Broadcasting live from Robertas 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 about 12 to 1245 on the Heritage Radio Network. In the back of Roberta's Pizzeria in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
Joined as usual in the studio with uh Nastasha the Hammer Lopez. How are you doing? I'm fine. And we got Jack and Carlos in the engineering booth. Hey fellas.
How's it going? Going well. Uh last week was the second kind of anniversary/slash holiday party of the Heritage Radio Network. Uh when good time was had by all, correct, Jack? Yeah, it was awesome.
Sorry for cursing in front of your kids. Uh well uh he's uh they're used to it. Yeah, well uh they are not, first of all. First of all, they're not, and second of all, uh we did the earmuff, so I did a very effective earmuff so much daddy, what are you doing? What are you doing?
Anyway, uh okay. Uh call in all of your questions to 718 497-2128. That's 718497-2128. Is that right? That's that's right.
Oh, nice. You got it. All right, so we have some questions to get to from by the way. This week is uh the last pre-Christmas show, correct, Nastasha? Yes.
So next week you have to ask all of your Christmas cooking related questions because that would be our last opportunity to answer them, yeah. We could do it next week, no? I'm doing a show next week. We'll have to ask the questions. Oh yeah.
Yeah, yeah. Oh, last uh night I was on the uh Anthony Bourdain uh the no reservation show, which I wasn't able to watch because I don't have cable. Nastasha was able to watch it and said that I didn't come off like an idiot, which means they must have heavily edited me. No, it was just good. It was compared to the rest of the show, you were the best part.
Wow, why don't you insult the rest of the show there? Uh who was on it? Uh how's Christopher Walken? He was on it, right? I only watched until 45.
So you missed the you missed the walking. I think I might have, yeah. You love Christopher Walken. Everybody loves Christopher Walken. How could you miss the walking?
Anyway. Maybe some ti I was tired. My 28 or 29-year-old body can't handle staying up till 11 anymore. Tired. Nice.
Okay. So, uh let's get to some of last week's questions while we're at it. Uh Ellie last week had two questions. I was only able to answer one of them. This one comes in on spherification, aka the tiny balls.
I use sodium alginate baths for spherifications once in a while. I do that based on a recipe from the Alinea book mostly. So typically uh mix the food to be spherified with calcium lactate. Uh this is a reverse spherification. Uh we'll go into that in a minute.
Uh this works great and I get no bad taste. Uh, but I always wonder why I can't use uh straight up calcium that I get from the grocery store instead of calcium lactate or calcium lactate gluconate. Uh I made yogurt spheres once and they worked great with no additional calcium, uh anything since the yogurt was already high uh without any additional calcium or anything because the yogurt was already high in calcium. Is plain calcium not soluble in a food liquid uh in its pure form, maybe what is the deal? All right, the deal is there's a couple of deals.
One, for those of you that don't know what we're talking about, sodium alginate is a seaweed uh derivative, a hydrocolloid, that uh as soon as you get a solution of it and it touches uh calcium, uh, it forms an irreversible gel. The downside is, there's two downsides. One is that uh there's three, it doesn't taste very good because it locks in flavor. Uh two, the texture is not particularly pleasant uh on its own. Uh and the third problem is is that if you were to take a flavor, let's say, and mix it with alginate and drop into calcium, it turns solid uh you know very quickly.
And once it's solid, it has basically no flavor to it at all. Uh so I mean, no good, no good flavor anyway. Uh so uh what Ellie's doing is called reverse verification, where you put the calcium into your flavor and you drop it into alginate and it just forms a thin membrane around the outside. Now, uh calcium is not extraordinarily soluble in water. Um foods that naturally have a lot of calcium in them can be used uh for uh reverse sperification.
So, for instance, uh olives uh typically already, I don't know whether they have natural calcium, but they usually add calcium uh to the uh uh brine that they're in to keep them crisp, uh, and that's enough to do reverse sperification. So uh calciums are basically in there's a uh a grade of bad taste to uh to solubility basically. So the most soluble form of calcium is the worst tasting, and that's calcium chloride. It tastes horrible. You would never use reverse serification for that.
Calcium lactate, uh slightly better. Calcium lactate gluconate, slightly better yet. I don't know what the form of calcium is that you can get in the supermarket grocery, but most forms of calcium, calcium carbonate is uh very insoluble, and you're not gonna get uh very good uh results. But fruit juices that are doped with calcium, I think are typically uh doped with uh calcium lactate gluconate, and so those would probably uh work. So the the other thing that you need to bear in mind is that the more available, the more calcium that's available in the system, uh the stronger the gel setting is.
So if you need a very strong gel, uh you need a very hard, fast form of calcium, and that's when you bust out the lactate or God forbid uh the chloride. If you want a softer gel, uh you can use a less available form of calcium or less calcium total. So I think you'll notice that the less calcium you have there, or the less available the calcium is to the alginate, the softer the gel will be. Uh and that has to do with the fact that um uh basically the strength of the gel uh is kind of dictated as it's forming. So it it just leaving it longer in a calcium bath will cause more gel to form, but won't make it a lot, lot stronger.
Anyway, what do you think, Stas? Yeah, good job. All right. Uh okay, now got some interesting question in on uh ducks. Ducks.
Yeah. Uh Jacob uh Cessna, you think you pronounce it Cessna? Not spelled like the airplane, the Cessna, uh the 172 being kind of the hallmark uh private aircraft, the Cessna 172. Anyway, but not spelled that way, spelled Cessna. Uh says, good morning, guys.
A longtime listener, a first-time writer. I have a crap ton of questions. By the way, Jacob, I changed your actual wording, which wasn't crap ton, but remember, this is now a family show, so we can't uh k can't curse anymore. Jack. Uh okay.
I have a crap ton of questions, but we will start with a few easy ones. I do a good amount of hunting uh and just hit a big on ducks the other weekend. I have breasts from a bunch of spoonies, that's a spoonbill duck, by the way, and have a few teal that I have plucked and vacuum sealed and are waiting for me in the fridge. I already ate some of the spoonies. I butterfly the breast soap and then rolled them in some house made guanchali um from Avedano's in San Francisco and quickly seared them in a hot cast iron skillet.
Guanchali, for those of you not in the know, is cured pig jowl. And it's one of the maybe the most delicious things you can put on a pizza. What do you think? Mm-hmm. It's some delicious stuff.
Nastash, I could have just said uh some any kind of crazy thing, and Nastasha would have just said, uh-huh. She's like, No, I actually don't like guanchali, but we don't know. You don't like guanchali? Oh my god! Oh Jesus.
Damn. Oh my god. Okay. Uh in San Francisco and quickly seared them in a hot cast iron skillet. My girlfriend and I had that with some duck liver mousse she made, and it was awesome.
The mousse was on bread and not on the duck breast, uh, which probably a good plan. Uh I recently returned from some training at Quantico. Ooh, Quantico, huh? Oh can training. Nice.
Marines, Quantico's Marines, right? Uh so I am uh getting caught up on your old shows, and I heard you talk about upland game and waterfowl. Any tips on cooking the few breasts I have left and the two teals. Okay. Uh now.
Uh here's the deal. So the the a regular duck breast, right, wants to cook anywhere between 57 Celsius, which is about 135, and 58 Celsius, depending on how tough the duck breast is. You don't want to over you don't want to cook uh one of these things too long. Even on a regular uh farm raised duck, uh, after a long cooking time, the breasts are gonna start losing their texture and they're gonna taste uh livery and gamey. My assumption is if you're doing uh wild duck that that's gonna happen a lot, lot faster.
But I would try the breasts sous vide at 57. I would try them for uh I would try one just to see what it's like. Uh at about 57 or 57 and a half for about an hour, cool it down and then sear it off and see kind of what result you get. If it's too tough, you could try going longer, uh like two hours, but you're starting gonna start probably getting a livery uh gamey taste in it. But I'm really curious as to what kind of uh results you get out of it.
Now, another thing to be uh aware of, and I'm sure you know this as a hunter, is that the taste of the animal is wildly dependent on what the duck has been eating. And this has been known uh for centuries. So I did some some research for you. Uh first I looked in my After the Hunt book, which is John Folse's book on uh hunting in uh in uh Louisiana, uh, and he had only one recipe for uh for spoonbill, but it was so like kind of doped up with stuff that I doubt you could taste what the spoon bill spoon bill uh actually tasted like. But he made an interesting point.
Canvasbacks are well known as one of the kind of best tasting ducks that you can get. But he says what they probably don't taste as good as they used to because they used to graze a lot on wild celery and uh basically all of that, all of that is gone. But that led me to more research. I was like, well, what do spoon bills, aka shovelers, uh shovel, you know, shovel-nosed ducks uh eat? Because what they do is is they stick their their big old uh you know, beak beak, what is it called?
The uh mount with the thing that ducks have. They stuck their big old bill into the mud and scoop crap up. So there was a study done in um 1922, uh notes on the food habitats of the shoveler or spoonbill duck uh by uh Will W. L. McCaddy.
And basically what's interesting about the spoonbill is that it not only eats a lot of uh vegetable matter, but a lot of uh animal matter out of the mud in the inside, especially kind of small crustaceans, and so my guess is that it's apt to have somewhat of a fishy taste. And so the thing is, is that can that be made a positive thing, or is that inherently uh a negative thing? Uh Edward T. Martin in 19 uh 18 in uh Hunter and uh Trader Trapper, the magazine, uh makes a note that uh you can remove the skin of these ducks, and a lot of the uh kind of fishy taste, because it's gonna be concentrated in the fat, is gonna be concentrated in the skin. And so if you're having a problem with fishy take taste in a in a spoon bill, uh perhaps you can remove the skin and get rid of that.
That would be horrible because the skin is obviously uh one of the reasons why God invented uh the duck. He also, if you re go in and read uh Edward uh T. Martin's uh piece on ducks in the 1918 edition of Hunter Tra uh Trader Trapper on Google. Uh, there's a very interesting discussion of rice birds, uh, Carolina rice birds, which are one of my uh fascinations because it's the bobble link, which is a still extant bird, uh, that used to gorge themselves on rice uh as they flew south uh through the Carolinas, and they were such a pest that uh people will go out and shoot them in droves, but they were incredibly delicious and could be eaten whole, similar to the French Ortalon. And um I'll just read you one quick passage.
I remember this is uh Edward T. Martin writing in 1918. I well remember how the Carolina rice fields were protected from the ravages of the rice birds by an army of plantation hands. They weren't slaves anymore, unfortunately. Well, I mean, fortunately, Drake Price.
Wow. Jesus, you know what I mean? What I mean is is fortunately they weren't sleeves slaves anymore, but they were still unfortunately held down in the plantation system. There's an excellent book called uh Black Rice, uh by uh what's her first name? Beth uh what's her name?
Something carny. Uh and it's an amazing book on the evolution of the uh rice plantation in South Carolina, specifically how the rice that was originally raised there was an African uh type of rice, glabarima rice, and the actual technology for uh raising that rice was introduced to the plantation owners by the first charter generation of slaves that were brought over to South Carolina, uh, and then how they got co-opted and ended up so they started out with kind of a better situation than many of the other slaves on the in the East Coast of and then got progressively worse because the conditions were so awful. After slavery was abolished, the rice plantations continued to exist, but the conditions were still horribly awful, and um the only reason that it went away was because it turned out that mechanization couldn't be applied to the Carolina rice fields. Anyway, crazy story. Okay.
Uh you guys know what I mean. Nastasha giving me the wow on that. I can't believe you're a bad person. You're a low-quality human being. Anyway, I well remember how the Carolina rice fields were protected from the ravages of the rice birds by an army of plantation hands armed with muskets and stationed along the levees.
The birds, so fat they could barely fly, were given no rest. It was one constant bombardment. I have uh been in some skirmishes where the firing was no heavier. I guess he was in the war. Uh very few of the birds were k uh, very few of the birds killed were picked up.
The object was to save the rice. But those that found their way to market were esteemed as a great delicacy for the table. They were far ahead of any other game I ever ate, not even accepting woodcock. Okay. Uh okay.
And then um, so that's kind of answered that question. Jacob writes on and says, uh something to think about, because when I get the funds, I'm gonna uh uh cooking CV. I'm going to be emailing you a lot of questions. I've been talking to the guys at 4505 Meets in San Francisco and the guys have fatty calf in Napa. I'm learning to make my own salumi, and because I like to hunt, I have decided to turn a small in-laws quarter in my backyard into a meat retreat.
I'm only 25 and don't have in-laws, and if I did, I wouldn't want them in my backyard like a bunch of vagrant vagrants. Jacob, let me tell you something. Once you have kids, if you should have the kids someday, uh, you're gonna want the in-laws to come over to take care of the kids, believe me. So you're gonna have to uh convert that back from a meat retreat into an in-lock cabin once you once you have the uh the little ones. So my plan is to put a small U.S.
cooler game locker in along uh along with uh areas to hold my meat slicer and butchering tables. I really want a buffalo chopper, and who doesn't? Uh the big question is what to use as a fermentation curing chamber. I was looking in U.S. cooler mixed floral coolers which allow you to control temperature and humidity.
But would they work? Just something to think about. Well, I don't know. I I was trying to look at a little bit of it. They're mainly meant for flowers, high humidity, and cool.
Uh if you want to control it more, you can also, it's very easy to build a uh simple uh humidity temperature controller for like two, three hundred bucks, so you could control uh however you want. I could go into that if anyone's interested later. I don't really have time, unfortunately, today, but it's you if you Google humidistat andor humidity control for a couple hundred bucks, you can do it. Uh and also Jacob Rudson, based on our recommendation, he got the book of garlic and aliens for his girlfriend. She's a science and food nut and has her degree in mechanical engineering.
Meky, love Mekie, Mekie and Touble E, my two favorite e's, and owns her own small bakery. She thought it was pretty freaking awesome. Thanks for the help. Sincerely, Jacob. Uh should we take our first commercial break?
Yeah. Alright, go to our first commercial break. Cooking issues. Them young girls, they do get weird. Wearing that same old shaggy dress.
But when she gets weary, try a little tendonet. You know she's waiting. Yes. And test all painting. That's your nephew, nepha, never nephe's there waiting.
And without them. Trua. A little tenderness. A little tenderness, yeah. Alright, so hey, welcome back to cooking issues.
Dave Marlon. Calling your questions to uh what is it? 7184972128. That's 7184972128. Today's show is sponsored by Modernist Pantry, supplying innovative ingredients for the modern cook.
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Yeah. Right? That's my new sound effect. Do you like that? Paper crunching on the mic sounds awesome.
Yeah, it does. It really does. Uh, okay. Gavin Norcal writes in on rotisseries and frying. Hey Nastasha, love the show.
You and Dave are great. Thanks for doing it every week. You are welcome. I had a suggestion for a cooking equipment gift for the holidays, as Dave requested at the end of the last week's show. A good quality deep fryer for the home probably can be had at a reasonable price, gently used from Craigslist or eBay.
I think it's under uh an underappreciated home appliance. Folks just need to take the plunge, haha, and use them, and I'm sure Dave can offer lots of suggestions for home use beyond French fries, right? Well, did you pick a question that I like? Okay, look. For the past twelve years or so, 10, 12 years, I've had uh in my home a professional deep fryer.
When I say professional, it requires 35 pounds of oil to fill it up and uh requires 90,000 BTUs of gas. Now, this sucker can take that 35 pounds of oil, which is a little more than five gallons, and heat it up to frying temperatures in about five minutes flat. Now, there is so much, and I got it for fifty bucks by the way. A Mexican restaurant went out of business uh down at what the time was the World Trade Center, uh, and I bought it there and professional deep fryers now almost always have stainless steel kettles on the inside because they're easier to clean. I found an old black steel one, and because nobody wanted it, and because there was a tiny leak in the bottom of the kettle that I had to braise shut, uh, I got it for 50 bucks.
And I wheeled it home in a snowstorm uh and hooked it up, and it's maybe the greatest thing uh I own. I love it. Uh here's the deal people have a misconception about frying. Uh when you have a large deep fryer like that, the oil lasts a lot longer, the food tastes a lot better, uh, and it's a lot it's a lot better. It's not like a small fryer is a smaller version of a real fryer.
A real restaurant fryer, um, especially a gas-fired one, uh tube fryer has uh what's called a cold zone. So what happens is first of all, the tubes are very large, and you have a very large uh flow, a very large surface area to heat. So you're not locally overheating the oil anywhere. It also starts nice uh uh convection currents of oil so that it really heats up very, very quickly and very evenly, has amazing recovery. The other thing is is that there's a large area below the tubes where all of the little particles from your food that come off settle.
Now, in a normal fryer at home, that stuff just sits at the bottom, scorches, burns, and ruins your oil. In a in a commercial fryer, they sink beneath the tubes into a much colder area of oil so that they don't burn and they don't ruin the rest of your oil. They just settle to the bottom. Then at the end of the night, you open it, you drain your oil, you filter it out, you pour it back in, and you're good to go. So your oil lasts a lot longer.
Also, there's nothing on I and by the way, a fry every damn thing in that thing. I fry uh rack of lamb, rack of goat, prime rib, steak, french fries, onion rings, fried chicken, uh basically anything that you want to eat can be fried. The best way to test your oil when you're frying uh to see whether she's still good or not. And yes, it's a woman, Nastasha. I know uh is to take a piece of neutral bread, fry the bread, and then eat the bread, because it soaks up the oil and the bread's very neutral, so it's very easy to test whether you're uh whether it's gone bad.
I've never done on eBay or Craigslist, although I'm sure you can. Uh if you live near a major city, you unfortunately have restaurants closing down all the time, uh, and you can get it at auction pretty pretty cheap. I mean, uh you I used to get all my stuff on auction um back before I had kids, and my wife still let me bring made major pieces of kitchen equipment home uh before I lived in a tiny apartment. But anywho, uh okay. And uh uh Gabe writes in while I have you, here's a question uh for the next podcast.
How about rotisserie turkey? I know Thanksgiving is behind us, but I was looking for an awesome roasting technique and thought rotisserie would be perfect if you would get the right setup. Does Dave know of any good spit setup uh outdoor wood oven with a side uh heat source like a wood fired oven? And what are the physics of having that pulsive heat that you get from rotisserie? And is it so good on chicken because it's continually being basted as it turns?
Okay, I don't know of a good uh rotisserie motor uh normal normally. Uh I built one once a long time ago to do a pig, but all rotisserie motors that I've seen, uh inexpensive ones anyway, are horrible. They suck. Uh and the reason is is the gearing isn't very good. So if you have a bad rotisserie, uh what happens is is you almost never have the meat on a rotisserie perfectly centered.
So the rotisserie slows down as it as it's lifting the heavier side of the of the meat over the top. Then it's it usually stops for a second, falls as it goes through the heavier part until the gear catches again and then goes a little faster on the down. So you basically don't have even heating all the way around. It's awful. I don't know why anyone's uh no one's invested in like a simple precision like worm gear drive that can't be overdriven.
Uh I used one once with a bow dean, which is an awesome little motor. Uh, and that thing, that sucker was dead on. Like I could have, I could have swung uh, you know, I could have swung a piece of meat entirely on one side and it would have spun evenly. Okay. So that said, I don't know of a good setup.
Uh it's all about um it's all about securing the meat and making sure that it doesn't flop around and and that the wingtips or or whatever don't fly off and get burnt. And you we gotta be careful when you're tying it that your string doesn't catch on fire and come off and the wings get burnt. That said, rotisserie is a fan fantastic technique, not because of the pulsive heat, but because you're applying a high average, a high, sorry, instantaneous heat on the one side, right? Uh, which is uh making a good skin or a good crust on whatever you're cooking, but a low average heat because you don't enclose it. You know, that's why you don't want to enclose a rotisserie.
And enclosed rotisserie is basically an oven with a broiler on one side. Rotisserie is really uh very akin to low temperature cooking in that you're keeping the average heat input very low, so you're not in cooking the meat. Uh the base, the self-basting helps, I guess, somewhat because it gets a little uh oil on the outside, but I don't know the actual science of the of the basting and what that does. I probably should, I should research it. But uh that said, the trick of a rotisserie is uh trying to get the heat input uh low enough that it doesn't over do too much overcooking of the outside of the meat, but high enough such that it cooks in a reasonable amount of time.
Uh and so that's that's the trick. But I don't know of a good wood fire to be great. Uh it's just a question of finding a good rotisserie motor, and I think that's one of the things we might build someday. Okay. Okay.
What do you mean? He's not paying attention. I am. Okay. Uh Jason Mulinari writes in about deep fried chicken and also wasabi.
Jason, I'm gonna apologize in advance. I don't know the answer to the wasabi question, but we will uh put it out to our readers. Keep up the good work with the podcast and Nastasha, keep hammering. Like that? Keep hammering.
A couple of questions. I'm trying to figure out how I can low temp cook chicken prior to deep frying and maintain the same deliciousness. Hopefully, you can get more deliciousness. Essentially, uh cook for insurance as you call it. Uh what that means is is you cook it the uh chicken beforehand, low temp, and then you fry it, and then when you're frying it, you just have to worry about the crust.
You don't have to worry about cooking the chicken all the way through. And that's really, really good technique when you want to cook chicken at the same time as French fries, and you don't want to have two separate oil temperatures. Okay. Uh the problem is the crust doesn't come out uh the same uh with um low temp cooking versus regular straight frying. I imagine because I've denatured some of the proteins in the skin and broken down some of the connective tissue.
Have you experimented with a precooked fried chicken? Any advice to get the best possible crust slash crunch on it? The main problem seems to be loss of adhesion between the crust and the chicken almost becoming a shell. Okay. Okay, I have the answer for you.
I believe, and tell me if I'm wrong, write in and tell me if I'm wrong. But a lot of people have had this problem. The main problem with adhesion of crust on a chicken is because uh the skin is wet. And when you're cooking something in a uh in low temp, you tend to get a soggy kind of uh uh outside of the skin because it's inside of a bag. What you need to do is as soon as you remove the chicken from the circulator, you need to cut it open while it's still blazing hot, put it on a rack and let the skin flash off and form a pellicle on the outside.
Okay? Uh, this is why after you brine a chicken before you fry it, you typically put it on a rack and let it dry. I mean, I know Carlos here doesn't do that. Uh Carlo, he doesn't uh Carlo just takes it straight from the brine and puts it in the butt, you know. His recipe, I haven't I haven't tested with it yet, but it goes against all all things I've ever known about fried chicken, but it's delicious, so I'll have to look into it anyway.
Uh so you want to form a pellicle, and that's gonna increase the adhesion, a dry thing. Then you're gonna want to go, I do a flour, then I do my uh liquid uh dip, which is uh a buttermilk, egg, baking powder, baking soda, salt, pepper, and then back into the flour. I'm just telling you the steps I use because if you're using a different kind of a breading technique, perhaps it won't work the same way, but it's all about drying the chicken off, and the best way is remove it from the bag when hot, let it dry on a rack, then bread it, then fry it. And uh, you should get the same kind of quality. And second question: why does wasabi taste so much stronger when paired with shellfish?
Uh it seems that when the same quantity of wasabi is put on uh ebby or a fish, Ebbie, you know, being a sweet shrimp, um the ebbie blows my sinuses up. I don't know. Do you have that experience, uh Nastasha, that it's stronger on uh shellfish? No, I no, I haven't tasted no. I don't know.
In other words, like, so on a s on the on the shrimp, he's getting more of a hit than he is on the fish. I don't know. I don't know either. Well, someone's gonna someone better write in or something like that. I did some preliminary searches on it, but that's a tough one to search for in the scientific literature.
Really is. Uh that's another one. I I tried to put a call into McGee, but he's on a deadline, so he he he couldn't come in. So then maybe next, maybe next time, maybe maybe for Christmas we can get McGee. You want to get try and get McKee on McGee on our Christmas episode?
Sure. Okay. Joe from Chicago writes in about tongue tacos and flan. Hello. I recently tried to impress my girlfriend by making a pumpkin flan in a low-temp water bath and completely failed.
Oh, that sucks. My approach was fairly simple. I basically applied Douglas Baldwin's approach to creme brulee to the flam flan custard mixture. Uh Douglas's technique, and Doug Doug Baldwin wrote um a sous vide primer that's on the web, and he wrote a book, and he was working on some of the uh differential equations with Nathan Mirvold for uh cooking times, uh which uh you know our uh our team of uh experimenters might be interested in that you know that are working on that uh science project. Okay.
Douglas's technique basically involves blending the various ingredients, pouring into a bag and cooking for 15 minutes at 180 degrees Fahrenheit. He actually cooks uh yeah, I guess a little higher. Agitate the bag, cook it for another 15 minutes, and then distribute it to a service vessel. I went with a pie pan that I applied uh caramel crust to the bottom. Uh so he's doing a flan, so he's gonna invert it.
Uh what I had left was a slightly more viscous mixture with some grain to it that did not improve at all after sitting, because Douglas lets his stuff uh sit in a service vessel for in like a ramekin for like four hours to eight hours to supposedly set up. Uh it did not improve after sitting in the fridge. The result was delicious, but not even close to a flan texture. It sort of collapsed into a pile of porridge when I flipped it on the plate. Do you have any temp uh tips for making low temp flan?
This technique is way more appealing to me than the traditional oven water bath approach. Okay. So Douglas Baldwin, what he does is he puts all the ingredients for he basically takes a creme anglaise mixture, by the way, and not like a standard uh like uh like a pot de creme or a or a or a custard mix for like a flan, right? And then he uh blends it and then he puts it into a bag, cooks it, uh, and then agitates it in a ziploc bag and then pours it in hope to set. This is never, first of all, uh he cooks it for 30 minutes.
Now on his I he you can YouTube Douglas Baldwin and go look at his YouTube and go all the way through it. But he basically he cooks his his custard, his what he calls a custard anywhere between 175 and 180 degrees five degrees Fahrenheit, which is anywhere from a little under 80 degrees Celsius to about 85 degrees Celsius. And he cooks it for a half of an hour. Now I've done many, many, many creme anglaise, which is a very similar mixture in bags in the in the circulator over time. I think half hour is too long.
Uh the longer you cook it, it does start getting thicker, so we'll get thicker, but also the egg taste comes out a lot more. So it ends up tasting a lot more like cooked eggs the longer uh you cook it. We try to keep our time between about 15 and um and 20 minutes at you know, in in a bag, at and we always do uh 82 degrees Celsius, uh, which is about 181 degrees uh Fahrenheit. I think 185 degrees Fahrenheit, which is 85 degrees Celsius, is too high. I think it's it's too high.
Uh and I think that the other number he gives, 175, which is 80 degrees Celsius, isn't going to set uh in the proper amount uh of time. So I would definitely uh do that. He also does his uh stuff in Ziplocks, and a Ziploc will work at those high temperatures, as he says, uh, but they're very fragile at those temperatures, so you have to be careful. The other problem is that if you do a side-by-side taste test of a uh creme en glaze made in a ziploc versus a creme en glaze made in a vacuum bag, the one in the vacuum bag tastes a lot better, and I think it's because the air that's trapped into the mixture when you're blending it, you're not getting any of that out, and it adds a kind of eggy sulfury taste to it that you don't get if you do it in a full-on vacuum bag. Uh as one of the uh the readers of his uh YouTube thing said, perhaps that when you're taking the bag out to agitate it so it doesn't form any curds uh halfway through the cook, you could crack the bag a little bit and get rid of some of the excess air, and maybe that'll fix some of the problem.
Uh, you know, because Douglas says when it happens that that it's mainly water vapor, and there is it is mainly water vapor caused from the increase of heat, but there's also some residual air from when he put it in the blender. Um okay. The other thing is is that aside from the fact that I would do that a creme and glaze in a vacuum bag and not in a ziploc, if you can help it, um a creme brulee uh to me is not done with a stirred kind of custard that way, it's done with a set custard. So I typically use a pot de creme recipe uh which is cooked in in a C vap oven, so it's not agitated at all. In fact, it's it's completely stationary.
Uh and the same holds true for a flan. A flan, unlike a creme brulee, which can be eaten out of the uh out of the pot, right? Uh, and I do mine, like I said, in a CVAP. I'll pour the uh the mixture, the custard mixture, into a ramic in, put it in a C vap oven, which is basically a steam uh low temperature steam oven, and I'll cook it at the same temperature that I would in a water bath, but without stirring, and it sets up into a nice creme brulee, I brulee it, it's great. For a flan, you need to add more texture because you have to unmold it.
So, first of all, you can't follow his recipe and use egg yolks. You have to use whole eggs so that you get that extra protein in there to have it set so you can uh upend it. Now, I've never done this, so I have no idea whether this would work. But you might be able to uh take a ramekin, uh put or or your pie pan won't work because it's gonna explode in the vacuum. But you could probably put it in a ramekin, uh I guess you do it in a ziploc too, and then put a lid on it and then ziplock it shut underwater and then weight it down so that you're in a water bath, but still in a ramekin.
The whole trick is to heat it at an accurate temperature without stirring it. But you're gonna have to go longer if it's not stirred and you're not getting convection with the bag with it moving around, you're gonna have to cook it a lot longer. So uh we typically do around uh you know 80, 82, 80, so between like he does, between 181 and 185 in a steam oven for about 45 minutes in a ramekin, and you should get a good result, and then you should be able to turn it off. So uh did that answer that question? Yeah.
Okay, second question. I made uh tacos de lengua, that's tongue, for the same meal. Uh thankfully my girlfriend is as adventurous as I am, and followed Kenji Alt's approach. Uh Kenji sou vives his uh tacos tongue for tacos. He suggests 24 to 48 hours at 170 Fahrenheit, which is 76.6 uh Celsius.
So I split the difference and cook my tongue for 36 hours. The results were entirely too mushy for me, but my girlfriend claimed to enjoy it a lot. What are your suggestions if I'm aiming for a texture that has more bite to it? I was thinking about trying 24 hours at 170. Thanks.
Joe from Chicago. Even that is too long for me. Look, when you're cooking up at 76.6 degrees, you're basically doing standard braise temperature. So the advantage you're getting from the bag is only a uh having to use less liquid so you can have a more intense tongue fli uh taste and also probably a slightly higher yield. Uh but and you know, you don't have to make as much too as you would in a traditional brace, so you could do a small amount in a bag.
So that's all great. But at those temperatures, uh, I wouldn't think you'd have to cook it longer than so if it's if a traditional braise was going to be like four hours, five hours, I would do only do it a couple hours more, like six, seven, eight, nine. You know what I mean? Like not that long. Uh that when you cook something for a long time, it tends to break all the texture down and it can get kind of mushy, as you say.
And some people like it that way. I don't. I I I like a little more texture to it. So I would try a radically shorter amount of time, like 12 or 10, uh, and see see how that is. And if it's not, you know, great, then you can uh I would put like a tester in a bag and then have your main bag and then pull one after 10 hours to see whether you like it.
And if you like it, go with that. If it's already too mushy, you have to go less. But I think you'll probably be okay with like eight to ten hours at those temperatures. But give me a shot, see what you think. Okay.
On the brine subject, I'm unfortunately going to push that brine subject off until next week again because I'm gonna try to get a hold of uh McGee because I also want to have the argument with McGee on the air about whether a brining a turkey causes you to have too much uh salt in the pan drippings and therefore not being able to use the gravy. And I was thinking about it in the shower this morning uh while I was washing my hair because I wash my hair every day, which apparently women and and men who care about their appearance do not. Is that true? Jack. Um, I wash my hair every day.
See, that's what I'm saying. I think are you not supposed to? Uh that's what I'm saying. Apparently not. I was told that, like, I guess we're like r regular dudes who wash our hair every day.
Because like we grew up washing our hair every day. That's what you do. Exactly. Like you go in the shower and the shampoo is there. And you use it on your hair.
Yes. To make your hair clean. Yes. Yeah. Well, women don't do that.
Were you aware of that, Jack? No. Yeah, yeah, women don't do that. What the hell, Jack? Yeah, anyway.
Now Nastasha gets to bust out the how they lose. Yeah. Don't you ask your ex when you had girlfriends if they wash their hair. I don't know. Anyway, anyway, it's an interesting fact for those of you that don't already know this.
But there, like in New York, because New York is where New Yorkers, there's a whole subset of uh men who also apparently care uh that their that their hair has a nice sh shine to it. Supposedly, I guess a non-greased shine, although I don't know how that works. So they do not wash their hair every day. How the hell are they getting into that? Oh, I was washing my hair, I was thinking about it, and I think what happens is uh McGee is expecting you to use a broth uh for your to reinforce the drippings to make your gravy or to do something.
I always make a stock and use the stock as the basis of the gravy and reinforce it with the pan drippings. The stock doesn't have any salt in it, and so therefore I'm not getting excess too much salt in my gravy. Does that make sense? Mm-hmm. Anyway, I want to have this argument with them on the air, and so we'll push off the uh the uh what's it called until until then.
Okay, uh Ken also, uh Ken Ingber wrote in, and uh he says, I want to remind you about the cooking issue I raised uh a few months ago regarding the lack of research on oxalate content of food. Uh oxalosis and kidney stones is the problem uh most recently faced for Thanksgiving, uh, because potatoes have a lot of it. Sweet potatoes are worse, cooked carrots and cooked celery are are poisonous to people with this problem, although raw celery seems to be okay for no apparent reason. Uh cranberry sauce is okay, but almonds are disastrous, and the list goes on and on. Uh I'm I more or less made two different meals, one that was low in ox uh oxalates and one that was normal.
As I uh said previously, oxalosis seems to be a rare disease, but there are plenty of people who have had kidney stones, i.e. my mom, uh, or are candidates for them, and the docs often say doctors often suggest a low oxalate diet. Uh I'm telling you, if you want to follow a low oxalate diet, good luck. The research and guidance are almost non-existent. Much of what is out there on the internet is from unreliable, pseudo-holistic or nutraceutical sorts of people.
Well, charts I have found from hospitals, foundations, and other sites that appear to be reputable, are inconsistent and would love to know more and how to accumulate reliable information. So I did a search again, and I went to the oxalosis and hyperoxaluria foundation, the OHF, and looked at their list of foods, and sure enough, Ken, it is a weird list of foods. And um, I think the problem is is there's not intensive research. First of all, like uh the the oxalate content of a food i is dependent in plant foods, is radically dependent upon kind of where it's grown, how it's grown, the conditions it's grown. Uh and so same with carrots, the calcium content, therefore the oxalate and all that concentration of the inside of a carrot is widely varied depending on where it comes from and how it's grown, the age of maturity, the variety, etc.
etc. And so uh because people haven't been doing the research, no one has done the research to try and figure out how to grow something with a predictable amount of oxalate in it. At least I haven't found anything so far. And so when it becomes a big enough deal, perhaps people will uh try to figure out a way, maybe not to reduce it and everything, but at least to make it consistent so that you're gonna know ahead of time what you're gonna go on. For instance, a random one you might not think of.
You think of oxalic acid when you think of rhubarbs, so you'd naturally stay away from it. But almonds, which have a very high oxalate content, you wouldn't think about it. So it's very, very weird. Secondly, he writes in uh to keep uh Dave Abreast or some buzz in the consumer coffee circles, uh, there is a new Breville 900 XL espresso maker that just became available in the U.S. The buzz is that because Breville is a major appliance maker, and by the way, Breville is pushing freaking hard.
They uh they they are they gave a bunch of stuff to the French Culinary Institute. They were at uh South Beach Food and Wine Festival last year, Nastasha, remember that? They uh they uh were working with Christina Tozzi from Milk Bar. Uh they're pushing hard with all of their appliances. Maybe, yeah, or give us some free crap at least, something anyway.
Um so they're pushing hard. I haven't used a lot of their appliances, although I will say that their their uh stand mixer that's trying to compete with KitchenAid comes with the scraper paddle blade, which is nice. You know, you don't have to buy an extra one, which I thought was nice, but I haven't I haven't used it yet. Anyway, the buzz is that because Brevel's a major appliance maker and can manufacture much more cheaply. Breville's $1,200 machine uh probably competes with uh regular commercial machines twice the price.
Dual stainless steel boiler boilers, variable pre-infusion, manual and automatic brew settings, a nice porta filter, really aimed at the budding barista types, um, and uh it seems like it has adequate steam pressure. There's not a full review on Coffee Geek yet, but you know, what do you think? I I looked at a uh I looked at a uh what's it called uh YouTube on it, and it seems okay. You don't really want stainless steel for your boiler. Most people want brass because, well, I guess here's the thing: all the old, all the old uh issues people had with espresso machines are really based on what that espresso machine was meant to do and and how it was designed.
Old espresso machines are designed uh to throw away a huge amount of heat and therefore become stable by taking in a bunch of uh energy and then throwing a bunch of it away, and that's how they gain stability. Uh now that everything's controlled uh with microprocessors, that's not the same reason you don't need that anymore. So you probably don't need a big brass boiler, stainless steel boiler is probably great and very sanitary and all that. It also has a heated uh um head, which means that separately heated head, which means it I mean it could be good. I'd love to try uh a couple shots with it.
Maybe if Breville was one of our sponsors, they could give us one of those machines and we could test it out. What do you think, Jack? Yeah, let's do it. Sound like it sounded like a good thing? Yes.
All right. Uh now we're gonna do have to wrap up in two minutes because we have a one o'clock show. Uh two minutes. Two minutes. All right, so we'll leave with this.
Listen, call in your questions next week uh for for Christmas related stuff and for your last minute uh Christmas shopping. I appreciated the Friar uh comment. That was a good one. Uh Colin wrote in with some uh typical Colin uh lunacy, and we'll I guess we'll end on that. Uh Colin says, uh dearest David, Nastasha, and Jack.
Uh and Carlos, you know, you've got to call Carlos. Really, Carlos? Wow, he didn't say that, he just called you out, but I'm saying I'm at here's how I suggest getting a rough number of listeners. I agree that an online poll is a good way to collect data. Something simple like, did you listen to cooking issues episode 66?
Well, did you? Well, did you? Uh do you regularly listen to cooking issues? Of course, people wouldn't answer that. And then uh, and then here's the weird one.
What do you think of the uh hyper advanced civilizations of the future will think when they unearth recordings of this direct that Dave Arnold spews into the universe? Wow. Wow, harsh. Uh okay. Uh okay, here's the thing.
He also thinks that what we should do is I should sketch a picture of Nastasha's vegan face, sign it, and then offer it as a prize to a random poll taker. We should sketch a picture of the face she just made after hearing that. Yeah. Yeah. He said, and he says, granted, that prize has a bias towards regular listeners who listeners who know what a vegan face is.
I think even if you don't know, you would gotta know that a vegan face can't be a good thing, right? No offense to vegans out there. Am I right? Well, vegans would think it's a nice face. Yeah.
There are probably some nice vegan faces out there. But not Nastasha's vegan face. No. Alright. Vegan face cooking issues.
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