Today's program has been brought to you by Whole Foods Market, a dynamic leader in the quality food business, a mission-driven company that aims to set the standards of excellence for food retailers. For more information, visit Whole Foods Market.com. Broadcasting live from Bushwick Brooklyn. You're listening to Heritage Radio Network.org. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues.
This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live from Roberta's Pizzeria on the Heritage Radio Network every Tuesday from roughly 12 to 1245. Joined in the theater. Theater, huh? Theater. Theater box.
In the in the containerized box. In the uh back of a bird's pizzeria with uh Nastasha the Hammer Lopez. How are you doing, Nastasha? Good, how are you? And Jack and Joe in the engineering room.
How are you doing, guys? Hey. Uh okay, first of all, a a thank you. A thank you. Uh uh, I'm gonna Michael, I'm gonna call you Mike.
I'm gonna butcher your last name. Does anyone here know how to pronounce I'm terrible at pronouncing? So I was gonna call you Michael. I don't want to destroy your last name. Okay, here's I'm gonna try it anyway.
Sizuski. Sizuski? What do you think? Let's hope so. Stas, right?
Especially because so nice. Sent me us a copy of uh Fuchsia Dunlop's book, A Land of Plenty, A Treasury of Authentic Sichuan Cuisine. A book, by the way, which I do not own, even though I've been meaning to get some Fuchsia Dunlop books because uh she was recommended to us by uh our good friend Harold McGee. Because she uh showed him around uh various places in China when he was there. Anyway, he writes, uh, thank you for answering my questions on seasoning pans.
Enjoy the Dunlop. It is a great book about my favorite type of Chinese food. Thanks for all the effort you put into the podcast, Mike. Very nice. Nice.
Very nice. Thank you. Alright. Now, uh, a Twitter question I missed from last week from uh Barry uh Moncasey. I hope.
Again, with me with the pronunciation, I should just never pronounce the name. Hey, listen, when you're writing something in, uh, even if your name is Smith, assume I don't know how to pronounce it and just put a little pronunciation guide next to it. Am I right or wrong? Because I'm a moron. True?
True. Uh anyway. Uh the question was uh tweeted in clearly over clearly overcooking a shrimp boil. Uh everything's abbreviated because it's Twitter. Uh uh shrimp, sausage, corn, potato, onion, uh, garlic, and zetteran's spice.
Uh question was perfect sous vide uh recipe or timing. Okay. Uh I'm interpreting this question to mean that whenever you cook shrimps, the shrimp boil, you're overcooking the hell out of the shrimp, uh, which is definitely the case, probably. I mean, definitely the case. Um I'm assuming that you're not overcooking by too much uh your sausage, uh, your corn, uh, your onion or potato.
Uh, and you're definitely not overcooking your Zataran spices, my guess. But uh I am not a huge fan of uh low temperature shellfish unless they are post-finished. Now, usually, let's say I was gonna cook a lobster or a shrimp. Anytime you're gonna cook a shellfish, you don't want to cook it for too long. Because if you cook it for too long, even at a very low temperature, uh the enzymes in it keep working, especially at a low temperature, actually.
The enzymes keep working and they turn mushy. In some cases, they can almost turn to a paste. And it's the most revolting paste that you've ever put in your mouth. In fact, you feel like you have to spit it out. Now, it doesn't always happen, and I can't I haven't figured out yet why sometimes shrimp has this enzyme in it that does that to it, and sometimes it doesn't.
Maybe someone out there knows why it's uh a variable situation. However, I actually prefer uh when things uh shellfish are cooked, not overcooked necessarily, but cooked at a higher temperature and have that slight springiness to them, but don't uh but you know aren't over aren't totally overdone. Uh lobster, the way you would cook a lobster, let's say, so I assume shrimp is somewhat similar, uh low temperature, is usually you would put it into a bath of uh butter uh at roughly uh 60 degrees Celsius for roughly this is after you've taken the tail meat out. Uh you put it on a skewer and you put it in there roughly 10 minutes. So that's what you're looking at for low temperature.
But the texture of it is always very, very soft. And uh I actually like a little more bite to my um lobster than that. Now, on shrimp, what I typically do uh whenever I'm doing uh kind of boiled things with shrimps is I'll uh rip off the shells and and heads uh and I will roast roast them to get some flavor and then infuse them into the soup base separately, pull them and discard them separately, like you know, basically grill cook the shrimp uh at a high temperature until it's just done, and then at the very end, as I'm putting the soup out, I will fold it back in. That way I get the maximum flavor from the shells and whatnot into the although a lot of the really thin shell shrimp we get, there's not as much flavor in the shells as you'd like, but you get the flavor from that in your into your uh into your soup base, and you don't uh viciously overcook the shrimp. On the sausage, I usually recommend cooking my sausage at 60 degrees Celsius, and you can cook that in a bag and then post chop it up and fold it in later.
You're not gonna get then any flavor of that sausage into the stock, so you might want to reinforce the stock with uh some other flavors if you're gonna do it that way. But the best way usually to handle it, because none of those ingredients cook properly at the same temperature, the potato is gonna need to be at least above 85 Celsius for a pretty uh you know long length of time to for it to cook out properly. Or not really 85, whatever, whatever. Yes, about that. Uh, an onion definitely above 85 Celsius for a good length of time to cook.
And so none of these things want to cook at the same temperature. So typically I cook them individually, add the flavor to the stock in layers and recombine at the end. And I do that all the time with any sort of uh so if you like when you're making like uh oh my god, the name's gone out of my head. The uh the soup that uh is from uh the soup that like bully-based uh spicy bully based with sausage with garlic bread in it from San Francisco. Anyone, anyone, anyone?
No. Oh my god, sounds like almost like the Italian word for onion, Cupino. Uh yeah, so uh when I make Capino, I I cook everything separately, you know, and make a stock basically from the bones and the drippings from the juice after I steam out, I'll steam out like all of the um you know mussels and shellfish and whatnot, save the steaming juices, uh make a stock with the fish bones, cook the stuff, and then recombine it all at the end. And that's always been the best way I get the maximum flavor and nothing's overcooked. What do you think?
That's good. Good. All right. Hey Dave and group and group, group, uh from Matt. I recently have made two dishes in my pressure cooker.
One was a chicken stock based on Hessen Blumenthal's recipe. Hessen Blumenthal recommends uh finely chopping up the chicken pieces and then either deep frying, I think, or roasting. I haven't actually read it, but this is my is my impression of it. Uh, and then pressure cooking that uh for I think quite a long time. Um of course he doesn't mention it in the book, but I looked at the pictures of it and he recommends using a coon recon pressure cooker, which it visually he recommends it, uh i.e.
that's what he uses, uh, because it's non-venting. Uh, if you go back on the cooking issues blog back to you know 2009 or whatever, you know, I wrote a bunch of posts or one, two posts on why I think that's very important that your pressure cooker not be venting out when you're making stocks, because the stocks from a pressure cooker that allows steam to escape tend to not taste as good, in uh in my opinion. Uh okay. Uh one was a chicken stock based on Heston Blumenthal's recipe, and the other was octopus based on her web recipe. In both cases, when I removed the lid, the smell was less than appetizing.
I don't know if I would call it a sulfur smell, but in uh but in that family, in the sulfur family. My wife had thought the chicken had gone bad, but it smelled fine when I put it into the pot. I thought it was maybe uh sulfur from the onions or garlic, but then I did it with the octopus and got the same result. For the octopus, I used water, salt, paprika, and pressure cooked for 45 minutes. Uh I know there was no onion, and I don't think I used garlic.
Also, I've done tons of meat with onion and garlic in the past and never had any problems. Any thoughts on what's causing the odor? Okay, it's definitely not the onion. In fact, uh onions are almost completely deodorized by pressure cooking and um and looking behind it, by the way, with these kinds of things, authors in the past, uh notably Julia Child in uh Mastering the Art of French Cooking, has uh notes on the pressure cooker that says she doesn't like certain things in the pressure cooker, pressure cooked stock is one of them because she says that it has a pressure cooked taste. Uh going back and you know reviewing what she's doing, I don't think what she's talking about is what you're talking about.
I think for her, like part of the problem is is that uh as anyone who cooks a lot in the pressure cooker knows, especially stocks, you need to double and triple the onions in the recipe because they're just not going to come through uh as much, or add some at the end after it's been uncapped. She also probably didn't take into account the fact that there's very little to no reduction on the inside of a pressure cooker, so she has all of her stocks uncapped and then simmered afterwards open for another hour or so to get the flavor where she thinks they should be for uh for a normal stock. So I'm not discounting Julie Child because of course Julie Child, you know, no one ever discounts anything Julia Child says that's be crazy. That's like you know culinary suicide to discount Julie Child. But uh I'm gonna have to say that I'm not sure that her uh opinion is necessarily well taken on pressure cookers.
Now I've never had what you're describing uh happen in a chicken stock. My question is did the did all of the giblets go in? Maybe you're getting an effect with the liver cooking for a long time in the pressure cooker. I don't know. Uh it's that's never happened to me.
I've never gotten an off flavor from a chicken stock. I will say that I do not cook chicken stock as long in the pressure cooker as many other people do. At home I actually only cook it for about 25 minutes at 15 PSI or both rings but uh at the school when I was running uh the tests we were doing it 45 minutes. I know people are cooking it a lot longer. And I think uh going back to your octopus that the main problem on your octopus might be the length of time you're cooking.
Most of the recipes that I've seen uh have the octopus only cooking for uh twenty to thirty minutes. I think if you overcook it too long you might be creating some flavors in there that otherwise wouldn't be there. Uh uh otherwise I can't explain uh what's what's going on there. But it's definitely not the um it's not the onion it's not onion or garlic. If anyone out there has an experience with this and knows what we're talking about and is and has experienced this kind of off flavor I'd really appreciate you writing or tweeting in and saying what's going on because um I'd love to solve this problem.
Uh sorry, Matt that I don't have anything more dis uh definitive to say, but uh there it is. Okay. Um Jack, you want to go to our first commercial break? Uh yes. All right, here we go.
Call back with cooking issues. With Ocode How. You betcha and how I'm pow. We're fooling around all over this town. I'm pow.
I'm pow with shooting dice, cause it's a vice. Our late each night. And that's not right. So I'm pow with Wahina's two. Believe me, it's true.
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So we got the CD mailed to us in the office with a nice note that he's a longtime listener, and that's his band. Nice. Plexifhonic? Yeah, pretty good, right? Yeah, I like that.
We'll play some other stuff from that. Yeah. Plexophonic. Plexiphonic. Right?
I got that. Yeah. I got a Twitter question in also, by the way. What do you got? We've got uh from Danny Combs.
I think I pronounced that right. Um trying to make an extremely thick simple syrup, glucose syrup thick for his bartender, and it keeps crystallizing. Any suggestions? Yeah, it's very, very difficult to make simple syrups with sugar that are as thick as glucose syrup. In fact, um for several reasons.
One, uh the glucose uh inherently doesn't form crystals as much as sucrose does, right? So right off there, you know, you're off the bat, you've got issues. Secondly, uh there are uh other things in there, dextrins and maltextrins in glucose uh syrup that are adding to the um uh thickness of it, but uh aren't going to form crystals. So you're kind of shafted two ways there. Uh glucose syrup, uh if my memory serves me, is uh a guy of bricks in the area of about 80%, meaning glucose syrup is about 80% solid, which is hard freaking core.
Uh you know, I typically when you make a rich simple syrup, when you make a two to one simple syrup, you're talking about a bricks of about sixty-six, right? Uh regular one-to-one simple syrup is a bricks duh of fifty if you do it by weight, which is how we do it. Uh, even at a mere 66 bricks, right, which is a two to one simple syrup, it can start forming some crystals eventually in it. Uh you might be able to push that up a little higher, 70 or so, but you're not going to get much higher than that using sucrose. Uh you could use uh an invert, like a tremoline, which will have roughly similar sweetening properties to it and get the sugar content that high, but not with uh, you know, regular Domino's uh sugar that you have uh on well, I'm not pumping the Domino's brand, but you know what I mean, regular beet or cane sucrose that you have sitting on the shelf.
Uh you could attempt to invert it yourself by long cooking, but in general, then you're gonna have problems with uh turning brown and all this. So i I think you're kind of in for a world of hurt trying to get that. You could artificially thicken it with um thickeners, but then it's going to have that artificial thickener. And so the question is why do you want it to be that thick? If you just want it to be much sweeter without adding water, I think you're gonna be SOL.
Uh another alternative, I mean, the glucose syrup isn't very sweet. Uh you know, uh none of those things are really. I mean, uh they're really, really thick. I'd have to know why you wanted it thick to recommend a way to do it. But you're not gonna get a regular 100% sucrose syrup that thick without it crystallizing out.
Just will not happen, uh, in my opinion. Someone call me in and tell me that uh I'm wrong. Oh, speaking of calling in, call your questions to 718497-2128. That's 718497-2128. Is that right?
Yeah. Okay. Uh all right. So uh going back to our questions. Uh hey, Dave, Nastasha, Jack and Joe.
Curious, uh, from behind Wall Street Journal's uh paywall, which I guess I mean they illegally sent it to me. Well, or they paid for it, so it's not easy. They're just asking me a question. I'm not calling this person out. It's from Steve.
Uh he says, a professor is trying to use distiller's grain as a healthy food additive, although I don't know how healthy it is. My understanding is most of it's mostly fiber remnants from grains. I'm against ethanol from grain, but if it's created, it may be good to find a variety of uses, or perhaps it's a fooled fool's errand. Also, uh, and this is the this is the opinion of Steve, and not necessarily the opinion of anyone here. Uh Arthur Daniel uh ADM is uh the devil incarnate.
What do you think about that, Jack? You hate that. You hate the ADM, right? What's that? Archer Daniel Mid Midlands or however you pronounce it.
You hate are you pro again? They're the devil incarnate, according to Steve. I have no comment. I have no comment because I don't want anyone knocking on my door and putting a bullet in my head. Uh I'm kidding.
They don't do that. They don't they don't I don't think. I don't know. Anyway. Uh thanks for your great program, by the way.
I can never listen live, so the podcast come in handy. Okay, so from the article, basically the the story is that when you're distilling uh anything from anything, you have uh left over after the fermentation and boiling process, you have whatever you had left. So if it's grain, it's grain. If it's spent uh grape, you know, whatever it's spent if you're doing brandy, it's it's that. So uh uh you there's all this stuff left over.
Uh now what are you gonna do with it? You don't want to just throw it away because that's a waste. You paid for the grain or whatever, and so now you have to do something with the leftovers, otherwise you're you're a moron from an economic standpoint. Now I've actually tasted uh directly wet distiller's grain uh spent from uh the production of makers uh mark bourbon, and I thought it was pretty good actually, because it's got a weird little kind of a a funky flavor to it, but uh that's not what what it doesn't get served to people. Typically, what happens is is it gets sent to livestock for the livestock to uh to gr to grow on uh because it's cheap.
Uh it's basically a byproduct, and if you feed it to something to make meat out of it, then win win. Okay. But in this article on Wall Street Journal, this uh guy, a Mr. Uh Krishnan, uh his whole idea is he wants to send he wants to use these things in human food products. Uh but what he's doing is basically what everyone does when they have a cheap food product is they try to make it as bland and tasteless as possible so they can jack it into foods without you noticing.
Uh in other words, here's what he says. Uh literally, this is a quote from him. If I can make it bland, then I can do lots of tricks, he says. He then tests uh how much regular flour, this is directly from the article. He tests how much regular flour he can replace.
If I put too much in there, he says, it'll be a brick. Uh and cookies, uh, don't go beyond seven percent. Chocolate chips come in handy too. I can hide anything if I have enough chocolate, he says. Uh, and that just goes to show you I mean, anyone who knows me knows what I'm gonna say right away based on what he says, which is if you're adding something because you want to save a nickel and jack food with it, then I think you're you're doing some bad stuff to food, right?
Now, theoretically you can make some argument that it's not basically it's it's it there's a lot, there's protein. There's a lot of protein in spent grains and a lot of fiber. So if you're having problems with the pooper and you need a lot of extra fiber in there, or if you're the one American uh who can afford to buy cookies that are jacked with uh uh you know, dispen uh spent distiller's grain and also has a protein deficiency, right? Because I doubt that the that the loads and loads of hungry, which there are many hungry people in the United States, people tend to forget this, a lot of hungry children in the in the United States especially, which is horribly sad. Uh I don't think those are the people who are gonna be able to afford to go get uh, you know, cookies that are jacked up with uh with spent grain.
Do you think, Stuzz? No. Yeah. So uh that could be wrong. Uh and also like it seems kind of gr even if it was that, it seems kind of gross to be like, hey, look, I'm gonna make these cheap cookies for these kids that don't have nothing to eat, and so what I'm gonna do is jack it with stuff that nobody wants.
Does that seem right or wrong? Seems wrong. Uh I mean, just from a mental note, it seems wrong. Uh anyway, so right there I'm saying uh this is not something that I'm hyper interested in. Um the I mean, as as a feed for cattle, uh, it seems like it it's fine.
Uh I was doing some research on it, and uh there's basically they either dry it out uh and use it that way because it keeps a lot longer, or if you live very close to where a distillery is, you can feed them the wet product. Uh and it's fed typically uh in in areas of like 10 to 20 percent of the total uh ration based on dry matter. This is according to uh KS grains and their DDGSF, which is uh dry distiller grain uh fact sheet. Uh and it basically they say that at those levels it doesn't make the meat taste like crap, i.e. they can't tell the difference, uh, and it can be uh economical.
Um and so basically how much of it's used is directly tied to whatever the current price of corn is. So as corn prices go up, uh the uh use of this stuff is gonna go up as well because it's we're gonna make it anyway. Now uh heh, the other thing that's useful for in feeding cattle is to prevent uh or to help prevent uh acidosis, which is a system uh where you you're not supposed cows aren't supposed to eat bay basically hugely carbohydrate rich uh diets all the time. And if they do, it can throw off their uh their rumen and basically eat eat away the lining of their rumen with the pH of their system gets messed up and uh and then uh well it's terrible. You can't cure you're they're done.
It's nightmare. So anyway, so feeding them this, which is lower in carbohydrate can help reduce that apparently. Now uh one thing I will say uh and and uh you know uh about this, and again, like what this guy is doing in this article is is is basically totally removing all of the uh aroma and flavor, which I actually think is quite interesting. If if you were gonna do something with spent grain, spent distiller's grain, what you should do is taste it and say, hey, this has a flavor, this has an aroma. What the hell would this taste good in?
I mean, that's what you should be doing. Of course, then you'll never soak up the eight billion pounds of the stuff or whatever it is that we make from uh fermenting ethanol. And I'm sure that most of the stuff that's made isn't made at the same quality as maker's mark, and so tastes like like behind. You know what I mean? And so if you're dealing with stuff that's poorly made, then uh there's not much use for it.
You know what I mean? Like uh I mean I'm sure I could find good uses for makersmark's grain or any one of the other distillers who we like uh their their grain. Uh but these guys have to totally de aromatize it with a bunch of different procedures. Now, uh going back it whenever I want to know what animal what feed stocks do to animals, traditional feedstocks do to animals, I turned to uh William Ewat, who was writing in the mid-1800s uh and wrote one of my favorite books of all time, and you can get it on the Google books, uh, and it's called the hog. And in other editions, it's called the pig.
I'm using the hog, the 1865 edition. If you go through it, he lists all of the feedstocks that were available to feed pigs at the time, and any time you had a bunch of less crap left over, one of the things you would do to it is feed it to pigs to make meat out of it. And uh what he says is, and certain things obviously are are delicious, acorns and whatnot, uh, but he says uh the refuse, this is from the 1865 edition, the refuse wash and grains and other residue of breweries and distilleries may also be given to swine with advantage and seem to induce an intensity to lay on uh to to induce a tendency to lay on flesh, but you must not do it in too large a quantities or unmixed uh without uh other more substantial food, as although they gain flesh rapidly, when fed uh on this alone, the meat is not firm. So you ought in the eighteen hundreds, and you know, you take it with a grain of salt, uh, but you what apparently was well known back in the day that if you fattened too much on these spent grains, that yes they fattened up, but the meat didn't taste as good as it otherwise would. So uh so there there you have it.
There you have it. Um should I take one more question before we go to a break, or do you want me to uh go to another break? Uh yeah, we got some tweets too, whenever you're ready. All right, give me a tweet, and then we'll go to break. I'll give you a tweet.
Once I zested this is from Andrew Switzer. Once I zested some lemon limes and oranges, I forgot about them for two weeks and cut them to find them extremely sweet. I have not been able to replicate this. Any idea what happened? The lime specifically tasted pure sweet with no acidity.
Wait, now the lime itself or the zest? Wait, he zested the lime. He doesn't know what happened. Huh. And it was I I'm I am baffled.
I I I am baffled because citric acid, uh, you know, so let's take the lemons. Okay, lemons, the main acidity in them is citric acid. Uh it should not uh it should not go away. It should not volatilize, neither should it be broken down. Uh the same goes in limes, which is a combination of malic acid and citric acid and succinic acid, uh not in that order.
Uh and those should not break down. Uh it's well known that acidity decreases in apples on storage, but I haven't read anything about uh increasing the availability of air to the inside of fruit on a lemon or a lime, causing the acidity to go down. Now, if you happen to be in an area that's growing, there are lemons and limes that are sweet, but I'm assuming that if you had picked it off of a tree of unknown provenance that you would have said something like, I picked this lime and lemon off of a tree of unknown provenance, in which case you might have gotten one of the rare and I think insipids. And Stash, you didn't like those, right? The sweet limes and sweet lemons?
No, no. They're kind of weak, right? Because they didn't have as much power as like an orange has. You know what I mean? Flavor wise.
Which is weird because like here they're my favorite citrus fruits, and all of a sudden you take away the acid and they're uh so I'm extremely curious. I'm gonna have to do some research on that and see whether or not I can figure anything out. But no, I have no explanation for it. All right, well, we have one more quick question. It's not really a question.
So this is from Landon Young, gonna be in New York City in a few weeks. Restaurant suggestions near LaGuardia. And then with the hashtag awaiting second coming of Indy Jesus. Uh aren't we all? Aren't we all?
Really. Aren't we all? Uh wow, near LaGuardia. Yeah, I know, right? Yeah.
Well, what is that near? What's the now I uh I have to be honest. Now there's there's there's uh there's two kinds of people. There's people who actually explore what what we Manhattan people call somewhat pejoratively the outer burrows. And then there are other people.
Uh I don't I mean like I basically, and this is gonna sound really it's it's just because my son does not like getting on subway trains in the weekend, but I do not uh which is strange considering that he is obsessed with subways. But I very, very rarely, with the exception of Roberta's Pizzeria, get to eat in the outer burrows very often. So I don't really know much around. What do you got? Jackson Diner in Jackson Heights.
It's uh Is that close to LaGuardia? Yeah, it's relatively close. So says my map here. Well, that entire neighborhood is is world renowned for having in interesting uh uh ethnic foods of uh you know and that that Jackson Diner has been famous for many, many, many years. Uh I just didn't know it was close to LaGuardia.
Seems like it. Yeah. That whole neighborhood, if you just search that that neighborhood on uh Jackson, uh there's a zillion blog posts on that whole neighborhood and every everything uh everything going on in it, and uh and that the one that Jack just mentioned, particularly famous, but Google around in there. Nastash, you ever eat out there? No.
Th the some of the restaurants in LaGuardia are pretty good. Come on. Seriously. Which one? Come on.
Um, I don't remember the name, but it was it was really good. She's like, that was the best blueberry muffin that'd been wrapped two weeks ago I ever had in my whole life. Is it Sabaros? Shut up, Jack. All right, and with that, we will go to our second commercial break.
I wish that I were twins. You grip big baby kins. So I could love you twice as much as I do. I'd have four loving arms to embrace you. Four eyes to idolise you each time I face this one's I Wish We Were Twins by Plexophonic.
What couldn't four lips do? When fault is you say that I'm yours, dad. I wish that I were twins. You great big baby kins. So I could love you twice as much as I do.
This is Brandon Hoy, co owner of Roberta's, and you're listening to Heritage Radio Network.org. Donate, donate, donate, donate. It's for a good cause, man. Heritage Radio. Super awesome dudes.
Snacky tunes. And that other show where dudes get drunk. I love Nicole Taylor. Hot Grease. Dave Arnold, Cooking Issues.
Farm Report. Patrick, Patrick, Patrick, Patrick. Patrick Morton. Listen to the radio because it's better than the TV, because it doesn't have pictures to distract you. Learn about food.
Donate at Heritage Radio Network dot or I like that. What why don't we get the Sunday, Sunday, Sunday monster truck effects? Sunday, Sunday, Sunday. I can do that. You might get a surprise next week.
Alright. I love I mean, like if there look, I never actually is that true? Have I ever been to a monster truck rally? I don't feel like I need to because I saw the commercials growing up so much when I was a kid that like, you know, that's that's all I needed. Everything I needed was there, and the and you know, and the and the and the seeing the truck like crush the other truck on the advertisement was I didn't feel like I needed to see it in the real life.
Have you ever been to a monster truck rally? Any of you guys ever been to a monster truck rally? I have, yeah, when I was a kid in Long Island Out East. Was it awesome? I I mean I was a small kid.
I remember it feeling awesome. Yeah. Yeah. It may have not been awesome though. I think maybe the reason was I saw like a televised monster truck rally once, and there was two monster trucks, and the idea for those of you that have never left your house is that monster trucks they they have giant, giant wheels, and they roll over other cars and crush those other cars.
And so they basically they they they try to race each other over a bunch of cars that they crush to the finish line. And uh and they also do things like pull each other and things like that. But uh, I've watched on TV, super excited, and uh neither truck actually finished the race because both of them either one flipped over and the other wheel fell off. Like they none of them made it over. So it was kind of like a want worm.
Maybe that's what uh soured me to the whole thing. Even cooler yet, when I was a kid, we I I saw a demolition derby, they called it, which essentially. Oh man, I've always wanted to go to a demolition derby. So cool. We should, you know, that would be a fundraiser.
What if Roberta's we all got a bunch of cars for like a hundred and fifty dollars, filled the sides with concrete, and had a like a heritage radio, Harris Radio Demolition Derby. I have a ninety six Nissan Censure I'm willing to donate for that event. Yeah? I mean, I'm uh that would like that's like a lifelong dream to be in a demolition derby. Oh man.
It's so baller. We we have a collar, by the way. Oh, all right, caller, you're on the air. Hi, Dave. Uh this is Marv Woodhouse calling from Wuppethal in Germany.
So uh I'm quite stoked to actually get through to the show. Uh I had a question. Uh I have a two-year-old and four-year-old uh child who are getting increasingly fussy about food. What do you feed your kids? Oh, oh my God.
You know what? This is like this is i i it's like it's it's like your kids learn whatever they can to punish you, right? And it it's like, you know, if you eat everything and try to serve them everything, then they will go the exact opposite direction. I end up having to I have a we have a a couple I have a couple of problems with it. One is that my cooking time with during the week is limited to roughly 15 to 20 minutes a night.
And so I have the added problem of it has to be quick. Uh I also have the the issue of like like the the the pitched battles that uh you know that you get into over food, but you know, like you know, you you do something you think they're gonna think is delicious, like cauliflower because it's not green, because for some reason, as soon as kids start hanging out with other kids, everyone gets together and has some sort of pow wow about how green vegetables are disgusting. So you're like, okay, I'll get you this cauliflower and I'll dump cheese sauce over it, which is universally and inherently delicious, and then yet you get this pitched screaming battle, which is impossible to to understand. So my c all my kids want to eat is steak, hot dogs, and hamburgers. And so you have to filter that through, and which is weird because before my older son Booker was uh when he was, you know, three and four and below, would eat anything like fistfuls of capers, olives.
Uh you know, I I I end up having them to sneak sneak things and then they end up liking it. Like for some reason they've they've developed uh a like for uh squid, you know. Uh yeah, uh initially you have to like fudge it with them a little bit. I'm I'm very, very much against lying to adults about what's in food and we'll get to that later. But uh with your kids, I think it's kind of an obligation to lie to them and then shame them later into uh you know, in in into eating.
Otherwise they're just, you know, all they want is you know, kasukai gummy candies and uh and uh hot dogs. Yeah, we have a problem uh I mean, like you talk about steak, hot dogs and hamburgers. We have a problem that uh my kids don't really go for protein, so they would eat pasta, particularly Nockey, like five days a week. Uh if they were allowed. Uh Nokia and pesto.
Uh so can you can you think of anything that's kind of uh like just not just white carbohydrate? Because especially in Germany, they they they would uh like to eat pasta and bread. Yeah all the time. You got them hooked on the spetzel yet? Or you don't want to you don't want to get 'em hooked on another white carbohydrate.
Uh yeah, uh man. Well in Germany, you're in the so you they you can't get 'em to do you guys eat meat or no? Yeah, we yeah, we do. But but the kids don't really uh I mean they're they're digging sort of salami and stuff, but they they're not really big on like you you give them chicken and they'll kind of poke at it. What about forced?
Do they like forced or no? Uh yeah, but uh it's quite different. We we come over from Ireland and it's quite different, so that they're they're not really going for the texture of the verse because it's a lot firmer than we'd have been used to over over in uh over in the UK. Right. Uh they're different, but both delicious.
Uh because I was gonna say, like, you know, what I would typically do, like I I I I get their vegetables into my kids also eat pasta, so I usually get the vegetables into that via purees and sauces. Uh we try and watch the the the verse and the salami because like we don't want to be just feeding them salt all the time as well. That's fair. That's fair. Uh yeah, that's uh that's an interesting it's interesting problem.
Um kids are so like here's here what we do, honestly, and uh so my kids now are seven and ten, and the the deal is is uh our current mode, and I can't say whether it's any better or any worse, is we cook whatever we want for ourselves. If they eat it, they eat it. If they don't, they don't, and which is we have a no complaining rule anymore, which doesn't appear to work. But it's just we s we decide to kind of give up on what they want with the exception of two, three days a week. We'll we have like hassle-free meals and I'll make whatever it is that they that they want, assuming it's reasonable.
Uh and then the rest of the time, like i it is what it is. I try not to do anything that's gonna be overtly gonna uh uh irritate them and make them angry because that's just pushing things too far. But uh, you know, and then eventually you find like the weird stuff that like for like for like even though my older son you can't get him to eat any vegetables at all, for some reason sauerkraut, he'll pound sauerkraut like the end of the world is coming. So uh you know, fine. Here's some sauerkraut.
And he loves canned sardines, good, so do I. Here have some canned sardines. But it's only through just like uh treating them like they're gonna eat everything and and just serving them everything that they're gonna do. I haven't had as much luck, unfortunately, hiding things in other things as I would uh unless it's like you know, something that they know what it is, a squid, and they won't eat it until they've eaten it, and then you're like, you like squid, and they're like, Okay, I like squid. But they you know, that but yeah, I wish I could be more helpful.
I read something about a a pasta sauce with broccoli. Oh yeah, that's easy. If they won't eat broccoli, yeah. So uh you know, basically you just take a chicken stock, which is another meat thing there, um, and then uh you can thicken it with a roux, but it's not necessary. Uh and uh chop up uh brocc whole broccoli, including stems, chop the stems finer because uh and I also peel off the very outside that's tough on the bottom because unless you have a very good blender, it won't puree well.
Just throw all those things into the chicken stock, uh blitz them to to blend them up. Uh I usually throw in uh some chunks into the in the blender if you're blend my blender's pretty good. If it's not, you have to pre grade it of uh you know, you know, your favorite grating cheese, and uh I crack a couple of egg yolks into it to thicken it while it's hot, uh, and then toss that into uh into I usually use a thinner pasta with that because it's a really kind of creamy sauce, so I like pastas with that that are creamy, like uh Angel's hair or something like that. And then we probably try pasta. Like they reject that.
Oh well, it also will work with a shell or something like that or whatever. Although that would also work with gnocchi, but I you know I feel bad that your kids are making you make gnocchi every day. Oh no, no, this is the packet stuff, but it's not too bad. So I mean, like the fastest way to make the gnocchi is the one where you you know it's not uh traditional or authentic, but you make it a little bit looser than you normally would, put it in a pastry bag, and squeeze the pastry bag over the boiling water and cut it with a knife as it goes into the boiling water. And then you can have uh and then you know, there were there you can increase at least the potato ratio higher than you or you could you you could do whatever you want.
I mean, that was a r recipe I got in the eighties from Jacques Papin, who's that's the way he used to do it, and it's kind of no fail and much less messy way of making gnocchi than if you wanted to try and do it rather than uh uh you know, rolling on boards and all this. What do they teach you guys to do, Staz? You never uh did that with uh Chesare? No. No.
He did one with um ricotta. I'm sure that's good. Yeah, potato. I'm sure that's good. But yeah, but that's a good way to hide some chicken stock and some broccoli in their in their pasta.
And my kids actually. You can buy it in vacuum packs, uh, and and it's just brilliant because it like takes literally one and a half minutes to cook and it's ready. Oh, that's all yeah, no sweat. Uh I also tend to blend a lot of anchovies into uh sauces, and that's a way to get anchovy in there and and everyone uh it's a well known fact that everyone likes anchovies and no one thinks they do. So uh, you know, that's another good thing.
Uh that works that's not gonna work in a broccoli sauce as much because you'll notice it more, but in tomato sauces, nothing pops a tomato sauce like some anchovies. That's the one time I'm allowed to lie to my wife about what I'm putting in our food, because sh she she will not eat it if she knows anchovies are in there. Right, but they're delicious. Right, right. Like like is there any better pizza sauce than like uh like uh reduced tomatoes uh blended with anchovies in it?
No. No. It's pe pizza sauce with anchovies in it is freaking delicious. It's delicious. And yet nobody thinks they like it.
And yet it has never once been rejected when I've served it to someone. Ever. Ever. Hey, that's awesome. Oh, and by the way, you you I don't know.
Uh I sent you a message on Twitter. You you can shotgun a bottle. Yeah, that was you. How do you how so how do you shotgun the bottom? How do you get the air in?
You stick a straw in the top. And it's just as fast. It's just as fast as a can? I put a big hole in the side of a can with a key. If you put a drinking straw in the top of the bottle and then just put your mouth around the top of the bottle with the drinking straw in, it lets the air in.
Alright, well, I I I just said to someone else that I'm retired. I haven't shotgunned one in a long time. I misspent yeast. Alright, so we'll we'll we'll uh we'll we'll I guess we'll have to try it. We'll have to try it and see what happens.
Alrighty. Well, thanks for the tip. That's awesome. Okay. You got another.
Oh, uh caller, you're on the air. Hey David's up. Brian, how are you? Hey, doing all doing all right. Your cell's cutting in and out.
I'm trying to hear you. Tell tell what's going on. Okay. No. Medium.
Yeah, a little better. Okay. Um question. I tried making my own homemade fish sauce and it turned out completely putrid. First of all, so w what did I do wrong?
Um, and second, is it even worth it to even try making? Okay. I just buy it store like Red Boat, which is the high quality one. Yeah. Uh I've had other people's homemade fish sauces that were delicious.
The person that I would look at, although I don't know if she's published anything recently, is Sally Granger, who is making her own Roman style fish sauce uh garums. Uh and I had her homemade fish sauce, and it was some of the best fish sauce I've ever had in in my life. Uh it is going to go through a putrid phase. I mean, it's going to be did it not c did it not clarify out. Did you not have the stuff sink to the bottom and the liquid come up?
I mean it was I I pretty much threw up when I opened up. Yeah, yeah. Well, how long how long into the process was that? It was three months. Oh, yeah, so you waited long enough.
It should have been okay. Uh but did you not add enough salt? I I that maybe that's the issue. I mean uh but but you know, it isn't garum different than fish sauce in that harum is just kind of strained uh but but there's not a fermentation to it. No, that's uh the the stuff that they sell, the anchovy stuff that they sell now, uh, and I don't know why the name just went out of my head, the Italian product that starts with a C.
I don't know what the heck's wrong with me here. Yeah, colotura, there you go. Uh that stuff is not like uh original garm. Original Garum is very much like fish sauce. There were many, many different types depending on how much fish was in it and what type of fish and what part of the fish.
So uh and and that changed uh depending on what era in uh Roman culture you're in. Uh Sally Granger, who uh did uh I think one of the best uh kind of a peaceish translations along with her husband as a scholar of this, is was working a couple of years ago, and probably done now, her PhD on Roman fish sauce, and she's the one who's uh one I tasted, and uh she had made one uh all from guts, the guts of uh fish, which is what the one of the highest levels of garment was during a pecious time. Uh and uh it was fantastic. And no, it is f it is fermented, uh definitely that way. Uh, my guess is is that if it was extremely putrid smelling on the order of like a Surstroming, which is the Swedish putrid fish, uh, that you just didn't have enough salt because that in fact is how Sir Stroming is made.
You under salt the fish and then let it ferment. So I'm gonna go ahead and guess that you uh just didn't have enough salt in the mix. Okay. Uh that that that that may have been that may have been it. Uh and I it's important to use the the gut that had the whole fish, or should I use only gut?
Uh well, all of them make uh all of them make will make a fish sauce. It just depends on I mean, I think the the enzymes in the gut uh help to uh get it going. The enzymes and bacteria in the gut help to get it going. So, you know, I wouldn't uh remove them, uh, but uh, you know, I think I either will work and have been used, every part has been used at various times in in history, all getting a different product. I mean, I think the like I said, at that one period, the highest end garland garum was just from the guts, but typically the high end garum was produced uh the literature from whole, very, very fresh whole mackerel that have been unbled so that the blood is still in them.
And uh and so then, you know, they break down quite nicely with uh the addition of enough salt into delicious fish sauce. And I know it works because I've tasted it. And and and where can I find it in about about tally? Does she have a book? Let's tell you.
Well, she uh you could look up her uh, you know, the uh uh the apecious is whatever it's called, De Ray Coconaria or whatever it is. Uh she's uh was the the person on one of the more recent ones of that, and she's out of England, but I don't know what university she's doing her PhD in, but her name is uh Granger, I believe spelled with an I G R A, I believe it's G R A I and G E R Sally Granger. And she's uh she is probably w or is one of the world's great uh authorities on that subject. Okay, I'll lift her. Cool.
How you thoughts. Oh that stuff's amazing. It is, it's incredibly delicious. Uh go buy it now. Don't wait.
Find if if you know where you can buy it, buy it now. It's delicious. Uh it's different from the other Jap famous Japanese fish saucy, uh, which comes from uh Ishikawa, which is also delicious, and tastes uh remarkably like the Roman uh guts only garum because it's made from the guts of fish. So uh both of those you should run out and buy right now. Okay, I'm gonna try it again.
Let's see how it goes. All right, very good. Thanks. All right. Um this in uh hi, Dave, uh, Nastasha, Jack, and Joe.
A longtime reader of your blog and listener to the show. Uh the call number's now steering into my brain, but I can't call in when you're on and never recalled you giving oh my gosh, my phone, giving the um email over the air. So Nastasha, what email should they use? Do you want to set up a whole separate email just for rarely? No, okay, so give me the email.
Info at heritage radio network dot org. And send the questions to that and you'll forward it to Nastasha. Yep. All right. Uh so uh a second I gotta find out where I was.
Uh so there you go. That's a good way to get into the uh to the radio code. I have a follow-up from Andrew Switzer on the uh lemons. He says the fruit was store-bought and in the following tests to replicate the fluke, the zested skin molded. Huh.
Yeah. Yeah. Hmm. I don't know. Someone's someone's gotta have something on that.
We'll see. Uh okay. My second question, somebody's reading my iPad is acting up. My second question is um regarding homemade vegan cheese and meltability. Before Nastasha starts doing her vegan face, I must say that I'm a proud omnivore, but I buy meat from a local farm, have uh no qualms about the idea of animal captivity or slaughter if they're both done humanely, and have on a dare even eaten a hamburger while watching Pita videos.
That is kind of rough because I'm sure those videos are nasty. I'm sure they're nasty. However, I've been experimenting with vegetarian and vegan meat and cheese analogs for two reasons. One, because even though they can be bought uh entirely upon the uh they can be uh well sorry because even though they can uh they brought it on entirely on themselves, I feel bad for opening up a package of Boca burgers and teasy cheese for non-meat eating guests during barbecues. I by the way concur with that I hate buying having to buy store uh packaged crap for people when they come to my house because it's like hey you know what I cared about these other people enough to cook stuff for them but you because you have a dietary restriction you you get crap.
I I'm with you on that. And all and two, I like the challenge also a good reason. I feel like I've gotten soy and gluten based meat analogs down as uh as well as I or perhaps anyone possibly can, but I'm still having issues with making meltable animal pre animal product free cheese. I've tried a few recipes for betum and the best one so far was a nut butter flavored uh nut butter flavored with nutritional yeast and set with agar. It did technically melt but needless to say not to my liking.
I also read the labels of some of the more melty cheese analogs to find that many brands of soy cheese have casein in them so perhaps I might never get the meltability I'm looking for. I was wondering if you had anything to say on the issue other than just give them real cheese and tell them it's vegan before you launch into a 10 minute rent. Well I I would never do that. I do not believe in uh lying to uh Nastasha's different Nastasha will lie. Yeah yeah uh I do not believe in lying to people about what's what's in their food because uh not because I think it's gonna hurt someone really, but just because it's just not in me to do it.
I can't like then sit down with them and watch them eat something knowing that I've lied to them. It's just it's not in me to do it. Uh here's the problem with uh with it like that casein is kind of a miracle, and it's what it's the protein that forms the gel for cheese, and it's what makes cheese melt like cheese, and it's very difficult to uh replicate. So when they're replicating it, what they're typically replicating it with now is they're using uh, and if you look at all of the meltable cheese analogs, they usually have you can use high amyloe starch. High amylo starch will eventually uh melt out, and high amylo starch uh as opposed to normal starch uh has uh uh forms a kind of a rubbery gel when it sets, which is similar to a cheese.
So that's in a lot of cheese analogs. But you need to have uh basically you need to have a structure for the cheese, something that will melt on emulsifier and oil in there to make it uh oily like cheese, and none of those things can break once it's once it's heated up. Now, uh one of the new things, and if you look at a lot of the higher end ones, uh they contain a lot of pea, sweet pea products, because pea, first of all, pea starch is fairly high in amylose, and secondly, pea proteins have the ability to form a gel that is thermally reversible, i.e. will melt out. So it they also make some they're working on gelatin replacers, I think, with made out of pea proteins.
But uh both of the galaxy foods and dia uh foods, which were two fairly highly rated uh cheese analogs that didn't have any sort of casein in them, both contained a whole bunch of pea flour, uh or or pea products, pea protein pea flour, and they will set up to to form a gel. They also had uh oil in them and emulsifier, so you're gonna need to add those. Uh these are incredibly complicated, and and if you're gonna use mod uh like pre-gelatinized starches, these are incredibly complicated, and this is a huge dark art amongst people who do it. And many patents are filed on it. You can read the patents, but it's extremely difficult to get a really good product this way, which is why people are paid lots and lots of money to try to get it right.
If you want to see an interesting review, go to vegan baking.net and look at they have a bunch of these different cheese analogs and how well they melt. Uh and and you know, you can go look at the ingredients, which is basic basically what I did. Here's a way you can make a somewhat acceptable cheese analog that's kind of brain dead. Just take and make something that tastes cheesy to you, right? Using whatever you want, whatever flavors you want.
Set it with uh um my brain is so fried today with low acyl gel-an gum, okay, uh, and set it f at a fairly high uh thickness, like a half a percent, I think. I'd have to look at it number but and then blend it. And then you have the texture of uh it's uh well, that's what's called a fluid gel, okay? And that fluid gel is gonna be heat stable. So you can kind of make that fluid gel, the texture of kind of cheese that's melted.
It's not gonna be actually like cheese because it won't be gooey, but it will actually melt out, right? To a liquid to a sauce. This is how Wiley uh at a lower percentage does uh Wiley Dufrain does his uh mayonnaise and his uh his fried mayonnaise and his fried hollandaise. Then after you do that, you heat the mixture again and you add uh you're gonna add kappa caragina and locust bean gum as a mix, uh hydrate that, then set it into a block, slice it, it'll melt at roughly 120 degrees, uh hundred and twenty, hundred and thirty degrees Fahrenheit, and should be like cheese. It won't have the stretchiness of uh cheese.
Uh and I think Jack is shutting me down. So if I missed any questions, we got one more. We got one more. What do we got? It's uh a few pounds of skirt steak somebody bought.
Smelled fine, looked good, but when they cooked it, there was an overwhelming odor of blue cheese, which got more potent when they took a bite. It was not dry aged. Any idea? Yeah. How long did they cook it?
Uh I don't have that. Okay. Uh here's what happened. Uh you cooked it, it was low temperature cooked or no? No.
How does it read it again real quick? I bought a pew a few pounds of skirt steak, smelled fine, looked good, but when I cooked it, there was an overwhelming odor of blue cheese, which got more potent when I took a bite. What's going on? Well, is not tried. That's that's the classic, that's the classic problem of uh low temp cooking, not getting the temperature up fast enough, and you're having lactic acid bacteria that are growing before the meat uh can cook.
That typically happens in bags when the bags are uh sandwiched close together in a low temperature bath, and it takes more than about uh two, three hours for the meat to get up to temperature where lactic acid bacteria are going to uh grow. Uh and so that is the that's the only explanation I can think of, because it's never gonna happen cooking on a pan. Uh that that's a bacterial phenomenon, and it's never gonna happen cooking on a pan, as far as I know. Oh, by the way, real quick, on the cream liqueur, I said I would look it up, and I did. Uh that stuff that uh uh the person was calling in last week was asking about.
Um's telling me I don't have enough time to actually go through it. So next week uh I will talk about cream liqueurs, and yes, propylene glycol monosterate is used in them to help stability. So you can go out and buy it. I'll talk more about it next week on cooking issues. Thanks for listening to this program on Heritage Radio Network.org.
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