Broadcasting live from Roberta's in Bushwick, Brooklyn. You're listening to Heritage Radio Network.com. The following program has been brought to you by Kane Vineyard and Winery. Kane Vineyard and Winery supports Heritage Radio and the growing movement to change how Americans eat and how we think about our planet. For more information, visit www.cane5.com.
Hello, happy new year and welcome to Cooking Issues. I'm Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live every Tuesday from the Heritage Radio Network in the back of Roberta's Pizzeria in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Joined as usual in the studio with Nastasha the Hammer Lopez. How are you doing? Good.
How are you? Doing all right. Uh how was your uh Christmas there? I can hear you crinkling up your bag, by the way. Fine.
Yeah, yes. How was yours? Uh good. Good. I was in uh up at my uh at uh my mom's house there in uh in Westchester, just north of the city.
Gave my uh my kids the crazy train set that uh you know was my dad's and given to me. Then I gave it to my kids. They seem to enjoy it, you know. Oh gauge the whole deal, Christmas tree, blah, blah, blah. Uh nice.
Yeah, nice, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah. You anything special? Anything?
Nothing special. Nothing? Wow. Wow, that's a depressing. No, it was fine.
Nothing special. Nothing I want to get into. Wow. All right. Well, anyway, calling your questions to 718 497-2128.
That's 718497-2128. All right, let's get oh, by the way. I'm not sure if we're gonna have a show next week because I will be in Sweden in uh and on Tuesday. I don't know exactly where I'm gonna be, so we'll have to figure that out. But uh, I would love to do a live call in from Sweden where it's dark all the time.
And uh, you know, uh I'm the only idiot. Actually, I'm not the only idiot, like a huge uh host, absolute vodka is sending me over, and uh basically uh a huge host of like some of the best known and uh nicest people actually in the bar business are going over there, Dale de Graff, Audrey Saunders, Jimmy and blah blah, etc. etcetera, etc. And for some reason I got put on that list, like they accidentally emailed it to me, and then when I replied yes, they they were like, Oh crap. And then they had you know they they couldn't rescind their offer.
Anyway, my wife bought me the uh the butt-kicking uh Canada goose uh like giant South Pole style parka to go with it, which is awesome because uh I get to stay warm and apparently a goose dies, which is good. Everyone knows Canadian geese. Well, they don't actually make that a Canadian geese, but is there any bird on Earth less pleasant than the than the Canadian goose? I really like them. What what?
Wait, you don't like biscuits, but you like Canadian geese? What is it? They're really pretty, I think. Pretty they poop if you've never lived on the east coast. No, no, I've stepped in their poop, but I think they're really pretty.
Have you ever been close to one? There's a phone call. There okay, I'm gonna take the phone call, but they're the Canadian geese are the meanest, meanest creatures in the world. They're so mean. So mean.
Anyway, caller, you're on the air. Hello. Oh, I guess we lost him. Oh man, so quick. So quick.
What happened? I don't know. I think it might be Matthew with stage fright. Anyway, hopefully they'll they'll call back. Anyway, we do have a question in uh from Matthew saying, I hope your uh 2012 is going well and uh no Mayan apocalypses have occurred yet, but there's still hope for the Mayan apocalypse.
I'll tell you something. Let's say the Mayan apocalypse does happen, right? That's kind of good news. It means that there is sort of something else out there, right? I mean, if if you were an agnostic or an atheist and the Mayan apocalypse comes true, well, that's proof that there's something out there.
That's good news, right? Gotta put a positive spin on things, Nastashi, even an apocalypse. No? But then you're not gonna know if it existed when as soon as you go. No, but that's the point.
If there if there is, it means there's a something higher. There's something out there. There's something. No one will relish in that fact, I mean. No, except me.
Anyway. Matthew has two questions in. The first one, Matthew's going to Colombia. I'm going to spend a week in Cartagena this January. I wanted to ask you about food recommendations.
I'm a huge f a huge fruit fan, like you are. Well, it says like you two are, but really I forced Nastasha to do it. She hates fruit. I'm kidding. She actually does like fruit, right?
Something she likes. She gotta like something. Anyway. If you have any specifics on fruit to try, that would be cool. Otherwise, if you have any specific dishes, seafood or ingredients maybe worth bringing home to look out for in Colombia, please let me know.
I'm not sure if you've been to Cartagena specifically, but if you have, do you know of any restaurants, fish kiosks or dive bars worth trying? Well, uh, I was only in Cartagena uh for one day, uh, and the only real restaurant I ate in was uh a friend of mine, Danielle Castaño, uh, who also does a razor shiny knife here in Brooklyn. Uh he has I don't know if he was even doing that anymore because he's got like eight billion restaurants in Colombia, but his restaurant in Columbia in uh Cartagena is called uh Vera or Vera. Uh it's in the uh Hotel Chirasi, and it's like really cool. It's all white, it's got a waterfall on the inside.
It's kind of indoor outdoor, which is kind of the coolest thing about uh Cartagena, but that's really the only place I ate and I can I can recommend it. I recommend going there. Uh I didn't go to we went to like one or two bot dive bars, but we almost got the crap eaten out of us by the locals, and so we ended up leaving. I don't remember the names of them. It was very late anyway.
Okay. Uh on fruit. Now I know I've mentioned these before uh on the on the air, but you you have to have when you're down there, Lulo. Lulo is and they make a drink out of Lulo. Lulo has an amazing, you blend it into a juice, and when you shake it into a drink, it makes a nice kind of creamy head.
So you gotta have a Lulo, which is very uh aesthetic. Uh Uchuva, which are basically like uh gooseberries, but they're really good and it's and they're they're almost free. It's like they come on the table uh when you you know when you come mango stines, you get great mango stems there, and they're not from there, but they're delicious. Uh guanabana is maybe my favorite fruit in like the world. You can get really great ones there.
Granite, they have many different kind of passion fruit variants. Uh Grenadilla is probably the most favorite one down there. Um, delicious, and cuba, which is another kind of a banana-shaped passion fruit, but smaller, also delicious. You want to try tomate de arbol, which is kind of bitter at the skin, but very interesting, uh, etc. etc.
etc. Another one, pataya, which is their dragon fruit, which is actually delicious as opposed to the dragon fruits we get here, which are, in my opinion, without use. Yeah? Okay. Yeah.
Yeah. Nastash's like, I don't care. I don't care. Okay. Two.
Low temperature, you know, it's it's nice to come back after you know a break. It's a new year, new everything, and it's good to know that some things don't change, like Nastasha not giving a crap about what I'm talking about. I am. No, I was thinking about how your kids yesterday asked me, are dragons related to dragon fruit? And I was like, Yeah, they're obsessed with this kind of relation, like word relation.
You're like, well, the words are really good. Yeah. Yeah. But the fruits themselves are not. Seeing how dragon fruit is real.
Dragon fruit's real. Dragons not so much. Okay. Uh Matthew's second question on low temperature duck breasts. I recently became the proud father of a poly science sous vide professional circulator.
Congratulations. Uh Christmas present, maybe? Maybe. Maybe. Uh I tried out a Muscovy duck breast at eight uh 58 degrees uh Celsius, which is like 136 or 137 uh Fahrenheit, for about an hour, sorry, 156, 157, 157, somewhere in there.
Uh for about an hour uh and a half. It came out tasty but a bit chewy. With such a lean cut uh without a huge amount of connective tissue, would cooking for a longer time yield a more tender result. I was also wondering when you do do duck breasts in a circulator, do you render the fat before or after the bath? Thanks, Matthew.
Okay, I always render my duck breasts after I cook them. Some people do a sear before and after. With duck breasts, I'm really just trying to cook the breast through, and then afterwards I sear it traditionally, basically in a pan to get that nice crisp duck breast. The modernist cuisine uh folks, they do a sear both before and after, and they use you know what they call cryo searing, which is like kind of a dry ice bag that they put the duck breast on to freeze that portion solid so you don't overcook the meat. Um I basically just put the duck breast in a bag, squish it very flat against the table, the skin side, so that it renders nicely after it's cooked, because if you just put it in the bag all willy-nilly, the skin will be bent and it won't render properly against the pan, okay, because the st because cooked meat is stiffer.
Uh then I try to cook it for the shortest possible amount of time, like 45 minutes. The problem, um cooking it longer will break down some more stuff, but it actually, to my to my taste, tends to make it more mushy, not necessarily more tender, just more mushy. And certain duck breasts, and I can't remember whether Muscovy does it, get a little bit um livery also if they're if they cook for a very long period of time. You could try. Some people I know do cook duck breasts for a long time and they seem to like it.
I don't. I like the duck breast cooked at like um 50 uh at like 57 actually Celsius is where I cook it, but it'll probably be a little tough in that range, or 58 if it's a tough breast for about 45 minutes to an hour. Try cooking one longer. I don't have too much experience with the muscovy breasts. I do most of my tests on the pecking duck uh breast.
Um, but I don't know. Again, I I hate to say don't do it uh because some people really like duck breasts when it's cooked longer and it will break it down further. Don't go any higher on on temperature. Usually if a duck breast is tough at fifty seven, I say go to 58 Celsius uh because that's going to take away a little of the squashiness the same way that if you have a skirt steak, you take it up one degree, it'll get rid of a little of the squash. So you could try to go to 59, but that seems way too high to me.
Maybe dial back to 57. I I wish I could give a better recommendation here because just what you're writing in to me is not my normal uh experience for what happens with duck breasts. Anyway, sorry about that. Uh two, Kurt writes in from Washington, DC. Uh, why is whole wheat pasta so terrible?
Do you agree, Nastasha? Yeah. You hate it, right? Yeah. Well, first of all, Nastasha, uh a hater of many things.
One of the things I think she hates most is kind of poorly done pasta. But she is a pasta lunatic, so much so that even I, who love pasta and used to make pasta uh basically three or four times a week, cook pasta quite often. She assumes that I dislike pasta because I don't appear to like it as much as she does, right? Yes. And you often tell me we're not the same person.
Yeah, we're not the same person, that's true. Uh and so you uh but you also hate the whole wheat pasta. So do I. Yeah, Jack, you hate as well? Yeah.
And what are your reasons for the hatred? I don't know. It's the texture and exactly the texture. I actually don't mind the the actual flavor of it so much uh if it's done properly, as long as it hasn't gone rancid. Uh but uh yeah, the texture is no good.
You Nastasha? Yeah. Uh there's a uh rice pasta out there, which is dreadful. If you try that one, oh dreadful, just awful. I mean, look, rice noodles are great when it's supposed to be a rice noodle in an Asian dish, but if you're trying to pretend that it's Italian pasta, it's just horrible, right?
Yeah. Uh and there's a corn pasta, also, uh, Jack, you wouldn't approve from a texture standpoint, but I actually kind of enjoy it. If you don't think about it as pasta. If you think about it as like the cor a corn noodle, it's uh actually kind of good. Anyway, uh what Kurt writes in is uh why is whole wheat pasta so terrible?
This is a serious question. I love pasta, as does apparently uh Nastasha and Jack. But my wife and mother regularly try to convince me that I should be eating Ronzoni Healthy Harvest, Berea Plus, is it pronounced Borilla or Borilla? Borilla. Barilla?
Like gorilla? Borilla Plus or some other healthier product, healthier in quotes. And by the way, I agree, like health. I hate you know what people think that like you need to be like if you eat whole wheat, you're suddenly healthier. Like we're not the most over uh we're we have so much uh an over soup superabundance of nutrition uh in our diets.
Anyway, okay. Uh I like the fact that healthier is in quotes, even though my wife uh always smacks me in the face when I put quotes around something and you know, if I put quotes anyway, whatever. Uh these products are terrible. Partially it's that the product itself tastes awful, and part of it is that it mocks me by reminding me of actual delicious pasta. The process of eating it is like chomping on raw field corn while staring at a stack of fresh corn tortillas.
It is entirely unsatisfying. When I've had to cook with the stuff, I simply tried to hide it, preparing dishes with strong flavors like Asian peanut sauces. But can the product itself be made better? And Nastasha hates peanut sauces, by the way, hates them anyway. Uh is there a good way to make improved pasta?
That is, are there pastas with lower glycemic indexes or more protein that are culinarily worthwhile? Well, no. Uh I mean the issue is is that uh wheat, the reason why wheat is so awesome is because wheat is awesome. And it it's the gluten in wheat that gives it that kind of that awesome texture that we associate with uh with pasta. And when you add the bran uh from you know, and all the other stuff that goes into a whole wheat uh pasta, then uh those things tend to um what's the word I'm looking for?
Not interrupt, but uh interfere with the gluten matrix and make the texture not as good. In addition, they have fat in them, uh which tends to go rancid, so if it's stored for a long period of time, you're gonna get rancidity uh in them. So there's all uh a bunch of associated problems with going whole wheat on pasta. Now, if you were gonna make your own whole wheat pasta, you could get a whole wheat fairly soft flour that is very, very finely ground, that doesn't taste like sawdust, for instance, uh chipati flour or something like this, that is quite good in something like a biscuit, make sure it's extraordinarily fresh. Then I would dope it with uh vital wheat gluten to try and add more gluten to it, try and get some more snap.
And then I would uh add uh consway, which is a little bit of an alkaline uh uh powder, or you could even uh add some baking soda to increase the alkalinity. Uh baking soda is not really strong enough. You want to add something like sodium carbonate, not sodium bicarbonate, or just get consuate at your Asian grocery. This will strengthen the uh the gluten network even fur fur uh further and give it a snap. It will give it a little bit of an alkaline taste, but that's kind of nice in certain applications.
Maybe it could be nice in the Italian thing. And maybe that would be enough to get some of the snap back. What do you think, Nastasha? Sure. Anyway, give it a shot, give us a ring.
Uh caller, you're on the air. Hey Dave, how are you doing? Howdy. This is Matthew, actually, you just answered a couple of my questions before. Nice.
Were you the caller on the line that we it got dropped by mistake? Yeah, I got disconnected. Oh, alright, good. So at least we didn't lose you permanently. What's all right.
Happy New Year, by the way. What's up? Happy New Year to you. Actually, I got a uh a small pork shouldered rose that I want to throw in my circulator right now. I just uh browned it I was about to throw it in.
Um I've done beef short ribs before at like forty eight hours for um at about fifty eight feet and I I loved them. They came out great. I haven't found much information on uh pork shoulder. All right. There's good news and b good news and bad news on the pork shoulder.
Anytime you're cook doing a low temperature cook on something that contains multiple muscles in it and pork shoulder is a prime example certain muscles are going to be perfect at the end of the cook time and other muscles aren't. So the muscles in the pork shoulder that have more connective tissue in them are going to be really good when they're cooked in a very similar way to a short rib. So uh like a um you know like 48 hours at like uh or you could do like probably 36 hours at like 60 degrees something in there in that range which is 140 somewhere in that range for a pork shoulder is going to be good. And and all of the muscles that contain connective tissue are going to be good right there. Do you know what I mean?
Yeah this uh I I took a look at the rose it's pretty small and it all looks like well marbled like pretty much you know it's it's small it's about uh five inches across I think maybe a little smaller and uh they all look good they all look like the right right muscles so uh yeah too much short rib. Yeah but a little higher people don't like to see their people don't like to see their pork too pinked out on them and unless unless you cure it with an instacure beforehand so in which case they don't notice because they can't tell. Uh but you um yeah I would go uh like up in the sixty degree range, like between sixty and sixty's still gonna be quite pink, so you're gonna put a nice sear on it. If you're not, you can go all the way up to sixty two. I wouldn't go above sixty two right?
It depends on your customer i or your family or whatever. If you if if it's just for me, actually, but uh it tastes good at 60, but it's it's still kind of it's gonna be kind of soft and it's gonna be pink. So if that's a problem for you visually, then go higher all the way up to 62. Or you could like I say, you could put a hard sear on it. You'll notice if there are some muscles that didn't have a lot of connective tissue in it, they will appear at uh at this point to be a little bit fibery.
They'll be tender and they won't be dry, but they they'll be a little fibried. So when you when you do it, just you know, t look keep a lookout for that just in case you notice it. All right. Uh another question on the same subject. If I was breaking down a you know, whole pork shoulder and I I I I wanted to cook it, you know, in in the circulator.
How would I, you know, I just look for the muscles that appear to have more um connective tissue or marbling kind of, or is that yeah. So like I'll give you one that I can visualize in my head, so therefore I can tell you is uh on a uh on pork belly. If you get the whole pork belly, almost all of it is good, but there's that one muscle that runs in the opposite direction from the most in the pork belly that looks like a little oval on the top of the pork. That muscle, if you look at that, it doesn't have any sort of connective tissue on the inside, and then that muscle itself on its own is fairly tender. That one doesn't respond to low temperature cooking for a long time very well, to give you an example.
All right. Thank you very much, babe. Thank you. All right, right in, tell us how it works. All right, bye.
Have a good day. All right. All right, we're gonna go to our first commercial break. Come back, call your questions to 718497-2128. That's 718497-2128 cooking issues ready or not you might come you can hide gonna find you and keep you happy of not give a co you can hide gonna love you and make you love me oh baby hey baby because I gotta like where you go my heart's gonna blow baby hey baby you can't hide forever ready or not and welcome back to Cooking Issues Jack what song was that the Delphonics nice nice ready or not nice and we have a caller caller you are on the air Hey how's it going?
It's Brian Hey what's up How you doing? Um listen I'm going to New York I'm I'm coming later in the week and I wanted to uh see what you and Nastasha thought about um restaurants to visit some some uh stores I should be going to to uh pick up some um some fun fun stuff all right so uh what kind of okay well tell you where I shop and Nastasha'll tell you tell you where she shops if you like Italian food do you like Italian food? Of course okay you go to Di Polo's but budget DiPalos is like the Italian market it's on uh Grand Street and Mott uh but budget some time because it's gonna take forever. If you're lucky you'll get one of the family members like Louie or Sal or Marie or or Renee, who's actually not a family member but is awesome, and it's kind of one of the gems of New York City. Uh I've been going, I don't know, mm well over a decade.
Well, well well over a decade. Uh but that's uh that's a great place. Uh if you want kitchen equipment, you're gonna go check out JB Prince, which is like it's in like 31st to 32nd Street, uh, just on the east side. It's on the 11th floor. It's like a jewelry box of like crazy awesome equipment.
You're gonna want to check out. Um you're gonna want to check out for cookbooks, Kitchen Arts and Letters, which is way uptown uh in the 90s. It's the best cookbook store I've ever been in. And um the people who run it know uh so much about cookbooks that you will be embarrassed if you don't actually buy from them if you sneak off and buy it on Amazon instead because they're worth supporting. Um what do you think for what do you think, Nastasha, for restaurants?
Um main ones that you always mention. Well, you mentioned some. You know, you always talk about Dell Post on WD 50 and uh and and milk bar, but uh you know, everybody knows those. But how about some that that that are a little off the radar? Hmm.
I'm gonna have to have Nastasha think about she's gonna think about that for a minute and have an actual response instead of just saying, Why don't you talk about it? Which I could say myself. I don't need to ask you to ask me to talk about it anyway. Um while while she's thinking about that, uh what when are you coming? What dates?
Um I'm uh I'm coming tomorrow and I'm there for a week and a half. Oh, yeah, yeah. Just gonna miss when theoretically, I'm not allowed to announce anything, but theoretically, when our bar is gonna open. Yeah. Oh, I'm gonna miss it.
Yeah, just just barely. But the uh bars, obviously, you're gonna want to go to the PDT, Death and Co., uh, Pegu Club, Little Branch. Milk and Honey is kind of hard to get into sometimes. You got any restaurants there, Nastasha? You're the one that always recommends restaurants for people.
I know. No, I know. We go to some really terrible restaurants. Well, good. So tell me the good ones.
What about lunch at Teresa's? Ooh, Therese's really good. And you know about Roberta's obviously, otherwise you wouldn't be calling in. Roberta's you gotta stop there. Gotta go out to push what.
Yeah. Oh, and if you want to taste some if you want to taste, and this is off the radar. Uh you I look okay, right, pumping heritage meats, but if you want to taste some delicious American country hams, the Essex Street Market shop for Heritage Meats has uh a probably the best supply other than a Sambar of American country hams to try of of people that are using Heritage Meats, but are also great producers like Benton's and uh and uh Nancy uh Mahaffey at Colonel Newsom's and uh and um S. Wallace Edwards who's a sponsor of the network, blah blah blah blah blah. Um what else, Sazie?
All right, she's gonna think about this crap. All right. And then hydrocolloids. Where we're uh, you know, any any good place to fix something like that up? Nah, I buy online.
I just buy online. Like go go to any one of the online suppliers, like Modernist Pantry or uh, you know, Terra Spice or any of that. Amazon now is linked up with some of these guys. You can get it really quickly. I've never walked into a store and bought bought stuff here um in terms of uh hydrocolloids.
You know, and we don't even have in New York City really great homebrew shops. There's a small homebrew shop at the Whole Foods, but nothing you know, nothing really to write home about. Any other specialty markets? I mean Oh, there's a weird why don't why don't you send me an email and then I'll send you an email back. Or or we'll try and think about it and we'll and we'll spout it off on the next on the next program or something like that.
Well, you should be too late for you. Anyway, we've given you some good recommendations. All right, all right, thanks. Happy to hear you. Oh, we have another caller?
Caller, you're on the air. Hey Dave, this is Joshua Stokes. How are you doing? I'm doing alright. What's up?
Um, I have to in the next few days and make a foie gras terrine, and I wanted to do it low temperature if I could. Could you give me some pointers on either making a terrine or a torsion? What's going to go in? Is it terrine basically 100% foie gras with flavoring, or are you adding other stuff to it? Just the foie gras.
Yeah. Now, uh I okay, I have to be honest, I don't cook because it's really expensive and it's not normally my it's not one of the things I normally cook. If you go on, so I I'd be basically be telling you from a long time ago memory what to do. But there's a there's various different ways of doing the uh terrene in terms of the time and temperature. Typically what you would do is you would pack it either in a terrine mold inside of a bag, or you could pack it just alone inside of a bag.
Um there's a it depends on how you want it, whether you want it basically me quiet, like partially cooked, or whether you want it kind of all the way cooked through. Most people I think now tend to go on the low side of cooked. And um, it's one of the few things that is still cooked at what they say is a delta temperature where the water bath temperature is slightly. You're uh you're doing this sous- vide, right? Um my memory just zapped out.
You're doing this sous vide. I mean, I would say low temperature. I don't have an actual vacuum machine. All right, so you can do it in a vacuum uh in a ziploc bag, no problem. They um most people put a slight delta delta T on it just because you don't want it to cook for a very, very long time because the longer it cooks, even at the lower temperatures, the more kind of uh fat leakage you're gonna get out of it.
Do you know what I'm saying? So they they tend to go uh they try to try to do it a little a little bit more more quickly. Um go on cookingissues.com, go to the Sous vide, Sous vide Low Temperature Primer, and in that, in the pretty Pictures charts, there is a section um on I believe there's a temperature there for foie gras terrine. If not, uh they're they're cooked low, like in the low to mid 50s Celsius, usually cooked at something like 60 degrees Celsius to something like 54, 55 in that range. For a higher temp cook, you could go up to like 57, but I wouldn't go higher than that.
I wish I could remember off the top of my head, but those numbers are in the primer in the pretty pictures charts. Uh especially redact redacted from Bruno Gusseau, Georges Pralu, and Juan Roca's recipes on foie gras terrine. Okay, great. Thank you very much. All right, no problem.
Good luck. And sorry I didn't have it right off the top of my head. Oh, no problem. Thanks. All right.
I should cook more foie gras, right? Yeah. I really just I just don't cook it very often. Weird. Um okay.
Oops. Getting a picture. We're getting a picture in. Nastash will have to explain to me what it is in a minute. Hold on a second.
So uh got a question in from uh Andrew from Andrew uh said about teeth brushing. This morning I was brushing my teeth as I habitually do every morning, we hope. Uh when I brush my teeth, I also brush my tongue as to remove the horrible morning breath germs and whatnot. I took pause this morning and thought, uh, does this abrasive action hurt my tongue and therefore my taste buds and palate? This may be pure paranoia, but as a budding professional cook, I'm doing my best to taste everything, develop a palate and not swallow some lie, uh making a joke on me swallowing live, burning half of my tongue.
By the way, uh uh that's Andrew from MPLS. What's MPLS? I don't know. Anyway, um, I did burn off uh a huge chunk of my taste buds with uh lye, but they grew back, thank goodness. So uh it's a curious question.
So not just brushing your teeth, but they sell tongue scrapers to scrape kind of your tongue off. And yeah, and uh first of all, I looked up is this is tongue scraping and teeth brushing actually effective? You know, tongue brushing effective. And uh I looked in a um an article called the impact of different tongue cleaning methods on bacterial load of the tongue from 2008. And yes, uh not once, but habitual uh cleaning of the tongue via scraping, and I would assume also by brushing, does reduce bacterial load on the tongue.
Okay, and therefore, you know, helps with halitosis and whatnot. Um but I read in another book, The Toxicology of the Eye, Ear, and Other Special Senses by Andrew Wallace Hayes, that yes, in fact, taste buds do get abraded, right, and taste cells do get damaged by abrasion. However, uh it only takes about 10 days. The average the average lifespan of a taste receptor cell is about ten days. They're getting turned over all the time.
So if you abrade some, right, and you ruin some, they're just gonna grow back. So it's not like you're gonna get any sort of permanent long-term loss from scraping or or from brushing, and you have to think uh about this is that if you have some sort of stank taste in your mouth, right, that's gonna affect your palate as much as as you know, wiping away a few taste buds. Wouldn't you think so, Nastasha? Now it is true that you should not brush your teeth any time close to when you're going to be tasting or cooking. In fact, um there is a whole body of research out there on how to neutralize the effect uh the effect of brushing teeth in tasting panels, because it's a huge problem in the industry where they're doing tasting panels uh and taking notes for for food manufacturers, for coffee, etc.
etc. People who brush their teeth and then try to taste sync because toothbrush teeth brushing and toothpaste wipes out your palate for a good length of time. So there's a whole I didn't get a chance to go reread all that, but there's a huge research body on that. So you should not brush your teeth uh with toothpaste anytime near when you're going to be eating uh eating professionally. And if if you do, you should be uh chewing on a bunch of carrots and drinking a bunch of stuff to wash away the uh toothbrush taste.
Yeah? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Uh Ryan Santos writes in Hey Dave and Nastasha, happy new year.
I recently acquired some locally raised pheasants. Having no experience with them, I was hoping to get some suggestions on how to prepare them, whole roasted, sous vide, whichever. They're all two to three pounds. That's small. Uh and cooking recommendations seem to vary widely from 15 to 20 minutes to 1.5 hours.
Help. Okay, here's the problem with pheasants. Pheasants are delicious, but they're very easy to overcook. The legs are tough, and the breast, if it overcooks, is is useless. That said, pheasant delicious, right?
Uh now, there's two basic ways you can do this. I would never cook for uh one and a half hours. That's just too dang long. If you want to do a roast pheasant, just a super high temperature to crisp up the outside to get some nice flavor without overcooking it. I've done that.
I've I've grilled uh pheasant over like raging wood fires. Basically, the outside was burnt, the inside was raw, and it was still delicious, you know, back in the day. If you want to do it low temp, which is I think gonna be the best way to get kind of a high end result out of it. What I would do is I would cut off the breasts, right? Then cut off the legs, cook the legs separately.
You could do a braise of the legs or whatever, because they're gonna be tough anyway. Uh take the uh bones, make a stock with it, take the breasts, cook them at around 57 degrees Celsius for and they're very thin, so I would cook them only for like 20 minutes. Uh yeah, let them cool down, right? And then quick sear, like not like rendering duck fat, but like quick sear very high to crisp up the skin on the outside, serve them and you're done. That's what I think you should do.
What do you think? Okay. Maybe 58. What do you think? Yes.
Nastasha doesn't really care. Okay. So uh should we go to our second break or no? Uh no. No?
Okay, good. Sebastian writes in, hey David Nastasha. By the way, in case you have a question, call in to 724972128. That's a one eight four nine seven two one two eight. Uh hey David Nastasha.
I love that you guys have put together such an amazing radio show amazing radio show. Thank you very much. Uh I'm a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America and love that I have a resource for learning about advanced and cutting edge cooking techniques. Here are my questions. I've been making root beer from scratch using the recipe from America's Test Kitchen.
You can find the recipe at WW Americans Test Test Fitchin Key blah blah blah blah blah blah. You look for online, America's Test Kitchen uh root beer recipe. Uh the root beer is quite delicious and amazing. It's carbonated with yeast and has a great depth of flavor. The only thing I'd like to improve is the head.
It has a small head when it's first poured and then dies off very quickly. Is there something I can do to make it have more of a Guinness type long lasting head that would be nice and foamy? Perhaps adding some liquid lessithin would do the job. Or would I add uh or what would uh or when would I, or what would I add to it? And do I have ec any recommendations for percentages to try, or is there anything else to get this effect?
Thanks, Sebastian from Napa Valley. Alright, Sebastian, I wouldn't go with uh lessithin for this. Uh less thin knives wouldn't go for it for this. What I would use, what the pros use for beer stabilization is uh I mean you can use gumerabic, by the way, as a bodying aid uh aid, and that's fairly you know, friendly. Uh also fairly expensive.
Uh and that can be used to stabilize the the head a little bit, although I I I don't have any experience with it. The really the thing for stabilizing uh the head of beer and whatnot. They have newer ones that are cheaper, but it's propylene glycol alginate, P G A. Uh and uh you can buy it from a homebrew shop under the name Heading Powder, or professionally one of the brand names of it's stable foam. And uh what PGA is uh it's a modified uh alginate, just like seaweed gel, like you'd get now.
PGA is one of the two or three hydrocolloids that are used by people that aren't all natural, doesn't occur in nature, and it's also fairly expensive, but uh unlike alginate, it is very good uh with in acidic environments, it's extremely stable, uh it's it's just a good stuff. And you use it in very, very low quantities, like somewhere in the range of like 80 parts per million or something like that. Very low quantities. Uh usually you'd make a water solution with it and then add a little bit of that water solution to your to your product before you uh do this the final fermentation with the yeast. Okay.
Um this is what you add to to beer basically for uh a super super stable stable foam. Uh so I I would I would do that. Uh if you have a problem with using something that's not 100% natural like PGA, there are other things under the under the they're basically beer foam stabilizers that you can add, but I don't know what they're made out of. I assume it's like some sort of like busted up pectin or some sort of crazy thing that's uh you know, maybe a little bit cheaper than PGA or maybe uh a little bit more natural, you know, that than PGA, but that's that's what I would go for. Um the other thing is that uh the the head in in beer is related to the um is related to the kind of surface active principle of the of the liquid itself, which is why different liquids with the same amount of uh CO2 in them can have different kinds of heads in them, and why beers which have like uh a lot of uh especially those thick ones that have stuff left over from the uh from the barley and whatnot have a bigger head uh you know gaining potential.
So you could there are probably other ingredients you could add to your root beer that would increase the head. I don't happen to know off the top of my head what they are. I just know this you know, the whiz bang, add the PGA and go. Uh but I would definitely research that. There's been a lot of research done in the beer head uh point.
Yeah? Good job. Yeah. Okay. Uh now, uh Andrew Switzer writes in with something that uh Nastasha, I don't know whether you checked it out, but you try yeah, so uh this is about Nastasha's famous but uh as yet unphotographed vegan face.
And uh Andrew writes in and says that you should go to YouTube and type in uh sh sugar honey iced tea that a vegan would say. That's my way of saying that curse word on a family. Remember a family show now. I wonder how that project worked out, by the way. Anyway.
They said it worked out well. They called back in, I remember again? No, but I mean after that they were still working on it. We're talking about the low temp souvine thing. Anyway, uh, so yeah, crap that a vegan we'll say crap that a vegan would say, although it's not crap, it's another word that starts with S.
Uh, but you can look at that, but that guy doesn't have a vegan face. Like that's his normal face. Yeah. Well, he's a vegan. He is a vegan and he has a face.
Right. Yeah, but he's not making the face of a vegan. That's the face of a vegan, not Nastasha's vegan face. Yeah. Yeah.
By the way, speaking of not vegan, my older son, you know, uh Booker says, Daddy, I like candy. Candy's my favorite. Dax, my younger one goes, I like meat. You like that? Yes.
That's good stuff. They like bagels too. Why are you trying to get me started on the air? Nastasha, by the way, so yesterday, uh any of you who have kids know that you take a kid out to lunch. You take the kid out to lunch, they don't eat, you're spending a lot of money, and they're like, first of all, if they're not eating, what are they doing?
They're shoving their finger up their nose, they're sneezing on the person next to them without covering their mouth, they're doing all sorts of horrible things. Uh, because of course that's the way it works, and they're not eating, so you're spending money and they're not eating, and what happens? You get angry, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah, right.
So then uh Nastasha, like I had a problem, a piece of equipment broke. I was like, Nastasha, can you help me out? And can you uh you know watch the kids for a second? Yes, and so then she goes and and uh takes them out and buys them bagel, which sounds like a really good thing, except for basically it was a way as an end around for them to not eat the lunch that we bought them, right? Right.
And then Nastasha's like, uh, whatever. I don't even why am I even getting into this? This is crazy. All right, uh let's go to our second commercial break. Call in your questions too, 718-497-2128.
That's 718497-2128. I had a dying for every time I dreamed about you. Dreamed about you. I'll tell you. Yes, I'm really broken.
And uh should I do me back to love me? Are you gonna make your problem? You said that you have me. And now you're acting so straight. You say that you need me.
And welcome back to cooking issues. What was that one, Jack? Uh more Delphonics. Nice, beautiful. Uh, calling your questions too.
718497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. By the way, uh, in case you were wondering, if I shouldn't do this, this is ridiculous. I'm gonna get I'm gonna get sued for this. Nastasha wants me to do this.
By the way, I am basically just Nastasha's puppet for this. But you're promoting his who he is. Yeah, but does he want promotion? Yes. Yeah, yeah.
Alright, so those of you, those of you who've listened to the show uh, you know, a lot, uh, you might know that there is a a character here at Roberta's uh a waiter that we call Indy Jesus. And uh we found out his name so that you can go look at his Facebook profile and you can see, you know, kind of what we're talking about. Because, you know, you know, very rarely we're here in a box. You don't know what we're talking about. Nasta Nastasha, I can't read his name aloud because I can't read your writing.
Dante is his first name. Damien is his middle and Dolly. Dolly is his last name. Alright, so you know you should friend, be a fan, be a fan. Be a fan.
We want you to be a fan. This is I say we set up a date between Nastasia and him. Yep. Look, this is a fly. This is not a hate throwdown.
This is a this is a this is a love thing. This is a love thing. This is a love thing. Okay. Okay.
Mark Younger writes in. Hi, Dave and Nastasha. I've been listening to the podcast since late last spring, and it finally caught up. I noticed that Dave frequently gives low temperature cooking times, but then he never states at what temperature the food is when it is placed in the circulator. Well, for longer times, it just probably does not make any difference.
There are occasions when he talks about cooking uh some items, e.g., fish, for relatively short periods of time. So is there a general assumption that everything is coming straight from a refrigerator and therefore with a temper in the high 30s, or is there some other assumed starting temperature? Thanks, Mark Younger. Okay. This is an excellent question, actually, because we really haven't addressed this uh issue.
And the temperature at which the uh product starts does have an effect, obviously, on how long something takes to cook through. Now, most of the work that I do, uh, I'm assuming that something's getting pulled straight from the fridge just because I don't have time to have stuff sitting around for you know forever. Uh and so most of my work is straight from the fridge with a with I know there's some exceptions, but I can't think of them off the top of my head. Uh most of my stuff comes straight from the fridge. That said, if you have a different temperature, there are programs like Sous V Dash that we talked about before on the uh on the program that will allow you to put the starting temperature of the of the product in so that you can figure out how long it takes.
The other thing is that I typically um something like a thin piece of fish, it's true that you don't want to cook it for too long. You don't want to cook it for you know more than 20 minutes or so, but that's enough time typically to make it up to temperature, whether or not the product if it's thin, very thin, uh whether the product starts at you know 38 or 48 uh you know Fahrenheit, because it's just you know, you have much more time than is needed. So I I usually try to build into my cooking technique uh enough time to make up for any sort of variance there is based on the initial temperature of the meat. Obviously, it's a big deal if you're trying to do a delta temperature or if you're working with razor thin margins. For instance, if you're doing fish that is cooked a la minute and you're using a delta T, let's say you're cooking a fish at s in a 60 degree water bath, but you only want the inside to make it up to like 55, 56 uh Celsius now or on Celsius, apologize going back and forth.
But uh then obviously the initial starting temperature is going to make a big difference. Um because in that case, you're you know counting on the seconds being right when you're cooking. And so for that, it's absolutely vital the temperature be the same every time. I don't think it's so vital if you've built in like a good 10 to 15% overage on the amount of time you're cooking, which is typically I'm at least at that number. But it's still it's an excellent question and something that be uh should be addressed.
I think fridge temperature is the easiest temperature because it's usually within uh you know two, three degrees, and so uh it's a good thing to start from. Yeah, and and again, as long as you can repeat it, then it doesn't really matter, right? You if if you did everything and it always started at the same temperature, then it wouldn't matter, it would just work the same, you just correct recipes, but fridge is easy to maintain, and that's what I use. Yeah? Mm-hmm.
Okay. Uh Harlan writes in uh hi Dave and Nastasha. I just ran across this great article in Smithsonian on potatoes. Have you seen it? Uh I had not seen it.
Go to Smithsonian Um Smithsonian Mag.com, how the potato changed the world. Uh, and then Harlan writes in there must be amazing kick-ass French fry possibilities in the thousands of varieties of potatoes they've got in Peru. Well, uh there are some amazing books on potatoes out. Uh, the article, by the way, is cool. You should read the article.
But there's some amazing books uh by about potatoes. I have one by the Brooklyn Botanic Brooklyn Botanical Garden has a whole series of books, by the way, one of which is like Tubers of the World, which is pretty cool, pretty kick butt little little book. Uh but uh here's uh some stuff that I thought was interesting from that article that I will share with you. Uh this is a quote from the article. Wild potatoes are laced with solanine and tomatine, toxic compounds believed to defend the plants against attacks from dangerous uh organisms like fungi, bacteria, and human beings.
Cooking often breaks down such chemical defenses, but not solanine and uh tomatine. This is why, by the way, when a potato turns green, uh that's chlorophyll, but it also indicates that other things are happening, including an increased solanine level, which is why you shouldn't eat potatoes that are green, or if you do, you should peel the hell out of them, which we've actually talked about on the show before. Um, here's the cool thing. In the mountains uh um of uh in the mountains, these animals I can't even pronounce, uh lick clay before eating poisonous plants. The toxins adsorb to the fine clay partial particles in the animal's stomach, passing through the digestive system without affecting it.
Mimicking this process, mountain peoples apparently learned to dunk wild potatoes in a gravy made of clay and water. How cool is that? Cool. Eventually they bred less toxic potatoes, though some of the old poisonous varieties remain favored for their resistance to frost, and clay dust is still sold in Peruvian and Bolivian markets to accompany them. So, first of all, there's this famous recipe uh from Mugaritz, right, uh, about dipping uh clay in ka sorry, dipping potatoes in kaolin, which is clay, right?
Uh and kaolin also great adsorber. It's uses the wine finding agent. Uh and so I don't even know if they know this. I don't even know if uh, you know, Andoni and the all those guys know this, but uh apparently this is a traditional uh thing to dip potatoes in clay or in some sort of kaolin thing. I thought that was pretty cool.
Uh pretty cool thing. Uh another thing that they mentioned in the article are chunio blanco, which chunio we've met I've mentioned this before, I think, on the air, but this is kind of inca freeze-dried potato, and basically they they these potatoes are like frozen and then thrown in a well and then frozen and and thawed again and they they dry out like really like old school like you know pre-technological freeze-drying technology. And uh Nastash and I made them thinking this is gonna be the most awesome thing in the world, and they smelled like uh like a like a goat's bedding. Right? Uh that's put a nice way to put it.
Like, and tasted like a goat's bedding. Uh and so, you know, I have a standing thing, and I'll repeat it now. Here's a standing offer. Uh I will give I don't know, Jack, can I do this? I will give a heritage meat of some type.
Can I do this? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Uh Jack will pick out a nice heritage meat of some type, and I will give it to anyone that can phone or write in a decent way to prepare chunyo blanco potatoes that doesn't taste like uh like I just licked a live goat. I like that.
Yeah. What meat would go well with those potatoes? Goat. Goat. Well, I don't know if we have goat.
Oh yeah, but oh yeah, we can give away whatever you think, Jack. I mean, I'm sure, you know, I just want someone to write in with a good recipe. Uh the last interesting thing I'll mention from this article, extremely, extremely interesting, and it relates to uh goat poop, not really goats, but poop, is uh so apparently there's these islands that uh off of Peru, the uh Chincha Islands, that uh for you know, millennia were coated in bird poop, bird guano, right? And there started uh when they realized that uh guano had in it uh nitrogen and was useful for a fertilizer in the 1840s, there began a rush for mining and or collecting guano, shipping it uh over to Europe to use as a fertilizer, right? So literally people would go fill a boat up with poo and then take the poo across the ocean and sell the poo.
Right? Anyway, not you know, it's not it's no bat guano, it was bird guano, but anyway, you know, guano, guano's guano. Okay. Uh well, it turns out that the current research is that uh and I can't pronounce it, Phyto Thora Infestons, right, which is uh potato blight, right, was brought to Europe on a poop boat. A boat made out of poop?
Well, a boat full of poop. Yeah. So they were filled with poop, and one of those poop boats brought over the potato blight. So potato comes from Peru. Uh, and then also this blight, uh, apparently the native stock is is resistant, comes over, and that's what caused the potato famine.
Poop boats. Anyway, uh, happy new year from the poop boat. This is cooking issues. Uh oh, sorry, I have one more comment from uh somebody emailed in. Tell the live my mic is screwed up.
Tell the live caller about corn for knives. Oh, yeah. Oh, oh yeah, duh! Duh. That's Brian.
Out to Brian. Okay, going out to Brian. Go to Coran Knives. I can't believe I overlooked this. I've actually bought some Christmas presents there uh for my for my mom.
Uh here's my recommendation. Corin Knives sells like Japanese uh kitchen stuff, but they're known for their Japanese knives. It's the best Japanese knife place I've ever seen. Uh, here's the only issue with it. Bring money.
Bring lots of money. Because you can't go to Corinne without spending a lot of money because it's just so amazing. Cooking issues. Vicious Vicious vodka. Oh, you dead.
Got me on this corner. And I don't know where I'm at. Supposed to meet my baby. You got my head all twisted. And I guess can't get it straight.
Thanks for listening to this program on the Heritage Radio Network. You can find all of our archived programs on Heritage Radio Network.com as well as a schedule of upcoming live shows. Thanks for listening. Now when my baby sees me, she's gonna bust my head right in. Oh you dirty rat.
Got me on this corner, and I don't
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