak tenderloin. So that's what I did, and that's you know, a crowd pleaser, it's you know, easy to do fifty-five, hour and hour and a half, and and you know, it's nice and tender, sear it off. The one time I have tried different cuts of steak, I think I was a New York strip. I basically use the same technique. And I know that um, you know, from your charts and stuff, uh you know, I think New York strip is considered a tender cut, so that's pretty much the same technique I applied, but it was really tough.
Um and I don't know if that was a function of just not a very good cut of meat, or do I need to cook a cut like that longer? Okay, so a strip, depending on uh well, you know, strip does have that piece of uh cartilage running underneath the fat line right up at the at the top, but you're not talking about that. You're talking about the whole, yeah, the whole hunk in general, I think was kind of just not very not very tender. What temperature did you use? I it w I it's been a while, but I think it was basically fifty-five.
Yeah. You know, what you medium rare. Fifty-five is a fine temperature for strip. It's great temperature for rib, for instance. It's a fine temperature for uh for for ri you know um uh ribeye.
Uh but the uh you might want to take the strip up to fifty-six or just cook it just cook it longer. I think uh, you know, a a strip in general, when we cook strips, I like to cook them at least two hours at fifty five um to soften them up, and actually I think they're kind of at their optimum at around four. Uh really, okay. At that range of four hours. They're not gonna go gamey on you, and you're not gonna break them down too much.
So I would say a fifty-five, which is a good number, I would cook it for about four hours, uh, no salt beforehand. Uh otherwise it's gonna lose some of its texture. And I would then uh drop the temperature of the circulator to 50 for about half hour or so uh just to let it uh between half hour and forty-five minutes to let it uh the temperature in the center of the steak come down to fifty, and then just sear the bejesus out of the outside. And why you just drop the temperature so you don't overcook it when you sear it? Bingo.
Okay. Yeah, that's the only reason. And you know, it if you have like uh I for instance, I did this uh just last night, is uh I I cooked a whole bunch of steaks on uh Sunday in a bag, unsalted, um rib steaks at 55, and then I had one uh left over because somebody cancelled on me. So I just left it in the bag, and then I uh I heated it up last night. I threw it uh uh cooked on Saturday rather.
I threw it in a uh in the circulator, but I put my retherm at 50, right? Re-therm it for 35 minutes and then sear it, right? So you're not gonna have any safety issues because you're only keeping it at 50 for a very short amount of time, and the rest of the time it was kept in the safe zone, and then you can flash it off. So if you if you don't want to worry about exactly you know dropping it at the right time and you're gonna cook it ahead of time, then you can just do your retherm at 50 and then steer it off, and you're not gonna have any problems. Right.
Great. Alrighty? Thanks for calling and let us know how the deer uh came out. We'll do keep up the good work. Super, thank you.
All right, so back to gel in. What? Yeah, well, let me finish the gel in before we go to break. Anyway. So if uh uh I had something to tell you about that too, about the about the steak.
Oh, you know what? My stepfather says I speak very, very quickly. Is that true? It's very true. I speak quick.
He says I speak uh more quickly on the radio than I actually do in the real life. Is that true? I fear if I open my mouth before I say something, you're gonna cut me off right before I say it. Uh past you speak. That's a confirmation.
Yeah. Anyway, whatever. What the who the hell wants to talk slow when they're on the radio? I mean, am I unintelligible? All right, right, all right.
Okay, okay. So gel an. So uh so gel the other cool thing J-an does is it makes a uh fluid gel. And a fluid gel is something where you make a gel and you shear it into very, very small particles. The particles tend to uh kind of adhere to each other when it's at rest and they form a gel.
Uh it what's acts like a gel, and then when you shear it, i.e. in your mouth or by pouring it or spooning it or anything like that, it reverts to the properties of a liquid, makes a fluid gel. Gel-in! Great stuff. Uh we like it a lot.
That's what we use for our ice cream that we uh I'm bleeding? Yeah. My nose is bleeding. Uh, but not through not through the nose hole, the bridge of the nose. In case you guys are getting grossed out that there's like blood shooting out of my nostrils while I'm talking, it's not true.
I scraped the bridge of my nose, is what Nastash is telling me. Anyway, now Nastash has an image of me blowing uh blood out of my uh nose holes. Anyway, nose holes. So uh gel-in, really good stuff. Uh we use it to make our hyper creamy torchable ice cream.
Anyway, with that, uh call in your questions to 718. What is it? Oh my god, I forgot. 74972128. That's right.
7184972128. We're gonna go to our first commercial break, cooking issues. Love that song, right? What was that noise? You don't like Stevie Wonder?
I got a glitter in my throat. Oh. I've got That's a new one. I've got glitter in my throat. Alright.
Welcome back to Cooking Issues. Hey Nastach, it was fun having uh Talbot on the show last week, right? Mm-hmm. He was fun guest. Mm-hmm.
Yeah. You guys enjoy the Talbot over there in the booth? Yeah? Thumbs up? Yeah, he's awesome.
Yeah, he's a good man. How was his other show that he recorded? He's good. He pulled a marathon and he was here all day. I know it.
He was just sitting out in Roberta's, like, you know, with his earphones in, being totally antisocial. I ran into him like, oh my god, how's Talbot? Come on the show. He may have slept here. I'm not even sure.
He did? In the morning or in the evening or both? After all the shows, you know. Yeah, just slept. Couldn't make it back to Philly.
Exactly. Nice. Nice. Okay. So calling your questions to 718497-2128.
That's 718497-2128. Gonna go to some rate uh writing questions, right? Is that what we call him? Writing questions? Yeah.
Email. Can you give me the glitter noise again? Um I'm just getting over something too, so I have the same laugh my grandpa used to, which is always like coughing. It's like start laughing and then coughing. So it reminds me of reminds me of being mean to people if because it makes me anyway.
Anyway. So I'm trying who's this from anyway. Do we know who this is from? This question? Is this flavor.
Also from Johnny? Oh, Blake. Alright. Blake Anderson writes in, I'm trying to make a chill to Zabayon, but the liquid separates out after an hour in the fridge. The recipe says to chill for four to six hours.
I'm using four egg yolks, very fresh and very local. One quarter cup of sugar, one half to one cup of red wine. I don't usually use red wine, but anyway, Marcella. Oh, really? Mm-hmm.
Blake, we're gonna come back to this. Caller, you're on the air. Hello? Were you lying to me, Nastasha? Oh, hey, caller, you're on the air.
Jack said. We lost him, sorry. You lost him? Yeah. Weird.
Nice, Jack. Thanks, man. Thanks, bro. Okay. Uh so we're going back to Blake's uh Zabayon.
Uh quarter cup sugar, half cup to one cup, red wine. He dropped the liquid ratio. That didn't fix the problem. Uh Blake, you think that's a man or a woman? So one man.
Uh dropping a liquid ratio did not fix the problem. I'm beating a mixture to a foam on a double boiler and mixing until the mixture cools to below 90 degrees Fahrenheit. Would adding less thin help to better emulsify. Any advice to make a stable mixture? All right, Blake, I think I know your problem, and you're not gonna believe it.
You ready for this? You're not gonna believe it. First of all, Zabayon, one of my favorite things. I love Zabayon. You like that stuff, Nastasha?
Yeah. Like over strawberries. It used to be I used to make this all the time. I would I, you know, I used to have like a bottle of marsala uh just lying around the house just for this occasion. When it was strawberry season, I'd cut up the strawberries, make a sabayon, pour that some bitch right over the strawberries and eat it.
That was dessert. It's a good dessert, yeah? Yes. Okay. Now, here's what you were doing wrong.
I almost guarantee it, because I used to do this too. You're undercooking your Zabayon. So what you're doing is you're you're super worried. And by the way, here's the procedure, folks. You put your egg yolks, your liquid, your sugar in a bowl, you whisk the uh heck out of them, and you put it over a heat source, and you keep whipping until it becomes foamy and thickens, right?
Then it becomes a creamy sauce. Now, everyone when they're making a Zabayon petrified that they're gonna overcook the uh egg yolks and uh thereby make it taste grainy and like scrambled eggs. Now, you're probably, if you're being careful and you keep beating it, is not gonna happen. Here's the issue. A Zabayon is gonna start getting foamy and look like it's built up a texture just from the fact that you're so afraid that you're gonna curdle it that you're beating the crap out of it with a whisk.
So you're forming a nice foamy mixture with your Zaboyon, but you're not cooking it enough. Then when you pull it off and put it in the fridge to cool down, over time that foam separates and you get a layer of liquid sitting at the bottom because it doesn't kind of keep self-emulsified the way that let's say a creme anglaise does when it's oh uh undercooked, right? Which is, you know, similar, but instead of using a wine, you're using uh milk, right? And usually not as high of an egg yolk uh ratio. So what you're doing here is you're making something that looks all foamy but it it's not cooked yet, and it's gonna separate.
I've done this many times. I guarantee that's your problem. Do not be afraid. Make sure that your mix isn't just foamed up, but that the actual liquid is thick in your in your Zabayon, and I guarantee you this is gonna solve your problem, you'll be able to chill it down just fine. Uh here's another thing.
Everyone gets all I saw some uh I was looking up on the internets and I saw some recommendations on uh cooking it, and they're like, don't let it get too hot, don't let it get too hot. And all of the recommendations that I saw on the internet about the temperature at which uh the egg yolks are gonna curdle in the Zabayon are all off and they're all low. Uh invariably, I don't know what the heck these guys are reading their temperatures with or how much of a carryover they're getting, but the information out there is just not right. Um, I, in fact, don't even make the thing. People are like, Don't let the don't let your pan touch the liquid in the double boiler, or everything's gonna go to hell in a handbasket.
Uh also not true. It's a matter of just being careful. Now, the larger amount you're making, the more careful you have to be about regulating your heat source because you can't keep the thing moving as quickly with your hands. But for small normal quantities, a couple of egg yolks, uh, you know, you can do it. I do it in a in a bowl with a smooth bottom.
You don't want something with a lot of edges on the bottom because you're not gonna be able to get your whisk into it effectively, and you might get some local curdling there. But I make the thing directly over a flame. I have like a bowl with like a loop in it that I hold the loop with a heat-proof thing, and I make it directly over a flame. I don't even use uh anything. If you're worried about cool cooling down, getting carryover, have a uh like a like a pan of hot of uh cold water next to it to stick it in and beat it a couple of times.
As soon as it starts cooling down, uh it's not gonna curdle on you. You're gonna be fine. So I think your problem is just fear of curdling. Get over your fear of curdling and your Zabillon is gonna be delicious. That's my recommendation.
If you uh are having like real issues, it's something that I don't understand. It is possible to stabilize it so much. I wouldn't use less than I'd use starch, but uh I wouldn't do it because it's gonna muddy the flavor. Zabillon is so pure and delicious and light and ethereal that uh it just shouldn't be messed with under any circumstances. What are your thoughts on this?
It's good. Yeah, all right. Johnny Kirk writes in says, I have a question about preserving lemons through sous vide. In my experience, preservation through the uh of lemons, through the use of a chamber machine takes an equal amount of time as the traditional method of preservation. My uh true.
My process uh using a multivax C200, which is just like multi-vax C200 for those of you that don't know what the hell that is, it's a standard medium-sized restaurant vacuum machine. Like standard. Yeah, standard. Okay, uh, is as follows. Place the container with the lemons, the salt, and the lemon juice in the vacuum machine, uh, and let it get down to about twenty millibar, which is fair to midland vacuum.
The guy's back on the phone. He's back on the phone. All right, caller. It's a new colour. New color?
We lost the old guy. I feel so bad now. Anyway. Caller, you are on the air. Hey guys.
Howdy. Uh question about methell solutions. Okay. Using them. I've I've been playing with them lately and uh have had what I would call absolutely no luck.
Really, really stinky, nasty, chemically, even like fishy smells coming off of this stuff. Like, you know, one percent solutions. I tried to try to make some meringues. You know, you were talking about meringues a couple of weeks ago. Oh, hey, that's cool.
I'll do I'll try that. I tried to make uh sort of like a tuy, you know, sort of crispy. I wanted to make a uh tamarind crispy piece. And man, that stuff was so foul. I must be doing something horribly wrong.
Okay. Help me. Let's start. Which methyl cell do you have? So I have tried uh both the F fifty and the E four M.
Okay. I tried to Yep. E f the E series I I don't like the E series. I'm just gonna be honest. They don't I don't even know that they make the E series anymore.
Uh, because their factory blowed uh blew up uh number of years ago. Maybe they maybe they started making again. But the E series is typically used for making like the twils and the chips. Is that what you were doing? 'Cause they're film formers.
That's what I was trying to do. Yeah, I don't like them. Uh much. I know a lot of people that like them. Uh I went to a restaurant which shall remain nameless.
It was Moto, and like half the dishes had on it uh like a tweel formed with uh methylcel, one of the E series. It's it's E4 what? E4C, E4M? E4M. Okay.
So that's also, I mean, the good news about E4M uh is that 4M, the the number, right, is uh 4, and then the M stands for thousand. So the viscosity of that one is like 4,000 times greater than uh what a one would be. So F50 versus F4M, you're looking at a factor of uh 240, like like 80, like 80 times thicker at a given uh thing. Okay. So you should be able to use a relatively minuscule amount of it to provide a thickening power, but the problem is that the E series is good at film forming, but it's not very good at gelling, and it's not very good at uh I mean I don't think it's a very good whipper.
Um it's mainly used for that film forming thing, but you need to have a certain amount of that in there to make the film forming thing. Anytime the methell uh percentage gets to be one, you're gonna start tasting the awful uh methyl cell stuff unless you're using some very, very, very strong flavors. So when when I'm using F50, F50 is the one that makes really good foams, it then makes a meringue. When you're using F50, if you have an extremely extremely strong flavor, like passion fruit, for instance, passion fruit or you know what some passion fruit variant um will obscure say that sounds nasty, right? Will obscure the methyl cell flavor up to about a percent or a little over.
Uh that said, in general, if you ki in a whipped product in a m in a meringue I don't taste the methell uh when it's down at like zero point eight percent so eight grams per kilo uh but you start adding like a gr like one point two grams per kilo over a percent like that and you're definitely gonna get uh an off flavor from the methell that's like and so and that's one of the the problems with it. Now how much were you using with the F50 and what flavor were you using? That was the tamarind? Yep. And I I had started at just under a percent.
I was going for 0.6 and then I I was paging through modernist cuisine and those guys use it often at you know one point two ish or so I upped it uh and I I tried that in tamarind I tried that in uh in a roasted cauliflower I was trying to put those two together and it just it just kept coming through. I also had it problems with it seeming like it was separating. Right. Which I assume is a dispersion problem. Yeah a lot of met a lot of methel uh ha if you have do you have a vita prep no I don't yeah so methylcel is kind of a pain to uh to disperse so one of the um unless you have like a you know very good uh blender so one way to to nicely disperse disperse methyl is to mix it with uh a quantity of corn syrup or sugar and then blend it in to keep the particles separated.
Another way is to go uh hot cold, so put the methyl cell into something very hot because it won't dissolve in stuff that's very hot. And then like like blend it and then add like cold or chilled stuff to drop the temperature and then it'll hydrate. And then uh the last resort you'll notice in a lot of methyl cell recipes if you look at them, they'll basically tell you to make the mixture and then let it sit overnight. And uh a lot of hydration problems with methell can be um can be fixed by by letting it sit overnight. Now the difference in taste of methyl between I I I look I don't know whether this is true or not.
I know the thickening power of uh of these products is not linear. In other words adding doubling the amount doesn't double the thickness it's uh it's a lot more than that. And I have a feeling and I don't know why this would be the case but it's my feeling that taste wise with methyl it's the same thing. So 0.2 is going to taste like a lot more than point six but my feeling is point six isn't going to be enough to get a nice stable meringue foam out of it, right? So I would say try like eight point nine but not above.
The other thing I'm gonna say is that is that it's a whipping agent in that it actually helps to stabilize uh um uh air you know foams but you're also gonna want uh some solids in there that uh provide a structure so in when we use fruit puree's it's basically pectin mixtures that are providing that structure to you so if you don't a lot of people add bulking agents like maltodextrin to their uh stuff to get them to whip up to a nice uh to have like to have structure left when uh you've dehydrated if that makes sense because there's not enough methyl cell there to provide the structure. So you what you're looking at is the methyl cell is basically a a whipping aid and also it's holding the structure until it can dehydrate. But you don't want methyl cell being the primary physical structure of the meringues that you're making, or I think you're gonna end up with those kind of a taste problems. Got it. Should that make sense?
Several things to try, yep. Alrighty, and uh let us know let us know what happens. I just don't like those E those E15 or E4M films, uh films that much. It's I mean like some people do like them, so don't write in and say that I'm a jerk for saying it's just it's not my preference. I'm allowed, right?
Absolutely. All right. Thanks for calling. What? I uh did the uh combu wrapped duck this weekend we talked about last week.
Was it delicious? Awesome. Good awesome, nice. Yep. I got that trick from I got that trick from Nils and it's delicious.
Yeah, I'm gonna wrap everything. I'm gonna wrap you know brownies in combo from now on. I know it's good stuff. Yeah, great. All right.
All right, thank you. Okay. Is there another collar, Jack? Yes. Oh caller, you're on the air.
Hi. Just wanted to say thank you. You guys have been hitting it for 60 shows. Appreciate it. Oh, hey, thanks.
Thanks for calling in. Uh in the combu wrapped uh Ahhi tuna that I went and caught was amazing. Yeah. Perfect. How how long how long was it wrapped?
Uh I wrapped it with some combu that was caught for just down the ocean from it. So yeah, it was pretty pretty dang amazing. Appreciate it. How long do you leave it? Overnight?
What's that? Do you left it over? Nice. Beautiful. And then we we just did sashimi with it.
But um my main question is um making hot sauce, and right now I'm using my my Vitamix blender, but I need to obviously move that forward a little bit. What what's the next thing I'm gonna look for to make like a like a sriracha style hot sauce? Huh. I don't have equipment. Oh, uh I don't have any recipes off the top of my head.
Well, what kind of problems are you have? I want equipment. I want to know what what homogenizer, etc. Oh me, you want it even finer than you can get it in a Vita prep? It's just I need to make more.
Oh, size. Well, they make like how much do you need to make? Like what are we talking about here? I'd like to do five gallons at a time. Wow.
Five gallons at a time. Yes. I'm gonna go in business here. Yeah, there's okay, let me think. They're I mean, they make obviously large uh style uh things, but they're not gonna get it as fine as a uh a Vita prep does.
But they're I was looking at large rotor staters, but those are expensive. Oh, they're very expensive. You might want to look, there's there's there's basically something in between a blender and a food processor that I haven't seen much in um in America, but in Europe they have them a lot. I and I forget who makes who makes them, but they're basically like two uh food processor blades stacked up but in like a five-gallon drum, and they sit on the floor and they're priced for restaurants. Uh I don't know how fine they can go, but I had some chefs from Australia and Europe tell me that they're like the greatest thing since uh since sliced bread.
And what's cool is they tilt. So you put your s you you top load your stuff, hit go, and then um and then it it tilts it out. Now I'm not exactly sure um what level of you know particle breakdown because the the the thing you're how many microns we can get you. Right. Um yeah, because the I mean rotor staters are they're they're expensive and they're not good at breaking down large, large things because they have to fit into the gaps.
So you're gonna need to do some initial breakdown anyway. You know and if you want to go really badass, they have basically inline uh like I think they have inline inline rotor stator jobs where basically you you you pre-pulp your stuff and then you stick it through the rotor stator and just goes through and gets completely annihilated. But that's not that big to begin with, so uh I just need to break down those hard seeds. Yeah, and the pepper. Yeah, and I'm like uh you want to actually physically disintegrate seeds.
I don't think that this thing is gonna I don't think that this that the the Robo Roboku like thing is gonna work on it. Um the other good thing is if you're actually gonna get a big piece of equipment, unless you're just gonna do a straight e b eBay buy, what you do is is you call them and you say, here's what I'm looking to do, who's got one? And then you go and you look at it and you see what you know what kind of it can do. Uh and you and once you make the next leap into like more expensive equipment, they're usually okay with that because they know that they're gonna get uh a customer uh out of you. Do you know what I'm saying?
Yeah, like I'd like to spend you know a thousand, maybe fifteen hundred bucks to get everything going, but oh yeah, no, it's gonna be more than that for that. Like another, you know, if you're making five gallons at a time, so I'm trying to think of like custom solutions. Even a gallon I might be able to live with, but right now the vita prep's just it's it's a lot of work. Well, they make a much bigger vita prep. Um they make one that's I think three times the capacity that I think does like like uh four liters or something like that.
And that one's in that range of like you know, fifteen hundred bucks or something like that. Um that's a big vital prep. Yeah, it's much bigger. I haven't I haven't used it, but one more qu quick question on the hot sauce thing is uh how do you measure garlicness? I mean we have scobile units for heat.
But uh how do we measure garlicness? Well, it's it's an interesting and a difficult question because garlic is not stable, like garlic chemistry is very, very uh Yeah, the elephant breaks down and all the other. And so I don't know how at what point it's considered stable, like at what like how many, you know, weeks or months it's considered stable, but you're also measuring the pungency is measured in in different ways. Uh it's been uh and I can't even keep them in my head, like the minute I read it, it goes out. But uh Eric Eric Block, I think, his book on garlic and other alliums.
Um I mean, it's just really a lot of complicated stuff to wade through. And so it's uh, you know, great thing about capsation is is that it is um you know, it's fairly stable, and so it's easy to characterize and Scoville's fairly easy for people to measure. Similarly with hops, you know, IBUs, international bitterness units are fairly easy to kind of get a hold on what's going on, and they make a lot of sense. Garlic, on the other hand, I don't know what the what the pungency rating of uh garlic is. It's probably measured as like a free percentage of like Allen and or whatever it is.
You know what I mean? Um but I don't I've never heard of anyone rating it that way in terms of uh trying to s to make a standard. Uh which is a pain because different kinds of garlic have different levels of like radically different levels of pungency, and so it's gonna be difficult to control that way. Right, right, right. You know, I mean?
Like Well, I appreciate I'll go ahead. Yeah, I have a bunch of hardneck garlic I just got from uh the farm that uh Thanksgiving farm that Cesare Casella works in, and it's it's baby twice as it's twice as you know powerful in terms of that awesome garlic flavor as like the normal crap I get out of the supermarket. But yeah, we picked up some from the Berkeley seed bank. It's uh I think it was uh Moroccan garlic or something weird like that. But it's holy crap, is this powerful.
I know it. And you know, it's too powerful to my wife who's not used to it. I love it. But um it's interesting. If uh let next time I speak to McGee, which is actually gonna be in two days, because I'm going up to the Harvard to give another uh Oh, he's gonna be there?
Yeah, Mickey's gonna be there. Yeah. I'll ask him about it because that's the kind of thing he's interested in too. And if I ask him about it, I'll I'll try to remember talking about on the show next time. Well, ask him about popping sorghum too.
Popping sorghum. Why it was were we talking? Oh, was I talking about it out here? Because I just had a conversation about this with somebody. Terrible inconsistency.
I love the stuff, but I can't get it consistent. I think it's just my distributors are different ages of sorghum. Right, different and different probably moisture contents. You know, you can equilibrate you can equilibrate grain, it takes a while, but you can equilibrate grain to a specific moisture content. I don't have the protocols in in the top of my head, but it's probably uh moisture contents your problem.
Ah, so I can I remoisturize it? Yeah, it just takes a while. It just takes a while. Like you carry it in the bag or something. Yeah, I don't know.
Like you look you look up on Google, like uh Google procedures for uh because it's called temper they temper grains out to particular uh moisture levels for industrial processes because you know, for instance, for puffing or extruding, if it's not exactly the same every time, like everything goes to hell. Right, right, right. Yeah, I noticed that one. Well, I can talk to you all day, but I really appreciate the answers. Thank you.
Call it call in if you have any more results. I will do. All right. Now, where was I? Preserved lemons?
Yep. All right. So preserved lemons, we're talking about Johnny Kirch preserved lemons, and basically he puts them in the uh vacuum machine, uh salt, lemon juice, lemons, uh, gets it down to about 20 millibar. I'm assuming he puts cuts into the lemons, because usually people put cuts into the lemons. Anywho, he does this about three times, uh, and then he uh bags them and seals them.
Oh, so he just puts them with juice and salt in the container, vax them without a bag, and then and then uh vax them down in a bag. Uh it seems to make sense. Decrease the oxygen level might speed the process of preservation. Also, if you could help me understand uh the point, some people freeze their lemons when they're preserving. What's the point of that?
I would appreciate it. Okay. So here's what's going on. Uh when you vac the the the reason you want to vacuum bag uh preserve things, whether it be kimchi, sauerkraut, preserved lemon, is that uh they like to be in oxygen free environments. Not that it speeds it, is that you can get all flavors if there is uh oxygen and the bacteria that are growing there want to be anaerobic anyway.
So uh vacuum bagging is a good way to not have to worry about weighting things down in jars and making sure they're covered with their own juices and things like that. So that like when you're making a pickles or or anything like that, there's always instructions to like load it down, cover it to make sure they're covered, and that's to exclude air. If you bag it in a vacuum machine, uh you get rid of that problem. Another great thing about a vacuum machine is uh the vacuum machine by doing kind of rapid infusion of any liquids that's there, can help get the salt and whatnot into the uh fleshy part of the fruit much faster, right? Uh and basically just kickstart those operations very quickly.
Now, the point of freezing a preserved lemon uh preparation, like uh Alex Talbot does, for instance, in his uh ideas and food cookbook, is uh you're breaking down that by repetitive freeze thawing, you're breaking down and tenderizing the the te uh texture of the uh of the product. It's gonna speed any sort of preservation if you are gonna do a longer keep to keep get have them ferment a little bit. Uh and it's also uh gonna change the flavor uh of the fruit a little bit. And we've done this with with our frozen and thawed lemons that we think I think they smell more like uh bergamot, like uh like Earl Grey, uh after they've been frozen and thawed. Um so that's what that's what that's all about.
But a traditional preserved lemon is a function of time because there are yeast and I believe it's uh like symbiotic yeast and like I think acetic acid bacteria. I think yeast makes alcohol, very salt tolerant, acid tolerant yeast makes small quantities of alcohol, which are then uh digested by bacteria, which I think make acetic acid. But uh this is coming off my memory. I didn't have time to research it this morning. I think that's what's going on.
And so um, you know, a preserved a traditional preserved lemon pickle is going to uh be a lot different from anything that you kind of shortchange or quick cut. Um should we take one more commercial break? No. We have to finish. Jack, do we have to finish or can we take one more commercial break?
Uh yeah, take another break. All right, we'll take another break. We'll come back, call your questions to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. Many guys have come to you with a line that wasn't true, and new pass them by stem by though you're in the series.
And welcome back to Cooking Issues. Uh, you like that? I come off that really mellow song with a screaming intro. Anyway. Uh we need to have an announcer.
I guess you want to be the announcer? No, I I want to have Phil Bravo. Well, we have a friend Phil Bravo, not good for much, but probably would be a good announcer. Right? I mean, everyone's good for something.
Anyway. Phil Bravo. Anyway. So Scott Hansma uh writes in and he says, uh, I'd like to make a uh transglutaminase that's uh meat glue, turduck in breast, and then cook it sous-vide or low temp, actually. I wouldn't do it sous-vide, I'd do it low temp.
Uh but the temperature for duck is very different than for chicken and turkey. Uh two ideas I have were to do the whole thing confit style, which would probably be pretty awesome, but I was hoping for a roast type texture. Or I thought about pre-cooking the chicken and turkey piece and then gluing it to the raw duck. But will the TG glue to the cooked meat? It will, not as strong, but it will.
Uh, or could I sous vide the whole thing to duck temperature with the duck in the center and then roast it to the other parts to a higher temp, but that's gonna be hard to get precisely right. Any other ideas? What do you recommend besides not doing it? Scott Hansbaum. Okay, well, uh, you're in luck because this is one of the recipes that uh I actually make quite a bit.
And the you uh hit one of the secrets there. The secret is to arrange the meats in the order that they want to cook. That's the secret. So uh what you do is you take turkey ski, this is what I do anyway. Take a turkey skin, I lay the uh lay the turkey skin out, then I I slice uh thin and pound out turkey breast, which I then uh meat glue in a layer on the skin.
Uh, then I put uh a layer of chicken breast and then a layer of uh sausage force meat, then a layer of duck, and then a squab in the center. Nils and I used to do this at like every Sous-Vide class, so we've done it dozens of times. Uh and then you roll the whole thing into one giant tube, uh, and then you put it into a water bath at 64 degrees Celsius, which is what the turkey wants to cook to with a thermometer in the center. And when the squab makes it up to 56 Celsius, you pull the whole thing out, and every piece of meat all the way through is cooked exactly the way you want it. The turkey's cooked to about 64, the chicken's cooked to 63.
Uh, the sausage meat goes between about 63 and about 58. Uh the duck goes between about 58 and 57, and the squab goes to 56, and everything's good. You then chill it down a little bit and you deep fry the outside of it to crisp up the skin, and you're good to go. Nastash, you've had that, right? It's very good.
It's good, right? That is the way to do it. The other way to do it is to take then the leg meats and do a total comfy of the leg meats, right? And since those are going to a high temperature anyway, that one you can just roll in a plastic tube, confie it at like 82 Celsius for uh or 85 Celsius for you know a couple of hours to get it cooked, pull it out, and I would serve them side by side, and that would be straight up delicious. We've never done that, but that would mean I'm telling you right now, that would be delicious.
Now, some tricks. I would I would make a miniature roll first of the squab and the duck and then place it in and then uh roll it in sausage and then roll the larger roll because the whole trick is centered on uh on getting the squab in the exact center, right? But that's the way you do it. You arrange it in concentric circles and uh it's uh delicious, good business. Um see what we have here.
Uh Joseph writes in, Dave, I'm thinking of cooking pork chops with apple juice concentrate, and was wondering if you have any experience with this combination. I mean, I've cooked uh hams in apple cider before, that was good. I'm assuming cooking a chop in apple juice concentrate is is going to be good as well. You're gonna want to be careful if you're doing a high temperature, if you use anything concentrated with a lot of sugar, you're gonna get a lot of scorching problems. If you're doing a low temp, you're gonna want to use it concentrated so it doesn't taste poached.
You're gonna get probably some flavor transfer, but I'm not sure how much. And then when you, if you're gonna do a post-sear as opposed to a braise, you're gonna get in trouble with again with scorching. So anytime you're dealing with high sugar glazes, uh, unless you like burnt sugar taste, which some people do, which is why they put barbecue sauce on their meats before they grill them, because they like a burnt sugar taste. It's just something to be aware of. But apple and pork, I mean, you can't get more classic than apple and pork, can you?
No. Can't be can't possibly get more classic than that. Okay, uh Dave, we get this from Jason. Dave, I cure meats at home rather successfully, he might add. Uh, he often cures uh pork, beef, goat, and lamb.
A hunter at work has offered uh me his next deer, which I promptly thought about curing into deer prosciutto, uh salami, brasala, etc. etc. I have one concern. I thought wild deer often have parasites. Do you know if freezing will kill these parasites?
If so, what temperature and for how long? The same question applies if I want a low temp cook some deer steaks. What's the minimum time temp for whatever parasites deer have? So any low temperature uh cooking that's gonna kill bacteria is gonna kill parasites. So you're not gonna worry about parasites in a cooked thing as long as you've cooked them properly.
I try to do some initial research, and you know, deer can carry tapeworms and other parasites, but they typically won't jump to humans. You get a lot of bacterial contamination through shooting and things like that if the guts uh done are through poor slaughtering. Uh and so and there have been outbreaks of bacteria-related problems due to uh beef jerky, uh venison jerky. So in something that's not gonna be cooked or salted enough or properly cured to kill all bacteria, you're gonna want to uh you're gonna want to do a cook step like when you're doing venison jerky. But for freezing, if there are uh sort of any sort of worms or parasites that are there, freezing should kill them.
Freezing does not kill bacteria, which is why freezing is not a good bacterial kill for doing uh dry cured meats, but freezing is a good uh kill for trichinosis and for tapeworm cysts. Now, I don't think there have been any cases of tapeworm cysts, uh tapeworms developing from deer to people. You got deer to dogs and you've gotten dogs to people, but I don't know that you've gotten deer to people, but maybe. Uh in which case I've seen recommendations of a hard freeze, very you know, low, like zero or lower Fahrenheit for like uh, you know, like well over a day. That I couldn't find them anymore because Clemson used to have this stuff online and they changed their site and I couldn't get it anymore.
Uh but uh take a look. I mean, um it's something you worry a little bit about, but I wouldn't worry too much about. Uh anyway, okay. Uh last question of the day, I've got two minutes. John Blue writes in hello, pecan prolines were a traditional dessert of Mexican settling in Texas way back in the day, because that's all apparently uh was necessary was pecans, water, and sugar, and apparently they had uh sugar, which is weird, but they had sugar in the hepicons.
Uh replicating this with uh pleasant results has not been successful. From what I've uncovered, refined sugar was commonly used. I've tried that and brown sugar, demerar, etc. I've tried short cook times and long times. They either end up too watery and won't harden, or too grainy from the sugar.
Any suggestions on how to keep the sugar dissolved while thickening, or how to harden the mixture without adding ingredients? Also, any plans to do a quest for French Fry Supremacy Part Three. Thanks, John Blue. Well, I'm gonna address the French fries first. Uh I'm gonna, you know, we're going to be opening 98% chance we're going to be opening a uh bar concept in an existing place soon.
And in it will be uh the R Supreme French Fry, uh, which isn't exactly what's in the blog because I've increased the size of the French fries since we last did it, and it requires a couple different steps. Uh but there will be an opportunity for anyone to come taste our French fries soon. It's true or false, Nash. True. Okay.
Uh I'm not I don't know if I'm gonna write about it anytime soon just because I'm so damn busy. Anyway, prolines are interesting. It's a question of what kind of a texture you want. Some people's pralines are uh hard, the sugar is hard, and some people's prolines, the sugar texture is very s is fairly soft, almost akin to a maple sugar. And the difference between them is how crystallized the sugar is.
So I'm just gonna go into general because I don't know exactly how you you want them, right? If you want hard sugar that breaks, like peanut brittle, you don't want uh basically any crystallization hardly at all. You want it to form into hard candy. And for that you want to minimize stirring and you're gonna want to add the nuts late or basically pour this stuff over top the nuts, right? And then you're gonna get a minimum amount of crystals uh forming.
You're gonna want to do very little stirring of your sugar before the uh before everything dissolves because you don't want big sugar crystals that then all of a sudden go back into the pot and form large crystals to uh to get seeds, uh seed crystals, right? If you want something more fudgy, you cook it all, you get it totally clean, and then you do stir it as it's cooling, and by stirring as it's cooling, you initiate the formation of lots of small crystals that give a fudgy texture. So, i it all depends. You're gonna have to write it and tell me exactly what kind of praline you want to hit, what kind of a texture you want to hit. But if it's getting too grainy, add the nuts much, much later in your process, even at the end.
And if you want it fudgy, follow more fudge-like procedures of stirring, letting it cool somewhat, and then stirring it to generate small crystals. And if you want it to be fairly clear, except for I don't know if you're adding any cream or milk-based stuff to it, then you're gonna want to uh do a minimal amount of stirring, make sure all of your crystals are dissolved, and then manipulate it the smallest amount uh you can before you uh pour it out and let it set. Uh, but let us know exactly what you're looking at, John, and we'll try to uh troubleshoot a little more. This has been cooking issues. Fishers fish.
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