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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 every Tuesday from roughly 12. Roughly 12, 1245, here on the Heritage Radio Network in the back of Roberta's Pizzeria in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
Joined with Joe and Jack in the engineering room, Nastasha the Hammer Lopez, as always sitting next to me. How you doing, guys? Good. Good? Yeah.
Yeah? Everyone good? Uh good. So uh I'm glad I got to do today's show because right after we have our weekly Roberta's lunch, with which Nastash and I always enjoy, thanks to the radio station. They give us the free lunch.
That's what we work for here, people, by the way. In case you were wondering what the reward for the show is, it's the free lunch. Uh but uh after that I'm going to the airport and going to Colombia, my favorite South American country. Of course it's the only South American country I've gone to, but it is uh Panama. Uh Central.
Well, yeah, the Panamanians think Panama is is South America, whereas because it's part of the skinny, skinny, skinny part, which I consider to be Central America, I call it Central American, but that kind of pisses them off because they consider themselves South American. I was like, if it's not Central America, then why do we you know what why is the canal there? Because it's the skinny part. In fact, it's the skinniest part. The skinniest part.
Right or wrong. Right. Yeah? Yeah. Anyway.
So uh Panama being my favorite Central American country I've ever visited. And uh Columbia being my favorite South America. But I actually, not just the only, I do actually like Columbia quite a bit. Going to Bogota, and the great news is I'm gonna look up your Lukama stuff, by the way, even though they don't have it there, they have a close relatives that can play with. And I get to visit a coffee plantation in uh Armenia, which is in you know the heart of Colombian coffee growing uh thing.
So I'm gonna hopefully, if they're if it's there right now, pick some coffee, do some fun stuff, and report back next week with uh news of uh coffee. Yeah? Mm-hmm. Yeah? Yeah, yeah.
Okay. Call in your questions to 7184972128. That's 7184972128. Got some questions from last week that I didn't do. Uh this one in from uh Senor Trepa's.
Uh I answered his question last week about uh Carpano uh Vermouth, but don't believe I answered his question about cherries. Uh uh I'm interested in making shelf stable marasino or bourbon style or maraschino or bourbon style cherries. All the recipes I found call refrigerated storage for a period of weeks. I want to keep them at cellar temperatures for up to a year. Okay, well look.
So m uh the actual uh things that you buy in the store as uh maraschino cherries, uh what they do with those things is they they bleach the color and flavor out of them and make them stable in a solution of uh kind of like sulfur dioxide, which is a bleacher and a preservative and uh and an antifungal, I think. And uh calcium chloride. Calcium chloride is what gives marashino cherries that hardness, right? Because what what the calcium is doing, calcium chloride is actually horrible because it tastes bad, but calcium chloride uh what it does is it the calcium helps to cross-link the um pectin inside of the cherry and cause the the flesh of the cherry to not break down uh over time. Right?
So that's why the calcium is there. Then they put it in uh food coloring and syrup over a length of time to reinfuse it with sugar, because it doesn't really have any much sugar f left or flavor or anything like that. Uh and that's not the that's not the way to do it. That that's horse that's horse hockey. Uh Toby Cicchini, the bartender, famous for the Cosmo, I think I did mention him last week in regard to cherries, but I gave a very abbreviated cherry.
If I talked about cherries at all, it was super abbreviated and I I apologize. Uh so he he makes his own, but I don't have his recipe. I wasn't able to get in touch with him and get his recipe. But uh you want to look up uh the person to look up on this on the internets is uh Darcy O'Neill from uh The Art of the Drink, who also did Fix the Pumps, the incredibly uh influential book on uh kind of rebringing back stuff from the soda fountain days, from the soda jerk days. Uh and so, okay, so I'm gonna compile all of all of these things.
First of all, uh some of the patents online and Marchino cherries in the store are made with sweet cherries. Old style real cherry uh like like cocktail cherries are uh brandied sour cherries and to this that's what I'm told. And Toby tells me that he's tested sweet cherries and sour cherries, i.e., or sour and or bitter cherries like you know, um, you know, Morellos and all those things. And says that the sweet ones are horrible and insipid and the sour ones are the ones you want. And that's actually borne out if you get the Italian uh preserved cherries.
They're the smaller kind, like you know, the the ones that we get in the blue ceramic jar whose name escapes me. But they're a smaller and uh the you know, not the not the sweet style. Now, uh the if you want a a good free guide to old cherry varieties, i.e. cherry varieties prior to about 1920, uh look up cherries of New York. Uh you can get a PDF version online for free.
It's like from the teens or twenties, and it's got full colored pictures of all the cherry varieties that were grown in New York at that time, which is also a wide range of all the charity varieties that that existed. Not not all of them by by a long shot, but ones that are available here in New York, uh from the Geneva Agricultural Experiment Station. And I ha I have actually have the whole collection in hard hard copy. Now listen, here's what I'm gonna say. I'm violently allergic to cherries.
I can't eat them. Haven't been able to eat them since I was thirty or thirty-one. So uh so bear that in mind. Uh don't like, you know, like anything here I can't actually test it for you because it'll kill me. Okay.
Now, the trick uh with there's there's two tricks. One, you want to keep the cherries firm, and two, you want to gr you know gradually preserve the cherries so that they don't rot. So uh typically there's two things we add to cherries to preserve them sugar to increase the sugar content so that we're storing them high sugar so that they don't go bad. And two, uh we're adding an acid, which is an antifungal in the thing that is basically a preserved antibacterial antifungal thing in the syrup. And three, uh you're going to add uh sugar, alcohol, whatever, I forget one, two, three, four, five, whatever.
Uh like sugar, alcohol, um sugar, alcohol, acid, and calcium, you're gonna add to this. But you have to do it carefully because you have to preserve the osmotic balance of the cherry so that they don't shrivel and or rupture. I'm gonna come back and give you what the answers to that is, but I have a collar on the air. Caller, you're on the air. Hey Dave, uh big fan.
I got a question for you today about uh shellfish protein. So uh trying to make uh todd, uh sort of fish paste, a little bit of egg, some curry, fried delicious Thai street food. Uh and was thinking of trying it with um shrimp paste, in fact have was thinking of frying it around some sugar cane. Problem is when you grind up shrimp shrimp paste tossed on a little egg, it falls apart when you throw it in the L. And uh was curious, you know, uh realized, oh maybe that's why crab cakes are much harder to keep together than burgers, but I was hoping you could shed a little light on what's going on and if there's a relatively simple fix.
Huh. Well, uh I wouldn't have expected that. Um, but I mean, obviously, the easiest fix, I mean, aside from actually figuring out what's going on in the recipe formulation, is just to add a little bit of transglutaminase to it, uh like Activa RM, and it would bind it, you know, lickety split. Is there enough salt in there for the proteins to bind together? Yeah, yeah.
Uh there's uh the uh I add a pinch of salt to everything, uh haven't didn't add uh crazy amount, um, but uh shrimp has some natural salt in it, does it not? Yeah, should. And and you process it long enough for it to get a good what looked like a good bind in the mix before you fried it. Yeah. That's very odd.
But I know for a fact that shrimp with a little bit of transglutaminase added to it, if uh, you know, if you'd have to poach it probably first in a little uh in a little water stock to set the outside, but they won't break ever. Never. They will not break. Um I mean that's what Wiley, you know, does to f to make his uh shrimp noodles. And those things I've fried them and they fry fine.
So I'm assuming that egg also containing protein wouldn't interfere with the bind with the uh with the uh I'm just so surprised. Although when you think about it, like I always when I'm doing things, I would never do straight shrimp, like in my sausages and poaching mixtures for like fish canals. It's always fish, scallops, and shrimp. So I'm what so maybe there is something strange about about shrimp. Uh but I mean, do you have access?
I mean, you can from Monarch Pantry you can buy a fairly small amount of transglutaminase, and it's fairly easy to use. Just sprinkle a little bit in. Don't go I wouldn't the maximum you can add is one percent by weight, but it p you don't need nearly one percent by weight just to just to keep it together. In fact, that might make it too firm. All right.
I will uh I'll try it, but uh so there's I'm curious though, you know, what why do crab cakes fall apart more easily than uh than a burger or something like that? Is there something about seafood proteins that uh make them bind less than uh than meat? Yeah, well, crab cakes, remember, a crab cake is being formed from uh meat, at least when I make them, that's already been cooked once. So there's not uh like a a lot of the proteins already coagulated in it, and so the and especially kind of the lump style crab meat that you're using the bigger bigger chunks aren't gonna want to bind together. So, you know, in an in a native in a native un uh uncooked protein, it's uh hasn't been coagulated yet.
Um, you know, there's a lot of soluble, you know, liquid-bound proteins. You add salt, more of those things come out, and they've kind of form a gluey, sticky matrix, and then when the heat sets uh you know sets them, it sets into kind of a solid matrix, like a sausage, that's how it works. But whereas like something like crab meat, you know, it's already been set, so you can't you can't do it. I don't know. Yeah.
I mean again, you can take cr uh crab meat and bind it with transglutaminase and get it to stick together, or you could add some uncooked protein like fish protein to it to help bind it if you don't want to add other extenders. But the crab meat itself is never gonna bind together as well just because it's cooked. Okay. Thanks for trying out and let you know. Cool, thanks.
All right, so back to the cherries for a second. So here's what you want to do. Uh if you go to Darcy O'Neill's website, uh The Art of the Drink, which I first of all highly recommend that you do, you should go to his website, I don't know, buy his you know, acid phosphate soda, support the man, except you know, he's uh doing very good work for all of us in in the world of cocktail and technologies. Uh and he's an actual scientist. I don't know if he still does science for a living or whether he just does cocktail stuff for a living.
Anyways, uh what you want to do is figure out about how much sugar in uh is in your cherry. And I don't really I don't know that I trust his numbers a hundred percent because I've read other numbers, but he's basically saying that the bricks equivalent bricks, which is weight of sugar in uh in water for a cherry, is somewhere on the on the order of five or six to sixteen uh bricks. I've heard as much up to like uh, you know, up to twenty, twenty-two, twenty-two uh bricks percent sugar on uh on one of the sweeter cherries. So you're gonna want to start with uh sugar syrup, only slightly more sugary than that. So one-to-one simple syrup is gonna be too much to start with.
Start lower and work your way up. Add acid. And Darcy says that malic and citric are the two components that are mainly the acids in there, so you're gonna want to add probably more malic than citric, although that's also what kind of limes taste like. So you're gonna want to add malic and citric acid. You're gonna want to add uh sugar, right?
And then you gradually increase the sugar content of the syrup. Uh now he says to make sure there's enough syrup in there such that the sugar content doesn't decrease too much because of the water that goes in, but I would say go a little bit stronger, add it a little bit as you go, get a strong syrup, and then after it's preserved in syrup, start doping in alcohol, like super high-proof ethanol, until it gets to where you want it, and then you should be good uh for a year. But please go read uh Darcy O'Neill's uh posts on uh preserved cherries. Now, we have a caller. Oh, uh also uh anyway, caller, you're on the air.
Hey Dave, uh I just made uh about 20 pounds of homemade sausage. Nice. And yeah, and I cooked it the way I usually cook sausage, and it'll uh I did like a link of each batch I made. I did like four different ones, and they all turned out really mealy. And uh I did a little research and it says it's just from the the fat breaking from d taking it making it too hot.
Right. And I'm wondering why why, you know, I I can do it a little lower temp next time, but I'm wondering why normal sausages don't uh break like that because the way the way I normally cook it is is you know I'll I'll brown it on one side in a pan and then flip it and put a little water in the pan and cover it and then after about ten minutes I take it off and let the and then cook it until it's kind of brown a little more. Yeah no what they're talking about with high temperature isn't on the cook side. They're talking about high temperature on the make side. Oh okay.
So like typically uh I mean uh what kind of sausage was it again? Well I g I I did uh some uh some Thai chicken with some ch I ground up chicken thighs and a little uh fat back in there and then put Thai chilies and Thai basil. I did a turkey with uh dried cherries, a lot of stuff all out of the charcuterie book. Right. So yeah, but so not emulsified though regular like so regular sausage mixers, not not like made into a battery emulsified right?
I mean fat right okay. Yeah I think um are you parti are you par freezing the the the the meat and the fat before you grind it? Um I try to um I don't have a great grinder though and so it was kind of just making more of a paste than actual stuff. But half of the half of the sausages I made I just bought from our local butcher shop. They had they make their own sausages and they sold me a pre-ground blend of you know pork bell or pork shoulder and pork fat to you know like thirty five percent fat.
And they just sold it to me pre-ground. So I wouldn't think that that would break as well. Huh. And that that one's the one that went mealy, the one that they did pre ground for you? All of them did.
The ones I ground myself and the ones that they had pre-ground. I mean, that that's l look look the cooking technique that you talk about the is you know, the old school one, pre pre poach and then and then brown off, right? That's what you said you do. That's what that's what I typically do when I if I don't have a circulator. I mean, that's good technique.
So that's not that's not doing it. So it's gotta be I mean, typically when you're looking at sausage manufacturer, there's uh you know, the m the main things are do you have a high enough fat content, which you do, you asked you got it, right? Do you have a high enough salt content to get a good bind going? 'Cause that'll also mean it won't bind together well if you don't have a high enough salt content because the salt is what's allowing the proteins to uh kind of come out and form that that bind in in a sausage mix, right? So was it bound right?
If it's not bound right, it's gonna be more like you know, compressed hamburger meat, right? Three, was the temperature of the of the fat and and whatnot cold enough when it was ground so you're not getting weird smearing effects and then you'll get a lot of you know, if the fat tissue is disrupted and and melted instead of you know, ground cleanly, then you'll bleed the fat out and you'll be left with dry and and mealiness. So the the temperature of the of the meat is important and uh you know, proper trim is important when you grind it. And thirdly, the temperature is vitally important in emulsified sausages because you're making an emulsion and the emulsion will break if it gets too hot. And really those uh those are the main factors that I always I mean, not that I'm a huge expert in it, but those are the main factors that I always look for in troubleshooting a sausage problem to see what's gone wrong.
But from what you've told me, I can't really figure out what you know I can't really figure out which one of those kind of like main precepts of sausage making were violated, especially 'cause you say you've done it before without problem, right? Yeah, and I mean that's I I you know, when I cook regular commercial sausage, they never break. The way I cook them. So I was wondering if they added something to it and uh you know, to keep it from doing that, or if it's just uh messed up somehow this time. I mean, you can add things to sausage to keep them from breaking, but you you shouldn't have to.
Do you know what I mean? So like anything that you add to a commercial sausage, uh anything that's added to to things to stabilize them are there to i just in case somebody happens to abuse them, like kerrageenin or things like that. But they're they shouldn't ever be necessary to uh to to produce a good a good sausage. I mean the only things necessary are high fat content, proper temperature regulation during manufacture, and proper uh salt content. And and of course proper fat type.
If you add a fat that's been rendered, that's gonna be horrible. If the fat's already been rendered once, you know, it's never gonna come back to its native form and then the fat won't hold in properly, all the fat'll bleed out and it's gonna be a huge nightmare. You know? I mean like you you you weren't using pr like you were using you said fat back. Yeah, if I got fat back from the local butcher shop and chopped it up and put it in the freezer.
But I was using a new uh I mean it's actually a vintage uh grinder I got from my dad. It's uh uh it's at the rival sausage grinder. But it it seemed like it was really maybe grinding it too much where the the fat wasn't making coming out in little chunks more than when it was coming out in almost a paste. So I'm thinking I might have ground the fat too much. Yeah, if the fat was p like came out like a I mean it's again, like it's hard to know, like if it comes out as a paste and you're breaking it up uh too much, then perhaps uh you know, you would need to treat it then more like an emulsified sausage.
If that breaks and those that weeps out, right? Then uh you're you know, it's not going to so you know any time you have fat, fat isn't you know, obviously fat's not just fat. Fat is mixture of fat and connected tissue and and uh and a and a bunch of other things. And so when it's native, it'll hold itself kind of in in in place properly, and when it's been melted out, then it's never gonna hold itself right, which is why you want to make which is why they don't want the fat to get smeared when they're grinding when you're grinding for sausage. But but maybe the blade isn't sharp on the on the uh on the grinder, you might sharpen the bri blade and look at it, just making sure you're getting good good contact.
It should it should grind clearly and shouldn't come out l warm at all or like a paste. You know what I mean? Yeah, I think that's the problem. It it's something from back in the 70s and uh you know it probably hasn't been sharpened for thirty years. Uh I mean those should work.
Like the old pork style or rival, they're all the same with the they look like they they look like the kitchenade, but the barrel it looks like it's been ex pulled out in Photoshop, right? One of those guys? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they're like, you know, they're like uh uh like shin shiny tin plate cast iron, those guys. They they should work.
Um you you know, it's just maybe the blade wasn't sharp. Uh you you should also put the grinder in the freezer as well, so the grinder's cold. Uh but it sounds like maybe that's what w what what happened is that you maybe uh you know, the something went wrong with the fat back and uh it just didn't gr it didn't grind right, paste it out and then uh and then leaked on you when you cooked it. So there's no salvaging it. I took some, you know, some leftover and made burger type, you know, an uncaste and fried 'em up, and those seem to taste all right.
Yeah, I'm sure they slip out of the casing. Yeah. Yeah, you could do that. Or, you know, I mean the real problem is is that if you had super accurate temperature control, you might be able to cook 'em at like a straight, like a 140 and then like let do a quick sear off on the outside without melting it out too much. But I know I don't know.
I'd have to see because I don't really know. At those temperatures, you know, some of the pig fat will remain semi, not super liquid. It'll all liquefy, but not like super liquid, and you might get it to not kind of run everywhere and go crazy. But uh yeah, but I think maybe breaking it up might be breaking it up and and making patties out of it might be the way to go. Alright, thanks for the help, boy.
Hey, thanks. And uh let me know next time you try it whether uh fixing that solved it. All right, cool. All right, cool. Take it easy.
You too. All right, so listen, Jack, why don't we go to our or Joe? I don't know who's there right now. Why don't we go to our first commercial break with cooking issues? The International Culinary Center is a proud sponsor of the Heritage Radio Network.org.
The ICC with locations in New York and California provide cutting edge education to future chefs, restaurateurs, and wine professionals. We're proud to claim Dan Barber, Bobby Clay, and David Chang among our honored alumni. This is Dorothy Cann Hamilton from Chef's Story. Check out our ICC website at International Culinary Center.com. Hello.
And so that uh the band, uh, Jack tells me that is fellow radio show host Damon Bolti's band called Brothers, because Damon Bolti has a twin brother who apparently is also in the band. Although be funny is if he had a band called Brothers and his twin brother wasn't in the band. That that'd be more funny, I think. I think maybe he should do that. They should have some sort of rift.
But you should go definitely go check them out and see them if you're really into seeing nine feet tall, uh, skinny uh bartenders um uh play music, right? Yeah. He is kind of really tall, man. He's like as tall as Tristan. Yeah.
He's a tall man. How tall would you say uh Damon is? He's taller than me. I mean, he's gotta be a good six three. Yeah, yeah.
How does he does he fit into the chairs here in the studio? He does. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
He's never been on my show. He should be. I've never been on his show. You know why? He hates me.
I know, I know he doesn't hate me at all. I'm just kidding. He's a good man. I would love that. Yeah, we'll do that.
And uh back to Damon for a second. Do you know he makes an excellent old fashioned? Were you aware of that fact? Uh well, I I assumed as much, but excellent, excellent old stuff. Uh they're they're very delicious.
He made uh what was the old fashioned he made first at the museum event? I don't remember. But it was damn good. Yeah. It was like he was like, I'm gonna he's like he doesn't talk like this.
He's like, I'm gonna do something really simple. Someone's gonna make an old fashioned, it's gonna be delicious crap on you guys. He doesn't talk at all like that. He's not like that. But listen, speaking of old fashions and cocktails and food, you need to come to Heritage Radio Network dot org's members only party, September 9th, between five and eight PM at Roberta's Roberta's Roberta's Pizza, 261 Moore Street in Brooklyn, New York.
There will be food from Grad Mercy Tavern. Back 40 West, Del Posto, Momo Sushi, Inside Park, Parish Hall, Heritage Foods USA, catered by Robertas, see the table, Saxobe Cheesemongers and the Heritage Meat Stop, Cocktails by none another than me, Dave Arnold, Elbuco Mezcal, Galeano, Absolute Vodka Plimotin, and Pierre Jouet Champagne. Beer by Great Brewers dot com, Greenport Harbor Brewing, and Cain Vineyard and Winery. Uh but wait, before we get there, uh if you enter Cooking Issues HRN at the checkout, we'll give you twenty-five dollars off. Holy crap!
Twenty-five dollars off! Yeah, and then and there's gonna be plenty of food and drink here, right? Oh yeah. I mean like a lot, right? Do you get the VIP?
You get a little private tour of uh the chocolate factory in the neighborhood. There'll be some special cocktails that won't be available at the party just for the VIP. Um and a whole bunch of other surprises. So And by that what we mean is special means Nastasha won't scowl at you when she gives it to you. That's right.
She'll smile at you. Yeah, yeah. And then you can have both experiences. You can come during the VIP section and get the smile, and then come back during the regular section and get scaled at, so you can get the double. That's the only thing.
I'm not sure. That's not confirmed. Not confirmed, but possible. Possible. And there'll be raffle tickets there for twenty five dollars.
Uh the VIP I think I mentioned is two hundred fifty dollars. Now listen, listen. I don't know whether you notice whether you listen, but I I I believe that every time we say we say heritage radio.org. And what that means is is that we are a non profit here at Heritage Radio, which means we need some money to keep this uh going. We need to make sure that we have people in the engineering booth making this stuff happen.
This stuff ain't free, people. Jack, am I right about this? It's not free. I wish it was free. It's not free.
And you know, we have, you know, sponsors, but listen, the sponsors we take are sponsors that we believe in that the and you know, this it's not we're not a commercial we're not a commercial thing here where anyone can come and just you know, plunk down money. It's just not the way it operates. This is like the we operate more like uh PBS. We take kind of good people's money when they want to give it to us, and then we rely on you guys for the rest. Is this true or is this false?
You're nailing it. Yeah. Okay, so listen, please sign up, come to the party. Uh I'll try to get Nastasha to even smile at the non VIPs, but you know, no no uh no guarantees. You know, if somebody buys a ticket now, Joe might be able to get lunch today.
Oh man. I'm just kidding. Joe gets lunch. Yeah, but it's gonna be a good lunch if he gets a ticket now. Now, yeah, otherwise you like you feed him out of what?
The scrap spins here at uh at Roberta's like when people leave a slice of pizza, like that's what you guys get? Yeah, exactly. Scraps. Snacky tunes, scraps, that's what we eat. Yeah, you gonna help these guys or what, people?
Please. All right. Uh speaking of, uh, Joel writes in, uh, Joel Gargano writes in with a big shout out to Joe and big ups. Effing awesome is what he said. He he is actually interested in starting uh another band with you uh and uh doing the old mosh pit.
The old bringing bringing mosh pits back. Do they still Joe? Do they still have mosh pits nowadays? Yes, they do. We have some mosh pits.
But I think you're supposed to be in this band too, Dave. Oh, really? I think he wants he wants you in it too. Oh, all right. I mean, do they still do our mosh pits like like what level of mosh pit are they now?
Do they do the are the frat boys still there actually trying to knock people over, or is it more like it used to be? Well, it depends on uh, you know, where you're where you're performing. But you know, sometimes you get some people that are just you know gonna kick the crap out of me and uh I get kind of scared. Yeah, but there's kick the crap out of, yeah, there's there's kick the crap out of and then there's kick the crap out of. You know what I mean?
Right, there's like the fun get the crap kicked out of you. Yeah, like if you take a if you take like a Doc Martin to the face because someone's flying over your head, like that's all in good fun as far as I'm gonna do it. But if there's like some guy who's just like uh, you know, red in the face and steam coming out of his ears, he just looks at you and just stares you down, and he's you know, this guy's just coming after you. Yeah, D-bags, they ruin it for everyone. Exactly.
And then I guess go hide in the bathroom. Yeah, that's what's weak. That's weak sauce. Listen, do they still do uh crowd surfing in the mosh pits these days? Oh, definitely.
That's good to see some things haven't changed. I know, exactly. Yeah. All right. Uh so now another question in from uh from Joel.
Uh what's the best way to get coffee flavor into beer? We want to use a local roaster's beans and not buy a pre-made extract. My brother just began operations as a brewer here in Connecticut, Thimble Island Brewing. Uh I'd like to try their product. Maybe someone could send us some Thimble Island brewing product, right?
Try it. Try it. It's only in Connecticut, very close to us. And we were doing a number of tests to see the best way to infuse coffee into a stout and hold off the overly biddic bitter slash acidic flavors. I'm thinking cold extraction is best suited.
You're correct. I went through the infusion post on the cooking issues blog and got some good ideas, yet nothing has proven to be tasty on its own. Here's what I did for testing before I attempt to get the coffee flavor into beer. Made an extract in room temperature water at uh 100 uh to one I can't really understand uh this thing, but 250 grams of uh coarse ground coffee, medium roast, um, and did like three minute, one minute infusions in the ISI whipper with uh charges and then uh blah blah blah blah blah. Uh anyway, your numbers here are way too uh not long.
Way too not long. What's the right word for that? Way too short. Short is the word I'm looking for. Uh Nastasha actually helped me with that.
She gave me this look, and I was like, oh yeah, short. Uh but uh when people are doing cold brew in the ISI, they're doing it usually for a much, much longer period of time. When I do it, I do it for two minutes, three minutes because I'm using alcohol and not water, right? So you could actually do a straight infusion into alcohol, or you could take much longer and infuse it into water. Uh and you had this question right here like, should I change the liquid medium?
Yes. Um we toss the whole beans into the fermenter and hope for the best? No. I would not do that. If uh what I would do is look, your beers, I don't know what your beers are coming in at, but if they let's say they're coming in at like five, five, six percent alcohol, somewhere in there, seven percent, eight, whatever.
Uh I'm usually extracting into twenty percent alcohol, uh sorry, forty percent alcohol. So my infusions with coffee are very strong and they happen very quickly, even at room temperature under an ISI infusion uh regime. I know people that have done cold infusion of coffee into uh water and liquor in huge five in huge by my standards, five gallon uh containers like corny kegs, uh, but they're letting it sit a lot longer. With your low alcohol percentage, you are gonna have to go uh a lot longer. Now I mean you give it a shot, but my problem with the if you make super concentrated extracts is they tend to go they tend to go bitter.
If you're allowed to use an alcohol-based extract, then you could do an alcohol-based coffee extract and dope it in afterwards, right? Just use ISI with um with high proof. And that's gonna be because if you're actually gonna do this in a commercial fashion, you're gonna have a difficult time uh, you know, infusing the entire amount of each batch of coffee that you make. Now, um you also say I grabbed a Starbucks via packet, which is their like supposedly high grade version of uh of uh you know freeze-dried coffee. I've never tried it, and poured some into a Guinness, it tasted pretty good.
Is that a better route? I know Wiley uses that stuff in sauces and whatnot. Uh I don't know whether he does or not, actually. I haven't talked to him about that's interesting. Uh if so, how can I make it myself?
That stuff's just freeze-dried uh coffee. Then you ask lastly, what about this guy? And you know, obviously the readers can't we have viewers can't, whatever they are, can't uh see it, but it filter the beer uh beer through a bunch of beans before kegging or bottling, and you post a link to the Randall. So, what a Randall is, is it is a Randall in beer in beer parlance, is um uh almost a modified uh water filter that was developed by the dogfish head brewery uh people to do post infusion. They were they developed it for hops, and what you're doing is running the beer out of the keg through a container full of hops that infuses on its way out to the tap.
Now, the issue with it, and people have done a lot of coffee in it to add coffee flavors to it. You have to use whole beans with something like that because ground beans are going to cause wicked foaming, wicked, wicked foaming. So you have to use whole beans in that. And I don't know how much beer you can filter through it and get the same taste, how long it needs to sit, etc. etc.
So I haven't run any tests with it, but there's plenty of people doing it. There's lots of links out there on how to build a Randall with uh parts that you know you can buy in a regular hardware store along with things you could buy at a homebrew shop. And what they all amount to is modifying water filters so that you can uh run the uh run the beer through the water filter on the way out to the tap. Now, the dogfish head guys realize that foaming is a big problem because duh foaming is going to be a big problem when you do that. And so their new version, which is on their website, and you can see it, and they tell you the parts you need to build it, but they don't think they build it for you, is has the initial infusion chamber and then a secondary chamber with ice surrounding it to keep the temperature down.
That's an anti anti-foam chamber. Uh so that's an interesting thing. Go look at Randall, and it's named after Randall the enamel Randall the the enamel eating whatever, blah, blah, blah, because the first thing had so much hops in it when they put it through it that they said it ate the enamel off of your teeth, and those guys at Dogfish Head have to come up with crazy names for everything. They just can't help themselves. They can't help it.
Uh so go look that up and uh try making some extracts with higherproof ethanol or doing it a lot longer with water, or you could do that a lot longer with water in five-gallon batches, like hours or maybe you know, hours and hours or maybe overnight. Uh, or do traditional grind and then like uh Kyoto style cold uh cold brewing. Anyways, let's take one more commercial break and we'll come back with cooking issues broke her heart today. She's out there crying. Broke my own heart today.
Hello, this is Mark Ladner from Del Posto, and you're listening to Heritage Radio Here. Yeah, yeah! Yeah, Mark Ladner calling it out. What do you think there, stuff? Did you know that he uh he wasn't even listening?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. He did a uh he did a shout-out for uh Hello, this is Mark Latiner from Del Posto, and you're listening to Heritage Radio Network. Thanks, Mark Ladner. That's by the way, like that's like if you ever ask Nastasha a question like her, like the only honest answer she can ever give you. I wasn't listening.
I wasn't listening. Yeah, right. Alright, so a question from before we missed from Andrew Marcus on gummy candies. Uh hey, uh gang. I've recently been trying to make gummy candies at home, but running into some issues, so I thought I'd just defer to you before spending more money on other ingredients, it might just lead to more dead ends.
Ideally, I'd rather not use gelatin for my veggie friends and potentially not have to cook it so much to preserve the delicate flavors. Nothing specific yet, in other words, on the delicacy of the flavors, just a preference. After reading around, it looks like the only way to achieve the first half, i.e., vegetarian, is with cornstarch uh or pectin, with which both seem to require tons of sugar and require lots of heat. But maybe I'm way off. I was working with gel an, low acyl and high acyl gel an previously, but haven't been able to get anything nearly chewy enough with good elasticity and sheer.
Do you have any advice? Usage rates for those hydrocolloids would be awesome too. Oh, if I can make it even more complicated, is there any way to add alcohol to the recipe or with that increase the liquid portion too much and make the gel too loose? Thanks for any help you can give Andrew Marcus. Okay.
Uh you're not gonna have any actual alcoholic candy that's gummy because by the time you get the solids level high enough, you're you're gonna not gonna have much alcohol left in it at all. You can make things that are hard like rocks, really jelly, gel, gel, gelled, uh, that have bless you, thank you. That have uh fairly high alcohol. The limit with most hydrocolloids in higher concentrations to get good gel strength is about 20% alcohol in the finite finished thing. I've done with some hydrocolloids higher, like I've done fluid gel agar fluid gels at like 25, 28%, then have gotten them to work, alcohol, uh, especially if the alcohol you have to add the alcohol later with agar because alcohol can't be boiled at agar setting temp uh, you know, agar um uh temperatures to well, brain is gone today.
The temperatures that you require to get the agar functional. Hydrate, there we go. Uh you um the alcohol will boil off before those temperatures happen. So most things that are so but you can do like an uh fluid gel that's pretty high in alcohol using agar uh or any one any one of those things, and you can set gels with them with a high enough if you add a high enough alcohol, not too high in alcohol. My brain is so fried today, crazy.
Anyways, so but you're not gonna get something that's a gummy candy that has actual appreciable amounts of alcohol in it, although it can have the flavor, the base flavor of an alcohol just by adding it and boiling off all of the water and alcohol in it. Okay. So that's that part of the question. Also, low acyl and high acyl gelan uh mixes, you're not gonna be able to get uh the look, you can get very good gelatin replacement with high acyl and low acyl gel-an in the ratios that are normal for gelatin, but in the super high ratio that's in a gummy candy of gelatin in there, it's not gonna have the same texture there that gelatin will. So I don't think you're gonna be barking up the right tree with that.
I've looked into other hydrocolloid replacers uh to do gelatin replacement, and the one most people use seems to be agar. Agar also, I mean, having done high high percentage alcohol, uh sorry, high percentage agar uh gummies before, uh there's not gonna get the right amount, they're not gonna get the right texture with that. You might be able to, I haven't looked it up, uh I wasn't able to to check it out, but there are kappa carrageen and locust bean gum mixes, and you can actually use agar and locust bean gum, but it's not quite the same. But uh and go to CP Kelco and look up their gelatin replacers or call them CP Kelco, and they might have a kappa carrageenin slash locust bean gum, and the cap is providing the gelling, and the locust bean gum is getting it to act more like uh more like gelat and make it softer. They might have a mix that can be used in a high at a high enough ratio to allow it to do uh gummy candies, but I c I don't know.
And I doubt it's ever gonna have the stretch and pull of a gummy bear. I mean, you might get something similar. Now, the real awesome one is, as you say, pectin, but you do have to cook the the the bee crap out of pectin to get it to work. What you could do is cook the bulk of it and overcook it slightly and then add super concentrated fresh flavors back. And uh Nastasha and I did that years ago with uh we rotovapped uh strawberry, fresh strawberry juice, down to uh like a si high high brick syrup, overcooked pectin and sugar, and then mixed it in.
We never achieved hard thing, we achieved like a toffee, but it was the most delicious toffee I've ever had in my life. I can't I wish I had that right now. It was so delicious. It was just really hard for us to calculate exactly what the bricks was because what you're doing when you're boiling is taking it to a certain temperature, but what you're really shooting for is a certain liquid content. And pectin requires high acidity and a high uh solids content, and that's why you have to cook it.
You don't want to cook it um, you can't cook it quickly because if you cook it quickly, you're gonna scorch the fruit at the bottom, which is the problem why everything has to be done slowly and more mellowly. But uh, you know, maybe you could get away with adding a little bit, you know, after the fact, after it's been cooked up to temperature, as long as you get the the ratios right. So sorry I couldn't be super helpful, but uh but there you there you have it. Okay. Uh and I'm gonna have to rock through these or Jack's gonna pull my microphone out because it's just the kind of guy he is.
Remember, we don't have enough money to keep my microphone plugged in. I'm just kidding. They have another show coming on, is actually what the story is. Okay, have a question in from uh is this from Paul. Uh in one of the cooking issues radio uh episodes, Dave mentioned that he uses a particular sharping stone.
It's proving impossible to find the name by going back through all the episodes. Would it be possible to email me the name? I think it was three initials or an acronym or three additionals. Well, better than that, here it is in the real life. DMT.
Uh I used Duo Sharp DMT uh Diamond uh whetstones. Uh when you're buying a whetstone, uh, none of the real hardcore knife people use this, and they're gonna say I'm a bad human being for using it, but when I actually sharpen everyone's like, meh, it's pretty freaking sharp. It's pretty freaky sharp. You want to get the largest stone you can possibly uh get because uh that's gonna make sharpening large stones easy. The one I have a lot of the one of the reasons why a lot of knife aficionados hate it is because it's got an interrupted pattern in it, and uh and that makes for easier clearing and less kind of gumming up of the abrasive as you're working, but like real, real hardcore people don't like it.
I like it fine. What I like about this one is it stays flat forever, it's very thin, it's not very heavy, it's unbreakable, unwarpable, and doesn't need to be uh dressed. So I get the two inch the 10 inch uh duo sharp, I buy it in um I buy it in fine, uh the one I get is fine slash extra fine, uh, which is 25 micron grit on the fine side and nine micron grit on the other. I think I've also said before, and if you're a freaking psycho and you like super high uh like soup polishing stuff out, uh DMT now makes uh an eight-inch stone, unfortunately not a ten, that is like a straight diamond with no interrupted holes that has a um a super extra fine three micron uh grit, which is like insanely small. That's as small as most of the high end Japanese stuff, and that'll take it to uh a polish.
But uh as I've said many times before, Japanese grids and American grits don't correlate with each other, the Japanese grit numbers being higher for the equivalent thing than an American grit number. And secondly, uh an actual grit number isn't necessarily gonna im uh indicate everything, it indicates a certain particle size, but not a spread and distribution of particle sizes, nor how they are bound to the substrate. So there's a lot to be known. And what I really recommend you all do, if you're interested in abrasives, is go to the Unified Abrasives Manufacturer Association, UAMA.org, and go to their uh section called Abrasive Grains 101. And they have a great little web thing in the jig on kind of what is actually going on, like what the grains look like, what the different materials are, why you would use different materials and what that means.
But if you just want the simple answer, go get a T a DMT 10-inch uh duo sharp uh greenslash red. Yeah? Yeah, okay. And we got one last uh thingamajiggy in from Chris who says uh and he just calls you out, he just says, Hey Nastashi, he doesn't give a crap about the rest of us. Does not care.
Anyway. Yeah, right. Uh Rumen and Pulsan just released their latest on Salumi, and in fact, uh I just got it. I just got the new Salumi book. Is it actually out yet or not?
Do you know? Yeah, anyway, I have it. I have it, you know, because I got it, I got it. Anyway, uh Roman and Poston just released their latest on Salumi and go into some fair detail on whole pig butchery, curing, etc. Where it comes up a little short is on specifics for curing chambers.
How much airflow do you need, mechanisms for controlling humidity, minimum practical sizes, etc. Do you guys have a good reference for someone trying to set up a small slash trial and development scale chamber? I want to uh give some Copa and Lard a shot, Lardo, I guess, before committing to a larger setup for the shop. So is it going to have to live in an apartment until I can convince the boss that it's ready for prime time? Also, in what may be a long shot, the website for National Center for Home Food Preservation publication seems to have been shut down.
Any chance you or Dave has a copy of their cured meats.pdf referenced to the November 15th, 2011 radio show, I think, or know a place to grab it. Uh okay, so I went on the national uh I went on the National Center for Home Curing and Food Uh Preservation, and I didn't go get to go back to listen to what I said, but most of their publications are back up, so I don't know if you had a temporary problem, whether it was temporarily broken and now it's back. But if it's still down, I'll look for the specific one that you you need to find. Some of them are organized in a wonky way, like you have to click next, next, next to get through it, and you can't download it easily, but it seems to be there. Now, back to uh Roman Pulson.
One of the great things I saw about it is uh they they actually very early in the book said something that uh it I need people need to say more often. They said, uh, when you're making salumi in America, do not try to make Italian salumi in America. Make American salumi. And I think that's a great, great thing. So for instance, Sam Edwards, our our good friend and one of the benefactors of the Heritage Radio, uh, he sells his hams as Suriano, trying to piggyback on Serrano style hams, which I think is a mistake.
And I've told him this to his face. This is not nothing he doesn't like already know that I think is a mistake, because I think American hams are amazing, delicious, and they're their own product. They shouldn't be compared to Spanish hams, they shouldn't be compared to Italian hams, they're American products. And the same goes with if you're making Salumi here, don't try to make an Italian product. Make what make an American, I mean you can use Italian techniques, but you should be shooting.
If you're trying to shoot to make somebody else's product, then all you're ever going to be is a runner-up to their product. If you try to make your own product, uh then you get to be the best at that, and you can focus on what makes it better, what makes it worse, which isn't to say you don't respect and love the procedures, techniques, and flavors that someone uses in a place like Italy. But I'll tell you what uh Fong told us from what's the Imperial Tea Court, right? Is the name of his place, Stas? We went out and visited.
He's growing tea in California now, and I asked him, I was like, What do you want the tea to taste like? He said was probably the most profound thing he could say about this. He says, I want it to taste like California wants tea to taste. In other words, he wants to make tea that tastes like what tea should taste like when it's grown to the best of its abilities in California. Anyway, so I thought it was a good point that uh Roman and Polson brought up in that.
Uh, but then let's go on to your actual question. If you want to see what real badass curing technology is like, before I get into your actual answer, see how long it takes me to get into an actual answer? It's ridiculous. Nastasha's shaking her head and giving me her I hate you face. Okay.
Uh the Italian company, Travelini, which is you know spelled Travag Lini, Travagini, right? Uh are the world's greatest curing, drying, aging, uh, and like ham and salumi production equipment machine people in the world. They are the best, bar none. They are amazing. In fact, they are the company I always point at when I say that technology can be used for good in the production of food rather than just for making it cheaper, because these guys have developed curing rooms and aging rooms that are specifically designed to mimic what goes on.
They originally built it around what goes on in Parma, like in a Parma ham. So they they get humidity, uh, they get temperature, they cycle the humidity and the temperature inside the place to uh mimic the day in, day the day night, day in and out uh changes and seasonal changes in the ham to try because that's what's what's driving the aging in a long-cured process like ham is not just the humidity and the temperature, but the shift in humidity and temperature from both season to season and through day and night. Uh okay. So look at their stuff if you want to see some real badassery. Okay, now, you're true, you're exactly correct.
In the book, I looked, and they all do have a rat you know rather um that's a paltry kind of amount of information on how to make a curing thing. Remember this. The smaller a curing chamber is the less it's the less stable it's going to be over time. People really and they do mention this a lot which is probably why they don't really go into it too much. People love their curing rooms.
Going back to Sam Edwards who I talked about before he has a number of curing uh houses for his hams and he says he can know which one you could blindfold him bring him into one and he'll know which one it is based on smell because curing houses develop their own set of microflora and fauna I guess over time and those are going to influence the flavor of each one of the products. So it's incredibly important. So you're not going to get probably a stability of flavor in a small thing because it's too easy to push a small item one way or the other same way it's hard to get a small fish tank to stay uh in good shape forever because if it goes a little bit off it goes way off whereas larger fish tanks can be more self-corrective because they're larger systems. That said um if you want to if you want to basically just hey say hey look you don't want you said airflow. I don't have a lot of data right now on airflow but you you need uh uh you don't want too much airflow because it's gonna uh cause case hardening on the outside drying off but you know some might be there but he the for the best deal in control of a small setup and by that I mean you're gonna convert a fridge to an aging chamber or you're gonna convert you know I don't know some sort of like a small box that I I could not believe what a cheap deal it is and they're gonna be back in stock they say in sept in September on September 20th.
Go to Aubur Instruments. I've used one of their things it's fine it's okay they're the cheapest people in the world Aubur instruments and check this out for ninety-seven bucks they have a plug and play temperature and humidity controller that already has the sensor on it. So what you do is you just plug in a humidifier or a dehumidifier and a heating element into it and they handle up to 10 amps and put it in and just dial in what you want it to be right so there's two ways you can do this if you know that your chamber is always going to have too low of a humidity then you could attach a humidifier to it and jack the humidity into it. If you know that the humidity is always going to be too uh it's going to be sorry that's gonna be too humid then you can add a dehumidifier to it. So uh another way you could do it for instance you can set the humidity of a chamber by doing something like a like if you go to Google saturated salt solution uh RH standing for relative humidity so sodium uh NACL so you know sodium chloride table salt saturated solution if you have a saturated solution that's sitting in your chamber the chamber is going to equilibrate to 75% humidity so if you want lower than that then you could put a dehumidifier on that sucker and you know that you're always going to need to dehumidify it slightly to get it down to sixty or seventy percent humidity when you're when you're going if you know if look if if the other way to do it is if you know that you're always in a relatively non-humid environment you could put a fan which moves a little bit of air out of it to keep the humidity down and then put a humidifier attached to it that makes it humid as it goes but but so that's a that's the way I I would go about doing it and it's cheap and it should work.
We'll see you when you get back when I get back from Columbia cooking issues thanks for listening to this program on heritageradio network dot org. You can find all of our archived programs on our website or as podcasts in the iTunes store by searching Heritage Radio Network. You can like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at heritage underscore radio. You can email us questions at any time at info at heritageradio network dot org. Heritage Radio network is a nonprofit organization.
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