Broadcasting live from Roberta's in Bushwick, Brooklyn. You're listening to Heritage Radio Network.com. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live from roughly 12 to 1245 every Tuesday in the back of Roberta's Pizzeria in Bushwick, Brooklyn on the Heritage Radio Network. Calling all of your questions to 718497-2128.
That's 718497-2128. Jack, I hear we already have a caller. Is this true? Yes. Caller, you are on the air.
Alright, before you start, uh for those of you who don't know what we're talking about, spherification is the technique where you make uh little balls out of things using uh hydrocolloid. The most famous one is uh sodium alginate. Uh the problem with that is that the balls turn solid over time and they're unpleasant if they're solid because the alginate steals all the flavor. So there's a technique called reverse verification where you basically form just a thin layer of uh alginate gel around a liquid and it stays liquid in the center forever, but it's a more difficult technique. All right, so shoot, what's the problem?
Okay, well, I guess uh first of all, uh it's working with the distilled water for the for the bath. Um, I guess my uh sodium citrate, maybe is what seemed to be settling out of it. Um I didn't notice it until after I had blended it and was trying to pour it into the bath. I didn't think there was enough left in the bottom. I went ahead and proceeded with it anyway.
Uh so it may have been a uh a weak uh sodium bath, I guess using both the sodium alginate and sodium citrate in the in the bath. Um how sensitive is that to um uh right so again so people don't know what we're talking about. In your when you're doing a reverse purification, your flavor has a calcium source in it, and the bath that you drop that flavor into has alginate and then usually something to stabilize the alginate in it. And uh that alginate then forms an instant kind of envelope around your flavor. Now, before we go any further, sodium citrate should not settle out.
Are you you're using you said distilled water? Uh correct, distilled water and uh and a stick blender. Right. So the sodium citrate shouldn't uh come out of it and you shouldn't have a problem with the alginate in the bath. Um the uh I mean I I don't use really citr citrate does is sodium citrate acts in two ways.
It's a it's a pH buffer, right? Because uh the alginate doesn't want the pH to go too low. If it does, it'll start gelling and turning goopy and ropey on you. And it's a l it acts somewhat as a sequestrant, which means it it it binds uh excess calcium in there, but a lot of that sequestering activity is really due to more of its buffering capacity. If you want a really good sequestrant, you want to move to sodium uh hexametaphosphate shrimp, which is available, I believe, uh through uh our one of our sponsors, uh Modern Pantry.
But what kind of failure are you getting out of it? Are you getting is it is the is the bath turning ropey and nasty on you? Or what what what's the failure mode? It it was uh the the bath was pretty uh it was pretty thick but clear. Right.
Okay. And what is the failure mode? What what's what's exactly is happening? Um I I guess when uh when I'm dropping the the base into it um I'm actually getting different results. I tried with three different things in the same bath.
I was using a a rum uh using calcium lactate and a little bit of Xanthem gum and it was dropping into it almost immediately dispersing. On the surface? Using uh very near the surface, yeah. Right, okay. Okay, next.
I'm wondering whether your problem is you're not getting I'm wondering whether your problem is you're not getting a good drop out of it. Okay one of the problems with reverse spherification is you need to have a fairly thin alginate base in order to get the stuff to drop in properly and if it if it if it's if the if it's too viscous right you'll just get like a pancake effect on the surface where it'll maybe it'll hollow out a little bit but you'll it'll just spread wide and then it'll form like kind of wisps of gel within it. Was it gelling it just was dispersing? No it was it was gelling and and the when you when you're describing wisps of gel that's almost exactly what the what the rum base was doing. Right.
I think your main problem there is you maybe need to go thicker on the on the rum or add some heft to the because also remember alcohol is fairly light compared to uh so you add some heft to it I mean with either sugar or glucose syrup or something like that to add some heft so that it wants to go down add some viscosity to it like even over and above the Xanthan gum another problem with Xanthan did you do did you get all of the air out of the rum before you dropped it in or was it still cloudy? Um it was the rum was just a little bit cloudy. I let it sit for for several hours, but it was still uh a little bit cloudy. Do you have access to a vacuum machine? Uh no, I don't.
Right. So you're only really way to do it is to wait for it to kind of settle out. But if you don't want to add xanthan, you could add b other b you you you're gonna need to add some xanthan, but you could add some other bodying agents like glucose syrup or like uh corn syrup, something to give it some extra density so it wants to sit, and you're gonna need to make sure that the stuff you're dropping in doesn't have air bubbles because the air bubbles are just gonna sit on the surface and prevent a good drop from forming. What percentage algorithm and what brand are you using? Um I I don't know what the brand was.
It came from one of your sponsors when you mentioned a moment ago. Right. Um and I'm I was using uh what is it uh two and a half grams to uh to five hundred grams of water. Uh two to five is four to one. So so point four percent?
Yeah, sounds four grams in a liter. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sounds right. Yeah, that's low. Yeah, yeah, right.
That's really low. I mean in other words, um, so uh I mean i it everything depends on the alginate. And I've never used modernist pantry's alginate, so I don't know kind of uh what what's going on with it, but you know, um alginates come in a variety of viscosities from a low viscosity algorithm to a high viscosity algorithm. The one I use, I use a medium and a high viscosity algorithm from FMC biopolymer, is the one that I typically use when I'm doing this. And with those, you want to with for the high viscosity one, I usually want to be around eight grams in a liter in order to get like a good gel to form.
And uh the other one maybe even uh you could go a little lower with the high viscosity one, like you know, seven grams uh per liter. Uh but yeah, like down at point four, it's gonna be hard to form a quick thing, and that might also be causing your dispersal problems. Uh if you and by the way, alginate, especially if you have all the stuff in the bath, you can heat it to get rid of the bubbles. And in fact, when you heat it, you're going to be uh decreasing its viscosity. So if you're having viscosity issues, you can do reverse verification into hot alginate bath.
It's not gonna hurt anything. You don't want it to be so hot that it's gonna boil the alcohol out of your rum, right? But assuming that that's not a problem, uh, you can go that way. Let me give you another thing you can do, depending on what size of balls you want to make. You can d you can if you have a sil pat, you can just take and this way you don't need to thicken it at all.
You can just take drops of uh and put drops onto a silpat and then uh let them freeze up. If they're small enough drops, that you know they'll pancake out, but you'll still be able to get a good uh good drop on it. And then just put those drops in one by one, they'll thaw almost instantly, especially if you're using a hot alginate bath, and that'll let you get it underneath. But I I would try to get your alginate bath higher than uh four grams per liter. I would get it up to like uh uh you want it as low as you can, obviously, but you you might want to try like seven, eight grams per liter.
Uh try it hot, make sure you get all the air out of it and try to put a little more body into the um into your into your uh rum. How how much calcium lactate per liter were you adding? You were using calcium lactate or calcium lactate gluconate? Uh I was using calcium lactate. Okay.
How much? And I was at I was at 30 grams per liter. Thirty? Correct. Uh uh says three percent.
That's that's high. Is that what they is that what they told you on the website to add? Uh correct. Yeah. Yeah.
Could you taste it? I mean, that's enough calcium, in other words. That should work. I mean Yeah, I could I I I could taste it a little bit. Right.
Uh in general, I mean, that's high. You could get the calcium lactate gluconate. It's gonna make a softer gel. But the first thing I would do is get it gelling properly. Once it's gelling properly, then start dialing the calcium back.
And so what I would do then is I would make your rum mixture first, right? And then I would hold some back with no calcium in it at all, right? And then and then take your one uh and add the calcium to it, and then as an experiment, just keep adding the uncalcium stuff back to it until it doesn't gel right anymore. And then you'll you'll get a feeling for exactly how much calcium is going to be required in that application. Okay.
That sounds sounds like a good idea. That's what it'll do. Another problem with reverse furification is that if the two if the balls um touch each other underneath the alginate bath, they'll glue each other, they'll glue themselves together because of uh that in other words the alginate will start bonding and then they'll be hard to break apart. So you want to make sure when you take them out to to very quickly put them into uh basically like a pure water solution to get them separated and to rinse the extra alginate off, and then to store them in a back basic the best thing to do is to have enough of your uh flavor base left to store the balls in the flavor base. If you store the balls in the flavor base, which has some calcium in it, they'll last forever or until they spoil, right?
Uh if you store them in water, then uh all of the very quickly all of the flavor and color will be leached out of them. Uh and it's somewhere in between is to store it in a sh basically a sugar and alcohol solution of the same relative sweetness and same relative alcohol level as your balls, and that that's kind of the intermediate. So when I the the thing that I use reverse furification for most is uh maple syrup balls that I put inside of pancakes, and when I do that, I basically store them in the maple syrup. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, good, good. All right. So give that a shot. Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much.
Awesome show. Listen to you guys all the time, having for a while. Thanks so much. We appreciate it. Yep.
All right. So how you doing, Nastasha? Good. How are you? All right.
All right. What's up? Nothing, just looking at cues. Oh, we got cues? What's going on?
Yeah, I think it's fine. All right. All right. So uh anything new happening in the world of uh cooking issues slash Nastasha Lopez the past uh week? No, Dave.
Nothing? Nothing. Actually, we've been working, we've been with you like 24 seconds. Yeah, we've been at the bar, like basically nothing new can happen except we've been at the bar, right? Mm-hmm.
I mean, that's basically the only new things that that happen. I tried yesterday, uh so we've had some calls from a show that wants wants us on, maybe in California, and we've been doing some crazy tests for that. So we've been yesterday I had to make a hurricane. Familiar with the hurricane? It's a it's like you know, nowadays a god awful rum drink.
It was invented by a guy, Pat O'Brien, apparently in New Orleans, who was given a whole bunch of rum. Uh right after prohibition, he opened up and basically he couldn't buy the good liquors from the distributor unless he also took rum, which at the time nobody really wanted. And so he had to find something to do with all of that rum, and so he mixed like a couple kinds of rum and passion fruit uh syrup and pomegranate syrup uh and you know, some other stuff. And there there's the hurricane. It was served in giant glasses, basically to get you effed up, which is how it works now in New Orleans anyway, but the quality is just even lower than than back then.
Then New Orleans, you know, is like the home of the crappy fake daiquiri shop. In fact, last time I was in New Orleans for Tales of the Cocktail, uh, they one of the uh bartenders who was working at a dinner that I was at, I forget who it was, and uh she had um ordered a daiquiri machine to come, and the fella who showed up to tweak out the daiquiri machine uh had no idea what an actual daiquiri was, and we s made and served him an actual dacquari. He's like, No, no, that's not it, that's not a dacquari. Like a daiquiri is basically Kool-Aid and like rum in one of these frozen machines. Horrible, horrible, horrible stuff.
The current hurricane is made with a powdered mix that might as well be Kool-Aid, uh, but just doesn't taste quite as good as Kool-Aid does, if that if that's humanly possible. Uh so it's just uh just a horrible, horrible thing. Anyway, so we tried to make uh uh what we thought was a good hurricane. Uh so I basically uh took uh pomegranate, smacked out the seeds, uh muddled them because I didn't want to blend them to get the bitterness in from the little pips on the seeds, added them to passion fruit pre-ray, hit it with SPL, uh, and spun it out in a centrifuge and got an amazing bright red, awesome flavored kind of passion fruit slash uh pomegranate syrup that you know is tart enough to use in place of lime juice in a daiquiri style recipe. Made it, actually tasted quite good.
Problem was that the show wanted me to do something carbonated, so I carbonated it and it tasted awful, right? Pretty much? You agree? Mm hmm. Yeah.
I don't really like most carbonated rum drinks except for like dark and stormies and things like that, because of the ginger really helps it out. But like I I think I said this before on the show, like carbonated rum often ends up tasting like Cisco, if you remember Cisco, which was a carbonated twenty percent alcohol beverage from the from the 80s or 90s. It was just dreadful, dreadful, dreadful stuff. But uh then, uh, at the behest of some of the the bartenders sitting, I think Tristan and Nick at uh Booker over Booker and Dax Our Bar uh was like, let's make a ginnicane. And we made a ginicane, we made like a gin hurricane, and that was delicious.
Delicious, delicious. Anyway, so that's the kind of crap we're working on nowadays. Okay. So uh go call in more questions, by the way. 27184972128.
That's 7184972128. We have a comment in on last week's show from Paul, uh, who in uh it's about the remember we had someone who wanted to know how to tell whether if their mom was allergic to a particular kind of fish because their mom was allergic to fish scales. And we had uh, or no, sorry, not fish scales, two, uh fish with scales. And we had a discussion that basically the scale is just a marker of where the fish is in the evolutionary chain, and so they need to stay away from that uh particular a whole group of fish. Uh Paul uh enjoyed our explanation of it, but had an interesting way to very simply find out whether or not it's got scales.
And that is is it kosher? Paul says, check the internet to see if a particular fish is kosher, i.e. if it's permission permissible under Jewish dietary laws. There are always tons of QA's on the internet about what is and isn't kosher. Kosher fish must have scales as well as fins.
Please note that the inverse is not necessarily true. It could have scales, but not be kosher, but this might definitely be an easy first test for her. Kosher equals definitely has scales, so your mom definitely can't have it. And not kosher uh equals might not have scales. So in other words, if it is kosher, your mom can't have it.
But just because it's not kosher doesn't mean your mom can't have it. Make sense? Mm-hmm. Very good. Thanks, Paul.
That's a good idea. Uh and then, you know, beyond that, go and look up uh where it is in the evolutionary chain uh and see, you know, where it where it fits. Is it a you know Teleost, etc., etc.? Okay. Uh two from Matthew.
And this question goes out to the uh good people in the engineering room, Jack and Carlos. Uh, I'm a big fan of your show and spend plenty of time listening to the archives. It always helps my dishwashing/slash house cleaning time go down a little smoother. Can you believe someone's actually doing work while they're listening? It's crazy.
Right? Yeah, it's nice. I like that. Uh anyway. Why, Jack, do you cut off the last five minutes or so from any of the shows on the archives?
It's important that we hear every last word that Nastasha and I have to say. Thanks, Matthew. Well, I don't know if it's important to hear every last word we have to say, but uh, but uh Jack, not to put you on the spot yet, or is Jack back there or Carlos? What's the explanation for that? What's going on?
They're stunned. Wait, Jack's coming. We'll look into it. Uh be there, but Matthew, we'll take care of it. Okay, so listen, with that, let's go to our first commercial break.
Calling all of your questions to 718497-2128. That's 718497-2128 cooking issues. You can rely on the old man's money. You can rely on the old man's money. It's a bitch, girl, but it's gone too far.
Cause you know it don't matter anyway. Send money, money won't get you too far, get you too far. Go to know, but don't you know? That is wrong. To take what is given you.
So far go on your own. But you could get alone. You can try to miss wrong, but you'll never be strong. Right, you're a rich, girl. And you're going to fall.
You can rely on the old man't matter anyway. You can rely on the old money. I take full responsibility for show cutouts. Sorry. Sorry, guys.
No problem. But I'll tell you something. I hate it when when she lets it go too far because she knows it doesn't freaking matter because she can rely on the old man's money. It's so disappointing, isn't it? So disappointing.
You know, you should stand on your own. Don't rely on the old man's money. Anyway. Apparently we have a caller. Caller, you are on the air.
Hi. Uh I have a question. I I have uh I'm looking to do the uh low times or cookies. And I have uh from beer rowing, I have my uh my hot weather tank is controlled by a PID. Right.
And I was wondering if there was any issues with using such a large volume of water because it would probably be about ten gallons. Uh well, how many watts is your heater? Uh I've got a I I've actually had two. I've got one the 5500 watt and one's a 4500 watt, and then I've got a pump that I can use to circulate back into it. All right, yeah.
Alright, with that kind of wattage, uh so I mean I'm gonna do a quick calculation here. A thousand watts, about twenty-eight liters, assume it's fairly linear and yeah, you should be fine. As long as your pump gets good uh movement through it, and as long as your PID is stabilizing within like a couple of tenths of a degree up or down, uh, which is it? Is it stabilizing properly? Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, then you shouldn't have any problem. Uh, you know, just you just want to make sure that you don't have any huge dead spots in the circulation, and that when you put your packages in that they um that they that you know that there's a lot of that there's water circulating around them. As long as you have water circulating on all sides, you should be okay. Uh i i the other thing I'd be c cautious of on certain items if you're gonna do eggs is if you're circulating that much water, you don't want it to be too too violent, or the stuff's gonna get knocked about in there. Uh or or you could have a situation where if you don't have the stuff properly contained, uh the the circulation is just gonna push it all to one corner of the bath, all of your bags will pile up, and then the the bags in the center are gonna take a long time to come up to temperature, which could be problematic in certain recipes.
Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But your your wattage should be more than enough. Um I've never had the uh pleasure of fooling around with a circulator uh that's uh five kilowatts, but sounds like it should be a lot of fun.
What are you cooking? You know, uh I'm just kind of glad to do everything. Uh probably you know, I I I have chicken, so probably a lot of eggs. Probably what? You I'm having a little bit of a bad connection.
What'd she say? Egg? What do you say, rather? Eggs? Yeah, probably a lot of eggs, yeah.
A lot of eggs for a lot of chicken for the most part. All right, so if you're uh if you yeah, so again, just make sure that the eggs don't get knocked around uh too much. And the other issue obviously is you're using quite a lot of power. Uh you you know, um so if you had the uh if you have the PID controller and whatnot, you might want to make a secondary bath that's smaller, like you know, two kilowatts and like twenty-eight liters or something like that, which would be is twice what was normally be used in twenty-eight liters to get up to temperature really, really fast. But just you don't want to be in a situation where you're pulling out those big guns all the time.
Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. And and I assume you're running that guy off two twenty. So if you're gonna run that guy what if you run that thing off of one twenty instead, right, uh you'll get uh about a quarter of the power, so that'll get it down to normal range.
So if you just make an alternate plug situation and run it off of one twenty instead of two twenty, assuming the amperage works out okay, uh, you should then ha be able to use it as a lower wattage uh item. It might be a problem with your pump, you might need to get a secondary pump, but you shouldn't need to get a second heater element. Okay. Does that make sense? Yeah, that that that that helps a lot.
Um now if I was looking at uh if you have me very interested in this rotary evaporator and I have money to burn. Ha good nice. That's a good problem. How how do you how do you clean them? I mean, I obviously have to buy you, so how would I I don't know where it'll been.
How do you how do you clean the glassware? Well, that's a good question. So uh I mean th there's two kinds of problems when you buy laboratory gear, and the one problem is uh kind of inorganic poisons, like straight up old school poisons, uh and also organic based poisons, and the other are kind of biohazards. So most likely you're not gonna have a biohazard in your rotov app, although it's po it's entirely possible. I'm pretty sure that the original one I bought off of eBay had carbon tetrachloride in it, which is nasty stuff.
Uh so I just um I w I bought uh you know a a basically a glass cleaner. I think uh think of the brand was Alcanox, and I just cleaned the ever loving hell out of it. Uh if you have access, uh I also in case there was a biological agent in it, I also bleached the hell out of it. You know what I mean? Basically soaked in bleach, ultrasonic cleaners, huge bunch of changes of water, bunch of bunch of bunch of changes of water, and detergents that'll attack both polar and nonpolar things, because the odds are there's a bunch of nonpolar stuff there too, which might be, you know, vile, vile stuff.
Um so you know, just do that again and again. Also note that if you're buying a standard roto vap with a condenser, re regular coil condenser, that one's going to be harder to clean because it's impossible to physically attack all the nooks and crannies on that. You can't get your fist into it. Whereas if you're getting what the heck was that? It sounds like someone just died on a roof.
Um if you if you get a cold finger condenser, you can disassemble it basically and get your hands into it and totally clean it out. And if you're really lucky, you can get a cold finger condenser that also has a coiled insert sleeve, and then you get the best of all worlds. You can use it as a cold finger condenser, you can use it as a regular coil condenser, and you can clean it. But it's very difficult to clean out the inside of the condenser, and it just takes a lot of time and flushes of detergent in water. Um could maybe like a per carbonate cleaner.
Like I have uh powdered brewery wash. Yeah. 50 pounds of it. Would that would that work for that? I mean, I'd look and see what whether or not uh what they say on that is uh how it works on um you know, uh chemical deposits that aren't uh, you know, like basically you you know, you'll be able to get rid of most of the polar stuff using normal detergents and most of the nonpolar stuff, frankly.
But I would just uh I haven't looked at it in a long time because it's been a couple of been like five years since I bought a rotovap on eBay. Uh and so I would just look up, for instance, like what the procedures are for cleaning out, like pick a couple of vicious nonpolar solvents like carbon tetrachloride, and just find out what the kind of uh what the kind of decontamination procedure is for it. But yeah, you know, uh maybe the brewery one would work. I mean, I uh like I say, I bought Alcanox just because that's what they use in labs. It's not that expensive, but I'm sure you you can get a hold of it, you know what I mean?
Yeah. But I would specifically look up, I would choose a couple of nasty solvents, uh, polar and and and non polar, and just check out the basic decontamination procedures for them. Okay. Um, and that cold finger condenser you're talking about. Is that like a Libig convention for uh for a still?
No, no, the cold the cold finger one is just a basically it's a cone shaped sleeve inside inside of the round condenser, and uh you fill it with uh in the lab, you would typically use dry ice uh acetone. I use either dry ice ethanol or um or liquid nitrogen. Uh I actually almost always use liquid nitrogen because it's actually easier for me to get than dry ice for storage reasons. Um but um the problem with a cold finger condenser if you're not using something super cold like dry ice and ethanol dry sacetone, is uh it has a very low surface area uh compared to a um because it's not indented like like you know, some of the condensers you're dealing with. So uh so it's got a fairly low surface area compared to a coil condenser.
I see. Yeah. Okay. Alright, is that helpful? It's very helpful.
Thank you. All right, and uh, you know, write us back and tell us uh what happened with your big mega circulator. We'll do. All right, thanks a lot. Thank you.
All right, today's show is sponsored by Modernist Pantry supplying innovative ingredients for the modern cook. Do you love to experiment with new cooking techniques and ingredients? But hate, hate, hate to overspend for pounds of supplies with only a few grams are needed per application. Modernist Pantry has a solution. They offer a wide range of modern ingredients and packages that make sense for the home cook and enthusiast, and most cost only around five bucks.
Saving you time, money, and storage space. I'm gonna edit it myself to have either enthusiasts or whatever. Whether you're looking for hydrocolloids, pH buffers, or even meat glue, you'll find it at Modernist Pantry. And if you need something that they don't carry, just ask. Chris Anderson and his team will be happy to source it for you with inexpensive shipping to any country in the world.
Modernist Pantry is your one-stop shop for innovative cooking ingredients. Modernist Pantry carries several types of modified starches for thickening, including Ultratex 3, Ultratex 8, and Ultrasperse 3. Fans of cooking issues at place an order of $25 or more before next week's show will get a free package of Ultratex 3 to play with. Simply use the promo code CI71 when placing your order online at ModernistPantry.com. Visit modernistpantry.com today for all of your modernist cooking needs.
Alright, listen. Listen. For some reason, a lot of chefs started using uh Ultratex um, you know, years ago. And what what Ultratex is, is it's a great product made by National Starch, and it's it's a part of a group of things that are basically they're pre-cooked starch. They're they're prehydrated, pre-cooked.
So you don't need to heat those starches, Ultratex, for instance, to get them to have their thickening capacity like you would with a normal starch, right? So that's great. That's fantastical. Uh the problem with Ultra Texas is because it's been uh prehydrated, pre-cooked, if you add it to liquids and you don't have like a high shear mixture, mixer, or you can't shear it in quite a bit, or you don't mix it into butter like in a bermini or any one of those things, mix it with sugar, anything, corn syrup, whatever, it tends to uh to glob up to turn into kind of globules, uh, you know, pearl up the same way as if you added starch to uh hot gravy. It works exactly the same as if you add starch to hot gravy.
So you need to really uh hit it with a blender or something like that to get it to disperse properly. And that's because uh when you add starch to gravy, typically what you'll do is you'll add starch to a cold liquid first, form a slurry, right? So that all the little starch particles get separated, and then you add it to a liquid, and then uh everything's kosher. You heat it up and it's good and it hydrates and all that stuff. Ultra spurse, right?
Not tex, ultra spurse is a uh an agglomerated uh pre-cooked, you know, prehydrated starch. And what that is is it looks like little kind of uh it looks kind of grainy when you look at it, instead of being a fine powder, it looks kind of grainy, and it's designed to not gl not kind of stick together into balls, and you can stir that one into things to thicken it up, and you don't need a lot of high shear mixing. Now, the reason that industrially ultra spurse isn't used as much as ultra texts is ultra spurse is uh a lot more expensive than ultra texts but in most home and like high-end chef kind of things, the cost uh isn't that much greater and is not that much of a of a concern because you're not using that much of it. And so I would always recommend, if you can, to go with ultra spurse instead of ultra texts all from a good folks at National Starch. All right.
That make any damn sense? Okay. So Chris, maybe next week give away the ultra spurse, the ultra spurse. What about commercial break? Already?
It's been 15 minutes. Really? Mm-hmm. All right, we'll go to our second commercial break. Calling all your questions to 718497-2128, 718497-2128 cooking issues.
Well I want, you to go back to hot to handle. Like a flame, the birds are candle. The candle feels the flame. What I got full stock. A full screen with a scatter.
And you pull them all together. And I can display. Oh yeah, well by you. Well, well, well, you make a my dreams of true. On a night ball, we become a screamer.
Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Hollow Notes Fest today, huh? Is that Nastasha or is that Carlos? That's Carlos Carlos.
Good call on Hollands Fest. You know, Nastasha and I have kind of like a running thing that we like. Dave completely bastardizes Holland Oaks. Yeah, well I'll rock out to it, but they they like, you know, so like if you've seen what's that show, like The Wedding Singer, where the guy sings with all the curses. I tend to sing songs with like many, many curses interspersed in them.
And so like what we feel is like, you know, uh you know how when you go to a concert, there's that guy who stands in the background screaming the song. Right? Yeah. So like we imagine that I'm like that guy screaming, but instead of giving like the rock and roll fingers, like you know, like the rock and roll fingers, I've just got my I'm just like flipping them the bird. But I'm in like the front row screaming along, like jamming out like to rich girl giving giving like hollow notes to the bird, and they're like, what the hell is this guy doing?
What's wrong with this guy? You see how long it takes before I get ejected from the concert? You know, those guys in the front row don't play. They pay so much for those tickets, especially on a reunion tour. They're not playing around with some joker, like flipping off the the the band and screaming curses.
Freaking rich girl. Anyway, okay. By the way, I know that was a scary sound we heard before, but it seems like Indy Jesus is okay. Oh man. That's good business.
We have checked the building. Andy Jesus is okay. Okay. That's good stuff. Jesus Christ Superstar is coming out at the end of next month on Broadway again, Dave.
Yeah, but look, okay, look. Jesus Christ Superstar, uh, aside from the fact that, you know, you kind of, as much as I love uh Andrew Lloyd Weber, and it's an Andrew Lloyd Weber thing, right? As much as I love him, I have to from a more kind of rational standpoint hate it. Well, because like, you know, I mean, all the people who are seriously into musicals are like, oh my god, Andrew Lloyd Webber, right? Even but I like that stuff.
You do. I do, I love that stuff. Jesus Christ Superstar, especially, but the problem is is that in my head, I have, you know, the original kind of voice of Judas is in my head. And if I go and hear somebody else, and the original guy is dead, by the way, so it's not like they're gonna bring that guy back. Uh and uh, you know, if I hear somebody else playing Judas, I'll just be like, oh my god, what is that?
It's the same way that you know that they redid uh Heat Miser, Snow Miser. Or Charlie Brown's voice. They redid Charlie Brown's voice? Horrible, horrible, horrible, awful, horrible. Uh, you know, it's like some things, you know, whatever.
Anyway. You're gonna make me go see it, aren't you? You should take your sons. Well, what what the heck do they want to see Jesus Christ Superstar for? They don't like it's me.
I like musicals. My son Booker would be so bored. He would be the screaming the entire time, when's it over? When's it over? And like they'd be saying, you know, what's the buzz?
And he'd be asking me when the buzz is gonna be over. I think I can't, you know, I can't. I can't. Anyway. Uh, question from Okay, I can't see who the question's from.
Oh, from Derek. Uh, hi again. I want to make my own sherry vinegar. Is it possible to take a red wine vinegar mother and put it in sherry and wind up with sherry vinegar? Are there any other methods?
Thanks for your help and insight and keep being awesome, Derek. We will try. We will try to start being awesome. Anyway. Uh okay, so here's the trick.
Uh when you're making um the answer is yes. It it's gonna work. Uh, but uh when you're making vinegar uh from wine, you're typically using a lower uh alcohol wine, right? So sherry, which you know is fortified, is uh is coming in at a much higher ABV than what it than is good for uh the vinegar. So you're gonna want to dilute to uh and I looked at a couple different sources, but between kind of seven and nine percent alcohol, and nine percent is pretty high.
Like you you might want to start down lower at like seven percent uh alcohol, okay? Uh so uh so you're gonna basically figure out what the alcohol content of your sherry is and then dilute it down with uh with whatever, but get the alcohol percentage down. If the alcohol is too high, you'll inhibit the acetobacter, and that's gonna be uh it's gonna be a problem, okay? Uh another thing that uh I've read, I don't know whether it's true or not, but is that if a wine is very highly sulfured, has a lot of sulfur dioxide in it, uh that can also be a problem uh for um for the acetobacter, but uh other than that, it it should basically be uh no problem. Now uh I looked up uh Sun Sunset magazine has uh a big how-to on this, including the vinegar things and remember, I don't know whether Sunset's any good anymore, but back in the day in the early 70s, Sunset magazine, which is from California, had like some kind of butt-kicking books on like how to get a really butt-kicking garden, how to make bon's eyes, how to bake bread.
I mean, Sunset Magazine. Desert E. It's California, not California. I mean, I don't know, Arizona, do they read it in Arizona? It was like, yeah, like You're from LA.
I'm sure you had Sunset Magazine coming out of your ears in the morning. No, I think it's more of like a desert Arizona, New Mexico, California. Hey, look, you know why it's called Sunset? Right. Because the sun sets on the freaking West Coast, right?
It's a West Coast thing, Southern West Coast. Right? But anyway, the books used to kick butt. That's all I'm saying. Is that Sunset Books?
You wouldn't think it. It seems like very consumer, but their books I used to enjoy them as I was growing up. I haven't read them in a long time. But if you if you look it up, uh, and you know who they asked as their consultant for it? Paula Wolfert.
Yeah, who Nastasha and I met when she was writing a like some sort of a clay pot cookbook. Is that true or false? Yeah, she had just finished it. Her house was freaking full of clay pots. I'm talking like she had a greater volume of clay pots than I have an air volume in my apartment, because her house is quite large compared to my apartment.
Anyway, um Paula recommends that you start small. In other words, if you get your mother, you add a little bit of the wine to start with. You gotta make sure that air can get to it because forming um forming acetic acid, it's an aerobic activity. There's air. So in fact, when you're doing a fast procedure, uh so the the the old school way is uh I don't know whether it's called the Orleans or the Oleon, because I've never heard anyone pronounce it, but that's the old school way of making vinegar where basically you take a cask, you drill holes in it, put a screen over it so bugs can't get in, you let air get in.
And it's the air that allows the acetic uh acid, uh the acetobacter, the acetic acid bacteria, to grow, uh, and therefore turn your uh turn your wine or turn whatever your cider into vinegar. If there's no air, they won't grow. If after they're done, you continue to allow air in, then the acetic acid will be lost, it'll oxidize and go out. So you have to strike a balance there. If you want to make it quickly, then what you have to do is increase the surface area that the bacteria can grow on.
And so you can do things like mix wood chips in with the with the uh with the vinegar with the base or whatever, and then have the mother on top. You don't want to swamp out the mother because you have to get the population of bacteria relatively high. So, what most people do to maintain their mother is remove like three-quarters of your vinegar and then put without disturbing it, put uh you know the rest back in in terms of fresh liquid, and then you can keep it going. Eventually, your vinegar mother will probably fall to the bottom. Uh you scoop it out.
Hopefully, a new one will form because you'll have a colony in there. Uh, we spoke about vinegar mother, what it is a while ago, but it's mainly cellulose, bacterial cellulose. So it floats on top, and eventually maybe it will fall to the bottom. Um another thing, and uh, you know, I'm not an expert by any means in in vinegar, but um after you make it, you're probably gonna want to age it to kind of mellow it out a little bit. Some people age it just on its own, some people age it in wooden barrels, uh which are getting increasingly difficult to get.
The small wooden barrels are getting increasingly difficult to get. When you are aging it, uh people tend to pasteurize it to stop further bacterial change, for instance, that might turn the vinegar uh, you know, to actually consume some of the acid in the vinegar and ruin it. Uh so you can either exclude air or pasteurize it, or exclude air and pasteurize it and age it to get a variety of different flavors. How's that? Good.
Make sense? Semi-sense? Partial sense. Okay. Uh from Matthew.
Hi, Nastasha and Dave. I hope you're doing well, and a big congratulations on the opening of Booker and Dax. Thank you. I think it's a pretty good bar. I mean, like, you know, we're still working.
It's gonna get better and better every day. But I think I'm I think I'm proud of what we're doing. What about you? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm proud of what we're doing.
Okay. I was recently given, which doesn't mean that we're nowhere near where we want to be, but I'm proud of what we're doing. Anyway, uh, I was recently given a Cuisinart ice cream machine, the kind where you pre-freeze the canister. I have made some excellent ice cream and with the help of some pastry chef friends, have learned to add some tweaks to my recipes that keep the ice cream from losing its smooth texture in the freezer and stay a little bit more stable at room temperature. And the two things uh that uh Matthew's adding are glucose syrup and gelatin.
Uh is there a simple formula for replacing sugar with glucose that could be applied to any ice cream recipe. My primary goal is to give ice cream a better texture post-freezer storage. Thanks, Matthew. Uh okay. So the simple there's no there's no simple anything.
You know what I mean? Uh, which is which is, you know, always always the problem. And uh I forgot to look up before I came in what the um what the solids uh ratio, what the solids content of glucose syrup is, but I think it hovers around 80%. I think it's in there. And you have to figure out what the DE, the dextrose equivalent of the glucose syrup is to figure out how how sweet it is.
But the book that I recommend, and most of it's online on Google Books, is called Glucose Syrups Technology and Applications. And there's a section on ice creams in there uh that talks about it. But basically what the glucose syrup, the glucose syrup is a c accomplishing uh a couple of things. It has a certain amount of sweetness to it, right? Uh not a lot, but a certain amount.
It depresses the freezing point of the uh of the ice cream base somewhat, right? But also it uh drastically increases the viscosity of the ice cream base. And what that's doing is it's gonna give you a kind of a denser, better mouthfeel and also prevent uh inhibit crystallization. The gelatin will also help with uh crystallization, but uh, you know, and anything you add, any hydrocolloid you add is going to uh help. Anything that increases the viscosity is gonna help prevent crystallization from happening uh once it's in your freezer afterwards.
So uh basically what you wanna do when you swap it out, let's assume that you don't want to um let's assume that you don't want to change the sweetness of your of your recipe. Uh so you have to look at what the relative sweetness of the glucose syrup is versus sugar. So your relative sweetness of uh of a of like a 42 DE glucose syrup is half, it's half as sweet as sugar. We're using low DE glucoserus when I usually do it, like a 28, and 28 is like 0.4 of the relative sweetness of it, and that's on a dry dry weight basis, right? But the freezing depression, uh so let's take glucose uh 28 DE glucose syrup.
It's a little under half the sweetness of uh of sucrose, right? But it has uh only half of the freezing point depression. So you need to add twice the like uh once you take into account the water that's in it, you're gonna you're gonna remove, let's say, uh you know, 200 grams of sugar, you're gonna have to add 400 grams of solids from glucose 28 DE to have the same sweetness, but you'll have a lot more solids, so it'll be a lot denser. Uh so this table is available on the Google Books, and you can get a sense of the relative freezing point depression and the relative sweetness for various different uh different sweeteners. So, so let's say you didn't want to add like that.
If you want to reduce the sweetness of something, right, but not really reduce uh the you know, not really change the freezing point depression or change the actual visc viscosity of it much, you could add glucose syrup, and then you could depress the freezing point further by adding small amounts of alcohol. And there's ratios in this table in this book that you can look at to really kind of get a better idea of what you're doing. But what you whenever you're swapping out sugar, you're removing body, you're changing the freezing point depression, and you're changing the sweetness. And all of those things need to be accounted for uh in an ice cream to balance out. So you you know, if you don't want to change anyone drastically uh or or there's gonna be problems.
Just uh what's cool about this book, the glucose syrup technology and applications in the ice cream section is that rather than go into really kind of technical uh explanations of trying to calculate things, they say, hey, look, uh calculate everything relative to sucrose. So the sweetness relative to sucrose, table sugar, and the freezing point depression relative to sucrose, and then just get into your head that ice cream should have a s uh like a a sucrose relative uh sweetness and relative freezing point depression, because sucrose we're taking it as one as unity, of 13 to 18. So something with uh with a soup with with basically 13, so 13% sugar in it is going to be hard, right? And uns not that sweet. And something with 18% is going to be relatively softer because it's gonna be have more of freezing point depression and relatively sweeter, right?
And so by by calculating the relative freezing point depression and relative sweetness to sucrose, you can play around with recipes fairly easily and try to get uh something that works for you. Does that make sense? Mm-hmm. Okay. Uh I I am being told.
Do I have any more questions or have I answered them all? I've answered all the online questions. I'm being told that I am out of time. So this has been Cooking Issues. Thank you.
And come again next week. 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 just can't get it straight.
Timestamps may be off due to dynamic ad insertion.