Today's program has been brought to you by Whole Foods Market, a dynamic leader in the quality food business, a mission-driven company that aims to set the standards of excellence for food retailers. For more information, visit Whole Foods Market.com. 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.
We on? Yeah. Wow. We didn't have any song. Uh Joe, what's up?
Uh trying out a new song, and uh maybe that one won't work. I think it's fine. It's just, you know, I didn't I thought that was part of the whole, you know, we're Heritage Radio Network. That's the thing. It's like you need a break between the Heritage Radio Network and the Cooking Issues.
Am I right? Yes. Am I right? Sure. Let's start this fresh people.
Hello, and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Hondur, host of Cooking Issues, coming to you live every Tuesday from 12 to 1245 on the Heritage Radio Network, broadcasting in a container in the back of uh what is it? Roberta's Pizzeria in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Live as always with Nastasha the Hammer Lopez and uh with Joe in the engineering booth. No Jack today, huh?
No, Jack's feeling real sick. Yeah, what kind of sick? I'm not exactly sure. It's uh some sort of flu type. Uh-huh.
Is it is it the kind of flu you can track from drinking all night? Well I'm just kidding. Jack is a very responsible man. Uh at least about that, so I'm sure that's not it. Anyway, call your questions live to 7184972128.
That's 718497-2128. Uh, I thought actually uh Nastasha was gonna be late because she had to run around like a nincompoop today because we have an event uh we have an event later this afternoon. What is the event we're doing anyway? It's for the American new product stuff, Martha Stewart. American new product stuff.
What's what's that? New products that Martha Stewart likes. That are happen to be American? Yeah. And uh we're we're helping out, or are we one of those products that she likes?
I'm just kidding. I'm just joking. I'm just joking. Apparently, we're supposed to dress in uh caterers' uniforms, is that correct? All black.
All black? So all the only requirements all black. Mm-hmm. So sequins that are all black. That's fine.
So if anyone out there knows a source in Manhattan, Lower Manhattan, preferably, for you know, not too svelt uh male sequined unitards. Please tweet them in so that I can go purchase my sequined unitard. Uh, you know, Booker and Dax became recently uh obsessed with the word unitard. Uh and for that, they were way ahead of me. I didn't become obsessed with unitards and the word unitard until possibly college.
Right? When I was when I first started in bands, one of my dreams was to have we were in a band called Jurassic Yellow Plastic, was to have a yellow sequined unitard and a velvet uh a velvet coat with lapels that uh were uh about uh you know a foot and a half taller than my head that went up. I was big on Bootsy Collins and that kind of thing. Anyways, on to today's question. So Nastasha, I realized that last week uh I started answering a question, and as is normal for someone like me, it totally went completely off base and never actually answered their question.
So uh I apologize to Tom Fisher. Uh Tom Fisher asked, uh recent this is not recently anymore, because it's two weeks, two weeks, whatever. I recently tried Polyscien'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? Now I answered a second question that he had, which was about C VASP, but I never answered this.
It's kind of an important question when it comes to low temperature cooking. The answer is no. You cannot get the best of uh well, you can't get the best of both worlds in that way. Low temperature cooking uh never renders the fat or the collagen out of uh the out of the meats. And so there's positives and negatives to this.
One, the meats don't get as much gelatin and all sorts of broken down uh you know collagen, which is gelatin, uh, throughout the throughout the piece of meat in a low temperature cooked uh item because the stuff it it turns tender but it stays in place. And so if you have a portion of something that you're in a traditional braise might get a little moistened by that by that that render stuff coming out, it's not gonna happen in a low temperature. On the other hand, uh the the benefit of uh it not rendering out, well, the other benefit of it not rendering out is as your guests found out, they can be a little bit freaked out by what they think are big chunks of fat, some of which are big chunks of fat, but also big uh chunks of soft but unrendered connective tissue. But the benefits are that uh unlike a regular traditional braise, you can take most and only with short ribs, if there's a lot of bones, there's you know, it's much harder, but you can do a lot of fabrication work on low temperature cooked stuff. So you can get very uh, you know, nicely sliced pieces of low temperature cooked things like ribs that are very tender that you can never do if you were doing a traditional uh cooking technique because they would just shred into into pieces, right?
So uh so the answer is no. Uh but you you know, you can't kind of get the best of both worlds because if you rendered that out, you'd be cooking it to such an extent that you might have just done low temperature. Uh I mean you might as well just done traditional cooking from the beginning. There's no reason to do the low temperature step. So I what I would say is that use each technique for its own um for its own best purpose.
So low temperature ribs, great for doing uh small portions that are um sliced very nicely and sauced and served as part of plated dish components, right? But if you want rendered out, you know, stick to your ribs, ribs, like you know, you know, grandma style, yeah, which I love, uh, then you know, go go traditional, right? Nastasha actually usually I think prefers the traditional one on that, right? Yes. Although I don't think they're I I really honestly, and I've said this a billion times, and I'll probably say it, you know, forever, there's no better or worse.
It's not better or worse. It's you know, can you achieve the result that you want to achieve? So, anyway, Tom, sorry about that. Another thing I think I don't think I mentioned uh last week uh that we had a question about cutting boards, and I talked about cutting boards. I'm just curious out there if anyone out there has tried these weird multi-layer cutting boards that are coming out of Asia now, where it's it's like literally just stacked sheets of thin cutting boards that are semi-laminated into one thick board, and then when the top gets dirty, instead of cleaning it, you shove a knife into it and peel the entire top layer of the board off.
You ever seen this, Nastasha? No, it's cool. It's cool, but it's weird. It makes a really you would hate it, you know why? It makes a something wrong with you noise when the when the uh when layers are separating, it's like Nastasha hates that because it makes her think of some sort of disease peeling off.
I mean, I've made that kind of noise in the kitchen before, not peeling a disease off. Right? Not not for that reason, but uh but and you hate that kind of noise, right? I hate your breathing, so. See, now that's classic Nastasha.
Now, for those of you out there who say uh Nastasia, she give it to me, like I give it to her. See, that's the only time on the air she's ever actually said something like she would normally say to me in uh you know in in the real world, just so you guys get a get a picture of of uh what's going on. Okay, very nice. Uh okay. Uh Alvin Schultz uh tweeted in with a couple different questions.
One was have we ever tried the technique of cryoshocking? So cryo shucking is uh is uh something that was uh pioneered or I should say uh advocated by I mean I don't know who actually came up with it, uh shucking oysters by um putting the oyster into liquid nitrogen for a brief period of time that kills slashes messes up the musculature of the oyster such that when they uh when they warm up a little bit so they're not frozen, you can get a knife in there and you don't have to worry about popping the belly, and you don't have to worry about getting little bits of shell into your oyster. Cryo shucking. Now I have to admit, uh, you know, Chris uh Chris Young and uh you know Nathan and Maxime and those guys, by the way, you know, none of that team together anymore. The whole team split up, the whole original modernist, like all three of those guys, they're all gone their own separate ways at this point.
And the end of that era, beginning of a new era. Uh so the uh cryoshucking, uh, I've never had much luck with it. They are big advocates of it. I've spoken to Nathan about it, and I've spoken to Chris Young about it. I forget exactly how many seconds you put it in.
The idea is not to freeze the oyster all the way through, just to uh shock the beejesus out of it so that and I guess kill it, but so that it you know you can um so that it relaxes enough for you to get your knife in without having to put too much force in it. Because when you're putting the force in it that you get the um that you get the problems of of chipping shell and all that. Now, uh Nils and I tried it years and years ago, uh years and years ago, and we know we just never had much luck with it. We always maybe we overfroze it, I don't know, but we never we never really we never really were too uh jazzed about it but you know Chris is enough of an advocate of it that I think it bears me trying it again at some point that the idea is to freeze it just long enough uh to uh get it to relax after it thaws but not enough to alter the texture by freezing it you also want to make sure that you put them cupside down when they're thawing so you don't lose any of the awesome precious juices uh when you cry a shuck. But shucking oysters is a huge problem so anything that makes it uh work out better is probably uh uh a good thing to do should I share the Nick Wang story even though I'm probably not supposed to Dave Chang doesn't listen.
Okay. Right? So Dave Chang Dave Chang is a huge uh huge on on oyster shucking. In fact we saw him not that long ago in an oyster shucking contest at Somme where like all of the Momo cooks were racing each other to see who could shuck oysters fastest. And so Dave Chang hates there's two things there's there's there's three things he hates about oyster shucking.
One if you're slow and puny he hates that right he hates if you pop a belly that's uh akin to if to him you might as well just punch him in the face as pop an oyster belly like he like that that would make him punch you in the face. So we're going back to last week's like what would cause a fo a food stuff that would cause your friend to punch you in the face if you shucked an oyster in front of Dave Chang and popped the belly. And the other one is if you served a customer an oyster with bits of broken shell in it. That would also like that's like you know infinite tirades from Dave Chang. So there was an extern years ago uh that Nick Wong saw do this uh actually be he was so frightened that he saw this he Nick stopped him so it didn't go out to the customers as far as I know so don't I don't want anyone to think that it went out to the customer.
Saw the dude rinse an oyster under the water to make sure there was no shell in it. Can you imagine that? Even I might lose my cool on that. I mean, it takes a lot for me to lose my my cool at anyone other than Nastasha. Like people will think I get worked up, but like honestly, like to actually lose my cool at someone I don't know, that takes a lot, right?
Yeah. You ever see me lose my cool on someone I don't know? I don't think so. No, right? No.
Anyway, cryosucking. Uh the other question uh Alvin had was uh he's having problems with this rotavap. Rhodovap is a rotary evaporator. It's used for low temperature uh well, it's it's it's a distillation rig that you use in laboratories, and it's got a couple of benefits. One, it does things at low temperature because it's under a vacuum, and when you put things under a vacuum, you can boil at lower temperatures, which means that you don't have any heat damage to very fragile flavors like herbs.
The other thing is uh the other two things is is it's very gentle, uh very gentle, not just from a heat standpoint, but just gentle in terms of it doesn't have any a lot of bumping and boiling, so it's it's nice that way. And uh two, three, it happens under a vacuum. And since it's under a vacuum, there's no oxidative effects when you're doing it. So it's it's very good for a number of things like that. Uh but if you're going to do legal evaporation, even illegal evaporation, I advocate using a cold finger because you want the maximum difference between your condenser and your boiler to get the maximum recovery of flavor volatiles from things like herbs and whatnot.
Because remember, we're not doing primary distillation with the rotary evaporator. We're not trying to get rid of impurities like you would with uh a column still. So we're trying to get maximum capture of our stuff back in a rotary evaporator, typically. So we want really cold things. So I use liquid nitrogen uh, but uh because I have a lot of it uh in in a thing called a cold finger condenser.
But Alvin's using uh, he says he's using dry ice and acetone, and he says that uh the condenser's getting saturated. First of all, I do not recommend using dry ice acetone in food applications because uh I don't want acetone anywhere near uh the stuff I'm working with. And also, you're gonna get a high like a kite if you have a whole boatload of acetone sitting around and it warms up and starts volatilizing. I don't I don't really like using acetone in the kitchen, so I wouldn't do that. I would use uh dry ice alcohol.
You can use denatured alcohol as long as you're sure it doesn't get anywhere near your food, or you could pick up some like Everclear 195 or something like that, and that stuff's fine. I would use that instead of uh acetone. The other thing is is that uh the dry I mean dry ice that's this is a classic lab way to do it, dry ice and alcohol. But for some reason, and a stash you backed me up on this. Whenever we do uh events where we try the dry ice in the condenser, it never seems to be as smooth or work as nicely as when we do the liquid nitrogen in the condenser.
For for some reason, I don't I I'm not sure why, but we always get a lot more boiling and it's just it's always a lot messier and things seem to get stuck more. And for some reason, I mean dry ice is extremely powerful, and uh I tend also to dry for some reason when we do the dry ice alcohol, it tends to gunk up uh my vacuum lines more because when you're getting when you oversaturate in something that's cold like that, you start getting uh vapor, moisture vapor, or or distillate vapor in your vacuum line or near the point where the vacuum line attaches to the condenser, it can clog up. Once it clogs up, your thing you gets uh saturated out, you can't get a vacuum level in there anymore. And the only way to fix it is to is to quickly put a blast of air through your vacuum line to clear it out by using the differential and pressure. But when you do that, then uh you know you you have all sorts of problems.
So once that happens, it's very hard to get your distillation really right back on track. And uh so I find that typically one way to stop that from happening is to always start your distillation before you chill your uh before you chill your thing down. Get the get your get a a little bit of a vacuum so that's not a great uh you know heat conductor. Get a little bit of a vacuum going in your condenser before you add the dry ice and the alcohol. Don't put dry ice and alcohol in the condenser and then start your distillation run.
Uh, but it's very difficult, and I really think that liquid nitrogen, even though it's not as powerful as dry ice, uh, and so therefore it would cost more in the long and and you have to keep refilling it. I just find that it's a lot easier for me to for me to work with. I've we we haven't had as good a luck with dry ice. Anyway, I hope that helps. Uh should we go to our first commercial break?
Sure. We're coming back from our first commercial break in a moment. Cooking issues! Today's program has been brought to you by Whole Foods Market. Are you a local?
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Tomorrow, the world. For more information, visit Whole Foodsmarket.com. Wow, Joe. I like that. I like that in the back of that.
It's very I don't know that it's Whole Foods sounding, but it's like, you know, right? What do you think? I don't know if that's exactly Whole Foods, but uh Yeah, definitely threw me for a loop. Yeah. That's that is that uh is that is that Jack's work?
No, that's not Jack. That's uh actually uh Rachel Wharton's boyfriend is in this band, and he does the theme song for her for her show, too. So nice, nice cool, right? All right, well, welcome back to cooking issues, calling your questions live to 7184972128. That's 724972128.
Tom wrote in and said, Hi, Dave, and all this not Nastasha now, you're the all too. She's like, I don't care. I don't care. I'm reading my tweets. Actually, you know what?
She's not because Nastasha hates all sorts of social media. She detests it. She detests social things in general, actually. But especially media related to being social, right? It's true.
Yeah. She also likes ordering shoes online, but hates it when other people do it. I died ordering shoes. Oh, yeah? Yeah.
Hold on. You're right. She's ordering jackets. She's literally she's sitting here, she always says that she's doing work. She's sitting here.
I never said she's sitting, she's sitting here ordering jack. Is that what you're doing? Like with See, here's the thing. Nastasha all day has her face in the computer. She's like, you don't know what I do, you don't know what I do.
The first time I ever went and actually took a load of a computer, she's ordering jackets. And not just any kind of jacket, like like early 90s beige barn jackets. No, it's like J. Cruz style. So what the hell does that have to do with anything we're doing right now on cooking issues?
Nothing. Nothing at all. I'm listening to you, though. Uh-huh. What was my last question about?
Oh! You just Harold McGee me. Hey, yeah, do you like this? Well. Okay, good.
Nastasha has this thing that she says I ask questions and then don't wait for the answer. Well, we don't have all day. It is a 45-minute program. Poor Harold. Crazy.
Nastash is a crazy person. By the way, for those of you that don't know, Nastasha, crazy person. Tom writes in. I've recently started making sourdough bread and some other fermented goods. My wife loves the new food, but can't stand the vinegar flies.
I put up with them until recently when they started attacking food mid-prep. Traps do trap flies, especially the ones I baited with water and soap to break the surface tension. Pear slices and sprouted, then roasted barley. But I don't want to cook for flies. That is a lot of work.
Sprouted and roasted barley? First of all, I hate sprouts. Yeah, we did sprouts and that's a test sprouts. Everyone out there, I know that a lot of you like sprouts. I don't like them.
I don't even like sprouts that everyone likes. I said this many times before. Please don't serve me a pea shoot. I know you like it. I know everyone else likes it.
I do not like it. Anyway, uh, I mean, I like to sprout barley, you know, uh to not to sprout it, but to germinate it. I mean, that's like the basis of many of the foods uh I mean foods, drinks that I like in the world are based on the notion of sprouting barley. But uh yeah, uh, you know, but don't uh I should say germinating it. Anyway, because you know, when you're doing malt, you don't want the uh the acro spire to come all the way out of the uh out of the barley because then it's eaten up too much of the too much of the carbo is used, and you don't have enough left over to make your delicious, delicious beer or your delicious, delicious whiskey.
So don't do that. Anyway, um I don't want to cook for flies, and it seems like the trap attracts and then kills extra flies, leaving roughly the same amount to be a nuisance. When I put the ferments in the fridge, the flies abate rapidly. So there isn't some other problem in the background. What do you do?
What can I do? What do professionals do? I can't imagine flies would be tolerated in a good restaurant or factory. Thanks, Tom. P.S.
Uh Dave, did you take any philosophy classes from Michael Delaroca at Yale? He is my dissertation director. If you did take his class, would you give him a shout on an air, uh, shout out on air? Well, I'm happy to give him a shout-out, but no, uh, I don't think he joined the uh faculty at Yale before I graduated. I graduated in ninety-three and I looked him up on the internet and uh his dissertation was in I think 91.
So I don't think he was on the faculty uh at Yale when I was there. And actually, I don't know, I haven't looked at their faculty recently to see whether any of the old guard from uh back in those days was uh is still, you know, there. I'm sure some of a lot of them are still alive. I had a bunch of young young people teaching us, but um I don't know if they're still there. But I'm gonna give a shout out to anyone doing their uh philosophy dissertation at Yale.
Shout out. I love that. Man, like you know, again, whatever. I mean, uh I looked them up uh uh uh uh, you know, Professor uh Della Roca is does a field that uh I didn't do so much in kind of early modern philosophy stuff. I was more I I I did two s two very different sides of the coin.
I spent most of my time worried about Plato and uh Nietzsche. I ended up writing a whole boatload of my papers on Nietzsche. Nietzsche is designed for like an 18 to 21 year old angst ridden philosophy student at an Ivy League institution. Like the writing is just like I I need to go back and read it, see whether I still like it. It'll be interesting whether 41 year old me has gets the same kind of feelings from reading Nietzsche Nietzsche as well.
No, crap on my essays. What the hell did I know? I was 20. But I mean, I don't know, the actual work. Go back and read Nietzsche.
Have you ever gone back, Nastasha, and read some of the old stuff that you read in college to see whether it's still like whether you have any feeling about it at all? I mean, the the the the what I'm worried about is I go back and I read it and I just feel nothing. Wouldn't that be weird to have spent like all that time and then go back and feel nothing? Of course, yeah, it served its purpose. Whatever.
Here is a story. So vinegar flies are similar to what are a named f uh fruit flies or drain flies. They're all different variants of the uh Drosphila like melangaster, you know, the famous melanchaster, the ones that they uh did all the genetics experiments on? Uh fruit flies. They're the same thing, and I hate them.
I detest them. I would why I'm sure that they serve a great ecological purpose, but I would wipe them off the face of the earth. I I I I absolutely detest them. And they're the bane of bars' existence, because uh, you know, so actually, just this uh apropos of nothing, but if if you own a bar and you watch someone come in and do a health inspection of your bar, what they do is they go and they grab your bottles of booze, they swirl them and put a flashlight in the bottom of them, and they're looking for dead fruit flies on the inside of your uh bottles. Now the health inspector that we had didn't have the brains to realize that we're not gonna have that problem because we don't have speed pores on our bottles, so there's no way for flies to get into our bottles.
Also, we were saying we weren't sure if it's actually technically illegal to do an infusion of fruit flies. If you raised food grade fruit flies, could you do a fruit fly infusion and have a bottle that was totally full of fruit flies? Like a hundred percent just fruit flies and grain alcohol as an infusion. Aside from the fact that infusions might be technically illegal, would there be a further b uh a further ill illegality as a result of the fruit flies themselves? It it's unclear to me.
We're not gonna do it, please. I've just I'm k half well I'm I'm a hundred percent kidding, but uh just wondering about whether it's the fruit flies themselves that are inherently some sort of the health hazard, right? Right. I mean the health hazard from a fruit fly is that it it might land on something that's incredibly gross and then land on your stuff. I want to make I told you I want to make little t-shirts for flies that say my last landing pad was poop.
You know what I mean? You want to make a t shirt before a flies. Yeah or somehow like you know maybe a little video where a fly is saying you know because a fly is like yeah it could right yeah my last landing pad was poop. I mean that's the problem with flies. Not fruit flies but flies.
Anyway so off the off the topic. I would look up the Ohio State University extension fact sheet uh entomology on vinegar, pumice or small fruit flies, uh drosphila multiple different species. That's the the you know the genus is uh dress fila. Okay. Here's the issue.
They live anywhere there is stuff they can feed on. So the obvious one that we think of is uh fermenting uh products, fermenting fruit they're attracted um to that kind of a thing. Liquids, also garbage, also mops that you have out that are uh mops that are that are wet dish rags that are wet, uh sponges that are wet, uh any garbage uh that you know is is lying around. Now the life cycle of them is you know between seven and and fourteen days so it takes a while and they it takes a while for them to grow. So most likely you have a source somewhere uh that is uh sitting around for long enough for it for these flies to uh grow.
Now do you want to know what the most likely culprit I think is for something like this is if you if you're not keeping a wet mop around and you're not keeping fruit out, right? And you're not having these kinds of problems. Drains. It's your drains that are the most likely place where these uh where these things uh are are are coming from. Or they're coming from outside.
Most screen mesh, most window screen mesh is not big enough. I mean, sorry it's not small enough to stop these flies from coming in. So uh all of the uh you know the uh the sites, you know, the technical sites on it, you need what's called a 16 mesh or finer, which is finer than most uh screen mesh to exclude uh these flies from coming into your uh kitchen. Also, they can enter through uh they they are attracted to light at night. So if you leave a light on and you have a screen open, they're attracted into the kitchen, and they'll then find a mop, a rag, uh uh, or any place like this to uh to go.
Now, the drains are a problem because you can get a biofilm, which is like a layer of slimy gunk that inhabits the inside of the drains all the way down into where the trap is in the drain. And normal washing uh even with hot water isn't enough to kill and or wipe these things out because the contact time is not long enough. And so what you need to do if you want to see whether this is where they're coming from is uh and this is uh you know, I read this on several of the technical sites, is you want to put tape over a portion of the drain, leaving enough like so air can get in and out and then overnight, and then come in the next day and see whether or not there's any flies stuck to the underside of the tape, which would be indicative that the flies are exiting from the drain pipe in order to lay their eggs and do and do their nasty, nasty work. So um so how do you get it out of the drains? You can uh you you can ru like every couple of months you can remove your drain uh your your the actual cover on the drain, take a scrub brush and bleach and scrub that stuff out, then pour uh a bio uh, you know, an enzymatic bio cleaner that will that will eat away at the uh coating that's on the inside of the drain pipe, and then flush multiple times with boiling water or uh and and then you know periodically pour boiling water down your drains to make sure that you're uh getting rid of it um so that's that's one way to do it also covering up uh you know covering up any source where they might go in that's wet not keeping any of that stuff in your in your kitchen remember they're attract attracted to light and to moisture uh now here's another good one you can use uh insecticides like pyrethrines to kill these suckers but you don't necessarily want to have those things uh laying around something you might not uh be aware of but that uh I I like quite a bit is uh a product called gentrol now gentrol is uh uh uh something called an insect growth regulator the actual active ingredient in gentrol and you can buy this at a lot of stores you can buy it I think on the Amazon uh is uh hydroprene and hydroprene and you you can look it up um just look up hydroprene if you look up gentrol you'll get a bunch of like things trying to sell it to you if you look up hydroprene H Y D R O P R E N E you'll get uh websites that talk about the actual product itself uh what it is is it is a hormone analog so insects use uh different hormones to try and s you know try and uh signal within their bodies that they need to move to the next level of uh either growth a different instar if they're in a in a nymph phase or uh or to lay eggs any so all parts of their reproductive and growth cycles are regulated by hormones the same way we are fortunately for us uh mammals and insects have different hormones and so we can use uh a hormone uh and it's not the actual hormone that's in the insects, but it's an it's analogous to it it.
It affects the same systems that the real hormones do. And we can essentially provide uh birth control to insects. So you and the the cool thing about this hydroprene is gentrol is it's totally food safe. Uh and it's not a human or mammalian hormone at all. So you can spray it on surfaces that are typically difficult to totally eradicate all water from porous wood surfaces, um, things like that, things that can trap uh trap and hold moisture and are great breeding places for these these wretched flies.
You can spray gentrol on them, you know, uh a couple of times. It lasts for a good long while in there, and it will provide continuous birth control for flies such that they will not be able to reproduce. Okay? So uh, you know, we we use this, and and by the way, it works on uh almost all uh insects. Uh go to read if you want to read a uh scholarly paper on it, go read Hydroprene Mode of Action, Current Status in Stored Product, Pest Management, Insect Insect Resistance, and Future Prospects by uh SM Mohandas.
That's available, it's in the magazine Crop Protection 2006, and it's available for free on the USDA.gov uh website. Uh and it goes through what it does uh and all of the uh studies of it. Um and it's it's good stuff, it's gentrol. It also wipes out cockroaches and it also wipes out moths. So, you know, uh, and I think it also might work on flower beetles and things like that.
So if you're having some sort of hard to crack infestation that's probably due to some thing somewhere in your kitchen you can't find that these suckers are attracted to, uh spray this on it, they'll go back to where they came from, wherever they lay eggs, and those eggs will not be fertile. So it's uh it's good stuff. Hope that what do you think? Good? Good job.
Do you like the gentral, right? Did you ever use it? Did you take some, you don't do you have any problems at your house? Really? Even though you live in Hell's Kitchen?
Hell's Kitchen's like, you know, it's like the older of a building you live in, or the more people in it, the harder it is to kind of eradicate these things. We once had uh uh, you know, I've I've had it work wonders on cockroaches at Gentral. I mean, I like it, and uh you know it's nice to find something because I have two kids in my house, so I don't want to spray a lot of poisonous stuff around, you know. Uh I mean I used to have no pets, now we have the two hamsters. Did I ever say on air that the one hamster escaped?
My kids had the hamster, the hamster escaped, but another hamster and the other hamster showed up like a week and a half later, like the prodigal hamster. He was totally emaciated and messed up and like you know, like like you know, on a forced march kind of a situation. My wife saw him and was like, ah, because she thought it was some sort of crazy road. She's like, Oh my god, Rhino, you've come back, and gets rhino, and and like we had two cages, a mini storage cage, right? For the uh and the big one, then the new hamster Sulu had the ran the run of of both hamster cages, right?
And then all of a sudden Rhino comes back, and Sulu gets shoved in the small cage and rhino gets his big cage back because the hamsters can't live together because they might, you know, rip each other to shreds. And we were all like, holy crap, and we're like, wow, it's just like the prodigal son from the Bible. He can leave, he can do what he wants. Hey Dad, how's the c house come? You're so much nicer to the one that did all this other crap.
He's like, I always had you as a son, but this son I had lost and now I have him again. What? Kind of message is that? Crazy. You're following it.
Look, here's the thing. I well, here's the thing. Here's the thing. Uh now look, i i for those of you that that aren't parents or have never been or are young or whatever, okay. When you read the prodigal son in you know section of the Bible, you're like, that is some load of bull.
What the hell is that? You know what I mean? You're like, this is horse crap. But then once you become a parent, you understand it. Really?
Why? Because it's true. You think you've lost something and nothing's worse than the loss. And then when it comes back, it's like, ho you know what I mean? You know what I'm saying?
It doesn't mean you give them the bigger cake. Go kill the fatted carrot. The prodigal hamster is back. Hey, dude. I think you have a caller.
Oh, yeah. Caller, you're on the air. I come choose the crew. It's Brian and Susanko. Oh, hey, Brian, how you doing?
Good. Okay, my question is, I'm looking for your tips to make the best pancakes and waffles. Ooh. What are your pri what are your criteria for for a good pancake and waffle? Because the answer depends.
Okay, so not soggy, uh yeah, got a little little crunch on the outside. It's got some f um some fluffiness to it. Uh and I'm also interested in in in maybe going the savory route also. So both both for breakfast and uh and um and for for dinner. So for dinner, most people on their pancake style things will Korean with yeah with kimchi or something like that.
Right. I mean they'll th like so most people want a different texture on a dinner pancake than they want. They want usually more crepe like on on a dinner style thing. And the the secret to crepe like things is to let the batter rest a long time, not only because of hydration issues, but uh to make sure all the air is out because it's very hard to get a good spread on a crepe if there's any air left over in the batter. Okay.
But crape like means thin. Thin, right. Now, but if you want to do standard pancakes and waffles, if you do, if you research old recipes on pancakes and waffles, you'll find that the major difference between them, in fact, in some ways, the only difference you need to pay attention to between them, is that a waffle recipe is going to contain a significant amount of oil or oil-like thing like butter, okay? And the reason is is you need something to uh you need something to reduce the uh sticking to the sides of the of the waffle iron. So if you try to do a lower fat version of a waffle, you'll s you'll find that uh it just sticks like a like like nobody's business.
Modern day waffle irons have a Teflon coating on the inside of them and are much better at releasing and so don't require as much fat in them as the old school recipes. And so you'll see a lot of more modern recipes really tone the fat level down because the fat level can be quite high. We're talking uh, you know, like over well over half of a cup of uh half a cup, well like two sticks of butter worth, yeah, well over a cup, right? Anyway, in uh in like a four and a half cup flour recipe. So you're um a significant amount of I find though that I like it better with that high amount of uh fat in it.
Now, I used to try various different things in my pancakes and waffles. So I use the same long story short, I use the same recipe because I'd rather have the more fat in my pancake recipe than the less fat in the waffle. It makes it easier to remember. So I use the same batter for both pancakes and for waffles. So uh the recipe I also what I do is I I hydrate a certain portion of the flour in uh my liquids before I before I start working.
I use buttermilk because I like the results I get. So the recipe that I actually use at home, it's not really measured, so I'll have to give it to you. Is I use uh a quart of uh buttermilk, right? The regular cultured like buttermilk, which isn't actually buttermilk, but that's what everyone calls buttermilk. I use a quart of that, five uh whole uh uh I use extra large eggs, I don't know why, but I always have five extra large eggs.
Um I then add uh a portion of the flour. I usually add like a cup and a half. My wife, and I actually like the taste of it, so I the uh if I'm gonna use a non-traditional flour at this point, I add it then. And I use a lot of times use a mixture of oats and/or buckwheat flour and/or cornmeal and/or you know, some little bit, but don't you can't use too much wheat charm, some of that, some or whole wheat, all different kinds or uh or uh chipati flour at this point. I I add it now, right?
At at this early stage, along with uh vanilla, which I usually use vanilla at that point, and if I'm gonna use it rum and also sugar to taste to make it uh a little bit sweeter. And that's what I would omit for a savory recipe, okay? Uh blend that thing together and allow the hydration to start. There's so much uh there's so much um there's so much moisture in that that you're not gonna develop any gluten. Don't worry about and I hit it with a stick blender to get it really well blended at that point.
You don't need to worry about gluten development at this point. I melt uh I also salt, sorry, I add some salt to it. I then melt What about the chemical leaveners? Uh yeah, I add that later. So then I add, so I let that hydrate for a little while.
Then I melt uh two sticks of butter, which is I guess a cup, or mixture of oil depending on what you're doing, if you don't want the butter. Uh I I mix I blitz that in, then I add a portion of the remaining flour, and then it sounds like a lot, but four and a half teaspoons of baking s uh powder. And uh I used to only use four. Uh and I used to also make a thinner recipe with the flour I added, but I decided I like my pancakes thicker, and so I add a slightly more baking uh powder. I take it up to four and a half, and I add a little more flour to make a stiffer.
If you want it thinner and you want the pancakes a little thinner and not quite as fluffed out, more less cakey, then take it down to four teaspoons and um don't uh add as much flour at the end. So four and a half teaspoons baking powder and two teaspoons soda to counteract the acidity from the buttermilk and to co uh do extra leavening. Then I stir in enough uh flour to get the consistency, the texture I want, and I cook it. I cook them on a large uh crepe maker actually, because I have a crepe maker from France. Uh and uh what I usually do is I'll hit it with a little bit of a high initial heat to start the crust going, 'cause it's also there's a big wallop of uh of a heat load on your pan because there's all that moisture sticking to it.
And then I'll reduce the heat down, wait for the bubbles when they break. I can see that I've cooked enough through my pancake for a good flip time, flip and and cook out. That's how I that's my standard pancake. And I use the same recipe for waffles. I tend not to try any of the more comp I I've done them many times, but I don't do a lot of the more complicated stuff like separately whip the egg whites and uh and then fold them in because I find that it reduces the structure on the inside of the waffle or pancake to the extent that it's not what I'm looking for anymore.
Does that make sense? That makes sense. What about things or what is what you know, if I want to do banana nut or add some fruit fruit or something in there? And then all and then also what about yeasted? What it w what if I want to go with with with yeasted and and um put put some yeast into the overnight thing?
Right. There's two kinds of yeasted. There's people that add yeast just for flavor, but then are doing standard rises on it. And uh, you know, that you can do whenever you want. The overnight ones, they they taste great.
They're they're um they tend uh they they have a a very unique flavor. I actually really like them, but um not everyone's uh a fan of that kind of uh a yeasted flavor, but I think they're great. I also used to uh I used to use uh you know, it's well so sourdough that's not right for bread baking, i.e. it's too far gone, it's very sour. But I used to keep that stuff around, not and then I would I would try to reconstitute it into a real bread starter to do bread, but I would use that starter as uh as just an addition to sourdough uh pancakes, where then it's functioning a lot more like the buttermilk.
That's also delicious. But remember, like those kind of preferments are gonna change the structure of the flour a little bit so the the pancakes won't have quite the same texture as a non-fermented pancake will. Not better, not worse, different. You know what I mean? So they'll have a little bit of that glossier inner crumb structure that you're gonna get from a sourdough than you would from a normal normal kind of a a pancake thing.
As regards fruits because it's more gluten development? Uh or I think because it breaks I think because it breaks things down, the the acidity is uh is uh messing with the with the structure, I think the same way that it's actually weakening it. Uh, but uh uh you know, I would think. I haven't done the research on it. I mean it's uh that's just off off the top of my head.
On fruits though, uh I tend not to mix fruits into the batter unless they are completely dry. I don't want them to bleed out, and also it's harder to dose them in. So I always add them to the uh I put the pancake down, I'll then add the fruit in the correct correct dosage and pattern to the pancake. And then because I'm extremely anal, I will take a spoon and paint a thin layer of batter over the over each piece of fruit before I flip it. That's how I do it.
Uh I used to do this also uh with uh I used to use frozen blueberries all the time in my uh in waffles. Uh let me tell you this, it works great, except for expect to buy a new waffle iron every couple of months because the blueberry burns onto the surface of the Teflon, and it is uh they are never the same again. And so eventually your your waffle iron is gonna start sticking, and you could sit there with uh with like a wooden chopstick and try to scrape that stuff off as much as you want to, but those waffle irons never come back to the same condition after you've stopped, you know, after you've started putting fruit into them. Now, maybe worth it to you, and I thought it was worth it for a while, but you know, the last time I I had my waffles start sticking uncontrollably, I was like, I'm just not doing this anymore. I haven't even replaced my waffle iron.
My sons are like, Dad, can you buy a waffle iron again? I'm like, Yeah, yeah, I'll get around to it to buying a good waffle iron. My last one was one of the uh flip guys, the ones that emulated the professional style, the flip ones. The flip ones are actually designed to have a much uh more watery dough, and they're designed to to cook a lot faster and to have a lot more of an empty inside. That's why they flip, right?
You flip it so that you can get the equal uh strike structure on your side. But even so, I used a standard recipe in them and they they work great. I love the the flip guys because they're so much faster. I mean, no one's designed the perfect waffle iron yet. What you really want is a waffle iron that that you know plugs into a 220 source and can make four real-size waffles at once because unless you're feeding only yourself, let's face it, who cooks waffles for themselves?
It's a huge pain in the butt to crank out enough waffles for everyone and then have everyone eat at the same time. Don't you agree on this? Agree. There's always gonna be some that are gonna be more crisp than others. Yeah.
Yeah, I know I hate that. May I, you know, but the problem is people don't have the power uh, you know, in their house to typically do it. I once invested in a bunch of old cast iron waffle irons, the ones that make the really thin, weird little waffles. That's what I have. Yeah, but in they always stuck a little bit.
They were never as release friendly as the other ones, but they did allow me, because I have six burners, I could crank out a whole bunch of them. Do you like the little cast iron guys? Uh it's I I like it. It's it's pretty well this one's pretty well greased. Right.
Um yeah I I find that it it has i it trans once it heats up and it's cranking it's it's it's going pretty well. I like it. Yeah nice. Well maybe I'll give it a uh a try again. It's certainly the only way to get out a bunch of waffles at once is to fire up a bunch of burners with a bunch of cast iron.
Well let's let me ask you more about the savory one because I got I had a recipe for a kimchi pancake that um it it the it was um half potato starch half all purpose flour. Right. Um and it seemed to crisp up pretty pretty nicely but it's a very different kind of deal because it's got a lot of a lot of kimchi in there and and a f and a fair amount of veg. Right. So um uh you know do you do you have any thoughts on that on uh on that for the savory application well what what did you not like about the texture of it?
No I I I actually like it. I don't know if if uh you know if I can take um if I can do that that uh that one to one with the the potato starch and and uh um and the all purpose flour and do use it for other kinds of um other kinds of things. I mean, probably it's it's interesting. I've never done that high of a ratio. I used to all of my cookies uh I used to bake with a like a uh uh a five to one AP to cornstarch base to soften them.
You know, I mean I mean probably they're adding the cornstarch there to soften the pancake up a little bit so that the actual structure of it's not too glutinous, it's not too tough. Uh which would I guess help if you were going to do a lot of um whipping or beating. But again, I'm also using a lot of low gluten stuff in my current pancakes, so I never have a tough problem with them getting tough. I'm using a lot of things like oats and and stuff like that. At fairly high usages.
So you could probab um you know uh usage rates that is, so you could uh on a flour basis. So I'm sure you could uh I'm sure you could use it for whatever you want. If you like the texture of that, I like I say I I've done that much of of non-glutinous flowers, but I've never used that much corn starch. It should hydrate relatively quickly. You know.
Oh, potato. Um the texture is closer to like uh like uh a lotka, like a potato pancake. Huh. Um than a more than a kind of uh sweet pancake, like a breakfast pancake. Right.
Potato starch is weird. I would expect it to be dense and very moist. Uh well the the inside is is is that way, but the outside crisps up very nicely. Yeah. It's interesting.
I'll have to do some uh do where what was the source of the recipe? There was uh it's from the New York Times website. Actually it's uh uh based on a rest uh some restaurant in in in Manhattan, I think. Huh. Well, I'll try to send you the link?
Yeah, yeah, send us the link on the shawcia and pass it on. Cool, thanks a lot. Okay, thank you. Bye. Derek writes in with a question.
Uh hi, I've listened to many shows over the last couple of years and I've heard a great deal of advice on cooking low temperature, especially beef and chicken. I don't recall much advice for lamb though. So as I have a two-pound lamb shoulder roast in my possession, I'd like to ask for some pointers. My plan is to cook it at 60 degrees. AKA 140 Fahrenheit, which by the way, people, I've said this a million times.
Remember that one. Always that like if you remember no other Celsius to Fahrenheit conversion, remember 60 to 140. In my circulator, chill, re-therm, and finish in a 450 degree or 500 degree oven for service. I like my lamb medium. It's 60 one.
I like my lamb medium at 60 degrees Celsius and appropriate temperature. Uh uh it's what I'm uh it's what I aim for when I'm oven baking or oven roasting, but I wonder if you have a di different recommendation for long cooking in a circulator. Uh two, I'm planning on cooking it for six to eight hours, and I want to balance between breaking down connective tissue and not making it too mutton-y. Is this long enough? Next, at what temperature should I re-therm it to get it warm without overcooking it during the final oven browning?
Um 130, for instance. Is that a good uh is that a good thing? Uh in other words, the internal temperature to re-therm it to. Um thanks, Derek. Okay.
First of all, to me, sixty like I looked up uh online. To me, sixty seems uh a little bit high. Uh look at some mean a little bit high for cooking for that long. The longer you cook it, the kind of lower you can get the temperature down. And I mean if unless it's strictly speaking a color issue gonna go up.
Sixty is not too high. I would try to I mean I would do it at fifty seven or fifty-eight, but sixty is probably gonna be fine. You try it, it's not gonna it's not it's not gonna be horrible. If you really want it more on the on the well not well, but on the medium side, sixty might be a a good number. I don't think that um I don't think that six to eight hours is gonna be enough.
You're probably gonna want to go longer, like twelve to twenty four, uh at sixty. But uh, you know, your problem is is that you uh it depends on how tender you want it, right? So the longer lamb usually doesn't need to take as much cooking as uh other things because lamb it's lamb, so it's it's younger. So the connective tissue is easier to break down than it is in uh in an older animal. Um so it typically doesn't take as long a time as you would with uh with an older animal, but um it's still probably gonna take longer than six to eight hours.
You'll get some tenderizing effect at 60 for six to eight hours, definitely, but it's gonna be the difference of taking something, let's go back to steak land, it's gonna be the difference of taking something from skirt steak texture to rib steak texture. Okay, not the difference of taking something from uh, you know, an undone braise to a done braise. So you know, it might be tender enough for you, but the comp like if it's going to be if you're gonna do something at 60, so you're gonna do it at that high a temperature, I think you needed to get it really, really tender in order for like that level of doneness to be pleasant, in which case you're gonna need to go longer, like like eight nick twelve to twenty-four. I would probably cook it long uh as high as twenty-four. I think that the muttony flavor that's gonna come out is gonna come out by eight hours anyway, if you're having a piece that's gonna get one of those gamey muttony flavors.
So I don't think that the extra twelve hours is gonna accentuate that cooking that much anyway. Usually when a meat protein is gonna start throwing off a gamey, livery, muttony uh taste, it's happening in the first four or five, six hours. So by the time you get to eight or nine, I think that flavor's already developed. Not that it won't uh intensify uh over time. Now, if you're gonna chill this guy all the way down, I think that uh, you know, I still think that it's only two pounds.
So I would do it in a very high temp oven to brown up the outside and don't worry about how warm it's gonna get in the middle. It it you could throw it into uh you could re-therm it 130, what's that in Fahrenheit? Could someone do that? I mean, in Celsius. Could someone do the conversions like Celsius to Fahrenheit for me?
130. Yeah. What is that? 54? Yeah, 54 for a 60.
I mean, I would do it even lower. I would re-therm it at like 52. I would bring it up uh at like uh 52, uh up to temperature for like half hour, maybe something like this. Depends on how thick you are. Go to Sous vide or whatnot and find out how long it's gonna take to get up to those temperatures, up to like 50 in that range, and then sear it off uh from there, or even slightly before it gets up to that when the center is like in the 40s or the center's in like the you know, like in the mid-40s.
You'll get a good roast on the outside and you're not gonna overcook it. Um that's what I would that's what I would recommend. What do you think? Or you can just pull it, you can just drop the temperature of the circulator for the last hour if you don't want to chill it down, drop the temperature of the circulator for the last hour, throw ice cubes, drop the temperature of the circulator to 50, pull it directly from the circulator and throw it into the and throw it into a hot oven, and you should be alright. Okay.
Uh one last uh question from Rob Traz. I think it's one last. I think I only have one last. Uh hello, when I cook low temperature or sous vide at home, I typically serve all that I make or chill sealed bags to re-therm them for a separate meal. Typically, I follow the 72-hour rule for uh five degrees Celsius, 41 degrees Fahrenheit storage, as per the FDA time and TEP standards for sous vide in my domestic refrigerator or freeze for longer storage.
If I follow the storage, uh the FDA storage guidelines, then sear or retherm the food, can I safely hold the leftovers for the next uh day or two under refrigeration? Uh do the FDA sous vide standards, uh pages one through 186 in Modernist Cuisine only or no volume one, page 186, I guess, for modernist cuisine, only pertaining to the time spent in the anaerobic environment, i.e. until the bag is opened, do these restrictions go away if I use Ziplocks instead of vacuum bags? I have some duck confie sous vide at 180 for eight hours, children stored in the freezer for a month, and I would like to use it to make Rietes. What kind of storage and serving window would be appropriate.
Thanks again for all your help, Rob Trapas. Well uh that is a that that is a really uh really good question. So it If you're storing it for a month, right, you're gonna want to have your storage as per the storage things all the way down at 38 Fahrenheit. However, with uh confie you're going to cook it, right? So what they're worried about on that probably is a botulism uh problem.
Uh and you know if you're gonna reheat it enough um I think you're going to be alright. You're gonna cook it, you're gonna recook it and make Riyettes with it. What kind of storage and serving window would be appropriate. If you pull something out of a bag and you consider safe it should be alright to to redo it normally. There's two issues going on and you rightly point them out here is one is you're worried about uh you know anaerobic things uh going wrong in your bag i.e botulism or mic or facultative bacteria microaerobic stuff like listeria going on.
You're gonna wipe out the listeria. So you're worried about things that are spore forming, like if you do a good job cooking, so if you're actually cooking it properly. Uh so you're worried more about things like uh botulism and um you you're still I'm not uh I you know what Rob? Like for some reason my brain is totally fried. I'm trying to parse through everything that you're that you're saying.
And I when it comes to safety, I want to make a hundred percent reliable judgment as to what I'm doing. So I'm gonna go ahead and reread your question, because I when I read it, I thought I could answer, because usually I can answer most safety things off the top of my head. But I want to make sure I give you exactly the right r uh advice on the order of what you're doing, things and where they're gonna go. So I'm gonna hold off on finishing your question for uh for next time. And on my way out, we have a question from Mike Cheshevsky.
Says, oh, by the way, he says PS because I know they're gonna cut us off before I'm done. He says, You guys need to have a TV show. From your from your lips to uh the I don't know, some producers' ears. The problem is very few people want to actually do a show the way that uh you know that we would want to do a show, which is I like to just go I just like to go crazy on particular subjects for a long period of time, and most people they don't they don't like that so much, right? Right.
Right. It turns out turns out they don't like it so much. Uh anyway, my question concerns dairy products and heat. I sometimes add dairy to hot dishes. For instance, I might finish a curry with a bit of yogurt or add sour cream to a paprika, which I haven't had one in a long time.
They're delicious. Anyway, uh sometimes the dairy curdles and looks gross. It does look gross, you're correct. I think it has something to do with the whey proteins denaturing and binding to the K pros uh casein uh proteins. Uh well, that I'm not sure about that.
But anyway, could you explain exactly what is going on and any possible solutions? One trick I found which sometimes works is tempering the dairy with a bit of the hot liquid and then incorporating it back into the main pot. Thanks, Mike. Okay. Um what's happening is is that the the you know, you in something like a sour cream, the stuff is partially uh coagulated and broken together, but it's still okay.
You stir it in, it's acidified, so it's right at the place where it's going to break and curdle and look awesome. It's very, very touchy. And this is why all the recipes recommend to you that you uh you know don't heat uh sauce after you add the sour cream to it. You're very gentle when you heat it. And the reason they're asking you to temper the stuff in is because if you put the uh sour cream directly into the hot uh uh sauce, especially if it contains acidic things like tomatoes that are adding to the acidity of it, right?
Uh it will tend to break right away. Whereas if you are if you're stirring the the the dairy product and adding hot liquid into it, it's much more gradual change, and so you're not gonna cause uh kind of the instant break where where it's gonna happen. The um the the recommendation so that's why that recommendation is there, right? Uh the the breaking is enhanced by heating, which is why the recommendation is also there to not heat up those things. The other one that works is to add a stabilizer.
So if you're adding a stabilizer, and a lot of uh, you know, people put either starches or flour in, uh, and the flour uh prevents the uh prevents the the the agglomeration of the uh of the casein and so it prevents that curdling and that you know that's doing that. On the other hand, that's gonna muddy the flavor somewhat of it by by masking it with the with the thing. My uh my uh the person who's now what's Piper's what's Piper's job with this? Uh product engineer, I think it is. Yeah.
He uses uh pectins actually, a particular kind of pectin. I'll try and get it for the next show to do acidified dairy products that don't curdle. And he made a really acidified dairy product for us uh yesterday it was kind of was kind of what do you think about that? Oh, you wasn't there. Oh, you didn't taste it.
Uh anyway, so so you you can do that. Uh uh again, my brain totally bad. I didn't didn't read precisely what you had said. I don't think it is the whey proteins binding to the casein uh proteins, although I will research it for uh for the next time, as well as answer a question about Pectanex that came in that I didn't get a chance to answer until next week. Cooking issues.org.
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