Broadcasting live from Roberta's in Bushwood, Brooklyn. You're listening to Heritage Radio Network.com. I'm Will Harris, and today's program has been brought to you by White Oak Pastures. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live from Roberta's Pizzeria on the Heritage Radio Network every Tuesday from roughly 12 to roughly 1245.
Was joined in the studio by Nastasha the Hammer Lopez, but when I opened up my bag, I found that my quart containers of coriander syrup for tonight's event for the Museum of Food and Drinks spilled all over the inside of my bag. And as everyone knows, I love sticky bags and losing all of my product, don't you, Jack? Yes. Yeah, it's good stuff. Yeah!
Huge fan. Yeah, huge. Luckily, uh, as is normal, I overmade what I needed, and so I'm pretty sure I'll have enough uh for the event. But we'll see. Uh, we'll give you uh a rundown next week on how the event went, but I am doing beers and brats.
So I'm gonna do in uh in a in a circulator, immersion circulator, I'm gonna hold some bratwurst that uh was made by uh Pat Lafrida uh at uh about 140, which is uh 60 degrees Celsius in beer. I'm just gonna let it sit there for a long time. Then uh as soon as I get there, but to the French culinary, which is where our event's gonna be today. Good old FCI French Culinary Institute. Uh, I'm gonna see what the hottest thing I have in the world is to finish the brats off, and we're just gonna stick them in regular, I think like Martin's potato rolls, right?
That sounds good, right? Yeah, I'm gonna try to make it to the event. Yeah, it'd be awesome. And then and then, right? So here's what I figure, right?
I need something that's easy because I need to roll in to be able to do the event, and that's easy. I need something that's delicious, and I need something that's gonna anchor you because we're having a whole bunch of really good bartenders there making drinks. The event's sponsored by uh William Grant, which is, you know, they do uh Hendrix and whatnot. Uh Booker and Dax, Tristan from Booker and Dax is coming and we're gonna make a uh we're gonna make a it's sort of like a coriander mule kind of a situation, like coriander uh with a little bit of red pepper and lime juice and uh vodka, and we're gonna carbonate that son of a gun, put some mint in it, and I think people are just gonna crush the hell out of it. Yeah, sounds like a crushable drink.
Oh, yeah. Jason Lattrell is going a little nut baggy. You ready for this one? Jason is uh Jason Latrell, a good friend of ours. He's doing, I swear to Christ, Welch's grape soda and Hendrix Gin.
Wow. Right? Yeah. Really? Well, look, I don't know whether he's just saying that to like mess with Nastasha or whether he's hit.
I mean, he might look first of all, Nastasha, who I I I actually, you know, for those of you, I don't really like to give her crap unless she's here. It's no fun if she's not here. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, but she had uh especially when she's off fixing my mistakes, apparently because my uh core containers weren't sealed properly. But um uh I uh you know, she had never heard of Welch's grape soda before.
No. Yeah. Is that an East Coast thing? I didn't think so. I mean I've I grew up with knowing Welch's grape soda.
Right. Yeah. But I mean I'm from New York, so I'm from New York too. Biggie Smalls calls out Welch's grape soda. Yeah, exactly.
You know, grape soda. What the hell? But grape soda and Hendrix? Look, man, I look, I think, you know, I trust my man Latrell. Latrell's a good man.
So I'm sure that uh it's gonna be some delicious, but all I have going through my head is kind of biggie biggie smalls, you know. Uh yeah, anyway. Uh yeah. Okay. So, oh, but speaking of core containers, I discovered something interesting about core containers.
I've been using them for a bazillion years, and I recommend everyone go out and have eight boatloads of quart containers in their house because it's the way to store your leftovers in your in your fridge. They stack, you can bring they're awesome. They they have only like one or two downsides. One is they get very brittle when they're frozen. Uh and this the second is that if you if basically if you don't dry them out well, they pick up smells.
So you have to smell core containers and make sure they haven't, you know, and let them dry open and stuff like that. I always yell at people for this. But uh I've my wife doesn't let me uh nuke. Nuke means microwave uh stuff in it to reheat it because she's worried about plastics leaching out. And I try to say that, you know, I don't know, but one thing I have always noticed when you nuke with the lid on is that the lid deforms and explodes.
You notice that, Jack? You ever done that? I I have seen that before. Yeah, the lid deforms and explodes, but the uh container is fine, right? And one of the reasons I've always thought it was really fine to microwave and a polypropylene uh well, the core container, which are made of polypropylene, is that the melting point of polypropylene a lot higher than a lot of the other things we deal with, like for instance polyethylene, plastic wrap.
So you can actually pressure cook uh polypropylene cork container, and it won't uh it you can't bend bend it still, it's still holding its its structure. So yeah, so I'm like, man, yeah, yeah, that's okay, right? Turns out the cork container is made of polypropylene, but the lid is made, and I just noticed this today when I was looking at the lids, the lid is made of low uh low density polyethylene. Polyethylene, lower melting temperature. Weird.
Why wouldn't they make it all the same? I don't know. It's weird, right? Yeah, that's weird. Although you know what it's kind of good, maybe they want the lid to blow up before the cork container deforms.
I don't know. Honestly, I don't know. But the the lid on it was uh polyethylene, and so that would explain why it deforms and blows off the top of the thing before anything happens to the uh to the container. So there you have that, and I literally discovered that this morning. So there you have it.
There you have it. Um, uh on to the question. Oh, call in your questions to 7184972128. That's 7184972128. And by the way, Jack, you know, I was thinking about this.
I know you think I should stick like me a basically only technical, but you know, I know how to cook other things besides low temperature and like crazy stuff. You know, if you have any questions on things like, you know, I make a mean pancake. Yeah, mean pancakes. I mean I make good pancakes. I can fry any damn thing.
Anything. I'll put the word out there. Yeah, I mean, like, so you don't, you know, you don't feel obliged to like you know, wait until you have like the one technical question a year that you have. If you have any question based on uh cooking, uh, you know, and if I don't know, we'll have a fun discussion about it, right? I mean, if you happen to stump me off something that I have no idea, then what the hell?
Fine. That's fun too, right? So call in your questions to 7184972128. That's 7184972128. I have a really quick question.
What's that? What did you think of the uh Blanca tasting menu? Uh Carlo. Well, am I allowed to talk about it now? Oh, maybe not.
I don't know. I was there on Saturday. Yeah, all right. So listen, maybe put a call in. Yeah.
Put a call in, find out if I'm allowed to talk about it or not. Okay. And then if if I'm allowed to talk about it, then I'll talk about it. Okay. All right.
I went to the WD 50 uh kind of uh new menu tasting. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's great. I bet. Yeah, all this stuff was delicious.
It was delicious. Um the interesting thing about it is is it the menus in entirely new, but for those of you uh who have never been before or wondering what it's like, it's still very clearly WD50 food. Like you would not walk in there and think that I'm in a different restaurant. You know what I mean? It's still very clearly what you expect from WD50, just entirely new.
Yeah. Nastasha's back. Were we able to save most of the stuff? Yeah. Yeah?
Is my bag totally ruined? Uh we're gonna have to clean it after. Awesome. Nothing I love. You know what?
I made here's what I hate. I made the bag myself. Like I bought the fabric, super high, you know, high end fabric. I sewed it myself. Everything designed, cut, sewed, and now it's full of simple syrup, which is like my worst nightmare on earth.
It's the equivalent of Nastasha being coated in leaves with uh leaf skin disease on them or something like that, which is kind of that's your worst nightmare, right? To be thrown into a bed of leaves with uh with those weird like fungal growths coming out of them. Yes. Yeah, it's her worst nightmare. Okay.
Uh on to a real we actually have interesting, like uh interesting synergy of questions today. Hello, Dave and the cooking issues crew. This is Darren from Sous vide Dash, and now the polyzyne sous vide toolkit, which we'll talk about later. Here's a question on which is a program for your iPad that allows you to uh determine cooking times for uh sous vide work and stuff like that, right? We'll talk about it later.
Uh uh with a completely different topic, the culinary application of static mixtures. I wonder if you have ever had any experience with static mixers. Uh I have. By the way, before we get on to it, so what a static mixer is uh a static mixer is basically a tube. And then inside of the tube are uh kind of imagine like uh like it's hard to explain on the radio.
Like they're like twisted plates that go crisscross to each other that basically when you're pumping uh a liquid through the tube, the twists twist it and mix it, and then it hits another tube in a different direction and it twists it and mix it in the other direction, kind of like folding again and again and again and again, but it's going through a tube, so there's no moving parts, right? So the the basic benefit of a static mixer are that you get very, very even mixing, right? Uh you can, you know, get extremely thorough mixing if you choose the right thing. And there are zero moving parts, and you don't incorporate air into the mixture when you're when you're pumping it in, right? So these are the main, these are the main kinds of uh advantages.
I mean, the disadvantage is you have to pipe everything through a little tube, right? I mean, that's the that's the that's the only downside, really. Okay. Uh I wonder if you ever had any experience with static mixers. I've read about them being used in the production of mayonnaise and ketchup at an industrial scale.
I've also seen very small ones that are used to attach to a double uh plunger dispenser for mixing epoxy. That got me thinking, could I adapt this technique using a small manual dispenser and a static mixer to create culinary emulsions? I did a little digging around and found a reference indicating that for stable mayonnaise, the oil droplet size should be between two and eight micrometers, aka small. Small. Okay.
Uh and but that's like super stable, like shelf stable forever. That's like, you know, helmins. Anyway, uh I also found a paper indicating that small static mixers tend to produce droplets two orders of magnitude larger than that, which was a little discouraging. So my question is do you have any experience trying to emulsify with a small static mixer? Uh there are all kinds of culinary emulsions that would be cool to make a la minute or even table side with a quick pull of a trigger.
I wonder how much uh the larger droplet size will affect texture and stability for something like mayonnaise and other interesting emulsions. I'm inclined to purchase some samples and do some experiments, but I figured if anyone has done it so far, it would be you. Any experience, suggestions, tips, tricks, or feedback? Thanks, Dee. Okay.
Um, and they gave a shout out because he was with uh P Press. That's Philip Preston, for those of you not in the know from PolyScience. He was hanging out with Philip Preston and our boy Hervé Molivare, we're gonna see today from the French Culinary Institute. Chef Hervé, the the now Muay Thai judo skiing race car driving lunatic French chef over at the French Culinary Institute. Anywho, here are my theories on static mixing.
Uh the my main experience with static mixing has not been, in fact, all of my experience with static mixing has not been in the culinary field, but has in fact been mixing epoxies and urethanes. Uh that said, they are freaking amazing at that. Uh, you know, I was like, you know, how good and I buy the you know the the in real ones, you know, they're the ones that I buy are like um oh I don't know, about ten to twelve inches long, and they're meant to dispense uh uh you know between two and four hundred milliliters of a urethane casting resin. And for those of you that ever mixed uh, you know, casting resins, you know that air bubbles are a nightmare and you have to vacuum this stuff out uh to get rid of the air bubbles, and it becomes very problematic if you want a nice bubble-free casting. Uh with these things, and I really had my doubts, it's just freaking genius.
It's just it's it's and also when you're mixing, you have to sit there and you wonder whether you're mixing all around and stuff like this. And it's just awesome. You know, just no air, no nothing, perfect. Um okay, one second, I'll finish on this. So, like the thing with the static mixer, okay, but listen.
Oh, wait, what wait, hold on a moment. Howdy? Uh, you call I'll take the caller and then I'll go back to static mixing. Caller, you're on the air. Hello.
I think you get the hole. Hello? Hi, how you doing? Oh, I'm on I'm on Skype, so it might be a little crappy. Nice, I like crappy.
Okay, uh, I have a question about uh rice-based Mexican Orchata. Oh, okay. Nice. Uh I I I thought I was gonna email it, sorry. I wrote it down.
I'm gonna be kind of regurgitated. Uh so most green gill recipes have you blend uh uncooked rice with water and let it eat like overnight or something. Right. But it it just doesn't taste very ricey. Uh uh the flip side, I've read some recipes where they have you cook the rice to some extent, not like all the way, like the inside will still be kind of hard and a little bit crunchy, and you blend this and and strain that.
But when you do that, it's super super viscous and and not really drinkably thin. But it it tastes delicious and ricey like rice pudding. So I guess what I want is like a a drinkably thin rice pudding. But are are are there's a ricey taste and viscosity in extric inextricably linked, or is there some way to separate them? Hmm.
And the the what what what pre what like what things do you do prior to the uh to soaking it with the with the with the uncooked one? Uh I guess I'll usually I I guess I'll usually rinse it. But you don't grind it. Uh I I grind it in the water in a blender. Right.
Let me think. This is an uh it's an interesting, it's a good one. I haven't thought about this. I have thought recently about another rice problem, but I'm thinking about this particular rice problem. I mean, it's the thing with viscosity, right, is you're getting starch bleeding into the uh into the water, and then uh that when you're cooking it, what a cooked starch bleeding is a thickener.
Do you know what I mean? And so it's gonna thicken it. You could probably thin that starch with I mean the high tech version of me says I will just add a uh an enzyme to break down the starch and I'll thin that sucker down right away. It'll also make it sweeter. Um, but uh but there's gotta be a real solution, right?
When I say real, I mean traditional solution. I mean, I have a bunch of enzymes literally that I could drop in there and thin it out in like in no time flat, you know. Uh and then it would keep that that ricey flavor. Have you had ones in Latin America made with raw rice that have enough of a ricey taste for you? Uh I I haven't actually been to Latin America.
I I moved to Los Angeles uh uh two years ago for grad school, and I've had some pretty good ones there, but they're made with they're made with uncooked? I'm I'm not sure what the the ones I'm I I've had have been made with. I have a feeling a lot of them are made with mixes. Yeah. Oh, mixes, right.
You could also, yeah, you could use rice flour too. Do you know what I mean? Uh I thought about that, but I haven't tried it yet. Yeah. Or pre-grind the rice and put it in.
I mean, I've I've been working a lot now. Um, so uh how sweet are these things? When you buy the mix, do they add a lot of sugar? Is there how sweet is it? They they tend to be they tend to be quite sweet, I would say.
Yeah. Well, there's a a question later on in the show get to uh that has to do with stuff you should bring back from China. And Harold McGee just got back uh from China, and uh one of the things that he brought back, not a physical thing, but an idea, is these uh these combination kind of yeast rice, uh these yeast uh slash mold uh balls. And what's cool about them is that uh the mold in them actually sacrifies the rice, i.e. takes the rice starch and converts it to sugar to make it sweet, and then yeast will start fermentation and turn that uh turn that sugar into alcohol.
But if you if you only do it for a couple of days, right, the mold basically makes what it's it's like a delicious, sweet uh rice drink that is super ricey and super awesome. It's almost like an unfermented rice beer, like a wart. Now I'm wondering whether or not traditionally uh and but that's done with cooked, but it's still thin, but it's done with cooked rice. I wonder whether you could do something like that uh if there's some sort of something it's actually sacrifying the starch or breaking it apart. I just don't know.
I have to think about it. But you might want to look into those things. You could buy them at any store in like any Chinatown near in a big city and they're called yeast balls. And when you add those to cooked rice, it takes a couple of days but like all of a sudden the rice breaks and you have a thin clear liquid that's delicious. Not orchata so like I'm it's not it's off the s off the subject but it's another oh no that's that sounds really cool.
I'm happy to have heard about that as well. Yeah so I mean go check that out and like look into you know or the familiar Japanese version uh you know you take the Koji starter that they have and you add it to rice it'll sacrifice and if you don't let it go I've never tested the Japanese version. I've only tested the the Chinese one and and it's made with a different mold. I can tell you from firsthand experience with the Chinese one it's really freaking delicious and ricey. And so you know you the you might want to play around play around with that one.
You know you store it you know at roughly like ninety five in like a bread proof or in your oven with just a pile it on if you have that. I used my dehydrator when I did the test but it's really good stuff. Uh but I'm I'm interested in trying to think about your problem but I'm gonna have to I'm gonna have to think about it kind of in more detail. Hopefully someone out there has had some experience with this and they can write us an email answer so that next week I can come back with someone who's had some practical experience with this. You know what I mean?
Yeah, yeah. That would be great. Alright cool. Thank you very, very much. One one one one yes or no questions before you go.
I'm in I'm in Tokyo for uh for two months, and I know you're coming here somewhat imminently. Is the event you're doing here something open to the public? Nastasha, is it? No. Really?
Oh. Uh that's too bad. All right. That's too bad. But thank you very much anyway.
All right, thank you so much. Bye. Okay, back to static mixers, my favorite static mixers. So uh on the static mixer, I forget exactly where I left off, but they like uh when you're mixing uh plastic with it, it's amazing how thorough the mix is. So one of the problems when you're doing any sort of mixture uh is the fact that if you're using a blender or a hand blender specifically, is that there's pockets of it that aren't blended the same amount as everything else, and you don't have thorough blending all the way through.
It's just you know the nature of the beast. Now, that's not so much of a problem if you have something big like a Vitaprep, but there you go. So uh a static mixer would be good in an application where what you want is very, very even mixing uh in a very short amount of time. You don't want the things to stay together very long, and you don't want to have to mix a large amount of product, right? The only parts that get mixed are the parts that's going through the little bit of tube.
So if you had two things that couldn't come together until the last minute and you didn't want to waste them all by blending, and you didn't want to waste enough each time by having to have enough to blend, static mixer would be fantastic. From an emulsion standpoint, the problem is that uh it's not that high shear a uh a thing. So emulsions are made in a number of ways, but basically, for any given system, the s the the larger the amount of energy you put into shearing to shearing the the the thing together, the smaller the droplet size. And static mixers, to the best of my knowledge, just aren't that good at high shear. So it's gonna be difficult to get super small emulsion size, uh well, droplet size in them, unless you hit it with a lot of emulsifiers.
In which case, what you're doing is reducing the amount of energy it takes to create an emulsion. So if you have something that wants to emulsify fairly easily, right, uh, and something that you needed to have it made all of minute, like for instance, I don't know, I couldn't think of one off the top of my head, but something that's fairly um fairly fragile, right? That doesn't want to stay together a long time, or uh or something you don't want to mix because it might oxidize if you put it in a blender, then a static mixer might work uh quite well with you. But I don't think it's gonna get down to super super small uh particle size. I just don't think that's what it's what it's good at.
Anyways, let's take a break and uh we'll come back with more cooking issues. Straight up, honey, really I'm asking. Most of these niggas think they be macin, but they be acting. Who they attracting with that line? What's your name?
What's your sign? Soon as he buy that wine, I just creep up from behind. And ask you what your interests are. Who you be with, things that make you smile, what numbers to dial? You're gonna be here for a while, I'm gonna call my crew.
You go call your crew. We can rendezvous at the bar around two. Plans to leave, though the keys, the little Cs, pull the truck up front and roll up the next book. So we can see on the way to the telly, go fill my belly. A T-bone steak, cheese, eggs, and we'll just grade.
Call the thing for a few. Cause in our few, we gon' do what we came to do. Ain't that right, boom? Forget the telly, we just go to the crib and watch a movie in the jackousy smoke L's while you're doing it. White Oak Pastures is a hundred and forty-six-year-old multi-generational family farm that works in cooperation with nature to produce artisans, meat that is safe, healthy, nutritious, and good to eat.
Well, I tell that fail, we ensure that our production practices are economically practical, ecologically sustainable, and that the animals are always humanely treated. We never falter in our determination to conduct our business in an honorable manner. For more information, visit Whiteoak Pastures.com. Wow. From the sound of him, it sounds like he really loves having Biggie Smalls be the background music for his uh Yeah, not so sure about that.
I had to fit the Welches in there though. Oh, you had to get the Welch's grapevine. I totally, totally agree. Totally agree. Okay.
Uh by the way, Nastasha, I was walking here like uh in the pouring rain, right? And uh with unknown stuff stuff leaking all over the inside of my bag, and the guy a guy walks past me in the baseball hat practicing his rap on the freaking sidewalk. Like, what the hell is that? Like, what the hell's going on? Listen, if you live in New York, it's like a long-standing rule.
If you want to learn bagpipes, right, you have to literally, no matter how crappy you are, you have to go out into a park or a subway station and just play the bagpipes. Because that's that's all you have open to you. You cannot play bagpipes in your house. It's just not reasonable. You know what I mean?
Uh and so that's why, you know, you can hear some crappy bagpipes now and again in a park because what else are you gonna do? There's no no choice, right? No choice, no problem. That's uh Karen Smith says. But uh rap you can kind of do in your house.
So if you suck, why are you walking around the street like with your crappy rap? You know what I mean? What does he expect? I'm gonna I'm gonna like walk by him and I'm some sort of like produce some rap producer. He's gonna walk next to a rap producer being like, Wow, that's the that's the exact pseudo-tough male voice that I've been looking for for years.
You know what I mean? Weak. I don't know. His hat was nice though. He had a nice baseball hat.
Okay, anyway. Uh hopefully, hopefully, well, he there's no way, but imagine if he was a listener and he came and he beat the crap out of me the next time I walked past him on the avenue on the way to River's. I love your rapper. I love you. I love it.
I was just kidding. Okay. Uh hi, Dave, Nastasha, and Jack. I'm running from the UK, a longtime listener, but it's been a while since I wrote in. I have a question about ultrasonic homogenizers.
More on the multiplication today. It's a really interesting uh week. Uh I'm another vegetarian chef like uh like Michael Nakin, uh we're who of whom we're a fan, and greatly looking forward to his book being available in the UK. I'm currently working on this and work on that, Michael. Uh I'm currently working on my own modern vegetarian book, which should be out this summer.
But I don't really want to weigh in on the whole recent vegetarian vegan debate beyond saying I happen to be a lacto ova vegetarian, but see myself as a chef first and foremost. Uh that define me defines me much more than my choice not to eat meat. And I work within that niche or constraint, strive to be my best create uh best creative and learn like all passionate young chefs. Sounds good to me. I recently got a hold of a poly science sonic prep, uh, for which I just have a couple of weeks on loan.
It's an amazing piece of equipment. Emulsions in an instant with no added emulsifier, uh infusions, flavor extractions, all fantastic. It's a pretty awe-inspiring bit of kit. Uh kit, by the way, is like, you know, cool stuff for those of you who've never been to the UK. However, I've noticed uh using it to infuse flavors into oil.
I did this with a few herbs and other things, but each time into olive oil, that whilst I would get an herb flavor coming through great and very quickly, the infused oil in some cases took on a mild metallic, almost burnt flavor. I have a decent understanding of the cavitation process by which the sonic prep works, and I can't see why this would cause such an effect. And none of the tests I've done so far that I run the machine long enough for the oil to become heated above just being mildly warm. Uh just running around three minutes each time and not on full power, or even at a constant cycle for all of them. Also, I didn't notice this problem when infusing alcohol or working with a water base.
Any ideas of what could be causing this effect or how to counteract, avoid it. Uh I hope I might overcome it with some informed trial and error, and there's tons of other stuff I want to try while I have it. But since it's on loan, any advice would be great. And if there's anything else you suggest, I should try it with too. That would be great.
All the best, Eddie Shepard. And he said cheers because he's from England. Yeah. Okay. So here's the dealy.
I think your main problem is olive oil. Have you tried it with another oil? Olive oil classically. Like so, listen, when you're making a mayonnaise, we all know that if you make a mayonnaise with uh certain kinds of olive oil, all of a sudden it can go bitter and messed up, right? Same way if you put olive oil in a blender and you over blend olive oil in a blender, like sometimes you're okay and sometimes it's messed up.
Now, the cafe and I forget what it is. I had a you know a long discussion with Harold McGee about you know what this actually might uh what might be causing this, and and uh I don't remember whether he was sure or not, but it's just a kind of a well-known fact that this can happen with olive oil. So first thing I would do is don't do it with olive oil, do it something else. Uh something that's more neutral or something that doesn't have that kind of ability to go uh bitter uh on you. Uh the other thing I've noticed is that you know, uh first of all, for those of you don't know, an ultrasonic homogenizer is basically an ultrasonic transducer, but on roids that can put out a lot of power and uh it vibrates ultrasonically, meaning faster than you can hear it.
Ha ha ha, we'll talk about that in a second. But uh the violent uh going back and forth actually causes uh little like cavitation, little vacuum bubbles to form that then collapse with a lot of force and do things like rupture cells, make very fine emulsions, etc. etc. Um I've had one for like I don't know, seven years, something like that, that was given to me on loan, but I never gave it back from Branson's ultrasonic, and it's the same style that everyone's using nowadays. It's 400 watts, which is you know, pretty baller.
Um I never had the enclosure, and I've never done too much experimentation with it because it makes people run from the room screaming. You know what I mean? Like Nastash, you've had you've been in the room when it comes on, right? I think so. Yeah, I mean it like the the the I don't know, it's like yes, it's theoretically ultrasonic, but l people like put their hands to their ears and run around.
The enclosure apparently does a lot to stop that. But one of the first things that I noticed when I was using it is that you could do this thing uh that you know Nathan Miraville and Chris Young and Maxime have kind of popularized is the idea of kind of created milks or constructed milks where you have a very you have an emulsion with a very low uh oil amount in it and you you know similar to milk on the order of like four or five percent fat and you emulsify that in and it and it gets really good uh results. Uh and it's it's fantastic at that. My issue with it I haven't really experimented enough with it to say whether what the awesome results with it are because the results that I were able to get, I wasn't able to uh it it wasn't the exclusive way I could get them. So it's like the milks, it's very, very good at without adding the emulsifiers.
But on the other hand, when I had to go say to someone, hey look, you're a chef, and uh would you would I rather have you spend four thousand dollars? I don't know what it costs now, but that's what it costs at the time. Would I rather have you spend four thousand dollars on this piece of ultrasonic uh homogenization stuff, or would I say spend four dollars on an emulsifier and make it in the vita prep that you already have? So and that basic fundamental thing that I haven't found anything that I can't do another way with it yet, plus the fact that running it, the one I have is a hardship on everyone around me, and there's no way I could do it during service, has um has kind of stopped me from investigating it to the level that uh I probably should. But I know that I investigated using it with avocados to try and get avocado oil when I was doing avocado in a centrifuge, and it ruined the flavor of the avocado, but I think that's because of oxidation uh of the actual avocado.
You know what I mean? And then we tried ascorbic acid, but it didn't didn't really help. So I think everything depends on the actual oil that you're using. I don't really have a lot of experience using it for infusions, although I'm sure it's uh great the same way that um you know, any any sort of like something that helps disrupt things at a small level is good at getting two things to go together. I will say this ultrasonic homogenization uh requires uh to to be really good, requires a certain amount of pre-emulsification, right?
So before you hit it with the ultrasonic homogenizer, put it in a blender and blend it up. Ultras ultrasonics aren't good at taking apart large particles like pieces of like peeps pieces of pepper grinds and stuff like this. It's just good at taking something that's already started forming and making it much, much, much finer. So for the best results, blend first and then hit it with the ultrasonic homogenizer to really do it well. Also, be careful with it because uh the demo I used to run with it about how dangerous it can be, just stick it into a into a bar towel on a table and light the bar towel on fire from the power of the uh ultrasonic homogenizer.
Anyways, uh hope that's helpful. Uh okay. Hello, my name is Juventino Magana, living in Las Vegas. My wife is in China and coming home in a week. Uh wanted for her to bring me something that I can't find here and need help on telling what to bring.
Uh please help. I'm a chef by the way. Send for my iPad. Wow, it's a hard question. I wish I'd asked McGee stuff that he smuggled back.
I no longer kind of advocate smuggling stuff back that you can't get in the US, but I mean, um I mean I would try to see if you can get some of the really interesting uh rice wines from China uh over here because McGee was saying he had some amazing ones over there that don't taste like any ones that he's had here. Uh when I when my wife was in China years ago, I had her smuggle me back uh Chinese hams, like amazing Chinese hams uh that were unlike any um like ones that tasted like blue cheese. It was made it was amazing. But I mean I can't really I can't really recommend to you that you smuggle back something that you know you could get in uh in big trouble for. Um shoot.
I don't know. I have to think about that. Let me think see if I have to come up with anything by the end of the show. Uh uh, I'll put it in. But that's it's an excellent question.
We you know what? Someone should start a website called crap I should try to bring back. And then just like with a with like a with a country list, and like here's stuff that doesn't get sent out, like you know, when you go to Turkey, crap I should bring back celep, you know what I mean? And like and then like whether or not you're actually smuggling and you get thrown in prison, or whether or not US customs would would stop you, you know what I mean? Like Hamony Barico or something like that.
So like a list kind of of of how illicit it is, or whether it's just not imported and like why it's awesome, country to country for travelers, like cooking travelers, right? I mean, we won't do it, but that would be a good site, right? I mean, I would use it, I won't make it. Someone make that website and then get back to us so we can we can plug it. Okay.
Uh hi Nastasha and Dave and Jack. I hope you guys are rocking. Been cooking a lot and running into a lot of observations. Uh anyway, bone marrow. If I take it out of the out of the bone and soak it, it is white as a pearl within two days.
Uh, I leave it in the bone, I soak it for a week, changing water regularly, and there's still so much blood in there. What the heck? Alright, I just to freak Nastasha out. I printed a picture of like a ball of bone marrow, and I'm showing it to her right now, and she's making her uh her putrid face because uh it's it's a really it doesn't look like bone marrow like we cook. It's like it's like really.
Yeah, even Jack is even Jacking's Jack's giving his like wow face. Uh but I think what's happening is is that if you leave it in the bone, remember the outside of the bone is a lot less porous, it's a lot denser than the inside of the bone, which is where a lot of the hollow stuff is. And um bone marrow, uh, you know, I I didn't have time to look at like an electron uh microscopy of it. But my feeling is is that uh most of the chunks of bone marrow are longer than they are bigger round, and that um if it takes two days to soak in uh you know, soak from the out from like the cylinder side of it out, right? Then it's gonna take then in those same two days or three days, whatever, it's only gonna soak that far into the ends.
So unless you're cutting the pieces basically as the of bone, basically as thin as uh the diameter of the cylinder of marrow that you're working with, that it's not going to uh soak out at a at a very quick rate at all. Not to mention which there's more red crap in the bone besides the marrow that still has to bleed out as well. So there's more product in there, and you're stopping uh the slowing rather drastically the rate of diffusion of that stuff out. So I'm pretty sure that's just what's going on, right? That's my guess.
Uh but I'm willing to have someone call and say, actually, you're an idiot, and here's this phenomena that's actually causing it. But I'm pretty sure that's what's going on. Also, if you're familiar with Francisco Magoya's post on the Alicia pastry cream, then do you know what kind of ratio of starch to use? I tried this technique and cannot uh and could really feel the starch on my teeth, uh, big frustration. So, what you're talking about is this post where to make uh pastry cream, instead of like the the normal uh well I looked at the post, so straight from the post uh that you know referring to uh regular recipe for pastry cream.
Place ninety-five percent of the milk in a saucep with half the sugar in another bowl, mix the remaining milk with the cornstarch, stir it well, add the egg yolks and the remaining sugar, stir until homogenous, and it must be lump free. Bring the liquid to a boil, temper the egg yolk uh slurry, and then return it to the heat and bring to the first boil while stirring constantly. So basically, for those of you who don't know, pastry cream, basically like an englaze mix, like a you know a custard with starch in it. The starch stabilize it, you go to a higher mix. So that's the that's the classic way.
Put your ingredients together with the egg yolk, the slurry, temper it so it doesn't curdle instantly, pour it into the hot mixture, stir constantly, bring it up to the boil. The starch is actually protecting it uh when you're boiling, right? So Wiley makes his uh Hollandaise with regular egg yolks, and he just dumps so much starch into them that uh they won't curdle even when they're fried. So uh the starch really is what's protecting you protecting you there. So the Alicia procedure is a lot easier because what they do is is you just mix uh the sugar uh with the milk uh and then you boil it, and then you have the co cornstarch and the uh egg yolk, and you mix those, and when the water brings to a boil, you just uh like kind of whisk the other stuff in uh and then it just kind of sets.
And the problem is, I I think maybe the problem you're having is is that uh the deal is if you don't make the right amount of that, what you're using is the residual heat from the milk to both uh cook the egg yolk, cook the egg yolk out without curdling it, and that's what the extra the starch is there to prevent the egg yolk from curdling and cooking. And B, you have to functionalize the starch. So uh the starch has to hydrate, swell, and and cook before the t uh temperature of of your product drops too low. So my guess is perhaps you are um perhaps what's going on is you're doing too small a batch compared to what he says. He says he makes at least uh you know more than a liter.
Uh perhaps your batch size is too small and it gets too cold uh too quickly, and the starch doesn't cook out, and so you're gonna have a raw grainy starch taste. I mean, that's that's a guess, right? Um it should be possible, by the way, to just use an instantized agglomerized starch, for instance, uh ultra spurse, uh, you know, one of the ultra spurse lines from National Starch. And then you really don't have to worry at all. As long as it's hot enough to pasteurize out the egg yolk and thicken it a little bit, then you don't have to worry about it uh doing the starch in time.
So maybe try try that. Yeah? Yeah. Yeah. But if anyone has any questions, uh let them uh write in and again tell me that I'm an idiot.
Uh okay. So uh that was from uh Philippe Lamont. P Press, our good friend Philip Preston from Polyscience writes in uh and he says it's been a while since we've connected. I hope this email finds you well. It does.
Uh this week, Philip has launched an iPad iPhone Sous vide application that uh he's very excited about. Uh and he says, we believe this application will be of tremendous help to chefs in determining the correct cooking time for various thicknesses of protein. Based on research done by Nathan, that's Nathan Miravold, Chris Young, uh, who's been on the show, uh, Doug Baldwin and others, uh, we can calculate the thermal conductivity of various proteins in various shapes and sizes. Uh to determine the accurate cooking time, he uses the thermal uh diffus uh diffusivity of food, thermal conductivity of the food, the shape coefficient, uh, which basically it's like a fudge factor. They're like, you know, it's like, I don't know, is it a certain sphere?
Is it a cylinder, something in between? Eh, anyway. Uh uh, etc. etc. And they use the differential equations and they actually calculate it.
Once you've entered these uh pieces of data, they calculate the time to cook pasteurized to the surface or pasteurized to the core and show the log reduction of pathogens. We've collaborated with uh the guys from Sous vide Dash, which I know you've mentioned on your cooking issues radio show, and they had a question earlier in the thing. I think you'll see the improvements for user friendliness and streamlining that we did, uh, and you can download it on the thing. I checked it out. Uh it's true.
It uh the interesting thing is it's it's clearly derived from the Sous Vash guys that they they workflow, but it adds things like it actually shows you the curves of how the bacteria are being killed, and it saves your it's it's it's very user-friendly actually. It's really uh it's good. I don't know how much it costs. Uh do you not we'll figure out how much it costs? I don't know how much it costs.
But uh it uh it seems to work well. Here's my here's my uh uh issue with with it. First of all, it has something like called an an ice an ice bath thing. Uh and it's basically the only thing they allow you to do is to figure out your chilling time. If you're a chef and you're worried about how long is it gonna take to chill my item, um, you know, the the problem with it is is that when we advocate it, Bruno Gusseau from Cuisine Solutions advocates uh and we now advocate a two-step, two or three-step chilling process.
When you take something out of low temperature, the idea is you don't want to chill the food right away. If you chill it right away, you prevent the proteins from when they're still uh have the ability to, when they're warm, from reabsorbing juices that have been expelled out during the cooking process. And so Bruno Gusot and we recommend a uh a process where you take it out of the out of the water bath cooking bath and you leave it on the counter for 10 to 15 minutes, depending on thickness, uh, and then put it into tap water to slowly cool it down for 10 to 15 minutes, and then an ice bath until it's cool. So it'll be nice if you have like a multiple regime chilling thing in there for chefs if they really want to figure out uh how fast they're getting the core temperature down with their chilling regime. Now, uh the other thing, and by the way, if you want to chill something quickly in an ice bath, and this is something I don't think people talk about, a really good way to chill quickly in an ice bath, small amounts, is to keep your immersion circulator uh in an ice bath.
Set the temperature below zero Celsius, below 32 Fahrenheit, and use it to circulate your ice bath because uh you're going to tremendously increase your cooling rate by circulating your ice bath. And this is something I think no one ever talks about. I've never seen anyone write about it. But it's another way to use the circulation in your circulator to help you to chill things very much, much, much more rapidly because there's very little movement inside an ice bath. And if you ever put your hand into an ice bath with a lot of product in it, you'll notice that there's a big warm spots right next to where the uh where the product is.
It can it can make a big big difference. The other thing I'd really love to see in an application like this that they don't have is uh how to apply it to the finishing of uh of your of your meat products. So, for instance, I have uh when when I'm finishing a product, you like I've I'll fry it or I'll put it on a grill or I'll put it in a pan for a couple of minutes, and you get a big temperature spike in the center out of that. And so, what you have to do before you finish it, if you don't want to overcook your meat, is you have to chill it a bit before you uh do a cook off. Conversely, I might want to know how long it's gonna take me to fry through a piece of chicken in a deep fryer without using low temperature at all.
And the same equations that they're using for low temperature cooking are applicable to these higher temperature cooking techniques. So, what I would like to see is it also have something in there be like, okay, I'm gonna deep fry uh a piece of chicken. How long is it gonna take to get my core temperature up? Or uh I'm going to uh put on a grill or in a deep fryer uh the steak that I just finished in sous vide. How much of a rise am I gonna get in the core?
Because this is a place that a lot of people ruin their products, and you've already done the math right to get the answer for what's going to happen to the temperature on the inside. So just add those, uh add those separate things, and uh I think you'd have a super duper winner. Um Jack, do I have time for one more or no? Yeah. Alright, cool.
Uh that was from our good friend Philip Preston, Apoly Science. Hello, Dave and Nastasha. I have a question about carbonation. This is from Jonathan Hunter. I know you said last week that it's difficult to do carbonation from a keg, but I'm wondering if it is all possible.
We are putting new beer lines in our space, and I have four lines open. I was thinking about doing two lines for a spritzer-like beverage, a French 75 or an Americano, and one line for an NA and one line for carbonated water. We have a glycol system and we're running the lines about 20 feet. We can keep the cooler about 34 degrees during service. I was wondering if there's just no way to make this work or if we could piece something together that would be possible.
Maybe if we carbonated the corny kegs ahead of time at 23 degrees and then let them sit with a tank connected before we put them on the lines, it might work. Any help with this would be great. The question I have is if there be any way to attach a valve from a CO2 tank. Another question is whether or there's a way to attach a CO2 tank directly to an ISI shaker. This would save us some money over buying cartridges.
Thanks so much. The show is really helpful. Jonathan Hunter. Okay, I'm going to take them in reverse real quick. You can absolutely connect a CO2 tank to uh an ISI.
I've done it before. All you have to do is uh get someone to machine the threads out uh to um to screw onto where you put the cartridge, right? And then go directly to a tank. I've done it before. Uh it's not that difficult, but you do need some machining skills.
Alternately, you could probably uh you could probably figure out a way to get a rig it by like molding with plastic or epoxy, but I don't know whether or not it's gonna hold uh gas and then it's gonna be more more permanent, right? Uh but eminently, eminently doable. Uh I'm sure someone out there has a DIY do it. Someone sells something to do that already, but they charge a preposterous amount of money and they expect you to buy nitrous tanks from them as well. Um ridiculous amount of money.
The other thing you could do is you could theoretically go through the dispense nozzle on it with CO2 if you wanted to do that, and that might be an easier thing for you to machine or to jerry rig, for instance. You could just screw you could just jam a piece of tube over the uh over the dispensing nozzle, right, and then take a hose clamp and tighten it down until it fits, and it might work. No guarantees on that, Nastasha, right? No guarantee. So if the thing sprays off and starts, you know, like flying around the room like a like a like a snake, then you know, don't blame me.
Uh but the good thing about that then is you could just put the you could just squeeze it and put the um the you know, squeeze it and let the gas in. The bad thing is you'd have to unscrew that that connector to vent it, unless you put like a uh a ball valve on the hose that let you vent and put change between doing gas and not. But it's it's all eminently doable, even with no machining uh technology, you could do it. Okay. Uh regarding the keg, uh look, 34 is kind of, I mean, that you're gonna need to go with a low alcohol drink.
Uh you're also gonna need because the lower the alcohol, the less foaming you're gonna have, and also the warmer it can be without getting excessive foam out, and the better carbonation you can get at those lower levels, right? So typically when we have our carbonated drinks, we're running them at uh at like 23, uh, which is where you say carbonating it at that and then letting it come up to temperature is not gonna reduce your foaming problems. That's the that's the issue on it. Now, plenty of people serve carbonated drinks out of kegs. The question is is what level of carbonation are you gonna get?
The you know if you the best result I've seen out of kegs are when you get a cold plate and you run the drink, and a cold plate sits in the bottom of an ice well, and you run the drink through two segments, two whole channels of a cold plate. So in into the cold plate, and when instead of going out of the cold plate to a gun, back into a cold plate, and then back out again, and using uh uh there's a valve called um a Becker valve, scan squeeze valve that you can get from a place called Mark Powers in Guntersville, Alabama. And it's a specially made valve for carbonated things, and it's about an order of magnitude better than uh a gun. And because it's got a big compensator in the back of it that really allows you to dispense uh between a high pressure and a low pressure without losing a lot of bubbles, and it's just the only way to do it. That's the way I do all my carbonated beverages uh and have since you know since I don't know, for like ten, ten, twelve, twelve years.
That's what I've been doing using that kind of a valve system on carbonated beverages, uh you know, at home just with seltzer. So you can do that, but you you need to make sure that the carbonation level is it's not going to be as high as it would be if you could keep the temperature lower. It's possible to salt out an ice bath and have the temperature go lower and or use glycol and get it lower even like you like you say, you can't get it lower than, but then you have to worry about freezing the stuff out inside of the coal plate, which can be a little bit of a hassle. So uh the long story is yes, it's possible. The short story is and the short story is that it whether or not it's feasible depends on what level of carbonation you want and how much you're willing to tolerate foaming.
I hope that's helpful. Come back next week for a cooking issues. Thanks for listening to this program on the Heritage Radio Network. You can find all of our archived programs on Heritage Radio Network.com, as well as a schedule of upcoming live shows. You can also podcast all of our programs on iTunes by searching Heritage Radio Network in the iTunes Store.
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