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, the host of Cooking Issues coming to you live actually 15 minutes early today, right? Usually we start 15 minutes late.
Today we're starting 15 minutes early. Uh, whatever. Whatever. 10 minutes early is like eight years early as far as we're concerned here. Anyway, coming to you semi live from Robertus Pizzeria in Bushwick Brooklyn on the Heritage Radio Network every Tuesday from roughly 12 to roughly 1245.
Uh today actually we had to shift it a little bit earlier because I have to go do an interview on uh that's public radio, right? Yeah. Yeah, it's just the splendid table. And some Nincom Poop thought that it would be a great idea for me to uh skip my own radio show to go do somebody else's, which makes no sense, right? So should you happen to be listening early or uh or you know in the next 10 minutes or so, call in your questions to 718497-2128, then 718497-2128.
Uh, might as well actually go through the uh who's sponsoring us today, right? Now uh today's it Well, it's sponsored by the Modernist Pantry again, which is what you know we're used to having sponsored by, but we don't have a new promo, so I'll just read the old one. Ready? 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?
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Simply use the promo code CI72 when placing your order online at modernistpantry.com. Visit modernistpantry.com today for all of your modernist cooking needs. Right? Mm-hmm. Yes.
Oh, by the way, Jack, uh, we have a uh request from uh Marvin Woodhouse, the the gentleman that's moving from Ireland to Germany, more on more on him later. Uh he uh requests Fool's Gold by the uh Stone Rose Stone Roses. Can we uh accommodate him for our break? Oh, yes we can. Wow.
I like the Obama reference. Yes, we can. All right. Uh in from uh Marty, just a quick question. I was making a quick red sauce by browning my meat, and because I was too lazy to chop, I buzzed the canned tomatoes, raw vegetables, and seasoning in a blender before adding it to the pot.
Seemed to work. So, in a long braise, is there any purpose for sweating the vegetables when you're not looking for caramelization? That's an interesting question. Mm-hmm. Right?
Well, I don't know. Uh I would assume that even if you're not browning, let's say let's take onions. Let's just take onions. First of all, I like to get a little color on some of my vegetables when I'm working with them when I'm sweating them out. What about you, Stas?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh now typically, you know, in a Frenchy French recipe, though, they're specifically not looking for color because they want to maintain, you know, the color of the sauce that they're making, even though all those classic French sauces end up a gloppy brown anyway, right?
I mean, let's face it. Right? Anyway, so uh they they're sweating them out to not get color. However, even below the um take an onion, even before real color is formed, there are flavor uh changes that take place in terms of sweetness. I don't know if those same kind of flavor transformations are gonna take place in the same way if you just blend them and then cook them.
Certainly in a long braise, the the liquid will be there enough to soften the vegetables to cook them. But the question is, is there any significant flavor change by pre-sweating and then adding? I don't know. Uh I would bet that uh it'd probably be minor if it exists at all, except for perhaps onion sweetness, but it's an interesting question. That's the kind of thing you should really just do uh side by side trial, you know.
Take one, blend it beforehand, cook it, take the other, sweat it, then blend it, and then uh bring them both up to the same temperature and serve it, make sure the dilution's right. Sounds like an interesting experiment, right, Stas? Yeah. So uh follow that under, hey, I have no idea. Okay.
Hi, Anastasia, Dave, Jack, and Carlos from Mark Younger. I was taking a truffles class at a local kitchen supply store, by the way, chocolate truffles, not the stuff that's growing underground, even though it this is the you know good season for crap that's growing underground. Actually, it's I guess it's a little late, right? Valentine's Day is the end? Yeah.
Anyway, you're like, yeah, I'm not paying attention to the phone. No, Jack's texting me. So helping you out. Yeah, sure. Yeah.
Anyway. Uh I was taking a uh Troubles class at local kitchen supply store and ended up getting into a discussion with the chef about how one might use an immersion circulator to make dealing with chocolate easier. It is pretty clear that it would be a great way to hold tempered chocolate as long as you were careful in getting all the water off the bags before you use the chocolate. The question we couldn't figure out is whether you could use the immersion circulator with its precise control of temperature to temperature temper the chocolate in the first place. This would presumably require melting the chocolate at the desired temp, then lowering the temp to get the level you traditionally aim for by either seating or uh tabling the chocolate, and then raising the temperature back up to get proper crystal formation.
Are you aware of whether this works or whether there's another way to temper chocolate in the immersion circulator? Uh Mark, okay. That's an interesting question. Uh I have been told a billion times that it works. Uh I've never actually done it, but uh we'll go into a very quick discussion of tempering chocolate for those out there who aren't hip to chocolate tempering.
So uh the cocoa butter and chocolate is uh goes into a number of different crystal forms, right? Only one of which is the desirable beta crystal that provides a snap and uh looks shiny and awesome and tastes awesome, right? Uh uh it f it basically is in direct distinction with beta prime forms, which are softer, melt at a lower temperature, don't have a snap, and it's just in general crap, right? So you really want a good for most applications, although not for truffles, for truffles is fine. You know what I mean?
Who cares in a truffle? It's a ganache. Ganache. Anyway, so um uh what you want to do when you temper chocolate, now the beta prime crystals, right, they will swamp out if you're cooling chocolate that's melted, right? Like the beta prime crystals will swamp out the good beta crystals and you'll end up with untempered chocolate.
This is why if you just heat chocolate uh up and then let it cool back down again, you get an untempered sloppy mess, right? Uh so the good news is that well, here's how you do it. So you heat up the chocolate and you melt all the crystals out. Then you cool it down and uh into the high 80s somewhere, and in that range, in the 80s somewhere, uh crystals start forming. Mostly the crappy ones, the uh the you know beta primes, right, and also the uh betas.
Then you heat the mixture up slowly again into a range where all the beta prime crystals melt, but the uh sorry, yeah, the beta prime crystals melt, but the beta crystals are still good. And then you hold it there for a while, and then when you chill it again, those beta crystals act as the seeds and you get tempered chocolate. Bang, bang, right? And since it's all about very accurate temperature control, this is possible. You can do this uh with an immersion circulator.
And you certainly could melt all of the chocolate up to a high temperature, drop it all, wait for it to get viscous and you see it start seeding it, and then bring it up uh very accurately with it with an immersion circulator. However, you should be able to do uh an even simpler technique, which is throw the entire uh block of probably graded pre-tempered chocolate, right? If you start with a tempered chocolate, uh in a bag, vacuum it down, and throw it in a circulator at like 92, 90, 91, 92, in a place that will uh melt the undesirable crystals but leave all your seed crystals intact. And I think that will work. I don't know if you need to take it above the total melting point of the chocolate before it'll become viscous enough to work.
Um I don't think so, because I've heard that I've heard you can do that, although I've never tried it. Either technique would work. It would just be a much simpler if you could just throw it in at the working temperature and go from there, right, Stuff? Yeah. I don't know.
Give it a try. I've heard it works. I've never done it. You ever done it? No.
No. You could ask Brooks or someone. Anyway. Uh uh Carlos, by the way, here's one, here's one for you. Hi, Nastasha, Dave, Jack, and the other guy.
Wow. Wow. The other guy. Even Indy Jesus has a name. Yeah, yeah, right.
Even Indy Jesus gets called out by name. Carlos becomes the other guy. You know, that reminds me, uh, I think I'm I don't know if I've mentioned this on the air, but the very first uh season of Gilligan's Island in the song, it's you know, Gilligan, the skipper too, the millionaire and his wife, the movie star, and the rest. That's what they say. They're like, the movie star and the rest here on Gil Wait, really?
Like, just it takes just as much energy to say Professor and Mary Ann as it does to say and the rest. And I think, you know, and because Mary Ann was obviously the hot one, right? And the and the professor was really cool. Everyone liked the professor, right? So in subsequent seasons, it was you know, the movie star, Professor and Mary Ann, I mean, which sounds even better than and the rest.
And the rest? Really? Come on now. And you know, Mary Ann's the one that ended up writing like the Gilligan's Island cookbooks, and I think keeps track of all the reunion stuff of all the people that are still alive. How do you know that?
What do you mean how do I know that? How does how do you not know that? Give first of all, Gilligan's Island, you know, a cultural milestone in American uh TV history. And uh, you know, Carlos, the other guy. Anyway.
He has a name. Now you're pulling out the Jim Croce references. That's actually the only reason why it's the only reason why. But so for for those of you that don't know, Jim Croce, the whatever, however you classify his singing, you know, died in a plane crash, I guess in the 70s. Nastasha and I have this ongoing kind of Jim Croce inside joke thing.
Yeah, love hate thing. Because like Jim Croce, when he's singing something, he's like, he never gets to the damn point. Like he'll call someone on the telephone, an operator who doesn't give a rat's ass about what he's talking about, and he'll sit there and chew this operator's ear off for like three or four minutes about this like lady he's trying to call, and then he's like, you know what? Forget about it and keep the dime. Like she gives a crap about the dime.
She's working for the phone company. Or this other one, he's like calling up this girl at like, you know, three in the freaking morning, saying, you know, I know it's kind of late. You know, then there's I hope I didn't wake you. What the hell? It's late.
And you're like this long ass story about how you has had to say that you love her in a song. Can't you do that at a reasonable damned hour? Makes no damn sense. Croaty. Well, we love him.
We love him anyway. We love crochet. Anyway, so the uh got a name references to a croochy song, long way of getting around it. Anyway, uh so Matthew says, I've been playing around with making mozzarella at home using some commercial cheese curds. It comes out really nice.
I just cut the curds into little pieces, let them come up to room temperature, heat up some lightly salted water between 180 and 190 degrees Fahrenheit, pour it over the curds, powder them a little, then pull out a ball of the cheese. After that, I usually plunge the ball into a bath of lightly salted cold water and help it set a little. The cheese is good, but I want it to be better. My goal is a softer, fresh mozzarella cheese as opposed to something harder, squeakier, or stringy. Do you have any strategies or suggestions for making better mozzarella without upgrading the quality of my curds?
Uh thanks, Matthew. Well, that's a very interesting question. Uh mozzarella is one of the, you know, it's one of those strange things in life that the simpler a product is, it often the easier it is for us to find uh major differences with kind of minor things in technique, right? So bread is a classic example, yeast, salt, water, uh, flour, and yet look at the variances in bread, right? Or coffee is an is another example.
And in general, the more complicated something is, the easier it is to cover up flaws and techniques or ingredients because there's just a mishmash of crap going on, right? So mozzarella is one of these things that's supposed to taste of the fresh milk. And so you have uh all of the factors involved before the cheese curd is made. Or you know, there's there's the quality of the milk, right? Then there is uh I was reading a bunch of studies this morning on the effect of different starter cultures uh on the uh texture and taste of mozzarella cheese and apparently they have a huge impact.
But the the key thing with mozzarella curd is the pH, the acidity level has to be right when it's made or it won't have the proper texture. Okay? So you you have to start with good curds. That said, the commercial curds are what everyone uh and and and by the way the the way it works is it is it the acidity is is necessary to get the stringiness right because it the the pH is is drastically affecting how the cheese curds are going to interact when they're melted out and and uh pulled uh to make a pasta filata style cheese dough. And the same same pH is the reason why you add wine to a fondue, Nastasha's favorite thing because she loves the Swiss uh because it kind of increase uh it basically you know alters the way that the that the casein's uh is going to interact with itself.
Anyways so um so all of that stuff is uh very vital that said once you say okay look I'm gonna I'm gonna have this commercial made curd there's a huge variance in um how the final mozzarella is going to taste based on the um based on uh your practices afterwards and so all everything is uh makes a difference including how you slice the curd because that's going to change how fast the heat from the hot water goes in the temperature of the water you use, whether there's any salt in the water, and finally the forming technique and how much you stretch it and pull it, right? So presumably um i and and just so show this, you know, if you I don't know if you live near New York, but you go to New York, you can go to any one of five or ten different mozzarella joints and you know New York, New Jersey, Connecticut major metropolitan area. You go to like five different fresh mozzarella joints, they're all getting their mozzarella curds from polio, uh, and yet their cheese styles are radically different. So some people do a lot of stretching right and pulling uh and that and think about what's happening. If you look at mozzarella under a uh microscope, scanning electron microscope, uh what you'll see is kind of these pulled layers and think of it the same way that you think of bread dough, these pulled layers in between the pulled layers you'll find uh trapped water, uh trapped whey uh and and and fat glaues.
So um if Nastasha hates that word globule she does she's making her globule face which is very similar to her vegan face. So um that stretching is going to align and create that structure squeeze out the water and make kind of thin sheets. So when you're making something like a biratta that needs to hold its outside shape they probably do a lot of a stretching to make it kind of or some people will even stretch it once, re melt it and stretch it again. Or some people prefer a softer curve with less uh softer mozzarella with less structure that has more weeping and more large open pores I tend to like the less structured more weepy kind of mozzarella what about you stuff yeah I mean that's what I prefer and so I would recommend probably less uh less kneading but what I really recommend you do is find a mozzarella joint that you like go there and watch what they do as opposed to what you do uh and see kind of what the difference is uh you know at the at the school at the French Culinary Institute they teach mozzarella making to all of the students and it's all universally horrible, right? I mean, no offense to the students, but the first time you make mozzarella, it's not going to be that good.
In fact, I've only made it a couple of times, and I stopped because my wife was like, You suck at this. We should just go, you know, to someone we like like DiPalos, who knows how to make mozzarella and buy it. And in fact, I said this before, like the po like uh like I'm not gonna get a debate over who makes the the good or best mozzarella, but uh I like the guys at DePaul's, I go to them all the time. When they uh when their cheesemaker who was hired by the current, you know, generation's father retired, they changed their cheese style to be more in line. So their cheese their mozzarella changed radically because they changed their uh their mold their forming technique from the one that their father and his cheesemaker had favored, which was a a less porous, less weepy mozzarella to uh, you know, to one that is kind of softer.
Um so it's entirely in in your control. Uh I would go observe someone with the real hands because it's a real art and practice to making a mozzarella, yeah? Yeah? No? Yeah.
All right. Let's go to our first commercial break. Calling your questions to 718497-21289 uh 784972128 cooking it's use. Hello, welcome back to Cooking Issues. Calling your questions.
We should be live now for normal people who are calling in. 27184972128. That's 7184972128. In case you just tuned in, this show is again brought to you by the Monist Pantry. Go back and listen to it.
It's the same promo as before. So uh Marvin uh Woodhouse uh called in. I gotta go get I was looking at his link that he sent me on his uh public transportation because I found turns out that I guess in the last couple of weeks I've been railing on New York's public transportation system, and I really shouldn't, because I love it. I use it all the time. I mean I'm appreciative of New York City's subway system, which is as far as I know, the only 24 hour subway system in the world.
So we don't have any like, you know, crazy night buses in our city that you have to like get scraped onto a bus with like all of the people who can barely hold themselves, you know, hold themselves upright or have already turned into a shivering mass of jelly. And uh, you know, so I'm really appreciative of our subway system. Oh, basically on that, before I go on. Uh, you know, uh, as some of you might know, uh, we recently opened a bar booker in Dax, and uh now uh I'm in the habit of quite often walking home at three and four in the morning stone sober, which is not something that I'm used to. And man, the pizza, the people on the streets of New York are are messed up looking at four in the morning.
Right? Yeah. It's but it's like uh you ever been to England back in the day, like when all the pubs were like closed at 11 and people it's like basically like at 11 o'clock, people stumbling around England. So 11 o'clock in England looks like you know two or three here. I think it's changed.
I don't know. Anyway, so uh he was uh Marvin was showing us uh his uh he moved to Wurpital Germany and it was showing us uh his public transportation, which is some crazy ass monorail called the Schwebybon. You like that name? Yeah, Shwebi Bon. Anyway, uh so uh well more on him later.
Let's go uh go back to our regular questions. Hello, Nastasha and Dave. Uh Tom Fisher writes in from Lansdown PA. I have a three-liter centrifuge arriving in about a week, and I'll need to bleach out the rabies. Any tips for making sure everything is safe before I use it.
Also, uh, what would you recommend is the first thing I spin? I think I'm making some fruit juices. How is a centrifuge with strawberries? Well, uh let's start backwards. Centerfuge strawberries are fantastic.
Uh, I recommend uh getting a hold of some Pectin X Ultra SPL. None of this stuff really centrifuges well without uh the addition of some uh enzyme to if you really want it clear. I mean you can centrifuge out and get uh a puck and a supernatant uh but it's it's not your yield is gonna be poor and it's not gonna be clear unless you uh unless you add the SPL. If you add the SPL, uh you can just literally blend strawberries in a blender, add a couple of grams of pectin X ultra SPL enzyme uh to the strawberry in the blender, hold the back of your hand against the blender until it warms up to a little bit above body temperature, let it sit for about 10 minutes. The enzyme is gonna break down a lot of the pectin and make it a lot more uh you know less viscous, so that when you spin it, uh you're gonna get a very good uh separation between you know of the of the of the solids from the liquids.
And your yield should be very high on the order of 70% or so. Uh one of the things you have to worry about when you're centrifuging is that when you blend something like strawberries, there's uh a lot of air that's whipped into it, and strangely that air uh doesn't necessarily pop when you spin it. Some of those air bubbles can actually withstand the G forces involved in centrifuging. So uh if you have access to a vacuum machine, it's a good idea to quickly at a very low temperature, obviously, because it's in a vacuum, do a quick uh de-aeration or boil out of the air in the strawberry in your vacuum machine before you centrifuge it. If not, it's not going to be too big of a problem.
Just spin it for 10 or 15 minutes, uh put it through a coffee filter or through a piece of muslin or something like that uh to catch anything that goes through. And we do strawberries all the time and and and we love it. Now, back on safety and bleaching out the rabies. There's two questions as to safety. There is uh there are well three really.
There's there's um poison that might be in it, right? You have to worry about. Then there are uh you know biohazards that might be in it, like uh uh infectious agents, right? And then although uh probably not poison, it's probably mainly gonna be biological agents that are gonna cause you problems. And uh third is um mechanical damage that could lead to unsafe operation in the centrifuge, right?
So you have to take care of all three. So uh the aluminum swinging buckets in your three liter centrifuge need to be uh first soaked in a bleach solution, right? And then uh eye pressure cook them, right? When you're pressure cooking, if you want to actually sterilize, what you need to do is make sure there's no air at all in the system because uh it can uh it can cause problems with uh sterilization. So you want to submerse the buckets in uh your pressure cooker and pressure cook them for like 20 minutes at second ring, and you should have killed anything that ails it.
You can then, if you'd like, re-bleach uh them and then let them air dry. You don't want to use any detergents really. You scrub them with you know with something, but you don't want to use any harsh detergents because they can uh affect the aluminum, the integrity of the aluminum. And you do not the one thing you always want to make sure is that you do not affect the integrity of the aluminum buckets. The other thing you wanna be careful of is you wanna inspect your buckets, your aluminum buckets for damage.
If your buckets are damaged, uh then they're probably unsafe. If you want to inspect your rotor, make sure that there's no cracks or problems with the rotor. Uh if there are, then it's unsafe. So you gotta ensure that all of that is is is okay. You wanna make sure that you balance your uh buckets properly, get a trip balance that can balance the two buckets against each other and and make sure you keep everything balanced at all times.
Make sure everything spins freely. The inside of your the entire centrifuge should be completely wiped down with a uh concentrated bleach sanitizing solution. You should then pour bleach sanitizing solution in the drain hole of your centrifuge and let it come out. Uh and then do this several times. And that's how that's the technique that I use to bleach the rabies out of these things and and to get them safe to go.
Um the strawberry technique I told you uh works with any non-acidic fruit, right? Uh even things that are mildly acidic, that's that will work with. If you need to clarify, like we do at the bar, lime juice, uh, you're gonna need to move to a different set of uh a different battery of uh clarification techniques. Uh no three-liter centrifuge that you get is going to be adequate to clarify lime juice on its own. That requires about 48,000 G's.
You could do it at 27,000, but it's n doesn't taste good. But you're not going to achieve that in a standard three-liter centrifuge. So what you're gonna need to use is a combination of the enzyme I mentioned, pectanex XPL, and wine finding agents. We use Kesel Sol, which is a sp suspended silica gel, uh suspended silicosol, rather, and uh chitosan, which is uh from shrimp sales. It's a hydrocolloid.
And our procedure very quickly is gonna be definitely boring to people who don't know who don't have this crap. But I'll give it to you anyway. Here it is, real quick. It's add two grams per liter of uh of uh pectinx ultra SPL and two grams per liter of Kesel Sol, suspended silicosol, uh to the to your lime juice, stir it, let it sit 20 minutes, add two grams of chitosan, stir, uh let's sit 20 minutes, add two more grams of Kesel Sol, stir it, and then spin it out, and you should get 100% clear lime juice. And the reason we add it so many times is you're playing a game with charges where you're adding uh uh charge to something, causing particles to flock together, then adding a different charge, causing those particles to flock together, and so on and so on.
But anyway, uh good luck with your centrifuge. I'm sure you will enjoy it, right? Are we doing another crucial break or no? No. No?
We're ripping on through. Uh man, I wonder whether we actually rip through everything. We can uh just talk about other stuff, did we? No, Marvin. Oh, yeah.
Well he didn't he was he said specifically, Marvin from Schwaby Bond, uh the Shwabi Bond, which he rides to work every day, which is the only cool thing in New York you can ride like that is the uh is the tram to uh to ro uh what is it called? Roosevelt's island, right? And uh and the reason that's cool is because you can imagine Rucker Hauer and uh and Sylvester Stallone shooting at themselves uh like they did in Cobra, which is an awesome bad movie, right? Everyone likes Rucker Howard, right? You gotta like Rucker Hauer and Sylvester Stallone together, right?
No? Yeah. She's nodding her head, not making her vegan face. She's uh doing well. But here's a I specifically was told not to read this whole uh dang uh thing, but I will read this one section.
Uh we asked why he was moving to Germany from uh Belfast, and he said, by the way, I'm moving to Germany from Belfast Islands, I have a new job in Germany. It will also be cool to experience a new food culture and for my kids to learn a new language, the beer kicks ass too. That's fair. And here's the interesting part as far as cooking issues is concerned. I'm a formulation scientist.
This means I developed the recipes and manufacturing process for new pharmaceutical projects, prodights. Please tap my knowledge for any queries on spray drying, tablet compaction, or the use of cyclodextrins, as I would be pleased to help. Uh well, that's stuff that we're very interested in, right? Yeah. I'm specifically interested in tablet compaction.
Like I I've been looking for a while for a good way to uh make uh our own uh mints and whatnot uh in in a kind of a quick fashion. Now there's people on the internet, I think I've mentioned this on this show, uh, who sell basically a little twisty thing that's almost like a pipe with a twist doodle in it, and you could t uh tighten down on that sucker and make like individual uh you know tablets. But you know, if you know of anything, Marvin, that I can get on eBay to bang out tablets that doesn't cost an arm or leg or isn't the size of a small Volkswagen beetle, uh I'd be uh I'd be certainly happy. And also, if you ever know anyone getting rid of a pilot-sized spray drying unit, I would love one. You know who has one?
Nathan Miravold, of course. Nathan Mirabold. Hmm. Mirabold. Uh okay.
Uh now one other thing, a question it's not on uh, and by the way, we we have to we're ending this show. The reason we I already mentioned the reason why we're gonna so we don't have to mention it again. But we'll mention this show on that show. We'll mention this show on that show? You'll mention I will.
Now I tell you what, let's go to one quick commercial break, because we have another like ten minutes before we have to go. So let's go to commercial break, Jack. Maybe we have maybe we have some Jim Croce. I don't know. Do you think you got some Jim Croce?
Anyway, you still have uh one last chance to call your questions to 7184972128. That's 7184972128 cooking issues. Little Southside of Chicago is the better's auto town. And if you go down there, you better just be well name or Leroy Brown. Now, Leroy, more in trouble.
You see, he's stand about six foot four. All of downtown leaders call the treetop over all the manfires call him so he's bear. Better than old game car. We know they're on the junk yard. Now Leroy, he or gambler, and he like his bouncing cards.
He did like his fancy clothes. Something else he liked to do is to uh shine his diamond ring under everybody's nose. You know, do you were aware of that fact? You know, and you know, for those of you that don't know this song, Leroy Brown at the end of the song. Well, the reason he he looks like a jigsaw puzzle with a couple of pieces gone is actually what happens to him at the end of the song.
And the reason is he uh Leroy Brown learned a lesson about messing with the wife of a jealous man. It just goes to show you shouldn't mess with anyone's uh, you know, spouse anyway. That's right. Yeah, right? Wow, Jack.
Yes. Quick. Yeah. Nice. Nice.
All right. So this is actually not uh a writing question, but uh someone from Milk Bar, you know, one of our sister companies, right, uh came and said that at Milk Bar, uh, you know, which is Tozy's Christina Toze's company, which is like infinite infinitely expanding. There's like they they have what, they have one in Brooklyn and like three in Manhattan, right? Right? Anyway, uh said that they had been getting some uh locally produced milk that had not been uh homogenized, right?
And the issue they were having with it was uh when they were making cappuccinos, they said the milk is delicious, right? But the non-homogenized milk wasn't foaming properly when they're making cappuccinos. And what did I think? And I said, quite honestly, I don't know. I had no idea.
Uh so I looked it up, and in fact it's true that homogenizing increases the ability of cappuccinos to foam. Now, she she had also said to me something strange. She said we tried to heat it, right? Because someone said that if you heat the milk, it's gonna increase its ability to foam. And that went exactly counter to everything that I had learned uh about forming uh milk foams when you're steaming them, which is that you can't really steam milk twice because you've denatured the proteins, right?
So then I went to try and research this thing, and it turns out the entire field is completely confused, and it was hard for me to get a straight answer. I was expecting to be able to go to the scientific literature and get a straight answer within like a half hour. But like 45 minutes later reading, I still didn't feel like I had a straight answer. So it's an interesting problem. Here's so UC Davis uh on their milk site, which UC Davis, I usually, you know, I love UC Davis for anything kind of food science related.
Uh although dairy, you go to Guelph, you know, the UGW for their website. But basically they say that uh heating uh milk, uh pasteurizing milk, uh homogene everyone says homogenizing makes milk foam better, but they don't really propose a mechanism for why or how. But everyone in the world says that homogenizing milk makes it foam better. So they should go ahead and get a homogenized milk, or we you know what, we can loan them our um our homogenizers, see whether that helps. I mean, it doesn't produce as good a homogenization as ultra, you know, high pressure homogenization, but they could try it.
Anyway, I hadn't thought about that loaning them that sucker. Anyways. I was? Yeah, you were like, should we really? Mm-hmm.
Huh. For what? It's like you had a premonition. Oh no, that's no, you're talking about my rotor stator homogenizer. I'm talking about the ultrasound one that totally dents your uh hearing and blah do you do use that still bother you, that ultrasonic homogenizer?
Remember, it's like it's that like it's like uh everyone like falls on the ground writhing in pain except for me because of the years of uh blasting my ears out with headphones. Anyways, so um homogenization, right? But heating is an interesting question. So when you heat uh milk, like you tend not to denature the uh casein proteins with normal pasteurization, but you do uh denature the whey proteins. Oh, uh I hear I have a call, so I'll get back to this, uh finish up with it.
Caller, you're on the air. Right. Uh you know, I heard you last week and you and you were talking about uh you had a deep fryer in your kitchen. And I guess I'd uh I'd never thought about putting a uh a commercial deep fryer in a residential kitchen because uh you know, I I've just been using a Dutch oven because from my understanding, all the uh the uh home use deep fryers suck. Uh so I was wondering if you can you can talk a little bit about the the logistics of using uh because I I thought some of those ran on like uh two twenty if you had to run two twenty in your kitchen or you know all right do you have gas uh I don't you don't have gas come on now uh you don't have gas okay do you live uh in do you do you live in an apartment or in a house?
I I live in a house and I have actually wired two twenty before um and there there's two twenty going to the stove but I I don't think it's you know right you should be able then to get an electric fryer. Um certain electric fryers are better than other electric fryers. I mean the here's the key the key to uh why uh I forget what I was saying about it but the key to a commercial fryer why it's so much better there's there's it's a number of things. It's not just the power although the power is huge. One they have a much larger volume of oil in them so you have a a very um you have a good surface to volume ratio, right?
So you're not you know it's it's good that way. But the key and the reason why even small commercial tabletop fryers suck is because they don't have a cold zone in them. So if you look at a uh a real a good fryer what you'll notice is the heating element isn't on the bottom of the of the kettle right it's nowhere near it. And in a commercial tube fryer uh you know like a a gas tube fryer the tube is there, you're really only frying in the upper level of the oil, and below it's a big area of unheated stuff. And that area is crucial to the uh to the functioning of the fryer.
Because when you're working with a Dutch oven, right, and a Dutch oven, by the way, assuming you have like good power in your stove, is going to be better than a crappy little fryer, which they're just underpowered. You know what I mean? Like there's just no way about around it. They're underpowered, and so the recovery time is very low. And when the recovery time is very low, it takes a uh they typically over ramp, they overheat the oil, and then they go back down low, and so your oil degrades extremely quickly and your products uh you know absorb too much oil and it's never very good.
So you're right in assuming that a larger quantity of oil in a Dutch oven over a high powered uh range is going to be better than most home fryers. That's 100% true. Now, in a commercial fryer though, with where you have a cold zone underneath the heating, uh when a when uh stuff comes off of your food, which it inevitably will, right, it sinks to the bottom into a relatively cold zone. So it doesn't scorch, right? And it doesn't impart a nasty burnt flavor to your oil.
When you're heating in a home fryer or in a Dutch oven, you'll notice the bottom of your oil has a bunch of brown and black particles, and that over a course of a couple of hours of frying, you'll start tasting burnt and and rancid nasty flavors in your oil, right? Yeah. Yeah. That never happens in a commercial fryer. So a commercial fryer, first of all, never overheats the oil because the heating element typically has a very large surface area, especially in a gas fryer, but also in a well constructed electric fryer.
Uh and it has a core a huge amount of power, so it can heat up uh very quickly, but without locally overheating, like you do if you burn the bottom of the pan. And and and two, it has this cold zone. Uh so all in all, you can get so yes, you're using my my fryer holds like six gallons uh of oil, but five and a half uh six gallons of oil, but I can use that five and a half, six gallons of oil for like five uh big fry nights in which I'm frying everything, and every piece of food that comes out of it tastes delicious and isn't oily. Do you know what I mean? And the way I always test I keep my fryer covered when not in use, you know, you strain out the oil, right, to get rid of the particles because they can increase rancidity.
And then you put the oil uh back in, you cover it so that you're not getting a lot of oxidation. Uh you know, mine also is covered with a wooden block so it's not getting any light in or anything like that, and it stays great. And you I always uh the day before I know I'm gonna have another fry night, I'll uh put a piece of bread into it. And bread's very good because it soaks up a lot of oil, but is it self-neutral, and you'll be able to taste any sort of rancidity or any sort of uh fat breakdown, whether the oil is going bad on that piece of bread and know whether you need to uh change it out. Uh if you are frying uh you want to fry actually quite a bit each time with something like French fries or potato chips so that absorb a lot of oil, and the reason is is then you can just keep replenishing the uh fat in the fryer, and if you replenish the oil quickly enough, you don't need to throw away the oil.
That's a that's the that's how continuous frying works. When they're making potato chips industrially, potato chips are like 50% oil. Uh you know, so they they're soaking up enough oil that the oil never goes bad. You know what I mean? Yeah.
Yeah. The other thing is get good ventilation in your house. Do you have the ability to put a decent hood in over your fryer? Hand me that hand. Uh yeah, I can.
Yeah. Here's what I did. Uh my current situation, I have an actual residential, uh, an actual residential hour uh sorry, uh commercial hood. Back in the day before I uh had that, I went to Home Depot, I bought two of the crappy little hoods and I bolted them together, like uh I bolted back to back and put them directly over the fryer, and I just sunk it down to very close to the level of the fryer so that uh even though the extraction is crappy, there was nowhere for it to go, and so I was able to get all of the stuff out. And that worked great, except for I eventually melted out a part of the uh of the hood just because it was so close to the fryer.
But you can make up for a good hood by putting two crappy hoods together and bolting it low down to the fryer. The disadvantage there is you have a weird ass hood in your space. The other disadvantage is that uh they're loud, those small home hoods are loud. Another thing you can do is put it outside on your porch, like a covered porch, and then just scoot it over away from the porch to fry, but then you're can only do it in fair weather, you know what I mean? Yeah.
Is that is this helpful at all? Yeah, yeah, very much. Thank you. All right. Cool.
Thanks, thanks for uh thanks for calling in. And uh Nastash is now telling me that I'm now late because I gotta go to the splendid table uh interview. But I'll finish up real quick with the milk. So uh uh it turns out I'm gonna have to do more research because uh it is true that all of the milk that we use. Mark Prince, who wrote like kind of the uh on Coffee Geek wrote the primer that everyone uses for uh doing um uh you know latte art style uh foaming, microfoam and milk.
Basically, uh his point has always been that when you heat milk, you denature whey proteins, and when they're denatured, they don't foam as well. Although UC Davis says that when you denature some of the whey proteins, it actually foams better. Huh. So who's right? I don't know.
And the other thing that's true, think about it, uh, Mark Principhiles, of which I'm one, right? Uh, when you uh use milk, you are always using, almost always, unless you aren't, using pasteurized milk. And the crap foams just fine. So I'm gonna have to do more research. Please, anyone call in with some questions or comments regarding that.
And hopefully I hear more about tablet compaction for next week's show. Thank you, and come back next week for cooking a shows. 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.
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