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If you like this program, visit Heritage Radio Network.org for thousands more. That's a little mellow for us, don't you think? Yeah, it is, huh? It's like a little mellow. It's like how am I supposed to go from that to Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues.
This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live every Tuesday from 12 to 1245 at Roberta's Pizzeria in Bushwick, Brooklyn on the Heritage Radio Network, joined as usual with Nastasha the Hammer Lopez in the studio and Jack and Joe in the engineering booth. How you guys doing? You know, I think the mellow theme actually got you more amped up. Well, I had to be. Yeah, that worked out well.
Yeah. I'm telling you, man, I have the the bass. I haven't practiced enough. Well here's what I realized. Like if you don't play bass for like 10, 12 years or so, uh, you lose your chops.
You know what I'm saying? Like my my hands tire out soon. I'm what they I'm what they call a a uh a sissy. Um but yeah, I'm still thinking about uh writing uh writing the you know a cooking issues based theme. Or I could just do like a night court style stupid bass intro thing.
We could try that. Yeah, for those of you that remember Night Court. Even do like some sign public, like Joe just said, yeah. That would be cool. Yeah, I I mean I could do that stuff all day long.
If you guys got the mic, I got the bass. Let's do it next week. All right, I'll bring in the bass. By the way, speaking of next week, on uh starting on this Sunday is the Star Chef's International Chef Conference, does. Are you are you happy that you're gonna be out of the country during that?
That means you're not gonna have to help during the uh yeah. So one thing we have to do is serve a cocktail though. No, no, I'm doing a uh I'm also doing a workshop. See you wouldn't know it because it doesn't say it anywhere on the website that I'm doing a workshop, but uh there is a slot. I'm doing a workshop on Monday from I think uh something in the afternoon sometime, like uh two to four or something like that.
Uh at the International Chefs Congress, and whatever, they had a slot, so they're like, hey Dave, will you be our sloppy third? Some guy cancel. Will you do it? I'm like, yeah, sure. What the hell, I'll do it.
I'll do it. I'll do it. So it's supposed to be tech and cocktails. I'm gonna bust out probably the centrifuge. I might bring the crappy little centrifuge just for you guys to play with.
Although it stars, it's not firing up. I uh I took it apart. So in in all fairness to the piece of equipment. I took it apart, but it's not getting electrical signal anymore. Is your yours at home still working?
Circulator? No, no, no, no, no. The uh the uh centrifuge. Pay attention, pay attention. Catch up.
Oh, uh he took it to Del Posto. So it's still working? Yeah. Alright, I'm gonna have to borrow that sucker. Um or fix fix mine.
But I'm gonna bring the full size centrifuge. I'm gonna do a lot of work with uh what I've been working on for the past couple of weeks for the new bar menu is tannin removal. Tannin removal. I'll just leave it there. I won't spoil it before the demo, or before I can write it, but just put that in your head.
Tannin removal. And also, some interesting bodying effects with uh whey protein. So head on down to the International Chefs Congress to see Dave Arnold, me from Booker and Dax, our bar doing a what in the hell they call this? Like a mixing workshop or something. I know, right?
Pathetic. Well, you're not doing it for me, you're sitting around. So every time I I have a birthday, right? Which is too many, too many, too many times that Nastasha and I have shared birthdays together. I'm like, we still work together?
What the hell? Like it's like we just increment the year and we're like, I'm 41 freaking years old, and I'm still carrying my own equipment to demos. You know, when you're like 20 and uh forget 20, when you're like 19 and you're in a band and you're like someday our band's gonna be awesome, and someone's gonna move my big bass rig for me from place to place. I'm gonna have like, you know, roadies. No, never happens.
Never happens. The day that someone actually picks up a piece of equipment for me, I will drop dead from shock. So I hope it never happens. Anyway. Japanese, the Japanese.
What? The Japanese. Oh, that's true, man. That was crazy. And then we almost died from shock.
Yeah. Right? We showed up, all the equipment was moved around. Yeah. Like the equipment we asked for was there, and we we almost passed out.
Remember that? Crazy. Don't do that to me. Don't, don't, don't all of a sudden change things like that. It's no good.
Okay. Uh last week we had a question in on oh, I didn't say the uh number. 718 497-2128. That's 718-497-2128 to call in live to the studio. 718 being a Brooklyn number, this being the land of hipsters.
Okay, uh last week I had a uh Twitter question come in and I didn't get a chance to uh answer it. I apologize. From Landon Young, ordered a Berkshire hog head and belly, bacon, cold or hot smoke, and head favorite use. Okay, look. The bacon, uh look, I I don't I've only made it like once or twice many, many, many, many years ago, and I don't do a lot of smoking.
In fact, there's another smoking question here. Um, but I will say what what I from what I do know, uh, I, you know, the recipes uh ask for a warm smoke, not a cold smoke. In other words, like bacon is supposed to be somewhat cooked, up in anywhere between 130, which is on the low side, but really more like 145, uh 150 is typical, like 140 I would do probably for it after it's been cured in a mixture of salt uh and nitrates and spices and possibly sugar and maple syrup and what else. Um, you know, you could do dry or wet, it doesn't matter, but they're almost invariably cooked during the uh smoking process. That said, that said, and it all depends.
If you're gonna fry it, I mean who the heck cares how much, you know, not not who the heck cares, but like it's not super uh critical on what temperature you're gonna cook it up to so long as you bring it up to the final cooking temperature. Now, if you salt the bejesus out of it and dry it, then you don't need to cook it at all, right? Um so it a lot is dependent upon what kind of cure you're gonna use uh and how you're gonna use the finished product. That said, the my favorite, not bacon, but pork belly I've ever had was Wiley, my brother-in-law Wiley Dufrein's original WD-50 opening menu uh long cooked pork belly, and he cured it. Uh he cured it in a mix with nitrites, actually, uh and salt for a long period of time, and he cooked it at an extremely low temperature in a circulator.
He didn't smoke it, right? So he just took it out uh of the cure, pressed it really flat so it was nice and dense, and then uh crisped up the skin side and sliced it thin, served it. Or not even thin, it was in chunks, but the most delicious pork belly I've ever had. But if you were going to do a uh something like that instead of a bacon, then what I would do is I would do the cooking procedure as Wiley did. Then I would uh dry it off at a very low temperature so you're not cooking it, uh, and then cold smoke it.
That stuff was delicious. Oh my god, was that stuff delicious? Okay. Uh and then as for the head, favorite use. Uh now, okay, look.
So if you want to go Italian on this, you should definitely cut the gel. I'm assuming the head comes with the jowl, right? And Nastasha, I know that you hate almost everything in the world that's delicious, but you like guanciali, right? Mm-hmm. Really?
You're not just saying that so I don't yell at you? I don't like it as much as Pinchale. I would, I don't put it in uh carbonara. Okay, uh listen, I'm not gonna, I can't I can't have this discussion with you, Nastasha. But guanchali, which is the cu which is the cured uh jowl of the pig, is in my mind one of the more delicious things in the world.
It's my it it perhaps ranks in the top one of my pizza toppings. You know, aside from you know, whatever cheese and sauce, blah blah blah. But like in terms of meat-based topping for a pizza, my absolute favorite. Have you not had the guancialian egg pizza here? I have not had that.
Guess what's gonna happen today? Guancialian egg pizza! At Robert's come to Robertas and have our delicious pizzas. Right? Right.
Uh anyway, uh so guanchali is delicious. So if there is uh if the jowl is left on the uh pig head, I would definitely take that off and cure that separately. I uh I you know I like a saw like a lot of people who are doing these artisanal guancholis, like cure the hell out of them, and they really salt the ever-loving crap out of them, uh, and they become a lot drier. I actually prefer a more modern, wetter, what? Nastasha's like uh shocked because she's reading something about uh uh drug-resistant gonorrhea on in a magazine.
But okay, so once you cut the jowl off, then uh and I've never made it, but one of my favorite things to eat made from pork head is uh is uh testa, you know, uh head cheese, uh the Italian-style head cheese. There's a decent recipe for it on page 187 of the new Salumi book by uh Poulson and Ruleman. You like Testa styles? She's not paying attention. I'm reading your tweets.
Uh no, uh yeah, I do. Yeah, okay, fine, fine. Good, good. Nice enough. She actually is trying to find out if any of you guys are tweeting in questions.
So I'm gonna give her a pass on this one for not paying attention. It's good, it's good. Anyway, uh, but if you the one thing I have done a lot with pork heads and I like, and I know it's not traditional at all, is making a scrapple with them. Scrapple, scrapple, for those of you that don't eat scrapple, smack yourself in the face. Unless you're a vegetarian, if you don't eat cra uh scrapple, I almost called it scrapple, which is a lot of people.
Smack yourself because scrapple is incredibly delicious. Now, what is scrapple? Scrapple is basically polenta plus. If you just sold scrapple as polenta plus, then everyone would order this, right? So when you're butchering a hog or whatever, whatever you got, right?
Hog, uh traditionally the scrapple will be made from kind of the the the uh metzels, you know, metals up of the butcher's soup of whatever's being boiled uh and done, along with uh all the entrails called the pluck, and it would have a lot of liver. And so the liver thing is what kind of I think what gave it a bad uh wrap among certain people, but modern scrapples don't have to be made with liver, don't have to have that livery taste. You just cook the heck out of the head, right? Get a nice strong gelatinum, the keys has to be a gelatinous stock. Pull the head out, pick the meat, chop it up, throw in the cornmeal, cook it like a polenta, at the last second, throw the meat back into it, form it into blocks, let that sucker set, cut that sucker, fry it, and pour maple syrup over it.
Could anything possibly be more delicious than this? I don't know. I don't know. I like scrapple hits like a cord in my taste memory uh because even my grandma actually, my non-Pennsylvania Dutch grandma used to make it for me, but you know, I have a lot of like Pennsylvania in my family going way back, although I never lived there. Uh so scrapple is uh fantastic, and there's many regional variants of scrapple.
If you want to read an incredibly informative but deathly boring book, the authoritative book on Scrapple is William Voice Weaver's book titled Scrapple. Uh another way, what's it? So Scrapple, you do you like Scrapp? You know, you're not even paying attention, but you don't like Scrapple. I don't think I've ever had it.
Do you like polenta? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Another thing, I don't know whether I've discussed this uh on the air before, but another food that has a bad rap, like scrapple, is freaking haggis. Haggis.
Have I discussed this? Anyone remember me discussing haggis? Hagis freaking delicious. If you were to just sell haggis as oatmeal plus, right, which is basically what it is. It's like oatmeal and meat stuff stuff stuffed into a sheep c uh sheep's uh what's that thing called?
Stomach and cooked. That is delicious. That is delicious. Haggis, neeps, and tatties. Look, there's meat, sure.
There's meat in haggis that some people are screamish about, but you eat that crap every day if you eat any sort of processed meat. And whatever. I'm just saying scrapple, haggis, come back, brothers, because you are some delicious meat products. Uh should we take a commercial break? Sure.
All right. Coming back in a second with some more cooking issues.org. Pasture raised on 150,000 acres in Central California. Hell yeah. Free range.
Sustainably produce. Humane. Hurst transgrass-fed beef. The authentic flavor of the American West. Oh, yeah.
The authentic flavor of the American West. Hurst ranch. Grass-fed beef. Right? Love that song.
It never gets old. Love that song. Love it. That's the only reason we did the uh the fundraiser here was because we knew that we would get the live performance of the Hearst French grass-fed beef song. That's all that's all I wanted.
Okay. Uh, this in uh we have a lot of actually smoking and preservation questions today, Stas. Uh, this one in, I'm gonna do one that I can't answer. Should I do the one I can't answer now, or just do it at the end and say, well, sorry, I can't answer it. Bye.
But I'm not gonna do that. I'm gonna suck it up and say I can't answer it. Uh John from Osaka writes in and says, if you know the temperature of a food, uh well, sorry, if you know the temperature of food will be stored at, and that food's water content, uh, in the literature, water content is abbreviated A with a little W, by the way, meaning water activity. Uh, is there a way to calculate how much salt you need to add to that food to preserve it indefinitely? I want to make a variety of salted foods that can be stored indefinitely in the refrigerator and around five degrees Celsius.
I found a few lists of water contents of common foods, but I was unable to find information about what saltage percent uh what salt percentage is necessary to prevent microbial growth. Thanks, thanks to John and Osaka. No. How messed up is that? No, there's not.
First of all, salt does a bunch of different things. Uh, huge quantities of salt uh actually stop uh almost everything from growing, right? Which is why mummies work. Uh you know, they're completely well, they're not just salted, they're dehydrated, right? They're actually not salt, it's natron, etc.
My point is is that salt is usually used uh uh in conjunction with dehydration for preservation in foods like uh ham, for instance. Now, salt also has some other properties uh in that it inhibits many pathogenic bacteria, but not certain you know reasonable amounts of salt, but not things like lactic acid bacteria. So you add salt to things like cabbage to produce sauerkraut uh or kimchi because they will select for uh lactic acid bacteria to grow. The lactic acid bacteria increase the acidity, decrease the pH. And it's actually the combination of the salt plus the acidity that prevents uh things from spoiling.
So, and we're gonna talk about this again when we talk about sriracha in a minute, but it's uh or siracha, sorry. Uh, but the the issue is is it's very hard. Um, like water water activity and salt are one combination. And so if you have a particular system, like a meat system, then you can know a certain quantity of salt plus a certain water activity that are good. Uh, but it's hard to know because the question is is you might be safe with a lower salt content if, for instance, there's acid present.
So it's very difficult to answer, and I looked around for any sort of general guidelines uh that were applicable to all circumstances, i.e., meats, vegetables, fruits, and I couldn't find anything that I'm willing to quote. Uh, and so I don't have an answer, although this, you know, I I'm interested if anyone uh writes or tweets in or calls in with uh a source for information like that. I'm I'm happy to take it. Uh should I take a non-preservation-related question, Frison? Alright, I'll do a non-preservation-related question.
Uh question from Justin. Uh for an upcoming party with friends, uh, we are all bringing special cocktails. I like special cocktails. You? I do.
Yeah. Although, what do you actually prefer? Champagne. Champagne, correct. Uh, I've decided I want to make a vodka coffee and would really appreciate your input on it.
The goal is a full strength cocktail with a strong, rich coffee flavor and full caffeine content as well. So you want to pick them up. You know, that's the uh the espresso martini, and I don't for some reason his name just pops straight out of my head. One of the most famous bartenders in London from like, you know, for a long time. His name literally just popped out of my head.
But uh he invented the espresso martini, and the quote that he says is that a model came in and she asked for something that would pick her up and F her up. Wow. And so he invented the espresso martini. It's a good quote, yeah? Okay.
Uh and I'm seeing that's what you want here. Okay, so uh my chosen technique is a mid-grade vodka, filtered through a charcoal filter. You gotta get the right kind of uh filter, obviously, to do the right kind of uh flavor stripping. Uh cold brew coffee with a very good uh dark chocolatey coffee and in the refrigerator overnight. Filter back into the bottle, mix in vanilla, uh simple syrup to flavor.
Is there anything I can do to take this up a notch? Well, yeah. Okay, so look. So you're doing cold brew. Um, assuming you're doing the um kind of concentrated um oh, what's the name of it?
The one where you basically just stir up the grounds, let them sit in contact with the grounds for a long time, and then filter, right? As opposed to the Kyoto style uh that produces a c a coffee concentrate. So here's the thing: cold brew. Uh cold brew is becoming extremely popular right now. I don't really do much of it because I I prefer I drink a boatload of coffee, but almost exclusively in the form of espresso.
I'm trying to branch out, but I'm branching out first into uh hot hot coffees, right? Drip drip style and press style, you know. Anyway. So uh, but uh I do a lot of work with nitrous infusion and coffee. And I what I would do to kick it up is to try to do the coffee extraction directly into the liquor.
It makes an obscenely coffee uh flavored thing. See if you like it better and will allow you to have more wiggle room in terms of the other ingredients you add because it's gonna put you on your behind, uh, as they say with the espresso market in more ways than one. So with anything, the the flavors that are extracted uh in in any sort of brewing situation are dependent upon what you're trying to extract. So in coffee, there are acidic flavors, there are um there are bitter flavors, there's caffeine, there's there's a whole range of different flavors, and they're all extracted uh differently under different regimes, i.e., different pressures, different temperatures, different times, right? So uh espresso uh is brewed under extremely high pressure in very short amounts of time, uh you know, you know, through a particular kind of ground and it favors the kind of extraction you get from espresso.
Colder one, colder uh they say, although I haven't done a lot of experimenting, like a long-term cold cold drip coffee tends to produce a less acidic uh coffee, extracts less of the or maybe changes the uh doesn't alter the coffee to make those more acidic things. I don't really know. But if you were to just mix coffee grounds into liquor, you get a certain extraction. The longer you let that that liquor sit, the more of the bitter components are extracted, and the less of the varietal note you get of the coffee, and more of the just the backbiting bitter. If you pressurize that liquor with nitrous oxide in a whip in an ISI whipper, and you can look up uh rapid infusion on the cooking issues website to check it out.
Um, but like two minutes, you get an extremely like you put the an espresso-related ground in the in the in the liquor, pressurize it with nitrous oxide. The nitrous oxide forces the liquor into the coffee grounds, you vent it, it boils out violently. You get a very dark, very rich and non-bitter uh coffee that you can do like that, and you could have the whole thing done in under three minutes. And we make a lot of drinks with that as a base, and it's extremely coffee and extremely punchy. You might like it worse than cold brew, you like might like it better than cold brew.
It is a form of cold brew in that there's no heat added to it. Um too long an extraction with that technique produces extremely bitter, bitter notes. You can also change the extraction into straight water by doing a nitrous oxide uh infusion of uh water into coffee at cold temperatures and test the difference between that kind of extraction and your standard cold brew technique. With any of these things, there's no better, there's no worse, there's just what you like better. I happen to like a two-minute infusion of coffee at I forget what it is, I think it's roughly 32 grams uh uh ground coffee per liter of uh per liter of uh liquor uh for two minutes with two ISI chargers in a one-liter container, um, shaken for about a minute and a half, uh allowed to sit for two minutes, vented violently and strained.
That's my favorite. But uh your favorite may vary. I find that that's non-bitter, but if you do two and a half to three minutes, you get uh more of a bitter uh bitter note. Uh so I would do that. Here's another thing.
If you really want to take up your coffee experience a uh notch. If you are a fan of the creamy mouthfeel of a hot espresso, you can re-mimic some of that by uh carbonating not with CO2, which Manhattan Special Soda aside, I'm not it's very hard to get a good brew that way. Uh nitrous. If you actually, once you chill the cocktail, you carbonate it with nitrous and spray it out of a foamer. It's not the necessarily the foam, but the creamy aeration you get from the nitrous bubbles and the slight sweetness that comes from it, uh, mimics the body that you get in a hot in a hot style espresso, but in a cold drink.
And uh I tend to do that with uh a good number of coffee drinks that I do that don't contain milk. Uh although I could do it in milky coffee drinks too. Why don't I? Is it because I'm stupid? I know why.
It's because it costs a lot of money to do in a commercial situation to keep pumping those cartridges out. We should do one. What the hell? I mean, just for ourselves. Do you like that coffee drink, Stuck?
Yeah, it's good, right? We make a drink called the Shakerado that's that that coffee liquor I just told you with uh um so two ounces of of that liquor. And this one's it's m it's mellow. It's a lot a lot mellower because there's there's milk and cream in it. So it's two ounces of that, I think a half ounce of simple syrup, one to one, and uh an ounce of cream and an ounce of uh milk shaken and it gets a good frothy head, and you pour that into a glass.
But we could do that probably with a cartridge and just spray that sucker out and just go go loony bins with it. I'll try it. Maybe I'll try it today or tomorrow or whatever. They have two things. Yeah.
Is that the guy? Uh from Espresso Martini. Oh, yeah, that is him. Yeah. And all right on the line.
Oh. Caller, you're on the air. Hi. Yeah, my name's Jeff. I'm calling from Los Angeles.
Um, I had a question about uh cocooey nuts or candle nuts in Indonesian food. Right. I know I understand that they're uh poisonous, and I guess I wondered what what's the temperature you're supposed to cook them to, or can you kind of pre-cook them so that way they're not poisonous? 'Cause I won't want to keep them around the house, but I'm worried about my young nephew and dogs and cats and stuff eating them and dying. Uh wait, wait, but you you want to eat them yourselves or you just want to find out how to oh you want to keep them as solids around but you want to neutralize them.
Right. Okay. I researched this uh I researched this a couple of months ago, and the only thing that stuck in my head was I really wanted one because you can burn them straight up apparently. Have you ever burned one? I haven't actually burned them before, but that's why they call them candle nuts, apparently, is because they make you can they're they're oily enough you can use them in like candles.
Right. Yeah, I mean that's what I read, and I've always wanted to like wouldn't that be awesome, like you know, instead of a regular candle on the table just burning that sucker. Um That'd be kind of cool. Yeah, uh but I see I seem to remember there there being some I I I can't remember off the top of my head what the toxic principles in it are, and therefore since I can't remember what the toxic principles in it are, I can't think of a good way to remove them. Um I seem to remember there being some procedures for it.
Are they they are they consumed locally or are they just burned? They're they're consumed. They're actually part of uh Indonesian cuisine. I guess they're a thickener for uh a lot of curries, Indonesian curries and things like that. And do they do more than just cook do they cook them in a bunch of soaks of water?
I I guess you kind of crush them up and put them inside of the curry and they create some type of thickening. Um I I I haven't kept them around the house or use them yet, just because I'm I'm concerned because I have m you know, small kids and and dogs, so I'm worried. Right. I was given some poisonous nuts by a friend of mine and from Singapore once, and I forget the name of them. They weren't candle nuts.
And those ones you had to uh I think you had to cook them in like three boils of water first and then use them for whatever you're gonna use them. But you know, there's a lot of nuts that aren't poisonous, acorns, for instance, that uh are extraordinarily bitter. And so uh you would extract the bitter components by boiling them a bunch of times in water, throwing that water away, and then and then crushing and grinding it. But I'd have to I'd have to look up and seeing whether or not there's some there's some poisonous things that are that are destroyed by fermentation, and there are some poisonous things that are destroyed by uh just being heat labile, and there are some poisonous things that are destroyed by leaching. My guess with these guys is that it's by leaching.
You're hoping it's by leaching, because then you can just boil it a bunch of times, throw the water away and be good. But I'm gonna have to research it because I don't know off the top of my head. Okay. Or I was I was also wondering, I have a circulator if I can just cook it at a certain temperature for X amount of time, I'll just pasteurize it and kill it off that way. Okay, so like certain things like water chestnuts are have actual parasites in them and need to be cooked.
You know, you can kill that way, but i it it's all a question of whether or not the whatever the toxic principle in them is uh is heat stable. If it's not heat stable, if it's heat labile, then yes, you can just cook it away, and then it's a question of knowing a time temperature. And if you're if you're lucky enough that the that the temperature uh to destroy the toxin is low enough to not destroy the structure of the nut, then you can have something that looks like a raw, undorked with nut that um you know is i is is okay, but the odds of that are fairly low, I would guess. I would guess you have to leach the stuff out. If you're never gonna if you're never gonna eat them, you could probably lease them out with something that won't ruin them.
But I have to I have to research it. Stas, can you put that down as like something for me to look? I'm gonna I'm gonna look into candle nut uh preparation and I'll I'll try to get to it next week. Does that sound good? Sounds good.
Thank you. All right, thank you. Uh okay. So I already answered the the coffee question, yeah? Yeah.
I did, right? I finished that? Okay, good. Uh because I never know. I can never remember whether or not I got like sucked off topic or whether I answered it.
Is that I mean, I guess that's that makes sense because of me, because that's how I work. Okay. You guys know next week is episode 100, right? What? Oh my god, we gotta blow this out.
What are we gonna do, Jack? Wait, I lied the week after next week. Oh that's just even more uh advanced notice for you. We gotta do something. Yeah?
Yeah? All right, we'll figure it out. Okay. From Jonathan. What is the best way to smoke a whole chicken?
I have a pretty good uh kitchen and includes a low temperature smoker as well as a hot smoker, and both have good temperature control. I also have a circulator and a CVAP. Yeah, that's pretty good. Uh so uh anyway, for the for the two people that listen to this show that don't know what a circulator is, God bless you for listening to my ramblings without knowing what a circulator is. But uh uh circulator is a piece of equipment that can hold a temperature very accurately.
Actually, uh there's kind of the like the wars between my buddies, right? Philip Preston now has the $500 circulator. What's the uh Nomiko going for? Uh Weepop circulator. $100?
No, it's like $350 or $400. Anyway, so it's the War of the Inexpensive Circulators, and while this may not be a good thing for circulator manufacturers, it is gonna be a great thing for the world at large. Because I predict that with the circulator dropping below 500, there's going to be an explosion of circulators on the market. What do you think? Yeah, I think so.
Yeah, she doesn't give care. She doesn't care. You like using the circulator, right? I haven't used it in a while, man. Really?
Why? Because you have brain damage or you don't cook anymore. Because she goes out with Mark Ladner from freaking Del Posto and just has him do the goddamn cooking. I didn't mean to curse. Wow, that was a curse.
It was a curse. Well, it depends on who you're talking to. Depends on who you're talking to. Jack, is that a curse on this radio show? We'll have to ask the concerned apparent who wrote in that one time.
Ooh. Oh no, but he was happy. He just didn't want to, he just said he pre-listened to it. Oh, right. Screened the shows.
He didn't hate us for it. I've cursed more than you. That's true. That is true. It's a family program.
Okay. So, Jonathan, yes, you do have a uh pretty well uh pointed kitchen there. Okay. Here's the issue with the smoked chicken. Uh so the question is most people I looked up on the internets uh to see what the kind of standard answer for the smoked chicken uh thing is, and it seems to me that everyone cooks the heck out of a chicken.
They overcook the hell out of it. They like it with the with the crap cooked out of it. So most people on the internets are smoking it uh at a temperature between 250 degrees and 300 degrees Fahrenheit inside of the smoking chamber for a long period of time. So it's the equivalent of of uh of like you know, slow cook uh on any sort of uh uh barbecue they just with smoke. Um in general, they brine the the ever loving whatever out of these birds because when you're gonna viciously overcook the birds because they're they're all cooked up to an internal temperature of like 170, which is like 165, 170, which is above 70 degrees Celsius, which is ouch, that's high.
It's high temperature, like 63, 64, 65, even 67 Celsius. So high. So high hurts my feelings to think about it. The leg meat might actually be okay at that temperature because there's enough connective tissue to break down and be good, but the breast meat is going to be dry. It will be dry.
There will be dry breast meat. Um so they brine uh the heck out of it with salt. The salt ameliorates uh the uh the protein, like lets up allow the protein to hold on to more water even when it's viciously overcooked. Um, and then then smoke it, and they love the smoke flavor so much from the long smoking that they probably tolerate the fact. They all say that it's juicy, and I'm sure there's fat present, which makes it look juicy, especially in the fatter parts of the chicken.
But I guarantee you that that breast meat is not juicy at those temperatures. It just isn't, unless you've really jacked it with phosphates and salt and all sorts of stuff, which I doubt you do. Here are the important things to take into consideration. One, if you want uh smoke to develop on the surface of the chicken, you want a real smoky flavor, you're really gonna have to uh dry the skin off, let it dry off before you hit the serious smoke with it. And the same thing, by the way, goes with the bacon, as we said before.
I probably didn't say it before, but obviously you want the surface to be dry, so it helps to uh let the thing, even before you hit heavy smoke on it to um to get dry. But you know this since you already have a smoker that can do low temperatures as well as high temperatures. Um the other thing is is that um you know it it depends on what you want out of a smoked chicken. So if you want to smoke chicken uh to be pink, right, to have take take on that pink color, then you're gonna need to make sure that you have uh an actual wood or a lot of gas fire. You're gonna you're gonna need a lot of like what they call NOX, i.e.
either uh NO gas or NO2 gas, right? NO2 gas, somewhat water soluble, permeates into the um into the chicken, reacts with whatever um you know myoglobin is present and forms a stable pink cured color, right? Which is the I think the best associated uh uh explanation of why uh smoke ring happens in things. So for a smokery for pinkness, you're gonna want uh low low temperatures so that you're not uh denaturing the myoglobin very quickly, right? Because the way myoglobin, even though there's not much in chicken, it's present, the the way myoglobin denatures is the slower it denatures, the more resistant it is to changing its color and uh turning into you know the gray color of totally cooked cooked myoglobe, gray and brown.
So uh that's why, for instance, that when you do low temperature cooking in a circulator, uh the meat around the bone, if it's not cooked quickly, uh gets insulated and never really gets cooked uh to uh what people are thinking is a done color. I call that kind of persistent pinking, but it's a slightly different pink when you get uh cured meats, and so you should be fine. People should like it. Although people do throw away pink smoked chickens and turkeys if they don't know any better. Anyway, uh that's that's neither here nor there.
Um so uh this is what these guys are doing. If I were you, I would cook this sucker through to I would you want to do a whole chicken, you said, right? Shoot, whole chicken. See if if you were allowed to if you if you're gonna do it whole, then I would brine it because the breast meat's still gonna need protection. Uh even if you cook it, uh let's say we're gonna C vap it up to an internal temperature of uh 66 Celsius, let's say 66 Celsius.
The bones will still be uh still be pink there. Now you gotta remember, like if I don't want any pinking around the bones, I completely bone it and leave it whole a la my totally boned out uh crazy aluminum, you know, Thanksgiving turkey. Are we gonna do that again this year, Stuz? Yeah, we can. You wanna?
You want to do two? You can have one? What are you doing? Who knows? You don't know what you're doing for Thanksgiving?
Oh, okay. Let me give this finished. So then what this is, what I would do then is uh I would I would cook it all the way through, pull it out hot, let it flash off so it dries off, and then you can do a cold smoke, but you will not get a pink ring with that because once you cook the meat, it won't pink up from the uh smoke ring. If you want to go more traditional and you want it more evenly cooked, uh, I would spatchcock it, i.e., cut the thing open and splay it open, although that's not really a uh a whole bird, but that's the way that I do uh larger animals like turkeys. If I'm gonna grill them and I don't have accurate temperature control, of course you do.
Okay, caller. You're on the air. Hi, Dave. It's Derek from uh Montreal. Hey.
And uh I have a question about oysters. Am I ready? Uh you uh a few weeks ago you mentioned just off the cuff that you would once uh steeped oysters in aquarium salts and water so that they would pick up flavors that you were infusing and not water. Correct. And uh I want to know uh I picked up the salt, and I just want to know what the uh the best approach was to get the a successful result.
All right, so okay, so so here's here's the here's the thing. So first thing you have to figure out is how uh briny you like uh your oysters, right? What kind of salt level you want in your oysters? I like fairly salty uh oysters, like so for instance, like ducks berries out of Massachusetts and things like that. I really enjoy that.
Uh you might like a slightly less saline one, and so you're gonna have to figure out how much salt you're gonna want to add per uh gallon of liquid. It's usually it's been a while since I've done it, but I believe it's 0.29 or 0.27 pounds of salt per gallon of uh liquid. I'm sorry I remember it for all you metric heads. I'm sorry I remember it in Imperial Units, but that's you know what it is. Um and that relates to the that relates to the average salinity of ocean water, which is what aquarium salt is kind of calibrated to.
Okay. So you you're gonna want to end up at something like that. Now the question is what flavors do you want to do? And how fine a uh so what you don't want to do is include anything in the liquid that's going to kill the oysters, i.e., either clog its gills, so large particles, I forget what the exact number is, but it's somewhere on the order of uh particles larger than I think like 10, 12, 14 microns, particles larger larger than that tend to clog up the gills of oysters and kill them. Okay.
So you so you don't want uh large particles like that. So you want everything filtered. I use a rotor stator homogenizer that can blend things down to well below that. A vita prep, just for your, you know, just for mental information, can only really get down to about a 20 micron size. So not enough to prevent um prevent gill clogging in this.
So you want to make sure that everything is filtered. So juices are good, uh things like that. Uh you also can't be uh acidic, right? So pH water, I mean you gotta get the pH balance of the water has to be uh accurate. So you can't use a lot of uh acids or that will also wipe them out.
Uh I have had people say that they've had luck with things that are otherwise irritants like smoke. And we have done bacon in clams, but I haven't done it in oysters because when I was doing a lot of my initial experiments, I want to stay away from things that were known irritants. I know for instance that cardamom uh works. So I'll tell you the recipe that we used to use was we would juice a boatload of carrots. Uh I would then take uh cardamom uh and we would hit it with the uh blender.
We make this carrot cardamom liquid, uh, strain it, uh hit it with a rotor stator to make sure all the particles are small. Then we would add uh sea salt uh basically to taste, but roughly see seawater quantity. Now the trick is to get oysters to feed, they can't be too cold. So in the at fridge temperature, it's not uh co it's not it's too cold, the oysters won't feed. Uh so you want to leave it.
Yeah, you want to leave them out uh for a little bit to let the let the oysters start feeding. You want to be completely undisturbed. If they hear rapping or tapping, then uh they won't open up and feed. And when we got good at it, we were getting something like 70, uh, 75% of the oysters would uh would open up and eat. Now here's the other thing.
They won't die uh you want to make sure it's well oxygenated, right? So blending right beforehand is good because it increases the oxygen level in the uh in the liquid. Okay. So you don't you don't want it to be you want it to be cold, not too warm because that's gonna drive off oxygen, but not too cold so that they feed. The other trick is you don't want to let them s uh go too long because an oyster physiologist once told me that uh there are things that can grow inside of an oyster that are not toxic to it, so won't kill it, but will can be toxic to you.
So I try to keep my infute my oyster eating period in um within the safety zone of food. So I keep my I usually try to keep my feeding period down to about two and a half hours, uh somewhere in that range, two and a half, three hours, keep them in that in that danger zone. They're alive still, so I don't consider a real danger zone. Then I ice them down immediately and then shuck them to order. Okay, okay.
That's that sounds great. Because I tried leaving them um in uh in the fridge overnight in in pure carrot juice just to see. And uh and they didn't really feed. Um I was kind of disappointed because they didn't there wasn't like visible carrot juice, you know, replacing their their natural juices inside. It was, you know, I could taste them, they're a bit saltier.
But uh that was in a cold, cold, cold fridge. So, if you're gonna never opened up. Right, too cold. In fact, that's why they do so well in the fridges, they clam up, they don't open and they're and they're and they're they're good. So you're talking like say I take my I have some beet juice uh sitting waiting for me at work.
I'm probably gonna get do another test this afternoon. So I'm gonna have that beet juice at almost room temperature, basically. I wouldn't go too high. Yeah, I mean like fifties, sixties are good. You don't want to go too high, or you know, uh, or you could be growing things like vibrio and all all these other things, but yeah, like fifty, fifty-five, sixty.
Like in Celsius, uh, what what is that? Uh oh. Like say like like a fridge, we keep our fridges at about four. So say you're talking like twelve degrees? Yeah, like in that range.
I wouldn't worry about it if it gets up, but like yeah, somewhere between twelve and eighteen, somewhere in there. Okay, okay, that's cool. And then and she's talking about two hours at that temperature. Yeah, yeah, two hours. Once they're at that temperature, like two hours, two, two and a half, and then ice them right down.
Yeah, perfect. Okay, I'm gonna try that this afternoon. All right, let us slip. Can I hit you with one more? Yeah, sure.
Um completely unrelated. I make uh a pine nut butter, or well, I've actually lots of different nut butters. At the moment, it's uh pecan, is what I'm doing. And uh it always breaks in the uh in the robo, and then I bring it back together and multify it by hand after. You have any uh tips, pointers for for smoothness?
What do you mean it what do you mean it breaks? What what's the what are the what are the ingredients? Are you adding extra oil to it? Uh I'm adding uh a little bit of uh caramel for sweetness, and uh I usually have to add a few drops of oil just to get it to to spin around in the uh in the robo coupe. Um is is my uh weapon of choice.
Do you have a champion juicer? I mean the natural oils come out of the nuts besides any oil that I add, but I find I can re-emulsify that with a whisk and some water by hand after. Yeah, do you have a champion juicer? Uh I have a juicer, I'm not sure what mark it is. Uh I mean, is it the kind that has the masticating, like a tube and the stuff comes out?
Because that's great for nut butters. That's what we use to do our pre-grind on nut butters, and then if we want them finer, we put them in a RoboCouper Vitaprep, and then after that, we put them into a wet grinder if we want them really, really, really fine. But ours didn't used to break, did they, Stuz? No. No?
I mean, uh, we have a nice juicer, but I don't know if I want to break it if uh that's like what what roasted nuts are gonna do to it. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, no, not break the, although I did break one once, but I was doing many, many, many, many, many nuts. Uh of course we were overheating the RoboCoos a lot. We were doing a lot of work.
We were making for like big events, we would make like big batches of nut butters uh and nut oils, actually. But uh we did have to add for some nuts, depending if they had low oil content. But I don't uh I don't know why they're breaking on you. I mean, you could add some, yeah, you could add an emulsifier, uh uh uh a water, you know, a an oil-loving emulsifier, for instance, less than or something like that, would probably buy it together. But I don't know what the emulsifier of choice is and things like peanut butter.
I have to look it up. We don't we never added any liquid at all to it, except for the small amounts of liquid in the form of simple syrup, right, Stas? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's kind of what I'm doing. And I I even boil my simple syrup like till it's almost caramel stage, because I figured less humidity is probably a good thing, right?
Uh yeah. You know, uh and you know when you process hard, you should you could probably add like a super finer powder, it'll eventually probably break down. I mean, that's quite the wet grinder we used was for. You could probably get away with it with no added, and then you notice it gets really hot when the robo runs a long time. You flash off a good amount of the water.
You know what I mean? Like if you run it long enough for it to get hot. Uh, but we never had a break. I'm trying to think. I'll I'll I'll I'm gonna I'm gonna put that on the list of things to try and try and look into.
Okay, all right, great. Well, I look forward to uh trying those oysters this afternoon. All right, uh let's know let's know how it works. Tweet tweet your results on in. Uh we'll do.
All right, cool. Uh got a question from Daniel in Illinois. Hi, Nastasha and Dave. I want to make Leela's Thai style sriracha sauce from She Simmers.com, which is like, you know, one of the good, you know, Thai uh Thai Thai slash American, Thai Merican blogs. Anyway, uh and give it uh as gifts this Christmas.
I'm wondering if it is possible to can small amounts of this stuff so that it will last longer before opening. Is there a way to figure out if and how this can be safely done? I'm assuming uh I would have to get some pH trips and probably increase the amount of vinegar and or sugar in the recipe. I do have a pressure cooker if that helps. Uh and a related question what are some of your favorite food items to make and give away?
Last year we did caramels, candied orange peel, and check's mix. This year I'm planning on roasting coffee uh and trying to do the hot sauce. Any other ideas? Roasting coffee is tough. Uh this is from Daniel in Illinois.
Uh roasting coffee is tough because uh it doesn't last very long. So if you're gonna roast it and bring it to someone's house that day, that that's good. But obviously, even like vacuum, it's not quite the same. I mean, you could vacuum pack, I guess, whatever. But anyway, roasted coffee is difficult, although fun to do.
I used to uh, you know, uh it's been a number of years since I roasted, but I used to only uh roast my own, and I love it. Of course you can get really interesting coffees from places like Sweet Maria's on the net and all that stuff. Uh I was uh I used to be uh uh uh an air popcorn uh roaster guy, uh, and then I had the the ones that were made for the purpose, and I burnt out three of them, and then I went to Whirly Pop. Anyway, enough in coffee roasting. I like to give away cookies.
What about you, Stas? Christmas? Yeah. Yeah. I like cookies.
Nastasha and I tried to give away uh like, you know, whatever that was, a thousand, two thousand cookies or whatever to uh the troops uh a number of years ago, and man, you would not believe how hard it is to give cookies to to troops. Uh but uh you know, leave that for a different life to talk about that. Uh so uh on the stuff. So I looked uh at her uh recipe, and by the way, she's also a linguistics expert, so it's uh uh not just in Thai apparently, but also in classics. So it's uh it's not uh sriracha, as most of us say, but siracha, siriracha, sorry.
It's one of our favorites, although I also found out that the one most of us use, which I call the actual name of it's uh Hui Fang's uh sriracha sauce, siracha sauce, uh is the one we call the the the nicely the rooster or actually the kitchen we call it the hot cock sauce is the one with the it's in the bottle with the rooster on the front and bright red because the bottle's clear. Apparently that's not the Thai style. The actually the one that she calls out, uh the two brand shark, I don't know, and panic, which is the one I don't know if I'm pronouncing it right, but that's the one that I got from my local Thai guy who said this is what we actually use the Panich, and that's the delicious, but not the same as the rooster brand one. So uh her recipe is more like the panic, which is delicious if you can get it. So her recipe is 24 ounces of uh red uh jalapenos or serranos.
Uh she says do not substitute any other type of pepper. Eight ounces of peeled garlic cloves, four ounces of white vinegar, twelve ounces water, sixteen ounces sugar, and uh six tablespoons of salt. Uh so and you know, you follow her recipe, but that's the basic thing. I don't think that that recipe on its own is probably a hundred percent safe. What you need to do is get a pH meter and check to make sure it has a pH of 4.5 or below.
Do not use your pressure cooker. Um, we'll get into that one second. So uh you need a pH of 4.5 or below to ensure that it's what's called a uh an acidified food, i.e. not a low acid food. Uh so just check that.
I don't count, I mean there is quite a bit of salt, that's quite a bit of salt uh in there, but I don't know that it's enough to uh to preserve it. I would go to the National Center for uh home proof food preservation and and look at their look at their things. Here's what they had to say. So I would I would take it below 4.5 and then do what's called the boiling water, where you actually cover the uh products in boiling water inside the cans and and and boil them out. Unfortunately, Jack's gonna cut me off.
I don't have enough time to fully explain uh um all all of the stuff, but I think you're right. Just get that get the thing below. And interestingly, the reason that they don't recommend small pressure cookers for canning is because all of the recipes that are written by the USDA and all the ones that have been tested by the agricultural extensions require the long heat-up time and the long cooling time of the larger canning things to get their recipes right. And they don't want to give you a recommendation. They could, but they don't want to give you a recommendation for how long to cook something in a smaller uh in a smaller thing.
Some people say, although I don't think this is the reason, that also the smaller ones they don't trust uh the accuracy of the pressure readings because the gauge doesn't go up high enough, but I think that's kind of a load of horse manure. The other thing is you need to uh make sure that if you are going to use the pressure cooker against their recommendations, that you open the lid and let it vent steam for a good 10 minutes before you allow the pressure to build up. That's gonna vent out all the air and get the uh pressure uh pressure uh working up. Um if you were to get it uh there's a it's not the same sauce, but I read a really interesting thing about uh someone who uh was using uh fermented uh pepper sauces. And you know what?
There's a lot to talk about with uh fermentation and canning, and uh maybe we should talk about that next time, huh? Sure. Because could because we're running out of time. Um get get all right. So I'll get back to it.
Uh I have a question question in uh that I'm really interested in that got tweeted in from Andrew about highly saturated fats. But since I'm probably gonna go on a 10-minute rant about highly saturated fats, uh I should probably leave that till next time. Same with uh the Harvard Lecture and Agar Agar Aggar Recipes. I'll get to you guys next week. I promise cooking Issues.
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