Today's episode of Cooking Issues has been brought to you by the International Culinary Center. For more information, visit International Culinary Center dot com. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. Roberta's Pizza Will in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Well, we're back from Tokyo, right?
Yeah. Do you have a good time with him? No, because you're not speaking to the microphone here. You had a good time? Yes, did you?
That fantastic time. Crazy. In fact, uh, the only problem is we have so many questions to get to that I don't know if I'm gonna have time to talk about today. We have a one o'clock here. Yeah, yeah.
Well, some other time. Since we have two weeks, we were gone for two weeks. It turned out it was impossible for Nastash and I to schedule doing the cooking issue show with our work schedule over there in the Japan because we were working bar basically until right before the uh show, and so we couldn't really prep out for it, right? Yeah. Anyway, calling your questions to 7184972128.
That's 7184972128. All right, so let's wait, is that right? Yeah. Silver remember. I don't even I didn't even listen to it.
I just like you just turn on the speech and it just like sprays out of your face and you don't you have no idea. Okay. Well, actually, you should since we don't have time to talk to Tokyo, they should go to the blog. Oh, hey, I restarted the blog again, right? I got uh the first post I did was an apology for not putting a post up.
And the second was when Nastash and I went to Jiro's uh sushi along with Mark Ladner. A lot of money. Yeah. Yeah, Jiro loves money. Jiro Dreams of the Money.
My favorite part was if the old man or the old man can watch me eat my uh melon, I think sweaty. Well, you know, look, uh for those of you who don't know, this is uh Jiro Dreams of Sushi is the uh is the the movie that's out now. And it's this 86 year old dude. He's eighty-two years old, he got three Michelin stars. Basically, all he does, he wakes up very early, goes to Sakiji Market, you know, fish market in Tokyo, gets the fish, shows up, and his, you know, must be 60s son, right?
Yeah. Who must be, he's dreaming of his dad dying so that he could take over the family business. Uh so these guys, along with like a couple other apprentices, are sitting there, and this 86 year old dude is pumping out the sushi every day. But when you show up, it's like 300, 350 dollars a pop, and it's one course every minute for about 19 minutes, and then you they move you to another seat and you eat your melon. And Nastasha and Mark were like like all like bent out of shape like pretzels, worried about like hurrying out.
He's like, they want us to leave, they want us to leave. I could give a wrap's ass, whether they want me to leave or not. You know, you know what I mean? It's like if look, if you invite me into your place and I'm spending 350 dollars, it's like, you know, you don't have a right to kick me out in like uh, you know, within 30 minutes. You know.
I understand you. Yeah, he's anxiety. He's not a hooker, he's not like you're done, you're out. You know what I mean? The melon, the melon is uh not that I would, you know, know about that.
No, yeah. No. Imagine yeah, anyway, whatever. Uh but the quality of sushi was amazing. Go see uh the write up on CookingIssues.com versus this, which is cooking issues the radio show.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Uh Daniel Seattle writes, hey Nastasha and Dave. Uh love the show.
I'm a music teacher and food nerd who loves listening to uh restaurant shop talk. My wife and I throw big dinner parties for twelve to twenty people in our small apartment. Uh, what are the current best practices for making coffee for a whole bunch of people? Usually our guests have at least one small cup each, and usually more, so I shoot for at least uh six to eight ounces per person. Normally you do French press or a pour over or an aero press, but those don't scale up well, even if we do a few batches and transfer them to Thermal carafts, what do you think, Daniel from Seattle?
Well, uh, if you're willing to do a pour over uh technique, I think what one thing you could do is switch to a much larger format when you're doing your your pour over. So uh with any of these things, you you're you're it you're into a couple problems. Like fresh coffee is always better than coffee that's uh not fresh, duh. But there's a couple of reasons. One is that the temperature of the coffee uh goes down, like that's the obvious one.
And two, um, the aroma of the coffee disperses, and actually the stuff in the coffee itself, the flavors of the coffee, uh, tend to physically change with time after they're brewed. Now, um so some of that can be mitigated by a proper carafe handling. So if you want to use one of your small-scale methods and put it in a craft and have good results, the first trick is to um add a boatload of boiling water to your carafe first. Let it sit for a couple of minutes, cover it, dump it out, add another layer of boiling water, uh, you know, another thing of boiling water to it. Now leave that boiling water in, and now your carafe is very, very hot.
Otherwise, even though your carafe is thermally insulated, you're wasting a lot of the heat energy of the coffee just warming up the glass walls of the caraft before you add any stuff to it. Makes sense, right, Sas? Right. Same is true when you're adding liquid nitrogen to a caraft. You you end up losing a lot of the initial batch of liquid nitrogen that you add because you need to chill down the caraft to to a low temperature.
So the first thing I would suggest is preheating your craft. Okay. Now, uh the second choice you have is to scale up your mode of production. The problem with most uh scale-ups is that you radically change the actual parameters of your of your brewing. By that I mean either the brew time or the brew water temperature.
And either one of those things can really drastically uh influence the flavor uh result in your coffee. So it's very hard to do in a French press unless you were to custom create some sort of a French press operation in a big pot. But I've noticed that whenever you're doing things uh in a large scale, it can still be difficult because the physical time to press something down is going to be different. The physical time to drain something off in a large situation is going to be different. So here's what I recommend.
If you're gonna if you're willing to do pour over technique, uh go online and purchase the large, large coffee filters that are meant to go with industrial uh for industrial size like bonomatic coffee machines that make 20 cups at a time. They're much, much larger, a lot more surface area than a standard one. Put it into a colander. Put your grounds into that with a bed depth that's roughly similar to what you would have in a normal pour over coffee situation. Put uh that colander over a larger pot that you can put into a Bain Marie of of hot water and then heat your water for the coffee and pour it all over at once so that your brew time is roughly similar to what your normal pour over uh drip time would be.
And that should create and then pour it directly into a thermal uh craft and serve out. And that's probably as close as I think I can get you just off the top of my head, having never done it myself. What do you think? It's good. Good.
Yeah. All right. Uh my my iPad, my my stuff is so long-winded that my iPad turns off in between and I have to do it. I think there's a way you can keep it on. There's a way I can keep it on?
That Mustacha, you want that for next week? Okay. Which reminds me, I just want to tell listeners that we now have iPhone and iPad compatibility for the live stream, so you guys can uh tune in live on the go. Oh hell. Hell yeah.
Yeah. All right. Uh Jonas from Switzerland writes in uh about meat. Hello, Nastasha and Dave. I'm a chef who's been working with the Sous vide technique for some time.
In 2011, we tasted various uh foods in Sou vide water baths and published the results we liked in an iPhone app called Sous vide degree Celsius. How the hell do you search for the degree symbol? Crazy. I don't know how you do that. Yeah, I don't know.
I have no idea. Anyway, uh recently I've been asked to present low temperature cooking and a science behind it at culinary schools. One of the most stunning examples when presenting it, uh presenting the sous vide method is of course low temperature cooking for long periods of time, as in uh spare ribs or beef shins, veal neck, etc. One question that has often come up, I don't know how to answer, is up to what temperature or for how long do uh collagenase enzymes remain active uh when cooking sous-vide? Uh okay, and then he brings up two articles.
One is studying the effects of uh heat on meat proteins by Tornberg, 2005, which says at temperatures between 53 and 63 degrees, the collagen denaturation occurs, uh followed by collagen fiber shrinkage. And then on 497, it quotes an article from 1970 that shows that collagenase, which would be an enzyme, by the way, ACE's enzyme always, and collagenase would be an enzyme that breaks down collagen, could remain active in the meat at cooking temperatures below 60 degrees, whereas uh faster heating um up to 70 or 80 Celsius, they were inactivated. But then uh to contradistinct to that, it says in the abstract for uh effect of prolonged heat treatment from 48 to 63 on toughness and cooking loss of pork, which is a recent article, uh, the residual activity of cat hespin, which is actually a different enzyme, by the way, uh in uh low temperature, long time treated pork was mainly affected by temperature, showing the highest activity between 58 and 63 degrees Celsius. So, what's up with that? How can we uh go for that?
Uh you know, how can we go and how long does it have an effect? Is it 60 degrees, 63 degrees? Can you help me sussing this crap out? Best witches from Switzerland Jonas. Okay, first of all, uh for those of you that couldn't follow a damn word I was just saying.
The argument here, the question is: in low temperature cooking, is the majority like there there are enzymes that are still working in low temperature cooking, and those enzymes break down various proteins in uh in the meat, okay? And the two main protein fractions we're looking to break down are connective tissue fractions, which is mainly collagen, uh, and uh muscle uh protein uh portions like actin myosin, the actual contraction portions of muscles. Now, collagenase is an enzyme that is present, uh it causes awesome stuff that Nastasha likes to look up on the internet like gas gangrene. It's the thought of like a gangrenous lesion and uh is sending Nastasha into queasy results now. Now look, uh yes, these enzymes uh keep working, and enzymes, especially protein breakdown enzymes have a huge uh impact on the texture of fish uh that's cooked low temperature, and it's why fish can go pasty and mushy.
And for a long time it's been theorized that um these enzymes are also a lot of what's going on in tenderizing low temperature cooked meat. I just don't believe it. I just don't think so. I think it has some effect, right? But I think it's not the majority uh of effect.
Furthermore, there's two main categories of enzymes you're looking at here. Collagenase enzymes, like I say, break down collagen, but in the recent literature, they're very, very uh they're they're not very often mentioned at all. The others are different, they're cat hespins, which break down the um break down the muscle proteins, and those are in uh they're contained with normally in intact muscle inside the lysosomes, can be released on cooking, and there's recent studies on that that they are released and they may maintain some activity, and so they can uh they can probably act towards muscle protein um um you know tenderness, but it's probably not the majority of the effect. The majority of the effect in low temperature cooking is probably just a thermal uh degradation of collagen over long periods of time at elevated temperatures. Uh that that is my feeling.
Also, these articles are, you know, there are a lot of them that are done are review articles, and so you it's like you're comparing apples and oranges when you're comparing temperatures because they're denaturing proteins in different environments, uh, you know, purified or not purified in different muscles and the presence of different fat, they're measuring different temperatures, i.e. the temperature they're cooking to versus internal temperatures. And so it it's really impossible. You're comparing uh apples and oranges, and and I read them and um they didn't make uh too much uh in other words, I wasn't putting too much of a of a weight in it. Is that makes sense, Nastash?
Uh okay, but when I was researching this stuff, I I did look up a new there's a new enzyme out that it's called uh colla uh collagenolytic protease MCPO1 that comes from a deep sea bacteria that can break down proteins at low temperatures, like in the fridge. So that might be something new to look at because that's a very recent uh that's a recent thing. That's uh uh you know in 2012, I think. The other thing is is that uh the muscles that these guys choose to do their tests on, and this is the problem with all meat tech all meat texture uh things, they always choose muscles that freaking suck. Like the two articles that you uh put in, they use um a lot of them uh uh semi-tendinosis muscle, which is like eye of round.
Sucks. It's a crappy muscle. And the reason they choose that crappy muscle is because it doesn't have a lot of variation in the muscles, so it's easy to run tests on, but it's not an accurate representation of what's going to happen when you're actually cooking meat that you would rather eat. Okay. Uh now, uh another thing, uh oh, by the way that college collagenase enzyme uh enzyme thing you that you cited, and it was cited a couple times.
Uh, it was done in 1970. It's really old research, and then uh I read some more recent research that said, you know, well, I don't know that that's still, you know, that's not, I don't think it's really a current research. But I found this awesome website that you should all go to right now www.beefresearch.org, beefresearch.org, beef research.org. And look for a ranking of beef muscles for tenderness. It's from the University of Nebraska.
And it's an awesome PDF, basically, where they they tell you in very fine detail what the problems are with running studies on tenderness and what tenderness means and the difference in tenderness when it's measured by a machine versus when it's measured by a person, and it ranks uh the different muscles, which is awesome. And then they have a supplementary website, which is freaking fantastic called bovine.unl.edu. Now, if you go to that uh PDF I told you, they mistakenly put a www in front of uh bovine.unl, and then you you can't get to the page. Forget the www. No www, it does bovine.unl.edu.
And they have a three-dimensional cow with the muscles on it and the meat and the skeleton, and and and you can click any one and get any one particular muscle and spin it around in 3D and like go in and out. And they have videos of a butcher breaking down every single cut that they have in that thing. So it's a fantastic resource. I can't believe I haven't seen it until now. I hope that all of anyone who's listening here is well finished listening to us.
And then after we're done talking, go uh and and check check that out. And first of all, Nebraska, they know their meat. Am I right? Nebraska meat? Mean, come on, Nebraska.
Possibilities? Endless. That's the state model. Oh, yeah. Did you know that?
No. Yeah. Shout out to Angela Gabots, our uh our Nebraska uh intern of all times, all times. Okay. Uh question three from Paul uh about invertase from uh it's an enzyme heavy show.
Enzyme heavy show. And remember, ACE means enzyme, people's peoples. All right, hello, Nastasha and Dave. What? No jack?
No jack? Anyway. I would like to ask about invertase. I only really know of it being used in those terrible cherry cordial bonbonds, but I'd like to know if it could be used in interesting ways in other applications or if there's a similar product that can similarly break down a less or non-sweet sugar to be used in a more savory application. P.S.
huge fan, thank you. Great info that I'll be using one day after I finish my upcoming training with Daniel Balud. Well, good job working with Daniel Balud, badass, well, you know, one of those, you know, major, major badasses, Daniel Balud. Okay. Uh from Paul.
Okay. Here's the thing. Invertase for all of you that don't uh know what's going on, invertase is an enzyme that breaks down sucrose, which is uh a disaccharide, right? It's got a fructose uh and a uh uh glucose, right? And and basically the invertase breaks that down into glucose and fructose.
Now, uh invertase uh in invert sugar, uh, which you can buy as trimoline or things like that, are very useful in uh confectionery because it can minimize or prevent crystallization or affect you know uh minimize the crystal size, uh increase the moisture holding capability of uh of a product. So it's it's good, it's good stuff, it's useful. Now, uh the way this is used in bonbons, the terrible cherry bonbons that you're that you know you refer to, is you make a fondant. Now, fondants are uh crystallized, they look like solids, but what they really are is a network of sugar crystals with a sugar syrup in between those crystals, right? And when you add the invertase to that and then coat that uh fondant in uh chocolate, let's say.
Uh what happens over time is uh the sugar the sugar is broken down into invertase, it loses its crystal structure and reverts to a semi-liquid syrup, right? So what you're using is the fact that um is that you you have this syrup that's being bound with sucrose crystals, you break down the sucrose, and then you have this liquid y center. All right. Now, uh the invertase is used for for other things, and so uh I looked up that, I looked up the website for those guys, and it says it's used uh you can make invert with it, which is better than acid uh, you know, acid-catalyzed uh inversion, which is what you normally do when you're making cooking sugar because it's more controlled, etc. etc.
Sugar, if you make if you invert sugar that way, it's less apt to turn brown when cooking as opposed to acid-catalyzed inversion. Uh it's also used uh in fruit juices and jams uh to increase sweetness and increase resistance to crystallization and things like that. Okay. Uh but you can't really, I think it really only works on glucose and sucrose. I don't know of any other enzymes that would do that.
If you wanted a slowly liquefying center, uh what I would recommend is uh using an enzyme that breaks down pectin uh or breaks down any hydrocolloid at a relatively slow rate. So I would get a uh uh pectin that sets relatively quickly. Stir in some uh SPL to it, uh set it and get it cold fast so that pectinase doesn't break it down too quickly, then you could enrobe that pectin thing in something, and then the pectin would dissolve over time and you get a liquid or something like that where you broke down a hydrocolloid structure instead of a sugar structure. Does that make sense to us? You could also probably do that with something that breaks down a starch the same way that uh undercooked uh like uh undercooked like custard things can liquefy over time if the starch gets broken down.
Anyway, those are my thoughts. Eh? Take it with take it, take it or dump. Okay. Uh anyway, let's take our first commercial break and come back.
Call your questions too, 718497-2128. That's 7184972128, the cooking issue. If you want to be a great chef, you can't learn everything from within the walls of a classroom. That's why the French Culinary Institute has evolved into the International Culinary Center. When you come here, you don't just learn basic culinary skills.
You come to understand and to feel the whole culinary world. You have to network. You have to observe the true meaning of world class performance. You have to intern at some of the world's great restaurants. At the International Culinary Center's campuses in New York, California, and Italy, we will expose you to the whole of the culinary world, one that is evolving daily at a very high speed.
The International Culinary Center offers a wide range of courses, including culinary, pastry, and bread baking to Italian wine management, culinary technology, and food writing. For more information, visit International Culinary Center.com. Jack, was that you? That was me. Give me some whole culinary world again.
Give me some Oh man. My radio voice. I love that. That's low. That's good.
That's good business. Guys, real quick before you go on. Uh so we were at Bonaroo covering the event this weekend, and the gastropod truck dude said hello. Oh, Jeremiah Bullfrogs? Yeah, I go up to him, I'm like, hey, can we interview you for Heritage Radio?
And he's like, Oh my god, you're the voice. It's cooking issues. You're the producer. Nice. Yeah.
Listen every week. Really? Are we on the air right now? Yeah, we're on the air right now. Yeah, this is how we do.
We talk on the air. That's how the radio works. Uh yeah, we're a big fan of the Jeremiah Bullfrog. We did an event with him maybe a year ago. Almost exactly a year ago.
Uh in uh in Miami. And uh I love like the crew that comes to uh frequent the uh his uh gastro gastropod truck turns out to be like a really great crew of customers. We really had a great time at their event. I like loved the crowd in Miami. I thought they were really they're really fun anyway.
Uh so you interviewed him, what do you use it for? Uh we did a piece on Bonaroo that will be up on the website today. Is Bonaroo the thing with the people, the young people who they meet each other and and the ladies like I'm gonna rock your world? No, it's the guys who threw Googamoga. It's the big music festival in Tennessee.
We have a call coming in though, so what's the one I'm talking about? Batteroo? The one where people get high? No, the one on the wall on the on the on the like the one sheets on uh on the street, and it's like I like to I like to mess with chickens. Yeah, I know that's bad to be a good thing.
Badaroo something. Anyway, caller, you're on the air. Hello. Hi, I'm Chris from the uh UK. Hey, how you doing?
Good thanks. Yeah, doing all right. All right. Good. Uh I have a question on egg free custards and egg free meringues as in Ilflaton.
Right. How would you best go around it? Hmm. Well, uh uh okay, so for a meringue like texture, you're gonna want to use uh you basically you just need something that's gonna be a whipping agent, it's gonna hold, right? So you so you can use um a protein that acts in a similar way to egg whites, and so for that I I would use something like a VersaWhip, and you can get either one that's soy based or one that's uh casein based.
I mean way based, rather, not casein, way-based. So uh and you know, those ones they they whip that when you're getting one of those things, the the issue is is that they sometimes take a long time to whip up and they don't cook off the same way. So they're not gonna hold their structure when they're done the way that uh a meringue will. But for uh like a very quick serve something, like if you just want that texture, uh, it'll work. Um a custard uh or on a meringue that's gonna hold.
I mean, that the the the issue is if you're wanting to go egg-free, presumably it's to go vegan. So I can't recommend something like a gelatin or some other set. You could it's not the vegan that's the problem, it's an egg allergy. Ah, okay. Well, I mean, you could then set if you were going to whip something with a Versa whip, you can then set it with gelatin so that it holds after it chills down, and then you could have something that holds up over time.
Or you could use an alternative if you did want to go vegan, you could use an alternative hydrocolloid that would hold the meringue over time, and then what you're just doing is using the VersaWhip as a uh whipping aid, uh you know, as a as a you know, foaming agent. So you then you would you would have a meringue to hold over time. If you wanted to do something that was going to be heat uh stable, like if you were gonna cook off a meringue in a in a in an oven, then you'd have to probably go a little more uh hardcore because you'd need a hydrocolloid that could withstand um uh heat. And so for then you you might be able to move to something like an agar, uh, but you'd have to make sure that it whips up before it cools down. Or if you're or if you want really heat stable, because agar will melt, you'd have to go with a gel an, but you'd have a real problem.
I've tried doing it, whipping up gel-ans, um whipping up gel-an uh gels, uh you know, so that they're stable before they set. Another alternative to whipping to setting a gel uh in a foam is to use a slow setting um sodium alginate uh foam. I don't like to do it, I've done it. The problem is is that I don't think sodium alginate tastes very good, right? So, what you would do is you would use a whipping agent and uh sodium alginate, and then you'd whip it into a foam, and then you'd add a little calcium at the last second, and then it it would, you know, uh it would set into a foamed gel.
You know what I mean? And and that and that one, uh I've done it. Uh you have to be careful to not be able to taste the alginate, right? Uh the other for the custard, um I I'd have to do uh I'd have to do some research. I've never thought of uh of eggless custards.
I mean, the way that I would the you know, off the top of my head, right, you can without egg set things into custard like textures using something like iota carrageenin, especially in the presence of milk, very small amounts of iota caraginin will produce uh kind of a custardy texture. The problem is iota is a little elastic, so you want to have it just set, and so you would use iota and maybe a little bit of kappa carragaenin to make it into uh have a little more of a break to it as opposed to iota, which is gonna be a little more rubbery. But I've had, you know, Wiley's done uh both pectin-based sets and um iota slash kappa caragenin mix based sets of custards that I've thought were uh very very good, you know, almost like a panicata texture. You know what I'm saying? Uh and yeah, and th those can be totally achieved with uh various uh hydrocholores, but I would stick with something kind of simple like carrageen is relatively simple to work with.
And um mixtures of i the great thing about iota is also that uh it'll reset uh after it after it breaks a little bit, but uh a mixture of mainly iota at a very low concentration and um and a little bit of kappa will give you a nice uh custardy uh texture. Not you know, you you'd have to adjust the firmness a little bit, you know what I mean? But you could get there. And those are all available, I would assume, from the uh the modernist pantry folk. Probably I I I don't know.
And then if you needed some thickening of it, right? If if if it didn't feel thick enough with whatever ingredients you were adding, I would thicken it with a s I wouldn't try to thicken it with the you know where it's like inc increase the creaminess of it with uh the iota and the kappa, then you would move to more of a thickening agent, something like an LBG or locust bean, or just a traditional something make it thicker, like add more of something that's uncuous to it. You know, you don't need to go to hydrocholid route on that. But that's that's the way I'd uh approach it. Okay, thank you.
All right, have uh and uh let us know how it works. Thank you. We'll do. All right, thanks a lot. All right.
So uh Paul K uh wrote in on meat cooking whole mussels. Hi, Dave. I was at an event a while ago where I saw a steak, I think an entre coat being prepared on a barbecue, by which I think he means grill. I think he means grill, like as far as our our terms. Anyway, uh in a way I'd never seen before.
Rather than cutting the steaks and then cooking them, an entire cylinder of beef was uh barbecued, rested out, and only then cut. It seems it was incredibly efficient, as the result was very beautiful. Every steak had a perfect gradient from crusty on the lateral edge uh to a disc that was essentially raw in the center. Normally you only see the sort of gradient once you cut into the steak. One, is this technique well known and if so does it have a name?
Two, what cuts of beef would you recommend for this techniques? And three, do you have any tips on how to make this work well? When cooking four kilograms of beef at a time, I can imagine that cock-ups can be expensive. Cock ups is a good way to say mess ups. I like that because it's kind of almost dirty, but not.
Uh I guess that it'll be critical to start with beef at room temperature. Thanks, Paul. Okay. Uh now when you're when you're uh dealing with I mean it's uh I mean essentially what they're doing is roasting the meat on a grill. Right?
It's basically roast meat. Think about like prime rib. Prime rib is delicious that way. So basically, what you're not basically, what you're doing here is using the grill to to instead uh roast something. And I I think the the most um similar idea would be like a rotisserie where you pull off something that's rare.
You know, I mean before before it's cooked all the way through, because then it would just be done manually. I would assume that these people who are using the grill were constantly turning the meat, and it's fundamentally different from a long when most people say barbecue, what they're referring to is long, long, long-term cooking, where the meat's took cooked totally all the way through right on a grill versus just straight grilling where the meat can be pulled off at any dunness, including rare in the middle, and you're just getting a nice crust on the outside. When you're doing it, you could use something that would one would normally barbecue with, right? I.e. a lower temperature, but just do it less long, in which case you're treating it more like a roast.
But you'd need to get the temperature high enough to get a crusty uh finish on the outside. Does that make sense, Nastasha? But I'm I'm not exactly sure what you mean. So you write back in, tell me more about it, kind of exactly kind of what's going on and where it falls in the continuum between grilling and barbecuing, or whether or not I have the right idea about uh what you're what you're referring to. Because I'm not exactly sure what you're referring to, so I don't want to you know go the wrong way, right, Stas?
Yes. She's like, I don't really care, whatever. Uh okay. Uh Aaron Lawton writes in from Portland, Maine on chili oil and botulism. All inclusive greetings.
I like that. Doesn't want to, you know, doesn't want to make any statements on who may or may not be here. Just the all-inclusive greetings. Everyone but Jack it says, actually. Anyway.
Uh it doesn't really. Uh I listen to your show every week via iTunes and appreciate the distraction it serves. Uh distraction. It's good. Uh I have long stewed over questions about chili oil.
My wife underwent a heart transplant a couple of years ago, and food safety is a preeminent concern in our cooking. Hey, my mom runs the heart transplant program, pediatric heart transplant program at uh Columbia Presbyterian. My mom, you know, hardcore badass, she's the cardiologist there. So uh, you know, uh heart transplant uh patients close to my close to my well- I wasn't even thinking about that. That's dumb.
Anyway, uh uh, you know, anyway. I think it's something I think about. Um food, which recently uh frequently calls for chili oil. I would like to make the oil myself due to my cheapness. Something we also share.
Cheapness. Cheapness. Uh all of us here are really cheap bastards, right, Stuy? Yeah. Yeah, really cheap, really cheap.
She'll walk to the airport rather than take a car, even if I'm paying for it. Uh however, I've been overcome with fears of botulism. We are both in our twenties and have years of cooking eating ahead of us. Can you allay my fears of contamination and provide advice on botulum-free chili oils? Uh the chili oil I tried came from Land of Plenty by Fuchsia Dunlap.
By the way, Fuchsia Dunlap, good friend Harold McGee was showing around China. Apparently, Fuchsia Dunlap, badass. That's what I hear. Although I don't own her book. Uh which only used heated peanut oil and dried pepper flakes with optional ginger.
Uh Barbara Tropp also has a recipe which adds orange zest and garlic, uh, Chinese black beans and sesame oil. Uh okay. So look, the danger here is with the garlic. Uh the the problem with with botulism in oil is this. Uh if you add something like a fresh herb or garlic, and garlic grows in the ground and frequently has uh contam botulism contamination in it.
Uh when you're cooking the uh even if you cook the garlic off in the oil, enough water remains in the garlic to um uh allow botulism to grow in it, right? And uh when you have uh botulism in uh oil, uh in there's no off taste, there's there's no nothing. So what happens is even if you heat the garlic, um, you let it cool, you store it not in the fridge, and the botulism spores, because you've killed all the vegetative bacteria, the bacteria that are actively operating, the spores regerminate and create botulism toxin, which then it's very bad. Very bad, bad. Uh so how do you get around this?
If you don't use the garlic, you're fine, right? Also, if you remove the garlic from the oil and there's only completely dried items in the oil when you're done, like dried pepper flakes, as long as you haven't reconstituted them with water, uh, then you should be okay. But if it makes you nervous, store in the fridge every uh, you know, store in the fridge, and if it gets more than a couple weeks old, you can reheat the oil to 80 degrees Celsius for 10 to 15 minutes or 20 minutes for a meat product. And botulism toxin is heat labile, uh i.e. it's it's destroyed by heat.
So if you heat uh the oil uh enough times, right, or high enough, you can actually destroy the botulism toxin that is already present. So the rules are uh store in the fridge. Uh if you store for a long time, um you can reheat. If you if when in doubt, throw it out. Uh also if you use only dry products, uh you're in a much better uh position.
And thirdly, if you add some acid to the ingredients that you're uh cooking that have water in them, the acid, citric acid, if you don't use ascorbic because ascorbic will get destroyed by the heat as well. Uh use citric acid if it's acidic enough, the product won't support uh the growth of botulism. So low water, uh low uh you know, high heats, all these things will help protect. Does that make sense to us? Yes.
Okay. All right. Caller, you are on the air. Hi guys, Ben from Minnesota here. How are you doing?
Thanks for taking my call. Uh question about bagels and pretzels and um the Y solution that I might be dipping them in. Okay. Um I know you had kind of a nasty experience with lye and want to avoid that myself. I I would avoid it.
I would avoid that experience. I would yeah. I was reading a paper, it looks like a lab experien uh experiment assignment possibly from Ohio State pretzel study, it's called. If you look that up, you might find it on the net. Uh and they're using a two percent, which I assume is just is that 100% household lie if I buy that at the hardware store, is that what I'm using?
Okay, uh uh uh we'll get it we'll we'll get into the hardware store. It is I mean look, if you go to the hardware store, 99% of uh the stuff that you buy, unless you're buying something that's packaged as lye. Uh it's packaged as 100% household lie. There's no other ingredients listed, but I'm you know, I'm wondering if there's a you know food grade lie that's made and where I would even get that. There is a food grade lie that's made.
You can get it at professional baker supplies. Um okay, now that that being said, I have used the hardware store stuff. But I I I can't recommend it because uh uh I I believe it's possible for it to have a heavy metal contamination and stuff like that. So I I I don't recommend using it. I recommend getting the food grade stuff from the um uh you know, from a uh a professional baker supply.
Really don't use um like some people have asked me, can I just go use drain cleaner? No. Uh first of all, there's like all kinds of weird stuff added to drain cleaner. Um just you know, stay away from it, like aluminum flakes and all sorts of nasty weird stuff. Um so you know, look, if you want to run a couple of experiments with lye, then you know, if you get the 100% lye, I wouldn't you I would I I can't recommend that you use it.
I would recommend you get the food grade stuff, but as an experiment to see what happens, it works. Um do you have kids in the house? I do. That's why it's uh high in the garage, tied up real tight, you know. Yeah, but you know, uh when I uh, you know, for those of you I don't know, I was doing a lot of experiments with uh lye and uh different bases, especially with in things like pretzels, but also for nyxtamalization and for the hardening of uh you know a lot of experiments.
Right. Well that was another route I could go. I've got uh some Mexican markets around. Is that something that would be sold there and as what, you know? Well they they have cal they have calcium uh yeah, they they have uh cal, which is, you know, um which is calcium hydroxide, but it's just not the it's not the same and it has a different taste.
Uh you you could use it. Anything basic is gonna you know, or you could go the route that uh McGee does where he cooks baking soda uh to convert it to you know the more basic uh form um and and and then use that. Lye is great for it. I mean I have to say, lye works great. Um and for those of you that you know pay we if you have a bagel, actually you can just boil, it doesn't need the extra browning.
It'll taste more like a pretzel if you add the lye. So most I mean some some b bagel recipes I've seen have some baking soda in the boiling water and some don't. Um but you know, unless you need the extra browning and that little uh taste that um that you get from the the basicity, uh then um you know you you don't need it. But the main water. Yeah, but the main flavor that you're getting in a pretzel from the boil out, first of all, you get that dark brown pretzel note, because when you increase the uh the alkalinity of the of the surface, you increase the rate at which the myard reactions happen.
You get that characteristic brown pretzel color. But also the characteristic flavor of a pretzel is uh having to do with that basic, that basic outside that so when you crunch into a pretzel, if you in your mind think uh kind of it I I don't want to hesitate to even say this because it makes it sound bad, but soapiness, you know what I mean? It's like but it's that flavor of uh basicness that is um what makes a pretzel great. Uh and so that in the addition in addition to never adding fat to people who add uh you know, if you add fat to your pretzel, I have a problem with you in your pretzels. You know me, so like for instance, rolled gold.
Yeah, to the dough itself. I mean it's no it's an abomination. It turns into a cracker, it's horrible. You know what I mean? Uh it's it's really makes me angry.
And I could if you hand me a pretzel, uh, and certain manufacturers who make so my first rule is pretzels are twisted. They have to be twisted. If it's not twisted, it's not a pretzel. I call them pretzelloids or like you know, non-pretz, but pretzel style things, right? But they're not freaking pretzels because uh for me, one of the great joys of pretzels is the textural difference between the different parts that bake differently uh because of the shape and break apart in your mouth differently because of the shape.
All right, boom. So that's it. That's it. Pretzel is pretzel shaped. Uh secondly, uh it and I I'm talking mainly about hard pretzels now.
I don't have that much experience with this with soft pretzels. I'm I'm talking hard pretzels. Hard pretzels, if if you add any oil to the uh recipe at all in the in the dough, it takes on a cracker texture, it's not a pretzel anymore. It's like a crack, it's like a cracker sole or something. It's not right.
You know, at Bachman, the company, they make a pretzel that you would looks like a real hard pretzel, but is in fact uh got a crackery texture because they you know they I guess they took a hint from rolled gold, you know, or something like that, who adds an abomination like amount of oil to their thing. Best pretzel that I've ever had in my whole life is Martin Bru Martin's brother's uh pretzels by far the best pretzels that you can get them over the mail order they're made by Mennonites they literally sit around singing hymns all day and making pretzels but they're the I mean not but but but you know probably because of the fact that they it's a religio religious meditation thing for them they make fantastic pretzels you ever had those things I have not no I uh the kind I was thinking of making are more like the you know like the ballpark big software chewy yeah yeah large big chunks of salt in the top you know yeah though I mean those are you know those are those are those are a valid product I'm not saying anything against uh a so a good soft pretzel I love a good soft pretzel especially with mustard I gotta have mustard on mine no mustard no no soft pretzel for me no that's good too yeah I agree yeah so uh so yeah so uh for that also remember when you're going to the baking supply you can also get the pretzel salt which is very nice because it's uh it yeah because you can't get that at the regular store. No, but the same place it's gonna have the lie will probably also have the pretzel salt. Okay. All right thanks uh one quick one about blending mixed drinks I was uh I'm not a cocktail guy at all but I was making margaritas the other night they blended up just fine then I made a crystal light version for my kids with no alcohol obviously and it turned into like a slush ball in water.
Is the alcohol doing something to keep the ice and the water together that you can't get without just blend it wrong. Hmm I don't uh I I don't know. Um I mean alcohol is gonna melt the uh the ice in a different way and it's gonna make it blend kind of uh faster. But I mean, obviously, you know, people make uh people make slushies all the time that are non-alcoholic in the 711. Right.
Yeah. Smoothies work fine. Yeah. Maybe a fluke. Yeah, maybe a fluke.
I don't know. Maybe I don't know. I doubt there's anything in the crystal light. Crystal light is actually has very little body, and maybe that's the problem. Maybe if it had more sugar in it, you might have more problem with a sugar free because you're not modifying the uh I maybe that's it.
Maybe try it with uh something that's got a I could try it just with the regular uh lime juice and sugar up this time without be the fact that the crystal light has no sugar in it, and it could be that the crystal light has something in it to mimic sugar. Um sometimes it in in um things that contain uh whatever crystal light contains now, it used to be aspartame. Um because there's no bodying effect from um aspartame and it's used in such small quantities, they often to sodas would add bodying agents to add back some of the feeling like there had been sugar there. And I don't know, maybe that has something to do with it too. I don't know.
But yeah, but give it a shot with uh real honest to God sugar. I will. Alright, cool. All right, thanks. Love you, Phil.
Bye. Uh Jack, let's take one more quickie commercial break, come back, and finish out cookie dishes. In case you're wondering what's up with the weird meditation music, it's called Alone in Kyoto by Air. Oh nice. Well we're done with all that music.
Thank God I was not alone in Kyoto. I was hanging with my with my family. Had a fantastic time checking out all the temples. I highly recommend them. Okay.
Uh Tom Fisher writes in. Howdy, Dave, Nastasha. Nastasha. Who am I? An idiot?
Nastasha and Jack. Uh about finally. What? Said hi to me. Yeah.
Yeah. First first call, I think. Yeah. ISI about the ISI, which is the EC or ISI, the whipped cream uh makers. Is this the one?
Yeah. Okay. Uh I'm looking at ISI whippers and just grabbed a gourmet whip on eBay, but the head is filthy and needs new seals, etc. It looks like the gourmet whip and the thermo whip share the same head, while the cream whip profit has a different head. Is there any real difference among the models insofar as cooking applications are concerned?
Thanks for keeping it awesome, Tom Fisher. Okay, listen. Little secret. I have a bunch of different models, all different types, and all the heads are completely interchangeable. They look different, but they all fit.
They all have the same exact screw thread from the head onto the uh onto the um what do you call it? Canister. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So they all work.
And they all have the same exact through screw thread, uh, with one exception, and it's not one of the ones you mentioned, of screwing uh the cartridge, the thing that screws the cartridge in to make it go. They're all the they're all the freaking same. Now what can be different is the screw-ons, I think for the uh for the uh whatever the tip is called. I think that those might be different, but as far as interchanging canisters and they're all same, all same. Right?
Uh-huh. Same. Uh and I don't know if there's any real difference. I mean the thermo whip obviously is different because it keeps things warmer hot because it's uh uh col cold rather because it's insulated, but other than that, not much anyway. So it's all good.
Mix and match, but don't tell the good folks at ISI that I told you so. Matthew Leaf at Landhouse writes in. Hey Nastasha and Dave. Hope everything's going well with all your projects. Wednesday this week, I'm serving some snacks at a charity gala for 500 people.
The dish I'm serving is short rib sliders with cheddar cheese sauce. The cheddar cheese is a whiz I made using sodium citrate and Iota carrageen and based on Mirvold's mac and cheese salad. I'm thinking for large production like this, it would be cool to have the cheese sauce and squeeze bottles for service. And my idea is to keep the squeeze bottles in a steam table water bath set up. Do you think this would be hot enough to keep the cheese liquefied?
Would it be better to put the bottles directly into the water section of the steam table or to set up a hotel pan with water above the steam section? I was hoping to get your advice on this as I don't know if I'll have a chance to test it out prior to the event. Okay, yeah, it works. I've done it. Uh what the one problem you're gonna have is uh when I when I do uh water water table setups, I use an immersion circulator, which is very accurate at its temperature holding, and then I have a top and I custom cut holes into the top to fit whatever I'm gonna have my inserts be.
And I've done cheese sauce many, many times. What you're gonna want to make sure is that uh wherever you're putting your bottles, you have like some sort of a cage so that the bottles don't fly around in there. They'll automatically find their own level of cheese sauce and they'll float in the top of the thing, but you have to contain them so that they don't just fly around the bath and turn upside down and then leak water into the top of your cheese spout. Does that make sense? Mm-hmm.
You don't want water in your cheese spout. Gross. What does it doesn't even have meaning? I like that. You're like, it does sound really gross though, doesn't it?
Yeah, yeah. Uh Michael Natkin, good friend Michael Natkin. Listener, rather. We never met him. We never actually met him in the real life.
No, not yet. No, but he's like a blog friend. Or, you know, whatever, whatever you call it. From Herbivoracious, writes in about smoking. Hey David Nastasha, no Jack.
No love for you, Jack. Even though you called him to get him on a show. Yikes. Nah, crazy. Uh I've got a question for you about stovetox too stove top smoking.
I generally just jury reach something with wood chips in a pot. I don't mind beating up. Usually hiskory hickory or mesquite. I know for modernist cuisine not to soak the chips, uh, because the temperature. The modernist cuisine says the lower temperature is actually not conducive for better smoke flavor, etc.
I'll let it rip over high heat until there's quite heavy smoke, then put a steamer basket in there with a single single layer of whatever I want to smoke, onions, tofus, mushrooms, etc., and go for 10 minutes or so. I found there's a nice smoky flavor, but also a bit of sourness that I don't love as much. It is fine, amazing actually, in dishes like uh the Frijolis charo charos, which you can see on their aberration's website. But the sourness is less appreciated in other contexts. Can you give me any clues as what's causing it and how to minimize it, thanks, Michael?
Okay. There's a couple of things that can happen when you break down wood, uh, there's uh basically acetic acid and other things that are uh created called pyroliginous acids, but I don't know if that's what what you're talking about. If you look at uh a good website to a good website, a good article to look at is contribution of phenolic compounds to smoke flavor by MAGA in 1992. Uh and this, you know, it's awesome because it's one of those, you know, it's it's still done on a typewriter, so the fonts and courier, even on the web, it's like the crappy old courier font that you got in technical documents, which Nastash is too young to have looked at. Not that she looks at the technical technical documents now, she doesn't give a crap about it.
So, it turns out that uh the stuff that's formed at really low temperatures, right, is acrid and bitter, right? Which is why they tell you not to soak the chips. Uh the stuff formed in the middle zone, uh up to about 750 degrees uh C is kind of the heart of the smoking flavor. And things that are formed above that temperature are uh with higher boiling points, phenolic things with higher boiling points, can taste uh acidic. So here I'll read I'll read from that article.
Um uh phenol compound volatility is also a factor relative to smoke flavor contribution. The low uh boiling phenolic portion obtained from distillation of smoke was found to have primarily contained phenol creosols and guacols described as hot and bitter taste. The fraction distilled at 92 to 132 C contained isousinols and syringeols. Those are the ones formed in the middle when much hotter, but they're formed uh in that middle range. Had a pure characteristic smoke flavor, and the high boiling stuff had an acid chemical sensory property.
Now, how do I recommend getting rid of first of all? Also, what's formed there's a lot of different things. There's the temperature of your of your the smoke makes a huge difference with the smok at which it's formed. Also, the amount of oxygen in the in this in the uh in the atmosphere where the smoke has a huge uh um impact on the flavor. Also, the moisture in your food, everything makes a difference.
The temperature of the food, everything makes a difference. But I I have a feeling this might help you. If you put uh two steamer baskets, a deep one and a tall one. In the bottom one, put a layer of ice, and then your food in a top one, uh it's gonna make a colder smoke, and I think you might get some of those um higher uh boiling compounds to condense onto the ice, those acid things, those acid sour taste things, and you might get a cleaner uh tasting product. That's how we used to do salmon.
Uh Nils used to do it that way. We were smoking large amounts of things. We would have a tray with ice, and then on top of that, another perf tray with our food, and we would put that over large hotel pans with burning wood in them. And those things never uh came out with any of those kind of off-flavors. So I would give that uh a shot, and uh barring that, maybe the temperature is a little bit too high, turn the temperature down a little bit.
Don't let it rip so hard on the on the smoke. You want to hit more of a middle zone. Make sense, Saz? Yeah. Sound good?
But please let us know how that works. We got any more time here, Jack? Or we oh shafted. Yeah, that's about it. All right, listen, Elliot Papineau wrote in uh he doesn't boil his pretzels.
Go boil your pretzels, boil your pretzels, do it side by side on boiled pretzels with uh um, you know, with some sort of basic thing versus not. Uh yeah, because I've done that test uh many, many times, and it makes a big difference. We still didn't get to Rob Trepas's cheese question. We did answer a bunch of his questions, but the thing is I need a lot of time to talk about the cheese because I've been thinking a lot about uh cheese and cheese analogs. In fact, Chris Anderson from Modernist Cuisine uh is gonna modernist pantry is gonna try to get uh me the rennet casing, which is what you use to make completely cheeseless, cheese-based, um, cheese-based things.
Uh, and we had a you know a qu a I'm gonna answer one real quick. No, Dave. I can't you can't. I can't. I gotta go do the egg whites next week and the uh and the and the meat analogs.
Anyway, this has been Cooking Issues. We're back. We'll see you next week. 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. You can find us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for up-to-date news and information. Thanks for listening.
Timestamps may be off due to dynamic ad insertion.