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 on Tuesday, about five, ten minutes late in the back of Roberta's Pizzeria in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Calling your questions live too. 7184972128. That's 718497-2128. Joining the studio as usual with uh Nastasha, the hammer Lopez, Joe and Jack in the in the booth.
How are you guys doing? Great. Yeah, you doing well, Nastasha. I just became members of Heritage Radio Network, so we're we're pretty happy with you. Who, Booker and Dax LLC or Cooking Issues the show?
Yeah, you guys, Nastasia and Oh, as humans? Nice. Well, congratulations to us, and thank you, Nastasha, for signing us up for that. Yeah? Each?
Each. Yeah? Nice. All right. Worth it.
Worth it. Worth every penny. Uh by the way, I'm it looks like I'm horribly out of shape. Today on the Williamsburg Bridge. No sympathy.
Today on the Williamsburg Bridge. No sympathy. This guy. I didn't ask for sympathy. You know, I like how see Nastasha f again, this is another thing about Nastasha.
Those of you who don't know. You left at 1155. For those of you that don't know what's going on. I didn't say I'm late as a result of being out of shape. I said I'm horribly out of shape.
Nastasha creates conversations in her head and assumes that they've already taken place and then makes conclusions based on those conversations that she thinks has already taken place. Like for instance, me saying, I'm late because I'm out of shape instead of leaving early. I'm just merely stating the fact that I'm out of late. Now continue with my story that has nothing to do with me being late, has to do with me being out of shape, Nastasha. Uh the um This guy passes me at the beginning of the Williamsburg Bridge, and he's on the straightaway, so I figure I'll catch up to him because I very rarely get passed because I bike uh not because I'm in shape or because I'm athletic, neither of which is the case, but I get extremely angry when I ride the bicycle, and as Nastasha knows anger increases my phys physical abilities.
Not in a hulk-like sense, but just you know, anger, right, Saz? Right. Yeah. Anyways, guy beat me by 30 seconds at the top of the bridge. I could not believe it.
I'm gonna have to go into some sort of training regimen. Uh the reason I'm late, actually, is because I didn't follow my own advice, because I'm a moron, to come here and do my research from Roberta's instead of doing it from home. That's the reason I'm late, uh, Nastasha, for your information. Uh anyways, let's go to some questions because I have a reduced amount of time. On the Leukama, which I promised I'd answer.
Uh the question was, uh, can you use Leukuma powder? Uh is there a substitute for Leukuma? Leukama is this uh fruit that I think some people think is a superfruit or something. I don't know. It comes from uh Peru.
And I said that I thought I'd use something similar to it in Colombia, and then I'll come back once I'm back from Colombia, which I am now, got back on Monday. Uh would uh, you know, maybe you could use instead, or that I try to use some of its properties to figure out a substitution. Turns out uh I was completely incorrect and memorying my memory was completely wrong. When I researched my memory when I got back, because I didn't see anything similar to it. What I remembered is is that Nastasha, you'll have to tune in for this and tune out of your uh uh Z Zappo's uh uh session there.
The uh it's not uh it wasn't anything in Columbia I had that was similar to Lucima, it's Canistelle. Remember Canistelle? Yes, the egg flu fruit that we had in the uh fruit and spice park? Uh and based on that, there is a taste component to it that's important, but it seems to me it's mostly the texture of it that's important. Uh because it it was the texture of that egg custard fruit, uh canistel, C-A-N, uh I can't spell it loud, but canistel, that was so kind of amazing.
And uh there is a producer of canistel that ships when it's in season, which is I think December through March or May or something like that. Uh and uh they're in Florida, and if you go on localharvest.org and look up fresh gardens, they will ship fresh canistel anywhere in um in the US. I don't think you're gonna get a powder that's going to mimic those same things. I mean, you could use a hydrocolloid mix to do it, but the thing about the thing about the canistel, and I guess a leukoma which I've never used fresh, is it's just extremely dense and custardy on its own, which is probably a combination of high fiber content, low water content, and uh probably a number of strange polysaccharides that contribute to its to its consistency. So you could try to get that texture just by jacking polysaccharides in it.
For instance, locust bean gum or well, locust bean gum is good for that, because guar is expensive now. If you're gonna use guar, you have to use the flavor free guar from TIC gums, uh, or some form of thickener. The issue when you thicken something is you some people say that you uh perceive an increased gumminess, which is true. The higher the concentration you use, the more a kind of gummy something is, but sometimes that can be pleasurable. It's just basically managing the expectations of what the texture is gonna be and messing around with it to get the texture right.
The other issue when you add hydrocolloids is um once you add them in enough of a concentration to truly thicken thicken thicken something, you're masking flavor. And the only way to uh reduce that masking effect is to increase the flavor profile of what you're what you're using. But um I'll try to look into it more. It's an interesting problem. I wasn't able to I wasn't able to get an answer for you, so I I apologize.
Right, styles I'm useless men. Yes. But you you enjoyed the uh the egg custard stuff, right? Yeah. Canistel, delicious.
And by the way, uh if you believe the uh the wiki folks, uh canistel actually tastes better than the leukum, I just they don't happen to grow the Lucum being the canistel in, I guess, Peru where it's popular, where Lucum is pro popular. How about that? So the stuff we had was actually superior. Anyway, okay. Next uh question uh from oh, we had a response actually to our vegetarian gummy question uh from uh Andrew.
He says, Hey guys, I just thought I might be able to help with the question about vegetarian gummies. On the subject of alcohol, because of you know the person who wrote in wanted to know if they could make an alcohol gummy. Uh on the subject of alcohol, I've made an I've made an alcohol-centered gummy for a product development project in a confectionary school. But the thing is you need a two-shot mogul. And for those of you who don't know what a mogul is, because that's not going to make sense to anyone.
Moghul uh is uh I think it's a brand name of uh NIDI NEDI or whatever the hell they're pronounced, is uh uh of confectionery machines that uh do starch molding. So it's a it's a whole confectionary line that produces starch molds and then does uh depositing of candies into starch molds. And they're called uh moguls. You can look up um I di mini-mogul if you want to look up the uh the uh thing. NIDI starch depot depositing.
Look up minim or there are other other lines, and they use them for depositing marshmallows, fondance, and uh, you know, jellies, all that kind of stuff. Uh anyways, so uh wait, where was it where where was I? Oh yes. Uh but the thing is you need a two-shot mogul and you need to make sure that both your outer gummy and your inner alcohol mixture have close to the same specific gravity, so it's not really possible at home. Which I figured, right?
Figured. Okay. Uh for vegetarian gummies with a really too chewy texture, however, I would try messing around with either starch, which we've talked about, or uh gum arabic. Uh agar is way too short, meaning I guess brittle to replicate a gelatin gummy, and I personally don't like the cooling effect that comes with high uh levels of agar. That said, pectin is my favorite for gels, has such a great flavor release and texture.
Thanks for everything you do, Andrew. Ah, and the one that you is really easy for you to do at home, it's not starch, it doesn't require a lot of cooking, and I hadn't thought of, is the one he mentions, which is uh gum Arabic. Gum Arabic is expensive, but what's interesting about gum Arabic is it's has an extremely high solubility. Uh so you but yet means you have to use a preposterously high amount of gum Arabic. But that said, you have uh minimal uh taste impact with gum Arabic uh on on your flavors.
Uh so this is an excellent suggestion, but I believe, and I I haven't had time because I just read this this morning to research uh Arabic-based can't gum Arabic-based candies, but I'm pretty sure you're gonna have to deposit it liquid into uh starch mixture and then let it dry for a uh fairly long period uh in a relatively controlled environment. Uh I mentioned, I believe, starch molding once in the past, and there is online available an 18, I think nineties or nineteen tens or twenties uh handbook produced in England on confectionery. It's like the complete confectioner or something like that, and it has an entire section on uh starch molding and how to accomplish it with techniques that don't require sophisticated equipment, i.e., you can do it at home. It's not state of the art because it's from over a hundred years ago, but it's doable at home and it goes through the ins and outs of molding and starch, and it's available free on Google Books. Uh so that's something maybe you should look into.
Another question. Should we take a break or should we take a good question? No, go on. Okay, another question. Uh James writes in with uh several things.
Uh once uh thanking us for circulation uh circulator info. Uh dear uh Jack, Joe, Nastash, and Dave. Uh, been really enjoying the show down here in Australia and have a few questions about freezing, shelf life and tentacles. After learning about re-thermalizing, which is what we call reheating so that the government doesn't get mad that we didn't reheat it to an incredibly high temperature, destroying all the flavor and texture, whatnot. After learning about re-thermalizing on your show using a thermal circulator, has become an everyday part of our cooking that has greatly increased the yumminess in our house.
It's now routine to make quantities of both stock and prepared meals, such as curry soups and other ingredients for more elaborate dishes, including wild mushrooms, confit and octopus. They are prepared and then chilled using good food handling practices, including ice baths and flat pans for chilling, uh fat p excuse me, flat pans for chilling, then held at two degrees C overnight and packed in server-sized portions using a chamber, vacuum sealer, flattened and frozen in layers no greater than thirty millimeters. Uh by the way, this is a kind of I love hearing that we've ever said anything that actually makes people's foods better, right? I mean that's that to me is uh that's the best. I love that.
Like that's that's a success. That's you know, but and before we had uh, you know, a bar or any kind of place when uh we could actually serve things to people to directly make them uh hopefully make them happy. But the only kind of uh satisfaction we got out of stuff was that people said that the information we gave them help. So I like that. Anyway, uh the freezer is set to negative nineteen C, which is roughly minus four Fahrenheit for you guys uh here in uh Fahrenheit land.
And using the turbo button, which we don't have, which I assume is a fan speeding thing to increase air circulation on the inside of your freezer, which is a good idea. I wish all freezers had kind of an increased circulation uh technique on the inside of the freezer to handle large loads like that when they couldn't, is rated to handle nineteen kilograms of freezing per twenty four hours. Uh, it is a frost-free model made by Mela uh Liebher, which we get Mila, but we don't get the fridges over here, do we? I don't think so. It's a I associate that more with uh Europe, yeah.
Um that seems to be designed to minimize the freeze thaw cycle by sealing the drawers and dehumidifying. Uh my question is, how long can I keep this frozen stuff? The online guide, say one month for stock, three for prepared meals and fish. Yet the snap frozen wild-caught shrimp I have purchased, have a shelf life of 18 plus months. What's the deal?
Ah, excellent question. What's the deal? Here's the deal. Um the freezing uh shelf life, uh the the frozen shelf life of products, and this is a dirty secret that no one tells you. When you are uh looking at the shelf life of a refrigerated product, most people think what you're talking about is how long can it stay in the refrigerator and still be safe, right?
Because bacteria can still grow, molds can grow in the fridge. And so in the fridge, shelf life is a safety concern. However, when someone is rating the shelf life of a product, they're actually rating two separate things. They're rating one, is it going to be safe to consume? And two, is it going to taste good?
Right? So there are plenty of things that exceed their shelf life in the fridge or in the freezer, but are still safe. Now, in the fridge, it actually is dual situation. Safety and uh safety and palatability. In the freezer, it's ex it's almost exclusively, shelf life is almost exclusively based on is it going to taste good or cook well once it gets out?
And the culprits uh in a freezer are one, freeze-thaw over time, right? So they have to assume a general uh, you know, a certain kind of level of quality of your of your fridge. Freezer, rather. So most freezers thermally cycle quite a bit and go up and down, up and down. In any home freezer, not a hundred percent of the water in a product is frozen unless you're talking about pure water ice.
Because not all of it is frozen, any time the temperature goes up and down, some more of the concentrated, basically everything that's in your meat, like salt, proteins, all those things are in a very concentrated solution. They uh water increases and decreases, and when every time it does, smaller ice crystals inside of your product tend to grow because the smallest ice crystals typically are going to melt all the way first, and then when they re when they refreeze, they'll freeze back onto the larger crystals. So ice crystal size increases over time in your freezer, and as a result, those larger ice crystals penetrate cell walls and whatnot and cause for more drip loss, which means when you thaw it, more of the inside juices of your product are going to drip out, rendering your product more crappy. So the longer period of time it spends in a freezer that's opened and closed a lot and goes through a lot of uh freeze thaw cycles, the crappier your product is. And so that's a major influence on shelf life.
Another uh problem with shelf life is it things that are exposed to uh actual atmosphere on the inside of your fridge, whether inside of a package or uh or not, tend to um what happens is they grow crystals on the outside and the and the surface of the meat become uh dehydrated due to sublimation and then recrystallization, etc. It's called uh freeze um freezer burn. And so this is a uh a situation that deteriorates over time, right? And so this is another reason why certain things have a specific shelf life. You minimize this by reducing any opportunity for your pro the product's surface to not be covered.
So if you're vacuum bagging, this reduces a lot of that. Or even if you're bagging something and you remove most of the air such that all the surface is in contact with uh something that's gonna prevent sublimation of of water, you're preventing that. The third thing is that because you're actually in a concentrated solution and not totally frozen, right, uh certain oxidative changes and other changes, enzymatic changes, whatnot, can take place in a freezer. Rincidity of fats is one that's uh very well known. Fats can become more rancid in the freezer if they're stored.
Uh and you're reducing that by vacuuming at a high level of vacuum. So you want to, you know, a high, high level of vacuum when you're doing this. And that's going to retard those kinds of things, thereby increasing uh the shelf life on the inside of a freezer. So the steps that you're taking, right, should ensure that you have a very long shelf life, right? The one thing you should note is that freezing is not a prevention, if freezing doesn't kill bacteria necessarily, so the safety of a product when you go when it goes into the freezer isn't any better than it is when it comes out.
The freezer just arrests uh kind of any sort of bacterial degradation during its freeze time. Uh if you actually want to preserve things for dang near infinity, you need a freezer that actually does freeze all the way down to the point where everything in the product is frozen, and for that you need a super deep freeze, like our friends Mark Ladner has over there at the Del Posto that keeps things at like minus 79 uh I think Fahrenheit or Celsius, I forget which, which uh in French is dang cold, and most people can't do at home. And in there, there's no uh liquid water left in the substance at all. And so, in essence, it's in uh suspended animation. Okay.
Next, I'm a big fan of the sous vide octopus tentacles as they are tender, but don't have the honeyish taste that seems to come out when cooked conventionally for a long time in stews. Um my question is uh sorry, uh cooking stews. After much experimentation and ruling out suppliers, uh I got octopus from Victorian and West Australian sources. I've worked out that timings uh in the both Under Pressure book and the Modernist Cuisine book result in an overcooked papy mess that falls to bits or delaminates, for want of a uh want of a better word. Prior to sealing, the legs are blanched for 45 seconds in a big pot of water and sealed to a medium vacuum.
The size of the octopus doesn't seem to influence the time that much of cooking, but the common about uh common across any cooking time is that the legs seem to lose a lot of fluid that sets and sets in much the same way as a gelatin, and they never seem to look like the pictures. Not that I'm complaining, they still taste good, and the octoo makes a great addition to sauces and to and makes a mean ramen. Doing some tests, I've worked out that the timing needs to be reduced one point uh one to one point five hours, about twenty-five to thirty percent of the recommended cooking times. By the way, uh under pressure, I consulted it, and uh their recommended octopus uh cooking is 77 degrees Celsius for five hours. Um but size seems to make little uh these can be big critters where I come from with uh four tentacles weighing in at over 1.8 kilograms, which is like uh almost five pounds for us uh Americans here.
But size seems to make little difference. I think this is a result of the practice of tenderizing that occurs down here using a freeze thaw cycle or a small cement mixer. Uh but I'm interested to get your take on it, Chains Jeers. Jeers James. Uh I like that.
Jeers. From Chains. That's gonna be my that's gonna be my that's gonna be my uh sign off on letters Jeers. See if anyone gets it. Anyway, uh so Nastashi, remember when we cooked that giant octopus?
Were you there that day? Yeah, so True World Foods, which is a Japanese supplier, and uh which, you know, Yuji uh Haraguchi, who now is working here at Robertas and has his own ramen shop. Yuji! Go Yuji anyway. Yuji used to be our supplier from True World, and uh he once got us a giant octopus tentacle.
Remember that sucker? That thing was big. Uh and here's the and we cooked it. And before I go on, because I'm gonna forget to mention it. The interesting thing that no one talks about with octopus cookery, uh, and that Nils and I used to think about quite a bit and only had a couple times to experiment with, is that, and McGee talked about, we talked about a lot in the McGee, Harold McGee classes, who I'm gonna see next week at Harvard, by the way.
Next week uh cooking issues is gonna be in Harvard. I can see if I can. I gotta see if we can do the show from Harvard, though. You know what I'm saying? Anyway, because we're doing the Harvard uh lecture again next week.
Uh okay, octopus, by the way, I'm sorry, I have so many, so many diversions that no one knows what I started talking about, but this you have to excuse me. That's how my brain works. So octopus are like the smartest things, uh, like the one of the smartest things in the in the ocean. They only live for like two, like some are even shorter, but like the big ones, like two, three years. And then after they uh either the males after they do their business, you know what I mean, with the women, right?
They uh go senile and just start wandering around on the floor and let themselves get uh of the ocean and start letting themselves get eaten by anything that goes around. They go, it's called senility, it's senescence. So this is literally what happens. The males do that, right? And then they're like, and they wander around the floor and just get eaten and taken apart and stuff like that.
The female octopus, whatever, they don't give a crap anymore. It's like literally like they just wander around on the floor of the ocean drunk and crazy and then get eaten. The female octopus holds itself up, like doesn't eat anymore, and sits there with its funnel, just uh airy, like you know, blowing uh uh water over the surface of its eggs to prevent uh kind of parasites from attaching and to protect them in case the the uh poop hits the fan down there. Then as soon as the eggs hatch, she wanders off and dies and starves or whatever, and it's done. Yeah.
So anyway, so there's these weird things that are uh that are incredibly smart, like kind of amazing, they have amazing skin, amazing abilities, like cephalopods in general, of which octopus is my favorite. Uh although probably not to eat, probably squid is my favorite to eat, cephalopod. I think it goes like this. I think it goes squid, then octopus, cuttlefish being dead last in my in my cephalopod ranking of eating. Anyway, they're like incredibly smart, and if they live for even like, you know, twice or three times as long, it's it's my feeling that we would have octopus butlers on like uh in like aquariums on motors, like following us around, like doing our work for us because they would have evolved to that much higher level of thinking.
And if they lived an order of magnitude longer, like 30 years, I have no question that they would have evolved to the point where they'd be out here just kicking our behinds left and right, and that we'd be in little cages and they'd be marveling at how well we could unscrew a jar with our tentacles. Really? I.e. fingers. Yeah, man.
They're really amazing creatures, but delicious. Anyway, something you might not know is that the different tentacles of an octopus taste different, right? Uh so they have dominant tentacles and non-dominant tentacles. So that's an interesting thing. Especially because we usually eat octopus like hacked up in a salad.
There's no way to know. And also, the texture of the tentacle is radically different depending on where in the tentacle you get it. So we did a comparative tasting of this giant octopus tentacle from the base of the tentacle all the way to the tip. And it's been many years since we did it. Uh, but I believe the sweet spot was somewhere uh like towards the first third of the of the tentacle.
I not the thin part. You didn't like the thin part, right? That's the more rubbery part. That's the more rubbery part. Uh and by rubbery I mean like the same texture as the small part of the lobster claw.
You know the small part of the lobster claw has that weird texture? Yeah. So the uh I believe the tip of the tentacle has that kind of a texture more, which makes sense if you think about it. Uh, but you don't want the very base either. I think it was uh the big like right around the first third.
And you could do that in this tentacle because it was like three feet long. It was crazy. Uh and so uh the way we did it similar to the way you did. We did Japanese style where it's slowly dipped tentacle point first so that curls into itself, then put in a bag and vacuumed. And it does indeed release a lot of goo.
And this is the difference between oven cooking something or or or pot cooking something and doing it in a bag, because the one thing that people always uh stop don't think about or rarely think about when they're cooking in a vacuum bag, is there's no reduction inside that bag at all. And so what that means is all the juices that are exuded from the meat itself end up in the bag. Uh that said, so you're not going to get that concentration, which is where that honeyness is coming from that you get if it's kind of reducing in its own goo over time in an oven. Uh that said that octagoo is delicious, but I don't think there's any way that you uh can get around uh get around that. As for the other problem you had, which is uh the shorter cooking time.
I haven't done a comparative study. I know about freestyling, which talking about before is basically ice crystals rupturing the uh flesh so that when it thaws out it it's gonna drip, but then also be more tender. Uh that works, uh and so does uh the technique we call beating the hell out of, which is also practiced by some people, but I myself have never run a comparative study of a non-frozen versus a fresh octopus, and I've never run a comparative study of a beaten the hell out of versus not the beaten hell out of uh of an octopus. So I can't really speak to whether or not your octopus is different from our octopus, and by that I mean whether your octopus is different from Nathan Miravold's octopus and uh Thomas Keller's octopus, which are the two uh sources that you cited. Um that said, some people like their octopus to be a papy mess, which I I don't.
I I like a little more tooth in uh in the octopus. Uh Nastasha, what do you like? A mushy mess or more tooth? Tooth. Tooth.
Yeah. So it could just also be a matter of taste because one person's mush is another person's uh tender. And so I think that's a nice way of saying, right? So I I don't know, it's really all a matter of matter of taste. I didn't time it when we did it.
We literally did it by pulling the bag out of the water and squeezing it. We also, I believe, did it at a much higher temperature. I don't think when we do our tests, we did our tests at 77. Um, I think we did it a good bit higher, like 85. So I can't really speak to it, but we did not cook for five hours.
There's no way on God's earth we cooked that thing for five hours. We just kept pulling it out of the bag and squeezing it. In our opinion, the amount of time did make a difference uh based on size. And the reason I say this is because the tips of the tentacles were differently done from the base of the tentacles. So the size did make uh a significant difference, in our opinion, but that also could be that the different parts of the muscle were different.
So we didn't test, we didn't basically we're schmucks, we're schmucks. What we should have done is is taken the octopus tentacle and sectioned it all the way down in an exactly uh you know same sized uh strip all the way down and tasted it along the length. But you can't do that either because uh octopus muscle, uh the way it's structured, uh it it's a uh it's what do they call it? A hydrostat, hydraulic hydrostat, something like that. There's a word for the way octopus muscles work, and it's the same way that our tongue works.
Our tongues are articulated such that we can move them in any direction even though there's no bones. And so there's a particular muscular arrangement in an octopus, same as an elephant's trunk, that allows that to happen. And so uh taking an internal portion of it's not gonna be the same as taking the external portion. So you can't win. Turns out, as usual, Nastasha, you can't win.
Wait, you never wrote a post on that, did you? No, of course I never wrote the post on that. I just have the information in my head. I didn't never write the post. We have the pictures, it was Piper who did it.
Uh and as an uh shout out to someone who's gonna buy the Bammox, clean the Bam. This is also from James. Uh, cleaning the Bammox is really easy. Run it in hot soapy water, then clean water and wipe down the housing. The blades grip really well, and I've used the units that are 25 years old, they're still going strong.
Make sure you get a 240 watt for home use, badass power, bamics from James. Uh, it's not our commercialized James. I was just reading it with my commercial voice. Yeah. With that, let's take our first break.
Cooking issues. So you don't shot the devil with your rock and roll on knows that coaching music is gonna say your soul. Rebel bosses groove in the rhythm and blow that sale. It's gonna get you side in the air. And those things that took you will.
So God's fearing man of team to what advances. The rock game open to escape. It's a telling you. Today's program has been brought to you by Whole Foods Market. Did you know that pollinators are needed for more than two-thirds of the world's crop species?
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You'll see them stones in hell by the village as well. Really, Jack, really, Jack, be the solution. That's not like happy. I thought it was kind of nice. So what music are we listening to?
It's uh more of Damon's band, brothers. Damon Bolti! Are we gonna get a shout out to the sh to the uh to the thing next week or not? Are you gonna give a shout-out to it? Come to the Heritage Radio!
And what is the annual fundraising party? It's right here. Our first annual fundraiser. First annual members only fundraising party at Roberta's Pizzeria on Sunday, September the what, eighth? You gotta give me the cotton, oh yeah.
September. I don't have in front of you. Look, if I'm gonna if I'm gonna scream like monster truck things, you have to have it in front of you. It's hard to put the monster truck voice on and add lib at the same time. Is it sold out?
Some additions. Yeah? We have sellers at Jasper Hill gonna bring cheese. Good Gript type from Dap Tone Records is gonna be DJing Funk and Soul with special guests. And get this, Brian Kenny, the guy you know from the Hearst Ranch commercial playing songs.
No way. Well, I I now there's something I have to say. If he's not gonna play it, we're not doing it. That's it. I think he'll do it.
Okay. Alright, because I was about to walk out. Like I Nastash and I have decided that uh our New Year's resolution last year, and it's a little late, so we'll have to do it again for this year, is to be complete divas at all times, right? Yes. You don't have the yellow Skittles.
I'm out! There is Perie Jouay, so that means I'm gonna be here. Nice. Did I mention what a badass uh pastry cook commit is? Yeah, he is.
Yeah. That's Brooks Hedley! How's this for a menu item description? Sidewalk greens and toast. Sidewalk greens.
Sidewalk greens. Uh, let me tell you, you can collect lots of sidewalk greens on the lower east side. I just don't happen to pick them. I'm a little nervous about the exhaust fumes from the in uh in my uh lamb's quarters. I'm assuming these were not from the lower east side.
I'm assuming it's lamb's bushwick. I hope not. I'm assuming it's lambs quarters. Those things grow all over the city. Like there's lamb's quarters all over the city that you can just pick and use.
Like personally, I guess. No, no, it's like Oric, it's like it's like a salad green, it's good. It does not, it's not like that source. It's good. But I mean, again, I've only collected it not next to uh where I've seen homeless people poop.
What? That's true. I'm not saying there's homeless poop in this dish, people. You should still pay the money and come to the members only party. Jack's horrified now.
All of a sudden Jack stops talking about it. I'm out. Hey, look, homeless people's poop washes off the same as horse and dog poop does, so don't worry about it. So it's heritage radio network.eventbrite.com. How much are the tickets?
They're 150, but you're a cooking issues listener, so you can use the code cooking issues for a $50 discount. Oh, snap. Has anyone used our code yet? I'll have to check that out. Yeah, uh uh are you gonna charge more if you come to the door?
No. VIP is two fifty. And you're at the VIP. And for that, Nastasha will smile at you while she has the glass of Pierre Jouay in her hand. My my one of my favorite things about Nastasha, and this is true favorite thing, is that this she is she is a sucker for champagne.
Loves as do I, by the way. I love champagne. Love it. And uh and Nastasha loves champagne so much that even if we're trying to serve a cocktail, instead of drinking our cocktail to like to sell the cocktail that we're making, she's like, crap, but no, I want champagne. I want me some champagne.
Well, if you put strawberry in it, you're a strawberry. Is that what we're gonna do? I think so. Yeah, that's what we're doing. When well, it's not gonna be strawberry, it's gonna be a different fruit that's in season.
But something like that. Something like that. Okay. Uh buy the dang tickets. Support this show by buying the tickets with our code so that people know that this is a PBS thing here, right?
This is our PBS pitch so that they know that you know you care about if you care about quality programming, like cooking issues radio, show your support by becoming a member of Heritage Radio Today. Right? Is that sound more like what they would say? PBS voice. Yeah, thank you.
Uh okay, another question from Co F Miles about Coon Recon pressure cookers. I'm a long time listener to your cooking issues radio show, albeit offline, and seriously, time delay via the podcast. The question may be more for David, uh, because Nastasha doesn't care. I'm just messing. But I've been experimenting with an eight-quart coon recon pressure cooker.
I would now like to start making healthy quantities of stock. Uh uh, that means big. I'm looking for a cooker between 28 and 30 quarts. To date, I've uh been able to find only aluminum cookers in that size. Since my stove is induction, I need stainless steel cookers or one with a stainless steel bottom plate.
Do you guys know where I might look? Thanks in advance, coF Miles. No. There is, as far as I know, no easily uh purchaseable pressure cooker uh that is uh that large, other than the ones made by uh American like American Pressure Cooker, American, it's Wisconsin Foundry, and they make the large ones. And Nastasha, we have one with the screw down things that look a little bit.
What? This question? It was no, yeah. Yeah, I did care. That's fair, fair.
I'm gonna take that as a smack. By the way, what you're hearing now is Nastasha's, I get beaten on by Dave on the radio show. Again, if you guys heard even one twelfth of what she says to me off air, you would have no sympathy. I'm just saying that because that's her ploy. It's her ploy.
I looked it up this morning because I was like, this guy thinks I won't know the answer. So he's asking David. Oh, you see, it's it's it's actually because you see, you never know what she's gonna take personally. You're getting better insight into the Lopez mind here, by the way, folks, which I appreciate. Uh but there is a simple solution for you.
Um the simple solution is they say uh you can buy this, it's preposterously overpriced, but you can look online for the Max Burton uh eight-inch induction interface disc. And it's just a slug of stainless steel with a handle on it that you put in between the induction burner and your uh stainless steel, uh your aluminum in um pressure cooker, and with that, you can then there also do uh ceramics, glass, you can heat anything because the induction burner is instead of heating your pot directly, is heating a steel slug in between your pot and the thing. It's not as efficient or as fast as um as a normal uh you know induction in a pot, right? Because you're not heating the pot directly, but it is m still fairly efficient, and I haven't tested it myself, but it should be fairly fast, not as fast, but fairly fast. Won't be on on obviously on ceramics because it takes a long time for the heat to travel through a ceramic no matter how it's applied.
But they charge like a hundred bucks for it, which is an outrage. You can just buy a like a steel plate like eight by eight or like twelve by twelve, but you really want to fit the size of your pot. You can just buy a steel plate online. Doesn't have to be stainless, even stainless is nicer and it won't rust. But uh anything like that, a slug uh to put in there.
But look at so you can get the basic like look of how it looks. Max Burton 8-inch induction interface disc with heat-proof handle, and that's your solution. If you're worried about putting um stuff inside of aluminum because you think that there's a taste issue, although I cook in aluminum quite often, you know, barring certain, you know, highly whatever. Anyway, uh, you can put a bain marie on the inside of it, a large bain marie on the inside of one of those pressure cookers and still make a large quantity of stock, or you can cook directly in the aluminum. One last thing.
If you have a lot of space, money, and power, you can buy a used autoclave, which is a medical piece of equipment uh that functions ha as a pressure cooker, and you can actually use an autoclave as an extremely large pressure cooker, but unless you uh you know, you have c have to keep it in your garage or something like that. But that's what they use. They use Frankie, the instrument uh the uh uh equipment company sells uh autoclaves that are repurposed for kitchens. Uh and also I think I forget who makes them here, uh Market Forage pressure cookers that are basically like autoclaves that are meant for kitchens, but they're not often used outside of industrial institutional cooking here, and in Europe they're used like Nils used to use them in Sweden on large amounts of uh potatoes. Okay.
Uh hi, Dave, uh Nastash Joe and Jack. This is coming in from uh Arny Skaug in Norway. Um listening to your podcast yesterday and a few tips for the guy who asked about shrimp cakes and sausages. I'm Norwegian. Uh in Norway, uh fish cakes are traditional popular way of processing fish, commonly made from cod, haddock, and pollock.
Homemade fish cakes invariably use egg, flour, and potato starch as a binder. It is said that not using a binder renders them short, that is grainy. Commercially made fish cakes use different binders like tapioca and contain only from 40 to 60 percent fish. However, I've been experimenting on using a different approach, wanting to use as much fits as possible for flavor, and I've been using a method adopted from research I've done on sausage making. I read somewhere, I think, in an article by Lynn Knipe, associate professor of Ohio State, uh, that uh in the meat department that regulating the pH value of meat of meat is a good way of obtaining uh good primary bind and sausage.
I lost the article on the computer crash and can't find it again, so this is from memory. The article says that a relatively high pH in meat helps solubleze myosin and meats. It also says poor slaughtering practices can result in meats with a low pH value due to improper chilling. Uh and also for animals that freaked out when they die, the pH can drop quick because they have not enough glycogen in them. Anyway, this promotes the breakdown of glycogen in the muscles.
However, a higher pH also increases the water holding capacity of proteins. Um, uh I've used this experiment to uh I've used this information to uh experiment regulating pH in sausage meat, and I usually incorporate sodium carbonate in the salt about one to two percent uh by weight of salt. I wonder whether he's actually means sodium carbonate or whether he means bicarbon, not sure. Uh but go look up Harold McGee on sodium carbonate versus bicarbon. He's basically raising the pH of the meat.
This greatly improves the binding capacity of the sausage, sometimes too much, and the sausage becomes rubbery. In those cases, I add vinegar to the sausage meat and mix well, which loosens the texture again. Back to shellfish protein, I've used the same technique with fish cakes uh with good results and believe it'll be worth trying. It's interesting. Um I've also experienced uh experienced that the freshness of the fish is important, but I don't know if this is because of pH.
What you're talking about there, and he agrees with me on the grinding and stuffing and says you use a sausage stuffer, but they're expensive because the auger in a meat grinder heats up the meat again. You can buy inexpensive sausage stuffers in this country if you go to like Harbor Freight or Northern Tools or Grizzly and buy sausage stuffers that are intended for hunters. They're not as well built as the normal kitchen ones, but they'll work. You can buy a five-pound sausage stuffer for under with a hand crank for under uh a hundred bucks, I think. Um, so the article he's talking about, which you should read, is by Lynn L Y N N Knipe, K N I P E Meat Export Research Center of Iowa State University, which is why we had problems, and it's called use of phosphates in sausage.
Read it. Uh it says a lot about phosphates, which increases the water holding capacity and also helps fat emulsification by uh altering the ionic balance in that. So go ahead and read it. Uh Arnie will be in New York in February and March of next year. Are there any classes he can take?
I'm gonna have Nastasha look into that and we'll talk about it next because I don't know when my classes are. They tell me like a day before and I just show up and cook them kindly. Uh William writes in about milk. Howdy all. I love making custard based ice cream.
I understand that tempering the egg yolks is a normal procedure, especially for food safety. Are there other benefits to tempering the yolks? Why not use pasteurized eggs? Sous pasteurized or Davidson's brand pasteurizing and skip the tempering altogether. Also, I live next door to a dairy farm that offers raw milk and cream.
My country living folks tell me that I should still paste the raw milk, so I never bothered going there. I've never had raw milk. Does it really taste much better? Okay, first of all, on the custard ice cream. There is a difference between un uh like ones that haven't been cooked out and ones that have.
If you look at it, a creme on glaze base is thicker than if you just blended the ingredients together. So I've never tasted side by side, same recipe, cooked uh normally versus not cooked, okay? But like cooked actually to an on glaze, up to like 82 to 15 minutes in a uh Celsius for 15 minutes in a circulator. However, um I'm assuming that you're gonna get a faster meltdown in the one that hasn't been cooked out just because there's a higher uh viscosity in the one that has been cooked. That said, Sam Mason, who's like an ice cream genius, like you know, like like an ice cream savant almost.
He's crazy ice cream delicious, doesn't like the taste of cooked eggs in his custards and doesn't cook therefore the custards. And I just started experimenting with low temperature, uh basically pasteurizing my uh ice creams at like 60 degrees Celsius or 62 degrees Celsius, which is what I did when I was in Columbia last. And they're great. So, you know, I don't think that there's uh uh in other words, you can make and Sam makes some of the most delicious ice cream that I've ever had in my life, uh, and that stuff uh he doesn't he doesn't cook it out. So I think it's m mainly a safety issue.
Uh and when I cook for myself, generally, I just take the salmonella risk and eat it without pasteurizing. But I've been having to cook for pregnant people recently, so I pasteurize the stuff out now at like 60. Um, on raw milk, does it taste better or does it taste worse? I am going to defer to uh Ann Mendelson, who wrote a book on milk. Uh and her argument on raw milk uh versus not raw milk is in I think incredibly well put, and she basically says that most people who talk about raw milk versus uh pasteurized milk come at it from some crazy perspective other than taste.
And she is a taste person. She says she's had that most pasteurized milk uh that you get, it's also homogenized pasteurized milk, by the way, uh, is bad in the supermarkets compared to what the best milk can be. However, just having it be raw uh doesn't make it better. The best milk she's had have been raw milks, but they've been from you know very small like producers who take a lot of care, have the right kind of cows, have the right kind of feed and X, Y, and Z. So her main point, which is the best point, and and it you so rarely read food writing where people come at it from what I think is the correct point of view, which is uh it's not it's this you know she's not starting from a preconceived notion of what's best.
She's saying, hey, taste is the notion that I'm shooting for, what makes it taste better. So she's had horrible raw milk and she's had fantastic raw milk. And so uh go read her discussion of it in her book on milk uh and see see what you think. Chris Young, uh, you know, from Modernist Cuisine, you know, interestingly points out that it taste is a matter of taste. In Africa, right, everyone likes the taste of what we think is ridiculously overcooked milk.
And if you tried to give them milk that taste as close to coming out of the cow as possible, they would think it's awful because they prefer the taste of cooked milk. So taste is taste. Uh while I was doing this, I looked up a website called uh RealMilkfacts.com, which is a shill out for a uh law firm called uh Marlar Clark, and this is a law firm that deals in food poisoning. So they're big on they make they make money based on suing people as a result of uh food poisoning. Uh that's that's how they do it.
So wait, but uh they they have some uh interesting things, and from them I got to the CDC. The CDC uh is on a uh uh basically a crusade now to stop people from wanting to ask for raw milk because they see that there's a huge surge in popularity in raw milk uh now among kind of health crunchies and then taste advocates. And so they have a big thing. So look up uh uh real raw milkfacts.com and they point to these two cases of kids. I would never serve raw milk, by the way, to like a young kid, because if they get an E.
coli breakout problem with a young kid, there's lots of things you wouldn't serve to a young kid other than just raw milk because of the possibility of uh of a breakdown. Um I'm not gonna have enough time to fully go through classes are the only one they have online, and it's hard to find, is um CV intensive September 28th, 29th of this month. I don't think they're doing hydrochloroids anymore. But if enough people No, no, no. We're supposed to teach one called Cooking Issues, but like we never never uh Well, maybe you should take that over and do it at this base.
Yeah, I don't know. Anyway, uh I I think I'm gonna have to go more into this uh pasteurization, not pasteurization and and and health and not next week, but I would like to point you to a a website before we go that I just when I was researching this stuff came across and uh they uh NHS, which is the National Health Services of Uh Britain, which by the way I grew up uh completely frightened of because my you know my parents uh uh well, you know, I grew up with my dad's an injured, and my mom's a doctor, and my stepfather's a doctor, so I grew up in kind of a doctory kind of a household. And I I I'm not gonna have a time to go into this, but basically, so they you know, when I was a kid, they were like, you know you think that the healthcare in Britain is great but if you're over the age of 65 and you need dialysis they let you die this was back in the like 80s so I don't that's probably not the case anymore and whatever yeah I'm gonna get some calls on this crap. But um an interesting website that's put out by the NHS is called um how to read health news oh it's called Choices behind the headlines and one of the articles in it is how to read the health news by Alicia White. And we need a website like this in this country where it's basically uh they go and they debunk all of the health related claims that are made in the news so like a big news story hits like uh you know gastric bypass surgery surges in the UK and then they'll go and they'll be like no it's not actually surged because we're a nation of like you know millions and millions of people and you know it increased from like a thousand to three thousand so yeah it's like three three hundred percent more but that's still like a drop in the bucket stuff like that.
And they they actually break down studies and why they're crap and then also say how the news media is misinterpreting scientific studies and not doing their research. So anyone involved in healthcare and health and uh research should in the US should check out how they're doing it in Britain and we'll talk more about that. Hopefully we'll get a comment on it and it's called uh behind the headlines on the NHS uh website at NHS I think dot UK look up how to read health news by Dr. Alicia White uh and and that maybe we'll talk more about it next week if I'm back next week we might have to skip a week depends on whether we have time when I'm at Harvard. Are we teaching on Tuesday?
I don't think so. Midnight. Tuesday night? So then maybe we can do the show live from Harvard with Harold McGee cooking Issues. Thanks for listening to this program on Heritage Radio Network.org.
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