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Broadcasting live from Robert is 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 every Tuesday from the back of Roberta's Pizzeria in Bushwick, Brooklyn on the Heritage Radio Network, answering all of your cooking related questions, technical or not. Call your questions in to 718497-2128.
That's 718497-2128. As usual, joined in the studio here with Nastasha the Hammer Lopez. How are you? I didn't. Nice.
That's really nice. Nice. Nice. That's just because she beat you here. Yeah.
I was like, Mark, we do have time to shave the back of your neck. Oh, that's what's happening. Now you all know something about Mark Ladner, like that. No, don't say. Alright, now, uh also, uh, howdy jack and the rest.
You like that? We got a quote like that last week. But I want everyone to know that uh was it two days ago on Sunday, Nastasha, the hammer, had dinner with none other than Dr. Ruth. Right?
I found out that she is an excellent sniper. You mean like sh like eBay sniping or killing people? Killing people. Yeah? Yeah.
So it's like all about the good sex, and if the sex isn't good, take you out from long range without you knowing. Wait, what? Yeah. Wait, wait, wait. Wait, wait.
You gotta talk more about this. First of all, she's 90 years old, folks, right? Yeah. And then her parents were uh, you know, died in the concentration camp. She was taken to an orphanage in Switzerland, and then for some reason she learned how to be a sniper.
After the war or during the war? During the war. Wow. Yeah. So like that little smile means that she will she will shoot you straight between the damned eyes.
Yeah. Wow. Yeah. I had no is this not is this commonly known, Dr. Ruth information?
No, I don't know how it came up. Well, with Nastasha in the house, you know, murder and sniping is gonna come up eventually. That's crazy stuff. Yeah. Wow.
That's impressive. That that certainly overshadows what I did this weekend. I went to the Sean Casey Animal Shelter in Brooklyn because we were looking to get a pet. Oh wow. Finally.
Well, Booker wanted a cat, of course, but we can't have cats because uh, you know, my sister-in-law is uh deadly allergic to them. And uh Jen doesn't want a dog. Oh, so you're getting an iguana. No, but the snakes, I mean, what are you gonna do with the snake? I was like, hey kids, you gotta feed the snake whole defrosted mice.
You have to purchase packages of like uh frozen whole mice. Wow that are they're frozen in kind of a uh suppository shape so that the snakes can just swallow those suckers without choking. You thaw them out, you thaw out this dead mouse, you throw it in the cage. I thought you were supposed to give him a live one. Uh well I mean I guess you could, but it's probably safer for the snake and kind of less traumatic for the kids if you throw in a frozen anyway, whatever.
I want a bird now. Not the things I want a bird. You know they have 20 pound turtles there? 20 pounds tortoise. Yeah, if they won't they won't give you the tortoise.
The tortoise they don't want to encourage people to own tortoises. Oh. This is a rescue only. Anyway. Uh okay.
Uh questions coming in. Uh hi, thanks for the brilliant show. Well, I don't know about that, but uh, thank you for enjoying it. Uh it's informative and hilarious and the absolute high point of my week. I've recently become chef of a medium-sized fine dining restaurant in Bergen.
Uh and I can't pronounce it with soot and salt, but but this isn't Bergen County, New Jersey. This is Bergen, Norway. Cool. Yeah, yeah, very cool. Nothing wrong with Bergen County.
Well. Stasi's got her jersey face on now. Actually, I'm gonna go to Jersey next weekend, rock and mineral show. The young one wants to go to a rock and mineral show in Jersey. Cool.
Did you know that New Jersey is one of the mineral capitals of the world? Yeah, I went there as a kid too. It's awesome. Yeah, right? It's cool, right?
Yeah, that's really cool. Yeah, see? See? Minerals. Okay.
Uh, where was I? Oh, yes. Uh somehow I got uh somehow I got drawn off track. Can you believe that, Nastasha? Uh and my so did my iPad.
Okay. We normally cook our fish wrapped in cling film. That's plastic wrap for all you guys out there. Uh, in the rationale combi oven with a fairly high delta T. Uh, meaning, if you don't know what we're talking about, it means that he's trying to cook it to uh a particular temperature, uh, let's say in the uh in the like 50 or somewhere Celsius in the middle or below, and then uh using a much higher temperature, like 60 or something Celsius, uh to cook it in, uh, which is actually a standard way of cooking, but in low temperature we talk about delta T's, we're talking about very specific uh differences in temperature between the cooking medium and uh what we're cooking.
Anyway, uh okay, with a fairly high delta T, usually 65 degrees centigrade for a core temperature of 39 to 42, which is I don't know what that is, but it's something like a hundred and see 42 is something like a hundred and three or something like that. It's the Fahrenheit. It's very low, very low. This is on the very, very low scale of uh cooking. In fact, most a lot of people wouldn't call it cooking, we call it warming.
There's like a lot of debate and contention about whether or not this is uh I mean I like it, but like this hyper low temperature fish anyway, let me get finished with with the question. Uh this yields a delicious fish in about five to seven minutes, but also a grossly overcooked and ugly exterior. Uh and what I'm assuming is happening is the outside is overcooked because 65 degrees is uh is high. And uh secondly, uh when you're cooking uh low temp in these temperature ranges, right, where you're not getting any seared uh or any sort of browning on the outside, you get uh white proteins that come out of uh basically solution or are drawn out and coagulate and look like little specks of almost egg white on the surface of the fish, and they look gross. Anyway, um okay.
So last night during service, we tried steaming the fish, but not really steaming, steaming is a misnomer. He had it in the combi oven with 100% humidity at 45 degrees centigrade to a core temperature of 42 centigrade, and it was awesome, stunning. The taste was almost raw, and the texture was almost flaky and completely transparent. It took uh we we cooked it almost 45 minutes. So my problem is, is this safe?
I always say to my customers that all the fish and seafood we serve are unpasteurized and/or raw, but is the additional 45 minutes in the danger zone okay? We use very fresh fish, usually in rigor. We dry salt it uh for 20 minutes beforehand. Uh and thanks, and please say hi to the guys out in Blue Hill Stone Barnes. So hello, Blue Hill Stone Barnes from uh Eric in Bergen, Norway.
Um okay. So my feel uh also he sent a follow-up email and he said 45 minutes was not the time needed to get the fish to the core temperature. It was an experiment to see if we could drop the fish in the combi as soon as we got the order in from a customer, but presumably it's a tasting plate, so it comes in early, uh, right? And if it would still be good after that amount of time. I now think it would be better to drop the fish when we have sent all the amounts to the to the table.
That would probably bring the cooking time down to 20 or 30 minutes. Uh we have a vacuum machine, uh vacuum packer, circulators, and so that's an option instead of putting heating in the combi oven, is heat transfer much quicker in a vacuum bag than in a combi. We feel cooking fish in a bag is good, but the look and texture suffers ever so slightly uh because their machine is small and they use an analog pressure meter, etc. etc. So they can never be very accurate with how much vacuum.
Uh it was also additional work. Okay, look. Let's knock these out in reverse order. One, I don't feel you have a need to vacuum the fish in a vacuum bag uh unless you are uh I mean most of us don't have a combi oven, right? And so vacing fish in a bag is the only way, or ziplocking a fish in a bag really is the only way we can uh do low temperature work with fish, right?
If you have a combi oven or if you have a uh uh man, the word just went right out of my head. If you have a combi oven or if you have a CVAP, you can do low temperature without it, and in many ways uh it's superior because uh a bag does a couple things. One, it tends to deform the portion slightly, right? Unless you're very good at vacuuming it or you put a lot of oil into it. Uh and two, if you suck a vacuum on fish uh and cook under a vacuum, I find that the texture is affected.
One of the things we do in the low temperature sous-vide class uh that I teach is um we serve a variety of the same fish in a sir at a variety of different vacuum levels cooked, and everyone, everyone can tell the difference in the higher vac fish. And also no one really likes usually the the super higher vac fish and also even some of the medium vac ones are weird. Ziplocks are usually pretty damn good because they don't have any sort of vacuum effect, but they allow you to cook low temperature and go on cooking issues, which yes, yes, I know I haven't written for in a long time. Uh and uh you you'll see step-by-step instructions on how to put uh fish in a Ziploc bag. Um But it is more work.
The other advantage of vacuum is you can infuse flavors uh if you do it, but you're not gonna hold these fish for a long time. Uh secondly, uh if you're telling people this stuff is raw and unpasteurized, uh, yeah, that's good. That's a good first step. I would not cook these things at that temperature for 45 minutes because you're incubating uh bacteria at that temperature. Um I think your 20 minute window is a lot uh safer, a lot, lot safer.
Um also 45 minutes, it might not be a problem with ling. I don't have a lot of experience with ling. Uh um, but uh some of your fatty fattier fishes uh will have enzymes in them that continue to break the fish down over time, and so a 45 minute fish will get mushy, even if uh it doesn't get uh microbially spoiled, it will get mushy. Uh I don't know specifically that when you when you put back when you put a piece of fish into the danger zone, uh the bacteria doesn't start growing immediately. There's a uh a lag time before the bacteria start growing, and then it goes into a log rate where it's growing uh at you know ferocious rates.
But the problem is I don't know exactly how long it's gonna take to get into the log rate uh of cooking, but your zone is right in the log area of growth where it's gonna grow at a ferocious rate. Then you have the problem if it goes out and you don't know how fast it was uh it was being served. I would feel completely comfortable with a fish that you tell people uh is basically raw, uncooked, unpasteurized, etc. Uh, with a 20 minute, with a 10 to 20 minute cook time and out if they were going to eat it right away and you never had the opportunity of trying to re-chill it again and serve it if anything happened. That I'd feel comfortable with 45 minutes, I'd start to feel a little bit um uncomfortable.
I mean, you know, again, you're probably not gonna do anything, but who knows. Also, certain fish can develop at these low temperatures uh histamines. Um I don't know which ones they are, but this is what Bruno Gusot tells me. I've never done the research because I kind of was looking at him cross-eyed when he was telling me because I he just hates this texture of fish. I mean, the real problem is is that also is that at these super low temperatures people, if you've never had these things, right?
Like this super super low temperature fish that we're talking about was one of the reasons why a lot of chefs in America, like Wiley Dufrein, my brother-in-law got into sous vide and low temperature in the first place is to get these hyper low textures of fish. They look amazing. They look like like almost like uh like candy, like jelly, like s like sometimes like it's almost like a like a vacuum-infused watermelon, like f like if it's like something like a like a salmon. So they look amazing. Like uh and the texture is uh we usually describe as kind of fudgy and dense.
Uh there's a particular temperature window right around there where the intense fishiness of raw fish goes away and yet it doesn't have the texture of cooked fish, and it's awesome. I really like it. A good fifty percent of the customers here in in New York don't like that texture. And so a lot of people have kind of moved away um from that kind of cooking here in the States. But yet uh it is a virtuoso thing to do.
Uh did I actually did I answer the question? I can't even remember. I did. And we just got an email from Matthew Leaf that says, Hey Nastasia, the way I remember it is that Dr. Ruth became a sniper for Israel after the war.
Oh, after the war of the war. Nice. I'm still trying to imagine this like what I've always known as kind of a sweet older woman sniping people. Yes. You know?
Like a little gun to the head sniping issue thing. Anyway, hmm. Uh all right, so you want to go to a first commercial break and come back? Sure. All right, let's go to our first commercial break.
Call your questions. 27184972128, that's 7184972128 cooking issues. That is Fay Lakuti Zombie. Zombie. Are you gonna like are you gonna like put that in with like cranberry zombie, like like opposite zombie?
Zombie opposites. No. So you know, speaking of zombie, my son is obsessed with this game, Zombie Highway. Have you played that game? Sounds awesome, though.
Yeah. Yeah. He was he was uh yeah, anyway, I won't get into it. Okay. Today's show is sponsored by Modernist Pantry, supplying innovative ingredients for the modern cook.
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It is particularly useful in creating what the heck are you opening over there? It's like it's like the sound effects thing. She like holds her zipper pocket right next to the uh microphone and goes it's crazy. Anyway, uh, where was I? Uh stabilize emulsions and thicken liquids.
It is particularly useful in creating a clean and creamy mouthfeel in beverages. Fans that's a gross thing to say, right? Nastash is giving her clean and creamy look. Uh fans of cooking issues that place an order of $25 or more before next week's show. We'll get a free package of PGA to play with.
Simply use the promo code CI75 when placing your order online at modernistpantry.com. Visit modernist pantry.com today for all of your modernist cooking needs. Alright. So PGA is one of the only uh PGA is one of the only uh ingredients that we use, along with methyl cell, methyl cellulose, that uh is not uh natural that we personally, I mean, use. And uh it's derived from um alginate and it's used as a thickener and especially in beverages.
It's been phased out recently because of label declaration problems because people want to say all natural and it's not. And the second reason is it's expensive. But it is a fantastic and unlike alginate, it does not have a problem with acidity. Color, you're on the air. Hey Dave, this is Mark Colling from Toronto, Canada.
How you doing? Great. I'm a big fan of your show. We listen to it all the time, and uh two good friends of mine are on their honeymoon, they're at your show right now, so big ups to Ann and Adam. Wait, what I do have a question for you.
What do they look like? Um they're you know, average height. Um Adam's got a bit of a pot belly. Wow. I wonder whether I wonder whether they're eating.
He's got a full head of hair. Yeah, okay. They're waving. Yeah. We're waving too much.
Oh, that's awesome. Uh you know what? You know what? I have a question. Is Indie Jesus here, Jack?
Can we get Indie Jesus to serve them? I haven't seen him. I he might have today off. It's awful. He's mysteriously missing.
Oh my gosh. All right. We'll look for him. All right. So your question.
My question is, um, so I'm interested in trying to do some freeze drying at home in my freezer. Ooh. And I built a couple sous-vide machines, so I understand about the the temperature controllers. I'm wondering if I can use a pressure controller to sort of put a pressure vessel in my freezer with whatever food I want to freeze dry, and then sort of decrease the pressure as the temperature goes down, trying to follow the you know, the triple point line of the the water phase. Okay, so you your your main um problem.
I mean, first of all, uh do you have access to uh liquid nitrogen and or dry ice? Uh dry ice. Okay. Uh yeah, you're gonna need to I mean i in general in a freeze dryer, they're gonna they'll actually sometimes heat heat the sample, right? I mean, what w what you're gonna need to do is uh get first do you have a really good vacuum source?
Uh yeah, I've got a pretty good vacuum pump. Yeah. Like a commercial, I can get a commercial vacuum pump. Like what but in other words, I I haven't looked it up recently, but you know, it's it's basically the the vacuum pumps that I use are commercial refrigeration vacuum pumps, and they only get down to about I'd say four, you know, three or four millibar in that range. And you're gonna need to get substantially better, you're gonna need to get better than that to get a really good result out of it.
Uh you need to get quite low, and you're gonna have to ensure that your cold trap, right, that can um you know the w so basically what you know for those of you who don't know, freeze drying, what you do is you freeze something typically, then you place it uh in a vessel, you suck a vacuum on it, and in and in between that and the vacuum you put a cold trap and the the liquids that are frozen solids, so say solids frozen in the thing, sublimate, turn to a gas, migrate to the cold trap where they're frozen in the cold trap, and you maintain a vacuum until uh the majority of the liquid that's in the product, or what would be a liquid in the product has sublimated and migrated over to the cold trap. That's the theory of operation uh of it. But typically you need to get a fairly cold um uh cold trap, so dry ice is fine. Uh anything I think below about minus sixty Celsius, I think is okay. Uh, but colder is typically better.
But you're gonna need to keep it cold the whole time. I would tr if you can, I mean if you can, I would uh use your vacuum pump to also vacuum insulate the cold trap on the outside. It's gonna stop your uh heat loss and prolong the life of your uh coolant of your uh dry ice. Um the other thing is uh yeah, the temperature control and I guess a freezer would work. But your main problem is gonna be getting the vacuum right and making sure your cold trap stays cold.
I've never had luck, let's put it that way. And the uh I tried it in the rotovap, basically using the roto vap as a kind of a a cheap uh way to freeze dry with my refrigeration vacuum pump, but again, that only got down, even I tweaked it all the way out and only got it got down to maybe like two, three millibar, and it's still I did not get any luck. But I encourage you to try and tell me what happens. Okay, we'll do. I'll keep experimenting and post something on the blog if uh anything works.
Please do. Please do. Thanks, thanks for thanks for calling it. My pleasure. All right.
Okay. Um wait, we have a follow-up. I just oh wait, wait, so we have a question in the other order, there you go. Other order, here we go. Uh from uh Aaron Call.
Hey cooking issue, Steam, great show. I started listening a couple months ago. I'm getting caught up with all the back shows. I recently decided to do a DIY, that's do it yourself, circulator, and just got it finished last weekend. I started uh with the Seattle Food Geek and Oh My Puddin plans, which I don't I don't know those particular ones, but I'm sure they're well-known plans on the on the internets.
But then made a few changes. Uh what I think are improvements. So that leads to my question. First, uh the fish tank pump I started with died around 55 degrees Celsius. I am now using a $15 high temperature pump that only moves one liter per minute, roughly 16 gallons per hour.
Using several probes, it seems to be acceptable in a small bath with one bag. Do you think this is enough movement or can you recommend a faster high temperature pump that won't break the bank? Okay, that I do not think that's enough. Uh that's look, any minor circulation is gonna be enough for one bag in a pot because you just need to get the thing moving. The problem is if you put the heater into a bigger unit and then you have a lot of bags in it, you're gonna have an you're gonna have issues with uh dead spots.
So uh a high pump, uh high you know, a higher flow pump is gonna be uh better typically. The one the last time I did one, I used a pump that was recommended uh on the brewer's forums. I forget what it is, but it wasn't that expensive for uh recirculated uh mash pumps, uh rims method, uh, and uh those pumps uh handle water quite well, and I believe can go up into the mid-60s or better uh Celsius. So you might want to check out the brewers' forums for uh recirculated mash pump setups, and they all have cheap ones. I just can't remember off the top of my head.
It's also readily available, the pump I remember from sources like Granger or eBay. Okay, second. Uh blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Second, about safety. I know this is a topic you've addressed before, but I wonder if you could quickly run through some safety tips.
I'm using Ziploc bags. Under what circumstances and how critical is getting every last bit of air out. This is tough with ground meat. Is there an absolute minimum temperature to which you'd cook grocery store beef, chicken, whole or ground? Can I add anything to the bag to adjust pH or oxygen to help?
Anything else? Thanks, uh, Aaron Call. Okay, look. Uh and I'll I'll hit the follow-up when I w when I wrote in. Um okay.
Uh I'll do the follow-up afterwards. So the deal is is with safety, you don't need to get all of the air out of the bag. Uh you know, the the reason to get all you're not trying to do preservation for a long time, you're trying to cook, right? So getting the air out isn't as big a deal. That said, you can get some oxidation if there's an excess amount of air, especially on something like a uh creme en glaze.
When you're cooking a cremon glaze, you want to get the air out because I've noticed you get more of kind of an eggy sulfury taste if you don't. That's why, even though I cook a lot of meats in Ziploc bags at home, I really do prefer vacuuming for something like a creme en glaze when you're cooking it. Uh, ground meat, you don't want to get all the air out. If you did, it would be, you know, like a puck, it would be like a sausage. You wouldn't want that.
So you want to keep keep, you know, you want to keep it not not dense and crushed down. Um so the minimum temperature I would cook, uh depends what you mean by minimum. The minimum temperature that I typically recommend for people to cook at is about 54.4 Celsius, uh, because that's the minimum temperature for beef on the uh on the food, you know, the FSIS USDA website. So that's the lowest temperature that I usually recommend. There are people that recommend lower.
I typically will cook at fifty-five like steak. I will typically, and even ground meat if you cook it long enough, you have to cook it long enough because you put a lot of bacteria into the inside of the meat when you grind it, but uh 55 uh for steak and usually for uh for a hamburger I'll do like fifty six uh if I want like a rarish, medium rarish kind of thing. Cook it through. Then if you want it to maintain rare all the way through, drop the temperature to 50 degrees Celsius for uh uh about 30 minutes to to cool it, cool it down, then sear the hell out of it to get a crust on it. If you want the burger to have more of a standard taste, then don't chill it before you cook it, and you'll be fine.
But that's uh typically uh what I do. Uh and as the follow-up, I took copious uh copious notes and decent photos through the process of making the circulator. You mentioned you have a close relationship to the poly science guys, so I don't know whether you'd be interested, but I'm happy to write it up and send it to you to use as a blog post, another resource, or even just for your amusement or a critique. It's surely no thing of beauty, but I think an improvement of the other plans that already exist on the internet with greater detail in the construction steps. Let me know if it's worth my time to draft and I'll send it your way.
Why don't you send some of the photos to Stas? She'll look at it. She's a rough critic. You're the roughest critic in the world. She she hates ninety percent of the stuff I do.
And she hangs out on the weekend with snipers. Right? Okay. Paul writes in with a comment on last week's show where I forget who it was, called in and said he had problems with his chickens being tough. Every like fifth chicken breast was being tough from the Costco.
And he says, virtually all broilers, uh, nine all nine billion of them that are slaughtered in the US, nine billion. Jesus. Wow. Uh in the US are slaughtered at essentially the same age, 40 to 45 days. So tough chicken is likely not an age effect.
I I agree. But the question is, what is the effect, Dan? Has anyone else noticed the one in five tough breast problem at Costco? Have you noticed that? No.
And then we'll there is a Costco in the Bronx in Harlem. Really? Mm-hmm. How do you notice? I passed it.
How do you on the train? If you go on the Metro North, you can see Target and Costco. The funny thing is it's actually easier for me to fly to Europe than it is for me to go to uh you know, above. Yeah, it's crazy. For those of you that don't know New York, like we think we're hot snots here, but I mean, I don't mean that in a bad way.
I mean, but I mean, yeah, you know what I'm talking about. And but the the thing is is that we're so provincial, we hardly ever leave within like 10 blocks or 20 blocks of where we live. We're like, oh my god, uptown. I have to go uptown. You know, coming out to Brooklyn here, basically I feel like I'm uh I'm uh an adventurer, an explorer because I live in Manhattan.
And people in Brooklyn, I guess sometimes feel the same way. They're like, oh man, I gotta go into the city, I gotta go to Manhattan, Jesus. Anyway, weird. What do you think, Jack? Yeah, that's exactly how I feel when I have to go to the city.
Yeah, see? But notice they call the city. Yeah, booya! Okay. Uh and a question from Paul.
Over the last month, Dave has mentioned two preferred knife sharpening tools, Duo Sharp and Edge Pro. Can you comment on the need to have both? Or is one preferred and which one? The um okay. So the Edge Pro is a sharpening system, and it's one of the uh sharpening systems that's based on fixing the angle between the knife blade and the uh sharpening tool.
So basically you have on the edge pro, you hold the knife by the handle with the blade facing towards you, and there's a stick on it that you rub back and forth over the surface of the knife, and that stick's maintained at a at a very you know precise angle. So you can get both sides of the knife, and you don't have to think, you don't have to look, and you can sharpen a billion knives in like 13 seconds once you set it up. It takes like five, six minutes to set it up. Once you set it up, you can sharpen all your knives very quickly to the same edge angle. It's extremely repeatable.
So if you want to know if you know you want a particular edge angle on something, you can just rip them all through, right? Now, uh it's not very effective uh if you only need to do one or two knives, or if you need to constantly change your angles, or if all of your knives are at different edge angles, because then uh you know you're having to reset it each time and and all this other stuff. I do like it for multiple multiple things, and it gets things unbelievably sharp, okay? And it has a wide range of grits on it, and you can replace the grits, and this you know the things stay true and they don't gouge out. The um the duo sharp is basically just a hand, a large the one that I use is a large hand diamond whetstone, right?
And what I you know it requires you to have a uh it you you know, like a traditionally sharpening your knives, it requires you to use your senses, your hands, your eyes, and your you know your your finger when you're when you're you know feeling for the burr edge to determine whether you've gotten the angle correct on the sharpening and uh you know when you're done, etc. etc. They have a grit on both sides. What I like about the duo sharp is it's extremely thin, it's fairly light, and it will never warp, and you'll never gouge it out because it's uh diamonds. So, like a lot of the Japanese water stones have problems where they get gouged and they have to be retrewed over time.
That said, like I like I say, most like high-end chefs, they still adhere to their uh, you know, their Japanese water stones, and they would probably scoff at you know, my duo sharp uh that I have around. But when I use it, my knives are freaking sharp, and I get people who are like, all right, that's freaking sharp. And uh Nils, who is a water stone man for many years, uh tried mine when I was away once and was like, alright, I'm getting one of these suckers because you know what? It's easy to fit in my bag. I don't have to freaking soak it in water.
It doesn't make a mess all over my knives the way that the uh water stones do. Uh, and I don't have to retrew it ever. Done done done done and done. Right? Hey, look, if you don't like it, call up and blame me and tell me I'm a jerkwad.
But make sure you get the really, really uh the the green and red one. Don't get one of the coarser ones. It's not gonna be it's not gonna be happy for you. Okay. So uh I have a uh should we do one more quick commercial break there, Jack?
What do you think? Yes. Commercial break, cooking issues, don't bring that shit to me. Don't bring bullshit to Africa. Don't bring that shit to me.
Don't bring Dashi and Brucey to Africa. That's exactly what he was saying. This is a Japanese food hater from Africa. Yeah, man. What was that?
Fighting words. Well, I had to just, you know, it was a quick commercial break call by you, so I did just click on something. But what the heck was that? That was Sean Cootie. I'm guessing Fela Kuti's son.
And the whole premise of this is I do not want to see a Japanese store in Africa. And furthermore, furthermore, I do not want to see any sort of crappy Japanese African fusion cuisine with your Dashi based stuff in my in my in in my food, basically. Yeah. That's crazy, crazy stuff. Crazy stuff?
Stas, you would like that. Stas does not like combo. You like Dashi, though. Yeah. As long as it's got the katsu Bushi in it.
Yeah. But don't bring Bushi to that guy. Don't do it. Don't do it. Don't do it.
He's not pleased with it. Okay. Wow. I I can't even think about anything else. My whole life's outlook is like changed.
I did not realize there was such a katsu Bushi hating crowd out there. Uh with uh, you know, um yeah, weird. Okay. Uh hey Nastasha. Uh just you.
I love what you and Dave. Oh, I love what you and Dave do. Uh, but mostly you, Nastashi. They know I read. They know you read?
Yeah. The emails. Oh, I see. I mean, she can also read. She has that capability.
Anyway, uh, I have two questions. Okay, listen, I'm gonna answer the first question, or really I'm gonna post postpone because I really don't know the answer to the first question. And the second one, I'm gonna do your question along with someone else's question because it's one of those rare instances where I've gotten very similar questions in the same week. Okay. One.
Where does the term eighty six come from? So those of you that don't know what we're talking about, uh, usually there's a there's a number of things. You could say someone is eighty six, which means they're no longer welcome, right? In a restaurant or a place, or you could say an item is 86, and that means we're out of it and and stop serving it, right? So, you know, when last night when we ran out of the peach, uh, by the way, listen to this.
At the bar, Booker and Dax, we have a peach dish on the menu, a peach drink. I don't want to hear about it about how it's not peach season. Let me tell you something. It's never freaking peach season in New York, right? I mean, like, we grow peaches here.
Remember when we had those really good ones? Were they from New York? No. They were from the remember they were we bought them in Harlem, but they were trucked up from like uh down south somewhere, like like Maryland or some crap, and he's known for that, right? New York is not like look, I have the book Peaches in New York, so I'm fully aware of the history of peach growing in New York State, okay?
Uh, but it it's uh, you know, look, we just it's not our finest point. But the fact of the matter is, right, that uh peaches when they are in season don't last very long. And so you have a boatload of peaches lying around. So the question is you can either make uh traditional peach brandy with it, which is delicious, right? Uh, or you can make uh peach jam, or you can make canned peaches, which Nastasha happens to find incredibly delicious.
Do you not? You like a canned peach. They're my favorite thing. Yeah. In fact, Nastasha likes a canned peach, not as a substitute for a fresh peach, but rather as its own thing.
Correct? Right. So Nastasha said, Hey, look, you know, it's uh it's winter time out. Why don't we make canned peaches a drink and put it on the menu? So we made canned peach juice, right?
And then uh Karen Jarman, one of our bartenders, made a delicious tequila mezcal umaboshi vinegar canned peach drink. Which, you know, it's clarified in the center of your snows. But people are like, oh my god, it's not seasonal. It totally is seasonal. It's absolutely seasonal.
Peaches are always in season. Well, no, canned peaches are not in season in the height of summer. You should be saving them for other times. Okay. Well, they're always in season for me.
Yes. Anyway, my point is it's okay to use it as long as you use it for the right reasons. That made that up. Oh, that reminds me. But I know I'm not gonna have time, but I have to go through it anyway.
As I was walking here to the to the radio show, I looked on the street and there was an empty, kind of crushed box uh box of hot pockets on the street. Hot pockets. You familiar with hot pockets? Yeah. Now, my kids, I don't know what the hell it is.
My kids look like go to the store, they look in the thing, and they they want the freaking hot pockets. And the thing is that the only television they ever watch is streamed through Netflix or Hulu. So they've never seen the commercial where they're like, Hot pockets. Now I I know that like hot pockets is like a, you know, that that tune, like, I almost want to buy it, you know, and the word hot pocket, like has that awesome like alliteration, hot pocket. You know what I mean?
It's like, and if they hired like Snoop Dogg to just get on the air and go like hot pockets, hot pockets, hot pockets, I would buy it. Like, if you just said it like five times in a row, I would do nothing but buy hot pockets. You know what I mean? But how the hell do my kids know this? What kind of evil marketing genius do they have that can make a kid look at a box of freaking hot pockets and say, Daddy, buy me those damn things.
What was the sound effect? I like that. What was that? Actually, uh, for those who don't know the Hot Pockets song. Oh, do it.
Do it. When you want a hot meal without a big deal, what are you gonna pick? Hot pockets! What are you gonna pick? Hot pockets!
Hot pockets filled with delicious pepperoni pizza, chicken and cheddar ham and cheese. In a crispy pocket. When it later, not in your own. It's not crispy, usually. Hot pockets!
You know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna go out and buy me some hot pockets. Oh, don't do that. But the thing is, how have my kids know that? They've never seen that.
I mean, that commercial is a sale, Jack. Come on now. It's pretty good. It's pretty damn good. Anyway, hot pockets.
Okay. Maybe we need to make a modernist pantry commercial like that. Oh man. Alright. So the second.
Oh, oh, so uh 86. I don't know how the hell we got it is. Okay, so 86. Uh anyway, the point is that when you're 86 something, uh, it's gone, or you have to get rid of the person, etc. etc.
Now, uh it's like many terms uh of this nature, uh, there's no accepted um there's no accepted uh derivation of it. The etymologies are kind of all BS and they're all based on like uh very tenuous uh reasoning. Uh some people say that, you know, Delmonico's the restaurant uh had an item number 86 that was uh always out. Uh some people have said that it comes from a streetcar where the 86th Street was the last stop. Some people have said it comes from uh, you know, the crew on a on a ship that only had eighty-five, and so the eighty-sixth person wasn't there, etc.
etc. Supposedly there was a law about alcohol service that was um, you know, Article 86 that no one's ever seen the article or printed it, uh, etc. There's no there's a table that only had 85 seats and 86, etc. blah blah blah blah blah. Anyway, uh these all seem to be pretty much to be uh horse hockey.
The other good one is uh Chumley's, which is a famous speakeasy in New York, it was spake easy, is number eighty six on its street, and so they would throw people out and they'd see the eighty six sign. Go to Snopes.com for you know, basically a good rundown of all this, but all this stuff seems kind of uh nonsense. This uh the Snopes writer, I believe it's a woman, I forget who it is. Uh I couldn't copy it because they have an anti-the like copyright. They won't let me right-click and paste.
But uh her main thesis is probably it's a rhyming slang, eighty-six for NYX. You know what I mean? Nix it, nix something, nix it eighty-six. Anyway, uh but there's also a whole host of I didn't have a chance to find my copy, but uh Darcy O'Neal's uh uh fix the pumps uh has a lot of old soda slang jargon in it, and that you know, and also probably old diner slang, and uh that's one of those old terms, so he might go into the etymology and he's good with that kind of a thing. The book Fix the Pumps, by the way, is an old slang term for check out the woman with the large breasts, basically fix the pumps.
That's what the slang is for. Uh uh anyway, so uh what do you think? Is that that answer that question? Basically, I don't think there is an answer. Uh the second question is quite interesting.
Is uh two, when it comes to soaking livers, may it be monkfish, duck, chicken, or even beef. What's the what difference does it make to soak it in water, carbonated water, or milk? What works best? Uh the carbonated water actually, uh, and this is from Philippe, the carbonated water I'd never heard of. Uh, but it's interesting.
I did notice in the 1890s, there was reference if a bird was gamey or if parts of things were gamey to uh wipe it with soda water. But my presumption with they say soda water isn't carbonated water, but water with baking soda in it. Or uh, you know, uh and so you know, or cooking soda in it. And uh uh that seems to me to make more sense because then they say to pack it with charcoal to get rid of the bad odors, right? Because you're gonna cook that damn thing, you're not gonna throw it away back in the 1890s Boston Cooking School book.
Um so I'm wondering whether that carbonated water is actually a modern thing that has some sort of scientific merit, or whether it's a misread of soda water from uh a much older technique of deodorizing a uh you know, a gamey bird. Uh the other thing, whether it's going to be water or milk and what works best, I'm going to combine in with uh a question we have on sweetbreads uh from uh Adam Lazarick. I was hoping you could give your opinion on soaking sweetbreads, livers, and other awful, mainly touching on using milk or not. If milk, what's exactly why exactly is it used, and are there other alternatives? Is there a time maybe you could touch on your preferred cooking technique for cooking sweetbreads, i.e.
in corte bouillon, sous vide or not, to press or not, peel before or after, and so on. I've always soaked in milk, poached and then pressed, but never really questioned why to press and soak in milk. Okay, so I'm gonna handle those two things at once. Here's the deal. Uh most of the cooking techniques for awful involve getting it's a horrible word, right?
They're they they now but even like all of the alternatives they use for awful are also awful, like variety meats. Variety. Sounds terrible, right? Anyway. Uh a lot of these techniques are made to either get rid of residual blood in them uh because there's uh you know, they're usually typically they're not um they're not muscle, and so a lot of times you want to get rid of the blood, like in sweetbreads, so that the color is good.
So soaking helps with that. Or to get rid of the off flavors that develop because um these things spoil relatively quickly compared to muscle meats and tend to have a higher bacterial contamination at the beginning, right? And they also uh tend to have a lot of fat that tends to break down more than the fat in uh regular whole muscle cuts. And so you have uh, you know, fat oxidation, you have microbial spoilage, uh, and you have a lot of other things that cause these things to kind of be stinky and to need a little uh special tender loving care before they're cooked. And that's a lot of times what the soak is doing.
Also, if you're gonna poach something, uh, you know, they'll typically say put it in cold and bring it up when you're poaching it, and that's also to draw stuff out. McGee mentions this that that you know you start cold and bring it up so that you can um so that basically you're drawing soluble proteins out, and then once they're drawn out, cold, then they coagulate on the surface, and you can skim off that uh undesirable scum that floats on the top of the uh of the blanching pot when you're doing uh poaching of uh offal and sweetbreads and things like this. Now, milk is very interesting because a lot of these uh a lot of these cuts can uh develop uh off flavors due to fat breakdown, rancidity, and um basically just you know the breakdown, free fatty acids, things like this. And they have a lot of lipid-based um uh off flavors in them. If you soak in milk, milk is going to be better.
This is by the way, just off the top of my head, but I believe it to be true. Uh but this is not based in like scientific research, but this is what I'm telling you. And someone can come back and tell me I'm a jerk or an idiot, which I'm sure they will. Uh uh like milk is good because it's water, but it has uh uh fat in it. So I'm thinking skim milk probably wouldn't be as good for this, right?
And it would suck out the um it would suck out some of the fat-based off flavors, right? Better than water alone would. That's my guess. What do you think about that guess, Nastasha? That's a good guess.
Yeah, good guess, good guess. Anyway, so the soaking is good is is to draw out uh things that are soluble, that are not bound, uh that can be taken off. Uh salt is going to flavor it, it's also going to um probably help it out texturally. Uh if you use salt water, uh salted milk might be a good alternative. Uh, and I think that's what's going on.
And then you you never keep the milk, you discard it because it apparently is sucking up all the evil, all the evil humor, right? Uh and so that is my guess for that. Uh as for um But I want are there any other like partially fatty things that you could use like that? I mean, I bet you could make a soaking thing that wasn't milk if you were allergic to milk. You could like emulsify some fat into something with an emulsifier and then add it to it.
You think that that might work. Like take a Lloyd 310S, use that to make like a uh an olive oil water emulsion, or use an ultrasonic homogenizer to make a milk out of like uh, you know, you could do it. I mean you could make a non-milk-based alternative if the question is that you can't use milk. Uh I tend to do, and I don't know why, but I tend to do the the old school uh with sweetbreads. I um I will I will soak them in salt water, poach them in milk, press them, and then fry them.
Uh but I don't know why. I like a crispy sweetbread, by the way. I don't do sous vide or any of that stuff on it. Uh I should. I have the instructions for it, uh or the temperatures for it on the blog in the in the cooking charge, but typically I do it the old school way because I like a crunchy sweetbread, right?
And not a mushy one. Do you like a mushy sweet bread or crunchy? Crunchy. Crunchy, yeah. Uh and uh I press it so it stays together.
I put salt water in the soak so that it tastes good and uh and draws out the extra uh blood and whatnot, and I use milk because I don't know why. I just do it. You know what I mean? Uh right? I mean, there's no no better.
Oh, by the way, if you like uh sweetbreads, but you uh don't like uh uh bovine spongiform and cephalopathy, aka mad cow, or if you're worried about it, I don't know if people are still worried about that nowadays. Or if you're worried about any sort of uh T S E trans uh transfer uh miscible, transmissible spongiform and cephalopathy, which is degenerative uh drain disorder uh brain disorder uh related to you, yup squatch fell, very similar, 100% fatal, uh takes a long time. Anyway, uh, if you're worried about that, uh you can make something of very passable fake sweet bread using uh chicken skins. You just roll up uh you you you sprinkle chicken skins with salt and meat glue, roll them into a roulade, let them set, poach them off, cut them into pinwheels, and deep fry them, and they are very similar to sweetbreads, and delicious, I might add. Very delicious.
Dave, I hate to do this, but it's time. Oh man, I can't get the one last one. We gotta get the next caller on the line for the next show. Oh man. Alright, listen, Lee Calman.
I have your question on hearts, on how to cook hearts, and I will tell them I will tell you my answers on it next week. And it involves an article called Studies on the Development of Tenderized Chicken Gizzard and Goat Heart Pickles. 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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