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If you like this program, visit Heritage Radio Network.org for thousands more. Oh you dirty red. Got me on this corner. And I don't know where I'm at. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues.
This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues, coming to you live every Tuesday from Roberta's Pizzeria on the Harriet Radio Network from roughly 12 to roughly 1245. And hey guys, you guys did a cover of uh Amos Milburn Victor Vicious Vodka? I didn't do a cover. Plexophonic did. No crap, really?
Plexiponic. Well, yeah, for those of you that follow this sort of thing, uh, you know, I'm a lover of the old kind of cocktail jazz phenomenon. Amos Milburn wrote a lot of good songs about uh drinking liquor, you know, a subject of which I'm fond. Uh, but we're no longer allowed to use his and it's not f for a long time a lot of our uh listeners thought it was fish is fish's vodka. In fact, not the case.
It's Vicious, Vicious Vodka. Oh, you dirty rat. But because we do not pay BMI ass cap uh fees, we can't use the original, but so that that covers awesome. I'm loving that. Yeah, it was a surprise in my inbox.
So is that uh so now we're cool? We can go back to uh I think we can I think we can use that. I mean, unless anybody wants to send in something else and one up that track. I don't know how you would, but I'm not sure. No, I mean that's it, that's perfect, beautiful.
Uh unfortunately today, not joined in the studio with uh Nastasha the Hammer Lopez. Her plane should be somewhere over Boston right now. She's flying back from Oktoberfest. Uh she was in Munich, and believe it or not, uh possibly the only human being in Munich right now who doesn't like beer. That crazy.
Like, why would you go to Oktoberfest? You don't like beer? She doesn't like any beer. I told her no. I was like, I was I said, Nastasha, look, you know, they're not gonna serve you champagne at Oktoberfest.
It's not gonna happen. You know what I mean? But luckily, we have uh Jack and Joe in the uh studio with us as usual. And today, uh crew from CNN who's uh shooting this, so we'll see we'll see what happens with that. By the way, you know what this means, Jack?
There was actually an opportunity to record on video for all time, Nastasha's vegan face. There was maybe that's why she's not here. You think so? You think she changed her flight or somehow somehow caused a delay on the on the airline so that she would not have to have her vegan face uh videoed? Maybe Joe can make a vegan face.
You think that well, Joe, do you have me? Joe, you don't uh you don't strike me as uh kind of hardcore as Nastasha is on the dislike of the vegan. No, I'm I I accept all people's dietary uh preferences. I'm not uh I'm not hater. Oh, isn't isn't that nice?
Isn't that nice? All right, listen, call your questions live to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. Uh, but let's get to some of the uh questions on uh the email. Okay.
Uh Kevin Scott wrote in and he enjoyed our uh suggestions on centrifuges. He says, Thank you very much for answering my questions about centrifuges a couple of shows back. Based on your advice, I've ordered a headache Rotanta 460R, which should be delivered in October. I'm pretty stoked and we'll post a bunch of stuff on my blogs as soon as I start experimenting and cooking with this new gear. Well, uh, Kevin, you decided to buy a pretty sweet little machine.
That's the same machine that uh I think that's the exact model perhaps that Wiley uses. Oh no, you have the R, the refrigerated. So you won upped Wiley Dufresne. Uh I think that also might be the one that uh Tony Canoyaro uses at uh 69 Colebrook Row. Good friend of ours, good friend of uh the program.
Uh so good call. I mean, expensive, a lot more expensive than my you know, buck you know, buck ninety nine centrifuges uh or uh not really. I've I have uh I've spent myself personally at least two hundred dollars on a centrifuge once, but that's about as high as I can go. Um anyway, good luck with it. I'm sure you'll love it.
It's a great machine. Uh got another question from Ed uh who wants to know about ice cream. What up, guys? Love the show. Kudos on having a uh well, there's a curse here.
Kick butt, kick butt radio show. Uh, and not ex not just because it's about cooking related stuff. Wanted to write in requesting some advice on stepping up to a large capacity ice cream freezer. I've been using the Lelo Musso 4080 for four years plus, and I can't recommend it enough for home ice cream enthusiasts. By the way, the uh the Lelo is that if the one that you've seen, it's kind of higher end.
It's uh around 600 bucks, I think. It's usually stainless steel, fits on a countertop, has its own refrigeration unit. My only gripe, obviously, with it is its batch times are around 30 minutes. Although I bet you could trick it out by really getting a cold base and not freezing quite as much. Batch time of 30 minutes, not really ideal.
You really want a batch time, you know, below about uh below 20, definitely. You know, remember the faster it freezes, the smaller the crystal size, smaller the crystal size, smoother the ice cream. Anyway, everyone apparently who has the Lello loves it. So you're not alone in your love of uh lellowness. In fact, I went and read uh a whole bunch of user review sites, and I couldn't find anyone who said anything negative about it.
Well, in the price range, it's clearly the best. Exception being good old fashioned uh rock salt and ice uh ice cream making, which is a pain in the butt, but makes some fantastic ice cream. That's that's how I do it at home when I'm not going all tech up on it. Anyway, um regarding the Lello. Uh thing takes a beating, freezes small batches quickly, and isn't too tough to clean up besides uh and besides the non-removable bowl, which is the bad part.
Anyway, uh I've been looking at used Carpagani freezers in the 40 to 50 quart batch range. Anything to watch out for when I'm buying it used and how old is too old. What the hell? You went from uh like you're going from a Lello machine to a 40 quart batch machine. Okay, so here's what I'm uh gathering.
You're opening a professional ice cream business. Now, the problem that okay, used equipment is great, except if you need to rely on it for your business. So, you know, if you're gonna get a 40 quart machine, you probably need that thing to run all of the time. Now, you might be able to find a company that bought one. Carpagani's a great brand, so I'm not, you know, don't worry about that.
But uh you you you have to make sure that the one that you're buying is I would not buy one that's really, really old because unless you have someone who's gonna refurbish that thing. If you have a professional or a Carpagani uh, you know, service person who will stand behind the machine and refurbish it, then and you know, of course, assuming it uses, you know, the normal, you know, modern refrigeration or it can be swapped to normal modern refrigeration gases, um, you know, it it could it's fine because you have someone who's gonna stand behind it and the parts are relatively available. But you have to make sure and check with other people who have the machine that the particular one that you're looking at isn't a dog, right? So, for instance, even the most loved ice cream, small ice cream machine that I've ever, you know, uh had pastry cooks talk about, which was the is a Carpegani Coldalite like Lab 100, that one has uh you know a critical expensive part that keeps breaking, the plastic uh faceplate where the draw the ice cream draw comes out of. And when that thing breaks, it's a lot of money to fix it.
Uh and you know, in a restaurant, you can stop it from breaking, but in the school, ours used to break all the time because students were brutal on it, because it's not the students, they don't care, and we're not allowed to yell yell at them, you know, uh too loudly when they do things that are rough to the machine. But uh that said, all of the parts for most of those Carpegani things are available, but it's good to ask other people who've used a particular machine to find out what parts fail, how much those parts cost to replace, and then uh making sure you can get it serviced. If all of those things seem fine, then a used machine can be a great deal. Uh and I poked around, and there are some people around who sell uh refurbished units that they'll stand behind. But uh if you need to rely on something for your business, I wouldn't uh go buy uh some because yes, you're gonna save a lot a lot of money.
The question is, can you afford to be wrong? So anytime you buy something on eBay, I mean I've gotten bitten in the butt before too. I try, you know, I I try to buy something that costs 10 grand new, and I'll buy it for you know a couple hundred bucks, and I'm hoping I can fix it. And sometimes I can, right? In fact, almost all the time I can, but sometimes you can't.
Uh, you know, you know, the biggest burn I ever got was I wanted a really beautiful inline refractometer, and the company straight up said they wouldn't support it anymore. So, you know, I would definitely not buy anything used if the company doesn't support anymore that has specialized parts, for instance, electronics boards. Because then if those things go bad, you need to buy a whole nother unit to swap out the parts in it, and can be it can be difficult. Um that said, you can get uh a great great deal. So uh it's all up to you.
It's very it's very hard to make a recommendation on this. Anyway, uh another question. Also, I've been starting to wrap my head around and experiment with hydrocolloids in my recipes. Uh lowering my egg content and adding lambda carragaen and locust bean gum. Can I disperse my hydrocolloids in a regular blender?
Any other particular hydrocolloids that you would recommend? Uh, one tip of advice I can give fried chicken flavored ice cream may get you punched in the face by one of your friends. You one of your friends literally punched you in the face when you made them the fried chicken ice cream? What did you tell them what they punched you in the face? Jack, that seems extreme, right?
Fried chicken ice cream seems extreme. Well, I mean, but that doesn't seem punchworthy. Right? No. I mean, you know, you know, I mean, like what food thing would cause you to punch somebody in the face?
That would have to be much more rancid than that. Yeah, I mean, I I mean I can I can think of one, okay, say, for instance, check this out. This was this this is punchworthy, right? So you take a rotary evaporator, which is of course the vacuum uh still that I use to do my distillation, and you can um literally deodorize without sterilizing, by the way, you can deodorize the most foul, rank, disgusting, putrid thing you could think of. Just totally rip all the aroma off of it, right?
Then turn that to turn whatever it is, your choice into an ice cream, right? And then you serve them the ice cream, and they won't know that it's some vile, rancid, putrid thing, and then you give them the distilled essence of vile. Now that you should get punched in the face for. Right? I mean that, you know, punch me.
Because, because you know, I I should probably be thrown in jail for that. That's awful. You know what I mean? Fried chicken ice cream, maybe the guy doesn't like it, but you know what, you gotta watch out. Your friends are your friends are too violent.
Your friends, too violent. Uh, anyway, um, on the carrageenins. Now, uh, carrageenins are a class of seaweed-based hydrocolloids, polysaccharides, and uh they have they're used quite often in ice cream because uh they react with milk, they have a synergistic reaction with milk. And what that means is you can use a very small amount of carrageenins to um enhance your ice cream. Now, there's three basic styles of carrageenin out there.
There's kappa carrageenin, which is brittle, uh, and you wouldn't you wouldn't want to use kappa carrageenin because you're not looking for something brittle. It's more that's more sets like more like an agar gel. In fact, it's very, very closely related to agar, although it's heating uh you know, just you know, properties are different. Iota carrageenin is a great one. Well, you might mean what am I saying?
Of course they use kappa carrageen. They use caparin all the time. You wouldn't want to use a lot of it. You're not trying to gel it hard. Uh iota caragenin is interesting because uh it will reform a gel after it's set and been sheared.
It's also very, very soft. So a mixture of kappa and iota are great for things like uh fake tofu set flavors or puddings, right? Great. Uh lambda is the third one, it doesn't actually gel, but it provides a creamy kind of mouthfeel. So if you're want to just increase increase or make more creamy the mouthfeel of the melted product, lambda is gonna be fine.
It'll also make it a little thicker, which will probably slow the meltdown characteristics of the ice cream. Typically, you include some other carrageenans in it, like uh iota or kappa, and in fact, carrageenins are standardized based on the application. So you could probably find a blend of carrageenins from a manufacturer, CP Kelco is the one that I usually deal with because they have a very wide range of it that's specifically blended for a certain set of ice cream properties. Now, uh carragenins in ice cream are typically there to modify the crystal properties to stop it from recrystallizing and have the crystals get big over time and to make it smoother and to prevent uh meltdown. The secondary thing that you add to it, like locust bean gum or guar gum, is usually there to prevent within the gel structure of the carrageenin to prevent the water or the whey from the water from leaching back out and uh ruining the texture of the ice cream.
It's called whey off, you know, with a with a not way like you know Uno Botella whey, way like W like whey protein and milk. Anyway, um so that's why they usually use two gum systems. They used to use guar a lot, but as I've said on the show many times, guar is now extremely expensive because the fracking industry wants so much guar. So fracking is uh, you know, where you inject high pressure liquid into rocks to shatter them so that you can get more stuff out like petroleum. And guar has this cool property that it reacts with borax, right?
Uh and when you react it with borax, it forms a gel, but the gel is pH dependent. Now you can't use this for food because you're not allowed to use borax and food anymore, even though it used to be used for things like caviar and whatnot. Anyway, uh, so it makes this gel. Here's why you want to do this, right? So when you're fracking, this has nothing to do with food, don't worry about it.
When you're fracking, what you want to do is put something like uh silica sand, which is called the propine, and that's going to keep the when you when you bust open a crack in the rock when you frack it, you need to keep that frack fracking crack open so that when the liquids come up, right, you can get them out. So you have to pump into the high pressure fracking uh fluid this uh like like grains of sand almost or silicates, but you need to carry them, and so you need something that's thick. And so they use guar that's been interacted with borax so that it will uh be a thick gel that they can pump it under high pressures. They then change the pH when they're done, and the guar melts away to a liquid. That's why they use so much guar when they're when they're fracking around.
Do you know that one, Jack? I had no idea. There you go. And uh Jack, of course, and apparently the network in general, anti-fracking. Yeah, we can have that discussion later, but anti-fracking.
Well, you know. Say for the most part, you know. Well, you have a like a giant no-frack sticker on the window as you walk in, so I'm assuming you're, you know, anti-fracking. Most of uh most of the network is anti-fracking. You do we actually have a pro-fracking comp.
I mean, I'm anti-fracking. I don't even know anything about the environmental issues, but I want my guar to be cheaper. So that's your piece. Yeah, I'm uh I'm the I'm the ice cream loving uh anti-fracker. You should leave that charge.
Well, because you know guar, uh guar and locus bean gum are extremely closely related. But guar has the cool property that when it's mixed with locust, uh when it's mixed with um uh gel-an gum, low acyl gel an gum, which is the one I use, forms an ice cream that both can be lit on fire, which is awesome. Uh, but also uh not not because it's combustible, not big, but because you know it it uh it it's a fluid gel, so it won't melt down. It's it's great brûle label ice cream. And and you know, I know gel and every chef does uh an ice cream that you can brute with uh Kelko gel F.
But the cool thing about the guar is when you add guar, it also gets a stretchy snappy kind of a characteristic, which is characteristic of Selepton Derma, the Turkish uh orchid ice cream, which you know, four or five years ago everyone was trying to duplicate. Anyways, uh so there you go, guar. But really cheap guar, uh really tastes terrible. It's beanie, it tastes like uh kind of like uh black-eyed pea flour, which I love black-eyed peas, but not the flour. Anyway, uh okay.
Uh so yeah, I would try other things like try locust bean gum, try doing a fluid gel, try adding a little bit of gel in. Small amounts of gel-an will really, really, really increase uh the holding time, i.e. decrease the meltdown of your ice cream, and it makes them absurdly smooth. Just look up Calco Gel Flo ACL gel an uh uh fluid gels, how to make a fluid gel with it. They're ridiculous, ridiculously smooth, the smoothest ice creams I've ever made.
The problem is add too many stabilizers and you decrease the flavor release. So a lot of people think gelato, for instance, is this all natural lovey dovey, no blah blah blah stuff. In fact, it's the most highly stabilized stuff in the world, which is why it has that texture, and which is why they have to add so much freaking flavor to gelato, because otherwise uh the flavor would be masked. Okay. What do you think, Jack?
Is that a good answer? Yeah, definitely. Let's take a break. Oh, okay. Going to our first commercial break.
Call your questions to 7184972128 cooking issues. So I could love you twice as much as I do. I wish I were twins. For us to idolize you each time I face you with two hearts twice as true. What couldn't full lips do when four is you say that I'm yours, da-da-da.
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Is that you guys with the music? Yeah, you know. Is that like ham what is that? Like some sort of hammer dulcimer thing? What is that?
Dramatic flourishes. We didn't make it. That was a friend of mine. Really? Or is in Kansas City?
Yeah. I'm just not used to hearing Dorothy talk with the with the kind of you know inspirational stuff behind her. Like that. Crazy. Nice.
Alright. So uh it you had a Twitter question coming in? We do have a Twitter question. So this one's coming from C Schneider, it seems. I don't know how to pronounce that.
Prime Rib cooked in circulator. Suggested time temperature. If cooked chills, should I reheat from room temp or tight from fridge? Alright, so here's the thing. Uh here's the issue.
The question is, how are you gonna serve this thing? I think I probably have mentioned this on air. I mentioned it in every sous vide low temp class that I ever do. Uh the last thing on earth, you want to do is cook an entire prime rib low temp and then just do a flash sear on the outside and carve it and serve it because you have one huge field of pink meat all all the way across. I'm sure I've mentioned this before on the air.
I ruined uh Christmas once at uh at my mom's house by doing that. I mean it ruined I mean in my family though, if you ruin the prime rib, you ruin Christmas. And it was perfectly cooked all the way across, but nobody wants a perfect field of uh one texture of meat all the way across. So it you can do the whole prime rib low temp if you're going to slice it into steaks and then uh and then sear them off because you have crust on each side, and then it's beautiful. And in fact, that's the way I cook rib steaks.
So for ribsteaks, I mean, and I think I've given it before, but for just a rib steak, what I would do is uh optionally sear it beforehand, uh put it in a Ziploc bag with uh a little bit of melted butter, circulate it at fifty either 55 Celsius or 55.2 Celsius for you know a couple of hours, drop the temperature to 50 Celsius for a half hour to 40 minutes, right? Don't hold it too long because I can't recommend as a safe, you know, holding temperature 50. Uh pull it out of the bag and put it onto something hotter, hotter than you know, hot the hottest thing you can find. Typically the hottest thing you can find in a house, unless you have a really butt-kicking grill or a deep fryer or a smoking hot cast iron pan, typically the hottest thing you have is not hot enough. So I'm talking hot, really hot to put a fast sear without overcooking it.
And the reason you drop the temperature down to 50 is so that you can get that good sear. So that's a steak. Now, let's assume you're talking about a roast. What you should really do is use a technique I call uh low temperature for insurance. And what I mean by insurance is cooking insurance.
So uh you might want to put an initial sear on the outside of the meat just to kill bacteria and start flavor development. Um circulate it. You could do it in a Ziploc bag, you could circulate oil if you have one of the old school uh fryers, and do the entire rib, the rip the rib roast to 55, 55, 2. And probe test it or use one of the programs like Sous vide toolbox that you can get on the internet to figure out how long it's going to take to get it up to temperature and give it a little bit longer than that so it's cooked all the way through. Now the entire rib is cooked all the way through.
Okay? That's why I call it now you don't have to worry anymore about the inside of the rib. Because when you're cooking a rib in a traditional way, you have two different problems you're working with. You're working with getting a good crust on the outside, and you're working with making sure that the inside is cooked, but not overcooked. So it's two separate problems.
So by doing the initial cook step, the low temperature step, you have gotten rid of that first problem. You know the inside of the meat is cooked. Now all you need to do is worry about the crust. Take it out of the bag. You can refrigerate it all the way down if you want to and cook it on a later day.
Just make sure it stays sealed in whatever you want. You don't want a lot of oxygen touching the already cooked uh fat and meat. Okay. Now you could also just drop the temperature uh or by pulling the roast out and letting it sit for an hour or so before you do your final roast off in the in the oven or you know, any one of these things. But once you let it cool down somewhat, now crank your oven so it's screaming hot and just put the roast in, and now all you're worried about is developing a delicious brown, crunchy crust with a little bit of the overcooked stuff on the outside that we all actually love.
You know, as much as I talk about low temperature cooking and getting all the cooking stuff right, the best part of a hammer or a roast is that like kind of overcooked, crackling fat stuff around the outside. Let's let's be honest. Uh, as long as there's a whole bunch of juicy, delicious stuff on the inside as well. And so you know, that technique is low temperature for an insurance where you've ensure that you've cooked the inside properly, but then uh make sure that you get a nice delicious crust on the outside is the technique that uh I'd use. Did that answer the question, Jack?
I think I answered the question. I think more than enough, yeah. Yeah? Definitely. All right.
Uh got a question in from uh Andrew. I'm gonna I'm gonna mispronounce your name, Andrew. Andrew Janjigjan. Janjijan. Janjajan?
That's not it. Really? Well, you come here and look at it at the next break. You tell me I got it right. And Andrew, you write in, tell me how to pronounce.
You know what? You know who you know who one of my favorites is writes in all the time? Rob Trepas. You know why? Because he knows I can't pronounce anything properly, and he put Trepas pronunciation, so now I see his name and I just think Traypa's.
See? Nice. See? Just me or TreyPaz sounds like something that could be delicious. Well, it does because it sounds like it does.
But it reminds me of creepies. Remember creepas? They're those like uh really kind of like like really saturated color, oily crayon suckers. Oh but imagine if they were delicious and edible, that would be Trepas. Right?
Yeah. Yeah. Crepas to Trapas. Anyway, uh, so Andrew, we'll just call him Andrew. His Twitter handle is at wordloaf, which I can pronounce.
Uh has a question for us that I was supposed to get to last week. Why are highly saturated fats better for frying slash crispness? Is it just better stability slash smoke point or something more? Thanks. Okay, I love this question.
I love it because I don't think you can say that there's any one fat that is the best fat for frying. There's okay, so look. High okay, so saturated fats are fats that uh that where all of the carbons and the fatty acid are uh fully saturated fats, or ones where all of the carbons are joined by single bonds. An unsaturated fatty acid is one where there's double bonds in the carbons. And you know, a monounsaturated means one double bond, and polyunsaturated means multiple double bonds.
Now it's the saturated fats, right, are the more plastic more plastic, i.e. solid fats, because the the more saturated something is, uh the higher the melting point, right? For a given length of fatty acid, right? Because fatty acid chains are measured by how many carbons long they are, and then after that, by how many bond double bonds they have in it, and then after that by where in the chain the double bonds are. Okay.
So it is true uh that uh the saturated ones have a higher melting point, and they're the solid fats. And the double bonds in unsaturated fats are much more reactive to oxygen, and it's oxidative breakdown that causes rancidity uh and all sorts of other you know issues that make oil taste bad. So, you know, in a world where you're going to abuse your fat, right, theoretically, saturated fats are going to last longer. It doesn't always work out that way, though, right? What I really want, what I really focus on when I'm choosing a fat is not the smoke point really, although it's important to have it, you know, be the smoke point to be high enough that it's going to break down.
It's not even how long the fat is going to last, although again, crucially important from an economic standpoint and making sure you can at least make it through tonight's uh frying. The crucial thing you need to first decide is what am I frying and how am I eating it? Let me give you an example. Uh donuts, when they're hot, always taste good, right? I mean, I've said this many times on the show.
Uh, like any any fool monkey can make a hot donut that tastes good, right? Also, yeast-raised donuts are much easier to make taste good than a cake donut. And the reason is that it has to do with oil absorption. So a cake donut absorbs much more oil from the fryer than uh yeast uh raised donut does. And so the quality of the oil makes a big difference.
Now, hot donuts, like most hot fried things, as long as the oil is of good quality, right, uh, are delicious. Let's be honest. Frying is God's cooking technique, okay? But um as they cool, right? If you fry in a liquid fat with a donut, it's gonna taste greasy.
And as you eat it, you'll get that greasy feeling on your mouth. What you want in a cold donut is for the oil to solidify for it to be a fat. So when you're frying donuts, you use solid fats, right? Now, when you're frying a potato chip, you need a liquid fat because what you don't want is the waxy feeling of a solid fat when you crunch on a potato chip. So, no matter how stable a solid fat is, if you're frying a potato chip, which is meant to be eaten cold, you use a liquid fat, right?
So, whether a fat is better or worse depends on the application. I'll give you an example of how hardcore this is. I don't know whether I've ever spoken about this on the air before. If I you know, if I have just to turn down, you know, whatever, just stop listening. But listen, uh if you remember wow, which is OLESCRA that you know came out, I don't know, about 20 years ago or something like that.
Um it was being licensed by the Frito Lake Corporation, and they were putting it into potato chips. Now, a Lestra is a fat that you can't digest, right? It's modified fat that you can't digest. And they can literally turn any any fat uh into OLESTRA. They could modify it such that you can no longer digest it.
Now, if you use l uh a liquid-based olestra, right? So it's so it's uh unsaturated, it's you know, it's a liquid at room temperature or liquid at body temperature, actually, more importantly. And here's where it's gonna get gross. I'm sorry, people, but if you eat a lot of olestra that is liquid at body temperature, to put it politely, it runs straight through you and you can't stop it. Hopefully you understand what I'm talking about so I don't have to get more graphic with you.
Uh so the solution, right, and because of that, OLEST got a really bad name and nobody wanted to eat it, and the product ended up dying, right? Uh, but the solution to that was they used a uh uh fat that had a very high solid fat index, SFI, which is how you rate fats, solid fat index or solid fat content. They had one that raised a very high SFI at body temperature. Now, the downside of that is that the potato chips that you made with it were extremely waxy, so that when you ate them, they had a waxy mouthfeel. It was such a problem that they built special impingement ovens that would blow air down on the potato chips as they were coming out of the line, and that would blow the surface coating of Olestra off of the top of the potato chip so it wouldn't have a waxy mouthfeel.
So everyone who complained about the Olestra chips that they could taste the Olestra, it's not that you could taste the Olestra, it's that you don't like potato chips cooked in a solid fat. Okay? So uh so anyway, so that's that. And I've complained on the air many times uh about cooking oils uh and the fact that um what you buy in the supermarket is is basically just a refined, bleached, deodorized fat. And that that's basically that's as that's how they, you know, that's how it's termed in the biz refined, bleached, deodorized fat.
Uh and they're not that tweaked out. So if you buy a liquid like that in the supermarket, they tend to be poor, you know, fairly bad frying oils because they're not that protected against oxidation. Uh and they're just they they break down fair fairly quickly, no matter what the source is on those liquid fats. The fats that I use to fry in are super tweaked out. So a lot of them are lightly hydrogenated, which means that they only take the double bonds out of the uh most reactive uh species.
So as you're hydrogenating something, you can actually uh hydrogenate only the most reactive species and therefore increase the oxidative stability of the rest of the oil. They also have uh all sorts of uh uh you know awesome stuff like antioxidants added to them, and consequently, commercial fry oil isn't like two times better. It's like ten times better from a stability perspective than the crap that you're buying in the supermarket. Another thing that people don't think about the freshest, and this has nothing to do with the question, but I just want to say it. The freshest uh oil isn't the best oil.
You've all noticed that there's a sweet spot in frying. And the reason is is as you're frying something, uh a layer of steam forms around your food, and and there's a water, uh there's a and also your food has a lot of water in it. And oil and water, as you all know, don't like to mix, and so you actually don't get that good a heat conduction with extremely fresh oil into food. Once the oil starts breaking down a little bit, then the oil can uh it forms its own emulsifiers and can really stick, really get in there and provide a lot more heat to the food. So oil that's been used a little bit, and you know, old school cooks know this, is actually a much better, more effective frying medium, faster transferring heat energy to your food than brand new oil.
And so real hardcore commercial people know exactly where that sweet spot is, and they adjust the systems, let's say in a potato chip line, so that the potato chips absorb, which absorb a lot of oil, something like 50% of the weight is you know, oil. As they go through the fryer, they're absorbing just the right amount of oil so that they're adding fresh oil all the time and never have to drain it, and the oil is always staying in the sweet spot. How awesome is that. Uh anyway, let's take one more commercial break. Call your questions to 7184972128.
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And welcome back to Cooking Issues. We have a caller, caller, you're on the air. Excellent. I was calling with a question about iced coffee. Okay.
And just brewing coffee and then putting it over ice afterwards. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Oh, yeah. I mean, look, I have to say, like, I'm not uh I haven't done a lot of personal experimenting with uh cold brew techniques, but uh I do know from um you know a lot I brewing kinetics are really complicated and interesting.
And so a couple of things happen. When you're extracting at a higher temperature, you shift uh the the different proportions of different things that you're leaching out of the coffee. Okay. So the hotter uh and and if you think about espresso, let's just take espresso. It's only think about espresso because that's something I know a lot about.
The even minor temperature shifts in something like espresso can radically change uh how the espresso tastes. So we you know, anyone who makes a lot of espresso knows that if your temperature is too cold, you get a sour shot because of what's getting extracted out of it. If it's too hot, you get a bitter uh taste, what's extracted out. Um the temperature, then the temperature also radically changes how things are infused in in general, like percolation rates. Everything is changed by temperature.
Um, yeah, so you're definitely extracting different ratios of things when you're doing it hot versus cold. Also, uh the what you do extract from coffee isn't uh uh stable. So when it's extracted at higher temperatures, the coffee will go through different uh kind of uh, I don't know how you'd put it, like auto hydrolysis or whatever, of the of the of the flavor components, and it will change differently from one that had never been heated. That's what I suspect. And based on discussions I've had with you, you know, coffee experts like Andrea Ily and stuff like that.
This is his words, not mine. So uh, and there are plenty of people who love the cold brew coffee and plenty of people that don't, you know. Uh and you know, when I make an iced coffee, I make iced coffee with I don't drink it first of all. My wife drinks it every day. I like espresso, that's what I drink.
I'm trying to try to get into loving uh other types of coffee, but but I'm I'm uh I'm you know I'm weird, I'm a weird guy. So uh but I love espresso, but when I make iced coffee, I make it from espresso. And that's to my wife's taste. But and there's no right or wrong here, but they definitely are different. Okay, thanks a lot.
Hey, no problem. Um, got a question from last week I should address. Uh Benjamin Petrazic writes in uh dear cooking issues. In your Harvard lecture, you say that the home chef should get comfortable with agar agar. Any starter recipes, either for uh dish or for a drink.
Okay, so if you're using agar is another seaweed powder, I love it because you can get it in any grocery store. Buy the powdered agar, don't buy the uh flake stuff. The flake stuff's not as predictable. Uh and just don't don't buy it. Buy the powder stuff.
Uh it's just as natural, it's not any more, you know, more or less natural. Get the powdered agar. Also get yourself a decent scale, one that can do tenths of a gram because you're gonna some of the agar recipes you're gonna be using uh were are gonna go down that low. So um agar starts gelling in about the 0.2% range. So that's uh two grams per kilo, and you use agar all the way up to about uh you know 0.8 or 0.9, all the way sometimes up to 1% by weight.
So that's the range you're gonna use. Uh agar, you want to disperse agar, and remember, whenever you're using a hydrocolloid or anything, you know, that that has that has that is a large molecule, you want to disperse it, i.e. get them all separated so that they don't glom together before you try to hydrate it. So agar you put into cold liquid, you disperse it with a whisk or whatever, then you heat it up, you heat it up to the boil, and when it boils, simmer it for a couple of minutes, and then you can let the temperature drop. Now the the main things you can do with it are you can set a gel, and it's a cool gel because uh it can be reheated all the way up to about 70, 75 Celsius before it starts to break down again.
So that's pretty awesome. Two, you can blend uh uh agar gels, and I would use about a 0.8, you know, eight eight grams in a liter, eight grams in a kilo, point eight percent fluid gel. You set the gel and you blend it in a blender and it forms a puree. So you could take any liquid you want and form a puree that you can plate out into, you know, that looks awesome. It looks like mashed potato on the plate, but when you eat it, it goes to a sauce, which is fantastic.
That same fluid gel, you can make an orange juice fluid gel or uh a lemon juice even fluid gel, and then use that to reinforce a whipped cream, which is awesome. Or uh if you use a very small amount with something like lime juice or lemon juice, like 0.2 to you know, two grams in a kilo. Uh that one when you set that gel, you can use for clarification. So you take your juice, you set it, you can actually boil the agar in water and temper in the juice if you don't want to heat the juice, as long as the numbers balance out right. Set it, break it with a risk uh whisk, put it into uh like a uh cloth napkin that you tie with string, throw it in a salad spinner, hit the salad spinner a bunch.
That's like you know, poor man's centerfuge, and you'll get clear, clarified liquid out. So that's just a couple of the things you can do with agar. You can drop, you can make little agar balls like you would alginate balls, but they're solid by dropping them into cold oil, which is a technique I don't know, pioneered by I guess Sam Mason, eight bajillion years ago. But uh agar is just fantastic. It works with almost everything.
Agar has weird interactions with gelatin and stocks, so be careful of that. And agar can have weird interactions with things like cassis because of the high tannin levels in it. But uh agar is just fantastic. And if you have any more specific questions on recipes, uh give me a holler. One more tweet before the show wraps up.
Um looking for a ratio for fluid gel and cream to disperse out of ISI. Oh, all right. Well, that follows up on that. So um what you want is it really depends. So if you do just a straight fluid gel, uh agar fluid gel or or a gel and fluid gel, and you're doing about, let's say, a 0.8% fluid gel, i.e.
0.8% agar by weight, uh, or eight grams in a kilo. Uh a straight fluid gel is gonna kind of look like weird alien slime when it comes out of an ISI. And whenever you're putting uh a fluid gel in the ISI, don't forget to put your finger over the tip and s and flick your hand down like you are trying to get the last bit of shampoo out of a bottle because the fluid gel is gonna be a gel until you put force on it, and then you can shoot it down to the bottom of the bottle and dispense it. So uh I so then I like to add it like about 50% cream usually uh or thereabouts. It depends on the punchiness of the flavor you want, but you just get an incredibly dense, uh dense uh fluid gel out of it.
Um okay, so you're telling me, Jack, that I'm running out of time. So here here's what I'm gonna say. I had a question in also on fry oil on disposal, and this Japanese uh fry oil disposal thing called katamero tempuru. And I mean you know, tempuru, I guess meaning from frying like temper. But anyway, I know nothing about it.
The question was from uh Mark Barter, and so what I'm gonna do, Mark, is look that sucker up and then report back to you next week. Uh I also got a question, two questions in from Joel Gargano uh about which vacuum machine uh he's gonna buy. And he narrowed it down to two, the Henkelman and the Samic. I'm gonna talk to him about also about cutting boards next week, uh, because I have a lot to say about vacuum machines and how to pick a good vacuum machine, and also a lot to say about cutting boards, because as usual I have too much to say about this stuff, and that's why Jack tells me I run out of time. But I got a tweet in that I just have to answer this week, Jack, if you'll let me on the way out.
Hi, Dave, Nastasha, Jack, and Joe. I love apples, cherries, and peaches. Who doesn't? But ever since I was a kid, these fruits ca fruits cause my mouth and throat to itch. I figured out that I suffer from oral allergy syndrome, which is an allergy to certain proteins and fruit, particularly in the skin.
Peeling the fruit solves the problem, as does cooking the fruit to denature the proteins. I love eating these fruits fresh, and peeling things like cherries is a huge pain. Do you have any suggestions on how to denature these proteins without actually cooking the fruit? Thanks for any advice. Huge fan of the show, Greg.
Greg, I feel you. I feel you. When I was thirty thirty or thirty-one, I suddenly developed an allergy to cherries that causes my throat to close uh when I eat them in large quantities and and and and causes itchiness. Certain apples also cause this to be. Thankfully, it hasn't happened with peaches yet.
Um First of all, I don't know if you know this, but uh different apple varieties have different widely different levels of the allergens in them that cause your throat to itch. So certain apples you might be okay with and others you don't, and there's a scientific paper that was never written, you know, right Susan Brown up at Cornell, who's doing the research, they know which varieties are more allergenic than the others, but I haven't been able to find public uh you know research on it, publicly available research on it anywhere. Uh but uh fresh cherries, which I can no longer eat, I think are kind of you know, uh possibly the greatest fruit in the world. I love them. Uh and I can't eat them, and to me, cooked cherries are not even cherries, it's something else.
It's like cherry pie filling or something. There's nothing like a fresh cherry, and I can't have them anymore. Um yeah, I I do not know any way, but anyone, anyone out there who has any solution to this problem, some sort of anything that can bind to these proteins so that Greg can have the stone fruits and I can have my cherries again. Let us know. Cooking issues.
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