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 on the Heritage Radio Network in the back of Roberta's Pizzeria in Bushwick, Brooklyn, from approximately 12 to 1245 every Tuesday. Joined again in the studio with Nastasha the Hammer Lopez.
How are you doing, Nastasha? Yeah. Strong. Yeah, so last week, uh, while I was here chilling with uh Tony Kinayaro in the in the studio, Nastasha was pretending to be me in Orlando, Florida, with the Bukey people, makers of our favorite rotovap. How'd that go?
Good. I get all the cool trips to Orlando. Dave goes to Sweden and Berlin. I know you're just the lucky one, aren't I? Lucky one.
Yeah, well, I told you you're supposed to uh get a free trip to uh Switzerland. For those of you that don't know, Nastasha is a uh a Switzerland lover. Italian Swiss lover. That they're German Swiss. It does not interest me.
So are you now insulting Bukey, who like may give us the I'm not, they love me. Alright. Call me all the Equations 2, 718497-2128. That's 718 497-2128. And Nastasha writes here that today is the Indy Jesus.
It's not Indie Jesus. I know Indy. Well, we haven't seen him in a while, but there's another one. No, no, he he he's here. He just doesn't work on Tuesdays.
I saw him on Sunday. This is like Indie Apostle. Right here, he's like a fail sh uh pale, pale shadow of the real Indie Jesus. That's a real nice dude. Oh yeah.
No, we're not saying he's bad. I'm not saying he's a bad human being. I'm saying he's a pale shadow of Indy Jesus and his Jesusness. That's all. That's all I'm saying.
Uh another note before we move on to more germane issues. Uh today, Nastasha tells me is the first day of spring. Uh, which is interesting that she cares about that because for those of you that are ever gonna meet Nastasha, never say to her that the weather is nice out. Never. It's not that she hates bad weather like I do.
I actually hate bad we uh good weather rather. I hate the sun, I hate everything about it. I'd be a cave uh dwelling uh troglown diet if I could. But uh Nastasha likes uh nice weather, but hates people in nice weather. Yeah.
True? I hate when they're happy. Yeah. You want to explain that for the folks? No, I just don't, I just don't like how people associate weather with their happiness, their level of happiness and productivity.
That's really deep. She's like, that person said it was nice out so that they're gonna have a go have a good time outside. Yeah. Those bastards. She hates that, right?
Yeah. What if they're hipsters? This is the worst combination of the thing. Worse, like a fair weather, happy hipster is like Nastasha Kryptonite. Okay.
This is from Elliot Papanow. I made corned beef sausage over the weekend. The idea came from Rob Levitt at the Butcher and Larder in Chicago, a place I've never been. I haven't been to Chicago in a couple years, though. I used to go to the NRA show, you know, the National Restaurant Association, not the rifle show.
Uh but uh, you know, budgets being what they are, I haven't been in a while. Anyway, uh the corned beef sausages were outstanding. Corned beef, potato, carrot, cabbage, cooked, ground, and stuffed. Um I did it the same way you would do a boudon noir. Uh served it with some sauerkraut, which is delicious, and mustard on a rye uh sausage roll.
Uh I think the dish would also work. It presented like Dave Chang's hot brown. Uh I had to go look up Dave's hot brown hot brown, as you may or may not know, is a very famous uh Kentucky dish from the Brown Hotel in Louisville based on kind of like a Welsh rare bit kind of thing, which I I used to love Welsh rare bit, which is just toast with like a cheese sauce over the top. You ever like you ever have that? Mm-mm.
Has nothing to do with rabbit, it's not Welsh Rabbit, Welsh rare bit. It's basically a toast with cheese sauce. It's good stuff, but it's like it's got like some white wine in the cheese sauce, so it's a little like van dude. You like it actually. Sounds good.
Yeah. Anyway, uh, so this is a take on that, but of course, because it's Kentucky, they throw a bunch of meat in it, so it's got like turkey and uh and bacon and whatnot. So Dave Chang turns out. I hadn't seen it before, it was in Lucky Peach. I go did uh I looked at the video on the web and it had uh our boy Nick Wong in it.
But the funny thing is Nick Wong was, you know, one of our great uh interns uh back at the FCI, worked at uh at uh Sambar, Momofuku Sam bar for many years. Fantastic guy. I think he's he th the video was shot after Nick left. I think he was just there to pretend to be Dave Chang to see if there were anyone would notice because he used to walk around Sambar with a hat pulled over his head and rush up on people as though he were Dave Chang to freak people out. Anyway, so what Dave did was to lighten it up by rolling it in a tube in saran, uh, like you know, like our meat glue tubes, like like or Mills' meat glue tubes more accurately.
But it was turkey with uh, I forget it was in the there's another layer, oh, country ham, which is delicious. Uh, and then uh he put uh gel-an set uh like a Mornay sauce in the middle of it. Uh fried it up, served it with a delicious looking broth. Anyway, interesting. So yes, you probably could do it that way, Elliot.
Anyway, second. Uh I sent Dave a question about smoking tomatoes in the past. I vaguely remember that. You remember that? Not really.
Remember I said you had to dry them out first? Anyway. Uh, and just read in the Wall Street Journal about the fatty cues, smoked tomato bloody merry. Have you tasted it or tried to make your own at BDX? I have not.
Uh in fact, we haven't done any sort of smoked anything uh at uh the bar. And the main reason is because I have a bunch of friends who are very well known for doing smoky uh drinks. I mean, we use smoke in the form of uh mezcal or uh certain scotches that have a smoky note, but we haven't actively smoked anything because if I smoked uh a syrup, uh Evan uh Freeman would come up to me and be like, smoking syrup now, what are you making smoke coke next? Right? Which uh, you know, I don't want to hear from because Evan likes to rib me anyway, right?
So I don't want to give him anything extra rib me on. And then uh if I did something with meat like bacon, uh Don Lee and also Evan Freeman would come up and be like, Really, Dave? Really? Really? Smoky bacon?
Anyway, so uh I'm sure it's delicious. I haven't tasted it, I would love to taste it, but it's not something I can put on the bar menu without having a bunch of my friends come down on me like a ton of bricks. What do you think, Stuff? Yeah, that's true. Yeah.
Okay. This in from Andrew. Uh I was hoping you could talk about the possibility of using just Pectonex Ultra SPL for enzymatic peeling. Uh Pectinex Ultra SPL is the magical enzyme that we use that you can get from modernistpantry.com. Anyway, it uh it eats any kind of pectin and hemicellulose.
I use it for French fries, I use it for enzymatic peeling, which we're about to talk about in a minute. I use it to clarify all of our juices. Anyway, I believe rec uh uh I believe I recall uh reading or hearing that a thousand grams of water, aka a liter, uh a thousand grams of water, uh, and three grams of pectinx uh solution um water mixed with three grams of pectinex was sufficient if a 12 hour refrigerated soak is used basically to peel fruit enzymatically to get rid of the membranes. Alright? I peeled my citrus and vacuum sealed it using a chamber sealer uh in a thousand grams, put three uh thousand grams of water, three grams pectanex, and let it soak for twelve hours.
When I came back, most of the pith was a gooey texture, easily washed away. Unfortunately, the membrane between the segments was still intact and needed to be carefully removed. The exposed portion of the membrane was mostly dissolved. In the future, if just using pectanex, I will need to s uh will I need to separate each segment or is there another time saving method? I bagged a mixture of Caracera oranges, uh, Rio Star grapefruit, blood tangerine, key shoe mandarin, and mini oletangelo.
All had similar results, but some are more easily peeled. Uh thanks to the great show, and I'll be in New York this summer and plan on hitting up Booker and Dex. Okay. Uh yes, Pectenex Ultra SPL is all you need. Uh but and you actually don't even need a vacuum sealer for this guy.
Uh your main mistake, and you don't even need to soak it that long, and it doesn't need to be in the fridge. In fact, it's gonna act longer, act faster if you just uh keep it out. We usually keep ours uh, you know, at in in warm room temperatures so the enzyme uh acts faster. Um that's just what we do. Um now I mean you can use a vacuum to get it into the pith faster, but you do need to separate out the segments.
Even with a vacuum, if you put a whole peeled uh citrus in a bag, uh it's not gonna penetrate into the inner membranes. It's just not. Uh and then by the time you broke them apart, it just never seems to work as well. So, what you want to do, it might eat through one membrane. You want to break them into as small segments as you can without breaking the actual segments apart, or without actually cutting into uh the vesicle.
So grapefruits are fairly easy. The hard ones are things like pomelo, uh, and those you just kind of split it in half and then in quarters, and there's so much pith in a pomelo that a lot of times you can eat between it as long as you break it into smaller pieces and let it soak uh, you know, for a while. I wouldn't, again, I wouldn't do it at refrigeration temperature because I think that's just going to uh just slow things down. Uh, another thing, you want to keep the peels, uh, try to keep them as whole as possible, put them in the bag with it, and it'll eat the white albedo away from the peel and you get these amazing uh peels. There's um I thought we used ice water, wasn't it?
I bagged it when I used a vacuum machine. I bag it with ice water so that I can get a good vacuum seal on it. And then I would remember to throw it into a hot water bath, warm water bath to heat it back up, melt out the ice and get the enzyme cooking. I didn't want to make it that complicated, but that's actually the way that's actually the way I do it when I do it. You can go on uh cooking issues.com, which is still up, even though I haven't written on it in a long time.
And there's a whole article there I did on enzymatic peeling with uh all of my procedures. I don't use three grams per liter, I think I use four. I use four now, maybe I use three back when I wrote it, but we typically use four now. You can never know exactly how good the enzymatic activity is of your batch depending on how old it is. And four always seems to work, and it's not gonna add any off flavors, and it's not particularly more expensive when you're using it in restaurant quantity, right?
Mm-hmm. If you're gonna do the peels, sometimes a toothbrush is helpful to scrape away all the uh melted albedo. That's a gross word, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah.
All right. Anyway, you wanna go to our first marsh break? Okay. Yeah. Our first commercial break, call your questions to 718497-2128.
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Hello and welcome back to Cooking Issues. Alright. Now uh last week, because I had uh Tony here, I didn't make it to all of the questions from last week. So Nastasha Wrightly says I should go over last week's questions before I go over this week's questions. So from Joel Gargano.
Hello guys. I'm in a really weird and interesting corporate kitchen, cafeteria, really, here in New Haven. New Haven. I lived in New Haven for many years. I was at Yale and I lived there for two years afterwards.
Nice town. I actually like New Haven. Anyway, uh feeding lunch to the company's employees. I wonder what company it is. Hmm.
Anyway. Uh being a trained chef and working in a fine uh working in fine dining as a cook for the past ten years. I took the opportunity to not only run my own kitchen, but experiment as much as possible and throw some cool shiznit out to the staff. I'm a bread baker, second generation, charcuterie, not DI we ups uh DIY obsessive and really into modernist technique. For example, I'm doing all my deli meats brine and then sous videos uh sous videes, both salami and fresh sausages, and they're all coming out killer doing charcuterie in an office building.
Weird. They all come through the buffet line pulling house made bread and freshly cooked and or cured meats and put them onto plastic cafeteria trays, walk to their high school appropriate lunch table and discuss marketing strategies. It's pretty hilarious. Thought I'd share that with you guys. The movement is all over the place.
That's nice, right? Good people are using I like that stuff. The question. I'm currently attempting to create some vegan desserts for select crew of the company using hydrocolloids. I developed a super good chocolate mousse, appropriate for an ISI, that's the whipped cream makers, using VersaWhip, which is uh either soy protein or uh uh milk protein, depending on uh what it is, whey or soy protein, and Ultra Tex eight, which is a pre-cooked scar starch.
Total success. Soy whipped cream, however, is totally failing. I need some help. What type of hydrocolloid should I use for this? Xanthan and LBG, which is locust bean gum, turn it into snot.
So Xanthan is known to do that. Xanthan is the snotty gum if you use it in too high a quantity. And I tried to use uh versa whip minus a xanthan gum and LBG, but got it a runny mess. I'm assuming that the chocolate works so well because it stabilizes the mixture while the soy milk does not. Uh if the fat content of this is the fat if the fat content of soy milk is messing with me, should I try gelatin?
Well, you shouldn't try gelatin if you want it to be vegan gel, that's for sure. Although not if you're gonna tell anyone, right? Right. Yeah. Uh if you want to try something that's like gelatin that might whip into it, uh they make a um uh carrageenin is uh agar, people use agar, but I wouldn't.
People typically use carrageenin uh for things like this, and in particular they use a specialist carragenin for whipping. If you're gonna make marshmallows called genutine. And genutine is made by the CP Kelco Corporation, and it's specifically a carrageen that's meant to be a gelatin replacer for applications like marshmallows, aka things that need to be whipped and hold their texture well. Now, uh I think I looked up, there's a uh, I think what it is is it's a lack of fat, is the problem, is why it's not it might whip up, but it's not uh holding its its whipping. I looked up a uh like an in-can, like a ready whip situation, uh soy whip topping that's available, I think, mainly in the UK, called Soyatu.
And luckily, their ingredient list was on the web, so I read it. It's organic soy milk, uh, organic coconut oil, organic fat uh fractionated palm curl oil, organic sugar beet syrup, maltodextrin, tartaric acid, carragainin, sea salt, uh, and vanilla extract. Okay, so let's break this down one by one. Soy milk is the main thing that you want to make out of. It's what you want to whip up, right?
They've added coconut oil and palm kernel oil, probably to get something that's fairly solid. I think you're gonna want a fairly solid fat, like a coconut uh style thing, like coconut fat mixed with a little coconut milk, maybe something that's gonna give it some body that is a uh a fat that is fairly solid at refrigerator temperatures because it's gonna give you more body. Um okay. And then um they're adding uh maltodextrin, and I wal sugar for for sugarness, obviously. They're adding maltodextrin, what that's doing is adding some extra mass, some body to the uh soy milk and giving it extra kind of whipping properties.
Tartaric acid is probably there uh just for flavor. Uh and carrageenin is there as the uh caragina is there as the gelling agent, which is gonna be a whipping uh a whipping agent, and it's going to be uh also something that's gonna provide some structure after it's been whipped. Uh I would guess they add a little bit of something called iota carrageenin in whipped because carragean is their blend, because it will reform a gel after it stands still. Vanilla's just for flavor, and they add nitrous oxide to whip it. So I would do that.
I would add fat, first of all, is gonna get you a higher whipping uh quality on it. I would have it be cold as hell, same way you would with whipped cream. Uh I would add uh some maltodextrin, and I would use some carragainin, preferably uh genutine, uh, in the mix with it. Uh and you should be able to get a good you should be able to get a good result. Yeah?
Yes. Yes. Okay. Uh, and by the way, I thought you think this is funny as that when I was researching it. Uh, one of the first people to come out with vegan marshmallows were using a vegan gelatin replacer from this uh company called Eames.
And it turns out that these v uh these guys, it was kosher gelatin, right? And it was advertised that it was vegan. Turns out the whole thing was made out of regular gelatin. And they were just selling it to all these vegans and these kosher guys, and it literally, like, what happened is like this uh woman who was making vegan marshmallows, she like quit her job in finance or law or something like that and became a vegan marshmallow maker. She called up the guy and was like, hey, are these mar uh is this uh gelatin?
Is this totally vegan? And he's like, Yeah, this vegan, what's vegan? You know what I mean? So the company ended up going out of business, and uh yada yada, blah blah. Did you see Ellen had a how to be a vegan on her website?
I did not. Yeah. I was on Ellen last week for St. Patty's Day, and uh she turns out to she's a vegan. She's a nice lady, though.
She seems very nice. Well, I I didn't mean it like that. Only you mean things like that. She's a nice lady, though. No, I just look look, people want it.
It had nothing, they're unrelated, they're unrelated statements. Like people always want to know is the person a nice person. Oh, Jesus, you know, Anastasia, she's just like you're a crazy person. But you know what's funny? I show up at the show and the producers, very nice, were said, uh, you know, Ellen, I was making alcoholic drinks, duh, for St.
Patrick's Day, you know, because I'm you know I'm at a bar, and uh they were like, you know, Ellen is not gonna be able to drink drink the alcohol because she's shooting two shows. She shoots two shows on a Thursday. And I was like, crap. And then so I had to go in, I was trying to make all these non-alcoholic versions that looked like and tasted similar to the ones. The mint, I did a mint drink, it's impossible to do it non-alcoholic because the mint turns brown.
Anyway, um, so she shows up and she's like, What are you talking about? I'll drink it. I was like, Yeah, Ellen! Yeah! And then she slams some Jameson.
What? Yeah, she's pounding Jameson, like, I'm kidding, she didn't. She didn't, she just took a sip. My kids, you know, who never don't know Ellen, I was like, it's Dory from Nemo. They were like, crap, you met Dory?
That's freaking awesome. Uh anyway, this uh question in this is uh this is a long one from uh Ollie uh, do you think it's collette or collet? I don't know, collette. You know, collette, call it, collette. Anyway.
First of all, I'd like to say how much I've enjoyed listening to your show over the past few months. I say months because I only discovered the show recently and spent most of my commute to and from work catching up with every single podcast. Well appreciate it, Ollie. Appreciate it. It's really refreshing to hear a cooking show from people who understand the practical application of science in cooking and who are not afraid of using ingredients and methods with other which others might deem foolish or which might foolishly dismiss, or both, maybe.
I do have lots of questions I like to ask, but I thought I'd keep things brief. Sorry for not calling you up to us. Do the time differences in the UK, the show overlap with when I'm on my way home, make from work making things difficult. I was wondering what your thoughts were on seasoning meat. Taking steak and as an example, I tend to uh season roughly an hour in advance, generously sprinkle the salt, uh sprinkle the salt, and occasionally adding a small amount of minced mixed uh minced garlic with the salt.
After an hour, I'll wipe off the excess moisture before cooking using the sear flip every 20, 30 seconds method. That's the McGee special, where you flip it a bunch of times to get a more even heat, and it's a good way to approximate uh it's a good way actually to approximate kind of either a rotisserie or a low temp cook uh using a regular thing because the the heat meat never overheats all the way through. It's a basically a very high instantaneous heat input, but a low average heat input. Good technique. Anyway, this method seems to work very well, but it does raise some questions.
Uh first, you have of course covered on your blog about how if you are cooking a steak C V'd, you should not salt the meat pre-sear unless you're serving it immediately. If you're only salting it afterwards, would does not result in an inferior flavor due to the salt only being on the surface and not seasoning through the meat. I guess I'm looking for further tests between salt cook serve and salt chill salt serve. Second, is the seasoning well in advanced method only really useful for less tender cuts or cuts that have not been dry aged for any serious length of time, which will contain more moisture, or should it always be used? I did notice that when Heston Blumenthal has covered steaks in two separate cooking shows, he's never really talked about seasoning as if he ha as if it had much importance, which I found odd.
But maybe I'm thinking it's more of an issue than it really is. Now, okay, now look. Here's the deal. If I'm going to serve a steak right away, and by right away I mean within a couple of hours, I always season the meat beforehand because yes, I do think it probably makes uh a better tasting steak. However, that it's not just seasoning and uh retaining of moisture, the textural difference and the color difference of a steak that's been salted a long time in advance, let's say three hours, four hours in advance, is not it's just not nearly as good to me as a steak uh than it would be if you didn't salt it beforehand.
And so um you know, the any advantage, which is relatively minor of salting the meat, I mean it's there, I agree, but relatively minor compared to the textual breakdown of the meat uh from over salting beforehand, uh I just don't think it's worth it. So I'm t I tend not to salt meat beforehand. Now, when I'm serving a steak, I almost always will slice, I first of all I salt the bee Jesus off the out of the steak, uh outside of the steak right before I sear it. Like you know, you know how in like uh a home cooked when they sear uh well, nothing when you know, when most people sear a steak, doesn't matter where they're working, they they put a small amount of salt on the outside. Uh look, when you're searing steak people, put an absurd amount of salt on the outside before you sear it because most of it's gonna come off anyway.
You know what I mean? So sear the heck out of it. Uh and then uh I find that the advantages of pre-salting way beforehand aren't nearly as great. Also, I tend to cut my steaks before I serve them and serve them in pieces so I can also salt the uh the cut face if I need to. It's not uh a situation, for instance, like bread, where if you don't salt it beforehand, you your bread is gonna be awful like the Tuscan spray, although Nastasha claims to like Tuscan bread, even though everyone in the world knows it tastes awful, you know, right?
Right. You like it, right? Yes. Why? I just like it.
Why? Maybe it's memory oriented. Do you is it the sallow, disgusting crust, or is it the lack of flavor in the crumb that you like best? Both. Anyway.
Um, so the the thing is, is uh it's not the same as that. It's also not the same as when you're cooking something in a braise and you under salt it and then you don't get the seasoning all the way through and something that's long cooked like a pot roast or something like that. Because in a situation like that, you're relying on the seasoning penetrating the meat for the flavor of the dish. Anyway, uh that's just my uh that's just my two my two cents. That makes sense to us.
Yeah. Uh my other question is regards to New York City. I know someone calls some time ago about places to visit, and I did note down some of them, but I think you mentioned you would email a list of suggestions to them personally for bars restaurants. We're gonna be heading over what? True.
Yes. We're gonna be heading over for a week on the first leg of my two-week tour of gluttony. The following week, we're on uh we're on a Grant Akitz uh pilgrimage to Chicago for next slash Alinea slash aviary place. Uh we've never been. Uh I've been to you know, a Linny, of course.
Uh, we have a pretty tight schedule, but I thought I would ask for some feedback on what I've got down so far during my first week of April. Uh gonna go to Kaijutsu. Nastash, you're supposed to make your vegan face, but you've been, right? Kaijutsu no. That's the Japanese temple food place, the one that's or the it's um vegan or supposed to be really, really good.
WD50, gotta go to WD50, my brother-in-law Wiley, his joint, Mamafuku Sam, and Noodle Bar, and then if you're there, go to BDX. Uh per se. That's Tony's favorite place. She mentioned it last night. Roberta's.
Yeah, Tuesday. Although listen, if you want to see N D G's, this turns out Sunday at lunchtime. Sunday is appropriate to see Indy's I haven't even thought of that. That's crazy. Uh, and 11 Madison Park.
Uh, I think we could squeeze one more nice meal, and I'm basically left with going for one of the nice uh sushi places like Yesuda, Massa's way out of uh uh league budget wise. No, no, go to Bar Massa. It's it's it's the same and it's amazing, and you aren't losing anything. Yeah? Yes.
Now see, here is good information from the start. The rare piece of good. It's the only thing I've ever said. Oh, no, for N is Bash. No, but it is true.
Barmasa, same thing, less money. Amazing. Yeah? Yes. Alright, was that on your list that you had in your email list?
Probably. Uh, and Blue Hill at Stone Barnes. Um, as another place he's looking to go. Anyway, so what we're gonna do uh is at the end of the show, if there's time, Nastasha's gonna read out her email list. My phone is not recognizing the word restaurant in any I've never typed restaurant.
iPhones iPhones. Yeah, well, maybe next week we can start the show with Nustachia's reading off a list of stuff. Yeah. And don't forget to come to Booker Index Bar uh from Ali Collette, all the way from London, England. And so let's go to our second commercial break.
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Call your questions to 718497-2128. 7184972128. Coming out a question from last week. I can't remember whether I answered it, so I'll answer it again if I did last week. Stephen Garrett wrote in with two questions.
I think I only answered one. The second one comes off the tale of Rulman, that's uh, you know, Ruleman from Soul of a Chef, and who writes all of uh Thomas Kell not writes all of them, whatever Thomas Keller books, uh and also Shirkutery, uh Pulson Ruman. Anyway, uh leaving his stock on the stove, the heat not on for days uh on end, and heating it up to the boil as he needs it, and subsequently, Harold McGee, our buddy Harold McGee, still in China, I think. Uh what? Cool.
Yeah. Uh calling him out for unsafe food practice. So so basically Rulman wrote this article or this blog post where he's like, hey, listen, our great grandpappies didn't have uh you know a refrigerator to put the stock in, so we would just leave it out, and then the next day we would boil it again before we used it, kill all the nasty stuff, and then that's it. Go, come on. I'm not dead yet.
Come on, Grandpappy. Well, he is dead, but you know, anyway, not from that. And then McGee was like, so I think the Times asked McGee to comment on this. And uh McGee was like, Well, I mean, of course the odds are that nothing bad is gonna happen, but there are things that can happen, especially if it's not brought up properly, etc. etc.
And that and that basically it's not considered a uh a hundred percent safe practice to do so, and since most of us own a refrigerator, why wouldn't we put it in the refrigerator? And the other thing is is you're gonna get quality degradation as the thing sits out over time uh at room temperature, so why wouldn't you just refrigerate it? That's the point. Uh so uh so then he's like, okay, so if Ruleman was kind of mistaken about that, and I'm not getting it, that's what McGee said about Rulman, although I tend to agree. Uh so when the rules takes talks about meat and saying uh when it's cured, it's cured and nothing bad is gonna happen to it.
I.e. you don't have to worry about meat that's being left out uh if it's cured. Uh is should I take that with a grain of salt, or is salt stopping all the bad stuff uh that is in it? Uh question in from Stephen Garrett, Wellington, New Zealand. Well, well, you know, I read the post uh Ruhlman was talking about.
He was talking about, I think it was uh it was last week I was looking it up, but it was duck prosciutto, I think, or some sort of uh, you know, hanging meat that he just wiped with uh you know a mixture of nitrites and salt and hung it up. Uh and you know, certain sometimes mold uh can develop on it depending on the uh moisture content of it and the relative, you know, the the temperature and the humidity and the atmosphere, etc. And the question is, is is it true uh what ruhlman says that nothing bad is going to grow on that meat, so you don't really need to worry about it. Well, mostly yes. Mostly that's true.
Uh although uh I mean I would take it with a, you know, I would take it with a little bit of a grain of salt. Uh I mean, there are bad things that can happen to meat that has been cured. Uh the cured meat itself probably isn't bad, but for instance, you could contaminate cured meat and then it could have really nasty stuff on it that doesn't die right away, right? So, yes, uh, you know, and also it depends on whether you've used enough salt. So, you know, if you haven't used enough salt, then you haven't cured uh you haven't killed all the bad stuff.
So uh just the fact that you have cured it and that it looks cured isn't necessarily mean that it's always gonna be okay in all circumstances. However, for the most part, if you properly cure something and follow the instructions, then yes, nothing bad is gonna happen. But let's not forget that in ground meats, especially, if you don't get the proper pH and you don't use the proper salt amount, you don't have the proper amount of nitrates, that you could do yourself some serious damage. Let's not forget that the word botulism comes from the Latin word for sausage. Okay?
Uh yeah. Although that doesn't really happen anymore because people, you know, they cure things properly. Anyway. Okay. Now uh now I'm gonna find uh another question.
Okay. Uh Derek uh Bodkin wrote in with a question saying, uh Dave and Co. That would be you and Dak and the rest. Um is it possible to substitute eastern red cedar berries for juniper berries? Thanks for your help and insight and keep being awesome.
Okay. So uh here in the US, a lot of us don't have uh the uh you know, the standard juniper that we use in flavoring, which is juniper, I guess communis, I think is what it's called, juniperis communis, something like that. I don't have the Latin in front of me. Um that's the one that's used for flavoring, but a lot of us have around uh the eastern red cedar, which is I'm gonna make it up now, juniperis, and then like Virginia Virginianica or something like that. Sounds like Virginia, whatever.
Anyway, common uh, you know, it's a common juniper that's around here a lot. It's also used a lot as an ornamental. It turns out that uh the red cedar, the berries are edible, in fact, uh, and have been used uh since prehistoric times by uh Native American tribes living in America uh as uh b both the the leaves, the berries, and the bark uh have been used in various uh decoctions and teas um uh for various various you know ailments that you might have. So, yes, i they can be used. The wood apparently is also quite nice.
Uh but the downside is that it doesn't have the same powerful aromatic quality that uh the traditional juniper is, so it's not gonna well, it's not gonna be as baller necessarily of a of a juniper flavor. That said, uh uh, you know, if you taste it and you like it, then maybe you can use it in a way that's different from a uh you know the juniper that we're used to. You might uh again, I'm a big believer in um you know, it might not be as good as juniper at being juniper, but it might be very good at being what it is, the eastern red cedar. Do you know what I'm saying, Saz? Mm-hmm.
Anyway, so give it a try. It's not gonna poison you. However, uh I've read some sources that say it's mildly toxic, but again, it's been used for a long time. It was in my uh herbal book. Uh it was in a bun, it's in a bunch of the references I've read.
Um I wouldn't eat a whole boatload of them, and there are juniper species out there that are toxic uh to a greater or lesser degree. So make sure you have your identification right. Uh don't eat boatloads of it, and uh maybe try to find an application where it tastes um as good or better than the regular juniper for what you're trying to use it for. There's a great article in 2000, I think, it's somewhere somewhere between 2006 and 2009 in the New York Times in the gardening section. You can find it on the internet uh about uh juniper and which junipers to use uh and and so on and so forth.
Right? You like that? Mm-hmm. Okay. Now, uh Philippe uh let's see get his first name.
I don't know. Well, I'm gonna get his last name. Anyway, Philippe writes in uh a question about uh knives. Uh he's been contemplating picking up a Michelle uh Brass, which is the famous uh French chef from uh where's he from, Albrach or something like that. Uh Michel Brass uh shun knife for years now.
I've read many reviews and they're split half in half. I'm worried about the platinum oxide coating on the uh blade. It's titanium oxide, actually, I believe. It's not platinum, I think it's titanium oxide. Titanium oxide coating on the blade.
Do you have one and does it scratch easily? Thanks so much. Okay. Titanium uh titani okay, first of all, Shun, aka Kershaw has a bunch of uh lines of knives out that are uh associated with celebrities of one type or another. So they have Alton Brown knives, have a funky angle because Alton Brown is tall, and he can't cut properly with a regular knife because the angle is bad.
So he says, I can't use the Alton Brown knives, but I'm not that tall. Maybe Mark has Mark tried those? No. Mark's tall man. He's never tried one of those knives.
He should try one. So I'd be interested to know whether or not a tall person, whether it's actually helpful for them. That's an interesting fact for me. I could probably get him one. Anyway.
Uh Ken Onion, a famous knife designer, also made one, uh, a knife for those guys. It's completely non-traditional chef's knife. It has a very curved belly, so you uh you rock it as you cut it, and it's got like a kind of a strange ergonomic handle on it. Chef Andre Soltner, uh, international old school badass, enjoys that knife. He actually uses it.
Um, and then they did a line with uh Michelle Brass. Michelle Brass, his knife, Michelle Brass is all about aesthetics, and so the knife is really pretty, right? So it's kind of a matte kind of like uh like gun metal gray color, and it's got a titanium oxide coating on it. Titanium, the metal is not very hard. It's tough as hell, and it doesn't ever it it basically it won't rust, uh, but it's not that hard.
Titanium oxide, on the other hand, I believe is quite hard. It's used as a coating for drills for high speed drills uh and things of that nature. So I'm pretty sure that it's kind of a baller coating to put on the outside, right? The knife itself has two different grades of stainless steel, a softer stainless steel on the outside for toughness, and a harder stainless steel uh in the center for the edge. Um so it should be okay.
I mean, I don't know if it's worth the huge price tag. I don't think it's gonna cut appreciably better than the less expensive uh Kershaw slash uh Shun knives because I don't think the blade chemistry itself is any different. It might be balanced better, it might be made better, it definitely looks better than those other ones, but I don't know if it's actually going to cut better. The um the other interesting thing about it is that it's uh unlike a lot of Japanese Western knives, I read on their website actually, I went on the website, it's sharpened with a 50-50 uh bevel, meaning it's sharpened the same way on either side, like a traditional French or German knife, which means it should be fairly easy for someone who's used to European knives to sharpen it. Um it sharpened uh fifteen degrees on each side, so it's not it's fairly it's a fairly sharp, fairly sharp blade.
Uh I've read some reports on the internet saying that they are well very well balanced blades and that they handle quite well. Um I'm gonna go on a little bit of a rant. A lot of people worry about uh the sharpness of their knives, and they buy the most uh you know the the best steel, the best this, the best that, ceramic knives, all this other stuff. Um, you know, in the words of Jeffrey Steingarden, which I think I've quoted here uh several times, you know, knives are like uh puppies. They're always good when they're new.
It's only later that the problems come out. And I think the main thing about a knife is how easy is it to sharpen, how fast is it for you to sharpen, and how well can you re-sharpen it? And I know I've talked about sharpening here uh a bunch, but I'll say something I don't think I've said before, which is I would prefer steel that isn't quite as badass that sharpens really well and just sharpen the dang thing more often, right? Uh a lesser quality reed softer steel that you sharpen right before you use it is going to uh do a much better job in general than the super hard, high quality powdered, centered steel that you buy uh and then have in sharpened in four months. I mean, that's just truth.
What do you think? Don't talk to Nastasha. She takes people's knives and beats them about about their head. She's she's a strange lady nostashum. Yes or no?
What? True. I don't know what you're talking about. Oh, yeah? Okay.
We'll talk about it later. Okay. Uh thanks for answering. Thanks for answering my liver question a few weeks back. You're welcome.
Uh and then one more question. Uh my chef asked me to turn some already old blanched cauliflower into a puree. I was hesitant. So I pumped the florets into a small pot and covered with half and half and then with a paper lid. I slowly simmered the cauliflower until it's tender, but the weird side effect was that a lot of the cauliflower turned brown as if it were caramelized.
Or, you know, my art. Uh uh, it no, it didn't taste good uh even in the first place. Uh do you know what happened? Uh that's interesting. First of all, I I did some bunch of research this morning on cauliflower.
It looks like we'll have to wrap up with this, but I did a bunch of research on cauliflower. And did you know that in the biz uh they don't call cauliflower florets florets, they call it curd? Weird. I guess because it looks like you know, like cheese curd, I guess. Weird, right?
Cauliflower, by the way, your kids' favorite. Oh my god, my kids, I swear to God, you know what? I love cauliflower. And I was like, there's no one on earth that doesn't, unless you're vegan, that doesn't like uh cauliflower drenched in a cheese sauce, right? I mean, it's just it's just good stuff, right?
And so, and you know, my kids for a long time, have I already talked about this? My kids for a long time uh wouldn't uh eat green vegetables really of any of any sort. Uh well by a long time I mean still. They don't like green vegetables. Uh it's one of these demented things that's put in their head by the by I don't know, by other kids.
It's one of these like weird things that's perpetuated generation after generation. I loved green vegetables growing up. Anyway, that's me. Uh so I was like, okay, I'm gonna go get cauliflower. It's not green.
I'm gonna drench it in cheese sauce. Everyone freaking loves cheese sauce. And uh it was the worst dinner I've ever had in my in my life. The worst experience of the d the cauliflower is delicious. It was the worst experience of a meal I have ever had in my entire life.
The screaming, the moaning, the pleading, the crying. Uh and and ever since that, all that day, all I've ever had to uh say is threaten my kids with cauliflower for dinner and they're quiet. Call them the sardines thing. Well, my kid, well, Booker loves sardines. They they like some weird stuff.
It's like, look, it's all it's all mental. It does no when you fill the sardine can. Oh, I filled a sardine can, gave it to my son Booker, who loves uh sardines, and I filled it with cauliflower, and he opened it up, he's like, ah like I had had like I don't know, some sort of like uh I don't know, toxic, toxic, something like that. Anywho, so uh turns out that cauliflower, like all other uh, you know, you know, kind of brassica style things like cabbages, like uh broccoli, like um Brussels sprouts, uh contain a lot of sulfur containing compounds. And so when you uh you know, and sulfur, the chemistry of these sulfur compounds in food is extremely complicated.
And as you cook these things for a long time, uh various things happen. They get stinky, right? Then they get old, then you have lipid oxidation, and then it turns out sometimes I guess they can change colors. Uh I couldn't find, I didn't have time to run it down, and since McGee is still in China, I guarantee you McGee knows right off the top of his head exactly what's going on. But since he's in China, I can't call him to get that information out of his head.
Um but uh you know, uh some of the stuff that's in it, I was thinking about there's uh there's a couple articles like the non-enzymatic browning of cauliflower in storage. And uh uh what one of the culprits might be these kind of uh polyphenols that are in it that can react with iron. I'm wondering if you had any sort of uh if you're using a steel pot, it's possible that maybe the steel in the pot had something to do with it. Um in which case, if if it is something like that, like non-enzymatic browning that's happening or some sort of weird mired reaction, maybe in conjunction with the uh half and half that you used. A little ascorbic acid might make it better.
Uh but there's all sorts of very complicated uh sulfur breakdown components uh in cauliflower that can change over time, get stinkier over time. It's a known uh it's a known fact. You might want to look for reference uh to some articles like the volatile constituents from Romanesco cauliflower, uh the uh gluco uh glucosinolate and free sugar content in cauliflower, and the non-enzymatic browning of cauliflower on storage. But uh, haven't found a you know a hundred percent uh you know ironclad reason why it would happen. Uh the more I read, the more complicated cauliflower turns out.
Just don't serve it to my kids. All right, and before we leave, 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 to overspend for pounds of supplies when only a few grams are needed per application? Modernist Pantry has a solution. They offer a wide range of modernist uh modern ingredients in packages that make sense for the home cook and enthusiast, and most cost only around five bucks, saving you time, money, and storage space.
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You can find all of my baby cleaning in a slate you got my head all twisted and I guess can't get it straight fishes fish is but good
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