Today's program has been brought to you by S. Wallace Edwards and Sons, third generation Cure Masters producing the country's best dry cured and aged hams, bacon, and sausage. For more information, visit SurreyFarms.com. You are listening to Heritage Radio Network, broadcasting live from Bushwick Brooklyn. If you like this program, visit Heritage Radio Network.org for thousands more.
Hello, and welcome to Cooking Issues 100th episode, live on the Heritage Radio Network. Patrick Martin's found in the network, happy anniversary, Dave and Nastasia. Michael Harlan to Rakel, Food Scene Heritage Radio Network.org. Mr. Jonathan Sawyer, the Greenhouse Tavern, Cleveland, Ohio.
Happy anniversary. We got uh we got Joe and Jack in the booth and Nastasia the Hammer Lopez here! As well as Aaron from the Heritage Radio Network's development team. Oh, thank you. Thank you.
Thank you very much. Happy anniversary. We're so proud of you. You're our number one rated show with Oslin to read all these amazing comments from people all around the world being like you are their inspiration, and we're honored to have you in our humble little shipping container, Dave in Niscalcia. It is in fact a shipping container's like shut up and pour the proseco.
It's not usually this late in the day when I happen to have a ship. You made me wait till noon. What's wrong with you? Right? Were you drinking all day at Oktoberfest when you were there?
Yes. Yeah, she actually, you were thank you. You were at Oktoberfest last week during the show, right? Or flying back. You were encountering turbulence over Nova Scotia as we were having our uh our show, right?
Ultimate Aryan couple going back to Germany. I'm not Aryan. What the hell? She's like half Mexican, half Ukrainian. How do you get Aryan out of that?
Wow. I'm gonna take my beautiful eyes. Thank you. Cheers. Cheers.
Cheers. Uh uh. Sobering note today. Uh there was a woman over the weekend, 18-year-old uh in England, who was served liquid nitrogen at a bar in a glass. Uh I think that's what happened.
There, you know, it's not totally in yet. Uh, and she lost uh a good portion of her sum stomach. It was taken out at the hospital because she either consumed actual liquid nitrogen or something that was so hyper frozen with liquid nitrogen uh that it caused uh irreparable damage to the lining of her stomach. Now, um I've I've been getting a lot of uh tweet action on this, and a lot of people ask me about it. And uh the fact of the matter is is it is exactly akin to a cook taking a uh chicken McNugget out of a deep fryer with a ladle and serving the chicken McNugget with the ladle full of uh deep fry oil.
Uh clearly not a good thing. It's a horrible tragedy that this has happened, but it's completely irresponsible practice and has nothing at all to do with liquid nitrogen. I've used liquid nitrogen daily for years. Uh, you know, and and dealt with um customers. We've had, you know, both at the French culinary and at Booker Index.
Everyone knows we never ever, ever, ever serve actual liquid cryogens to people, and we never serve uh foods or drinks that are so chilled that they could cause uh frostbite or any sort of damage on uh on consumption. And it's actually not that difficult. If you're if you're a practitioner, it's not that difficult to um judge whether something has gotten that cold or not. For instance, if your cocktail has become a rock solid, this sucker is too cold to deal with and may cause damage. If you see liquid nitrogen floating around on the surface of your cocktail, there are issues and you should not serve it.
It is it it would be clear to any uh you know well-trained novice practitioner of uh uh you know liquid nitrogen use, uh, what to do and what not to do. And it's horrible that this has happened, uh, but we hear all sorts of crazy things. I've someone sent me a BBC uh report saying that technology has no place uh in bars and in kitchens. Buddies, the knife is a piece of technology or was back in the day. The blender is a piece of technology or was back in the day.
Deep fryers are dangerous. The trick is knowing what you're doing and uh you know, you know, having some common sense and respect for the safety of your customers. You know, liquid nitrogen can be used for a bunch of gimmick BS in the bar, or it can be used hopefully as we use it, which is to good effect to get the best freshest infusions, for instance, by doing liquid nitrogen muddling at the bar or by chilling glasses, where it's clearly technically the most superior way to do it and has nothing to do with uh gimmicry. So that's my little Happy Anniversary And then a related question. Got a tweet in from Ian Benz who saw the uh demonstration we did at the Star Chef's ICC.
And uh he's like, how well, how do you get this liquid nitrogen? First of all, I would go ahead and read the safety uh the safety information. It's on Cooking Issues blog. It's formatted weirdly now. We're working on it, I know, uh, but the information is still there.
Uh secondly, you get it from a welding supply shop. The cheapest way to get it is in units of 160, 180, or 240 liters in large doers. Those doers cost two thousand dollars. Uh I've purchased them used for a thousand, but uh you can also rent one for thirty-five dollars a month, and we end up paying in those large quantities roughly uh 70 cents a liter once everything's said and done, delivered. Uh it's much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much cheaper than buying smaller quantities like 35 or 40 or 50 liters at a time, where they really rake you over the coals for the uh for the uh you know fact of giving you a smaller amount.
So any welding supply shop, you give them a $2,000 deposit, they drop off a doer, do your safety thing. Don't buy the dumb hose that they want to sell send you uh or sell you to get the liquid nitrogen off. Uh just make something out of copper. I have all of the parts on the cooking issues website. All right, that's the positive note about liquid nitrogen for us.
Very nice. Anyway, it is um one of a kind in all the world. It's an honor to have you. We'll we'll leave you to be brilliant, but happy anniversary. Thank you so much.
Cheers. Cheers. Are you did you give Jack and Joe some prosecco or did you totally chef that? No. Holy crap.
Holy crap. That's bad, right? Terrible. Terrible. Call in your questions live to 718497-2128.
That's 718497-2128. Uh uh, those of you will notice that the um we did not have our wonderful cover of Vicious Vicious Vodka today, and that is because it turns out the law sucks. Is that right, Jack? I would agree with that. The law does suck.
Yeah, uh, because I love that cover. You know, we're just we're we're playing it super safe right now. We're gonna look into our uh publishing rights here and get our T's crossed and I's got it. Did I mention that Amos Milburn is dead? I don't know that any does anyone I mean, like the rights are from when like when when can we just use that stuff legit?
That's just from the 40s. Is it possible that it was run out and that no one re-upped it? 100 years. Um check in with the lawyer. Oh my gracious.
I just want my vicious vodka cover. I don't even want the original anymore. I want the cover now. All right. All right.
Okay. Question from last week I did not answer from Joel Gargano regarding vacuum machines and cutting boards. Yo, Joel from New Haven again. Hey, New Haven, sweet, right? Nastasha's sister's up in New Haven now at the Yale.
Hey, you know, Yale got like nuked in in the uh recent uh US News crap on them, crap on US News and we'll put crap on them people. Unless you work for them out there, in which case I love you. Okay. Uh looking into some new equipment. Need a workhorse of a vacuum sealer for my kitchen.
I've narrowed it down to the Henkelman Boxer 52, which is a tabletop uh model made by Henkleman. Or the Samic SV 410S. Uh double steel bar uh in a vacuum machines plus, but not necessary. Both these units have it, but I would like a large chamber to perform aeration techniques, uh, like aeration of chocolate, uh uh to fit like fitting a fish tub would be good in it. Um I also like the idea of the Vac Norm external kit on the Samic to seal up hotel pants of food rather than bagging it.
I hold things over a few days normally in bags and it would save a cost for sure. What do you think? I'll take your opinion on Best Bang for my bucks under six grand uh in terms of size and durability. Feel free to give me what you'd buy. Uh lastly, uh any kind of non wood cutting boards.
I'm sick of the standard cheapy plastic guys. And Jack, play more Bluetooth. Bluetooth. Look at that. Bluetooth.
Bluetooth. All right. Well, if you bring the bass next week, maybe we can just play some some live Bluetooth lines. Some live Bluetooth bass lines? Well, we were gonna do the putting katonka ding stuff, right?
We need that too. Yeah. Anyway, um okay, listen, here's the thing. For those of you that don't know what the hell just happened in terms of the question, let me explain it to you. We're talking about chamber vacuum machines, the things that let you do sous vide in a uh kitchen.
They're relatively expensive. Uh the real ones uh start at around two grand and go up to uh like six. Um when you're sealing something in in a professional kitchen uh and you're doing a lot of packages, what's very important is your ability to uh not spend all of your time at the vacuum machine. Someone who has a large sous- vide program tends to have a bottleneck, a production bottleneck at the vacuum machine. Why?
Because you have to put a bag in and you're running a cycle, and the cycle takes longer than you'd think. And you usually want to bag things portion by portion if you're gonna serve them portion by portion, which means you have to run a bunch of cycles. And so you're sitting there for sometimes uh a a long, long time. Nastash, how long were we bagging that time that we did those cookies for the troops? Oh it was like a it was like an eight-hour shift of bagging alone, right?
And so what you want to make sure is to spend the extra couple hundred bucks to get two different seal bars in the machine uh because it's going to chop your bagging time in half when you're doing uh large things. So when companies usually say when they say dual seal, what they what they mean actually isn't that there are two seal bars, they mean that there's two seals on the seal bar itself, which is also important because you don't want the bags to leak. I recommend getting uh seal bars, two seal bars, each one with a double seal, and have uh one wide normal seal and the other be a sever seal that's gonna cut off the flappy parts of the bag because I detest having those flappy bag parts all over everything. Don't you hate that, Stas? Yes.
She hates it. Well, she hates bags in general, and she hates anything flappy. She hates flappy things, hates uh, like for instance, uh, you know, uh weird fungal growth on leaves, any sort of flappy, leafy thing she hates. Yeah? Yeah, true.
Okay, so uh so that's what I look for first. Secondly, I'd look for uh chamber size, uh as you state. Um you have to just go look at it. I don't have personal experience with the uh Henkelman. The Samic I looked at, and uh this is no offense to Samic people if you're listening, they are uh wildly overpriced.
Samic is wildly overpriced. In fact, I asked their rep, I said, hey, Samic rep, I don't remember his name. He was a European dude. I was like, how's come your machine is so much more expensive than the comparable machine from somebody else? And it wasn't like uh, you know, this one will cook your breakfast for you or something like that.
I didn't really understand why the Samic cost so much more at that time. I don't know if it still costs more or whether they bought their prices in line with uh Mini Pack and uh Multivac. So the you know, the ones that the three companies that I have the most experience with are Kotch, which is the one you buy if you want to buy an American product, Kotch, uh, and they're they're fine. I don't like the old Kotch manual ones very much. I use that one uh at Sambar, because that's what they have.
Um Multivac, which was the market leader and probably still is in the US, and they for a long time had kind of the best programming out there, and they had such a huge chunk of the market that they didn't do a lot of work to try and maintain chef uh like love from chefs. They didn't really care about it that much. And in fact, their smaller machines have a subpar chamber size. That said, their programming is pretty good and they're pretty robo. Minipack has worked a lot on their programming recently.
Uh in fact, uh that they have a lot of good programming in the new one. The problem is that sometimes it's a little too complicated. Like you remember that machine. We're like, what the hell? How do you make it go?
Right? But I think that they're they've worked on that. And MiniPack has has very, very good chamber size for what they do. Now, the thing that you asked about the um the VAC norms, right? First of all, in everywhere but the US, what we call a hotel pan, in Europe they call a gastronorm pan, right?
So I don't know why. We call them hotel pants, they call them gastronorm pants. Now, a regular US hotel pan, if you were to suck a vacuum on it, believe me, I've tried this. If you suck a vacuum on it, it will crush. Crush.
And so it's useless uh to use uh for vacuum sealing. So Samic has made or had made for them a, if you look at it, it looks like a little ziggurat. It's a hotel pan with like steps in it, and the wall of the stainless is much thicker than a standard hotel pan. And they also make like a like a like a Lexan lid for it with a seal on it so that you can suck a vacuum on the hotel pan itself, on this vac norm, this heavy-duty uh hotel pan. And these systems are great.
Here's the secret. Uh the system itself has nothing to do with SEMIC, right? So you can buy, and I've I've asked Cambro, I've asked all the people who make uh these things every year when I'm at the trade shows. Uh you go, no one knows who I am, doesn't matter. So I go to the trade show and I'm like, hey, listen, have you why don't you make uh uh why don't you make a hotel pan here in the US that can uh have a vacuum applied to it?
And they they always look at me like I'm some sort of an idiot, like I'm a moron, you know? Well, well, let me, yes, okay, Nastasha, correct, right? Fair, but I happen to be right on this one. And uh no one knows what why uh it hasn't it hasn't been done. Um but you can just buy the VAC norms, which are absurdly expensive also from Samic, the lid and the hose, and stick it over almost any other vacuum machine uh company's stuff, so long as you can get to the hole where the air uh comes in and out of the vacuum chamber.
So in a in a in a mini pack, that hole is exposed, which sucks most of the time because uh it means it you like when air comes back in, it can blow stuff all over the inside of the chamber, but it can be useful for something like this. So don't think that just because you want a VAC norm that you have to go with Samic's machine, right? Uh I encourage you to go uh two places that have these, look at them, play with them. Henkelman, is that the one that Miravold recommends? I don't remember.
He recommended a German brand that starts with an H and I can't remember it, German or Austrian or someone who speaks German. You know what I mean? And I think it was Henkelman and he loved it uh because of the programming, but I don't have any personal experience on it. I hope this is a reasonable response. Now, on cutting boards.
Uh when you say that you're sick of the standard cheapy plastic guys, if you're referring to the very hard polyethylene guys that come in different uh color, I hate those. I hate cutting on them, I hate looking at them, I hate touching them, I hate the way that they spin around on my on my surfaces, even if I put down the wet paper towel. By the way, everyone's worried about slipping of their boards. Just put the wet paper towel down. Does everyone not know that trick?
Like a little wet towel, put it on the on your counter, not so wet, so it's a slip and slide. You put the board on top of the board stays. Duh. Anyway, I mean not duh. Well, if you whatever.
I'm just saying do that. Uh it's terrible. Why did I say it that? Why'd I say dust? Because I'm drinking proseco at 12, right?
Okay. Uh a little hyped up today. Sorry, folks. Okay. Now, the uh there's there's there's two basic uh uh higher end, but made of plastic.
Because you specified you didn't want a non-wood cutting board. I actually love wood. I love wood, and uh usually I scrub them down with uh salt at the end of the night, and I you know I'm not worried about it. There's those studies that show that uh you know that you're not gonna get sick from using wood. But if you can't, because you're in a pro kitchen, use wood.
Uh here are the two ones that I've come across. The one that everyone seems to use that I know is a product called Sandy Tuff, made by Technor Apex. Um they won't say what it is, they'll just say it's rubber. But they won't I I looked for about 45 minutes to try and find the composition of the rubber, like what kind of rubber it is, but I could not find it anywhere. And the boards themselves are hideously ugly and crazily heavy.
Uh but they um they work they work quite well. I don't feel that they hurt my knives at all. They do discolor, they can be sanded, which is nice. Uh so you could take a belt sand or two and sand them down when they go. But the thicker ones of those get really, really, really, really heavy.
They also, if you overheat them, will warp. And if you put them on accidentally on a burner, you'll get scorch marks where you put them on a burner, but most boards are like that. The other alternative is a material called uh high soft, which is polyvinyl uh acetate PVA. Uh, PVA is the same stuff that you make. Elmer's glue is made out of, and you can buy boards uh like this, and some uh it's a Japanese use them called High Soft.
You can get them at Corin and places like that. Uh they are very expensive. They aren't as heavy as I think. I mean, I've never had them side by side, but my memory, because remember we had that when we did all the Ikijime tests on the fish, we the Corinne lent us that giant cutting board for Star Chefs. Do you remember that?
Anyway, uh my memory of that giant cutting board is that it didn't uh it didn't weigh as much as the Sandy Tuff boards. Um but they are some pricey business. They're very nice, and they felt soft on the uh on the knives, uh, and they also supposedly have it, they have a nice texture, they're non-slip, and they uh they feel good. They felt good to cut on them. So I like it.
And a lot of the sushi the sushi folks uh use that. So I hope that helps. John from Chicago, you're on the air. Hey, hey Dave. Thanks for taking my call.
Um I had a couple questions for you. When you uh when you're cooking low temperature for insurance and cooling it down, I guess I I just don't know that much about um what's what's okay to do um in terms of cooling stuff down and then just searing the exterior in terms of uh from a safety standpoint. From a safety standpoint, okay. Well, m again, everything depends on on what you're doing. If you now for those of you that uh don't know, when we're saying low temperature uh for insurance, we're just cooking the product all the way through to the minimum temperature and then afterwards doing an actual full-on uh cook step on it to get a nice uh exterior, and they cooking this way for insurance tends to produce things that taste more uh like their classical counterparts, but have a lot of the benefits of uh low temperature cooking.
Okay. So it everything depends and also depends on how much of uh of a kind of a nice uh c crust and cooking difference on the crust you want. Does that make sense? So I mean if you cook a roast all the way through so that it's pasteurized, if you're let's if you're gonna cook that long to pasteurize the whole thing, then you could chill it down and then uh you could chill it all the way down to fridge temp and then it's it's you know, it's done. So you can let it come up to uh you know, ro room temp before you do your finished sear and then throw it in a hot oven and you'll be fine.
Do you know what I mean? But a lot depends on what you're gonna do. Most of the time we don't do a full cool down on a large item. Most of the time we do a um a partial cool down. Uh or you know, like you could soak it for a while at a lower temperature.
So for instance, uh Dave Chang with with his uh chicken, he he keeps his chicken at fifty-eight degrees and then does a traditional cook for fried, and does a traditional cook-off in the fryer from fifty-eight and and finds that he can get the nice uh crust without overcooking it if he's holding it at that at that temperature. So a lot depends on exactly what you're doing, but from a safety standpoint, a lot a lot depends on whether the product has been pasteurized or not. Is that make sense? Yeah, so so if I was doing uh uh a duck breast, let's say for um at 57 for 45 minutes. Right.
I I should be cooling it down at to some extent so that I can so that I can cook and crisp up the skin, right? Yeah, I duck. So that's a good specific duck breast fifty-seven for 45 minutes is actually enough to pasteurize. I mean, okay, look. Uh I feel totally comfortable with duck breast at 57 for 45 minutes because duck breasts are fairly thin, they come to temperature pretty quickly.
Uh there's no food code on on earth that allows you because they consider duck to be poultry, and so you they normally want you to hit the higher poultry numbers, which doesn't really make a lot of sense, but you know, th that is what it is. But from an actual safety standpoint, w I think you're fine. What I do usually is uh I do fifty fifty-seven forty-five, and then I put them in the in the fridge, let them cool down, and then when it's time to sear them off, I just do a higher heat than I, you know, uh uh well, I just focus the heat directly on the skin and don't worry about the center of it. And and they come out they come out great. That's a classic use of low temperature for insurance.
So I I mean I would just chill them down in the fridge and you could hold them, you know, as you would any other cooked product. And then follow up uh because I I never imagined getting stuff like uh a sous vide setup. What do you think is the next big thing for a home kitchen or what would be like the uh the invention down the road that you really look forward to? Oh, uh well, oh by the way, to go back, uh please someone, because I don't have it in front of me, double check before you say it's a hundred percent safe on pasteurization, what the thermal death curves are of uh salmonella with uh because that's what they're gonna that's what they're gonna knock you for. Uh both you I would look at all the bacteria of interest uh like how they fare over 45 minutes.
You might need to stretch it to an hour or an hour and ten minutes, depending on uh how thick your duck breast is and how long you think the internals take to get up to temperature. Just a safety note to look at it. I have it on the blog somewhere, you just have to go find it. I don't have it in my head. Okay.
The next the next big thing um I would say uh I mean, I I want it to be the centrifuge. Uh there's n there's none out there yet uh that is fantastic for uh most people at home. I'm working on it. You know what I mean? I think look, it took us ten years for the first circulator under 500 bucks to hit the market.
And now we're there. You know, now we have circulators for 350. And once you hit the 350 mark, once you're below 500, you've now jumped into a whole new planet of uh what's possible. Um yeah. My my vote would be for uh a small, small ultra customizable curing chamber that you can use for cheeses and for you know curing sausage.
That's a good idea. The the issue with it is remember with a curing chamber, you you're gonna want to develop some sort of stability over time with the uh I mean the smaller the thing, the the the more they're moved by individual batches, you know what I mean? And the less you get the effect of uh kind of the stable uh micro, you know, microflora and fauna of of uh of a of a steady big curing room. But it would be a good idea. And you know, it could easily be made.
People sell kits now, actually. If you go to Auburn Instruments, you can go to them. I've never purchased one from them, but they b they sell kits where you can control the humidity and the temperature, so you could turn any refrigerator or whatever into a curing chamber. But yeah, maybe the one that's marketed more directly, less less DIY and more marketed directly. Okay, and then uh final thing and then I'll hang up.
Uh um if you're looking to increase the flavor of a braise or a stew, what are some good tips to keep in mind? Low temp or regular. Oh, well, I uh do your initial brown properly, get a lot of extra. I you know, I usually start with a really, really flavorful stock. Uh uh, you know, as my base boil, like do some pre-reduction on that.
Um, you know, the stock with with uh with the wine, basically, you know, a bourguignon sauce uh you know thing, and then you use the right vegetable mix and pre-brown your meat before you go. That's that's that's typically what we do. Any typical other ingredient add-ons that that can kind of give you a boost? Well, I mean, if you're if money is no object, you can make the stock with something really crazy fatty and gelatinous like like like uh oxtail. But you know, that's if you have that's if you have money to light on fire.
Okay. I'll I'll look at some money, thanks. All right, cool. Thanks a lot. Break time.
Oh, break time. Cooking issues, I'll be like the product. Heritage Radio Rick. Wake up, wake up. What would you do with that be?
Like what you hear so far? Support the network and become a member. Membership helps us bring you the best food radio in the world and gives you access to thousands of dollars in discounts at the sustainably minded businesses that support us. To become a member, visit Heritage Radio Network.org today. Edwards Surreano hams are aged to perfection for no less than 400 days and hickory smoked to achieve a deep mahogany color.
The Edwards name is well known for its world-class aged and cured meats. Their exclusive curing and aging recipe produces a unique flavor profile that enhances the quality characteristics of Berkshire Pork. Optimum amounts of pure white fat marbling contribute to a flavor that's a delicate, perfect balance between sweet and salty. For more information, visit www.surifarms.com. I don't know that I'd characterize uh S.
Wallace Edwards hams as sweet. No. No, they're delicious. What do you mean by sweet? They're not sugary sweet.
No. I mean. They're not too salty, though. No, they're not. Well, too salty.
Here's the thing, right? When people are eating American country hams, what they do in old school, the American way of eating country hams years ago, and it's forever, it's because we've we've inherited our ham eating culture from the from the Brits, right? Is that you take your cured hams and you cook them afterwards, right? And when you cook an American uh country ham, you turn it into a salt lick. So everyone's idea of uh American hams being too salty comes from this fact that they're horribly overcooked.
And as soon as you overcook it, it's it it really is horribly, horribly salty. The other problem is Americans think that ham should come in thick, thick slices. And this is not because we're used to eating city hams, and city hams you can eat in big thick slices because they're pumped full of water and they're big and they're spongy, right? Whereas American country ham was never intended to be eaten this way. It was intended to be eaten in in thin pieces, small things as a seasoning over a long period of time.
Hence the old joke. What's the definition of eternity? A couple in a Virginia ham, because they can eat that thing forever, right? And it's a good way to preserve meat and have it go. So people who think that American ham is too salty just aren't eating it right.
You don't agree with me, Jack? I I do agree with you, yeah. I I've had the uh Suriano thinly sliced and then kind of chunks of it, and it doesn't even thin. Thin. Thin.
And you know, and uh it is saltier than uh the you know European counterparts that we're used to, like Prosciutta di Parma and things like this. Uh but uh American ham is its own thing. It is what it is, which is why, and I'll say it uh again, even though I probably said it ten times on this show, uh Sam Edwards from S. Wallace Edwards, even though I like him and I love his ham, his you know, the wigwam and the one that they do for with heritage meats that Berkshire wanted to do is delicious. I wish he wouldn't call it Suriano.
I wish he wouldn't reference a European ham at all because his family has been curing for hundreds of years in uh you know in in that area of Virginia, and it's a product unique to itself and shouldn't be compared to anything else. It's a delicious product. I love it, you know. I hate the fact that it's compared to a European product. Jax has nothing to say about this because it's a sponsor now.
Look, it's like whatever. I like you know, I I I I like I like the product, it's a good product. If I I'm gonna throw in my two cents and don't get the country ham at Waffle House. Okay, that's fair. You know, the the thing that people don't realize about country ham is that uh for many, many years it was seen as a commodity product.
And so country ham producers over the decades after World War II uh made a cheaper and cheaper product because it was seen that cost was the driver, and they kept on losing their market to city hams, and people are eating more and more of these spongy city hams. And so country hams are really dying out, and to try and stay ahead, people would try to you know make it cheaper and cheaper, make it cost less and less, push the cure time shorter, and uh uh you know, a few people stayed around and made kept on making the product the old way, and we're really keeping an uh you know a national uh a national food cultural tradition alive, an important one, I think. And that's why years ago, uh, you know, actually when I f we first started first started the you know museum of food and drink, one of the first things I focused on was American country ham and how we're eating it wrong, and how a modern way to consume it is to eat it the same way we eat prosciutto, which you're seeing now a lot of places like uh Ike Sambar, who has a uh you know a ham program now, but years ago, people weren't doing this with American country ham. And I think that's what's the the the new way of eating it, and these ham producers I think now realize, you know, it's the the Nancy Mahaffey's from Colonel Newsom, the the Sam Edwards from S. Wallace Edwards are realizing that it's the kind of this new consumption mode is is uh you know good good news for for uh country hams uh all over the country.
I don't know, whatever. Country ham, love it. Okay. Brian writes in from San Francisco about fruit in Hawaii. Hello, cooking issues posse.
I'm going to Hawaii over Thanksgiving and want to taste some yummy tropical fruit. Is there a Brogdale equivalent in Hawaii, i.e. a tasting farm? If not, which fruit should I be seeking out and where? Uh mostly being kawaii.
Now listen, Brian, I sorry to say I have never been to Hawaii in my my whole life, uh, although my wife was born there. It's one of the places I want to go. You ever been there, Stas? No. No?
Be nice though, right? I mean you can take a vacation. Nah. Anyway, but like it's I I like I hate uh I've said this many times. I hate tropical paradise, except for the fruit, right?
And so like I'd love to go to Hawaii and and try the fruit, but uh unfortunately I don't have any real recommendations because I haven't been there. What I would do is I would go to the uh Hawaii Hawaii Tropical Fruit Growers website and uh try to get in contact with them and see if there's anyone that they know. There's a really good website that I've used, well, not good from a design standpoint, not that we can talk because our thing is c always broken, but she has like uh he or she. I don't know why I said she, I don't really know who it is, but they have like this weird space thing in their website, like you know how like websites have like that weird spacing with the stars and the Milky Way behind it, so it makes it hard to read and all the writings in big bold yellow stuff. You know what I'm talking about, Styles?
And then like rainbow writing and like weird pictures and stuff. Well, this website's like that, but aside from that, great information, great varieties of fruit, and also v awesome, awesome links. Some of the best links on tropical fruits that you can get on the internet. And it's www.fruitlovers.com. And they have nursery and they sell fruit.
Uh unfortunately they're closed uh from October till December 15th, so you're out of luck for Thanksgiving visiting those guys. But uh try to contact some of these people and find out where to go. I'm sorry that I don't have any kind of a better information. Nastash's like, yeah, you're useless, pretty much. Right?
Yeah. Right. Uh Tony Heron writes in from the mixing bar team in Brazil. Uh hello, Jack, Joe, Nastasha, and Dave. Congratulations on the hundredth show.
Wow, what a great journey. Thank you. Uh have to is that is that stay that's obligatory, Jack? I knew 100 meters, by the way, too. Well, we'll try to unfortunately later on in the show we have uh something that's a hundred degrees Celsius, and so you uh we better you know keep track of when it's a hundred degrees and when it's a hundredth show, or it doesn't matter.
Well, we'll see, we'll see what happens. Uh thank you very much for all the hints, great ideas, inspiration, and good laughs. Keep up the outstanding work. Well, thank you very much. I've got a cook uh a few questions about Pectanex, which is an enzyme that breaks down pectins.
We use Pectanex Ultra SPL from Novozymes. Uh, I've got a few questions about Pectanex for Dave. Uh not too long ago I got some Pectanex from Modernist Pantry, who used to be a sponsor of our show, modernistpantry.com. Uh, but haven't had much time to play with it. We've tried enzymatic peeling as described on the cooking issues blog, but the results weren't great.
The stuff didn't peel right, and limes oxidized very quickly. I can't ruh recall the concentration for us right now, but we sealed the fruit with quite a few cuts in the skin uh and uh put the solution inside a jar under vacuum. The jar was put in a water bath at 40 degrees Celsius to activate the enzyme for quite a long time. Nothing remarkably really happened before the end of several hours, but by then the flavor of the fruit was gone. We did lemons, limes, tangerines, and cumquats.
What other cool tricks do you recommend uh for us to try with uh SPL that don't require centrifuge? Okay. Um limes aren't I've never had any good luck with limes. Uh what what you want to do, I want to see what you said here. I wouldn't make uh cuts in the skin.
Look, unless the unless the actual enzyme is in direct contact with the white part, with the albedo of the uh fruit, you're not gonna get uh very good results. So when we're working with it, if you want the peel, we peel the fruit in in you know, kind of nicely cut peels, and then bag those in a vacuum, bag them in a vacuum with uh with the enzyme, right? Then after that's done, the white will be kind of gelatinous and disgusting, the stasha won't touch it. And then we take a toothbrush and we run it with the toothbrush under running water, and all of the albedo can be kind of wiped away, right? So that's what you do with the peels.
Lime peel does not work very well. I'm just telling you right now. Oranges work well, pomelo works well, uh, grapefruit works well, uh, lemons work okay, right? Now for the fruit itself, uh, the best possible thing to do is to break is to pull the the actual fruit after it's peeled into at least halves and possibly quarters and then bag it so that the actual enzyme can get to the membrane in between uh in between the fruits. And that's when you can get the really good um you know destruction from the enzyme.
It's very difficult for the enzyme to pierce into the center of the fruit. It just does not work that way. You have to kind of break it apart. Other tricks to do with SPL, I know you're doing a bar, but if you want to do French fries, I use SPL for all of our French fry needs, right? Um, but I can't think of you can also do clarify.
Okay. Let's say you're doing agar clarification, and your agar clarification isn't working very well, right? Because you're using a puree. You're in Brazil, you're getting amazing pureees. So you don't have a centrifuge, fine.
But agar clarification, very difficult for you to do on very thick items, things like uh sour sap, aka guanabana. So what you want to do is treat the puree with SPL, right? Let the SPL sit for a long time. It's gonna liquefy the puree and make it a lot uh more liquidy by breaking down the pectin, and then your yield when you're doing agar clarification is gonna go way up. So even if you're doing standard agar clarification because you don't have a centrifuge, um, you can use the SPL to help benefit uh your clarification uh results overall.
Okay. Uh also Tales of the Cocktail, we spoke about trying to rotovat the leftover liquid from peeling. Did you ever give that a try? No. You know what?
There's so many things we need to try, and we just don't have time. You ever notice that, Stas? Yeah. How days just run away from us? How like you know, you have a day and then like you wake up and then the day is gone.
It's crazy, right? Okay. So no, I'm sorry, I haven't tried it. Uh Red from Zymergy, right, same with the problem on lamb. Hey Dave, this is the second time I've done lamb shanks with sous vide at 62 degrees Celsius for around 48 hours with uh half a percent salt added to each shank.
The first time they came out, fantastic, with no issues. Well, this uh well, this is only the second time for the Shanks. I've been doing sous vide for almost three years and have never encountered what happened to these ones. I was in Whole Foods, they were selling Icelandic lamb. Who did you know they made lamb in Iceland?
No. New Zealand, yeah. Iceland? But it's green there. Yeah, it's right, it's reversed.
It's green, but I mean, yeah, I just never knew that Iceland was a big land place. I you know, I know them from financial collapse, from Bjork, from you know, from uh, you know, power from uh what's the what's it, geothermal power, all that? Lamb, I did not know. Makes sense though, right? Yeah, okay.
Uh I bought six shanks, salted them, chilled them, and vacuumed them. I put them in a bath within the half an hour, all the bags began to bloat and float, which I'm gonna use that from now on. Red, I'm using bloat and float. That's my new term for that. Bloat and float.
You like that? Bloat and float? That tell you that like I'm never gonna do this. I was talking to Jeremiah Bullfrog, one of our chef friends from Miami, and what we need to do is start a website where it's kind of like uh I don't know, like Craigslist or something, but it's just lists of good band names that we're never gonna use, and then when people use them, they just check it off, and then you know it's used already. You know?
So it's just like a huge list of band names, or you you know, they could use it for whatever, but mostly it's band names, and then like we're like, oh, bloat and float. We just add it to the list, and then someone's like bloat and float, thanks, and they check it off. You know what I mean? It's a great idea. Yeah.
Jeremiah's awesome too. He was just here in New York. Yeah, he's a good man. So one of you guys gonna make that website? I'm never gonna do it.
Uh put it on the list. Yeah, but bloat and float. All right. Uh okay. Bags began to bloat and float.
So not knowing what happened, I took them out of the bath and placed them um in an ice bath and chilled them down for about an hour and put them in new bags. These two began to bloat and float, so I placed a screen on them and weighted them down in the bath. The only thing I can come up with is that the shanks were off-gassing or something. They were not sitting around in the meat case, they came right out of a sealed box and appeared to be as fresh as possible with no off aroma. You never know those Icelandic people.
You never know what they've added to it. Just kidding. Uh I'm as I'm typing this email, they're uh they're still in the bath, so I cannot comment on the outcome. I just turned them and the bags are not as bloated as before. So I'm still wondering what's happened.
By the time your show airs, the shank will be done, and I will follow up with an additional email to comment on their taste. Which has already happened. Uh I appreciate your passing. Oh, wait, wait. The lamb shanks came out fine.
For the most part, all the shanks came out of the bath uh indicating that they were still under uh vacuum. I have still never encountered this type of initial bloating in the bag, so any assistance would be uh be appreciated. Red. Okay. What's interesting about this problem is that your bloat happened in the first 45 minutes.
Usually uh bad bloat, i.e. bacterial bloat, happens after several hours. And the reason for bacterial bloat is if you put a bunch of bags together and you haven't uh you know pasteurized the outside of those bags first, there's bacteria in it, and because the bags are jammed together, it can take hours for the surface temperature in those bags that are clustered too tightly to get up to temperatures where they're killing bacteria. And you get lactic acid bacteria usually growing in those bags, and they inflate and they puff up, and when you cut them open, they smell awful like blue cheese mixed with sauerkraut, mixed with death, they're horrible, right? You smell those, right, Stas?
Yeah, horrible. Uh which is why typically, if you don't know why a bag is bloated, you probably shouldn't eat it. Now, if a bag bloats immediately, i.e., well immediately, within 45 minutes or so of putting it in, you're dealing with most probably not a bacterial problem. You're most probably dealing with uh thermal expansion and release of air. Now, where is this most likely coming from?
Think about it. It's two places it can come from. One, the bones in your lamb in your lamb shank are hollow and contain air. If you want to bag something with bones like lamb shanks, you're gonna want to suck a serious vacuum on it. So if your product wasn't that cold when it went into the vacuum uh chamber and you weren't able to suck a hardcore vacuum for a long time on that bone, there's gonna be trapped air inside of that bone, and then when you vacuum it, uh, that I mean when you vacuum it, the air is gonna be still there, and when you heat it, the air is gonna expand out of the bone and puff up your bag.
Which happens all the time when you uh when you do things uh with bones and bags, which is why when you have a bone in the bag and you want to do cooking, you have to suck a serious, serious vacuum on it. Uh a lot ex a lot longer than you would in a normal kind of vacuum ceiling uh scenario. The so that's you know, keep it cold and suck a good vacuum on it. The problem is if you're gonna do that on something like a chicken bone, the uh the red crud on the inside of the bone gets sucked out and goes along the meat and it never you know turns unred, and so you get this unappetizing, basically inedible from those people because visually they can't get past it. Red mark called persistent pinking around the outside of the meat.
Uh okay. So the other problem is is perhaps you had veg in with your lamb shanks, right? And the veg wasn't fully cooked. Not only there's two things. One, vegetables aren't gonna cook at 62 degrees Celsius, even if you left them in there for weeks, so carrots are gonna stay crunchy for the entire time.
But uncooked vegetables have a lot of air in them, and if you don't suck a long vacuum on it, that trapped air inside of those uncooked vegetables will also come out when you're cooking and cause the bag to bloat. My guess is 90%, I'm 90% certain that that is the reason this has happened. What do you think? Good answer, good answer. All right, should we take one more break?
No. No? Keep going? You have like five minutes. What?
You have a call at one. Oh my god. Okay. The people on air do not give a rat's behind about what calls I have at one. I don't care about.
All right. Fine. All right. Tom Fisher writes in uh regarding rib fat. Recently I tried poly science's recipe for low temperature ribs, and while the flavor was amazing, my guests were a little freaked out by the unrendered fat.
Is there any way to do a combination of high and low temperature cooking to get the best of both worlds? I was looking uh at picking up a CVAP. CVAP is uh we'll explain in a minute. A CVAP for my kitchen, and I noticed that Winston sells both cook and hold ovens and hold and serve drawers. Both are described as having the same theory of operation.
What's really the difference between the two? Thanks for all the great information, Tom Fisher. Now CVAP is a holding oven almost like an Alto Sham, but it has a Bane Marie in the bottom. And the Bain Marie heats water to a very accurate temperature. And so the whole notion of a CVAP is that they can control the difference in temperature between the water bath and the air temperature, and therefore set the humidity inside of the oven.
And so by properly setting it, you can keep all, you know, any kind of food you want at uh exactly the right condition. It was invented for holding uh fried chicken. For it was invented by uh Winston from Winston Industries for Colonel Sanders from Kentucky Fried Chicken. And so you can keep crunchy things in it by setting the humidity level right. You can keep uh, you know, you can keep moist things in it.
In low temperature cooking, we typically set it to 100% humidity and they're fairly accurate, which is why we do it. The difference between the cook and hold and uh the uh whatever the other one is called is that the cook and hold ones versus the hold and serve ones uh have more power. And so they're meant to um bring the temperature of a food item up, cook it and let it go. Whereas the hold and serve ones have less power and they're not designed to do the actual cooking. Now, with low temperature cooking, they're adequate, right?
If you're actually gonna try to, you know, mimic some of the effects of a combi oven by doing roasting, then you need the extra power from a cook and hold. Hope that helps. I don't know what the cost difference is, because I've never had to never had to research the cost difference in it. Okay. Uh Michael Sanders writes in from England about boiling baths.
Uh good afternoon, Nastasha, Dave, Jack, and Joe. First of all, I'd like to say thank you for doing the show every week. Thank you. Well, thanks for listening. I'm a longtime listener of the podcast.
I'm in London, so work commute prevents me from listening live. Uh and I regularly revisit the old episodes and eagerly look forward to a new show each week. The enjoyment factor aside, the show has improved the quality of the food I cook at home and has introduced me to some great working practices, products, and techniques. That's nice. That's very gratifying.
That's my favorite thing to hear. Thank you. Uh the reason for my email is to ask a question regarding a recent eBay purchase. I've acquired a grant SBB6 boiling bath for no reason other than it was going to uh for a bargain price of 30 pounds. 50 dollars.
Can you believe that 30 pounds is fifty bucks? I was in England the other, like very recently, and you know, everything is the same price tag there, but it's in pounds. It's crazy. It's crazy. It's like, you know, man, but it used to be worse.
Tony C. Tony Kingliar from 69 Cobra Grove, Conliaro. He used to come here and our money was like Monopoly money. He would like laugh in my face and like light money in front of me because you know, our money was so worthless compared to their uh British money. Anyway, it has nothing to do with it.
Okay. Uh I thought there might be a culinary application for which the Grant boiling bath is useful. I was hoping that it may be useful in its current working state, or that I may be able to recalibrate the unit to a lower fixed temperature, perhaps to use it as a water bath for the preparation of vegetables, freeing up a separate circulator for the preparation of the protein at a lower temperature. How do you rate my chances of being able to hack the unit to do this reliably? If this is unlikely to produce a successful outcome, can you think of a use for a water bath at a fixed hundred degree C temperature?
Secondly, what would you recommend is good practice for cleaning of lab equipment purchased from eBay? This unit is new, but all the same, I would like to clean it just in case. Plus, I'm currently bidding on a number of other units from laboratory sales, and I'm unsure what use they may have had in their previous lives. I know that you have covered cleaning on previous shows, but was hoping that a 30-second recap may be possible. Keep up the good work.
My girlfriend and I are coming uh are looking forward to visiting Booker and Dax bar next year where we are in New York for a food and drink tour time to coincide with the first New York Formula One race. Thanks, Michael Sanders. Okay. Great question. Great question.
So I looked up your boiling bath, and uh unfortunately the boiling bath doesn't work on a thermostat because it's literally boiling. So the knob on the front of your uh of your boiling bath just all it does is it modifies how much power is being introduced. So the way you're supposed to use this thing is you fill it up with water, you turn it on, you crank it, and then when it starts boiling, you turn it down until you're just maintaining a boil so you're not using extra uh energy. Cool thing about your unit is that it has a little uh hose that you can attach to it to add water to it without having to uh go do you know anything else, and it has a drain. So these are two very very useful things.
So it's six liters. So it would make a good probably you could probably uh you know make a jury-rigged uh pasta cooker out of it because it's boiling and it's got a drain, so you could probably use that drain to get the starch off the top of the of the pasta thing and keep it going. It would also be great for vegetables, even at a hundred degrees C because you're not gonna have a lot of things touching uh the bag that could cause it to break. So it'd probably be good for uh sous vegetables at that temperature. If you want to treat it as a water bath, the problem is if you're gonna do a lot of low temperature work with it, it at only six liters, it doesn't have that large a capacity.
And so you're gonna have some uh issues with it if you're trying to do large amounts of cooking in it. That said, if six liters is big enough, and you really want to turn it into a second circulator. All you need to do is buy uh any one of the uh PID rice cooker conversions that use a thermocouple, and you plug, you know, instead of plugging this sucker into the wall, plug it into the PID rice cooker converter, put the uh th, you know, the temperature probe in, and now you have a thermostatically controlled water bath. Just bypass the controls on it entirely. Um, you know, the only issue there is that these water baths that you have are unstirred, and so if you want the actual, you know, total even temperature from top to bottom, you'll have to throw an aquarium pump or a bubbler in there that's pushing some air in to move the water around.
None of it's complicated, it's all easily done. It's just a question of how much you want to do. I would love to have a you know something that could boil that's not on a fire if I'm doing vegetables because I don't really see a lot of difference in cooking a vegetable at 85 C or at 100 C. The uh, you know, the the main difference is it's difficult on a stove to do vegetables at uh a hundred and always make sure that there's no flame because you know I'm working this, there's no flame that's gonna touch the side of my bag, right? And to always make sure that you're gonna have the right level of water in there.
So if you have this cool water input that makes it sure that your level is always right and there's no flame touching the uh sides where the bag is, it could be very useful for doing things like veg. Um what do you think, Stas? Yeah, you are done. No, we're not done. It's 48 after, Stas.
Crazy head. Well, we're supposed to go to 45, so what? So buttons. I'm not even done with this question yet. I will be hey, for the record, for everyone on the air, I have a telephone call at one o'clock that Nastasha is concerned with because it's possible that I'm gonna be on air with her idol, Hoda, and she wants a good 10 minutes of me having mellow time to think about what I'm gonna say to Hoda's producer.
Goodbye to CNN, you have to say goodbye to Jack. They don't have to leave during the what am I gonna say the call for the entire the for like the next hour and a half? Anyway, so I'm gonna finish this question. Uh so about cleaning equipment, you want to make sure it depends on what the equipment is going to be used for. Anything that might have touched a biological agent, like a centrifuge, you want to make sure that you treat it with a very hardcore bleach.
Uh, and then after you hardcore bleach it, really hardcore bleach it, I try to pressure cook the stuff to sterilize it, and then I treat it with bleach again. Equipment that's going to have inorganic chemicals touching it, like rotovaps, things like this that might be a problem. You want to uh add uh, you know, we bought some hardcore glass cleaner called what was that stuff called? Sus Alcanex? Alc Alcanox?
Alcanox uh cleaner that you know strips a bunch of stuff off and just you're gonna have to rinse it like a million times to get the stuff off. You just really want to make sure you get everything off because there can be some really, really, really, really nasty business. Things that can't be there's certain things that like can't really be fixed that well, things that might absorb different uh different chemicals like rubbers and stuff. Sometimes with those, you're better off totally replacing them. Um that said, uh, you know, I always err on the side of of overcleaning and making sure that everything is eaten or melted off.
If you have metal, you can do alternate, you can bleach, and then don't do this to aluminum, but if you can do bleach and then you could do oven cleaner because oven cleaner is gonna eat any pro you know protonace stuff that's uh caught on it. So I just recommend uh going uh really hardcore on that. Okay. Uh and one last question in on the on the Twitter from uh what was it from from Clefs. Uh at cooking issues, does adding oxidized oil to non-oxidized oil cause the non-oxidized oil to oxidize faster than it would alone?
Or is it linear? Now, uh you know, I had never really stupidly I'd never really thought about this problem before. Um, but uh, you know, it makes sense that that what you're saying is is right. However, I know, and I said on the last week's show, which is maybe what prompted this, that the way that you do this professionally and in continuous frying is to achieve a certain level of oxidation and keep it constant by constantly adding fresh oil to it, and you reach kind of a steady state where the oil stays the same. Things like potatoes uh absorb the exact amount of oil that they need and everything goes in a steady state.
But uh, I don't know. Here's what you know. I know that what affects uh oxidation rate in oil is the presence of oxygen and the presence of metallic ions, which is why you don't salt things, for instance, before you put them in oil, typically, because it's going to increase the rate at which your oil breaks down. It's not really important if you're not going to use the oil for a long time or if you're pan-frying, but in deep frying, it can be uh quite important. But I recommend that you read uh Egan Press.
Uh go online, you can get a downloadable PDF of their uh edible fats and oils book. It's very short, it's very good. Uh, and uh I go back and read it, uh read it quite a bit. And uh here's a quick paragraph from them uh on flavor and order uh uh flavor and odor. Organoleptic evaluation of oils is an empirical test, and there's no substitute for an experienced analyst.
That experienced analyst is going to be you, and the way that I test my oils constantly to see whether or not they're any good is I get bread, regular white bread, totally neutral white bread. Why? Because it's porous and it soaks up oil. Heat the oil up uh and then put the bread in and fry off the bread a little bit. Don't need to fry it long, you don't want it to brown or anything like that.
Pull it out and taste that bread. If that bread tastes good, if that bread tastes neutral, then you're good to go. And if it doesn't, that oil is no good. And that's literally the test that I run whenever I'm wondering whether my oil is on the edge or not. And it's really very, very uh sensitive.
You know, your palate is very sensitive, and it's what you should follow. If you want a more scientific explanation, go to this, uh go to this paper. It's available free on the web. It's called Mechanism and Factors for Edible Oil Oxidation by Eunic Coey and David B. Min.
Eunuch Coe is a rough name to have. That's this week in cooking Issues. Come back next week, our hundredth episode. Thanks for listening to this program on Heritage Radio Network.org. You can find all of our archived programs on our website or as podcasts in the iTunes store by searching Heritage Radio Network.
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