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Go to Rackiton.com or get the app. That's R-A-K-U-T-E-N. Broadcasting live from Roberta's in Bushwick, Brooklyn. You're listening to Heritage Radio Network.com. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues.
This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live every Tuesday from the Heritage Radio Network at Roberta's Pizzeria in the back in the little container they have cut here for our radio station in the Bushwick. Joined as usual with Nastasha the Hammer Lopez, although a sick Nastasha. Yes, right? Yes. Listen, while I while I talk about Nastasha, I'm gonna I'm gonna tell you to call all of your questions to 718497-2128.
That's 718497-2128. You gotta hurry, because we're only here to answer your Thanksgiving related cooking questions or otherwise for the next 45 minutes or say. So uh Nastash you're not feeling well, huh? No. You know it was even more depressing.
What? Getting on the subway and seeing everyone with their suitcases at Port Authority going home. Well, well, they were at Port Authority, so you can laugh at them for that reason. Port Authority is for those of you that haven't uh visited our fine city, Port Authority's a hellhole. I mean uh 100% unmitigated hunk of crap.
One job. One job. One job. Get people into the city and out of the city in an effective manner. So what what are some things you need?
Good transport back and forth, right? Good signage? Mm-hmm. Friendly staff. Yeah.
Any of those? No. No. Worse staff. Worse, unless you work there, in which case I love you.
Worse signage. Uh hard, you know, the building itself is split into two sections with a road running through it. So you're like, where's my bus? Oh, it's in the other building. How come there's no sign saying it's in the other freaking building?
Because this is Port Authority. What do you want? An easy way to get in and out of the city? What the hell's wrong with you? Anyway, Port Authority sucks.
The only thing that uh kind of rivals Port Authority for sucking has got to be Penn Station. Yeah. The other biggest hunk of crap in the entire city. And also the other place that's supposed to get people in and out of the city relatively easy. Again, for those of you that don't take trains in out of the city, either because you're rich enough to always have a car or whatever, I don't know why.
But uh for some reason, even at Grand Central, at Grand Central, I can tell you right now on a program exactly what track your train will be on in a month and a half. Okay. Uh at Penn Station, they like to wait until five minutes before the train's gonna leave. So that everyone with their luggage is smashing into each other down a tiny corridor to rush and beat each other up and like knock each other into the tracks to get to the train. Does this make any freaking sense?
Come on, people. Anyway, all right, enough of that. Okay. Uh did I already tell them to call in their questions? Yeah.
Anyway, so I think the reason Nastasha is sick is because Nastasha was in part, aside from all the other cooking issues and you know, new company related work that we're doing, she ran the uh wedding celebration for our good buddy Nils Norn and and Vicky. Uh, you know, chef Nils Norn, our buddy, had his uh wedding. Never thought he he never thought he would get married until he found Vicky, the right woman. And Nastasha forgets to tell me, it's a true story. Forgets to tell me, hey, Nils requested that you make some cocktails for the wedding, which I would gladly do.
I'll do anything for Nils. Uh doesn't tell me, makes them and was like, they've made them. Like the hell I made them. They were good. They were delicious, right?
But like I'm not gonna take the recipe. So's my recipe. If I make if I make Bobby Flay's recipe, I was like, hey, Bobby Flay made your chicken. Anyway, they were good. So, you know, to you goes the credit.
But had they sucked, to you would have gone the blame as well. Because that's the way she goes. All right. Matthew writes in, hi Dave and Nastasha. I'm looking forward to today's show.
Uh this Friday I'm catering a party, and the host has requested uh me to prepare a fillet of beef that's tenderloins for all the uh all you other people out there. I don't have access to a circulator, although there's a slight chance I could borrow one from some friends, and we'll have to cook the tenderloins from raw at the apartment where the party is. I'll probably cook one uh from medium rare to medium, which is already too high for my taste, by the way, uh, Matthew. Uh and another medium to well done and in parenthy writes, not my choice, obviously. Not anyone's choice.
What the hell? Just put a blindfold on the customer so they don't know how overcooked it is, and they'll enjoy it when it's cooked less. Anyway, i if you don't have the opportunity to poke their eyes out so they can't look at the color. I mean, uh, it's what you know, you're gonna have to so obviously if you do tenderloin well done, you're gonna have to sauce the sauce the bee Jesus out of it in order to have it be like even moderately edible, right or wrong. Right.
Anyway, uh, do you have any do you have any suggestions, guidelines, temperatures, or general advice for preparing preparing a beef filet with standard issue home kitchen equipment. I have about a three-hour window from when I arrive at the house until the meat will be served. Okay, look it. Uh if you really do have to cook one of these suckers until it's uh gray and unappetizing, you're gonna have to make a uh delicious sauce to go with it. Uh I suggest something a sauce with a lot of fat in it that's bound that's not gonna have the fat pull out, a cream-based sauce, perhaps, perhaps onions, cassis, and cream, some mixture thereof might be good with some reduced beef stock, right?
Sas, that sounds good, right? Anywho, uh so that's one thing. Another thing, if you if if you're gonna look if you're supposed to overcook it because your customers want it overcooked, you might as well go ballsy and do a beef wellington, because that's kind of ballsy, right? Where you take, you're gonna sear off the meat, then you're gonna uh take a mixture of pate and uh sauteed mushrooms and shallots and put it over the top of the tenderloin, wrap the sucker in puff pastry, and then cook it in a high oven. Guaranteed to overcook the tenderloin, but if they want it overcooked anyway, uh that's what I would recommend.
Now, tenderloin uh is interesting. It's a you know, it's a cut that a lot of chefs don't give um a lot of merit to because uh it doesn't have a lot of connective tissue, and people think of it as a fairly as far as beef goes, not having a lot of beef flavor. So chefs tend to make fun of the cut. Now, it can be delicious as a textural thing, and it does, I mean, come on, it does have some beef flavor, right? Yeah.
So uh and and sexist, it's usually it's like a lot of it, basically, there's a lot of sexism among news flash, a lot of sexism in this business. And uh, you know, it's seen as kind of a lady's cut, is kind of like it's the cosmo of steaks, basically. Uh so uh, but the trick to cooking one is one, not overcooking it. It because there's no connective tissue, it wants to cook at a very, very low temperature. So when I am using a circulator, I only cook it up to like 54.4 Celsius, which is very low, rare, uh, because it doesn't have any sort of fat really or connective tissue to protect it from overcooking.
Two, you don't want to cook it that long because you know even with a low temperature, even if you had a circulator, um, the meat would get um uh kind of mushy if you cooked it for uh a long time. So if you and I'm presuming, by the way, you are writing the the question that you want to keep it whole as a whole fillet and then cut serving. Otherwise, I would just cut it into steaks and cook the steaks, which is a lot easier to do uh well using home equipment. Now, I'm gonna go radical on you. First of all, if you have to do it at home equipment, I would put uh a crust on it, and then I would put it in the oven, in and out, in and out, in and out, in and out, in and out of the oven to try and uh get a more moderate heat on it so it doesn't uh overcook.
Uh, but that's a pain in the butt. And if you don't do it all the time, that's how David Kinch like now replicates because he does David Kinch from Manresa, amazing chef, uh he uh moved away from using circulators and instead mimics uh the effect of a circulator, which is a low average heat input, by moving the meat in and out, in and out, in and out uh of an oven, which at the same time has the high heat of the oven, which crisps crisps and browns the outside while he's getting the low have it average heat input. So he's doing it that way. You can do it that way. Here's something I suggest: go to the apartment.
Most people's hot water taps at an apartment are fairly hot. Measure the temperature of the hot water using uh an instant read thermodynamic. If the water is within a couple of degrees of 54, like if it's 53, all the way up to like 55, 56, then I would put the tenderloin in a Ziploc bag with a little bit of oil and turn the running water on. If the water's too hot, add a tiny bit of cold water and it'll stabilize. Get a steady but not severe stream of uh hot water.
This won't work in an apartment, by the way, uh in a house because you'll typically run out of hot water, but in an apartment, usually you won't. So you can run a steady stream of hot water over a Ziploc bag. And I've actually cooked food this way in a pinch. It's completely eco unfriendly, uh, but uh it will work. Bring it, you want to make sure that the thing cooks through in under you want to cook it in about 45 to 50 minutes, and a tenderloin will cook through.
Uh, it depends on how thick it is. It might take an hour and a half if it's really thick, uh, and then pull it out, cool it down a little bit and sear the outside of it. Is that helpful? Yeah. Yeah.
Anyway. So about 54 is where I shoot for for rare. I do not go above 56. Tenderloin has a very, very short window of uh yumminess. Okay.
Uh now, uh, our good friend uh Arielle from UC Davis. Is she a postdoc now at UC Davis? Or is she still a grad student? What is she? Is she postdoc?
I don't know. Anyway, our good buddy who used to be at NYU is friends with uh Kent Kirstenbaum, and um she gave us some very interesting information. She's uh running some tests on lime juice for us uh for herself, really, but you know, it also helps us because uh you know people who've heard me yap about lime juice a lot know that uh a lot of people prefer lime juice that's three or four hours old as opposed to very fresh lime juice in a cocktail. And so she's doing the preliminary studies on what's actually going on in the lime juice, and apparently the volatile, the level of volatiles decreases rapidly over that first three to four hour chunk, and other flavors are starting to come in. So that's it looks like there might be an actual sweet spot in the lime juice if you like a specific profile.
More to come. She's gonna work on it more in the new year, but that's pretty interesting, huh? Mm-hmm. Yeah. And uh the other thing is that she wrote in about uh pungency and garlic, which is something that I, you know, I apparently now got wrong, and apparently McGee also we both got it wrong.
There is a pungency scale for alliums, onions in in particular, but I'm sure it would also work with garlic, and it's called the pyruvate scale. So what happens is is when it when you convert uh alian or whatever it is to allicin, whichever way it goes, from the non-pungent to the pungent using the enzymes when you cut or crush garlic or onion, uh, that pungency that's created also creates uh a mod a molecule of pyruvate, which is easily measurable and doesn't degrade. So what happens is they uh as fast. So they make the uh they crush up onions and they use a relatively inexpensive piece of equipment, a uh spectrophotometer, as opposed to like doing uh um uh you know uh chromatography, a more expensive process. And they can measure directly the level of uh pyruvate that's there, and therefore uh have a measure of how pungent the uh product is.
So there is a measure of pungency. Uh that in from Ariel, and you can look it up. You it was even on Wikipedia, I should have looked at it. It's called pyruvate scale. Dumb.
I'm dumb. Uh anyway, she sent us a paper. Um, and you can you can just go look it up for those of you that have that sort of uh that sort of a capability to look up papers, pyruvate scale. Anyway, interesting, yeah? Mm-hmm.
Yeah. Um, all right. Now, Jason from the southwest of England writes in and says, I'm a dedicated podcast listener, but usually cannot listen live and call in because I am in England, although I'm a native New Yorker. So hopefully I can ask Dave a question via email. Well, here you are doing it.
Here it is happening. Okay. Uh I had an argument recently with some people, most notably my wife, about storing coffee. She told me it should not be stored cold. I keep my current bag of coffee in the fridge and any supplies in the freezer.
No one could explain to me why this was bad. And I assume that reducing the rate of oxidation in general spoilers by keeping the coffee cold has to be a major benefit given how fast uh coffee gets old and stale. My rationale also include the fact that the ground uh coffee is going to come up to temperature super fast given its low moisture content, high surface area, and the fact that it's being immersed in hundred degree water. What do you think? The science uh the science uh says store it cold, but people seem to be arguing against us for some reason.
Thanks. Jason, who adds uh in parents, stuck in Southwest England. Well, listen. Hey, if you're gonna be in Southwest England, Jason, now's the time. Shout out to Somerset and the cider folks over there.
You guys gotta be rolling an apple cider at this point. I mean, maybe it's not done yet, but that's one of the apple cider producing kingdoms, like centers of the universe right there. I mean, if I like like in fact, if I had the time, if I wasn't working on so much stuff, and if it wasn't Thanksgiving, I'd be getting on a plane right now and flying to the uh other side, and you know, sorry, Somerset, I'd be going to Kent to go to the uh the Brogdale collection and chewing down on some apples and having some delicious cider over there. So good time to be from the South, uh, I mean, good time of year, to be uh from the south of England. Remember?
Yeah. Yeah, it was a fun time. Good time. Yeah, fun time, fun time I have my own. Yeah.
I'm sick. Anyway, uh, that's my nostalgia invitation, by the way. Okay, so back to the question on coffee. Now, listen. I was not able, listen, I was not able to find any actual uh scholarly research on this.
But I will tell you uh the reasoning uh that I have heard over the years and uh it's also and you know not to choose sides with your wife but that you shouldn't store the coffee in the fridge and here's why uh it's not the cold uh it's not the co it's not the cold that's hurting it it's the fact that uh you get a lot of condensation as the temperature changes up and down up and down up and down so if you had uh if if you had coffee in a hermetically sealed bag that had no moisture or you know the same amount of moisture that the coffee had in it controlled atmosphere let's say CO2 purge nitrogen purge vacuum right uh and you pulled it uh in and out of the fridge there might actually be some damage from temperature cycling but the damage wouldn't be that great because you wouldn't be getting any condensation from the outside from moisture coming into the outside uh in a normal situation there's moisture and the condensation of that moisture on the surface of the beans as the temperature changes is what's causing the problem and that's especially going to happen if you're in and out in and out in and out if you are going to freeze uh the coffee freezing is viable but you have to make sure that there's no moisture in the package at all. So you want to get all the air out of the package if you have the ability to flush uh with some sort of gas like CO2 or whatnot if it's not fresh. Very fresh beans by the way when you roast a fresh bean if you were to you by the way, you should just roast you should roast your own beans, which is a load of fun. Just get some green beans, roast them. It's a lot of fun.
Uh uh I mean it's really it really is. And you can you don't have to get really some fancy equipment. You can start just with a pan and and and you know, spoon, you know, shake it around. Uh if you just invest, I think like twenty bucks in a whirly pop popcorn maker, they make great you can roast coffee very well in that. I know I'm gonna get some calls saying that I'm a jerk, but you don't even need a thermometer.
Uh you can do it based on sound and smell. Don't say don't tell anyone I said that, but you can do good coffee roasting just uh based on that, or you can move to an air popcorn popper, a number of ways to do roast coffee. But then you can do it. But if you roast your own coffee, you'll notice that um they gas a lot. If you were to take freshly roasted coffee that you just roasted and sealed it in a jar, uh w i i assuming the jar didn't blow up, I don't think it would make enough pressure to blow up the jar.
But when you open it, it will you get a blast of CO2 out because the CO2 is being evolved out of the beans as they age. Uh and so that's why they actually have one-way valves in these bags to stop the bags from puffing up so that the CO2 can get out. Umce the beans uh have gotten rid of all of their CO2 beans. Once the beans have gotten rid of the CO2, uh, then they start to oxidize much more rapidly and they and they stale. Um I don't know what I what got me in.
I don't know what I got into that. But my point is is that uh they want to be protected from oxygen. Oxygen is gonna be their enemy, moisture is gonna be their enemy. Um so I think that the also your fridge has lots of uh I mean, I don't know about your fridge. You might have the cleanest fridge in the world, but fridges tend to have a lot of um stink in them.
They have a little stank. Uh which is why like when a fridge, when the power goes out, you realize how stinky your fridge is because it's not cold anymore, which does you know it doesn't dampen down the volatiles and you can really smell it. So coffee, which is very porous, tends to pick up bad aromas. It tends to pick up moisture, which condenses on it as it goes in and out of the fridge, and so the consensus is don't do it. Yeah?
Good job. Yeah. Alright, Nastash is happy with my answer. I hope, Jason, that you are happy with my answer. What?
Nastasha thinks we should go to our first commercial break, so we'll do that. Calling all your questions to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128 cooking issues. I've been drawn into your magnets all strap. Welcome back to Cooking Issues.
Call your questions to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. So the Nirvana folks, the I like the Nirvana, that was what I grew up with. So I'm at this wedding that Nastasha is running, right? This was not my fault.
Hey, look. So the DJ's playing all kind of easy, you know, not easy, but you know, like, you know, brick house. Like wedding kind of stuff, you know. Mighty my te. Anyway, and so like, you know, I'm dancing.
By well, by the way, I'm a kind of a lunatic dancer, and I was with Vicky, our former intern, who's all like an awesome Staten Island lunatic dancer. Awesome, amazing. And my wife, we're dancing, and they throw on uh, you know, they throw on um uh smells like Teen Spirit from Nirvana. And I'm like, wait, what, what? What?
At a wedding? I was like, look, if you're gonna do that, the only appropriate way to do that is to go complete mosh out headbang slam. So I'm like, alright. You asked for it. You played it.
And so I started doing the the headbang. Now it's not the same as when I had long hair back in 19 uh, you know, 90, 91. But uh you clear the dance floor. Uh clear the dance floor. I mean, everyone's like trying to do the little shoulder shake.
It's freaking nirvana. Anyways, uh, you know, thank god it wasn't 1991, or like some giant football jock would have started doing it and smashed into me and knocked me halfway across the this is my memory, by the way. Now this is what my life used to be like. Anywho, uh my neck is still sore. So it turns out that when you're 40 going on 41, if you haven't done the headbang in a while, you might want to stay away.
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I like it though. It's good stuff. It is good for the holiday season, the little meat glue. Um, those guys, they like us, those modernist pantry guys, huh? It's good.
We met them? No. Never met them in person, huh? Anyway. Uh, so what are you doing for the Thanksgiving?
I don't know yet. You don't know? Are you I I've I put my order in for the uh turkey. You put your orders in there. No, I didn't.
I do the Turkey Farmer. Do you guys remember his name, the turkey farmer? Larry Sorell. Larry Sorrell, the Heritage Meat Turkey Farmer, right? I guess like it's done done.
The turkeys are slaughtered. They're dead. So you can come in from where does he live? He lives in Pennsylvania. Where is he?
Uh Kansas. Kansas. Same thing. Kansas, Pennsylvania. Same thing.
Same thing. Anyway, so he's uh he's here at Roberta's eating, which is awesome because I'm about to go uh to the Heritage Meat Stand at Essex Street Market. By the way, you can now just any any Jocomo who happens to show up in the Lower East Side of New York can go purchase Heritage Meads at the Essex Street Market. Little known fact by people who didn't already know it. And uh uh and I'm gonna go pick up my turkey today and next week I'll report back of how delicious.
What are you doing? I don't know. You know what? You know what I'm thinking? I'm thinking I might look I I've become lazy in my old age.
As soon as you hit 40, you instantly become lazy. Sorry, all you 45 year olds, your lazy sons of guns. Anyway, uh I'm I think I'm just gonna bone the sucker out, roll it in. What are you doing for Thanksgiving? I meant that's what I'm telling you about the turkey cook.
I'm gonna bone it out. What else is there to do? Be thankful for my family? I'm kidding. Uh so I'm going to Mystic, which is where my uh in-laws live.
But uh, I'm gonna bone out the turkey uh and probably roll it and then uh and then cook it that way. I think that's the easiest way. I you know, I just don't have the time this year to do the uh, you know, the the aluminum skeleton and pumping the oil, although it is the best damn turkey I've ever made. Anyway, on to questions. Uh Matthew writes in uh about braise colors.
Thanks a lot for answering my questions last week. This week I'm working on a sandwich for my business based around red wine braised beef. I am braising Chuck on the stovetop in red wine and beef broth. After slowly simmering for a few hours, I pull the beef apart and reduce the brace to a glaze. Everything comes out pretty well except for the color ends up being grayish.
Ideally, I want to end up with something the color of red wine or Concord grape juice. Mmm, Concord Grape. Delicious, Nustacha's favorite. Any ideas or suggestions would be a great help. Thanks, Matthew.
Okay, look. Here's the issue. Let's just let's knock right off the bat. You're not using an aluminum, I mean, not aluminum. You're not using a reactive pan that's going to cause a color problem, right?
So typically like aluminum or copper or anything like that. I'm assuming that you're working in stainless or some other form of something that's not going to cause any sort of off coloring based on the metal. Bang, done. Uh I think anytime you're doing a long cook and you're reducing and you have a lot of uh stuff like beef brothers or browns, the colors are never going to be as punchy as you want. Uh if you say gray, usually I'm used to going kind of a brownish color.
Uh, and then that brown can go somewhat grayish if there's fat that ends up getting emulsified into the braise. So I'd make sure you try and skim the fat after before you before you reduce it down to a glaze, get the fat off of it. Um also you might the flavor is going to be different. Like the real depth of flavor, you're gonna want that uh that you know browned, you know, meat stock, but you might move to like a white veal stock, which you can reduce a lot more without getting the huge color impact from all the brown bits. Uh, you know, if you don't brown the meat as much, but again, all that stuff's what makes it delicious.
So I think it's gonna be hard to kind of punch the color. Now you can cheat, but it it really ruin, you know, change not ruins, it's delicious, changes the flavor by doping up the color with things that have very high colorant values, like uh jelly, like Concord grape jelly, but that's gonna add Concord or tomato paste or something of that nature. It's gonna punch uh punch the red up. Um I'm interested in hearing anyone else whether they have any suggestions on this. Uh I mean, I like a braised kind of a sauce, but they always do look kind of gloopy unless you just create the sauce from scratch instead of having it be part of the braise.
You know, like have the braise be the braise, save that sauce, continue to brazen it, and then just make a specific sauce that has a specific color profile, a cassis or whatever, to go with it. What do you think, Steph? Sounds good. She's like, I don't care, I'm sick. She's like, I don't give a crap, I'm sick.
Happy Thanksgiving. Okay. Colin writes in. You mentioned uh on last week's show that tannins and pectins combine in persimmons as they ripen to make them less astringent. Can I add pectin to something tannic like black walnut booze, for instance, to reduce the astringency?
I tried an LN2, that's liquid nitrogen for all you folks out there, freeze last year to dehydrate the tannins at your suggestion, but that did not have a strong effect. Sorry. Uh I'll try pectin, but if you ever tried something similar, thanks, Colin. Okay, look it. Look it.
What happens is um tannin will complex with uh pectin in fruit, right, in a bleding situation. Uh bleding. That's look it up. Anyway, uh or listen to last week's show. Uh but the um uh most effective way to do it, tannins like to bind with proteins a lot.
So if you really want to bind the hell out of tannins, you're gonna want to treat it with a protein-based wine finding agent. So, what are your choices? Uh already in your fridge, most likely egg white. So uh mix um and you can look up the proportions uh in uh you know in a wine finding on the internet, but it's usually egg white and salt. Uh I forget why the salt's there.
I think to I don't know, make the proteins act better. I don't know why it's there, frankly. Uh and water to make it easy to mix in. You stir it into your liquid, um, and then over the course of set of like a week or two, the egg white proteins will combine with the tannins into larger, um into larger complexes, and when they do that, they'll slowly sink to the bottom, and then you can rack the stuff off the top. So that's classic way to do it.
Uh even more hardcore than uh egg in terms of its ability to remove tannins, because egg's gonna remove tannins, but not uh necessarily that much. Gelatin. If you uh if you uh dissolve gelatin, mix the gelatin in the gelatin will complex with the tannin, and then over time settle out into the bottom, and you can rack it off. If you have a center fuse, you can do it uh e even easier. So it's typically these also milk proteins can do it.
If you it uh if you combine uh milk proteins, but the problem with milk proteins is uh I think in order to get them to settle out properly, you might have to have a fairly low pH, which I think you won't have in your walnut liqueur. So it's you know it's it's a question. Uh I'm also I think the gelatin will work at basically any pH, but typically these things are done at wine pHs. But I would use this sort of uh this sort of a technique. Or move to something like kitasan, which you can get at a um you know what, stick with a protein.
Tell tell me how it works. So one of those things uh should work. Does that make sense? Mm-hmm. Anyway, whatever.
Whatever. Anyway. Okay. Aaron from the north of England. It's an English show today.
By the way, our good friend Tony Canularo is engaged from Dark 6ix9ine Cobrook Road, engaged to be married. Happened a long time ago, but I don't think we've mentioned it on the air. Yeah, amazing. Congratulations. Yeah.
Nice. Anyway, good people. Uh okay. Uh Aaron writes in uh hello, Nastasha and Dave. Um still loving the show.
Thanks very much, very inspiring. I like that he's like assuming that we're gonna turn to crap. He's like, I'm still loving it. I was expecting it would be crap by now, but I'm still loving it. I think it's a lot of people are responding to are you listening?
Oh, yeah, right. It's one of these. You there? You there? Anyway.
Uh I would really like to improve how I present my food. I'm not looking for super fine dining level of presentation, but I would like to incorporate as much as possible that quality into the food I serve people at home. Uh, I'm in the north of England and haven't found any appropriate courses anywhere near me so far. Can you recommend any resources online or in print to help me learn? Uh all the best.
Thanks very much, Aaron. It's an interesting question, actually. Um it's a very interesting question. Uh and it's one I was thinking about this morning, and I don't have a I don't have a good answer, so I'm just gonna talk about it. We used to teach a plating course at the French culinary, but I don't Nils taught it because Nils is kind of a monster plater.
Uh but they you know they they don't teach it anymore. Plating at home is always uh it's difficult because usually you're the only person doing the plating and you have to get all the components together and and serve it out, so it can be uh a little more difficult. But if what you're interested in is just I typically at home will serve uh family style, and then the question is just making the individual dishes look nice. So you have to look at it from a like a range of a range of of ideas. One, are you just talking about what the food looks like in general, or are we really talking about plating?
If you're just talking about what the food looks like in general, then as you're making choices, you make choices not only based on taste, but based on how how something's gonna look in the end, right? So you'll choose things. They obviously taste is the primary thing you're gonna choose, but you'll think, well, that color is gonna go really nice with that. And instinctively you start making choices about how things like that are gonna look. Being that, oh man, that color would look really nice.
You know, what flavor would go really nice that has that color, and you could bring like a pop, you know, like a like really something nice and poppy to it color-wise, right? Uh uh, or I'm gonna use a different kind of a cooking technique because I don't want it to look overreduced or brown or something like this, right? So that's the first step. The second step then is is actually once you get the the colors and the and the look of the food to be what you want. Now, how do you present it?
And the the best way to do that is to just read, not uh I don't have any good uh I've read some, I'm not gonna even recommend it, but the ones I've I'm sure there's great ones. So I'm not insulting if it happens to be someone here that's written one, please tell us which one it is, I'll take a look at it. But some of the old plating technique books that I've read, I don't really first of all, they tend to be dated by the time they come out, and you know, they're kind of they're kind of I don't know, just they've never really been inspired by them, you know. What I would do is just go look at a bunch of chef cookbooks that put out restaurant meals and you get an idea for what's possible with plating. So if you're looking to do food at a particular in a particular style, then find the cookbook of a chef who's respected who does that.
Like if you want like kind of, hey, I'm a I'm a badass big meat jockey, go get the uh Piet de Couchon book and like you know, he'll show you how to stick a knife through a sandwich or something like that. You know what I mean? Or if you want to do something kind of really like high-end plating and fresh and new, go look at like 11 Madison's all plated out, you know, the new cookbook. But I would look at at cookbooks. But I'm gonna think more about this, and hopefully people will write in and tell me things that they like so that next week I can mention them on the show.
Do you have anything? No, no, I think that's a good idea, though. Yeah, but I'm I'm I'm interested in hearing from uh, you know, this week you can prove you're listening by writing in with uh ideas for blading technique, uh, like resources, right? You live in the middle of nowhere, yeah. Yeah, I mean other things like you can practice, like there's certain plating techniques you can learn, like you can learn to canal something, right?
Uh and just look online for YouTube videos on how to canel. Or you can learn how to drop uh, you know, oil onto a soup with a with a squeeze bottle. I mean, if you want to do some fancy plating techniques, learn to do good work with a spoon, like the brush, the schmear, learn to learn to drop things out of squeeze bottles, but that's kind of old school. Anyway, uh look it up. Nastasha is is trying to punch me in the face, telling me we have to take our second commercial break.
So we'll come right back, call your questions to 718-497-2128. 718497-2128. A fly just attacked me. Welcome back to Cooking Issues. So Nastasha, you're gonna you're gonna, even though you're sick, are you gonna go to the Thanksgiving Day parade this year?
No, no. I'm gonna watch them blow up the balloons tomorrow. I like that. I wish they would explode the balloons. I hate parades.
The only thing I like what? Have your kids gone? No. Hell no. No.
No. First of all, my son Booker, can you imagine him in that crowd of people waiting for a balloon to pass? Blown up around natural history. That's cool. Yeah?
Mm-hmm. Yeah, whatever. I've seen it, I've seen every parade. I hate parades. Hey, listen.
You know what I like? Bagpipes. You don't like bagpipes now? No, I do. It's just you would, you know.
I mean I would. I don't know. Bagpipes are amazing. It's sad. What's sad?
Sound is sad. It's not sad. It's stirring. Okay. Look.
If you get married, bagpipe. Oh my God. Yes. No, it's not only for funerals. I want all of Scotland to punch Nastasha in the face the next time you see her.
I'm kidding, don't do that. Not advocating any violence. But I'm saying yes, funerals, because it's stirring. You're also supposed to play bagpipes when you march into battle. And you play the big weddings.
Bagpipes are always appropriate. Anytime music is appropriate, the Great Highland bagpipes is appropriate. Okay. It's an amazing instrument. Anyway, I enjoy bagpipes.
What do you think every parade is a funeral? Why do they have them at parades? I I guarantee they don't have them here. What? Well, I don't care.
I don't like the Thanksgiving Day parade. The heck. Just marching bands. Yeah, marching bands. Bagpipes.
Yeah. Funeral. Can we just do the rest of the show with bagpipes in the background? Yeah, definitely. Definitely.
We have to put in the greatest rock and roll bagpipe of all time. That's not really a great look. Which is long way to the top. If you want to rock and roll, it's the greatest use of bagpipes in rock and roll. Am I right?
Yeah. Yes! Okay. Back on back on task. Back on task.
Back on cooking issues task. Alright, sorry. Anyway, uh, on record, I do not enjoy a parade except for the bagpipes. Okay. Uh Steve Santana writes in.
I was wondering if Dave could go over a few sous vide questions relating to duck breasts. Should the skin be scored before bagging or just before searing? Should the breast be bagged with butter, or better yet, rendered duck fat if I can find some, or were the fat already under the skin be enough? With the same results from uh the last to salt or not to salt post, apply to duck breast too. And should the duck breast be chilled after cooking, uh, and he's asking 40 minutes to 64 Celsius as the time and temperature for cooking before searing.
Okay, I'm just gonna go over this. First of all, don't cook the duck breast that high. I would not go uh standard uh, you know, like Long Island Peckin style duck uh breasts 57 degrees Celsius for 45 minutes is sufficient. Uh I wouldn't go above that. If you have a uh a tougher duck breast, sometimes you can go to 58.
I don't recommend cooking duck breasts longer than about an hour because it doesn't happen all the time, but they can start tasting livery and the color can start going gray if they're cooked for too long. So I would not recommend cooking the duck breast too long. Also, I don't bag the duck breast with anything other than the duck breast. Uh they they don't really need it because here's what you're gonna and I don't cut it or do anything beforehand because you're not really rendering out fat at those temperatures. If you're cooking to 50, 57, 58, you're not really rendering a lot of fat.
So uh what I would do is bag the duck breast, put it on a table, squash the skin side flat so that later on when you sear it, it will um it will be flat against your pan, it's gonna sear out properly. Now I know the the good folks at Modernist Cuisine, you know, young Miravold, Belay, they I think do a pre-sear, a cryo sear. Uh they freeze the duck's skin, then they s uh they poke it with holes, then they freeze it, then they then they bag it, then they cook it, then they refreeze it, then they sear it. I typically, I haven't done a side-by-side, so I don't know what's better. I typically don't sear my duck breast before because what I'm doing when I do my sous- vide cooking is uh technique I call uh low temperature or sous vide for insurance purposes.
I'm ensuring that the duck breast is cooked throughout to the temperature I want. And then I cool it and then I sear it off as though I was doing a traditional cook on it. The only difference is is that now all I'm focusing on is crispy, delicious skin. So I'm not worried about cooking the duck breast because it's already cooked. So uh all I'm worried about then is rendering the fat and crisping the skin out.
Uh and so that's a and it's a whole there's a whole range of techniques like that that I call low temp, you might call it sous-vide, although you're wrong, it's low temp unless it's in a vacuum bag, which this is, uh, for insurance. I do that with roasts, I'll do it with poultry, I'll do it with a lot of things. And it it and what it lets you do is get a lot of traditional taste and texture, uh, but at the same time ensure that uh you have the meat cooked properly and that you're only focusing on one problem at a time, getting the skin right, instead of trying to get the skin right and the meat right at the same time. Okay? Now, uh as uh regards uh scoring it, uh Nils, and I have to agree with him here because I did a side-by-side, detests scoring uh the skin on a duck because when you score it, uh where you score it, you tend to overcook the meat because the steam when you're rendering goes up and overcooks the meat at that point.
Uh there's a f there's there's fly mageddon, by the way, going on outside. It's always something funny. There's something crazy always going on outside at Roberta's Pizzeria. Today is Fly Mageddon. They're like running around with smashing uh flies with uh with papers.
What? What was it last week? I don't remember. Oh, and last week it was Indie Jesus. Well, that's every week at Roberta's Pizzeria.
Uh so, anyways, so uh where was I? So uh I would use here's a technique that modernist cuisine does, which everyone can do, and I think is awesome. Go to your local pet supply store and purchase a dog combing brush, the one with all the little spikes in it, and instead of scoring the uh skin on the duck breast, whack it a few times with the dog with the stainless steel dog comb, and that way uh you can render out a lot of the fat without overcooking the uh meat. It's a great technique. I've tried it.
Uh I think it's awesome. Do not salt the duck before you cook it, salt the duck, maybe right before you sear it, and that's the that's the way to go. What do you think? Good. I'm gonna make a shout out to the guys who listen at Blue Hill at Stone Barnes.
All right, make a shout out. Hi. Well, that's quite a shout-out, Nastasha. You really know how to shout out. Be like, to the guys who listen at Blue Hill Stone Barns, keep it farming.
That's a shout-out. Anyway, okay. Uh Tim Hayes from Eugene, Oregon writes in uh regard I'll just read it. Hi, Tim from Eugene, Oregon here. Ready to tell you how great the podcast is and ask you a question.
I usually stay on the savory side when cooking, but lately I've been seduced by the sweet recipes from Christina Tozi's Mama Fuku milk bar book. Specifically the incredible cookie recipe she has so kindly shared with the world. My favorite cookie of hers is a corn is the corn cookie. I enjoy the corn cookie quite a lot. Do you like the corn cookie?
You don't like corn and cookies. You're a low quality person, Nustacha. Although I love you, but you're a low-quality human being. Okay. Wow.
Yeah. Right? I mean, you know what I'm saying. I'm so immune to it. What is you say to me?
What are you talking about? Like low quality when you call me that. I I it's like a it's like a nice love thing. Yeah. When other people hear you say it, they're like, whoa.
Yeah. Well, you know, it's with love folks. I don't want anyone, I don't want anyone to be like, whoa, you just called her a low-quality human being. One day we'll be low-quality human beings. Exactly, Jack.
Well, it depends. Uh, do you hate corn and peanuts? No. Do you hate biscuits? No.
Alright. Alright. Um, okay, sorry. Specifically the incredible cookie recipe she's so kindly shared with the world. My question relates to the epic hard-bodied 10-minute creaming of butter and sugar that the rest of her cookie recipes require.
Uh, and by the way, what what we're talking about here is Tozy recommends um uh a very long creaming process, 10 minutes where the sugar and the butter are creamed together uh and then the eggs are whipped in. And the uh basic idea is is to generate as much uh by the way, if you heard that thap ten seconds ago, it was part of Fly Mageddon going on in Robertus. Uh so the cream the prolonged creaming step uh whips a lot of air into the cookie and provides the uh structure that she likes in her cookie, and so she's very and we work in the milk bar commissary. I can say they cream the hell out of that stuff. Anyway, so uh my question relates to the epic hard body ten minute creaming of butter and sugar that her recipes require.
I see the reasons for this step uh to aerate the mix, but her peanut butter cookie recipe got me thinking. She mentions that you only need to cream this recipe for about three minutes because of the emulsifying properties of the peanut butter. Sure enough, uh the mix fluffs up much quicker. So a two-part question. What about peanut butter makes it such a great emulsifier?
And would it be possible to use emulsifying agents to quicken the creaming in other cookie recipes? Now I guarantee that the way that uh C Tozy figured this out was she noticed that her peanut butter stuff was uh cream, you know, was getting the amount of air beaten into it much more quickly than other things. Then the question is, is it really the emulsifiers in it that are doing it? And I did some initial research. Uh and it it it's hard to find.
Apparently, look, like protein, there is protein in peanuts, and that protein can probably act as somewhat as an emulsifying agent. Then the second question is well, perhaps there's what the was wrong with you, Nastasha. This guy's hitting the flies, but he's got this cigarette in the other hand. What does that have to do with anything? Stasi, she's crazy, she's crazy from big.
Anyway, so uh I looked up uh peanut butters, uh, industrial peanut butters. I looked up GIF and I looked up Skippy. Okay. Now, everybody knows, some people know, I should say, if you grind your own peanut butter or you buy natural peanut butter, the uh peanut oil separates from the peanut solids and has to be whisked back in, right? Peanut butter is basically you know, solids kind of emulsified into a it into peanut oil.
So GIF does that, good old GIF. GIF does that by adding monoandiglycerides, which is a straight up emulsifier. So if you use GIF, you are added, you are adding an emulsifier into your cookie mix, and that will help incorporate air, right? But uh if you look at Skippy's label, Skippy doesn't put monoandiglycerides in their regular peanut butter. Instead, they substitute a certain amount of peanut oil for a hydrogenated fat.
And that hydrogenated fat, which is solid instead of uh liquid at room temperature, prevents the separation of skippy peanut butter. Okay? So there's two basic ways that they can stop the separation of peanut butter emulsifiers or with uh adding uh a hydrogenated fat. My prediction look towards more people adding uh emulsifiers because less and less people are going to want to add hydrogenated fat because of the bad wrap hydrogenated fat gets. This guy is freaking serious about killing flies, by the way.
That's it. It's crazy. It's like it's like seriously, it's like it's like, you know, war crimes against flies. He's like going crazy over here. Anyway.
Uh but that led me to think. Actually, I think what's going on is that the peanut butter itself is acting as a whipping agent, right? So when you're creaming sugar and uh butter, uh the sugar, the particles in the sugar before they dissolve and melt are acting as uh basically they're carving holes in the butter as you as you're whipping, and they act as a whipping and aerating agent. And I think the tiny particles in peanut butter are also acting as a whipping agent, which is why you can actually whip peanut butter if you add a little liquid to it, you can whip it up on its own. So I think it's probably not the emulsifiers that are doing it, but the fact that a peanut butter itself is acting as a whipping agent.
I could use a peanut butter cookie right about now. Maybe I'll go to milk bar and steal a peanut butter cookie. Are we going there? We're going to milk bar because I have work work to do, but I'm gonna I'm gonna steal a peanut butter cookie. So if anyone there is uh you know, beyond notice, I'm gonna steal a peanut butter cookie from you.
Anyway, uh, I hope all of you have a fantastic Thanksgiving and a delicious, delicious, delicious turkey on your turkey day. Cooking issues.com, as well as a schedule of upcoming live shows. You can also podcast all of our programs on iTunes by searching Heritage Radio Network in the iTunes Store. You can find us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for up-to-date news and information. Thanks for listening.
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