Broadcasting live from Roberta's in Bushwick, Brooklyn. You're listening to Heritage Radio Network.com. Bringing you pizza live from Robert's Indie Jesus. Oh, you did that. Got me on this corner.
And welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cookie Issues. I was on the air with that. That's awesome. Yeah, we got a little piece of that.
Alright, alright, so here's here's how it works, folks. My headphones weren't on, and usually when my headphones aren't on, no one can hear what I'm saying, so I can say whatever uh whatever I want. And there is a waiter here at Robert's. Who, I mean, doesn't wear the same clothing as Jesus, you know, uh, but basically looks like, you know, Indy Rock Indy Rock Jesus. Am I right about this?
Robert Plan Jesus. Yes. Yeah, yeah. Anyway. And welcome to Cooking Issues.
Okay. And and you can come down to Roberta's, which I highly recommend, and have a pizza served to you by Indie Jesus on any given Tuesday. Uh okay. So uh coming to you live from Roberta's Pizzeria uh on the Heritage Radio Network every Tuesday from roughly 12 to roughly 1245. Can we say that?
Is that accurate? Yeah, I had a little running with the M train and then jogged over here. Uh my fault. I should have just left earlier. But I was at home researching all of my listeners' questions.
What do you listeners? What do we call them? Listeners? Listeners. Anyway, joined as usual in the studio by uh with uh Nastasha the Hammer Lopez.
How you doing? Rough. Rough? We were out. Rough.
Well, cooking issues had a late night last night. Uh we were doing the eater awards, and uh we made uh milk soup, right? It's a Colombian soup, changua. I think I talked about it on the air. I I made it in Colombia, and they wanted something with eggs and pears, and so we did that.
So it was like, you know, milk and chicken stock and fish sauce and uh little lime, poached egg, and uh some stuff, like uh vacuum-infused pears with um with uh, you know, some uh what's that stuff called? What my brain is on is on hold today. You know, the Spanish pepper, pimenton uh oil and uh cilantro oil and cilantro and vacuum-infused onions, you know, all that good stuff. Oh, and corn nuts, by the way. I'm bringing corn nuts back.
By the way, that's my job for the rest of my life is to make corn nuts come back because corn nuts are some delicious product. Anywho, so um basically, if you're ever gonna do one of these events, uh, here's what you should do. Everyone else did this, right? They made up a little sign about what they were making. They, you know, with it.
I swear to Christ, I shouldn't say that in the air. Like next next to us, right, was Red Farm. The the dim sum guy there made a miniature village out of dough. Different colors of dough. Man did not paint any of those little figures.
I'm talking like like absurdly detailed miniature people holding pandas with like flowers out of dough, all on a bed of of like pink peppercorns and like with like these weird flowers that look like tree bonsai things. The lady next to us had you know, like eight million year old candle drippings like Vincent Price House of Wax kind of business, spray painted gold. We had nothing. Ninda, nothing. And we show up, and not only do we have nothing, we don't even write down what we're serving.
So the entire time we had to just sit there and give the whole long shebang spiel of what the hell we were doing. By the end, we were just dancing in our booth going, milk soup, milk soup, get your milk soup, milk soup. Right? Pretty much. Anywho.
So I highly recommend making a sign before you go out to one of these events. Also, uh been a busy week. We were we were up at the Harvard uh with uh Harold McGee uh and John, his son, who's a TA for that class, uh doing the uh what were we doing, drinks? Mm-hmm. How do you think that went?
I think it went well. Yeah, I think it went well. I think they enjoyed it up there, the drinks. Although I wasn't allowed to serve any oh, check this. All right, look.
The Harvard undergrads, now I know that like, you know, you know, universities, I remember back that long ago, universities, they get all, you know, they get their privates all bunched up about uh underage drinkers, right? You know, uh, and uh so we weren't allowed to serve any liquor, even to students who were over 21, which I was fine with. But check this, it's like some sort of weird, like 70s beer commercial. I'm not allowed to taste what I'm working on. It's absurd, right?
Absurd. Absurd. Anyway, uh so uh enough of uh what we've been except for I'll tell you one more thing that's interesting. Uh Nastasha just went to see Fishbone. This is not a cooking related.
Oh, by the way, you should call in your questions. Two 718-497-2128. That's 718497-2128. Okay, so um uh Nastasha went to go see Fishbone, which was one of my my favorite bands growing up. Nastasha from Los Angeles never listened to Fishbone or the Chili Pepper.
She hates anything that's local, by the way. She's like an anti-local person. Like, if it was around when she was a kid, she hates it. You know what I mean? Like, you know, tacos, she hates them because she's from LA.
You know what I mean? Fishbone, she didn't listen to it. Why? Because she's from LA. Me, East Coast guy my whole life, grew up listening to kind of that West Coast uh ska funk punk kind of stuff.
Anyway, Fishbone Seminole Band. I'm happy to report to my listeners out there that Fishbone still rocks after all these years, right? Yeah. They were hardcore. Their horn playing was so tight back in the day that you could have put a anyway, whatever.
Um to the questions. All right. Hi, Dave and Nastasha. I've got a couple of sausage questions for you today. Some sausage recipes call for the addition of soy protein or milk powder to help with moisture retention during cooking.
I've got an excellent Bratwurst recipe. Bratz. Bratwurst. Bratwurst recipe right now that I always get good results and juicy results from. I'm wondering if I should try and tweak the recipe by adding some milk powder or soy protein.
Maybe it will be even better. You know, this is from Matthew, and he has a second part, but I don't think so. Um I don't think you need to uh no, no. What do you think? No.
I don't think you need to kind of enchepen it. I mean, look, you you if you're if your stuff is juicy now, right? Then I don't see the point of adding like a filler or extender. Milk pro milk protein, it's okay. Uh you know, if I don't know.
I just wouldn't do it. I wouldn't do it. Soy protein, I definitely wouldn't do. Taste it. Does it taste delicious?
Is it making your sausage more delicious, right? If your sausage is already juicy and you don't need any additional Oh my god, Indy Jesus is coming by the stuff coming by the station. If you don't need the additional binding power, uh don't use it. That's my feeling. What do you think, Nastasha?
He looks at his reflection. All right. For those of you, which is everyone who who uh doesn't know what we're talking about, like we basically, here in the radio station, we look through uh a window at whomever is eating in the kind of like faux outside enclosed, you know, backyard of uh of Roberta's pizzeria. So you know, on break, we will often make comments to ourselves about the guests and or the weight staff. True?
True? Okay. Uh okay, matt back to Matthew. When I cook my bratwurst, I usually gently poach them in beer, good call, before browning them on the grill. Also a good call.
An issue that comes up is they tend to swell and the meat ends up poking out of the ends of the casing. One suggestion I got was to let the sausages air dry a little after stuffing them. This would dry them out uh a little bit, and thus when they rehydrate during cooking, they will not swell as much. I'd like to hear your thoughts on this. I don't know that um I don't know that uh that the issue with uh sausage bursting is uh a rehydration of the meat issue.
I think it's basically a swelling, um, probably swell swelling of the air pockets that are inside of your uh of your bratwurst. Now, if you make the texture denser by like vacuuming the meat before you put it in, you probably get less swelling. Um I think what what you're doing when you when you're letting it dry out a little bit, lose some of its weight, is you're just uh providing a little extra space in the casing for expansion, because it's still gonna expand the same amount if the same amount of air is in there. At least that's my feeling. I don't know.
This is just off the cuff. So uh, or you could stuff them a little less tight and they're not gonna burst. Also, I would recommend probably poaching at a lower, I don't know. When you say gently poach, um, I don't know what you mean by gently. I would, when I do brats uh or any kind of sausage, I think I've mentioned this on the air, uh, you want to get an immersion circulator, uh, and you can put your beer directly in the immersion circulator, or you could put a small amount of beer in a bag uh with uh the brats and circum at um uh 140 degrees uh Fahrenheit, which is 60 Celsius.
That's the magic one you should all remember. I don't care if you can't do Celsius and Fahrenheit, you should just remember 60, 140. Just remember that. Anyway, um the other magic one I always remember for some reason is 57135. Anyway, so I would circum at uh 140 uh 60 Celsius for like you know, 40 minutes, something even longer.
You can go. This is actually going to okay. So look, when you're making a sausage, the whole idea of grinding up the meat is to take uh tougher other things and flavorful things, uh make them you know join together into kind of a more homogenous mixture, but also to tenderize by grinding, right? Uh and you add a lot of fat to keep the sausage uh moist even after it's cooked, because you know, sausage if it didn't have a lot of fat would dry out. With a circulator, you can tenderize the actual individual particles of meat by cooking longer, and you don't need you should keep the fat in because the fat's delicious, but you're not gonna need the fat just from a simply a juice standpoint, from a juiciness standpoint.
So uh it's like a double win. So if you get a circulator, I would cook your brats with a circulator. You could do them in beer and then uh and then cook them off on your on your grill. What do you think? Good, good.
All right, anyway. Um Keith Solomon from how do you pronounce that? When winetka winetka, Illinois, uh writes in and he says, per our request to please write in some questions. Uh, I'm one of those who listens every week via podcast. I have a question about taste.
Well, thank you for listening. Uh, why uh why does so much fish always have that frozen taste? I know that you can get good frozen frozen fish. What is the secret? Um and also Thanksgiving is coming up.
Why is so much uh deli turkey so awful? It can't be that hard to make turkey taste like turkey. Well, here's the here's the deal with deli turkey. It's just bad. You know what I mean?
It's like they uh they they're forced to kind of overcook the turkey um, you know, per per the regulations that they do, and so to make up for that, they have to like hit it with a bunch of stuff to keep the moisture levels high enough after they overcook it. And it's just, you know, it's just not turkey. And then they slice it preposterous. It's just not, it's just not turkey. It's not turkey.
What do you guys think? Anyone in anyone here think that stuff's turkey? No. No. And you know where you should get your turkey this year, right?
You should get it from Heritage Foods. Actually, you know what? Heritage Foods turkeys are delicious. Do we still have those or are they sold out, Jack? No, we've still got some.
Yeah. Patrick just got back from Kansas City. Well, is that like the turkey capital? Yeah, it's turkey. Turkey Capital.
Turkey Capital. Yeah, the turkeys here at Heritage, and you know, not to pump our own brand or nothing, but the turkeys we get here are uh are are pretty damn good. I mean, I didn't pay for mine last year. I stole it from Patrick actually when he wasn't looking, but it was a delicious turkey. Oh, also, speaking of pumping, you know who came to the event yesterday?
Tim Musick from JB Prince, Chef Superstore came to um our event and gave us a sauce funnel to use at the event. Sauce funnel, by the way, a sauce gun, is basically a funnel with with a little stick that sits in the bottom of it. These things should cost like a dollar fifty cents, but they cost like $150 for some reason. And so everyone always resists purchasing one because they're just so damned expensive. And if you're working at a school, they tend to get lost.
Um, however, they are like the world's greatest thing. I wish my hands was cons were constructed out of them because you can just dump unbelievable like accurate, fast portions of anything liquid out of these suckers. So we did, you know, our 400 uh portions of soup, and I didn't spill a drop until someone asked me a question, and I leaned over on the funnel and it actually opened it onto the table. Did you see that? No, you didn't catch that?
Thank God. Because she would not let me forget it. Anyway, sauce gun, uh, like the greatest thing in the whole in the whole damn world, and uh you can purchase it at the JB Prince. I'm gonna get back to my uh whose question is this. Keith's question after our first break.
This is a house that Jack built. Remember the south. This was the land that it works by hand. It was the dream of it, a bright man. There was a room that was filled with love.
It was a love that I was proud of. This is a life and a lot better plan. On the love of the same old love in the house that jackets, the house to justice, the member this house. Now the fence is that a hell down love. Yes, it was the gate that it walked out of.
This is the law that I decided. You know, I brought it on myself out. But it is funny that I didn't understand. And that was The House that Jack built by Aretha Franklin. An actual request from uh one of our listeners.
You can call in your request, we'll take them. We don't care. We like that song, and uh Jack especially likes that song because it's the house that he built. That's for Lee Calder. Yeah, you know, Aretha Franklin, afraid of flying in such a severe way that she has to drive a bus wherever she goes to go on tour.
Did you know this? Did you know this? Anyway. Today's episode number sixty-two, which by the way, sixty-two, you can now cook a low temperature uh pork belly and listen exclusively to uh cooking issues broadcast while you do it. I don't recommend doing that, but if you stayed up for 62, basically, you know, cooking issues straight, cooking your uh pork belly, low temp, you would have a nice pork belly.
Well, it's just that's how many hours of of BS that we've spewed over the air. It takes 62 hours to cook. Well, we don't have a full hour, but it's like rough. It depends. Look, it'll I'm just lying.
It depends on what temperature you do. But anyway, today's episode is sponsored again by our friends at Modernist Pantry, supplying innovative ingredients for the modern cooked. You love to experiment with new cooking techniques and ingredients, but hate to overspend for pounds of supplies when only a few grams are needed per application. I wish we could call these guys. You know, the school doesn't have any of their hydrocolloids left right now.
They have nothing, and I have to go to a Nate. We're doing look, right after this episode, we're going to do an event with uh Nathan Miravold at the FCI and Maxine Belay. And we could use some Modernist Pantry Love right now because they have no uh Kelco gel F, gel Anne left. They have no flavor-free guar. Anyway, it's pathetic.
Anyway, Modernist Pantry offers a wide range of modern ingredients and packages that make sense for the home cook or enthusiast, and most cost only around five bucks, saving you time, money, and storage space. Whether you're looking for hydrocolloids, pH buffers, or even meat glue. You'll find it at Modernist Pantry. And if you need something that they don't carry, just ask. Chris Anderson and his team will be happy to source it for you with inexpensive shipping to any country in the world.
Modernist Pantry is your one-stop shop for innovative cooking ingredients. Modernist Pantry now carries ingredients for curing, including two types of prague powder and pure sodium nitrate. Fans of cooking issues a place in order of thirty-five dollars or more before next week's show, we'll get a free package of Prague Powder number one. Simply use the promo code CI62. That's CI62 and placing your order online at modernist pantry.com.
Visit modernist pantry.com today for all of your modernist cooking needs. So when I by the way it's uh collar. Oh, this color? All right, when I when we're done with color, I gotta talk about prague powder. Collar, you're on the air.
Oh, great. Well, thanks for being late, I was too. Nice. All right. So uh yeah, lift all your shoes.
Got the number memorized even. Beautiful. Nice. So what do you what do you got for me? Oh, yeah.
I uh yeah, filled it in a jar, vaced it with uh a few tablespoons of water. Works great now. Except for a few days. A few days? Just took um nice.
So it's basically so the thing was like if they were too dry, couple like a couple tablespoons of water for like what size? Like a liter mason jar or something like that? Yeah, yeah. And then just let it equilibrate for a couple of days at regular ambient temperature. Is it whose phone?
That's your phone. It's beautiful. And and and so now now you pop entirely evenly all the way across? I still have a lot of widows. By the way, it worked really wonderfully.
Nice uh nice use of the actual technical term for unpopped kernels. Did you know uh many people do not know that an unpopped popcorn kernel, and now I guess also uh by analogy a sorghum uh kernel are called widows, which is an interesting fact. Yeah, yeah. You mentioned that one before, I think. Oh, really?
Oh, I don't know. Who knows? I can't remember what to say. So uh bringing back corn nuts. We went to a Peruvian restaurant in uh Sonoma.
Right. And they uh they deep fried Peruvian giant corn. Yeah. It was the size of a corn nut, but way lighter. Much bigger than a corn nut.
How to trust some of those? Well, the Peru yeah, Peruvians have like several different kind of uh fried uh corn. Like some of them have like a weird papery husk, which I actually kinda like, and some of them are in weird shapes and they're bigger, but like the Peruvians have forgotten more about corn than we'll ever know in terms of uh pop like like crunchy corn snacks. Do you know what I mean? Uh Peru, like you know, Peru is one of those places where uh, you know, I we I need to go.
Everyone when you s when you you know you go to South America, they're like, Yeah, you need to go to Peru. You need to go to Peru. That's where it's happened in Peru. But I've never been. So I'm looking uh looking forward someday.
The one thing that in Peruvian, I don't know whether I've mentioned it here that's crazy, is they have these uh it's not corn, they have these crazy freeze air freeze dried potatoes that they make up in the mountains that taste like uh mm unwashed goat fur. Is that accurate discussion? Unwashed goat fur. So I think I actually asked this on the air once. I'm looking for anyone out there who has a knowledge of how to actually make these uh f these like uh naturally freeze dried potatoes from Peru taste good, and I haven't had anyone tell me how to do it yet.
Do you remember what they're called? Um like chunta chunta something, chunta uh j ja I'm sure Jack will look it up. Anyway, but yeah. So my my main question, the reason I called, I have a boatload of nori. It's raw Nori.
What do I do with it? I want to make uh I my I was thought of making like a Nori cracker or something like this, but the stuff tastes uh it's got the texture of a wallet. Yeah, well it it's me, but it's already in sheets, you mean. It it's rolled into sheets. It's not no, no, no, it's raw and oar.
Like just taken out of the ocean and dried. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, you could I'd like to leave it raw if I could. Yeah.
Make some sort of snack food or something out of it. Well, you mean you could rehydrate it and then get it thinner, and then when it dries out, it will be less uh leather wallity. You probably just have too thick of a layer of it. You know what I mean? Well, it's one whatever, I guess a leaf of frown sick.
I uh rehydrated it and and uh put it in the dehydrator for a few couple a few times, just cycled it to try to make it weaker, and it's didn't really help a lot. It's still gonna try freezing it next. Still yeah. Yeah, freezing might break it down. I don't know.
I don't have any experience with it. Another thing, I mean, obviously you could um you could shop chop it and then and then uh put it into a mat and then dehydrate it and it'll it'll stick together. You know what I mean? Like I'm I'm pretty sure that's how they make the thin the thin sheets, right? The lava sheets is they get a bunch of it and then they they spread it out thin.
Hmm. I haven't I don't have any experience with this. I'm gonna have I'm gonna have to put my thinking cap on on this one. Yeah, I thought I'd try to maybe fermenting uh what else could I do? I was gonna grind it into flour, possibly and make crackers.
Yeah. Like a fleck crack or something like that. But uh any ideas you have would be. I'll tell you what I'll do sometime during this week. I'm gonna try to remember to look up some seaweed processing technology and I'll try to talk about it on the next week's show.
Wonderful. I appreciate it. Thank you. Alrighty, I'll talk to you soon. Alright, I have another caller, apparently.
Caller, you are on the air. Uh hey Dave and Nastasha, it's Brian. How are you doing? Doing well, doing well. What's up?
Um, so I saw that on the modernist cuisine blog that they posted uh EIY style, what they call uh vacuum concentrating system. And basically what it is is um a vacuum pump. Um the other two with a vacuum pump or what they call an aspirating nozzle that hooks up to uh a vacuum to a flask um that has uh one of those magnetic stirring bars in it, and basically it allows you to um do vacuum kind of reductions or concentrations of of of liquid. So I guess it's not a rotofap, but it's a kind of DIY has. And I'm wondering what you thought uh if you had a look at at that post and what you thought of um and what you thought of it.
Is there is there anything I can do to improve what they they have here? Will it work? Um what are your costs? All right, so here's the here's the here's the dealy. Um it works.
It's not it doesn't do um distillation in the sense that you it's very difficult to save the distillate because you don't have a cold trap. So the way an aspirator works is you you have a jet of liquid water typically that uh uh goes down and the actual speed of the jet going down sucks the air out, carries the air with it and and goes down. Much like uh you would you know, if you spray air, you can suck paint up into that and then spray it out, right? So it's that that that that's what's going on with an aspirator. Now the in chem labs aspirators are used as a very cheap uh vacuum source, and classically what what you would do is you would screw the aspirator into uh water faucet, you turn it on, and you just dump water down into the sink to produce your vacuum.
Okay. Now they people don't like to do that anymore because it wastes ginormous amounts of water, and it's considered, you know, not uh necessarily green to to do that anymore. So people have built aspirators with uh circulating pumps that they can circulate and they can keep the aspirators going without wasting a lot of water. Now, the downsides of uh of an aspirator as a pump is that they're not very uh quick pumps. It takes a long time to pump down to a vacuum.
Second thing is an aspirator pump is limited in the number of uh in the the depth of vacuum it can pull by uh the vapor pressure of water at the temperature of the water. So you like if you're using an aspirator, the trick is to get as cold a water as you can, for instance, ice water works great, uh, and then recirculate it to uh achieve a vacuum. Now, if you don't have a cold trap, you're not gonna, like I say, be able to recapture. So it's basically for reduction. And uh in order to get a good reduction and to stop a lot of bumping, you need to do uh a lot of stirring and agitation of your liquid, which is why they use a magnetic uh stir plate, hot plate, right?
Um so yeah, it totally works for that, and you know, the the the temperature of your liquid is going to be determined by uh not by the temperature of the hot plate, but by the uh ultimate pressure that your vacuum is able to uh maintain, right? And so you can kind of you can measure that if you want to. So this works, and and it's very important that you use an aspirator pump for this uh technology because it's one of the only types of vacuum pump that uh that can get contaminated by vapor, ethanol vapor or water vapor, without crapping out on you, right? And so that's why they use that kind of a pump for that, um, because uh they're actually not the cheapest kind of pump. There's a much cheaper vacuum pump you can get that does a much better vacuum, but it can't handle the contaminant, it can't handle the contaminants the way that uh way an aspirator pump can.
Uh and by contaminants, I mean all the stuff that I like to save in a rotovap. So it definitely, if you look, be an eBay ninja, get yourself a hot plate, they're not that expensive. Get an Erlenmeyer flask with a takeoff on it, also not that expensive. Um, you know, a cap and the aspirator, you can uh you can either buy them, they're not cheap because they and uh they don't come up that often uh with the circulator pump in it already. I mean you can get it, um, but um you can buy uh the actual individual aspirator units and hook up a pump yourself, and I recommend going to um any uh meth head uh like uh methamphetamine production uh website by you know by like these tweak tweet junkies.
And uh because they need a vacuum source to do some of their distillation work, and so you know they have uh kindly put plans out there where you can go basically to the Home Depot and build uh an aspirator pump for fairly fairly cheap, you know. Because remember, they need to be able to do this stuff without getting caught, you know, in like trailers and whatnot. So uh, you know, they they have that that pretty locked down. And what are their websites? Oh, I hesitate to actually mention the name of it, but you know, Google like you know, DIY meth lab uh or DIY aspirator.
Am I getting in trouble? I'm getting in trouble. I'm I'm tell I'm being told that I'm getting in trouble anyway. Nastasha's shaking her head and making the vegan face. But that is in fact where uh where I learned how to build my own aspirator pump back in the day.
And I'm assuming that the feds haven't figured out how to go on and kill all those websites yet, um, even though it has been like six years. But anyway, uh good luck experimenting with that and uh call back and tell us how it works. Okay, I'll uh I'll Google and see if I can get some from the meth head. Alrighty, thanks a lot. Okay, now uh key song, back to Keith's question, which I which I never freaking answered.
Okay, so we've we've we've established that the deli turkey is awful because they start with low-quality turkey, overcook it, and pump it up with a bunch of crap to keep it moist, right? Okay, so the other part of uh Matt of uh Keith's question was uh why does so much fish always have a frozen taste? And I know you can get good frozen fish, but what's the secret? All right, there's a couple problems. Here's the thing with fish, and with anything really uh that you freeze.
Uh home freezers don't actually freeze everything uh solid. You're only freezing a portion of the wall of the water that's in uh a food, right? And so when you're freezing in a freezer, ice crystals are actually forming on the outside of the cells and in a sense, in essence, dehydrating uh the actual cells in the muscles. And what that means is is that all of the stuff in the cells, proteins, liquids, enzymes, um, uh myoglobin, anything like that, and fats and whatever, whatever's there, is getting more concentrated. And as it's getting more concentrated, even though the temperature is lowing, lowering, certain reactions can take place very quickly.
And one of those reactions is rancidity. So what happens is fish typically contains a lot of uh polyunsaturated um fatty acids. Those are the types of fatty acids that are very prone to going rancid. Fish also have a lot of things in them, you know, like blood and whatnot, uh, that are pro that that basically help to catalyze uh rancidity uh reactions in their own fat. So um that thing, that rancid taste is I'm assuming what you're talking about, happens in the freezer just like it would out in uh not I mean I mean it happens slower, obviously, but it still happens even though the thing's frozen, and it's all because fish isn't actually frozen uh like solid down to a hundred percent uh solidity.
Okay? Now, there's a couple ways to solve this. Don't store your fish too long in a freezer, that's one, right? Two is to vacuum bag fish before you freeze it because in the absence of oxygen, uh it's gonna be very difficult for the fat to oxidize and go rancid, right? So you want to get rid of air.
You want to not store it in the freezer too long, uh if you can't get rid of the air, uh, but you still getting rid of the air is is the main thing. Uh and the the same thing happens with bacon, by the way, bacon goes rancid in the freezer. Um the other unless it's vac packed. Um the other thing is is in the really high quality fish, the sushi stuff, it's frozen solid, is uh they freeze it way down, they superfreeze it to uh I I forget what they call it, they probably call it the eutectic point or something like that, even though I don't even think that has meaning. Anyway, um they they super freeze it down to the point where literally all of the water is solid and the chemical reactions cease to take place at a reasonable rate.
And so uh that happens down around minus 70 C. So if you go to like some high-end sushi joints, or if you go to uh Del Posto has one, a bunch of people have these super freezers, and they store their meats in the superfrezers, and there's basically zero temperature cycling, everything is solid, there's no recrystallizing and decrystallizing and recrystallizing, and so the quality stays perfect, right? That's a good answer, right? Okay. Um Jack, should we go to one more break or should I take another question?
Yeah, we should. All right, we'll go to one more commercial break. Call your questions too. For this break, we have a uh certain song dedicated to a certain somebody from a certain vegan-faced co-host. All right.
So here's that. If I were your woman, and you were my maid. You'd have no other woman. You'd be weak as a land. If you had the strength to walk out that door.
My love would overrue my sense. And I call you back for more. If I were you. If I were you. And you were my maid.
So who's this? Wait, who is that for? Gladys Knight in the pitch. Yeah, but who is that? I thought it was a reetha.
Who requested it for Nastasha? No. No, no, no. This is a dedication from a certain co-host to a certain somebody else. Oh, all right, nice.
That's for that's for an episode of Issues. Some secret love going on. You know what you gotta play then? If it's a secret, you gotta pull out the Kenny Rogers, the uh the one where like daytime friends and nighttime lovers hoping no one else discovers. Yeah, it's good stuff, right?
Anyway. Uh okay. We have two unrelated questions from uh uh Ryan, right? From Ryan Santos Santos. Uh one, what's the best way to clean my circulator?
Answer, it depends on what kind of circulator you have. Uh but uh in general, um the new plastic ones are a little more difficult to clean out the insides of the old stainless steel ones are easy to kind of work with. It you we use you can use a combination of like a CLR, which is like clear uh lime rust remover, you can use uh like a light, like a degreaser, and you can actually circulate these things with with the product. So you circulate it with that, you can get the the uh tabs that are used to clean out combi ovens. Uh basically anything that's gonna eat grease.
Uh I mean, obviously, basic solutions uh eat grease very well, but I'm not exactly sure whether or not uh you're you can put um a very very basic solution onto the uh onto the circulators. I have to check it. But basically you run it with detergent uh and a degreaser, like uh, you know, like uh commercial degreaser, and and then you rinse it in water and uh and run it again in hot water and they should clean up. But it is a problem uh that needs to be addressed. I told Philip Preston on the new plastic one, I think he should install little shoulder screws so that you can very easily pop the back off and really clean in and out where the pump is, but not yet.
Hasn't done it yet. I'm sure he's gonna do it because I think it's a good idea anyway. Two, I experienced a weird reaction at a recent dinner. I served uh local baby persimmons with a green tea called hojicha, hojicha, hojita, hoji to uh some reaction happened that caused an extreme uh tannin uh tannin reaction and made my mouth super dry and astringent, unlike anything I've experienced. Do you have any idea what's happening?
Was it a reaction in the skins in the tea? The reaction didn't happen with water, soda, beer, etc. Well, this is interesting. I mean, well, I mean obviously look, you have tea. T has uh tea has tannins in it, right?
And persimmons have tannins in them. And the way uh tannins work is uh they bind to um proteins in uh in your mouth, proline-rich proteins, uh, and uh it those proteins lubricate your mouth. So when the those proteins bind to the tannins, now your mouth feels dry because it's not lubricated anymore, and that's astringency. Okay. Now, uh in persimmons, persimmons naturally have a lot of uh tannins in them, and what what you do, you know, normally is you uh blet, you know, like uh a persimmon, you let it really, really ripen.
The ones that have a lot of tannins, you let them ripen for a long time. The uh pectin starts to the cells start to break down, the pectin and the tannins, which are separated normally, get together, they complex. Once the tannin gets hooked up to the pectin, it no longer has a astringency, and bang, stuff's not astringent anymore. You take apples that are very highly tannic, which are known as spitters because you can't eat them, uh, but they're used in in making cider and whatnot. If you dry them out, when they're drying, the tissue starts to break down, tannins complex with the uh with other parts of the apple, precipitate uh into something that doesn't cause uh astringency, and boom.
So you are in a weird situation where you took two things that weren't very astringent on their own, and somehow the tannins uh in them have a higher now affinity to the uh proteins in your mouth than they did before. And I don't know what would what would cause that, whether, you know, it's uh I d I don't know. It's very interesting. It's another thing that uh you know I should uh bring up with uh McGee. Too bad this didn't come in last week.
I could have asked him when I spoke to him. Uh and by the way, I don't know if we mentioned it. I did ask Harold McGee about a separate question we had last week on garlic and whether there's any units of garlicness that uh and he said no, but we also have some inform uh interesting information, I'm not gonna have time to get to it today, from our good friend at UC Davis, Ariel Johnson, who's gonna who sent us a paper to read on that, and also has some very interesting stuff to report on limes. It's a good reason to tune in next week because there's going to be a lot of interesting uh lime work coming out. Um anyway, so I don't know exactly what's going on, but uh somehow the two things mixed together um have you know synergistically uh increased the ability of those tannins to bind with the with uh your uh the proteins in your saliva.
Interesting. I just said saliva, which is a word Nastasha hates. Anyway, uh hello, Nastashian Dave. I was listening to your podcast last week, and now I remember that there was a question about uh the white powder on combu. I did a research project last summer in Denmark uh with uh South Denmark University and Lars Williams, who's at NOMA, to see whether we could quantify a mommy in the lab.
We worked a bit on Scandinavian seaweeds. And I recall the white powder on Kanbu is Manitol. I might have read it in a book. I don't remember a search online where where there's confirmation. Um Manitol, uh look, I I I that's I kind of remembered that too, but I still couldn't find quickly the information on that.
Manitol, interesting, is a sugar, uh, a sugar that is uh discovered uh in manna. Yeah, you know, manna, manitol from manna. So interesting what goes around comes around. Anyway, uh uh and uh Manitol from Kambu. Uh but it's a sugar alcohol.
Uh anyway, but manitive combo is pretty harmless, and some websites say there's a sweetness to the combu, and therefore it shouldn't be wiped off. Okay, aside from that, aside from the combu, I have a question about French fries. This is from Larissa, by the way. Uh I am now working on a research project to develop an optimal recipe for French fries at Fundacio Alicia in Spain, which is you know like a school that teams up with Harvard to do the cooking uh to cooking thing. Uh long story short, I was an undergrad teaching assistant for Harvard Science Cooking course in 2010, which is how I learned about Alicia.
So after graduating with a physics degree, I came to Alicia for six-month internship. Okay, so for the project, I've been consulting a lot of specific papers and your another blog post on what's going on. We make french fries. Most of my findings have been similar to yours, uh, plus some interesting things. For example, when we freeze raw potatoes before frying, the fries are extremely hard and get harder with time.
We had some fries that got really hard with time, they were kind of gross. Anyway, um uh tests ongoing. Anyway, I was wondering whether you have any new findings since the last fries uh post in 2010, especially on using different potato varieties. Here in Spain, the two common types we get are Kennebex, which are white, and agrias, which are yellow. Agri's yellow color being more pleasing to the majority of people, and the Kennebecs come out of the uh uh fryer extremely blonde uh and don't turn yellow.
Okay, Kennebex, Nastasha and I were hanging out with a potato lunatic at a show once, and I was just you weren't there for that one? Anyway, so I talked to the potato lunatic, someone's literally staring in at the radio station going, What is these people? What are they doing? You see that? Anyway, and she she didn't like what she she uh she saw.
She made the vegan face and walked away. Uh so the um uh Kennebex uh are good, very good potato, but apparently they don't do well on storage, and so for storage they're not gonna necessarily work very very well. I haven't done the research on uh varieties the way I want. I mean, typically, look for a French fry, you're looking for high solids, low moisture, uh, you know, starchy uh potato. And you know, the good old-fashioned uh russet burbank uh that we use is pretty good for that, or any kind of similar kind of high starch, high solid, low moisture potato.
Uh the interesting thing about uh potatoes is that also the optimum potato isn't just a variety, it is a variety and how it was stored because potato goes through uh potato goes through a lot of changes during storage. In fact, older potatoes that have been stored properly, not ones that are all shriveled and nasty, but an older potato that has been stored properly is actually a uh better uh frying potatoes. So there are people who don't like the new crop potatoes when they come out and will continue to use the ones that have been stored for a whole year uh under cold storage because or not cold storage, but under optimum storage because that that those are the ones that they like that they fry up nice. So, anyway, also on my fry, my fries, I'm gonna re I'm gonna not repost it, but like uh, you know, we're we're opening up a bar concept here soon, and there's gonna be french fries on the menu. I'm just letting you know there's gonna be french fries on the menu.
And it's not gonna be the exact recipe that we have on the blog because that recipe was written for three eighths inch French fries. I now favor a half inch French fry. And uh the trick to a French fry is always about getting the moisture level exactly right on the inside of the French fry. Uh if you go if you dehydrate them too much, you get hollow fry. Uh, and if you don't do it enough, you get a soggy fry.
And at the same time, I uh you know I don't want the outside to be hard and leathery. I want it to be crisp, but I want it to bite nicely and not be like a I don't want it to be like a rock. If I want to eat a rock, you uh just serve you a rock. You know what I mean? Anyway, so uh, and so basically in my post, I didn't recommend if you're gonna use uh pectin X SPL, which is the enzyme that we use to uh break down the the uh pectin on the hemicellulose on the surface of the French uh fries so that you get uh very good crust formation.
Mirvold uh et al. Maxime and and Chris recommend uh using ultrasonic bath for similar purpose. Uh when you do that, I recommend not uh not drying after you do your initial uh blanch step. I recommend not doing too much air drying uh because that leads us to a phenomenon known as hollow fry, where you've gotten rid of so much moisture that the potato on the inside just it doesn't have any structure anymore and it goes hollow. Uh when you switch to a half inch fry, you do need to bring some of that drying back just to get to moisture level right.
So, like with anything else, it's just a matter of paying attention to your ingredients and figuring out what's going on. Anyway, I hope that's helpful. Uh Matthew writes in uh I've heard Dave say a couple of times not to salt things too far ahead of time or before a cooking uh long low cooking process. This will eliminate some juiciness. In my head, I remember reading something from McGee to the contrary that the general wisdom of not wanting to salt meat too far ahead as it would cause it to leak juice is actually bunk.
What's the deal? I like the word uh bunk. Oh uh he also follows up and uh says, How do you feel about salting meat that will be braced for a long time? For example, salting or brining some beef overnight before braising, so uh so the salt penetrates all the way through the meat. I guess this uh also applies to salty marinades.
Is the issue at hand that the salt will turn the texture of the meat mushy, or that you believe it will rob it of its juices, which I thought McGee uh debunked. Well, McGee's favorite McGee's like famous debunk is on searing, sealing in the juices, right? That's his super famous debunk, right? Um, but it's not that ju it's not juiciness. In fact, when you salt meat, the literal amount of water in it is uh gonna be higher because the the after cooking, because the proteins, even though you actually some moisture will come out, the meat uh itself will uh bind water uh better, which is what brining does, which is why when you brine chicken, it you know it you can overcook it a little bit and it still stays juicy.
Okay, so um salting can help juiciness that way, and it's not that it makes uh texture mushy, it just makes it firmer, more like a cured uh texture. And so when you're eating something like a steak, you don't want that firmness that you get from uh kind of curing with salt, and so you want to stay away from it. In braises, especially a traditional braise, where you're gonna cook the thing to death and you're using the gelatin, uh, the collagen breakdown of the gelatin to moisturize it. I don't think it's going to be an issue, and there you want the salt in there for flavor, so I think it's okay. It's when you're gonna serve something like a steak and you want to have the texture of a like a uh you know, a regular juicy steak and not have it be firm.
It's not that it's actually less juicy, it's just firmer. Does that make sense? Anyway, so uh I'm I am I am not in uh I'm in no way contradicting McGee. We are we are in agreement. Okay, so um all right, so there's a question coming in.
I gotta answer it because it's coming up on on Thanksgiving. We mentioned uh this is from uh Joe from Chicago. Uh I shudder to think of a day when you no longer release your weekly podcast. I'm constantly learning inspired. Thank you.
Thank you. Uh speaking of inspiration, I came away from last week's uh episode feeling compelled to make a modernist version of Turducken, uh, which is where you know you wrap the turkey and the duck and the chicken, and yeah, you go back and listen to last week if you want to know the specifics. Anyway, but have the following questions before I ruin a perfectly good turkey. What specific kind of meat glue would you recommend for this application? Uh you're gonna want to, Joe, you're gonna want to get uh transglutaminase at which is Activa RM.
RM is the one you sprinkle. If you want, you can get G S. G S is the one that you paint on in a paste. I'm uh kind of an RM junkie, but you know, GS will work fine. Don't get any other variety for this because you know you might run into problems.
So RM or GS. And you could probably get them from modernistpantry.com too. You mentioned gluing the turkey skin to the flattened turkey breasts. Would you recommend gluing any of the other layers together? Uh Joe, I glue all the layers together.
So what you're gonna do is you're gonna you're gonna put a sprinkling of glue. Every every time you uh put a layer of meat down, you're gonna sprinkle a little glue to get good adhesion um all the way through. Um and then what about stuffing as a layer or perhaps the core? I do use a sausage layer in the middle of the uh turduccin between the chicken and the duck. Um, and I do it, put it there because that's where uh you want like a thermal barrier.
So the duck doesn't want to be at 63, duck wants to be at uh like you know, 57, 58, you know, maxly 59, and then the turkey the chicken doesn't want to be anything below 63, so the sausage layer goes there because it can kind of take up that thermal difference. It'll be good in that whole range, and so that's why we put the stuffing there. You could also put it in the core, but the problem is it won't get cooked at that temperature. So you either have to pre-cook this the core then or you know, do something else. So I wouldn't put the stuffing at the core because the core is where the least cooked stuff is going to be.
Uh four, to retain the tube shape that is achieved primarily through meat glue and plastic the meat glue and plastic wrap, or would you recommend butcher's twine plastic wrap? Don't go with butcher's twine. If you've ever tried to meet glue stuff with Butcher's Twine, it's a bloody freaking mess. Don't do it. It's gonna everything, it's like just use the plastic wrap and roll it.
If you are against cooking in plastic wrap, then take the plastic wrap uh off before you cook it. By the way, Wiley was doing some plastic wrap in tubes at the uh at the Harvard, and he got heckled by a couple of students who was like, You're using plastic, you're killing the earth. Remember? Anyway. Uh and he was like, What?
I think you just ignored them. Uh five. You mentioned using a thermometer. Do you have any tips for using a probe thermometer with a ziploc without compromising the integrity of the bag? Is there an easy way to do it without pulling the bags out of the bath?
No. Uh I wouldn't put a ziploc through uh I mean, I wouldn't put a thermometer through a ziploc bag. They make semi-waterproof uh and heat-proof thermometers, Cooper Atkins does that. You can theoretically dishwash, you can stick them in the Ziploc bag. Um, but I've had bad luck.
I've had them always leak. So I wouldn't um I wouldn't recommend doing that. You look in a plastic wrap situation with a large thing like a Turduckin, I just shove the shove it probe through the through the plastic wrap, and you're gonna get a little bit of water leakage in, but over the size of like a whole kind of Turduccan thing, it's not gonna be uh it's not gonna be a big problem. Um okay. So uh those are my recommendations on that.
And to uh round it out, uh we have a call, I don't even know who this is from, actually, but someone sent us in. Steve. Oh, Steve. Hey, Steve. So Steve says uh the at water system's failure to address actual energy availability is well known, but people seem to assume it just scales uniformly, and that strikes me as a very flawed assumption, and sends us a link to an interesting paper uh which I can't actually get to, and the paper is known as uh processing food extensively by thermal and non thermal techniques.
Hmm. Uh anyway, so the Atwater system, for those of you that don't know, right? Atwater was the guy who uh his name was Wilbur Olin At uh Atwater, and he was uh alive, you know, in the in the you know he he was working roughly from after the Civil War up to the early part of the 1900s. And um he was the one that kind of figured out uh food energy and calories, right? So what he would do is he would uh eat a bunch of stuff and then uh kind of measure kind of uh what you know what he was that he that he ate.
He would burn it to kind of figure out how much energy it had, and then he would measure the like his poop and he would burn his poop and figure out how much stuff was left in his poop. He would try to figure out how much stuff he was peeing out, he tried to figure out how much he was breathing out in terms of figuring out like what like how you're actually utilizing the energy that's in food. And so the concept of the calorie as being a re like a reasonable thing was basically from you know stemming from his research and going on. And uh the the point is is in fact is that it's it uh kind of bunk, right? And so now we all have these calorie uh things uh that we see, and they try to they basically just take individual units, like protein has this much calories, fat has this many calories, carbohydrates have this many calories, and they lump them and then scale them.
And Steve, you're exactly right. Uh this it's completely incorrect. It's based on a whole bunch of like super incorrect uh assumptions. Um, you know, the people who are and the problem with it is is you know, as you say, that there no one has really given an alternative to try and figure out how it works. But my favorite is this.
Look, if you're eating a raw vegan diet, everybody knows that if you take a look at what's let what's excreted from your body that you don't digest it effectively, right? Uh and everybody knows that if you drink a gallon of corn oil, you're not gonna absorb that thing, you're gonna be spraying some corn oil out the other side, right? So uh clearly the combinations you eat, how you eat, and the quantities you eat and what you're eating is gonna make a huge difference. But the paper that he uh that he uh you know sent to us is very interesting because they did a bunch of testing on availability of uh energy from food cooking versus not cooking, and this is to go back to the raw vegan uh section we had before, and a lot more typically with meats, uh not just with starches, which is obvious, but with meats, uh cooking it makes a lot more of the energy apparently uh available, a lot more than just beating the hell out of it or blending it or anything like that. So, another argument for cooking your meat, cooking issues fishes got me on this corner and I don't know where I'm at.
Supposed to meet my baby between the minutes late. You got my head all twisted, and I guess can't get it straight.
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