Broadcasting live from Roberta's 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. On time. On time and live from the Heritage Radio Network here in the back of Roberta's Pizzeria in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
Joined as usual with Nastasha the Hammer Lopez in the engineering room. We have Jack and Carlos with us today. Hello. Hello. Call in all your questions to 7184972128.
Is that right? Yeah. 7184972128. Uh cooking questions. Any kind of questions, really.
We'll take anything you got. Is that true, Nastash? That's true. We take them all. Okay.
So, uh anything good happening? No. We only have 45 minutes, so you should get through. You see, but that they the custom the customers don't care about that. Okay.
Yeah. Uh you can like save that for the break. So the uh so and i there actually we're gonna we're gonna there there are some there are some listener comments on Nastasha later, which we'll get into. Um yeah, it should be fun. So uh this is the second week of uh the Booker and Dax bar that uh we opened, Booker and Dax at some.
How do you think it's going there, Nastasha? Oh wonderful. Well, from a drink standpoint. Great. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's a it's it's it's different. Actually, uh, you know, starting something, it's uh it's a lot of fun. Anyway. Hello, Dave and Nastasha from Matthew. I'm a longtime listener and a first-time emailer.
I was recently gifted uh with a um okay now here's it's a knife, right? We're talking about a knife here. I've never actually pronounced the brand out out loud. It's very well regarded knife. It's it's spelled Glestain, but I believe it's pronounced Glyston.
G-L-E-U-S-T-A-N-S-T-A-I-N. Anyway, uh I was recently gifted uh with a Glyson uh Gyoto, which is a Japanese uh it's a basically a Japanese chef's knife, like look looks like a Western style knife, but it's Japanese. So uh a um Glyston uh uh Gyoto knife, it's sharpened on one side, more on that later, and it's left-handed, uh, which means they paid a lot more for it because to get a left, first of all, like culturally in Japan, you know, there's no such thing as left-handed. It's like what's wrong with you? You like use your right hand.
You know what I mean? So like the left-handed one, and and Japanese knives typically are handed because they're not uh sharpened uh with uh symmetrical bevel the way uh Western knives are. But again, more on that later. Uh my question is how do I properly steal this? And uh how do I properly uh how do I properly sharpen it on a stone?
Uh any other general techniques, tips for using a sharpening stone would be great too, as I am new to self-sharpening uh and having nicer knives. Thank you, Matthew. Okay, look. Uh okay. Traditional Japanese knives, and first of all, if you want to we're we'll talk more about corn later, but anyone who comes into uh New York needs to stop by Corin K K-O-R-I-N, their knife uh place because it's fantastic.
And you can see firsthand uh a bunch of different styles of knives and really get a feel for kind of what the differences are. It's a fantastic place. Uh so it's it's in uh down near where the trade center used to be. Uh and so if you um a Japanese traditional knife is sharpened, literally sharpened basically on one side only, almost like a western chisel. Uh these knives are typically heavier and thicker on the spine, uh, and they have like a very uh very very they're very, very sharp because with the one angle, that one angle is not uh very big.
And so you have you have a very, very sharp but fairly fragile uh blade. I highly, I highly recommend those things. They're extremely easy to learn to sharpen because you basically all you have you have a very large bevel that you can see very easily. You sharpen that until a burr is raised raised up, right? Which means that you've taken all the way across.
You can feel it. You draw your thumb uh across the opposite side from the side you were sharpening. Uh, you draw it uh down over the edge, and you can feel a burr, a little curl being raised up around it, and you know, uh you don't want to do it too much because you're you know curling over the edge, but you feel a light burr, and you know that you've sharpened all the way down. So when you're sharpening a knife like this, or any knife really, you feel all the way, and you'll see a chef do this when they're when they're working, they'll take their thumb and they'll prick it over the blade all the way down. And what they're ensuring is that they're a burr has been raised all the way along the edge of that blade, and that you haven't sharpened too much in one place and too little in another.
And then the key to the the one I'm talking about, the Japanese style, or anything is basically recreating exactly the bevel that was put on there when they uh sharpened the knife. Now, the beauty of a traditional Japanese knife is you get that one bevel, which is fairly easy to see, and then you just turn the blade over and it's almost flat on that. In fact, the back side of the blade is concave. So you just put the you just lift the back spine ever so slightly off your stone and swipe it a couple of times to take the burr off, and you have a fantastically sharp knife, right? I love uh Japanese style knives.
I went to Corin. Unfortunately, their prices have gone um up because the yen is uh I guess doing well against the dollar. So a knife that I bought like you know, three, four years ago for around a hundred dollars is now like a hundred and eighty dollars or something like that. But um if you are going to use a knife every day in a work environment, uh the good old-fashioned carbon uh i.e. they will stain, they are not stainless.
Japanese traditional knives are fantastic to work with uh because you know that after that shift of working, you're just gonna uh you know take care of your knives and before or after sharpen them uh and it takes very little time to sharpen them, bring them back into edge, and they just they're fantastically fun to cut with and they're awesome. Uh unless someone borrows your uh Japanese vegetable knife and hacks a bone with it and uh shatters the blade, which is what happened to me. I want I didn't find who it was because they literally went into my knife kit at the school, took it out of my knife kit when I wasn't there, uh hacked it up, put it away wet, and I got a rusted broken knife, and it's incredibly depressing. But anyway, so they're extremely easy to sharpen, and I highly recommend them. Now, on the exact opposite end of the scale, is a traditional Western knife.
A traditional western knife is sharpened with an identical bevel on both sides. So no matter what the angle of the cutting edge is, right, which is determined by how you hold the blade against the stone as you're sharpening, no matter what it is, it's the same on both sides of the blade. Which means a Western knife, there's no such thing as a right-handed knife or a left-handed knife because it's symmetrical around it around its cutting axis. These are also fairly easy to sharpen because all you have to do is get that angle right. Okay.
Uh now, uh you have your Western, you have your Japanese. Now, the Japanese uh knife manufacturers invented a new style uh while ago. I don't know exactly when. It's basically a hybrid, it's a Japanese Western knife. And Japanese Western knives are insane in that they are not sharpened symmetrically necessarily.
The other thing is that there is no uh manufacture, there's no like uh cross-manufacture standard for what the asymmetrical bevel is. Uh and so you have to actually look at your knife. And what you typically do, if you're not uh good at seeing what the edge is, uh, you just take a uh a sharpie and you mark on the edge of the blade with a sharpie so you can see where the bevel is on both sides, and then you take your knife gently against a very, very fine stone, and you you try to get the angle right and you look at the sharpie and you see whether or not you've worn away the sharpie uh flat across the bevel of the knife. And if you have, you've gotten the same angle that the manufacturer made. Now, uh typical uh the also like the way that they specify uh angles is insane.
So when you talk about a bevel, you'll hear people say things like 7030 or 90 10. And what that means, and by the way, your knife probably isn't sharpened on one side only, it's probably like an like somewhere between a 90-10 and a 70-30. And what that means is is that 70% of the bevel on the knife is on one side versus the other, right? So if it was a zero and a hundred, then it would be a hundred percent flat blade, which basically none of those Western style Japanese knives are. Uh and then uh, you know, if 10% of the bevel is on one side and 90% on the other, it's a it's a 90-10, and you get the picture.
But but what that doesn't tell you is what the entire angle of the of the edge is, right? So if you were to sharpen a Western style knife and you were to have so that the bevel would be equal, that's what we call 50-50, right? Then you would say, okay, what's my total uh edge angle? And an older knife with kind of these, you know, uh less modern steel, the bigger the angle, right, the less fragile your blade is, but the duller it is. And so uh newer steels you can get a total angle all the way down to like 17 degrees.
Some people go down to like 15 degrees, it's cra and I my knives won't handle that. But like older style knives, I'm typically having it like 30 degrees, which is very wide for a modern standard. Not as uh easier to they don't break, but uh you know, not not nearly as sharp. So you have to specify what the total angle is on the on the blade and then whether or not that bevel is skewed uh one one way or the other. Personally, I find Japanese Western knives a pain in the butt to sharpen.
I don't like sharpening them. I've never been good at sharpening them. I'm very good at sharpening Western knives. Well, not very good. I'm good enough at sharpening western knives, and I'm I'm pretty you know uh proficient with Japanese uh knives, but I find the Japanese Westerns difficult.
Now, the advantage theoretically of the asymmetric grinding is uh that it cuts differently, and so it's designed to cut for a left-handed person or a right-handed person, and bear in mind that in in Japan, when you're cutting that way, you're making very uh specific slices. And so if you were cutting with your right hand, the slice is always gonna fall off on the right side. And so the bevel is designed to facilitate that kind of that kind of cutting. Uh your particular knife, uh, the Glysen knives are well known for what's called a grantin edge as well, which is a scallopy uh scallopy divots that are taken out of the blade. Those things have nothing to do with sharpness that uh reduces um stickiness.
Supposedly, and I've never used one, but uh, you know, I have a lot of friends that swear by it. Uh basically those little dimples prevent your food from sticking to the blade. Anyway, um as for sharpening, it's oh by the way, uh, if some of these knives can be re-ground to be 50-50 if you want to sharpen them like a traditional knife. Hold on a sec. Was it a collar or something like that?
Are you just pulling on me because I'm something's wrong with my sleeves? She thought my shirt was polyester, so she stopped me in the middle of the thing. It's not, it's cut. Anyway. Uh so uh so anyway, so you can re-grind if you if it turns out that you can't get used to sharpening an asymmetric bevel, you can have these knives re-ground.
Some knives take to that better than others, and there's professionals that'll do it for you. When you're in New York next, go to Corinne and or buy their knife sharpening video, it's insane. They're in they're insane. Uh now here's another thing. Don't believe the hype you hear on the internet about different kind of grits and different, you know, it's it's insane.
First of all, there's no uh international standard for what grits are. So people who are buying Japanese water stones have fantastically high grits, think that they're and a higher grit means a finer particle. They think that their uh sharpening stones are whooping butt on all of the American uh stones that we have. The fact of the matter is is that the Japanese grit definition is wildly different and not even applicable to American grit definitions. So you it's not a one-to-one correspondence.
So if you have a 3,000, uh if you have a 3,000 uh Japanese grit water stone, it uh is not mean that it's three times as sharp as an American stone rated at 1,000. All right. So just bear that in mind. Here's another thing. Japanese water stones are a pain in the butt.
Any real stone needs to be dressed a bunch to keep it flat. Uh they need to be watered or oiled when you're using them. I find them uh to be uh a pain in the butt. I don't I don't use them. I use DMT diamond stones, which uh and I use their duo sharp uh 10-inch bench uh hone, which is big.
You want a big, big stone to sharpen on because it means that you can get more of a swipe without having to lift your blade and reposition it, which means you can be more accurate and everything's faster, everything's more pleasant. The DMT stones are awesome because they're small, they're light, and they store uh for their size, and they store very easily. They last forever and they never need to be flattened again. Uh some people don't like it because they're purists, but uh everyone I've handed it to, including uh Nils, was like, you know, who's like, ah man, that that no one wants that. And he used it, he bought one.
Right. So you want to get the if you get it though, you want to get the fine and the extra fine, which is the green dot and the red dot, and you flip it over and you start on the coarser, which is the fine, and then you finish uh with a light, light couple of strokes on the on the extra fine side. Those things will last forever. It takes a little bit of a break in before they get as fine as they're gonna get because there's some errant particles of diamond that are bonded on the surface, and once those get knocked off, uh it's very consistent, very good. I I like it a lot, but you know, your Japanese uh knife buddies will will think that you're a Philistine, but crap on them because your knives are gonna be incredibly sharp.
Uh what do you think, Staz? It's a good job. Good. All right. Now, uh is there anything else I want to talk about in that or is that good?
Good. All right. All right. Go to Corin. I wish the prices hadn't gone up so much.
It's crazy. Uh two. Hi, Dave and Nastasha. Uh, first of all, a hardy Mazlotov on your new venture, which is the the bar. I hope to check it out next time I'm in town.
It's a bummer that I just missed the opening. Thank you so much for your advice on how to make a recent New York trip uh culinarily satisfying. By the way, this is from Brian who called us earlier. Um unfortunately, I didn't have as much time as I wished, but highlights included the crude and gelato at Edley. Have you had crude idly?
No. Really? Uh I can't I can't stand the lines at Ely. It's crazy. It's like a madhouse.
It's like I feel like uh like a like it's a madhouse. Yeah. They must make more money than God, those guys. Yeah. Yeah.
Uh the great uh not that God makes money, he doesn't need money. Or she. Yeah. Uh the great spices at uh La Boîte Epice, uh coming in from the freezing cold to a deliciously warm noodles at Toto Raman, which I haven't been to yet. You've been there?
Yeah, it's in my neighborhood. Was it good? Mm-hmm. Yeah, enjoyed. Good.
Uh and uh the corn cookie from Milk Bar. Our buddies at Milk Bar. The corn cookie is in fact my favorite cookie there. Uh and a visit to JB Prince. In JB Prince, Chef Superstore.
I love that place. Uh which needed a tour guide to explain to me what all the cool crap was that was in there. It didn't say crap, it said something else, but I can't say it on the show. Uh today my question is about dry aging various dry aging various meats and fish. I've heard of dry edged beef, of course, but uh this post, which is referenced from uh Chuck Eats, you know, well known blog, uh, about a meal at San Francisco's uh Saison restaurant references aging fish and poultry.
I'm especially interested in aging fish. How can I do it safely? Can I age fill laser steaks or just the whole fish? The article referenced a seven day aging for fish killed via via Ikajime, more on that later, as well as an 80-day smoked tuna belly that had been aged and smoked periodically. It also mentions aging pigeons for 21 days, 43 days, 50 days, and 73 days.
It also mentions that they were aged with their viscera intact for a while first before dry aging, and what does that do? It also mentions that one of the pigeons had been salted to encourage fermentation. How can I guarantee that it won't spoil? I read in the latest Lucky Peach that McGee recommends dry aging take place in a dedicated fridge with the meat hung and using primal cuts. But how can I do this method at home with poultry and fish?
Okay. Uh thanks so much, Brian. Uh you ever watch Shogun when you were a kid? No. Funny.
So, you know, Western style uh, you know, w western style game birds typically are killed and then hung until what they're called high. And what that means is until they stink and they're about to fall apart. Uh and uh one of the uh funny scenes when you're like you know, a ten year old watching Shogun on the on the on the TV show is the Western guy, I guess Portuguese guy shows up, puts a pigeon up, hangs it, and uh the villagers think that uh this is spoiled, and so someone like basically, you know, literally takes it down and then uh commits sepaku for for the act of ruining the guest pigeon. And when I was young, I was like, man, that's crazy. And I'm sure that's just some sort of like weird, like uh it's gotta be some sort of weird racist thing.
Because no one's gonna commit seppiku over a pigeon. I just don't think it's gonna happen. I just don't buy it. Do you buy that? No.
I mean, some sort of punishment maybe for ruining the guy's pigeon, but sepiku? Really? Anyway. 70s racism, there's nothing better. Okay.
Um, but uh as far uh ikajime, so ikajime on fish, the technique with ikijime is you take a uh and large tuna, they always do it on because it's very expensive fish. I've said this a million times before, so I apologize. You can just glaze over for a minute while I talk about it. Is you destroy the brain uh and then you do a uh technique called uh shinkanuki, which means uh no spine, and you shove a needle uh down the spine of the fish, destroy the spinal cord. Uh what you're doing when you destroy the spinal cord is stopping any messages, electrical messages from getting to the muscles.
And what that's doing is preserving the ATP, the energy in the muscles. And what that's doing is allowing the muscles to go into rigor later and softer. The faster you deplete the ATP in a muscle, the faster and the harder it goes into rigor mortis. Fish flesh, in particular, because it's so delicate compared to meat fleshes, tends to rip itself apart uh during rigor if the rigor is too hard, and when it comes out of rigor, you're gonna get more weeping, more loss of the of uh juices, more gaping in the flesh, and just an overall not as good texture. The flavor's also affected.
I don't really know why uh from a from a scientific point of view, why the flavor would be affected, but in side by side taste tests, it is. So that's what the Ikajime is. Now, very widely held misconception that fish is uh better uh fresh. Uh fish is best when fish is best, not when it's necessarily the freshest. So when I go into a market and I see a bunch of you know fish and they're so psyched that they just got the fish off the boat, but the fish is in hard, hard rigor because of the way it was killed and died, and you can see it's curled up and in a hard, hard rigor.
I'm like, that fish is not the best it's gonna be. Sure, it's the freshest maybe, but uh the texture isn't necessarily the best it's gonna be. And if for any of you that ever cooked a fish that's in rigor mortise, uh it's quite hard and doesn't have the kind of tenderness that we expect with it with a fish. So almost all fish, like especially larger fishes, take a long time to come out of rigor. So things like salmon, things like tuna, you would never eat them hyper hyper fresh because they have to go into rigor and come out again and soften up and be excellent.
With Ikajima, I've run tests on smaller Ikajime, and they are clearly better the second day after they're killed, uh, and good the third day after they're killed. Larger fish like tuna, it's typical to go many days and salmon many days to get the optimal, optimal texture on it. Now, the bad news is with fish is that the minute you reach that optimal taste and texture, it goes rapidly downhill. So you have to know kind of exactly where to serve it. So the real high-end sushi joints uh know exactly how old each piece of fish is, and they're not serving you the freshest fish, they're serving you the fish that's at its peak of flavor.
And for each species of fish and for each way that it's killed, the time that it's best to eat it is different. And that is part of the great art and mist mystique and mystical power of the uh sushi chef is to know that kind of thing. Um as regards the longer age stuff, like a tuna belly, these are typically cured products that aren't going to go uh spoil, and they can last as long as you'd like, and there you're fighting against how dry is it gonna be and how much is the taste changing, and most of the taste changing is some of it's gonna be due to protein breakdown, obviously, but also fat breakdown, especially in something like tuna. Now, the reason that McGee recommends uh pull cuts or primal cuts is because A, they're gonna lose moisture faster, and for dry aging something like beef, you don't want it to get dried out like a jerky. You want the moisture to stay inside, you're gonna lose some, and that's gonna increase and concentrate the flavors, but you don't want to lose a lot.
And also most of the spoilage and funkiness is gonna be on the outside. So the larger the piece of meat, uh the bigger the bigger it's gonna be after you trim off whatever's on the outside, the less loss you're gonna get. And also remember, the inside of meat is sterile. There's not a lot of bacteria in there, and so it's not going to spoil. The outside's gonna get a little dry, therefore the bacteria aren't gonna grow too much on the outside of the of the thing.
It's not like a swamp, you know what I mean. You don't want to keep it too too humid. Uh, and then uh, and then after that, you can just age it, and you can age it for a long, long, long, long, long, long, long time. Now, on birds, if you keep the viscera, now I have uh shot a pheasant, and uh the the viscera got punctured by a baby. I didn't really know what the hell I was doing, you know, not B, whatever they call it, shot from a shotgun.
And uh we we hung that thing up for three days, and man, did the inside of that thing stink. I almost vomited when I gutted that thing and and plucked the feathers because the stench was just unfreaking real. Now it still tasted good because I soaked it in a salt solution afterwards, scrubbed out the inside, and it was okay. And I cut away the parts where the uh visceral juices had hit the meat where the uh gun had uh gone in. I looked at that uh Chuck Eats uh uh blog post, and all of those birds were smothered basically, so there was no chance for the viscera to leak into the cavity and cause a lot of awful bacterial spoilage.
The inside of the bird is sterile, except for the stuff that's on the inside of the alimentary canal, which is full of bacteria. So I don't know exactly why leave it in uh for a couple of days. Maybe it increases the funk, does a little bit of something, then cut it open. I would bet they probably, even though you say some of them are unsalted, I would bet they salt it a little bit to dry out the outside of the meat. And then the inside that hasn't been cut is relatively sterile and can be especially if there's air coming around it, getting around it, is not gonna really spoil, it's just gonna get funkier and funkier and funkier.
Uh that make any dang sense. Yeah. All right. So listen, we're gonna go to our first commercial break and we'll come back with more cooking issues. Soy el cantante.
Lo mejor del repertorio. Jack, what was that? Hector Laveau. Nice. And welcome back to Cookie.
What'd you say? Oh, the song was El Cantante. That just means the song, right? The singer. The singer.
Yeah. The singer. Alright. The singer sings the song. Yeah.
Is this a Barry Manalo reference or is this prior to Barry Manilow? I think it's prior. If we have another break, are you gonna do the I write I uh sing the song write the song, Trevor? Yeah, sure. All right.
Call in all your questions to 7184972128. That's 7184972128. Did I say that right? Anyway. Today's show is brought to you by Modernist Pantry, supplying innovative ingredients for the modern cook.
They're back. They like us. For a while they were like, eh man, not so much as cooking issues. I don't think so. Anyway.
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When placing your order online at ModernistPantry.com. Visit modernistpantry.com today for all of your modernist cooking needs. Hey, Nastashi, we should call them. We're actually running low on SPL and I don't want to buy a whole 25-liter. Yeah.
Yeah. SPL, the magic enzyme. We use that dang thing in everything. Do you know that? Literally, our bar.
If you were to suddenly take away Pectin X SPL from us, like all like all of our recipes would would change. I'd have to change all of our recipes. It's true. It's in every damn thing. It's true.
It's like some, it's it's not a season, but like, you know, it's like we use it like it's salt. It's everything. Everywhere. Everything is SPL. Ultra SPL.
Ultra Ultra SPL. Okay. Uh go to a question here. Dear Nastasha and Dave. This is from Kevin in North Carolina.
I like North Carolina. I haven't been a long time. No, you don't. I do like North Carolina. What do you know about North Carolina?
I don't like I think you're No, okay. What she's referring to is Nastasha's parents live in uh outside of Los Angeles. Okay, folks. I think you told us. Well, I don't know.
But you you make a crack that I don't like North Carolina. Now I have to talk about and they say, okay, look, we don't want we want to escape the humidity. Not that I knew that was a problem in LA because I don't go to LA, but they're like, I want to escape the humidity. And so where do they get where do they buy a house? The outer banks of North Carolina, right?
Not even North Carolina properly. The outer banks of North Carolina. And I've only been there a couple times, but it's the most humid place on earth. The giant biting green flies need to learn to swim through the atmosphere because it's so humid. I looked up online as a joke, and one of the people lived down there said, I was walking down the street the other day, and I what do you what do you say?
I saw a squirrel chasing. A squirrel chasing a bass into a tree because it's so dang humid over there. And only only a relative of Nastasha would move to the outer banks of North Carolina to escape the humidity. So I love North Carolina, especially uh the eastern side of North Carolina and their barbecue, which is one of the finest uh American traditional products we have to offer. Thank you so much, Nastasha, for trying to make it seem like I don't like North Carolina.
Anyway, I recently made venison sausage, and at the time I did not have much pork fat to add to the lean venison. Only about 1.5 pounds per 10 pounds of final product. And as you know, Kevin, that's not enough. The sausage is okay, but would be better with more fat. Yes, it would.
I now have a plethora of high quality pork fat, having recently broken down half of an Osabah cross from a quality farm. The sausage was stuffed into collagen casings, smoking, uh smoked and frozen. What do you think about thawing, remixing the sausage uh with more fat and restuffing into casing? Would the texture suffer? Would you re-smoke it?
Uh love the show. Keep up the good work, Kevin. Okay. First of all, for those of you that uh aren't down with uh, you know, kind of your pig terminology, uh, an Osabah cross is a cross, usually with a Durak, which is a relatively like good tasting, fatty but commercial pig, with an Osabah pig. Osabah pigs come from uh Osaba Island, well, originally from Osaba Island off the coast of Georgia, where the theory is is that a herd of uh pigs was dropped off there by conquistador style folks, I guess in the 1500s, and uh just left there, and there was no uh in breed, there was no breeding, no selective breeding, then there was no uh influx of new genes, and so they developed their own race based on this kind of Iberian hog that it put there, but they became dwarfs.
So it's these tiny and apparently mean son of a bitch uh pigs that have the most incredibly large uh fat cap around the meat that I've ever seen because they they are designed to put on fat like lunatics because they the season, I guess that the feed there is so scarce, and that's why they became dwarfs. There's not a lot of feed there on the island, and so they're incredibly efficient at converting uh um food to fat uh and they're small. So they're very interesting. I first had an Awesaba ham, probably I don't know, like 2004, 2003 or something like that, uh, when they were first coming out. Uh and they're quite interesting, and the Osabah cross is kind of a good uh mix because they're a little bit bigger and um they're they're nice anyway.
Uh now on to your question. I'm I would be hesitant about thawing and re-mixing it uh and then restuffing it into a casing from a texture standpoint. I mean, you could try it. First of all, I mean if you have the venison, if you had a circulator, even with that low amount of fat, you could cook it at a low, low temp, uh, and you wouldn't dry it out, even though there's not a sufficient amount of fat there, and then you could split it and like drizzle some fat over it to get that kind of fatty, uncuous taste in. Uh, I mean, I I hesitate when you mix a sausage, obviously everyone knows this.
You put in the salt and the uh basically you you create the primary bind and it glues together. I don't know if you've already smoked it, like how cooked through it is with your smoke. Once it's cooked through, it's not gonna bind the same way again. So you could probably maybe add some of that product back into a back in other words. Let's say you were to add like a like a use half of that, grind it up and add it into a fresh sausage mix so you could get the bind proper again with the fat, maybe that would work.
But I don't think the texture is gonna be the same. And then if you add more, you could re-smoke it, but then you're gonna be double smoking a portion of it, so you'd have to work around it. I mean, I'm not saying it can't be done. I just don't know if it can be done. Um I don't know.
Hey, that's not very helpful, but what are you gonna do? What are you gonna do? It's all I know. Kevin, next time I'll try to be better. Right?
Anyway, so much. There's only so much I can do. There's only so much I know. Okay. Hi, Dave, Nastasha, Jack, and Indy Jesus.
Wow. Carlos gets no love though, huh? Carlos, you get love from me, brother. There you go. Thank you.
So uh but Indie Jesus is in rare form today. He's wearing he's wearing the Jesus Christ Superstar bandana, which I appreciate. It's one of my favorite looks of his. Someday he's gonna come in here with a knife and cut all of our heads off. You know that?
Yeah. Not mine, I like him. I like him too. Wait, what? So do I.
So do I. What the hell are you talking about? First of all, Nastasha's the one that brings on this uh anyway, whatever. You know, this is like a typical Nastasia trick. This is if any of you guys ever end up working with Nastasha for whatever reason, just know that what she'll do is uh goad you into saying something when nobody's listening and then skewer you for it as though you're a bad human being.
That's like classic nostalgia trick. Anyway, uh I have a question that I think has uh got to be right up your alley. I've heard a lot of discussion lately about the huge of use of large spheres of ice in drinks. Some people have told me that uh that uh wait, some people told me things that demonstrate nothing other than that they couldn't pass high school physics. Boom.
Uh one person gave up and admitted he just thinks they look cool. Um now I'm intrigued enough to want to know more. So, Dave, as the uh modern modernist mixologist, you are I'm sure uh you you you are I'm sure uh as a modernist mixologist, you are. I'm sure you can save me a ton of time and experimentation. Please clear the air and let the world know what people are trying to achieve with spheres.
Is it faster cooling, slower cooling, less water in the drink for the same amount of cooling or something else? And does using spheres instead of other shapes actually accomplish the goal? Okay, thanks, D. Okay, listen. I have a very particular thing.
The spheres to me are simply a presentation aid. Nobody is shaking with uh spheres, right? They're they're straight up uh presentation. Uh now, and the way that you make those spheres, by the way, uh well, there's a couple ways. People hand hack the spheres, and those are the rough kind of ones, and then they'll polish them out, uh, you know, polish them out with something warm so that they look a little more spherical uh and then there's the aluminum block melted spheres where someone uh you where you buy a big block of aluminum with a sphere shape in it and the aluminum quickly melts the ice into a sphere so either of those two ways uh are are are possible and what they do is they look cool in the glass right now as regards to cooling the cooling power of ice is not dependent on the shape but the cooling rate is in the sense that um the more surface area you have of ice in contact with the liquid the faster the liquid is going to cool and the faster it's going to dilute there's no such thing as something that cools without diluting or dilutes without cooling when it comes to ice every bit of cooling that a block of ice does in a drink is done by melting and diluting and every bit of diluting that a block of ice does in a drink is uh done by chilling the drink down or by losing to the atmosphere but over the short you know short point it's basically all involved in the drink so a a large uh block of ice spherical or square or whatever right uh will typically because it has uh most of its volume on the inside and less surface area for the amount of ice will chill slower will not be as cold and will be less diluted in your drink if you were to put finely shaved ice in it would have an immense surface area it would chill very quickly but be very diluted, right?
And there's no other way around that. You can't, you can't you can't get around that. For a given volume of ice, a sphere is gonna have, I believe, less surface area than a I'd have to do the math. But I believe a sphere will have less surface area than a square for a given volume of ice, and therefore will have uh probably less chilling power and therefore probably less dilution. But the real fact of the matter is is that usually those spheres are quite wet when they're put in, and so there's a lot of dilution anyway.
And I would say those effects are minimal. I would say that it is strictly a presentation tool. Now, uh I don't know anyone that shakes a drink with spherical ice, because that would be crazy. But uh, you know, there is a possibility that the texture of a uh shaken drink can be affected by the size and configuration of the ice in the shaker. Uh but that's an entirely different different kind of kind of uh a question.
So I don't know whether I've cleared have I cleared the air on that? Yeah. It's pretty clear. Yeah. Made any sense at all?
All right. Okay. Uh we have a comment in from Adam Walker in Bowmanville, Ontario. Uh Thanks for taking the time to answer my glucose syrup question last week. I've done some reading, and it is way more complicated than just having enough dextrose to make it sweet and maltodextrin to make it viscous.
Even just having a mix of multodextras seems important for having a proper mix of multixtrin seems important for inhibiting crystallization in some applications. Maybe I could adapt some recipes, but it's not going to be identical. I'll just ask modernist pantry to stock it. I'd rather buy from somebody that supports the show. Yeah.
Yeah. Uh I did find a great book on the topic uh called The Handbook of Starch Hydrolysis Products and Their Derivatives, 1995. And you can look at a preview on it in Google Books, and in fact, it is a pretty good book. I was reading some of it this morning, which is part of the reason that I came in. I almost was late again because I was reading the handbook of starch hydrolysis products.
Uh but uh Adam found a couple things that you uh readers might listeners might find interesting. Uh one, glucose cereals were invented because Britain got uh got their sugar supply cut off during the Napoleonic Wars. Uh yeah, I mean like it's it's interesting. That they they started producing it because of that pretty cool. A lot of uh cool uh food things were because of wars, you know, like canning, like Napoleon needed to feed his armies, and so Appair, who was working on canning the first really accurate, a good canning method was uh basically a result of the Napoleonic Wars as well.
So there you have it. Uh and two, uh he says cyclodextrins sound cool. Uh cyclodextrins, by the way, are uh chains of glucose that are formed into a ring, uh, and they have some cool, cool properties. They are uh grass, which means generally regarded as safe by the government, and have been used to hold on to flavor and industrial food. Wikipedia tells me they are an ingredient in phibreze.
I love Febreze. Like when you have a stink, like when you have stinky gym clothes, like and they get all packed in it, it's like I I've I like I used to soak all that crap in Febreze. Febreze. My wife hates the smell of Febreze, some Febreze, but I just like the word. Anyway, um uh Wikipedia tells me their ingredient in Febreze that traps the stink.
That's a good traps the stink. Uh, has anybody found good culinary uses for cyclodextrins other than uh infrees, which you're not using in culinary things? Oh, and to answer the question we were talking about before, uh on their honeymoon, they got married in October but didn't want to plan the honeymoon on top of planning the wedding. Is that what you said? You said it was you said it could be money.
You said it was one of those two. Whatever. You just change you'll change your story. Whatever it is, just change your story. You know what I'm saying?
And then she'll say, I have an uncanny feeling. And uh congratulations on opening the bars. Now on cyclodextrins, the interesting thing about cyclodextrin is the inside of the cyclodextrin, it's not hydrophobic, but it's less hydrophilic than the outside. But the cyclodextrin itself is gonna keep its structure and be very soluble in water. So it's used to complex somewhat hydrophobic ingredients uh into water, and that's why it's used as a carrier in uh flavors in in in industrial applications.
I haven't heard of anyone using it in food, so we'll see. Would we have time to take a break? Yeah. Alright, we're gonna go to another break, come back with cooking your shoes. My dream last night was about Alibaba with the forty feet.
Tom, Tom about her son. He was there with me. I rode through a valley with a princess by my side. The Duke and the Duchess was there to meet to me with a smile. Alice was staring wander, staring far away.
The tree blind mass was there with me to tell the teddy bear to me. The teddy bear came smiling here. With a big smile. The little baby has lost the sheep. So that song was actually emailed in from a listener.
Oh wow. Just now? Uh a few days ago, I think. Yeah. Yeah, from Andy Melka.
That song is John Holt. It's called Alibaba. I like that. I like Alibaba. My son, my younger son, Dax, is obsessed with uh Alibaba due to the uh 30s or 40s Popeye cartoon where Bruto Bluto or Brutus, whatever he was at that time, plays Alibaba.
Remember that? Loves that stuff. Maybe we can get that song. It's called I'm a Terrible Guy. We'll get that for next week.
Got it. Good. It's good business. Uh so, by the way, I forgot to mention this when I was talking about Saison, the restaurant that uh the Chuck Eats post with the aging and all that. Uh, because I've never been there.
You know, I haven't been to San Francisco in a while. I was talking to Daniel Patterson. Daniel Patterson came into the bar last night. We were talking about the state of eating in San Francisco, and he says that the state of eating, and now remember, by and large, most people on earth think that it wasn't broken to begin with because people love eating in San Francisco, right? But then you have uh kind of like the school of thought, which Dave Chang famously was almost banned from the city for saying that the whole dang city is just uh uh, you know, a uh a really nice fig on a plate, basically.
They just cut off he doesn't talk like this. They just cut up a thing and put it on a plate. That's not how Dave Chang talks. But the attitude is right, right? Anyway, so um so anywho, so uh Patterson was telling me who his restaurant Quaz, like one of my favorite restaurants in San Francisco.
I love his cooking, it's great stuff. Uh and it's funny if you ask him, if you anyway, he's he's a he's an interesting guy. He writes sometimes for the New York Times. Uh and uh friend of the show. I was gonna ask him to get on the show this morning, but his flight out was at seven in the morning, so he didn't he said next time he's in the city, he'll come do the show.
Uh he says the state of eating is uh is getting better and better every day. Anyway, Cezanne is the restaurant uh that had all that uh you know the crazy aged pigeons and all that. But here is the uh when I was looking it up on the internet, I had, and I hate Yelp. By the way, I made the mistake of looking at our Yelp reviews, and I wanted to I want like here's the thing. I I'm over it now.
I'm I'm not never gonna look at it again. Really? I mean, it's just you know, Yelp is is crazy because but by the way, I learned a lot from the Yelp reviews to try and like, you know, I did fix some stuff based on what I saw in the Yelp reviews. So, so you know, that's there. But the review's there forever.
That it just the whole thing is is it's crazy. It drives you crazy. It's nutty. Anyway, I I can't deal with it. But I looked on uh some sort of Yelp equivalent or Google and I saw for Saison, the restaurant, the very best restaurant review I've ever seen in my life.
You ready for it? It was it was two sentences. Very romantic, pricey, but will get you laid. I was like, man, that's everything you need to know. Everything you need to know about a restaurant.
Right? Awesome. Anyway. Uh yeah. So uh for those uh who this is the first time you you're listening, uh uh longtime listener Ken Ingber is having an ongoing feud with uh Nastasha Lopez on her use of uh the internet and various texting and technological things while we're trying to do a radio show.
Now, uh I will have all everyone who cares about this know that she in fact was not doing that today. No. She was paying attention today. Yes. Yes.
Yeah, nice. Anyway, so Ken, this is to Nest this is from Ken to Nastasha. Sorry I upset you. Although on balance, I think you will have to agree that it made for some funny radio. I was delighted that you appreciate the irony of my complaining about your reading my email on air.
Uh while I was actually like you multitasking while listening. I appreciate that Dave took my side, but Jack really made an excellent point. If the vast majority of listeners yesterday were me, then you're promptly responding to my email instead of paying attention to the show would turn out to be exactly the customer service Dave Dave says all of your listeners deserve. So boom, crap on me, huh? Yeah.
Crap on me. What do you think, Jack? Crap on me? Crap on me. Uh yeah.
Anyway. More from Ken Ingbert, because King Ken Ingwer has decided that we're gonna try this Breville coffee maker. And they're coming tonight. And they're coming tonight to the bar to uh test it out and we'll see, we'll see how the thing is. I'm excited.
And as as I've said before on the show, Breville, huge fans of uh of the Dave Chang. They love Dave Chang, so hopefully they'll uh then love me as well, right? Mm-hmm. Yes? Yes?
Okay. Uh now, last thing up, uh talk about the blog for a second. Yes, I realize I haven't done it uh since October. I also realize I haven't written uh the my serious seeds column. I owe that from just before Halloween.
Serious Eats column. Not serious, Jesus Christ. Eater. Eater eater column. Nastasha's giving me the the uh the D bag face now.
Nastasha has a couple faces. She has the vegan face, what was the other one? I don't remember. And the D-bag face. She's giving me the D-bag face.
Anyway, uh I have I owe Craiggy on Maine some answers, and they're it's a great restaurant in Boston, and they're good people, so I'm gonna answer that. Uh but I've decided what my coming out of semi-retirement post is gonna be. What? I'm gonna do a post on uh technique we are working on at the bar called uh nitro muddling, and it's a cool technique, and so here it goes. So uh everybody who uses liquid nitrogen knows that you can put an herb in a blender with liquid nitrogen, blend it to a fine powder, and get these amazing kind of fresh powdered herbs, right?
Uh, but uh we're now doing that in the bar, and here's what we do we take a regular uh, you know, uh regular shaking tin for uh you know cocktail tin, and we put uh nine Thai basil leaves into it, pour the liquid nitrogen on top. They get crunchy really quick at Lee. And then we uh you know pour off the extra liquid nitrogen, muddle it just like it was regular mint. I have to work on that a little bit because the noise of muddling frozen stainless steel is insane. Maybe we should try it in glass.
Maybe it'll work in glass without cracking. We'll find out. Uh you muddle it, then you add the spirit, and it's very important, unlike normal bartending practices to add the spirit first. And the reason is because uh the alcohol and the spirit will prevent the thawing herbs from getting that swampy browned out taste because it inhibits the enzymes that are in them. And uh those things get that taste relatively quickly because they're so finely broken up, right?
So you pour the uh the um the spirit in, you know, while it's still frozen, swirl it, thaw it out. We add uh so we're doing Thai basil rum, rum rum rum, and then we're doing well, we're using a white rum, Florida Cagna, actually. And then uh we add simple syrup, lime, swirl it around, shake it like a normal cocktail, put it through a uh fine mesh strainer, and only the green particles of the Thai basil that are crushed fine enough to make it through finely, enough to make it through that uh that strainer, get into your drink, and you have a bright green, incredibly fresh Thai basil daiquiri. Nitro muddling cooking issues. 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. You can also podcast all of our programs on iTunes by searching Heritage Radio Network in the iTunes Store. You can find us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for up-to-date news and information. Thanks for listening. You got my head all twisted, and I guess can't get it straight.
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