Today's program was brought to you by our friends at the International Culinary Center. For more information, visit www.nternationalculinary center dot com. Broadcasting live from Bushwick, Brooklyn, you're listening to Heritage Radio Network.org. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold.
You're a host of Cooking Issues coming to you live at Reverse Pizzeria every Tuesday from roughly 12 to roughly 1245 on the Heritage Radio Network.org, Jack.org. Oh man. Yeah. Joined as always with uh Nastasha the Hammer Lopez, keeping the cooking issues machine running. Jack.
And of course, today we have a special guest, special guest producer, Aaron Marks, who bid for this uh guest producing spot uh at uh the last museum of food and drink uh fundraiser that we had. Right? Right? Uh now uh you know Aaron's actually working on an interesting uh food-related project right now, which I'm gonna let him talk about in a second. But remember, call in your questions to 718497-2128, that's 7184972128.
Now, Aaron, aside from bidding on this uh great thing and being with us today, was uh uh a long time ago, not that long, I guess, a member of my favorite Great Satan, which is uh the Gold Goldman Sachs, which I've always had actually a soft spot for strange, because I love history of finance is a great thing. He's not doing that anymore. Uh he is in fact working on a project called Deconstructing Dinner. You want to talk about that? Yeah.
And maybe about the Great Satan, because I love those things. Well we'll leave we'll leave my past out of it. Uh it's not it doesn't really sit well with a lot of people, but uh I have turned my passions towards uh towards my my my hobbies uh really, which is food uh and restaurants. So we are produced a documentary called Deconstructing Dinner on the Farm to Table movement, um, really to educate people on on the origins of food. Um really kind of the twist here is is that we we focus on individual staple ingredients.
Uh we've been filming with a couple really excellent chefs, Michael Anthony last week, Heather Carlucci in New York. We did the pilot with Michael Statlander on pork up in Toronto. He has a beautiful farm up there. And uh to supplement all the these great mini-series, uh we we have uh some webisodes and and a lot of extra bonus material that that linked these award-winning chefs in. So we're we're really excited for it.
We uh we're in the process of fundraising at the moment. Uh we need uh about sixty thousand dollars by July 20th. Uh you can check us out on the Kickstarter campaign. Uh we just we just passed a hundred backers online. Um so we're doing well.
Uh it's deconstructing dinner on Kickstarter. And you uh you've already filmed one of the last time I spoke with you is what you were working on eight or nine episodes. Yeah, we've we've uh we're focused on six at the moment. Um we have uh each of them is gonna be uh garlic or wheat or eggs. We we just did uh uh a shot on honey uh in a farm outside of New York.
Um and uh March 2013, spring 2013 is when we we hope we have a finished product. Right, and you're uh is he the is Declan the uh the director or the producer both? Uh, Declan Adriscal is uh Declan Adriscal and John Steim are the two two folks that I'm partnering with on this. Uh Declan is the filmmaker behind this. Uh he won a James Beard Award uh last year for his documentary called called Milk War, uh which was about raw milk.
Uh very fascinating story. And uh John Steinman is is kind of the I I guess I refer to him as the Mark Bittman of Canada. Uh he he he he's so well versed in in the the the farm to table movement uh and he he uh he does a lot of speech he goes around speaking about it. Um so he he actually had a radio show by the same name, Deconstructing Dinner, uh, and this is the reincarnation onto the screen. Nice.
So go to Kickstarter and go look at deconstructing dinner on Kickstarter. Exactly. That or just go to Deconstructing dinner.com. Right. All right, nice.
All right, very good. All right, so uh and uh Aaron also brought me I was been re we were talking last time we were talking about uh Michael Lewis, the uh the financial writer, and uh he I he just brought me a copy of the big short to read. I actually read his later book, Boomerang, which if you if any of you guys aren't interested in uh kind of financial history, I'm not interested in finances at all. I really could give a rat's behind about my own finances. I've never otherwise we I guess we'd be rich, right?
But anyway, uh but uh I don't really care about it, but I love I love myself some financial history, and I've sadly have been um you know lacking in recent financial history until uh Maria Gordon Shelley, our publisher for you know uh for my cocktail book and coming up, gave me a Michael Lewis book, and uh now Aaron you know brought me the other one. So hopefully I'm gonna be up to date uh with our current financial woes and the amusing history behind it uh very soon. Right? Yeah, well Michael Lewis is a great writer. Yeah.
Anyway, okay. Now on to questions. By the way, uh this one in from Pete actually gave a call out to Indie Jesus, but I'd like our our readers to know uh listeners to know that I have not seen Indy Jesus in a long time. Jack, have you seen Indy Jesus? I see.
I mean, I don't think he's working this shift anymore, but I have to say, really nice guy. Yeah, but is does he not work the shift because of his hatred for us? I mean, I guess it's possible, but I I I would guess not. No? No, no.
I mean, Jesus probably shouldn't have any hatred in him. There are plenty of other interesting characters around though. We just need to coin a name for somebody. All right. Well, for those of you that you know have never heard Indy Jesus is a waiter here who is uh looks like Jesus in in kind of indie rock clothes, and I I miss him.
I miss seeing Indy Jesus during the during the broadcast. I think he made our broadcast better just by his presence. It's true. Yeah. We had didn't we have a Manson Jesus for a while.
There are plenty of Manson Jesus'. Oh, that was at a coffee event. That was a different Manson Jesus was at a different event. Sorry. Okay.
Okay, love the podcast. I've been blitzing through your back catalog quickly as I just discovered it recently. Keep up the great work and thank you. Thank you. Question.
I recently purchased a combi steam oven. I wanted a small oven for day-to-day stuff, and I love to bake bread, and there's nothing that compares the steam for making that amazing crust. The oven does a great job with things like soft-boiled eggs in large quantities and steam fist, etc. And it has very precise temperature controls, which got me thinking I could use this bad boy for low-temp cooking in sous vide. And I would love to get your thoughts.
Pete, okay. Um okay, look. I don't know you you gotta write in and tell me what brand of combi oven you have. Uh uh the smaller ones, there used to be one made by Electrolux that kind of fit on a counter that was uh maybe microwave size or a little bit bigger. And uh of course Gaganao makes one that's fantastically expensive if you can afford Gaganau uh appliances in your home.
God bless. Um but um Combi Steve Oven, for those of you that don't know, is an oven that uses a combination of steam technology and convection technology, and recently have been used in restaurants to do uh low temperature cooking because they have very accurate temperature controls. And the reason they have accurate temperature controls is because they need accuracy to be able to uh be able to achieve the results that they want to achieve without any sort of human intervention. And the byproduct is that we get to use it for very accurate low temperature work, typically by setting uh the temperature of the oven below uh the boiling point, well below, uh, you know, down to like you know, uh 55 Celsius thereabouts, and 100% humidity, which gives good thermal uh transfer. Now uh commercial combi ovens are in the on average, the higher end ones, rationale being one and um uh electrolux being another, and uh there's you know several others, um, on average they are fairly accurate, but at any given second their temperature can fluctuate quite a bit, and it's because they inject steam into the cavity which shoots the temperature up, uh then the temperature goes down, they shoot more steam, it goes up, up, up, up, up.
So the answer is for very thin items, it does not work very well for low temperature cooking because those thin items can't handle the short-term over temp that you go through as the temperature porpoises back and forth. Uh thicker items can withstand that. Uh so the temperature of you know, modernist cuisine, um, Chris Young who's on the show and Nathan Miravold uh said the same thing in Maxime Belay when they were here, all you know, talked about this uh very interesting data that they had, which was they actually measured the temperature of combi ovens using many kind of high accuracy um uh temperature probes and showed that there was uh when I say wide, I'm talking like tens of degrees variation uh from second to second based on the internal temperature of the cavity. Now, how can you uh test this? Set your oven to a hundred percent steam, set the temperature to some temperature well below boiling, uh, and then test it with something simple like an egg.
If you stick an egg in there uh and after an hour the uh at sixty-two Celsius, and after an hour the yolk is still runny, but the it cracks out of the egg and has kind of a the the white has a very kind of, you know, uh custardy texture, I think, then that's a good sixty-two egg. You're pretty much good. Uh if you then set it to sixty three, go for an hour, and it's got a very creamy yolk, but it's all one texture, very creamy like a sauce almost, uh, then you've produced an accurate sixty-three degree egg. If you go to sixty-four degrees uh and your yolk is just set, just set, but still very, very soft, you have a very accurate sixty-four degree egg on a large egg. And these are extremely simple and extremely accurate and reliable temperature tests for um your combi to see whether or not you are getting the actual temperatures that you think you are getting.
If those three numbers come out right, then you're good. You know what I mean? And in fact, if your oven is repeatably wrong, right, you you can dial up or down a degree or two and figure out what your thing is actually set to. So if if if what I tell you is a 60 uh three degree egg actually happens at 65, well your oven's about two degrees hot uh in terms of the way that it it works, as long as the the humidity is a hundred percent. Ervate's made a a huge error uh you know those th those who know me know I'm no fan of Airvete's you know this is a well known fact I'm no fan of him or his his writing or his demagoguery.
But he believes that a 65 degrees Celsius uh egg is still runny uh and he did all of his tests in an oven and the reason his um the reason his numbers are completely wrong is because they weren't done in a hundred percent humidity environment and uh they were actually steam moisture was evaporating out of the egg during the process thereby lowering the temperature of uh the inside of the egg through evaporative cooling and because there was evaporative cooling the inside of the egg was roughly three degrees uh or so lower than the actual oven temperature was even though he was fairly accurately controlling his oven temperature. Just goes to show it happened when you don't really think about what you're doing, Airvay. Anyway, uh enough b bashing on uh Erve that that answers that question yeah? Yes. Yeah?
Yeah? Okay. And it presupposes that all eggs are the same. Yeah. Uh well, all large chicken eggs act I mean I'm talking this isn't just um this isn't like one or two eggs I've cooked over like for the past you know seven years I've been cooking a bazillion eggs uh as part of a teaching um you know it's part of teaching over the years.
And uh in the restaurant at the French culinary and at home. And I can pretty much tell whether or not equipment is right by how a large chicken egg is cooked in terms of time. Uh you know, other eggs might be slightly different, but the major ones, for instance, like some people have reported like slightly different temperatures on things like duck. I don't have any experience on ostrich eggs or things like that, although I have friends that do. Uh but they're pretty accurate, reliable measures of um of temperature.
You know, at least that's been that's been my experience. And they're incredibly cheap. And they're much easier to implement uh than trying to rig actual accurate um thermometers in your in your oven. I mean it's possible to rig an accurate thermometer, but you have to get a good rig. And uh, you know, on top of that, you have to mean it you can just go to a supermarket and buy a bunch of eggs.
Set the sucker at 63. Well what I would really set it at 63 Celsius, right? And then see whether the egg is set or whether it's runny or whether it's creamy. If it's creamy, you're dead on, right? If it's runny, then your oven is low.
And if it's set, then your oven is high, assuming you have a hundred percent humidity in that oven. That's another assumption that you gotta make. And then later on, if you want to get accurate thermocouples, you can test it and see what's going on, blah, blah, blah. But the reason I chose an egg is an egg is fairly thick. It takes uh a good um it takes a good hour for the very center of an egg to get uh within a half a degree or so of the temperature of uh in a water bath, that is.
So if you have a 10 minute fluctuation in temperature in your oven, an egg should be thick enough that most of that temperature fluctuation is taken up by the egg white and not by the egg yolk. And so you shouldn't get any over or under temp effects in the yolk after an hour of cooking because it should have evened out by then. That's why egg good choice, cutlet not so much. You know what I mean? Yeah.
Anyway, okay. Uh what'd you say, Jack? You say something? No, I didn't. Yeah?
Should we go to our first commercial break? Yeah. Commercial break. Come back. Cooking issues.
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Why? Why? Welcome back to Picking Your Shoes. You're listening to Propeller by Bluetooth. Wow.
You're pulling out all the old, all the old Bluetooth songs from the college days. Oh yeah. That like that song, I can remember playing that song wearing a uh flight helmet with a blast shield down with my fingers like spraying blood out of the base and the lead singer smashing me on the head with a microphone and that was a the nineties, the early nineties. Good times. Good times.
Anyway, uh we should we should probably see whether or not listeners mind being uh assaulted with uh my old college band. Because we could just move to you know, Jack's music. Anyway. Uh second question in. I'm fermenting two types of vinegar in my basement now.
The first is a beer barley malt syrup vanilla vinegar, and the other is a bourbon buckwheat honey caraway seed vinegar. I'm using the method from ideasandfood.com with the live culture vinegar as a starter that is added to the alcohol mixture. The beer version was complete after three weeks, and the bourbon is already on week five. How long should I wait for the bourbon version before I start over? I'm thinking the alcohol content was too high for fermentation.
Any thoughts, Elliot Papanell? Okay. Uh I looked for uh, you know, our good friend's Ide Ideas and Food, Alex Nacke. Uh I looked on their website for their vinegar method and wasn't able to find any explicit instructions on their website proper, but they did publish a uh an article on it in Popular Science. When they I are they still writing for Popular Science?
Anyone know? I don't know. Uh but anyway, I looked at their popular science article um on it and in fact found a um a maple syrup uh a maple syrup um what's the word I'm looking for? Maple syrup rum vinegar base that they they made their vinegar out of. And so I'm assuming, Elliot, that you're basing it on on that technique.
Uh here's what I'm thinking. There's a couple of things that can go wrong in uh vinegar. So vinegar, for those of you that uh have no idea how vinegar is made, you take a uh fairly low concentration of alcohol product uh and then acetobacter uh acetobacter acts on the alcohol and converts the ethanol to vinegar. Now, uh in the Ideas and Food uh recipe, they use 950 grams of maple syrup, which is a lot of freaking maple syrup, because it's eight they use 950 grams of maple syrup, 800 grams of what they call a live vinegar, which is a vinegar that is currently has active acetobacter in it, right? Um so assuming you're already making vinegar, you have some vinegar sitting around that's still live, so it has active acetobacter in it.
Uh 300 grams of dark rum and 200 grams of water. If you calculate this all out, uh uh and I calculated it based on the assumption that the maple syrup was about eighty uh bricks, meaning eighty percent sugar and about twenty percent water, uh, you're gonna end up with a an alcohol, uh a water vinegar slash ethanol mix that's roughly uh 11% uh uh alcohol, I think. I gotta go look at my calculations again. I did it on Excel this morning, but I think it's roughly 11% alcohol, which is a good number, maybe even lower, maybe it's like eight, I forget, but it's a good number for acetobacter to work on. I was a little concerned uh with this that the because the bricks of this mixture is like 30%.
It's very high bricks. Uh that bricks meaning bri bricks is the percent uh of uh of the weight of your product that is sugar. That's what bricks means. Uh and uh if you do the calculations, I think this mixture that that Ideas and Food has uh ends up about 30 bricks. There's good news and there's bad news with that, I mean, high bricks things usually tend to inhibit the uh action of bacteria because they really mess with um what's called osmoregulation, the ability uh for the cells to keep uh water, uh their water balance uh proper.
But balsamic vinegar uh is uh made with musts that are even higher bricks than this. So clearly acetobacter can uh work in these environments. You are probably, and this is a good thing if you want to keep the sugar in it, if you want it to stay very sugary, uh the high sugar level and the massive acidity from the pre-made vinegar is almost surely inhibiting the uh inhibiting any further yeast activity. Uh basically, as soon as uh as soon as the uh acidity gets higher than about a percent or so, especially in it with a lot of the yeast is gonna have a tough uh time anyway with uh 30% bricks, really tough time. Uh and uh you know you need you'd need special yeasts anyway that were very sugar tolerant to be able to go up that high.
And um and then within combination with that, with the fact that they're already using vinegar or yeast is not going to be a problem in this mixture. Uh so it should work. So your problems are probably you went too high in the alcohol and the acetobacter can't uh work, in which case dilute it some more and throw some fresh uh vinegar mother in. You can order, you know, uh acetobacter cultures and uh off of the internets. Uh two, you could have, although it doesn't sound like your ingredients in there like you have any preservatives that are gonna cause a problem, like uh or like chlorine can be a problem sometimes, or or whether you have uh sulfites because you're not adding a sulfited wine to it, so that's probably not a problem.
You could have a problem with not enough oxygen contact if your vessel's not proper or if it's sealed too hard, or if you because acetobacter needs oxygen to live. So uh any one of these things can be a problem. Uh if you want to read more about vinegar, the book, like the book, is Vinegars of the World by uh Lisa, uh edited by Lisa Solieri and uh Paolo uh Giudici uh from uh 2009. Fantastical book, and they have uh sections on almost any kind of vinegar that you could um you could want. But you should uh take take a look at that one.
Right? That makes sense? Yeah. Or you started with some dead dead vinegar too. That's the other thing, right?
I would just look. If you don't already have a lot of vinegar lying around, just buy some freaking culture. Don't worry about trying to like go buy apple cider vinegar from a natural health food store and hope that it works. I've had this problem when uh culturing buttermilk, trying to make uh cultured butter, and you buy certain strains of certain things, even if they're not pasteurized, and it turns out that they're bacteriologically dead because they've been around a long time and the bacteria haven't survived enough for things to happen. So, uh I mean eventually you can you know do things based on wild cultures or just luck and hope and prayer, but you know, at the outset, if you want to make sure your results are good and your recipe is good, just start with a purchase culture.
It's not that hard to get a hold of and it's fairly easy. That's my uh suggestion. Okay. Uh Tristan in Virginia writes in, hey everyone. I'm tenderizing pork shoulder in my home pressure cooker, and many uh and many recommendations I've seen online recommend the natural release method of pressure instead of quick releasing, citing a few manufacturers' websites and mainly Lorna Sass, an author of a pressure cooking cookbook.
Sass strongly recommends natural release for meat, especially beef, claiming the fibers will be more tender. Why would a slower ramp down in pressure affect the meat fibers and why would beef behave more differently from pork or any other meat, assuming a similar leanness and connective tissue? Thanks from Tristan. Pressure cooking and uh natural release. Okay, so for those of you that don't know what the hell I'm talking about, uh pressure cookers, uh you seal your object in a in a pressure cooker, you heat it.
Uh by by sealing it, you allow a pressure to build up that increases your temperature at which things cook. Things cook faster. They also cook differently. So an egg white, an egg, whole egg cooked in a pressure cooker turns brown because at the elevated temperatures in a pressure cooker, roughly 259 degrees Fahrenheit for 15 PSI over pressure at boiling, uh assuming straight water that is, uh egg whites will turn brown in an hour due to my hard reactions at the slightly elevated temperatures uh inside of a pressure cooker. Things like garlic, uh you destroy their pungency.
We've we've talked about this before. I love pressure cookers, I love me some pressure cookers. But I also almost always recommend a natural release. And what that means is when you have a pressure cooker at 15 psi and you turn off the heat, it's going to keep on cooking for a while. That's just simply uh all there is to it.
This is one of the good things about a pressure cooker, by the way, is that they take very once you get them hot, it takes a very, very low input of energy to keep them cooking because they're sealed, they don't throw a lot of heat on from the atmosphere. So in the summertime, even though you don't necessarily want to eat a lot of braises and stews in the summertime, it's an extremely efficient way to not heat up your house and do cooking, right? It also uses a very low amount of energy for the amount of uh cooking you can do in it. So it's it's great all around. But uh now you're stuck with a pot and it's gonna keep cooking.
So there's usually there's some way to open the pot to the atmosphere and steam rockets out of it, right? That's the quick release, and even quicker sometimes release is to plunge the pot into cold water, which you know instantly lowers the pressure, sometimes even faster than releasing the steam. Uh or you just let it sit and let the pressure come down naturally as it cools, the pressure will come down. As soon as it gets below 212 degrees on the inside, there will be no more pressure on the vessel, and you can open it up with no problem. Now, uh I think you are absolutely correct, uh, Tristan, in that uh I don't think it makes a damn bit of difference whether it's beef, pork, chicken, fish, or whatever.
I think you should almost always use natural release on anything that's delicate at all. Because what happens is um when you are when you release the pressure very suddenly, the water on the inside and outside and everywhere tends to violently boil. And what it does is rip things apart. And so the easiest thing to see it on is uh uh like if you pressure cook an egg and you open it very, very quickly, uh by opening stink you'll you you can blow the egg up. You know what I mean?
Not violently, like microwave blowing up is violent, but you'll crack the eggs open. Uh if you've ever pressure cooked a can of evaporated uh sweetened condensed milk rather to make uh dulce de leche, you'll know that unless you let the can heat uh cool down quite a bit, when you open it, it'll squirt product everywhere because all of a sudden the pressure is is released. Beans tend to explode it if they're if they're released too suddenly. And the texture of meats can be very uh highly affected by uh violent sudden release. So I unless you know that your product is like really rough and tough and can handle the abuse of interior boiling, or unless you actually want to shred something apart by interior boiling, I almost always recommend uh natural release on a pressure cooker instead of allowing it to to to vent to the atmosphere.
Sometimes it doesn't matter, but often uh often it does. You do any pressure cooking, Aaron? I don't do much cooking at all, actually. I uh I grew up in New York, so it's my kitchen was about the size of most people's closets. Yeah, yeah, that's true.
You know what cooking in New York, a lot of people have problems cooking in New York. Uh there's size and also ventilation is a big issue. Everyone's apartment in New York is horribly ventilated for cooking. So any time you actually do try and cook, you uh you end up uh making the entire and then everyone's like, Oh, it smells of food. Yeah, but oil caked all over your ceiling is never pleasant.
We have uh uh a call in from the studio if it's okay. This is Patrick Martins, by the way, who's uh he's like a uh what's up. I'm born and raised in New York City, and I've lived in some you know apartments, very, very small kitchens. I will say this it forces one to become better uh at very minimal ingredients, like for instance, cook or you know, uh techniques like cooking perfectly medium rare, you know, because you don't really have the luxury of space to be brazing and have like a Julia Child kitchen with stuff all over the place, but you do know how not to overcook a chicken because it's you alone with that thing and a pot of vegetables, you know. But I think brazing is fairly space efficient though, no?
Like one pot braising? Um no, no, well, I don't know. You know what I mean? It's just like all these recipes. Everyone comes to the heritage meet shop, hey, give me a Boston butt because I want to do a 19-hour breeze, and I'm gonna make seven reduction sauces, you know, and me growing up in the city in a little, you know, stove pot.
You know, I'm just like, let me just heat some meat perfectly and dip it in mustard, you know, something like that. Just simple, not trying to get too gastronomic about it. All right. All right. Yeah.
What do you think about that, Nastasha? Uh I agree. I especially don't want to be in my apartment with no air conditioning for 18 hours braising something. You know, that's uh didn't I just tell you guys to buy a freaking pressure cooker if you're gonna brace? Did I not just get through telling you guys to buy a pressure cooker so that you're not heating up your apartment when you're doing a brace?
Did anyone not hear me say that? We heard you. I heard you. Yeah, or the fact that in general you don't want braises in the freaking summertime. We heard you.
Yeah. But you know what, you know what your New York City tiny apartment's not good at? Grilling a freaking steak. True. Yeah.
I rely on my foreman every now and then. Oh, the foreman, you know, I never had one of those. A genius. Like George Foreman has nothing to do with cooking, right? At all.
Nothing. They're like, hey, you're a good boxer, you have a bunch of children all named George. Why don't you be the rep for this product? He does have uh a talent in shaking and bacon though. Is that what he used to say when he was fighting?
Are you actually referring to shaking baking and shit? Shaking and bacon. He did call him uh he did refer to himself as doing that once. But David Nelson of MPR, uh Lost and Found Sound, did a story on George Foreman Grill saying that it basically allowed uh homeless people to have a kitchen. I mean, if they just could get access to an outlet, they could basically prepare meals like people in their home.
So it was a very kind of democrat uh, you know, project, more than people give it credit for. Wait, wait, wait. Homeless people could feel like they had home. Oh, homeless people who have the money for a George Foreman grill and an electric socket. Have you seen that movie about the mole people?
Finding an electric socket. The mole people used to have the people used to live in what's called the Freedom Oh you could wait. Patrick, you can't leave after dropping that thing on. No. But I mean the vast majority of people that have no home also have no access to electric power.
I mean that's true, that's true. But I mean you can get access. Damn it, if someone was like, get me access to an electrical outlet, I would do it. I would still figure it out somehow, even if I'm like going into the Middle Eastern restaurant around the corner and just borrowing his electricity for ten minutes. But I mean it did allow them to have a carry around portable kitchen.
I mean, not a full kitchen, of course, but they could heat meat and grill like, you know. This has to be one of the craziest conversations we've ever had on the cooking issues radio show. You know, I'll tell you this though. When I lived in a dorm room and didn't have yeah, uh when I lived in a dorm room and didn't have uh a kitchen, I went to the thrift shop and bought a Westinghouse turkey oven from the 50s and used it to bake bread. I mean that was kind of my first oven away from home was this kind of thrift store oven.
So dorm rooms mean. Yeah, uh guy cooked everything in a hot pot back then. Yeah, it's kinda like being homeless with the world's greatest support network around you, is what you're saying? With like everyone like just catering to every need that you have and not forcing you to have any responsibility other than that, completely like the real world. No offense to you college students out there.
Anyway, uh I loved college. Nastasha's the only person who didn't like college. True? True. True.
Yeah. All right. This is a this is a crazy day. Okay. Uh hello, Jack and Nastasha and Dave as well.
Uh hope you guys are doing well with all the heat out there. My question has to do with sugar substitutes. I grew up being afraid of NutraSweet, sweet and low, aka saccharin, and other sugar substitutes, thinking that they cause cancer and lead to birth defects. I know that NutraSweet is banned in other countries, which is not to slightly look other can't countries ban lots of other weird things, by the way. Like what another country does, or our country for that matter, uh you know, isn't really a measure necessarily of whether something is safe or not, is a measure of whether or not there's enough of a public outcry based sometimes in fact and sometimes not.
Uh anyway, uh banned in other countries. Uh my wife likes to drink diet soda, and I cringe when she does. Uh this just so you guys know. Uh for me I drink almost exclusively seltzer now, but for many, many years I only drank diet soda. That was what I drank.
Uh because I grew up drinking it. That was my liquid of choice. And uh before I even finish this question, I will tell anyone out here who's gonna work for the who's buying things for their grill or barbecue or party for 4th of July tomorrow. If you are a regular soda drinker, you are going to purchase the incorrect amount of diet soda. Okay?
This is you are going to get the wrong amount. Here's the here's how it works. When you are purchasing soda for a party, realize that someone who drinks a sugarful soda, let's just say Coke, right? Uh uh the average soda drinker will have maybe one glass of that coke, right? So a two-liter bottle will serve a good number of people for Coca-Cola, right?
The average diet coke drinker will finish the entire freaking two-liter bottle themselves because they're gonna sit there and pound Diet Coke like the f like like nobody's freaking business. So I guarantee you that unless you yourself are a diet soda drinker, you underbuy your diet soda. Anyone here anyone here, what do you think? Agree, disagree? Well, I'll be drinking beer tomorrow.
Yeah, well I'm saying so much about soda drinkers. What? Like we say you say that you don't care about your guests? Most guests drink. I think they're just gonna drink soda tomorrow.
Oh my god. People, you people, you you know, people. Anyway, I'm just telling you, if you're gonna get a non-alcoholic drink, you're you're you're you should have at least no less than one to one on diet to regular soda. No less. And in fact, you should probably have for whatever your non-alcoholic basis, if you're gonna do soda, you should have two two-thirds diet and one third regular.
That's in general, you know, whatever. Anyway, if I'm coming, just get seltzer. You need some non alcoholic stuff. I mean, beer is relatively low in alcohol, so you can pound that all day. But if you're sitting there pounding wine after wine after wine after wine after one, you need some non alcoholic product.
I mean, as we all know, water is wretched. Uh just kidding. I just happen to not drink water. I drink I drink seltzer only. Okay, sorry, back to the question.
Uh my wife likes to drink diet soda and I cringe when she does. Is that rational or just paranoid? What re what research uh and studies have been done around the safety of sugar substitutes, which are safe and which are not? What is the process of their production? Lastly, I've heard about isomalt and manitol, sugars that are used for culinary purposes and not for diet sodas necessarily.
What is the deal with those in terms of safety? And aside aside from that, uh what is their culinary value in the kitchen? Finally, I was in New York briefly and went down to uh the bar, that's Booker and Dax, our bar. The drinks are awesome, but there were no pretzels. Please put some on the menu.
Maybe we should have some pretzels on the menu. Yeah. Martin Brothers? Sounds good. Martin Martin pretzels, because they're the best.
Uh thanks so much for keeping the airwaves delicious. Brian in San Francisco. Okay. First of all, isomalt and manitol are used uh because uh well isomalt is used uh a lot in confectionary with uh kind of higher end uh what's it like technological cooking because it doesn't absorb moisture as much, doesn't turn as brown as much uh when you're cooking it into a caramel, it's nice and hard. So you use it a lot in um in blown sugar work or in confectioner, or if you look at like what Ferran and those guys do making those and Jose Andres and making those uh those like isomalt packages with the with the uh olive oil in them.
So they're they're they're great for that. And they're slightly less uh there's less sweet than sugar. So they have a lot of the structural properties of sugar without uh all the sweetness. Manitole is a little you know a little bit different. I don't really use that one in the kitchen.
Um but let's go back to what I think is the important part of the question here is is are uh what what what are called non nutritive sweeteners, are they dangerous or not? And uh the the short answer is is all the research points to them not being dangerous. Every actual bit of current scientific research points to non nutritive sweeteners being absolutely uh fine from a uh health perspective. Now, um, you know, uh, and you know, you can look at, and I I can't even believe that I'm uh quoting these guys because I don't, you know, it's not my normal thing. And and again, I'm not usually a health guy, I'm not the guy to ask health questions of.
But if you read the the recent paper, for instance, in 2012, the position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, which, you know, again, for any of you who've ever listened to me uh go on a rant and rave about this, you know that uh I have uh big problems with the entire um uh n nutritionist kind of um outlook on things because it keeps changing. All all the data, all the ideas, like what's good, what's bad, keep changing every every year, what changes. Salt's good, salt's bad, this is good, this is bad. So I tend to I tend to regard every every piece of information as horse hockey uh except for the one that I always go back to, which is eat uh eat a moderate amount of a wide variety of things. I mean, I'm overweight right now, and it's because I eat too much freaking food.
It's because I eat an absurd amount of freaking food. My total caloric consumption is way higher than it should be. And that's that's the God's truth. It doesn't matter which kind of calorie I'm consuming, I'm consuming too much of it. Okay, that said.
Uh the position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics uh does and you should look at this. Cindy uh Fitch uh PhD and Catherine Kime PhD were the uh the main authors on it, and it's they do an exhaustive review of all of the studies. Uh aspartame, which is nutrition. Uh a lot of people used to worry about aspartame because it has the warning on it, phenol ketinor uh about phenyl ketinuria, which is a basically it's a genetic disorder. If you have it, you know you have it.
You were tested at birth. And yes, uh, you know, your brain can be damaged because you don't um you don't metabolize uh phenolalanine, which is an amino acid also present in proteins, uh, you don't metabolize it properly. And when nutrition is broken down in the body, it creates an excess of phenylalanine in the system, and so you should be aware of it. For all the rest of us, uh that's fine. Uh and uh there've never been uh any study, uh or there's no current study anyway that shows that there's been any sort of um problem with it.
Uh and the average consumption, even for people who pound diet soda all day, according to this article, is uh below um your your, you know, your recommended maximum uh daily intake that have any issues. Saccharin uh was uh banned because there was uh some uh bladder cancer studies in rats in I think the 70s, late 70s or 80s. And the uh the the problem was is that uh they were feeding these rats an absurd amount of uh saccharin, and it turns out that uh that all of the actual studies done uh and this is the major studies done um with people uh over time measuring their incidence of uh bladder cancer or other cancers with sacchar intake have shown that uh in fact it's not uh in fact it's not true. Uh and and um and uh basically the government uh realizes this, but they're not going back like anyway. The the point is that there's no current studies that anyone can uh point to.
Uh there's no studies that haven't been debunked that show that saccharin causes uh any any sort of uh problem. Uh sucralose um uh sucralose again, uh in other words, like all of the ones that are being used, even cyclomates, which were the first one to be banned because of cancer studies. Current research seems to show that cyclates uh don't actually cause uh any any sort of cancer. Sucralose, I'll just give you a gross fact about it. You don't break it down so you pee and poop it out.
So theoretically, if you eat a lot of sucrose, your pee and poop will be sweet if you were to try it. Uh I I wouldn't go ahead and try it, but I'm just saying uh like that's that's uh the case. Um so the long story short, uh every single piece of evidence I was able to find that was not put out by a crank or a quack goes to show that uh non-nutrient sweeteners are uh fine to use. Uh whether you think that they're gross from a mental perspective and therefore should not be used because they're an abomination, because what you should do is uh eat products that are made with care and that taste good and that non-nutrient sweeteners taste bad and not like real sugar and therefore uh are an abomination, I think that's a valid point. Uh you know, uh also uh another I tried to look at a bunch of studies that uh looked into whether or not um there the you know one of the arguments back in the day was that if you ate uh sugar substitutes, your body would have an increased uh desire for other foods, and therefore you would actually eat more because you weren't getting the sugar from the taste of sweet and they would increase your consumption of other solids and then you wouldn't regulate properly.
Apparently, all that's horse hockey too. I don't found any current studies that show that that's the case. Uh and then after I researched this, I looked at another uh interesting uh article. Uh did you know that with uh and because this comes goes back to uh what happened what was it last week, Jack, with the question on Bloomberg sugar ban? Last week?
Yeah. Uh did you know that over the past uh three years the consumption of sugar per capita in the United States has gone down? Really? Yeah, it's gone down. You know why?
Because we're drinking less freaking soda because it's gotten such bad press. So everyone is talking about, everyone's talking about all of these uh these problems. But if you actually look at the data, right, the actual current data, the data since people have been starting to scream about uh sugar being the the the evil that that you know that and in fact, like there's a the the the the the studies show that our sugar content like since that time in the past four, five, six years, has started to go down. And at the very most conservative estimates that it's leveled off. Our general caloric intake way freaking high, right?
Our general caloric intake has gone up, but uh our sugar consumption has gone down or at least stabilized. And some of these numbers I I you know I only had a couple of hours to research it so it's hard for me to make any actual pronouncements but if you go and look online, like one of the one of the articles to look at uh is called uh where is it uh Consumption of added sugars is decreasing in the United States by J.A. Welsh and AJ Sharma. Uh and they're using their data comes from the nutrition and health science uh sorry their uh data comes from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Uh so go look at that and uh you know it's just it just goes to show that these problems are much more complicated than banning sugar or or b or trying to ban sodas to to try and get rid of uh sugar consumption that sugar is uh not some sort of horrible uh poison uh you know one of the big um one of the big people out there who's anti-sugar is a doctor in California named Robert uh Lustig and he's been writing a lot of articles getting a lot of play uh and I I don't have the the time I haven't had the time to to look at his uh articles thoroughly enough to debunk what he writes in them but he writes articles with titles like fructose metabolic hedonic and societal parallels with ethanol, because basically the man thinks that sugar is a poison and a drug with uh, you know, so did KRS one, by the way, uh uh with kind of parallels to ethanol and is on an anti-sugar cake.
Interestingly, you know, this same group of doctors actually goes to show how our dietary information was so bad in the in the 70s and 80s, decrying uh fat as the enemy, and that those low fat diets actually uh caused a lot of problems, uh including obesity and and whatnot, and then fail to recognize that their own insistence on sugar as being the ultimate enemy in all of these things is similarly just rotten data from a particular uh slice in time that I'm sure uh later on uh is gonna be shown that well, they were wrong for a different reason. I think again it goes back to uh and you know, I need to spend more time going to the ins and outs of uh all of the research that they cite, but um it goes back to the point that what you really want to do is eat a uh wide variety of uh foods in moderation. Yeah? Yeah? Yeah.
Oh, another thing. Tomorrow at Roberta's Pizzeria on the fourth of July, uh Kobayashi is going to be doing a hot dog eating contest sponsored, I guess by Roberta and Crift Dogs. Yeah, and I'm gonna be interviewing him. Yeah? Yeah, I mean, if all goes well.
What do you mean if all goes well? What can not go well? The man knows how to eat a hot dog. Who knows? He may just have his hands full, but they said if they can wrangle him in here for a minute, you know, I'm gonna keep the AC on.
I'll have some cold drinks, you know. The man's not gonna freaking drink anything before the cut. That's a good point. Uh but I don't think he speaks English, so it should be a fun interview. That's the best.
Do you have a translator? I think so. I hope so. Well, listen, is there any if do you you don't know if you have a translator? Hey, is there well, should I put a call out for anyone that speaks Japanese who wants to come translate for me?
I mean, he will. It's just that they said it's gonna be crazy and they hope he can come in here, and at the very least, they're promising a drop. So we'll get Kobayashi trying to say, you know, heritage radio network.org. That's gonna be awesome. It will be pretty awesome.
The man single-handedly kind of made like competitive eating like kind of a thing, right? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know the whole story about him, right? Like he was banned from the contest because he wouldn't sign with the major league eating union or whatever.
You know, they have like the organization of all the eaters they're represented for competitions, and he did not want to sign with them. He wanted his own representation, so he could not compete in the Nathan's hot dog eating contest because he was not in that union. So he showed up anyway with a shirt that said free Kobe, and he kind of crashed the stage, and then the police had to kick him out, and it was this whole thing. So that's why he'll be here. Kobe beef or Kobe Bryant?
No, free Kobayashi. Oh, Kobayashi. Right. You know, he just shortened it. So anyway, so he'll be here competing against the Nathan's hot dog eating people remotely via video.
I mean, didn't the guy invent the the Duncan smash? I think he did, yeah. Yeah. First of all, it's all kind of it's I mean, from an actual from my my perspective as a food person, I mean, the whole thing is kind of gross, like massive consumption. I'm I'm kind of fascinated by it, but it's also gross, right?
I mean, I think hot dogs are gross, period. Really? So yeah, I don't really like one. They taste good though. That's the problem with them.
They taste good. Also, did you know that if you make hot dogs, if you use the proper spices, no matter what meat you make it out of, you know what it tastes like? No. Hot dog. I've made one out of like all out of duck, all hand done, emulsify, blah, blah, blah, uh, you know, all this thing, trammed everything.
Tastes like a hot dog. What's hot dog spice? What is that? I forget what the mix is, but I like anyway, but but that's not my point. Here's what I'm gonna talk about with the with the with the with the eating, right?
Back to uh another one of my non-scientific just you know, diet trap. But this is my soapbox, so I get to say what I want. Uh calorie is in fact uh not uh a calorie because your body is not uh a hundred percent uh efficient, right? So if Kobayashi, who I believe his current record for this hot dog, I don't know how many minutes it is or whatever, but it's 69 hot dogs, right? That's his current record for whatever the the official professional hot dog eating round is is 69 hot dogs, which is a absurd.
But uh that's 270 calories a pop according to the internet's 69 hot dogs is uh 18,630 calories in what is it, two minutes, Jack? I don't know. I can look it up. Yeah, something like that. Uh okay.
So uh if you believe that a calorie is a calorie, right, and that they all add up, that would mean that uh he would gain from that alone in terms of actual body fat five point uh three pounds, right? You that doesn't happen though. You well, you know what gains five point three pounds? His toilet gains five point three pounds because your body simply cannot process all of that all of that food in one schlag. It just can't it can't be none.
Similarly, if you were to drink a gallon of oil, do you think that you would gain uh eight point nine pounds, which is the actual at thirty five hundred uh calories per pound is the number that's bandied about. Do you think you would gain eight point nine pounds, or do you think you would just run to the toilet and poop it all out? What do you think, Aaron? I I I hope he pulls the trigger after the contest. Yeah, yeah.
But I imagine it goes right through your system. Right. One in in maybe even out the same way it came in. Wow, you think you think you throw it up? You know, that's true.
I've never seen someone do the gallon of milk contest uh thing without without throwing it up. I we had a with a competitive eater on one of the shows, uh Tim Jan is oh, I forget what his name was, but he called it a reversal of fortune. And he said if anybody says the word vomit or puke in front of a competitive eater, it's like get out of the room. You're you can't do that. You can't even say the word.
You mean like when they're just sitting talking? Yeah, or like getting ready for a competition more, you know. But like after the comp like. Or especially after the comp, yeah, you know. But what I'm saying is like like, you know, in general casual conversation, are you allowed to say puke?
Uh that's a good question. What about boot? Also a good we should get we should get him back and on the show. Yeah, let's do it. Let's let's try to do that.
All right, so uh all right, so uh I think we answered most of the question. Do you have any closing uh comments here, uh Aaron, other than go to Kickstarter and go to deconstructing dinner and give some freaking money? Yeah, check check out deconstructing dinner.com. Uh we we we really need the help of of all all the listeners and and anyone who's uh and and like us on Facebook too, uh, from the site. Send it to all your friends.
Anyone who's passionate about food, I think will will really like this project. All right. Well, thank you for uh being our guest producer today. Thanks to everyone. This has been cooking issues.
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