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Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live on the Heritage Radio Network in the back of what is it? Roberta's Pizzeria in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Joined as always with Nastasha the Hammer Lopez. We got uh Jack and Joe in the engineering booth.
Thank you. Thanks. It's good to be back. Uh I actually was uh late this morning, not for my normal reasons, but thanks to Hurricane Sandy. My building still no longer has heat or hot water, and so uh we pretty much boil a giant pot of water on the on the stove all day every day.
Uh so I forgot to turn off the stove, and I had to bike all the way back home and uh turn the stove off to prevent uh my house from burning down. But call all of your questions in to 718497-2128. That's 718497-2128. Now, the first week we were gone because I was in Portland. Uh, doing a cocktail demo, and I had to uh set up actually during our show.
Uh and last week, as those of you in this area will know or in the US will know, we had a uh little bit of a hurricane here in New York City. Uh shut down uh all of lower Manhattan for about three, four days, and uh destroyed a lot of people's houses in Staten Island and uh uh, you know, out on the shore in Queens and the Rockaways, and so we've been spending the better part of the week kind of dealing with that. But anyway, back to business. We have a lot of questions uh already uh emailed in because we've been gone for two weeks so I'll just start getting to them uh by the way uh any news uh from you Nastash anything good nothing no stash and I did the today show uh two two days after three days out there three days after the hurricane right yeah and so uh like they thankfully they put me up in a hotel along with my family which uh saved us from better part of ha half of the problems because Nastash was like well he I didn't have we didn't have self service in the lower Manhattan. People don't people don't understand it's not really that it's not really the power loss it's a huge problem.
Uh it's it's lost we lost you know all all service. Now luckily obviously we're all safe so we have very little to complain about compared to most people but um the the the thing people don't get about New York City is that we have in New York City a large population of elderly people who are able to live alone because there are a lot of services in New York that you wouldn't ordinarily get if you were living very spread apart in a suburb let's say we have a lot of people who are kind of right on the verge of being able to live alone who are elderly have some sort of disability but then you shut down everything including power and uh water and some people are living you know on very high up floors and they have to now walk or get things it's just that it was a nightmare for those people. And that's you know those are the kind of people you don't necessarily think about if you don't live in a city, right? Right. Anyway terrible so I the guy I buy my cheese from was saying he went and visited uh some of my cheese uh you know his mother-in-law, the day after the hurricane, he was visiting his store that was shut down, and she's probably I don't know, 80, in her apartment alone, crying her eyes out in the dark by herself because she ha couldn't call anyone, because a lot of us don't have landlines anymore, and just had no idea what was going on, had no news, had no one.
She was afraid to go outside. Crazy. Anyway, enough of that. Joseph, and then we we never got his pronunciation uh name is uh the pronunciation of his name. Joseph Petto wrote in about uh Cambodian food.
I'm interested in expanding my knowledge of Cambodian foods and was wondering if there's a cookbookslash resources you can recommend uh to help with my adventure. Thanks. Um well, unfortunately, Joseph, I only have myself personally one cookbook that deals specifically with um Cambodian food, and it's actually as a kind of it it the book is mainly about Vietnamese cooking. I wasn't able to dig it out, so I I can't uh give give you the name of it right now. But it looks like one of those crappy 80s cookbooks that you used to get back in Borders in the bargain shelf.
In fact, I purchased it in the bargain shelf at Borders in the early 2000s, and it's one of those books that looks like that. It's on Vietnamese and Cambodian food, and surprisingly, it is a very good book. And uh they uh I found on Amazon that they reissued the Cambodian portion of it. Uh and I can't see what they what they call it, but it it's it's um anyway, you I think it's the food and cooking of Cambodia, over 60 authentic classic recipes from undiscovered cuisine. Uh, and and it's part of that you should just get the one that's Vietnamese and Cambodian.
And uh I asked, you know, the person who had Nastasha's job before Nastasha uh was Vietnamese, is Vietnamese, she's still alive, and uh her name is uh uh Mindy uh Nguyen, and she looked at the at the Vietnamese section and said, Yeah, the Vietnamese section looks good. And uh, and then someone else said on the on the reviews in Amazon said the Cambodian section looked good. Another one out of print that I would like to get if I could get a hold of it, but it's out of print, is called the Elephant Walk Cookbook. Uh there's one that looks very short, and I don't know how in-depth it is, but you can fund some humanitarian aid in Cambodia by buying uh a book called Cambodian Cooking and Humanitarian Project in collaboration with Act for Cambodia. Um anyway.
Hope that helps. Um again, it's something that I don't know as much about as I should. We don't really have that many uh Cambodian restaurants here, do we? No. Vietnamese.
Yeah. It's pretty huge. Uh isn't that one by the FCI Cambodian? Which one? N.
No, something within N. I don't remember. Nils used to go there a lot. No, that's Malaysian. Yonya?
No, no, no, yeah. Malaysian. That's like the Malaysian joint that uh a lot of chefs used to go to. My son, actually, Booker and Dax, who hate almost everything, love Yonya. They love it.
The bread, probably, right? Crispy Squid. Oh. Crispy Squid and uh their chicken soup noodle soup. Oh, I have a caller, caller, you're on the air.
Hi, David Natasia and Jack. This is Eric from Oakland. And a couple uh pressure cooker questions. Shoot. Um first uh I'm looking into buying one.
Uh, and I do mostly cooking around the house uh for two to maybe upwards uh eight to ten people. Right. Uh what size pressure cooker should I be looking at? Well, uh excluding the huge ones made by like uh the American Foundry, like the pressure canner style ones, just get the largest one you can get. I forget what the leader rating is, but I prefer.
I have the really tall Coon Recon, not the really fat wide one, but the tall Coon Recon. And uh I like the handle or the the long handle or the two small handles on the side. I you well it used to have a long handle, but it fell so many times on the floor that the handles have all broken off. And so now I have to put the lid on with a uh you know by holding it with pot holders and everything like that. But yeah, it used to have a long handle on it.
Alright, so that's probably the 12 quart variety then, huh? Probably. I mean the good thing about the tall one is that it it the the pot surface isn't that wide. I mean so you can you're not gonna use it as a fry pan obviously but the pot surface is not that wide so you don't get a lot of scorching on it. And also because of that you can have smaller volumes in it and still pressure cook uh fairly effectively as opposed to the ones that are really wide which sometimes when you're getting it up to heat you could get some scorching around the center part if your burners aren't big enough.
You know what I mean? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Um question I had was you were talking a lot about uh cooking down garlic and onions uh to sort of concentrate and maybe take the bite out of them. Uh do you put liquid in with them so that you can bring the thing up to pressure and what's the procedure for doing that?
Yes, you put liquid in. I used to use uh for garlic and onions I I depending on what you're gonna do I a lot of times I use milk. I don't know why it's just a habit and it works nicely and uh I don't know whether there's any functionality to it but it curds up uh but usually I end up pureeing it anyway and so it it ends up being good. So for some reason I've always used milk. But uh how far do you fill it up?
Do you cover the uh the onions and the garlic? No no no you just need enough to you bring it to a boil while you're stirring it so that you don't uh scorch the milk, close it, bring it up to fr pressure very quickly and then lower it so the milk doesn't scorch. Or you could use broth or s or or you could use water even, but or you could put the you could put the allium, whatever garlic onion in a bowl, uh like over a trivet inside of it and just have it not touch the water at all. All those will work. Okay.
So and then you but remember it's not gonna have uh necessarily the same flavor that you're used to because you're taking all all of the pungency pretty much away. But the good news is you can. Yeah, you can eat a ridiculous amount of garlic that way without it uh you know destroying your your pores. Now, for those of you out there who might be like uh health obsessed with garlic, I th th I think that if you believe that garlic has some sort of amazing health-giving principle, that you're probably obliterating that by doing this, but you know, I don't care about that sort of thing. Do you have time for uh one more question about fluid gels?
Sure, quickie. All right. Um trying to make a brandy fluid gel for uh Thanksgiving dessert. Um and real quick, it's uh my test batch was three and a milliliters of brandy, two point four grams of auger, point two grams of salt, point four grams of nutmeg, ninety grams of sugar, uh bring to a simmer, cook off the brandy, ice bath to let set, uh and then blend. Right.
Um and after uh about a day, two days in the fridge, uh the gel started really loosening up. And I was wondering if there would have anything I'd do about that. Uh I'm amazed that it's set because you didn't uh I mean I would it formed a really nice fluid gel at the beginning or no. Yeah, yeah, it was pretty pretty thick and had a good texture and I could uh squeeze it out of a bottle and get a nice little collop. Huh, you mu you must have really boiled off a lot of the alcohol then.
Yeah, I did uh I boiled it until uh and then I lit the pan on fire and boiled it till the fire went away. Ah, yeah, okay, good. Because um two things, agar won't set in that high of a proof of alcohol, and two, uh needs a higher boiling point than you can get just out of when you bring a brandy to the boil to hydrate properly. So yeah, so getting rid of the alcohol was a good thing. How much acid was in it, you said?
Uh there was no acid in it. And it's separated on it, it just separated? It wouldn't come back together when you started. It's not really separating, it's just loosening up. It's not as is like thick of a gel.
It's more of like a a sauce now. Huh. Well, uh I haven't had that happen. My guess is that the you know, the way you're forming a fluid gel is you're breaking the particles into very tiny, tiny bits that have some affinity for themselves, but are uh are floating around in a f in a fluid so that when you when you move through them they uh you're you're they they shear apart quite easily and then regain their affinity for themselves when they're standing still. So my guess is that they uh that you more water was squeezed out of the uh the gel particles, and so the individual gel particles are becoming denser and the water phase is increasing.
And you might therefore be able to bring it back by adding a little bit of something that's gonna absorb some of the water, like Xanthan. But I don't know uh that that that's the case. That is my guess as to what's going on. What percentage of gel was it? Well, assuming uh brandy is the same density as water, which it's not, uh I went I shot for point eight percent.
Yeah. So uh uh right around point eight, it's nice, but uh but like small increases in water around that point are gonna uh decrease the viscosity a good chunk. Uh and so you that's that might be what what's happening is you the balance um the the water might be centeracing more out of the gel and just decreasing the liquid balance. I mean increasing the liquid and the balance slightly. That's my guess.
Okay. Should I try upping uh the a little bit? Not the same gun doesn't work. Uh you mean if you're going to make it again, I would just make it day of. And that way you don't have to worry about it.
Um because if you up it, you could always up it and then keep a little bit of the liquid around and then dilute it to the proper consistency at the moment that you're gonna serve it, if that makes sense. Okay. Yeah, I was trying to make Thanksgiving Day a little bit easier and as much beforehand as possible. So yeah, you can set it a little thicker, like fairly fairly thick, as long as your blender can take it, and then just keep a little bit of the liquid around and then just kind of stir in a little liquid to get the uh get the balance where you want it. Alright.
All right. Okay, thanks, Dave. All right, good luck. Good luck. Let us know how it goes.
I will. Cheers. Hi. Okay. Uh Brian Zerbius wrote in about circulators.
And uh says, first of all, I love the show and uh make my cooks listen to it during prep. I feel sorry for them, but thank you for making them uh listen to it. Uh two questions. First, what do you think about the current surge uh in popularity of street foods, mainly food trucks? Instead of the sappy weepy stuff.
Uh yeah, and you uh you can't force bartenders to do anything, is what I've learned. Uh uh, what do you think about the current surge in popularity of street foods, mainly food trucks? And second, do you think it's practical to use sous vide on a food truck? As a chef looking to open a truck in the next year here in Indianapolis, uh, I want to plan slash prep cook most of my proteins sous vide in an attempt to create an awesome dish and to I assume you mean decrease my production times without losing any quality from my guests, uh Alan Sternberg. Well, hell yes, it's good in a food truck.
I like food trucks actually. I mean, here in New York, I don't really get to eat eat at them uh very very often. I don't know. Do you ever eat in the food trucks? Not really.
When I was in Portland, I ate in some, they're not really food trucks, they're more like kind of food kiosks kinda. But I think they're great. And you know, I've had uh Chef Jeremiah Bullfrog's uh gastro pub stuff down in the Florida in the Miami. I think they're I think they're good. I think it's I think it's awesome because uh, you know, they allow they allow uh like the the thing that's good about them is it's not just like schlock artists, jerkwads who are who are opening them, you know, it's like people who want to do a very finely focused item at an inexpensive price.
A lot of people I know who are doing it are focusing on quality. And so anytime you're gonna bring quality and speed to a uh a lot of people at a reasonable price, hell yes, bonus, right, says? Yeah. Anyway, uh sous vide in a truck uh or low temperature in general truck is a fantastic idea uh as long you know as long as you uh can get the the the bottlenecks going and get a circulator that you can run it in a truck or a CVAP or something to do your re therm. Or like like do you can do if you plan your menu item properly, you can go from zero to finished in a normal procedure straight out of a refrigerator.
I'll give you an example. So I know I always talk about steak because I like cooking steak, but here's steak. So um uh I worked on a steak where I did uh I did it was a very thin rib steak, like fairly thin. I forget the exact thing. It's on the on the about three-quarters of an inch.
I had it exactly calculated. But anyway, so what you what you do is is you fully cook the thing through to 55 degrees uh 552 Celsius in a circulator, cook it long enough to get the tenurization effects you want from me. It was about two hours uh in in a bag in zippies, actually, so I didn't have to deal with uh you know board of health stuff, then uh chill it all the way down in in a fridge. Uh right, you know, don't throw it directly in ice water, let it sit out to reabsorb some of this moisture for a second, then throw it in the in a fridge, get it down in an ice bike, get it down. Store it in the fridge at refrigeration temperature, right?
Now here's the trick. It's coming out cold, but it's thin, right? So what you do is you drop the steak in a deep fryer. Just drop the steak directly in a freaking deep fryer, right out of right out of the right out of the fridge into the deep fryer, two minutes on the button. Uh it was all calculated based on thickness.
Anyway, two minutes on the button, pull it out. Now you've overcooked the outside, so unlike normal sous vide finishing, you need to rest this steak now. So it's two minutes in the fryer, two minutes rest on the plate, slice and out. Bang. And those steaks were perfect all the time.
Now they had a little more of a cooked region on the outside than you would have in a normal uh sous vide or low temperature steak, but they were just warm on the in the middle, then they were perfectly cooked throughout, and literally four minutes total and only two minutes of cook time from fridge to plate uh without having to have the steak sitting around in a circulator without even having to have a circulator at service time at all. So if you get your portions uh done that way, then you can you're all of a sudden you're like master blaster genius. So, like fried chicken, get your chicken pieces such that they just get warm in the center in let's say a two-minute fry time, so you have to calculate what that is. Pre-cook all of your white meat to 64, let's say, be on the safe side, although I like 63. Cook all of your leg meat to uh 66, although 65 is what I like to do, but 66 is good.
Uh, and then have the slices so that they'll they'll warm through. Then you can uh you know dry them out, batter them, chill them down, and now you can you can fry them from cold uh you know, and then bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, without having to ha hold warm. So in a truck, I would definitely do that rather than having to have a lot of warm holding. I would try to do mostly things that you can finish you know in whatever your finishing uh operation is. I mean, for me it would always be frying because I love frying.
Uh, but um like that. That gets rid of an extra step for the truck, which is going to make it a lot easier. Or if you want to do really high-end stuff, you could always hold things in a circulator, but it's uh it's it's great for that. Anyway, right? Yes.
Dave and Nastasha, this is in from uh from Andrew, and his last name is Janjigian, Janjigian, and I'll get to the pronunciation of it later because I butchered his name uh prior. Uh I've been looking for, and and I apologize by the way, that uh both of the things that you're about to mention, the auction's already ended because we've been gone for two weeks. But hey, whoo! What do you gonna do? Uh I've been looking for a cheapish circulator on the eBay and I found a couple of items.
But you know the eBay started by a guy who wanted to help his wife sell Pez uh Pez dispensers? Pez. Pez. Do you like Pez? Uh-huh.
I I think they are gross and I love them. Like I can't, like, I can't eat just one. I have to eat like the whole dang package of the Pez. But they're not actually good. They remind me of the aspirin, the bears, the kids' children's St.
Joe's Joseph's rather. Anyway, sorry, sorry, sorry. Uh, on the eBay and found a couple of items, both being sold by Global Machinery. I don't really know that. He said, not sure if you're familiar, but they're selling a lot of interesting equipment.
I love the name though. Global Machinery. I wish we had a name. That's an awesome name. Global machinery.
Local machinery? Yeah. Local? No. Global.
Global. Global. Anyway, okay. The first is a poly science heating recirculator Model 210. Uh, and you know, and the question is do I have any.
I think now that that's an old uh poly science uh like kind of heater circulator with an in tube and an out tube. And I've used one similar similar to that. And the second one that you linked to was a blue magic whirl water bath. Nastasha, I don't think likes the word whirl. I think it reminds her of something something gross like a leaf fungus, whirl, right?
Does now? Yeah anyway. Uh it seems like the first would work for low temperature cooking with the addition of tubing and a container. Not sure about the second one. Second one, by the way, for those of you that can't look at it on the web like we can here, actually, like I did before.
Uh one is uh a head that you stick into a bath and then have tubes that you send outside, or you can shunt them the in to the out uh so that you don't go to an external with tubing and just put it in a bath. Uh so it's it's an older version of a kind of a current model circulator, but that's meant to go into a bath and then uh you know heat an external source, but you don't need to use it that way. And the second is a contained water bath that has a drain that it's basically looks like a big kind of uh Bainbury soup warmer thing. It's itself contained just with a proport, you know, a PID controller in it. Um anyway, it seems like the first would work for low temperature cooking with the addition of tubing.
Not sure about the second. Are you familiar and do you think either is worth buying? P.S. I love the show and it helped keep me sane this summer while I hike the Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada. Thanks, Brian Zerbies.
Can you believe uh uh can wait I this one's not from Andrew, by the way. This is from Brian Zerbies. I got my questions mixed up. But anyway, I'll get to Andrew in a second. But can you believe that this guy hiked from Mexico to Canada?
That's some crazy hiking. Yeah. That's nutty bags. I mean, I'll always want to do the Appalachian Trail. Someday I'll do the Appalachian Trail.
Once my kids are in uh the college, I told my wife, hey, we're gonna hike the Appalachian Trail. She's like, Yeah, shut up, whatever. Yeah, yeah. Because she doesn't have to think about it because you got like another 10 years to worry about it. You know what I mean?
Would you like to hike the Appalachian Trail sometime? No. No, you don't like hiking? No, I do. I just wouldn't want to do it in the US.
Too many heat too many funk fungi along the way. Why would you want to want to do it in the US? I'd want to go somewhere abroad. Why? Why can't you hike here and hike there?
You're not what? I'm not patriotic like you. You're not patriot. It's a freaking election day. I voted already, by the way.
I know. Did you vote? Yes, I did, but yeah. So it has nothing to do with patriot. No, I know.
I don't give a rat but you. You really like to you really like to explore America? I don't. That's that's all. This is what I deal with on a daily folks people.
First of all, I don't care. Like I happen to love America quite a bit. All right. But even if you even if you didn't love America the way I love America, like uh we have some beautiful freaking scenery here, and the Appalachian Trail is not about putting on your durndal and going to Oktoberfest. It's about natural freaking beauty.
Yeah, freaking. Then fly to where is the people seriously. Tennessee. It's it's it runs through New York. It runs from Maine to Georgia.
So you would do the whole thing. Yeah, I want to do the whole damn thing. Wow. Anyway. Takes a couple of months.
And everyone always they start down south and then they quit, like they which I probably do too. People are like, crap on this, and then they they quit. Where? Uh well, it depends on how far how far you go. I mean, it's a long, long, and it's tough.
It's like through the mountains, and you can't carry a lot because otherwise you're carrying a lot and you can't. And so people like all the a lot of times they'll they'll bring too much on the Appalachian Trail and they'll have to throw it away or shed it halfway through. You can mail stuff to yourself halfway along so that you could pick it up at these weird little zones along there to get food and I don't know. Apparently you smell really bad. But hey, that's no news to us here in New York.
We're not gonna let some showered for like a week. Oh! Anyway, uh, well, those of us don't have hot water. Anyway, uh, you know, we're sponging ourselves off. So uh anyway, so back to the circulators.
Here's the problem with the old, I don't know how we get to the Appalachian Trail from circulators. Oh, yeah, yeah, he hiked. He hiked, he hiked. Okay, listen. Uh the problem with old circulators is this.
Uh often they are on their last legs. They've been used in a lab for a long, long time, uh, and they've been packed away. And the newer circulators are a lot better, not in terms of their temperature control, but in terms of the bearings that are in the motors. So the motor lifetime in an old circulator is not nearly what the motor life is like in a new circulator or a new circulating water bath. Now, add to that the fact that the older one has also been used for a long time, and also sometimes questionable items, right?
The second problem is the electronics in the older circulators can also go bad after a long time. It's because they've been exposed to uh moist environment for for uh a long, long time. So most of the time in an old circulator, what's gonna go bad is either the bearings or the uh electronics. Um and they're all fixable, most of them, uh, but it's a crab shoot. Now, if you get one that happens to work or is in good shape, then God bless, they work.
You know what I mean? But uh, especially nowadays, like look the ones you sell were selling for about a hundred bucks, and you you have like maybe uh 20 to 30% chance that it's gonna be no good, so you toss that money down the drain. Within a couple of months, the average circulator is gonna be between 350 and 500 for something that's guaranteed to work. You know what I mean? So I would probably go that route in st instead, unless you like to take crapshoots.
And I'm with you, I do, I do like to take crapshoots. Anywho, now on to Andrew uh John Johnjiggins, John Janjigian, Janjigian. Okay, I'm gonna get to it made. On fry oil, two Nastasha and Dave. Thanks for covering my fat saturation and frying question a few weeks back.
I was a bit behind on listening to the podcast and just heard this segment the other day. I had a follow-up question. If continuous batch frying operations use a blend of fresh and partially oxidized fats, can a home cook do the same thing, save the previous batch of oil and blend it with fresh the next time around. Also, I forgive you for butchering my name on the air. You are right, I should have provided pronunciation assistance.
It is a hard G as in pig. Otherwise, you had it right. Uh by the way, I like that someone's like, G is in pig, not G is not G is in something else. Like he's like pig. Well, you're right about saturated.
Right? That's good. Saturated fat's pig. Anyway, finally, I seem to recall uh Dave saying he was a sample of uh the uh William S. Burroughs, a fan of William S.
Burroughs, which reminds me of one of my favorite old food-related WSB quotes. I hate sprouts. They put them on everything they serve. Eating sprouts is like going down on a robot. Damn.
Damn, I'm hearing some damn from the engineering room over there. Damn. Cheers, Andrew. John Jiggian. Well, I mean, it's a robot.
You could do anything you want to a robot, right? You can't have an X-rated robot, can you? I mean, it's a robot. Uh I I don't think I have ever mentioned that. I mean, like I I, like almost everyone, have read uh some burrows, ex like naked lunch freaked me the heck out because I read it as a teenager.
Probably, oh my god. You read that stuff, Stuff? Oh no. You've never read Burroughs? I don't think so.
Jack and Joe, you're Burroughs readers, right? What the hell's wrong with you people? You know, great American look. Look, first of all, anyone who's a connoisseur of the crazy has to like a little bit of the burrows. Burroughs, when he was like, you know, 75 or 80 was something, his last boyfriend was like, I don't know, it's crazy.
He's crazy. Go research some burrows. He's a nut job. Anyway, whether you like him or whether you hate him, that is one of the great sprout quotes, and I believe entirely accurate. Now, back to your frying question.
Usually when you're frying at home, if you're actually deep frying, the first couple of things you fry, uh, especially if you've overheated it, which is normally what happens in home frying, you've ruined the oil enough to have it be a good frying situation. Um that said, uh, you can uh save a portion of your oil and blend it back. But fry the fry oil uh really kind of tempers itself out pretty quickly. Uh but yeah, I don't see why you can't, you know, you don't want to, you don't want to, you don't want to add so much back that it degrades before you're finished frying. So the here's the answer.
If usually at the end of frying the stuff's tasting bad and the stuff's smelling bad, and you smell that kind of fishy, broken down fat uh aroma in your kitchen, which by the way, that smell makes me want to puke. You like that smell stuff? It makes you want to puke, right? Yeah, if you're smelling that at the end of your frying, then you can't afford to have it go off any faster. If at the end of uh your frying sessions, the oil smells entirely neutral and awesome, and when you throw a bread uh crouton into it and eat it, it still tastes uh clean.
Then, yeah, you could save some of that and add it back. It's not gonna be a problem. So it depends on how abusive you are to your oil. That makes sense, though? Uh-huh.
Anyway, going down on a robot. Michael Nakin writes in. Hey, Dave, Nastasha et al. I was pondering uh our friend Michael Nakin, right? Uh, who I don't think I I don't think I've ever met him personally.
Have you ever met him personally? Didn't no. I thought he came to the bar. Did he? I don't know.
No, I don't think not when I was there. Uh I was pondering why refrigeration always breaks down while stoves and ovens are much more reliable. I'll tell you why. I think it's a freaking racket. You notice how your home fridge never breaks down?
Hey, Jack and Joe, is your home fridge ever broken? Yeah, right? Stas, is your home fridge ever broken? My parents, yeah. Your parents, but how old was that fridge?
Who knows? Yeah, right. I mean, like, you know, it's the first fridge ever made. You know? What about you?
Have you ever had a fridge? No. My home fridges have never broken. For a four-year period, I had a commercial fridge in my house and it broke four times. Commercial refrigeration sucks.
Here's a little known fact. Commercial refrigeration sucks. And uh, you know, by and large, I mean, I you know, I like the good folks at uh, you know, Randell. But and I think it's a racket. Here's what commercial refrigeration people will tell you.
They'll say, they'll say, look, a home fridge, you don't have to open and close it all the time. You open and close the commercial fridges, and they they they go through a lot more abuse, and that's why they break. No, it's because they build them like crap. It's they vibrate. You ever notice how loud commercial refrigeration is compared to a normal refrigerator?
It's because they just don't put the stuff together as well. They don't insulate it as well, and they don't solder it as well. There's no reason why a compressor should rattle itself apart, develop a leak, throw out its uh refrigerant and have to be recharged every couple of years, like you do in commercial refrigeration. No reason. Anyway, enough of a rant on commercial refrigeration.
Well, uh well, a lot of people have had their home stoves break, and your gas, regular old gas stove is a freaking demon. The only thing that breaks in commercial gas stoves is the little bezoval valve in the oven. Or if you have an electric one, they break all the time. Whatever. Anyway.
Uh, yeah, so stoves uh reliable, especially gas ones. And that's one of the reasons, by the way, that Americans are so resi aside from the fact that our natural gas is so freaking cheap, and that um and that the feedback loop for a for a cook looking at a gas flame is one of the great uh kind of visual feedback loops of all time, right up there with the with the two switches and a paddle and a vita prep. Uh one of the reasons that we favor gas over uh electricity and especially induction is even though it's horribly inefficient, is because uh they never break gas uh gas ranges, never break. Anyway, rarely break. Um okay.
Uh anyway, Michael's pondering why refrigeration breaks down, and he says, obviously it's primarily because of compressors, which are a lot more complicated than just piping gas somewhere and burning the crap out of it, like a stove does. Which goes back to the idea of entropy. I'm no physicist, but I believe when you're adding heat to a system, you're increasing the entropy and therefore doing what the universe wants to do while taking uh heat out of something reduces entropy, so you're fighting an uphill battle. Well, actually, I mean heat and entropy uh uh are are are separate, right? So entropy is a measure of kind of uh the disorderness or the number of states that something can take on.
Well, you know, heat is uh, you know, a form of energy that you are a adding or removing. So changes in entropy and heat often go hand in hand. I mean, obviously you can have isentropic, i.e. same same entropy things, same heat things, and you can have something where heat doesn't go in and out, but entropy. Anyway, so in other words, they are separate.
They're the two main things that you're dealing with when you're dealing with kind of thermodynamic changes, but they're not they're not the same. Anyway, uh anyhow, uh back to Michael. Anyhow, all this amusing got me thinking about whether you could chill food by using an endothermic reaction, i.e., one that uh one that gets gets colder, one that uh absorbs energy. The opposite of burning fuel to produce an exothermic reaction, rather than by compressing and expanding a gas. I found one patent on the topic, and it was about using uh salts, uh potassium uh I think it was potassium chloride or something like that.
Uh I found one patent uh uh interestingly assigned to the Coca-Cola company, and apparently motorhome refrigerators work on an endothermic reaction involving uh ammonia as well. Uh who knew? So my questions are do you know of any other commercial systems that use endothermic reactions for refrigeration? And do you think there are any potential for having them uh potential for them to make more reliable restaurant refrigeration or any other ideas for solving that problem? Thanks, Michael Natkin.
Okay, so listen, here's the deal. So an endothermic, there's there's the the two things that you point to are two different kinds of reactions. So in an in a normal uh like endothermic reactions take place because um so normally most reactions that take place spontaneously are exothermic, they give off heat. In order for something endothermic to take place naturally without having to add anything to it, the entropy increase needs to be so great that it basically wants to wants to happen anyway. So certain salts when they dissolve, certain things when they dissolve, um, they absorb heat and make things colder, right, because it's so favored for them to dissolve in that situation that it actually it actually overrides the fact that they need to absorb uh heat energy from the outside.
So that's how those salts work. And that that patent that you uh did was Coca-Cola was trying to figure out a way to make a soda machine in space because compressor situations, normal compressor uh based refrigeration don't work uh properly in a zero gravity situation. So they were trying to figure out a way that they could add uh salts that um have an endothermic reaction when they dissolve and create a refrigeration system that way. It's not so efficient to use as a continuous refrigeration system on Earth because it's harder to regenerate the salt, and after you dissolve it, then you gotta remove the liquid again from it using heat to boil it down and then redo it. And so it's not so efficient a way to do it here on Earth, but you can use it for individual cold packs.
And they sell cold packs that work that way where you have an endothermic chemical reaction, and then once that chemical reaction is over, then sometimes you can regenerate it and sometimes you can't. But it's not necessarily so good for long-term situations. The R V thing is an extremely interesting type of refrigeration. All the refrigeration that we use, you compress a uh a liquid, condense it down, and then spray it out, and as it expands, right, that change in pressure uh it it creates the cold, right? So that that's where where it comes from.
Uh that you know, you acquires heat, absorbs from the outside, boom, right? Uh so it's expansion, it's two pressures. RV refrigerators work uh in a single pressure system. And what's awesome about that is it doesn't require any moving parts. So the way they work is you heat up uh a mixture of ammonia and water, because ammonia wants to dissolve in water, right?
Very badly. So uh you heat that up and you boil the ammonia in the whole system's under one, but large, but under one pressure. The ammonia boils off. As it boils off, the water is stripped away from it. It goes up physically up, like you know, gravity-wise, up, because it's now a gas, goes into a condenser where the uh ammonia under pressure under the same pressure, the whole system's under one pressure, that's the key, uh, turns back to a liquid in the condenser and then drifts back into a zone also the same pressure that has uh primarily hydrogen gas.
And uh what and strangely, very counterintuitively actually, what happens when the ammonia goes from being a liquid in a pure ammonia environment to being added to a gas is gaseous hydrogen environment is it evaporates. And the reason it evaporates is it wants is it there's a very low, what's called partial pressure of ammonia in that hydrogen region, and so the ammonia needs to evaporate to kind of ameliorate that lack of partial pressure that it has, and that uh requires a lot of energy, which it absorbs from uh the inside of the RV fridge. Then that uh now heavier thing trickles down where it meets the water again and is absorbed into the water and goes and boils and the whole thing keeps going like a big cycle uh and all you're doing is adding heat in the with the heater and removing it using room temperature uh air in the condenser section. So it's a very interesting system. You can run, in fact, if you have a camp uh that only has propane, you run your fridge and your uh blah blah.
What's the what's the word blah blah I'm looking for? Your stove and your refrigerator off of the one propane thing. So you can use it. I don't know why they don't use them in uh in large systems in restaurants. Maybe maybe they're I mean they should see they should be reliable.
I don't know why. It's an interesting question, Michael. Something we should look at, right? Something maybe to look at anyway. Okay, uh Mike uh Matthew writes in about sausages.
Hey Dave, Nastasha, Nastasia, and crew. I had a couple of questions on circulating sausage. This coming Sunday, which is over, unfortunately. Sorry, Matthew. Uh I'm throwing a party where I'll be serving about a hundred sausages.
I want to circulate the sausages ahead of time to eliminate as much day of prep uh day of day of prep cooking as possible, and then reheat them and sear them on a grill. Do you feel that the quality of the sausages will deteriorate if they are cooked 24 to 48 hours ahead of time? My plan is to circulate them for about an hour in a 65 degree bath. I chose 65 since they are chicken sausages, and I think that's a safe temp for them. That's true.
Any other suggestions on circulating sausages? Any good ideas on a liquid to use in the bag with a chicken and chorizo sausage. I'm pretty curious about uh how best to hold the circulated sausages and how long they can be held without deteriorating quality. Thanks for any help on this. Uh also uh now then listen, right back because your event might have been uh canceled because it was in Williamsburg, and so it might be in the future now.
It was supposed to be on 1028, right? That was right when the hurricane was hitting, right? Okay, so uh the company Landhouse is throwing a grand opening bash at the Woods Bar in Williamsburg where they've started serving food on a permanent basis. Uh the menu uh on the day is going to increase include Heritage Pork from Heritage Foods. And the party was supposed to be 2 to 6 uh PM uh on 1028 at the woods on South 4th Street between White and Kent, Williamsburg.
Maybe it's gonna maybe it was postponed, in which case, you know, please put a plug in. I'm sure Heritage Radio will tweet it out. Will you not, Jack? You will, you'll tweet it out. He will.
He's not on the thing, but he'll tweet it out. Uh okay. The thing you have to worry about with sausages being cooked ahead of time is to get all the oxygen out of the bag. You can use a liquid, uh, but uh, you know, uh that a regular like a water based liquid, but I would stick with a fat chorizo fat would be a really good choice, actually, because you don't really need that much, especially if you're putting it in zippies to cook off. The problem with sausages held for a long time is that uh with any sausage is the development of rancidity, aka what's known as warmed over flavors.
And what happens is is that it's uh auto oxidation and and the the further things that are that are taken out, uh that the further uh chemical breakdown of fats uh when they're exposed to uh oxygen. And the weird thing about warmed over flavor is it happens in animal meats because it's the actual cell membrane fats, the phospholipid things that break down uh because you when you cook something and then hold it afterwards, you release iron from hemoglobin uh and other iron containing things. That iron now becomes available to help catalyze auto oxidation, just like in a deep fryer of the fatty ashy tissues. So, but it requires oxygen. So I'd get rid of oxygen.
Uh I would add uh an antioxidant. Rosemary is a great antioxidant, but Nastasha can't add it because she's exposed to too much rosemary during the time she was working with Chesaree Casella, our good friend, uh, but lover of rosemary. Vitamin E. Uh you could add any other sort of fat-based antioxidant. Um, and there's a couple uh things you can look at on the also if you pre-sear the sausages a little bit to give a mired reaction or throw mired stuff, that might have an antioxidant effect that will uh decrease warmed over flavor.
Um and other also not storing for too long is gonna reduce the amount of what's called warmed over flavor. But just do a search on warmed over flavor or WOF. Specifically, the mechanism responsible for warmed over flavor and cooked meat in 1983. Uh also you could wick it, Wikipedia if you want it. Also, the 2005 uh article, comparison of natural rosemary extract and BHA BHT for relative antioxidant uh effectiveness in pork sausage and the antioxidant mired reaction uh products for uh application in sausage by Lingert and Lungren in 2007.
Take a look at that. Uh and then we're ripping through this stuff. Uh dear uh Daniel Price writes, Dear Nastasha, Jack, uh Dave, and Joe, hi again from the West Coast. I wanted to thank you all again for the show, and I have a couple of cocktail questions. First, this weekend I made a big batch of uh clarified Bartlett pear juice using the agar agar method.
For fun, I tried uh treating my puree with pectanex ultra SPL and steeping at 45 degrees Celsius for 20 minutes to increase the yield. It was hard to tell if it worked. Is there some visual clue when using Pectanex? Regardless, the agar method worked and the juice was great, and I was able to combine it with champagne and pear brandy for a crystal for crystal clear pear bellinis, but I have a lot of juice left. Can I freeze clarified juices without significant problems?
Yes, you can freeze them without significant problems if that juice was stable to begin with. So uh normal, you know, like lime juice is not stable, so you can't freeze it and hope to preserve it, but pear juice is relatively stable, and so you can freeze it and preserve it. Uh you might want to let it sit longer. You should be able to tell. It should self-clarify a little bit, unless it's a thick puree, in which case you won't see it, but you're definitely going to increase your yield by adding pectanex beforehand, uh, sometimes dramatically.
Second, I was wondering what do you think about the efficacy of digestifs? Do they really aid the digestion, or is that just marketing? If yes, do you think the flavorings matter, or is it just the alcohol content? I've always thought it was kind of BS, but you know, I I'm gonna look into that more. I I didn't have a chance this morning to look in because they there's a bunch of articles about serving herbs to chickens and rabbits, is seeing whether it increases their growth weight uh when you're feeding them in farms, and so like that might be an indication whether they actually work in humans.
So more on that, more on that later. Um I'm gonna get to I'm gonna get through these. I'm gonna get through these. Dave. Well, how long how Jack, how much longer do I have?
Jack or Joe. A couple of okay, Joshua, you have a beer question. I'm gonna get back to you on that beer next week. Uh, but okay, now Nastasha, with the email that came through, I'm gonna pronounce your name incorrectly. Uh I remember you from the class because he's like he's he's anyway, interesting stories.
Anyway, co miles, but co miles, but like he said he had. He's the one who wanted to go out with you after that. But he gave the pronunciation. Yeah. But I can't see the pronunciation on my.
Anyway, yeah. First, please tell Dave I had a boatload of fun in a sous vide low temp course at the uh International Culinary Center. It was great. Thanks so much. Second, I would like to get Dave's recommendations for one, the best high-end home extrusion pasta maker, and two, the best high-end home ice cream maker.
Hope you're doing well. I continue to look forward to your weekly show. By the way, congratulations on passing the 100 show mark. Thanks in advance. Uh okay.
Here are the two machines I would look at for uh for pasta. The Arco Bellino, the one that uh ideas and food uh gets they pump that all the time because they were given one for free, by the way. I still let everyone know they were given one for free. Oh, it's a fantastic machine. I used that one at Starchefs a couple of years ago, and it is awesome.
I think it's around three grand, two and a half, three grand, something like that. It's amazing. Um the guys at JB Prince don't carry that one, they carry a different one that they call Dolly, which I haven't used, but I've seen it. And uh Tim Musig, my friend at JB Prince, assures me that that one also works in a similar way to the Arcabolino. On home ice cream, most people use that $350 uh kind of uh um musso machine, like the Lelo ice musso machine.
But I can't really recommend it because the batch times are too long on it, and that's in the $300 range. Now, if you jump up, you have to jump, now you're jumping, way up, to like the several thousand dollar range. Paco jets are awesome. It's not a traditional ice cream machine, but they are awesome. Now, the one that I always wanted to get was not has not been available in the US for a long time, but they still make and you can get in European websites is uh the Pronto 4, which is made by Carpeggiani.
Carpegani machines are amazing. The Pronto 4 is a small vertical uh batch machine that I believe does one quart. Uh, and they're by all accounts, I've never used one. Awesome. And then when I was researching that to make sure that they still make it, they make a new thing, Carpeg Johnny makes that I've never used before, but please check this one out and look on the web.
It's got a batch time of they say five minutes, and it uses a small canister like a Paco Jet, but the canister has a freezing uh mechanism in it. Now it's only got 300 watts of I think three or four hundred watts of freezing, but it does small batches at a time, and they claim five minute batch times and only two or three minutes in between batches. It's called the freeze and go, and it's meant to be an extremely small unit. It's the size of kind of a relatively large drip coffee maker. And so if I have more time to research it, had time to use one, I definitely would uh take a look at the Carpagani freeze and go.
Alright, here's the last one gonna be able to get to today because uh I'm gonna get ripped off the air. I have a couple questions I'm gonna miss. I'll get you next week, I promise, even though some of them are already too late. Greg writes in about sauces. Hiya, Nastasha, not Dave, and not Jack, but maybe Indie Jesus.
Wow. I like that. Wow. Well, yeah, yeah. That means you have to answer it.
I'll read it, you answer it. First, I hope you uh you folks and all your friends and family in New York City and New Jersey are recovering from Sandy. I guess I need to get out more because uh you were all on my mind a lot during the storm. Well, thank you. Sadly, because of travel, I'm often weeks behind on the show, but I listen to each and every episode like it's church for a dying sinner.
Maybe Indie Jesus will save me with his hipster blessings. Uh a fellow from New Zealand named Rory wrote in with a question about brown uh the brown band at the top of a blended pepper sauce. Rory thought this might be due to oxidation, and I think this saved uh Dave on a red herring. Based on the recipe of the sauce, vinegar, pepper, garlic, ginger, and salt, and this is important with no other additives. I think we're seeing simple stratification here.
I think Rory's seeing capsation rising to the top of the bottle. To prevent this, I'd add a little Xanthan gum or lessithin to the mix to keep things emulsified. This leaves to a question. Uh for a three to six months room temperature shelf life, which is better in the long term, xanthan or lessithin. Let's assume we've already dealt with oxidation and ascorbic acid.
My bet is on less it then because it works on a molecular level, whereas Xanthan works more on a mechanical level. What do you think? You guys rock, take care, Greg. Alright. Um well, I mean, they're different.
One is a stabilizer, so I would definitely have Xanthan's gonna stop things because it's gonna form a weak gel over time. That's how salad dressings are stabilized, and the other one's an emulsifier, which actually makes it easier for things to stay together. I don't know that I would choose less it then as an emulsifier. I'd probably choose a different emulsifier. But I typically, like when we're doing long-term health sauces, we'll use a combination of an emulsifier and a stabilizer.
So Xanthan plus an emulsifier. So if you like Zet uh lesson, use that. I would use both. In other words, it's not uh one or the other. And I think they're gonna rip me off the air, but listen, Ben!
Ben Dweck, if you're gonna buy your rice cooker now, he wanted to know whether he has an old Zoji Rushi uh and he wants to know whether he should get that or whether there's a better one. Zoji Rushi for my money make the best rice cookers on the market. I own one, have used one, NeuroFuzzy, the big one for years, induction, and it rocks. I don't know whether the pressure cooking thing is a gimmick. I don't know about the alpha versus ba uh beta starch.
I'll try to do more research on it, but pressure cooking is gonna make brown rice softer and cook it faster, and everyone knows waiting for brown rice is a pain in the butt. Cooking is huge. 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. You can like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at heritage underscore radio.
You can email us questions at any time at info at heritageradio network.org. Heritage Radio Network is a nonprofit organization. To donate and become a member, visit our website today. Thanks for listening.
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