Broadcasting live from Roberta's in Bushwick, Brooklyn. You're listening to Heritage Radio Network.com. This is Sam Edwards, proud sponsor of Heritage Radio Network, SurreyFarms.com. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live every Tuesday in the back of Roberta's Pizzeria in Bushwick, Brooklyn on the Heritage Radio Network.
Joined today with Nastasha the Hammer Lopez, who's gonna leave directly from here to go to Seattle for the modernist cuisine dinner. Portland, what are you doing in Portland? Stump Town. Even though I don't appreciate good coffee. Well, she has she says she agrees because what she wants you, the listener, to feel, is that somehow, like I only pick on her.
Instead, what actually happens, I'll just give you a uh here's the thing. So uh for a living, Nastash and I try to tell people what they should be eating, you know, not what they should be eating in a in a way you should eat this, but trying to help people make better decisions, to make things better, to do a better job making food, using technology or otherwise, whether it's with cooking issues, whether it's at Booker and Dax, whether it's at the Museum of Food and Drink, we spend all of our time trying to increase the quality and not the snobbery, but the quality of uh what people can produce and do produce and do consume, right? So, like n s what Nastash will do is not once or twice, or three or four or twenty or thirty or a hundred and twenty times, but more. Poke me with things that she knows will bother me. For instance, that her favorite coffee happens to be from one of those quilted like boxes on the side of the street with wheels.
You guys know what I'm talking about? Also joined in the studio with uh our intrepid engineer and the guy who keeps the entire Heritage Radio running, Jack Insley over there. Hello. Yeah. Yeah, you know what I'm talking about?
Those quilted those quilted, like they got like stale stale bagels and coffee in 'em. So Nastasha, uh uh her point is that she likes to say that this is her favorite coffee because and the first thirty or forty times I didn't let it irritate me. And then because it's not like I can say, hey, look, Nastasha, you enjoy that coffee, right? It's not that you don't enjoy it because somehow you enjoy going down to the cesspool that is your street and and buying a coffee from this guy, and somehow that's an enjoyable human interaction that doesn't involve hipsters. Because folks, Nastasha hates hipsters and good yeah, hates them.
And good coffee and hipsters in this city, they go together. Do they not, Jack? Most cities. Yeah. Yes.
Yes. Okay, fair. Fair. Okay. Uh she hates going to uh Starbucks because she hates corporations and and the people who work in them.
Jack, you can agree with that. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. But she so she hates that. And and she hates the the general alternative, which are hipsters, right?
Because you're not it's hard to get unless they're an owner, like a fifty-year-old non-hipster, to sit around and make you a coffee all day. Jack, am I correct about this? You're spot on. Yeah. Good coffee's good coffee though.
That's what I'm saying. And and and and and there's no snobbery to enjoying good coffee. It's just it's it's a right it's a ri it's a ritual. Like literally, there are peasants somewhere, most likely, picking the coffee cherries that they then processed or shipped all the way around the world to make a cup of coffee for you. Respect it.
That's all I'm saying. Respect. Respect the coffee. You have a caller. Oh, okay, call caller, you're on the air.
Uh hey there, Dave. Uh I wanted to ask about uh pressure cooking. Ah good. Uh I am in the enthusiast category, not uh it's uh home chef, and have been listening to your show for a while. Um long enough that I memorized the phone number, which is a little scary to me.
Wow, cool. Yeah, because I forgot to mention it. Good. Yeah. Uh and uh uh So the I can't really afford this the sous vide equipment, the low the low temperature right now, but I did get a pressure cooker and because I've heard you mention it a bunch of times, and I was curious about some recipes.
I hadn't really heard you talk too much about like what's pressure cook is really good for. I really I got it in the mail, then I was like, Well, what do I do with this? Okay, do you what kind of pressure cooker do you have? It's just a s it's a six quart, and I c I can't remember the brand. Does it vent or does it not vent?
Like in other words, when it's when it's running, do does it constantly put steam out or not? I haven't even tried it yet. Okay. So they the the pressure cookers in general, they uh all pressure cookers that you that you buy. It's gas or it's electric.
It's uh it's g it's stove. Okay. Stove top yeah. So all stovetop um units basically uh can either generate five Psi of pressure or fifteen, right? And so they it's fifteen.
Yeah, yeah, no, but you could do uh in other words, they they're usually settable to do either. But you Oh, I see, okay, great. Right, but m most of the recipes that I do are based on fifteen. Uh the the main difference is is that certain pressure cookers have a uh pressure regulating mechanism in them that uh regulates pressure without venting steam. So they use a spring and you actually can see like uh um a spring traveling up without any steam coming out of the units, notably kun recon has ones like that then other um pressure cookers um they let you know they're at pressure and they regulate their pressure by uh emitting steam and so you have to have steam emitting from it a little bit not a lot uh in order to judge whether you've reached the proper pressure or not okay so one of the great things to do with pressure cookers is uh stocks stocks and and soups um what you need to realize when you're doing that when you're making soups in in general in a pressure cooker is that pressure cooking drastically mutes the flavor of things like onions it gets rid of a lot of their pungency but it also amplifies their sweetness so I like a lot of that sweetness from onions so I like I quadruple my onion base in a recipe right uh but things like carrots they stay sweet but they don't get more or less sweet or celery so if you just take the classic miropoi there okay.
But what what what happens is you get extremely fast removal of gelatin and flavor from the meats. So you can do a pressure cook stock in 15 minutes. Right? And then you you you let it come down and then you can do you could put a second set of bones into a second stock. I could do a triple stock which is extremely indulgent uh I grant you but in in a in about an hour.
The trick is if your pressure cooker is the kind of pressure cooker that releases steam uh I found that there's a flavor degradation in in the stock versus regular regular production. It's still faster, it's still good. But a pressure cooker that does not really release steam makes a pr a stock that, in my estimation, and the people that have tasted it is darker, meatier, and tastes better and has better flavor than regular cooked stock and and is also faster. Whereas if you have one that releases steam, then the flavor is not quite as good as regularly produced stock. Still good, but not quite as good as regularly produced stock, but it still is quicker.
One way around this is something that I I learned actually from Mirvold and Young and Maxime from Modernist Cuisine is they actually do smaller stocks inside of mason jars in the pressure cooker. So when you're doing that, there's a there's a couple of advantages if you're doing a soup or something with meat in it that way. One, it's sterilized if you cook it long enough. You have to know what you're doing, right? So it's shelf stable at that point.
Uh but you know, unless you read up on it, be careful. Okay. Uh second, uh there is no choice, there's no way that volatiles can uh leave, and so even with a uh pressure cooker that vents, you can get all the benefits of an undone pressure cooker. And the third one is you can do extremely small volumes. So if you have um something um like uh squab and you don't have that many bones or some sort of game bird or anything like that where you don't have a lot of the product to begin with, you can still make a very concentrated flavorful stock because if you put it into a mason jar, and you can get different sizes of mason jars all the way up to a liter and a half if you wanted to, uh then uh you can make those things very concentrated in small quantities.
So that's a that's a good thing to do. Um another uh great thing with pressure cookers is uh pressure cooking uh eggs. You let them you let them uh hard boil for a couple of minutes with the lid off, then uh just so that they're set so that they don't rupture. Then you you bring them up from cold. Then you close the pressure cooker, allow it to come up to 15 psi, cook it for between 45 minutes, an hour and 10 minutes, let it come down naturally.
If you let if you vent it, uh it the eggs could explode. And then when they're cool, you'll open them, you'll see that they're brown uh and they'll have the out the whites will have a kind of nutty toastiness, and the yolks will have an aroma of kind of a giblet gravy kind of kind of chicken livery uh aroma, which I find uh quite awesome. And that's due to the myard reactions in it. Um pressure cooking mustard seeds in vinegar. You have to blanch them once or twice to get rid of the dirty taste.
Uh then after you pressure cooked them in vinegar, then drain them and toss them in sugar, makes an amazing garnish. Uh horseradish grated, again, blanched to get rid of the dirty flavor, pressure cooked. Uh you can make horseradish purees that taste of horseradish but aren't very pungent. Um I actually use the pressure cooker all the time. And this is something I don't normally do.
I would never do this to serve someone in a uh in a restaurant situation because I would just do a long cooked braise. But um pork shoulder, just hacked up with a bunch of uh, you know, you just get like you know your three or four favorite ground dried chilies and uh you know pork shoulder and even a little even, you know, I always have the I always I always use chicken stock because I always have chicken stock in my freezer, but any kind of stock in there, uh, and just very minimal amounts of liquid. The trick with pressure cooking is a minimal amount of uh liquid in there because you're not gonna boil a lot of it off. Uh but they're they're fantastic for you know for all of these things. And then you can get into kind of crazier situations like uh trying to do pressure cooked caramels, um but they they require uh a little bit of tweaking.
But yeah, pressure cooker, you're gonna have and not only that, I don't know where you live, but summertime's coming on, and nothing beats uh pressure cooking. You know, sub summertime pressure cooking is awesome because you can you could tear off uh a lot of ingredients in it without releasing a lot of heat into your kitchen because once they're at pressure they have they're very very efficient once they're pressure because remember you have to throttle it way down once they're cooking so I think you're gonna I think you're gonna enjoy it. Cool thanks. Hey thank you. I have one one quick comment for Jack.
Oh Jack here you go Jack. Oh all right. What's up with the reverb button? At the end of the show the reverb button always goes off over the credits. Wow it it makes me very happy that somebody noticed that thanks that's just that's just to keep me entertained back here.
Yeah. Thanks man. Nice nice. Speaking of thank you very much. I was listening by the way uh quite correct call your questions to 7184972128.
That's 7184972128. Alright so back to Nastasha and her coffee. The main point of that was the main point was that is that she'll say something like I don't like that kind of coffee and to you the listener when and I I on purpose knew she was going to do something like this so I didn't go crazy. But to when I go completely bonkers when she says something like that, it's because it's as though she's opening a wound that hasn't even healed yet that she's been stabbing me with the same knife for like two and a half, three months in this that particular one years. So she's her her one of her little joys in life is to set up these situations where she can make me look like a tyrant in public uh through this c kind of careful application of minor irritants over long periods of time.
It's not that calculated it's really not. I mean that just comes naturally to you? Yes. Wow. Anyway, hopefully I'll come back with an appreciation for coffee.
Is is are you gonna are you gonna see Dwayne? Or hipsters. Yeah, or hipsters. Right. Right.
You know, Portland, Portland, many great things have come from Portland. Andy Andy Ricker. I'm gonna see him out. Jack, you gonna see him out there? Jack, you been to that restaurant yet?
Pac Pac? No. What the hell's wrong with you? I don't know. Jesus.
It's in your hipster part of town, Joe. Wow. Damn. Also, speaking of Reaver Button, I listened to a little bit of the show to check how the iTunes worked. I sound like I'm on Coke most of the time.
I'm trying to speak slower today. I uh look I'm telling you guys, I'm not on like the my drug of choice is alcohol. Uh consumed hopefully responsibly on most occasions. Uh what? That's what my drug?
My drug is rage. Rage. Yeah, rage. Anyway. Uh so I'm trying to speak a little bit more slowly today.
Uh if you guys have any opinions on whether I should speak uh at this pa pace or at my normal pace, give me a call. But I can't help it. Like I'm trying right now. I'm deliberately slowing myself down so I don't sound like I'm I wanna know if people like the personal anecdotes that you that you tal uh say, tell like what? I don't know, just some of your stories I enjoy.
I tell you. Like when it's all scientific and food. I mean I told people I told people, you know, boring show. Call call in about waffles, anything. Yeah, we'll talk about anything.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh no question is too stupid. That should be the new tagline for the show. No question too stupid, no host. No host too smart, no question too stupid.
Yes, yes. Alright, there we go. Uh Dave and Nastasha the Hammer Lopez, which was abbreviated here to N T H L Chang. What? Did you get that right away?
I didn't. You didn't? Yeah, well, you don't yeah, whatever. Okay. Greetings from New Hampshire.
Chris Anderson at the Monitor's Pantry pointed me to your show, and I've been enjoying the podcast. With Memorial Day around the corner. Oh my god, it is around the corner. Nastasha's going directly, by the way, from Portland to Mirvold in Seattle to Japan. And I'm making her fly to all those locations with three.
Count them three red hot pokers. Oh, that's fine. Oh, I have a stop in Philadelphia. See? What the hell's wrong with you?
Hey, listen, Nastasha, here's the thing. You would I'm I'm sorry, I'm gonna get to your question in in what in one second. Uh uh here's the thing. Uh Nastash and I are the two cheapest people on earth. We are so freaking cheap that even though we're out on the L train, Nastasha's like, how many transfers do I gotta get to take a subway with all my stuff to the to the airport to LaGuardia so I can I'm like, listen, Nastasha, listen.
We have a company now. Booker, I want everyone to listen to this. Booker and Dax will pay for you to take a car service to LaGuardia, the airport. Oh wow. That's funny.
I was looking for the applause and I found that. Yeah, which is even better. Yeah, but yeah, it would be it would be hard to um it would be hard to kind of understand the deeply ingrained cheapness that Nastasha and I have in general. We're some cheap people. Yeah.
Anyway, uh okay, so with Memorial Day around the corner, can you summarize some specific time, temperature, and prep recommendations for low temperature for insurance and other low temperature cookout dishes? Off the top of my head are sausage and beer, uh hamburger, fried chicken, strip steak, ribeye, and others. I have a polycyon circulator and will likely cook, chill, re-therm, and finish on the grill slash fryer, etc. How do you guesstimate minimum return time for a mixed pot of proteins? Is the maximum hold time four hours minus the cook time?
Uh and there's another question, but this that which I'm gonna get in one second. In fact, I might do it later because it's gonna take me a million years to answer that one. And Nastasha doesn't want to hear about any science, apparently. But they these questions are from Rob Trapas. And by the way, thank you for telling me how to pronounce your name because there's no way I would have gotten it off the spelling.
What would your guess have been? I know, I don't know, but I knew you were gonna appreciate that, and I I did too. Yeah, I yeah, we appreciate that kind of thing. We appreciate it. Unless your name's Smith, in which case I know how to pronounce that already.
Okay. Uh so on retherm time, by the way, uh the don't worry. Everything on how long you can hold uh a meat depends on the temperature of the bath. If the bath temperature is extremely low, so if I'm doing so first of all, your first question was cooking for insurance. For those of you that don't know what that is, it's what you do is you use low temperature cooking, which is uh using a water bath or a combi oven or uh CVAP is using a very, very accurate temperature to cook the meat all the way through.
Now the meat at this point is not finished. In general, when I do cooking for insurance, low temperature for insurance, I don't do any kind of pretreatments to it at all. All I'm doing is assuring that the center of the meat is cooked exactly where I want it to be, and then I cool it. Okay. And so for chicken breast, it would be 63 degrees Celsius.
Uh for chicken leg, it would be 65, 66 degrees Celsius. Uh for uh rib steak, it would be 55 degrees Celsius. Uh and the you know the list goes on and on. For sausage, it would be uh I usually do 60 or 140 degrees. It's a little pink in the center, but I like it that way.
Did you like the brats we had? Yeah, I love them. That was 60 degrees. But Pat Lafrida donated to the uh museum of food and drink event we had last week. Uh thank you for people that have uh been to our fundraisers in the past.
And Pat LaFrida made up a bunch of delicious brats. We circulated them in Brooklyn, uh Brooklyn Brewery, gave us a bunch of beer, graciously gave us beer to circulate the brats in, and we circulated the brats at uh 140 degrees uh Fahrenheit, 60 degrees Celsius, and then grilled them off. Man, were those good. They're really good. Man, on Martin's potato rolls.
What was the name of the mustard we got? That's a good mustard, too. Look it up. That was delicious mustard. Anyway, delicious.
Um so what you do is you cook it all the way through, and then when you're finishing them, uh and a lot of times we don't re-therm when you're doing for insurance. We don't re-therm using uh or reheat using low temperature, we just do traditional cooking methods. So if you're doing a prime rib, here's my recommendation for a prime rib. Cook an entire prime rib to 55 degrees all the way through. Now it's medium rare, rare, medium rare in the center.
It's good, right? Whole thing's good. Now let it cool down, wrap it, let it cool down, put it into a very hot oven, and just wait for the crust to develop. What you want is that nice crispy crust on the outside, and with a prime rib, actually, you want a little bit of overcooked stuff on the outside. Otherwise, the prime rib doesn't look appetizing when you cut through it because it's all one color of meat.
But you're all you need to focus on is delicious crust because the inside is already cooked to where you want it, right? And so that's the essence of cooking for insurance. Duck breast, 57 degrees uh Celsius, about 135 uh Fahrenheit. You want to cook it for 45 minutes, make sure you flatten the breast uh so that the skin will render later, let it cool down, and then all you need to focus on is searing off the skin. And that scare sear searing off the skin will reheat the meat enough to serve it, but it's not gonna overcook it because you're just focused on the skin, so your pan heat can be a little bit higher than it normally would, right?
So uh, and basically anything can be can be done that way. Hamburgers, I do it 55 to 57, depending on uh the how squeamish the people are who are eating it. Uh then on a hamburger, uh a hamburger sometimes you could even let cool all the way down. You gotta be a little careful to not let oxygen in the bag, otherwise there's gonna be a problem with uh rancidity when it reheats, especially if it sits overnight, which you don't want to do. Uh and then you know, you you can let it cool down and then deep fry it, and they're great.
Uh rib steak, uh, if you're gonna serve it um right away, I would drop the temperature to 50 degrees Celsius, but the not if you're gonna serve it in the health department, kind of but I do that at home. But don't let it sit very long at 50. I will only let it sit a couple of hours at 50 C because there you you're at the borderline where bacteria are gonna start coming back to life. They won't, but you know, you don't want to be in that situation uh too long. But if you're holding something like a sausage above the temperature at which bacteria are dying, and the temperature keeps getting revised down and down, uh, but a sausage you can hold easily at 140 or even uh lower.
Uh, you're gonna be killing bacteria, and you can hold it for infinity, basically. You know, the texture will start going down, but you can hold it uh for infinity. Um, how's that sound? Is that good? Good.
All right. Uh I'm gonna come back to your other question after uh the commercial break and answer it a little bit later on cheeses. Come back, cooking issues. She'll only come out at night. Nothing is new.
I'm seeing the hair before. Watching the wedding. We should sit with you, but our eyes are on the door. What you think you get it for free? The woman is wild.
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The Reaver busting it out. Yeah, man. Call any questions. Oh, we have a caller right now, but let me just say this before. Before we take the collar on, I like myself some Sam Edwards ham.
Sam Edwards though does not enjoy the potty mouth. Oh. Does not curse around Sam Edwards. It's true. He's a traditional man.
Caller, you're on the air. Well, you know, I hear Nasasha's coming to Portland. So uh I don't actually have a question. I do have one about the uh the pressure cooking stock and account tools cool. Um but I do have a suggestion, uh, which is if you only go to one brewery in Portland, it would be go to the Cascade Brewing Barrel House, which is fantastic, and all they have is sour beer.
And it's constantly changing and it's probably the uh the best place. Like in general? Yeah. No, no, like seriously, in in general, I you have so many to choose from. It's the one place.
You just keep going back. It changes all the time. There's uh it's like seriously the best place in general. The cheese bar is good too. Awesome.
I'll take it outside cascade cascade brewing? Cascade brewing it's a barrel house. It's on it's on Belmont. It's it's just constantly changing sour beer and it's uh it's it's a fantastic value as well. Yeah and they they specialize in sour in sour beers like uh like uh Rodenbach style or or what?
Uh well they have they have some Rodenbach style but they'll do they'll do everything from uh from sour wheat beers uh to and and then and then they'll barrel age them and then they'll serve some of them alive from the barrel. Um and uh they'll add I mean the most random fruits and nuts that I haven't uh trying to remember there's one that's like a I can't even pronounce the nut that they put in there. Um but it was it was fantastic. Nastasha likes it actually uh if she's gonna have a beer it's hard to get her to have it frankly which I don't want to bring up right now but but she likes beer with acidity. I do.
So she this might may be the place for her and I hope to hear back from her on uh how much she enjoyed it. Yeah, thank you so much. Yeah. Uh about the the stock in the in the can though when you're when you're canning what does uh if you if you add any aromatics or uh or uh you know when you add vegetables to it does that or are you talking about just making it with uh with the bones because wouldn't would those break down or something if you left them in a can for a while? Uh if you let them a long time probably.
I mean uh they th you know the the ones they were doing they were doing almost like um I mean think about confis are are done in jars all the time and they're delicious and there's there's bones in them. Um so once it stops cooking you're not gonna get a uh that much more extraction. I mean in other words I don't think you're gonna be ripping the calcium out of it if that's what you mean. Um depend 'cause it it's not gonna be acidic. Do you know what I'm saying?
Um and in things like confit that are often jugged or or or can process, um they're fine for for a long period of time. But i I think in modern cuisine they were making just smaller versions of stocks. Uh I I haven't seen that section in a long time so you're stretching my uh my memory banks and when I did get to look at it I I have to this make a confession I don't own it yet so I've only gotten to look at it when I have like pawed through it at the events I've gone to you know what I mean? So it's so and I I mean I know all those guys and I've t I talk to those guys all the time and and and I've read ch you know chunks of it but literally sitting at a library. You know not uh I will own it.
It's I'm not I I'm it's worth the money. You know what I mean? But I just don't own it yet. Because imagine if I told my wife, hey honey I spent five hundred dollars on a book what? You know what I mean?
Booker and Daxon loan a copy. We'll keep it at the uh what's it called uh so yeah so uh that answer your question? Yeah, yeah, I think it does. Cool. I have a question for the caller actually.
Twitter Twitter wants to know if that brewery uses spontaneous fermentation. You know, I believe they have their own cultures now. So they they're it's actually uh in the barrels now. And so when they when they put the beer into the barrel, um, it picks up all the uh lacto bacillus and uh botanamyces and uh whatever else is in there. And so they've got uh they've got different barrels, and then they'll blend some of them together towards the end.
And but I'm not sure if that originally came from spontaneous fermentation, if if the cultures are in the barrel. But I I think they are because they have their own um they get like all their all their fruit from around here and they just they just let it go. They they're really, really, really good. Cool. Thanks.
Thank you. We also have another caller, guys. All right, caller, you're on the air. Uh hi, David Dandy from Chicago. Hey.
Hey, how you guys doing today? All right. Good, good. Hey, I had a meal at Charlie Trotter's last Thursday at the kitchen table. That was incredible.
Oh, when when are they closing that down? When are they closing down? Hey, I'm having trouble hearing you. I I think I might need to call back. Uh well, well, what you you talked talk all right.
You call back in a sec. I want to hear about the dinner of Charlie. Give a call right back. I will, thanks. Michael.
So while he's waiting to call back, Michael Nackin from Herbaboracious uh wrote in and uh thanked us for mentioning the book. We've read the book. I enjoyed the book, and by the way, it gives a well-deserved shout out, he does to iceberg lettuce, which is delicious. I like iceberg lettuce. Who doesn't like iceberg lettuce?
It's some crunchy, cool, refreshing stuff. Jack, are you with me? I'm on board. Nastasha even is on board. We're all three of us are on board for for iceberg lettuce and and for Michael Natkin from Urbavaracious.
Uh he wrote back if you would like to be on one of our shows, let him know what you think would be a good fit. You cook them on this show if you wanted to. Yeah. We could have a talk. Maybe I don't know if you want to.
You could if you if that's what you wanted to do. He just was in New York and didn't stop by the Booker and Dex because he went to uh Aterra, which uh he gave an amazing uh review to the uh have you been there? No. With Mark? This seems like the kind of place you would go.
Apparently amazing new place uh platform New York magazine gave it four stars. Uh I haven't been cup because I haven't been but uh he says says very very good things about caller's back by the way all right caller you are on the air hey Dave this is Andy again. Yeah is that better? Can you hear me? Yeah yeah I can hear you what's going on.
Good good so Charlie Trotter when are they closing down? They're closed end of August. I think August 31st or something like that. Alright so you're one of the last people to ever eat there. I I think I was and in fact the group that I went with we loved it so much we're gonna try to go again on the very last day that they're open.
It was just you know it was it was incredible. I mean being in the kitchen and actually seeing everybody cook and uh you know serving us right there it was just uh really an experience of a lifetime and a couple of my dining companions actually got were able to get up and help help some of the chefs like prepare our prepare some of the dishes near the end. So was it as clean as it is famously purported to be it was pretty clean. Yeah we we ended up staying there until like 1 30 a.m or something like that and they were scrubbing the heck out of that thing by the time they were done. Yeah I was pretty impressed with the cleanliness.
Charlie's uh he's he's uh he's kind of got a coarse mouth which is pretty fun he's it seems like he's having fun in the last few months that he's open. So wait so you're saying the floor is clean but his mouth is not that's exactly right yes yeah but that's the important thing you know yeah, exactly. Well, he famously said once that uh you could almost review a restaurant just by looking at its floor in the kitchen. Interesting you know, I think I've heard that now that you say that. Yeah.
Yeah, it's kind of one of his better known uh statements. Yeah. Well, I I I like it. You know, I like eating in clean establishments, and that was one of the cleaner ones I've well, I mean, I've never been in a real you know, rarely been in a real restaurant kitchen before, so this was uh but I was I was impressed nonetheless. Nice.
Yeah, so they did kind of this like uh this uh beet terrene. And I was wondering what do you think they use? Do they use anything to bind it together or uh how you know I imagine it would be cooked at a fairly high temp, or would you cook the beets beforehand and then just put them in the terrine and let them chill and set, or what do you think? Well, is it served hot or cold? Uh cold.
Yeah, so they could bind it with almost anything then. So it's served cold, um uh I mean the classically obviously you could you would bind something like a gelatin. If you wanted to stay um if you want to stay vegetarian, I would use a combination of um if you want it that gelatin like feel, that awesome mouthfeel of gelatin, I would use uh a mixture of kappa carragenin and locust bean gum. The kappa carragenin by itself is brittle and the locust bean gum when you add it to it, um softens it. So it's like jay uh so it's like gelatin, but it still can re melt, so you can use it.
If you wanted to heat it, I mean you could use agar. The problem with agar is uh it's not a hundred percent clear, so it's not gonna look as shiny. Do you know what I'm saying? Uh as as as Kappa plus the special LBG that CP Coco serves will use. Uh you could also use uh something called gelan gum.
Gelan is not gonna be as flexible if you use the clear one, it's gonna be a little more brittle, but then you could deep fry it. Cool. Yeah, that oh wow, deep fry it. Yeah, that would be incredible. Yeah.
Uh the problem with gel-an, if you're gonna use gel-an, is that you have to um you m you have to heat the beets before you pour it on, or you're gonna get some pre-gelling problem. Do you know what I mean? Okay. Uh agar is gonna be a little simpler to work with, but but uh kappa carrageenan LBG, which is uh uh I think Modernist has a has a version of that uh somewhere. Uh that mixture is a really good or just straight up gelatin.
Gelatin is great as as long as your kitchen's not going to be too hot and you're gonna serve it cold. Yeah, and I'm not too worried about you know keeping it veggie or vegan. So I think gelatin would probably be the way to go. But yeah, it was really nice. Real golden beet, just gorgeous.
So another quick question. I I called in last summer about a ham I was curing in my attic, and unfortunately I went up there a couple of a couple of weeks ago and I've got bugs. Uh I hate that. No. Beetles or mites?
I what what was the first one? Beetles. I think they're mites. Uh they well, they're little uh they look to be little grubby type things. Um, you know, they leave kind of a sawdust looking what I assume is some sort of feces, you know, around where they're where they're chewing.
Basically, there was a little bit of a taint in up near the bone. Uh there's a little bit of extra skin removed and a little too much exposure. I don't think I got it faulted quite well enough when I first uh, you know, when I first cured it. And so there's always been a little bit of a taint up there, but until a few weeks ago, you know, no sign of any other type of contamination. So you think there's yeah, what do I do?
Am I am I just screwed? I mean, or or do you think there's some is there a way I can, you know, cut the rest of it around the bugs, or what do you think? Okay, so you're in Chicago, yeah? I am, yeah. So you're pr probably pretty much like New York.
I mean, they have other things like skippers down south that cause problems, but in our kind of uh latitudes, the two main enemies of ham are different varieties of boring beetle and mites. So uh the boring beetle, you'll see holes in the meat just above the fat line. Uh did you see those? Are there holes in the meat? I I couldn't really tell.
Like the plate the butcher job wasn't wasn't very good. You know, they they uh there it was clear that the pig was hung from this leg, so there's like a little bit of split, you know, in the tendon by the uh what do you call it? The uh um Gambrel? Right gamble holes, basically. Yeah.
Uh so I I haven't had the chance to really inspect it that closely to see where it is. But it's not on the face. It's all up by the uh up by the the bone. I'm hanging it uh, you know, hock hock up. All right, well, I haven't noticed.
I mean the well the good news is is that the taint can be cut away and the rest of the ham is is okay. And that uh, you know, I I I've I've had a lot of beetle damage before on hams I've been had hanging, but they were always on the face, but for for those of you that don't know what we're talking about, the face is the portion of meat that the bone projects out of that was attached to the pig. And I usually see beetle damage right at the fat line uh on the face side, right? Not on the not through the skin, because the skin's a lot harder to attack than the face. So the boring beetle damage that I've had has been on the face side.
So it's probably not that. If you're not seeing individual bugs, but just kind of dust on the ground, that's probably mites, and those mites that like the dust is actually mites and not feces, it's actually mites. The good news there, brush off the mites and you're and you're good to go. The bad news, the bad news, once you have mites in your attic, you have mites in your freaking attic, and like even if you wait for a year and hang another ham, you're gonna get mites on that ham. So yeah.
So like there are things you can treat your your uh attic with that uh I forget what I forget the name of them because I've never I've never tried to do it. I also now have mites in my house, so when I hang hams, I get mites. It's not gonna hurt it. You can brush them off. It's not a problem.
Cool. Uh well I think I think I did see some actual little grubby larva looking things, so it's probably not the mice. Oh, but that was probably on the taint section. Oh yeah, good point. Right, right, right.
So maybe it's just uh you know, flies or something like that. Right. That could be flies, any kind of fly, like blow fly or anything like that. You know, things like that, like because they'll eat um that section, whereas they won't eat the really cured part. I mean, cut yeah, cut yourself a good section around that that tainted portion.
And to be honest, there's not that much meat up there anyway. You're not losing that much. What you're losing is a couple good soups. That's it. Yep.
You know what I mean? And the rest of your ham should be fine. Yeah, you can give that up and the rest of your ham should be fine. Yeah, and you know, frankly, it's it's been a good experiment, but you know, for the quality of ham you can get from you know, Finchville and Newsom and stuff like that, not that expensive and pretty freaking incredible. So uh this might be my last stab at it, but at least I can salvage this one.
Yeah, so but you know what? Like it's rewarding and there is a learning curve to it. Um, you know, you might want to check out uh Dr. Norman Marriott, uh formerly a m he's emeritus at uh I think of Virginia Tech, has a uh pretty good PDF available online. Uh yeah.
Uh with saying that. Yeah, with troubleshooting on uh on on ham curing if you want to give it again. I unfortunately don't have a place that I can hang one, so I haven't I haven't done, but as soon as I get a house out in the middle of nowhere to, you know, take my kids to when I'm not in New York City, I'll be hanging up some pork, believe it or not. Let me believe it. Yeah, yeah.
I think I I'm looking at a cur curing chamber too. Uh you know, the cured meats blog, Jason Molinari, I think he's written in a couple of times. He's got uh, you know, some good, good DIY curing chamber tips. So I think that uh hopefully that'll help. Uh I I'd like to try some other type of uh salumi and things like that as well.
So it is the age of the DIY, thank God it's an exciting time to be alive. Heck yeah. Heck yeah. Cool. Thanks so much.
Thank you. Uh Jack, can we do one more commercial break? Uh sure. Call your questions. What is it?
71849728. 7184972128. Cooking and use. Stealing from the mouse of technology. But I can feed all the power little swimming cups already over.
Who's from Seattle? Yeah. What you don't know is that my cousins are from Seattle and we're always doing like the weird Eddie Vetter stuff when we're cooking. By the way, I pre-apologize to everyone for not getting to all I'm not gonna be able to get to all the questions today. Right, Stas?
Well, let's do them for Japan. Oh, we're gonna try and do cooking issues from Japan? Can we do that, Jack? Yeah, let's do it. Cooking issues from Tokyo.
What? Yeah, we're gonna be in the in the uh in the prep kitchen. Yeah, it's awesome. Okay. Uh Dear Nastasha, Dave, and Jack.
Uh love the show. Appreciate how accessible you make it for us to not in the industry full time. I've learned a lot and had a chance to use much of what you talk about. Thank you. Uh this is from Alan Freeman Friedman, by the way.
Uh, and he expects us all to be killed by uh by vegan terrorists, but you first, Nastasha. Just saying. I'm curious whether current microwave technology is at all interesting. I have a chance to get a very cheap new microwave with continuous amplitude control rather than traditional pulse width full on, full-off cycling. But it wouldn't be worth the hassle of swapping out and disposing of the old one if there's nothing really new and interesting I can do with it.
I've never really used a microwave for anything other than leftovers and melting chocolate, but perhaps there are fun techniques that you could share. Thanks, Alan. And then a little note to Ben A is as much fun as playing with old microwaves was as a rather reckless young geek. I may be more averse to self-immolation these days. Alan.
Okay, true story. Having done it several times, please don't chop up your microwave oven. There are dangerous voltages in there. If you defeat the safety interlocks, you can uh nuke your eyeballs with uh microwaves and then they turn white like a cooked egg, never to unwite. Uh yeah.
So please don't mess with your excuse me. Please don't mess with your microwaves. Uh that said, I've done it several times. Uh but the the the trick here, for those of you who don't know what the hell we're talking about, when you put a microwave, a standard microwave on half power. Have you noticed this, Nastasha?
Do you have a microwave? No. Have you ever had a microwave? You notice how it goes and the light dims a little bit? That's because it doesn't actually change the power level.
It just turns the magnetron off and on for a specific amount of time. And it actually takes a little bit of time. The magnetron, by the way, is the thing that's generating the microwaves. That's what it's called. It's called the Magnetron.
And it takes a while for the magnetron to heat up and start generating the, you know, to actually start producing appreciable amounts of microwave. So they time the uh the duty cycle, not the duty cycle, the uh the the full cycle, how long that cycle is of to uh take advantage of the fact that the magnetron has a little bit of uh time lag between when you apply power and when the microwaves come out. So uh 80% power, it's on 80% of the time and then off 20. Uh 100% power, it's on 100% of the time. And the theory with microwaves is that that's okay because you're hitting it with full power and then turning it off, and the food gets to cool off and it all averages out.
Continuous uh control basic uh is something that allows you to um actually change the amount of power that the microwave is putting out on a continuous basis. I've always wanted one to do very controlled, delicate work on defrosting and things like that, but I've never used one. So I can't say whether or not it's actually any better. The one time I tried to build one, I was trying to do microwave dehydration in a vacuum. Uh and so the idea is is that you use a microwave uh to boil the inside of so microwaves penetrate food, and so you're actually boiling the liquids out on the inside of a product.
Um that is advantageous if you're trying to dry it in the presence of a vacuum to instead of freeze-drying, if you don't have it, to do things like uh dehydrated grapes without them having shrunk like raisins because the pro positive pressure of the water boiling out uh keeps them in the proper shape as they're going. The issue is I had a I had a lot of issues, but I wanted to control the power so that it didn't overheat. But my temperature control, my I had a thermocouple in there, and it was arcing like a bastard because as soon as you apply microwaves in a vacuum, a partial vacuum, you get huge plasma balls rolling around and lighting everything on fire on the inside of the microwave. I then was trying to do uh power control on it of my own kind of accord. It was a complete nightmare, horrible.
I don't recommend doing it. That said, I've always been interested in actual continuous controlled uh microwaves, but I don't know uh I don't really know. I mean, and what we mean uh all of my microwave tricks are like really crappy things to do to somebody else's microwave at a party at this point, which I can't really I don't really want to talk about on the air. Because there's plenty of websites that'll teach you how to do it, right, Stuzz? Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Um take another question. Uh hey, uh Dave, Nastasha and Jack went to the NRA show recently and scored a deal for a poly science professional circulator frackage for about 50% off.
By the way, good tip. If you're going to uh trade shows, the last day of the trade show, people don't want to carry that crap home. So what you can do is make a deal with them, preferably early in the trade show to buy their units before they go home. This way they don't have to take them home, and you can get usually dealer price or sometimes even slightly below dealer price uh at at trade shows. Good little tip.
Uh I do not have a vacuum sealer, food stair food saver style, nor chamber. I will receive the circulator soon. I had a couple of questions. Can you leave proteins in the cryovac packaging to cook sous vide? Um perhaps you just give up the ability to pre-sear season and marinate.
Okay, the problem with that, uh a lot of um cryovac uh bags that are shipped aren't shipped, they're not cook chill bags, and so you they're not gonna they're not gonna melt in the in at the temperatures you're using in a circulator, but they're not necessarily rated for heating, and so I can't guarantee that there's no sort of plastic, I can't guarantee the plastic safety at temperature. That said, I've done it many times. Um what's the problem with air in the bag while cooking a sous vide or low temp? There's the there's two problems with air. One is that it can cause uh uh an issue where it doesn't heat as quickly and so in shorter cooked things it can um it can lead to spots that aren't cooked as well in very very long cooked things in the middle of the air stops the heat penetration you can get growth of lactobacillus in the place where there was an air pocket uh if it doesn't heat quickly enough and then you can get all flavors the main problem is if there's air in the bag and then you store it for a long time there's oxygen in the bag and you can develop rancidity in the uh in the fat um and that's bad right bad um but in the short term it's not a problem at all uh and finally if I use low temp zip ziplock approach which you can see on cookingissues.com I give uh step by step with pictures uh what limitations safety etc are there with regards to length of time in the bath or temperature used as the bagging is uh not quite a vacuum there are no limitations on time I've done limit I've only cooked up to three days in one but there's no limitations.
I wouldn't do anything that's cooked higher than about 70 degrees C. Uh but that's in other words not vegetables. Almost anything else I would cook in a Ziploc bag and it's a great technique. I do that all the time. Thanks I love the show I'm looking forward to checking out Booker and Dax next time in New York City.
Nastasha here it is please pick on Dave more on the air so it does not seem so one sided. Drop by the bar and then you'll see it. Wow. Wow what see what you picking on me live? You have to come early I'm mainly at the bar I'm mainly at the bar uh early what I mean we so many other interesting questions uh that I didn't get a chance uh to do today.
We have one we're not gonna get any questions this week because of Memorial Day so we can get him. So Colin has a question on pressure cooking marmalades. Marty wants to know about meat analogs uh I you know I still still didn't get to Rob's question on emulsifying sauce uh salts with uh processed cheese and the uh studies that I was looking at where they're making ketchup flavored processed cheese, and we could talk about our ketchup chocolate that we did back in the day. So many, many interesting things that we didn't get to on the air today. I promise to get to them all, hopefully live from Tokyo next week.
Cooking issues.com, as well as a schedule of upcoming live shows. You can also podcast all of our programs on iTunes by searching Heritage Radio Network in the iTunes Store. You can find us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for up-to-date news and information. Thanks for listening.
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