Broadcasting live from Robert is in Bushwood, 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 around 12 to 1245 from the back of Roberta's Pizzeria in Bushwick, Brooklyn, on the Heritage Radio Network. Hey Jack, our uh our engineer Jack in the booth as always.
My headphones appear to be not working. Ah. Thank you. Joined as usual in the station with Nastasha the Hammer Lopez, Cooking Issues Hammer and uh usual uh resident meaning. What?
The collar our collar called back. Hello, caller. You are on the air. Hi, Dave. Just a quick question about pecans specifically.
Um since it's a time of year where you can get uh whole unshelled pecans, I like to get a bunch of you know pecans and other bulk nuts and cracking myself. And bulk nuts. It's either the pecan itself or that reddish stuff. Inside like the pith, sort of right. Something just it's bitter and mouth dry and and just kind of not acidic, but it's really dries out my mouth.
What's up with that? Alright, so the skin of nuts like that, and pecans is one, the one I think that's been more studied uh is uh walnuts. The skin, the kind of the silvery this the uh reddish, brownish skin around it, has a lot of uh tannins in it that are gonna dry out your uh mouth and can be bitter. Uh and the same it goes true for a lot of nuts, which is why, for instance, uh when you use hazelnuts, you often uh heat them briefly and then rub the skins off. So you could I mean pecans are kind of a pain.
I don't really see a lot of recipes where you're supposed to uh take the skin off of a pecan. Um have you ever seen that in a recipe? I've never seen that in a recipe. No. No.
Uh me neither. But the strange thing about uh this phenomenon is that, and I know more about walnuts with this, is that different cultivars of uh walnut will have radically different uh astringency uh and bitterness associated with that skin layer. So every you know it all depends on exactly who you're getting it from, um uh, etc. etc. You could try uh to a hot roast and rub between towels.
Any percentage of that skin that you get off of there is going to um decrease that perception. The downside is is that it's not gonna look like a pecan anymore for for you know for what people are are used to doing. If you notice this specifically in a in a person that you're buying bulk from? No, I just usually get um, you know, diamond, diamond or whoever, just in a bulk bag. And when I do the pecans, uh I really notice the bitterness.
I don't really notice it so much for the other nuts, oddly enough. Yeah, do you uh not even for walnuts, huh? No well, I mean a little, but pecans like sometimes they just really zing me or whatever. Well, you know, uh a lot like so uh, you know, we used to make a lot, and hopefully we will again, uh pecan oil and pecan butter in uh in the centrifuge, and the bottom layer of that has all of that stuff that you're talking about. The uh uh, you know, because uh this the skin layer settles to the bottom when you're centrifuging it.
Uh and so you know that that's one way to to to get rid of it. Do you live in the south? Yeah. I mean, uh what I would do is uh search out a you know, a really like the I looked online once because we were looking into selling nut oils at school a couple years back, and I found a couple of very I can't remember their names, unfortunately, off the top of my head, but a couple of super high uh quality producers, uh, you know, that will give you fresh this year's crop right when they get it, uh, and just I'm sure loads higher than whatever the commercial stuff is. And strangely the prices weren't that bad.
You know what I mean? Very cool. Yeah, you might want to look into that, and then the the folks that I spoke to on the phone, uh, were you know, and this is the good thing about dealing with real people, is they actually grew the darn thing. So if you tell them your uh concerns, they can they they could probably steer you the right way. So does age affect it also?
Well, uh age, I I don't know about age and um astringency. I mean, obviously nuts as they age get rancid, uh and you know, they they tend to not be as good. I mean, um and that's why you know it's always best to vacuum pack uh you know in cans so you don't crush them too much, but it's always best uh best to vacuum pack um things that are high in oil content. So a lot of nuts when they're commercially uh produced are vacuum packed for that reason, or or nitrogen flushed or any one of a number of things you can do to remove the oxygen so that you don't have uh oxidation problems. So nuts are definitely unstable.
I mean, I'm sure you've had um you know, you've had some nuts sitting out for a while and you try to get the they turn stale, obviously, and then you try to uh get the crispness back by uh roasting them for a minute, letting them cool down, and the taste just isn't the same. Uh it's just they've either like gone stale permanently or gone rancid because they have such a high oil content, you know. Yeah very cool do you think this is anything like when you get a funky batch of pine nuts you know you get that pine nut mouth condition oh you know I haven't I haven't researched what that is I think that's probably something uh like very specific and I don't know that might be and I don't know anything about it so I I you know I I hesitate to speculate but uh for instance I'm told that it's a fungal uh problem like a bad pistachio and that those are actually extremely toxic because of high levels of aflatoxin uh that are uh pleasant and anyone that's ever bitten into a bad pistachio knows that it's like one of the most horrible things that could possibly happen to you. So definitely don't eat that. No don't eat that.
In fact uh we we used to make a pistachio uh oil and butter uh and what we we you know at the school we would get these uh three pound uh tins of nuts right from a reputable uh person and so uh one time I had an intern make a batch of pistachio butter with it and they just threw the tin into the uh into our grinder and then into our centrifuge and the stuff tasted awful uh then I then uh from then on I said hey look you have to throw all of the pistachios onto a sheet uh big sheet tray and you have to look at them all and we took out all the ones that had yellowed you know with age that weren't green anymore all the ones that look shriveled and the stuff tasted great so you know I know with pistachios they're extremely fragile uh you know and and most suppliers you know if you're buying uh bulk shelled nuts they don't they're not giving you the they're not giving you necessarily a hundred percent of the best, even if they're a reputable manufacturer. It only takes a couple bad nuts to really ruin things. Yeah. Anyway, good luck with that and let us know how it works out for you. Alright, thanks a lot, Dave.
Keep bringing the awesome. Thanks. Alrighty, so let me see. Uh I am I'm late as usual, and uh we are being held to our time today because there's a live show coming on the Heritage Radio Network. Uh and so I'm gonna read the promo after the first break.
I'm just gonna start going into questions. Okay, Andy writes in, hey Nastasha and Dave, I recently acquired a massive 21-pound free-ranged aged country ham from Nancy Newsome at uh her name's that Nancy Mahaffey actually. From Nancy uh Mahaffey at Colonel Newsome's ham. And uh there's a bunch of cursing about how delicious it is. Holy effing sugar honey iced tea delicious, which it is.
I actually happen to like that ham a lot. Had incredible marbling. Uh I want to figure out a way to get the best yield from the ham while eating it over a few months. Uh start into the less meaty side of the ham. Uh less meaty side would be the you know, the they call it the forward top side, I think.
Uh serrano style, i.e., uh long the length. But I'm thinking about boning it out and bonding it back together, prosciutto style, and then slicing it across the face of the ham. I practice deboning on a smaller home cured ham, so I think I've got good butchering method, but how does the home cook press and bind it back together? I assume some form of meat glue. Any recommendations for uh which style to use, uh, etc.
etc. The bone will leave a big hole. How do I ensure that I can uh press the uh the hole completely shut? Uh as a side note, um this ham is much thicker than either the serrano or the prosciutto, but I can't think of a way that would affect the preparation. Uh first of all, a couple notes.
Uh for those of you that don't have uh don't eat American country hams. Uh Colonel Newsom's hams out of uh Kentucky is one of the my favorite producers. They've been producing for a long, long time. Their recipe is several hundred years old. Uh Nancy Mahaffey is the current proprietor and cure master of that place.
Uh they have a distinction that they uh only cure one time a year at the traditional time in the winter, uh, and and then the hams are aged however old they are. She sometimes has hams that are over a year old, but in general, you can judge the age of the ham based on how long after the winter it is right now. So the hams that she has left over now are a year old. If you can get them, they're good. Uh another thing is that she has been working with uh Heritage Foods, our parent peoples, uh, to get some high very high quality um uh ham in that has a lot of marbling.
So she's been doing that. I think Benton's has been doing that, Benton's hams and uh Edwards hams. And I've had I haven't had Nan I've had a little bit of Nancy's, it was good. I had a lot of uh Edwards one, which was uh excellent. Uh and they're all good because I've said for many years that uh American ham masters, we you know they have the ability to cure, they have the know-how, they're they're you know, they're they're masters at it.
Uh but what what has been lacking is the quality of the raw material. And so these people have been joining up with uh folks like Patrick Martins and trying to kind of rectify that and be able to produce a ham that has uh the same kind of quality uh in the meat as the highest end uh European style hams. And and I have to say they are uh they are some incredibly uh delicious things. Um where you say as a side note that that this ham is much thicker than either the serrano or the prosciutto, it really does affect the preparation, has a lot to do with the way American hams are hung. American hams typically were designed, uh even the you know the country cured ones to be uh eaten in slices and then uh briefly cooked or cooked and then sliced.
Uh and so they want them to be a little wetter than you would on your average European ham. They're hung uh in the opposite direction from a normal uh European ham, and they're not squished flat. And so they have the cushion, that big part of the meat, the cushion area, is uh a lot thicker than it would be in um in a European ham. And what that means is is that you're gonna have uh a wetter center typically on that, and so it's gonna be more difficult to get a perfect slice out of an American-style ham that way than it would be to get out of a European ham. And you're also, because of the way American hams are hung uh and and aged, you're gonna get more of a variation in salt level and uh density uh and water uh level between the outside of the meat, especially towards the uh face, towards where it was cut off of the animal where there's no skin, and the center of the cushion where it's gonna be the softest.
So it does affect preparation. Um it's not better, it's not worse, but it it does affect it. Now, on to your real uh question here, which is uh how do I uh well, you already have a boning technique. The best way is to go uh F Dick Cutlery makes a uh what looks like a long gouge that you can use, uh like a tunnel boning thing that you can get in, and that's what uh a lot of the people use uh to get the bones out uh effectively. I have to say that boning a prosciutto and a country ham is the only time in my life I've ever broken a knife, at least that I've ever broken it when it wasn't breaking it on purpose.
So it, you know, they are difficult to bone depending on how uh old they are, right? Younger one, like seven, eight month-old, not gonna be a problem, but year uh year and a half, it can become uh uh kind of a nightmare to bone out and keep in one piece. Assuming you have a good technique to bone out the take the bone out, you're gonna have a hole in the center. And even the professionals here, when they bone it, are not going to uh take be able to squish that hole flat. And the reason is uh it takes an immense amount of pressure uh to do that.
So in uh prosciutto de Parma, what they'll do is they'll they'll age it bone in, like like God wants you to. They'll remove the bone and then they'll put it into a ham mold. And the ham mold has uh uh a water cooling because otherwise the ham would heat up too much and it would affect the uh flavor of the ham. And they put it under immense pressure inside of a metal mold that's you know very well cooled in order to compress it into that ham shape, exclude any oxygen or anything else from the inside of that uh gap. Uh, I don't think you're gonna be able to do that.
Uh I just don't think it's possible. Another problem with with enclosing that hole is you could be sealing uh something and you might want to let it dry out a little more in there, especially on an American ham that can be a little wetter on the inside uh than uh European ham. You're also gonna want to make sure you cut off any kind of bad areas or taint around that. Now, if you wanted to try, I mean I mean I encourage you to try and tell me what happens. Yes, you could sprinkle some meat glue in that thing, put it uh between uh two plates on a hydraulic press and uh and press it flat.
I don't know what kind of results you're gonna have. It's not typically something you you would do. And I just might make this suggestion is that because American hams weren't necessarily cured in order to slice in one whole piece, I would remove the section below the bone, and then you just have the section above the bone that you can slice as its own. It's gonna have a little like kind of semicircle mark in it, but that's okay. And then the bottom piece, which is a lot tougher anyway, uh, is going to uh you know, maybe be served as a separate uh separate preparation.
Anyway, my thoughts. What do you think, Stas? Uh that sounds good. Do you want to take a break? It's 24.
I don't know. Do I want to take a break? You just want to go all the way through? I'll take one more and then I'll do a break. Uh okay.
Uh I don't I don't I don't have the person's name, it's unfortunate, but it's another faithful faithful listener from iTunes uh and also a big fan of Heritage Radio in general. Big shout out to Heritage Radio. Uh I have three brining questions. Is there a rule of uh thumb for the brine to uh brine strength to soak time? I'm looking for a general brine I can customize to accommodate the amount of time I have to brine.
Some days I can do an overnight, some days I want to do an hour soak. Does the addition of herbs or other flavors in a brine come through in the end product? I see many recipes for complex brines with multiple flavor additions. Is this just showing off? And is there a brine concentration that could reduce the risk of salmonella or other bugs?
I refrigerate and cook properly, but I'm curious. Thanks. Okay. Uh I am embarrassed to say this is a subject that uh I should have researched long, long ago, uh, but uh have not. Here's the issue with uh brine strength and soak time.
There's a couple things that a brine is doing. Salt, specific take salt first. Salt is flavoring uh your meat, right? That's one thing it's doing, and also uh salt soaking through into the meat is altering the protein structure so that it can uh hold on to more water when it's cooked and thereby provide more uh more insurance against overcooking. Now, I've definitely uh overbrine things, but I you know I I haven't done the research.
And what I'm saying is is that I'm going to have to do more research before I can thoroughly answer this question. It's one of the few things that even though I've been doing it a lot, and I'm supposed to be a technical related cook who pays attention to this sort of nonsense. Uh I have literally always done this by uh making a brine, dipping my finger in it, and tasting it. And uh I always make my brines pretty much the same, which is uh make them until they're salty as the ocean and for chicken or poultry, I then add sugar until I can just barely taste the sweetness and then go. I don't find that other flavors uh do too much to it uh except for they flavor the outside quite effectively.
In vacuum bag situations, you can get some permeation in, but uh not a lot. But um I promise Nastasha's writing this down now uh for me to do uh some research. Maybe I'll go look in the modernist cuisine and see what they have to say about it and uh get back to you on that next week. Right, Nastashi, making a note? Sure.
She's pretend typing. By the way, folks, that's Nastasha's pretend typing, right? So uh I'll tell you when she's actually doing what I'm asking so that I can properly answer you sometime, but uh that wasn't it. Okay. So with that, uh let me go to our first commercial break.
Call your questions to 718 uh 4972128. 7184972128. I've been holding out alone. I've been sleeping all alone. I've been holding on the phone.
I've been sleeping all alone. I won't miss you. Welcome back to Cooking Issues. By the way, Jack, uh, I don't know if we're gonna get to it, but you had a shout-out for uh good uh good interim music. You like that?
Anyway, we'll get to it in a minute. Okay. Hello, Nastasha. My name is Jamie, and my research on rotovaps, that's rotary evaporators for all of you not hip to the fact, have led me time and time again to the cooking issues blog, which I have not updated in a long time, and I apologize more on that later. I am looking into using a rotovap for distilling produce from our 72-acre farm.
I had a few questions that I was wondering if Dave may answer. Currently, we're looking into buying a larger roto vap for a line of spirits we intended to still in the near future. Depending on yield, we were looking into producing everything from start to finish without rectifying any existing base spirits, i.e., buying neutral spirits uh made off site and infusing them with uh stuff and then redistilling them on the roto vap. I understand uh the equipment will distill alcohol out of a solvent while maintaining the flavors to the truest form, which is true, that's the case. I just want to know how much can we rely on the roto vap to get a low wine mash?
A low wine is a low alcohol uh product or the first distillation run off of a normal thing uh to an 80-proof finished liquor. I'm assuming uh so 80 proof 40% finished liquor. Uh has Dave uh ever heard of distilling one's own base spirit through the roto vap. I've read that Dave personally buys low-end vodka, sometimes high end, uh, to pay the taxes uh and not run into any legal issues. With that aside, could it be done from the mass straight to the roto vap, um running it through again and again?
Uh thanks, Jamie Oakes from Jamie at Tamworth Garden.com. Tamworth Garden, I'd love a garden full of Tamworth pigs, wouldn't you? Good. Uh okay. So uh here here's the deal.
First of all, um, even though I do buy uh pre made spirits and redistill them uh and therefore pay the taxes on it, it is still illegal. So it's still not legal for me to do it. Uh you know, uh the reason it's uh illegal is because of tax bases, uh ta tax purposes, right? That's the reason that uh distillation is illegal. And uh our legal system hasn't figured out a way in most areas to kind of get around that, although things hopefully are changing soon and have been changing in certain places.
That said, the laws specifically are written to prevent someone with a 72 acre farm from taking all of their produce on site, converting it into liquor and selling it without paying taxes. So if you're gonna be doing it, um either just don't, you know, tell anyone that you're doing it uh or get uh permit to do it. Because other otherwise, like that's exactly the kind of thing that uh that those those guys are are looking at. Now I have done uh you know distillation uh with uh wine before. I've never distilled anything below about uh the with whose starting alcohol content was uh below about 12%.
So the the lowest alcohol content thing that I've really ever I mean other than water, right? Other than just water-based stuff, um, is about 12%. And I was uh easily able to get uh brandies well above uh 40 uh percent on one pass period. Bang. And it's because um uh the way the rota vap works, uh, you know, when everything's under uh vacuum, you can get um I you know it's been a long time since I've researched the curves, but you can get uh it there's a certain uh inherent like theoretical reflux rate on the inside, so it doesn't work the same way as with normal distillation with plates, and plus the vacuum shifts everything around in terms of what boils off first, etc.
etc. But uh I have taken well let's take port, which I do all the time, like 18 to 20, put that in, and I'll get uh I'll get a 100-proof brandy off, no sweat. No sweat. So um 100 proof, sorry. Uh yeah, 100 proof.
So uh so yes, that's definitely feasible. Your speeds are gonna be quite low because unlike a normal still, you're gonna need to provide uh if you want to keep the temperatures extremely low to not affect the flavors of your fruits, you're going to have to use uh a cooling power other than tap water. If you're using a cooling power other than tap water, you are going to have to um you're gonna have to chill it, and that's going to be really expensive to chill all that stuff down. Alternatively, you can keep your temperatures somewhat higher, right? And then when your temperatures are higher, then you can use regular tap water or you know, lime water, whatever process, you know, processed water, stream water, whatever you have, to chill your roto vap down uh and keep your margins uh high enough on your uh uh the temperature between the the water bath and the uh and the cooling water uh large enough to be able to do a good job.
But you have to test to see whether or not the stuff is gonna uh taste the way you want it. Before you invest in a 20 and 30 30 liter rotary evaporator, I highly, highly recommend you uh invest in a small rotary evaporator because the process scales up quite well from a small rotoVap to a big rotoVap. So, you know, invest a couple of grand in a small rotoVap or go find someone that has one that you can use so you can see whether you like the procedure before you invest in something as big as a large rotary evaporator, right? Because there's a lot of uh it takes a while to get to learn it. Another problem about doing uh base wines, like you're saying, is that most rotary evaporators don't have a way to separate heads from tails, and you're gonna have a uh big big problem on this.
So, what you're gonna have to do, I mean, I designed a pump for my rotary evaporator that allows me to taste the distillate as it works, as it pr as it's produced. So I can do easy cuts between heads and tails when I'm doing a distillation, right? It makes my life a lot easier, but it's not something that's standardly available. If you need to do that, what you're gonna need to do is over the course of your distillation run on the first pilot run, you're gonna have to figure out for X number of uh mil you know milliliters or liters of stuff that I put into the uh distillation flask, I gotta throw away the first X amount. And you're gonna do that by opening your system every, you know, every you know, chunk of time and tasting it to see whether you've gotten rid of the heads, and then uh at the same time you're gonna have to start tasting to see when the tails come in.
And then hopefully that recipe scales from small to large. In my experience, it has scaled percentage-wise. Uh as long as your temperatures are the same, your uh, you know, your the the product that you're putting in is the same, and the vacuum levels that you use are the same. But these are all things that are gonna have to be tweaked out. Uh so I wish you the best of luck.
And if you have any more questions, please write them in because everybody knows I love a rotovap. Uh did I read the promo yet? No. Today's show is sponsored by Modernist Pantry, supplying innovative ingredients for the modern cook. Do 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?
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Uh, fans of cooking issues that place an order of fifty dollars or more before next week's show, we'll get a free home size package of any ingredient of your choice. That's pretty cool. Any ingredient. Nice. Simply use the promo code CI65 when placing your order online at ModernistPantry.com and indicate in the comment box what ingredient you would like.
Visit modernist pantry.com today for all of your modernist pantry cooking needs. Fifty bucks though, huh? I guess in exchange they get to get any anyone that they want. Yeah. Okay.
Uh all right. By the way, Nastasha, have you ever heard of Wolfman Jack? Yeah. Oh, good. I was gonna I was thinking on the way over, like, you know, like uh radio people I used to listen to when I was a kid, and whether you'd heard of them.
If you hadn't heard of them, I was gonna be incredibly depressed, like you're a three-year-old and I'm nine million years old. You know, uh uh, I'm gonna go to questions because otherwise I'm gonna run out of time. I was gonna tell a story about uh about my cherry allergy and my hoping that by getting my tonsils out I could fix it and how all my hopes were dashed and I'm incredibly depressed about it. Anyway, uh Jason Molinari writes in uh uh two questions. Recently, some new studies have shown that many or most plastic leak leech estrogenic chemicals which have been shown to be harmful to fetal and young mammals messing with development.
This is of particular concern to me given that I have a 2.5-year-old girl, uh I should probably say two and a half. Yeah, two and a half year old girl, and we often eat souvited food. I understand the uh research seems to be incomplete, but you may have access to other articles or studies which I do not. Should I be freaking out, or is this another item blown out of proportion? Uh and then uh there's a link to the relevant study, and uh you'll have to uh you'll have to excuse me for one minute while I call up said relevant study.
Uh but the relevant study is uh Oh no, please tell me it didn't close it. Okay. That's a good word to start with anything, right? If you're writing if you're writing anything, a book, magazine article, anything, start it with the word estrogenic. Most plastic products released estrogenic chemicals, a potential health problem that can be solved.
Uh, and this is uh fairly recent article, I think, from July of 2011. And uh look, this article was new to me. I read it this morning, and I read uh some other uh articles uh uh on this subject. But the point is basically that there's a whole class of chemicals called endocrine disruptors that mess with your hormones and can do things like cause uh early puberty in girls or can uh have kind of delayed sexual development in in boys. It just messes you up all around, kind of.
Uh and so as a result of this, many people have stayed away from, for instance, baby bottles containing the ingredient what's that? Anyway, containing the ingredient uh BPA uh bisphenol A. Um so this is something that's been uh kind of bubbling under the surface. People have been worried about certain plastics, but uh the theory has been that the plastics that don't contain uh known endocrine disruptors are okay. So what this study did was uh they took a whole boatload of different plastics and uh and basically they sent the researchers over the course of four years out to various supermarkets and food chains, purchased both empty and full plastic containers, uh, and then subjected them to a bunch of tests to try to see whether they could leach crap out of these things, including microwave heating, including uh soaking it in alcohol, including soaking it in salt, uh things like that, different various heating regimes.
And uh unfortunately, and then what they would do is they take the whatever they uh did, you know, whatever whatever the liquid was they used to leach, and they would apply it to see whether or not it bound uh to have an assay to see they have an assay for uh endocrine you know for estrogen um uh you know estrogen uh estrogenic products. And they said, Is there a reaction on this assay that we can see that it there are uh um active components in here that could be endocrine disruptors? Okay. Uh the bad news, I'll give you the bad news. The bad news is according to this study, uh many things that you would think are safe, including baby bottles that are labeled BPA free, in fact can leach crap out.
And even plastics that are free of plasticizers, for instance, polyethylene, can have additives added to the plastics that um make them release some form of uh endo, you know, like estrogenically active uh compound into foods under certain conditions. So that's the bad news. Uh this is very uh new research, so I really don't know what to make of it. I looked up uh some of the other relevant uh articles on it and uh you know there's there's just not really uh enough known part of the problem is is that the there's no kind of known no known minimum level at which kind of uh where this stuff is okay and you know and the research is still being done. The good news was I couldn't look over the charts thoroughly and like really digest them, but it looks like things like plastic wrap had fairly low levels compared to other things um of having um uh things leaching out of them.
PETG bottles that were uh free of BPA tended to leach uh stuff um because the actual monomer itself is uh is uh it has some activity, some endocrine disruption activity, and if it's not fully if it degrades over time, that can that can leach out uh apparently according to the article. Uh and so I I don't know, I just don't know. Uh it's kind of uh it's an interesting subject, and I hope to look uh into it um more. Um I was a little upset to find that things that I knew were free of these sorts of uh um uh endocrine disruptors in terms of what the actual makeup of the plastics were when tested uh had some activity in them. I that I don't know that this stuff's been retested.
I gotta look into it. Anyway. Two, and on a lighter note, can you give me any ideas for some pan sauces that might go with low temperature fish, meat, and poultry? Since it's not cooked in a pan except for a super quick sear, there usually isn't any deglazable fond in the pan. And let's face it, a low temperature fillet of cod can be pretty boring, even if flavorings are used in the bag.
Okay, a couple things you do. One, uh take the bones or whatever else and make a stock. If you're doing chicken or doing fish, uh, you know, well, fish you're not gonna brown it, but you know, chicken, you can bump brown out the bones, make a stock, reduce it, and make a sauce that way. In fish, typically what cooks are gonna do is they're gonna add something that's very high in umami to uh a finished sauce. That's why a lot of times when these fish came out, you'd see a lot of things with miso sauces, with soy-based sauces, sauces that had a lot of those brown notes and those kind of uh brown characteristics that you would want that you don't get in those high uh high temperature things.
But it's true that uh a plain low temperature fillet of cod can be pretty boring, unless it's so low temperature that you haven't killed the worms and the worms are still moving around on the inside of a cod. Nastasha, did you know that cod has all sorts of worms in it? Are you ever gonna eat cod again? You know, whenever students, the first time they butcher cod at the at the school or wherever, the first time you butcher cod and you see the little worms coming out of it, you're like, oh my gosh, but you know what? You've been eating cod your whole life.
We cooked the worms out. Anyways. Speaking of cook the worms out, that reminds me of uh bleach the rabies out, which is uh uh Kent Kirstenbaum, our friend uh at uh uh NYU, Professor at NYU. His favorite thing that I ever said was bleach the rabies out when I have a new centrifuge. And he was just on Sid the Science Kid.
I don't know what that is. Uh well it's well if you have next time you have a little kid, Sid the Science Kid is like you know, a show on the TV that little kids watch. Anyway, cool that Kent's on Sid the Science Kid. Okay. Uh I hope that was a good answer.
Is that a good answer? Yeah. Yeah. From uh Jason Mulinari. Okay.
Um we have a question in from Matt. How do you think you pronounce that? Hasa? Has? Haas.
Okay. Uh love the show. Use iTunes to listen. In regards to braising jus color, this is by the way, a response where we said, Does anyone else have a good way to get the uh sauce color? Remember?
Mm-hmm. Yeah. So this is this is a response uh from Matt. He also has a response for uh good plating ideas, I think. Uh okay, and then a question.
Okay. So uh in regards to brazing uh color, uh brazing sauce color. I learned a technique from uh Paul Bartellato, who learned it from uh Joy Robouchon uh on refreshing sauces. The technique is good not only for color but flavor as well. But for every service, bring the sauce to a boil uh and in a separate pot for a red wine sauce, reduce a half bottle of wine along with aromatics and roasted shanks of meat scraps or shank or scraps of meat.
I'm I don't know, what shanks of meat scraps. When the wine is very close to being reduced, crank both pots and slowly incorporate the base into the uh into the reduction. Do this two ounces at a time, and when you're done, the sauce will be very ruby and have all the flavors reinforced. The color will last for around five hours. We did this every service with all of our sauces.
Good tip. Good tip. On the topic of fancy presentation for the home cooking. This is a really good tip, by the way. Uh I hadn't thought of it because we're stupid.
That's why. Uh uh, YouTube, some baller chef demos to see how they plate. Uh FrenchChef.tv has some demos as well, uh, as well as the Alinea/slash next videos. That's a really good idea. So stupid.
Everyone on YouTube now has like famous people doing plating work. Why am I such an idiot? And why didn't you suggest that to me? God, we're useless. Anyway, thanks, Matt.
Those are two excellent, a good tip and a really good idea. Anyway, finally, I have a question. Is there a specific formula for savory ice creams and sorbet? I have formulas for sweet versions where the solid sugars and liquids are balanced. Adapted from Sebastian Canon, who's from the French pastry school or competitor in uh in what's it called?
Chicago. Uh also seen on Michael Lisconis' blog. Ran into Michael Scottis the other day at Sambar, by the way. Oh yeah? Yeah.
It was? Yeah. Well, and he told me it's his birthday. What I said, happy birthday. He's like, oh, I saw Michael Scott's there.
It's his birthday. You know going into the see uh what's going on, you're gonna say hello you're not gonna say happy birthday. Nice. So I didn't say happy birthday to the guy. Yeah.
Him and his wife Heathers, the uh GM at uh Aldea, George Mendes' restaurant. Anyways, now I feel like a jackass for not saying uh happy birthday. But uh I was commenting his last you know, it's pastry chef Armageddon right now. Uh Johnny Azini from Jean Georges is leaving JG and Michael Asconis is leaving uh La Bernadette. And I was like, when's your last day?
He's like, he's like December 30th. I'm like, what are you assissing? You can't go all the way to the 31st to finish all years. He's like, Le Bernard Dan's closed on New Year's. I was like, oh.
Oh. Anyway, uh, good guy, Michael Scott. Okay. Uh all the sorbets and ice cream using this formulation are great. The only thing I've changed is maybe adding um non-fat uh milk protein, aka dry milk, to certain sorbetes, although that's gonna make them more milky, which is gonna make them more like uh like a sherbet, right?
Anyway. Uh, do most people substitute isomalt for sucrose or just make a yummy base and hit it with uh liquid nitrogen? Okay. Uh you can't just hit a base with liquid nitrogen and uh get a uh really good uh result. You can get a sore because the sugar is there as a texturizing agent, right?
You need that sugar there to get uh a proper texture. Otherwise, even with liquid nitrogen, it's gonna be hard, it's not gonna feel right in the mouth. I wouldn't substitute uh I mean isom you can substitute isomalt. Uh some people claim that it gives you the runs if you eat too much, but that's never happened to me. And I've eaten a bunch once just to the reason is you just don't digest it as much.
That's why they say that. Uh I would move to uh but isomalt, I'm gonna have to remember I'm making this up. Uh it's something like 50, 30 to 50% as sweet as sucrose, so it is substantially less sweet, but uh glucose syrup is even less sweet than um than isomalt. Uh and I don't know whether it gives you the poops or not. I don't think it gives you the poops, the glucose syrup.
So I would go with glucose syrup, which is what you can use, or very low DE corn, you know, corn base or syrup, you know, everyone says corn syrup's, you know. Look, it's it first of all, if high fructose corn corn syrup is what's causing uh the entire world to fall apart, you know, whether it is or whether it isn't. Not all corn syrups are high fructose corn syrup, let's just say that right now. Anyway, so a low DE, in other words, non sweet corn syrup would be the way I would go as opposed to using um isomalt. Uh although I have used isomalt uh as well, and it works.
You just need something that has the water binding properties of uh although my isomalt now. Anyway, of uh and the texturizing properties of sugar, otherwise the texture's not gonna be right. Uh anyway, uh I'll try to find some recipes or or if you if you're having problems uh working out a formulation, just give us another holler and I'll uh call one of my buddies and figure out the exact numbers. Okay. Question in from uh Ellie.
It's this is a you know, we remember we had a problem pronouncing pronunciation guy now. Ellie, like Eddie but with an L. Okay. Uh I am now on my second immersion circulator unit from eBay in the last three years. I'm thinking I should have spent the money on a new one from Polyscience instead.
Yeah, you know what? I think I said this a million times. I used to I used to buy circulators constantly off of eBay and then spend all my time keeping them running. And the first time I got a new excuse me, a something wrong with my face. A new poly science, I was like, wow, this is what it's like to not be a D-bag.
Anyway, uh it was what? Right, right? No. Anyway, Nastasha's tapping her watch, meaning I have to hurry. Um, yeah, she probably should have.
Anyway, the one that uh the one that's now the one I have now is a very nice looking digital lauda with barely any cosmetic damage, and it holds the temperature perfectly. For all intents and purposes, it looks barely used. I've had it for maybe two months now, and it used to work almost silently, uh, just humming along. Now it seems to be developing a slight grading noise. Nothing very noisy or terribly annoying, but I remember you mentioning that some immersion circulators develop that noise after long-term use.
The problem is I do not remember if you said it was something that could be fixed with some WD-40, or is a problem that will get worse and worse until the machine is unusable in a month or two. Any help is much appreciated. Okay. First of all, I don't know which louda you have. I used to buy Lauda's all the time.
They looked awesome and they looked barely used, and they all died. They all died on me. Um what died on them was the triac. And the ones that I'd use, uh, most of them. I had somewhere the motor went, uh, where the inside the triac would burn out so it wasn't wouldn't heat anymore, it would still run.
The kind of noise you're getting depends. You have to make a decision. Uh uh and uh the new loud is probably that doesn't happen to, uh, or newer. Um you have to figure out whether it's a bearing noise, which it sounds like like it's a bearing noise, hard to describe. Or whether it sounds like the shaft is rubbing on something.
If the shaft is rubbing on something try to bend the bottom a little bit so that the shaft no longer touches any metal parts and that should stop it and then you're good to go for a long time. If it's the bearing making the noise then you're kind of in a world of hurt eventually. I have kept them running for months and months and months by spraying with WD forty but remember WD40 ain't food grade. So you don't want to do it uh too much and it's very easy to test. Hit the bearing with a little WD 40 and if the squeaking and scraping goes away then it's your bearing.
If not then the shaft is touching on something. Hold on what jack tones? Take the collar oh we have a caller? Caller, you are on the air. Hey Dave and Nastasha this is uh Sarah Beth Stad.
Hey how are you doing nice good we answer did we answer the question or no? Did it work? Uh you did you sure did we ended up uh so we ended up putting the meat in a uh boiling water. So now we joke we're gonna go uh boil up some steaks for some friends. So yeah yeah so um we got three different cuts of steak from the same eye.
Uh so it was pretty con hopefully the marbling would stay consistent. And then we put it in a double boiler. So that way the meat didn't hit the bottom of the pan. Right. And then got got a uh got a probe uh just one of the instant read thermometers that only registered at the tip and then we put that horizontally into the meat and um numbers were almost dead on with the with the four times and we haven't we haven't attempted the uh the equations yet but uh we downloaded the app and all that stuff, so we're playing around with that right now.
And and your your numbers, your numbers uh jibed with the application's numbers roughly or no, no, with that with that um roughly four times, you know, the the the inch was just about uh roughly you know equal to you know, when you add in the the inch to the inch and a half to the two inches, it was like a pretty straight straight line with the times. Really? Um yeah, yeah. Wow, it shouldn't it shouldn't be straight though, it shouldn't be linear. Yeah, well that's what it that's what it graphed out as.
That's why we're gonna we're gonna break out that app and play with that a little bit and see, you know, because it cause it um you know that's what it showed, but like you were saying, it shouldn't be linear. No, it should not be linear. No. Every every double every doubling of thickness should be a factor of four. Yeah, yeah.
So that's why we're gonna break out the thing and see if you know maybe something was wrong in our experiment or or just run the math on it and double check it. Uh that's that's an expensive cut to boil, huh? Oh, you're telling me. If you're not gonna eat it, get like eye of round or something like that, 'cause it's got very low uh fat content in it and it's a lot cheaper. Tastes bad when when it's cooked long time because it goes livery and it doesn't have any fat, so it's not my favorite cut to eat, but uh if you're gonna be boiling it, I mean d how did it taste after you boiled it?
Uh well, yeah, I could have used it for my shoes. It was pretty pretty tough. Pretty tough. You know, but what I did just for grins, I put it in a hot pan and I you know, we we seared it with some olive oil and garlic and all that, try to dress it up a little bit. But yeah, once you boil it, once you boil it, suckers boiled.
Uh one last question. How um what was the uh like uh okay, let's say thickness is the Z dimension, how large was the X and Y? Oh, as far as uh the size of it, yeah. Um they were fairly consistent, so the if we we we took the steak and we cut it in half, so it was like two two pieces for each size. And they were about four inches by four inches.
Okay, so it was a it was circumference, but it was like a slab. Right, but a a lot bigger, a lot bigger uh X and Y than Z. Yes. Okay, good. Yeah.
Yeah. So approxim approximating a slab. Good, good, good. Exactly. Yeah.
Well, you know, uh I'm surprised it came out uh as a linear uh relationship. I'm gonna you're gonna have to like fill me in. You have to do do some tests with that app, see what it re tells you to happen. That's what we're gonna do. And the other problem was, you know, we only had like what, two pieces for each thickness, so we didn't have a lot of data points to graph either.
Right. So may I recommend in the future a cheaper cut? Yes. Duly noted. Yeah.
Yeah, but my daughter loves your podcast. We were we were listening to it on uh on the way to uh school this morning. Oh wow. So yeah, yeah. And and don't worry, I pre-screen most of them for the for the cursing.
So we try not well, you know, we really we try not to do it now, especially because you know we now uh label as a family show. You know, surprisingly in the real life, I'm the one you have to worry about, but on the air, Nastasha's the one you have to worry about, isn't that strange? Uh-huh. And me. I'm not saying any I'm not saying anything.
Anybody that's called the hammer, I'm I'm just gonna be quiet. All righty. Well uh well listen, thanks so much for calling. Do you have a uh a separate separate question or no? No, no, I was just calling to let you guys know that we we we heard it and we uh we did the thing.
So uh we'll play around with that app and uh let you know what happened. Cool. Thanks so much. Yeah. All right.
Alright, have a good one. All right. Uh one question we had uh that I'm gonna actually know I know I'm gonna postpone until the next one from Howard is with the holiday season winding up. I was wondering and the reason is going to become apparent. Uh I was uh wondering if you had any suggestions for kitchen gadget equipments uh and gifts with the holiday season.
If you could include some things from a variety of price ranges, that would be great. And I figured this would be a good thing for us to actually discuss on next week's show and to give anyone who's listening an opportunity to write in with what they think a good idea would be. What do you think? That's a good idea. Smart?
I mean, I have my ideas, which but you know, I can uh you know, I'm I could do more. Uh another thing, just a quick in uh Kevin writes in, says, Hope all is well. Just want to drop a quick line and let you know that carbonating vodka with a soda stream system works quite well. Uh and he's attached pictures. Uh and I I didn't get a chance to look at the pictures yet, but he's said I use the same tubing I use for an aquarium pump I have connected to my uh D uh do it yourself immersion circulator.
Um and he recommends using a soda stream to vent out trapped air before pressurizing for the first time to get the pressures high. This is a technique I've advocated for a while if you have a soda stream of putting an extender tube on the end of it so that you can actually carbonate with a smaller amount of liquor uh and actually have the tube sit below the level. Uh because if you don't do that, you're not gonna get good carbonation. If you if you if you fill it up high enough, your uh you're good. The problem is it's gonna overflow when it foams because vodka wants to foam a little bit after it carbonates.
But I will say this also, uh, Kevin. Keep tuned. We're gonna have uh and I'll talk more about it, but I have some new carbonation stuff coming out that's gonna uh it's gonna blow everyone's mind, right? Yeah. Gonna blow everyone's mind.
How much time do I have left? What? Yes. All right. So listen, I have some questions in.
For instance, uh, I have another question in uh from Ellie about alginate. I'm gonna get to that one next time. Uh Colin wrote in with some uh typical Collin kind of stuff, and we'll get to that uh next time. And Kangber wrote in actually after you got to speak to us. And by the way, I was giving us uh Jack, he's the one that says that he no longer fast forwards because he enjoys your choice of segue music so much.
That was an awesome email. Thanks, man. Yeah, yeah. So uh Jack says thank you. And uh I'm gonna get more to what you wrote about, other than that, next week because today we're out of time and this has been cooking issues.
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