Today's program has been brought to you by the International Culinary Center. Offering courses that range from classic French techniques in culinary, pastry, and bread baking to Italian studies to management. From culinary technology to food writing, from cake making to wine tasting. For more information, visit International Culinary Center.com. You are listening to Heritage Radio Network, broadcasting live from Bushwood Brooklyn.
If you like this program, visit Heritage Radio Network.org for thousands more. Many people in our food community have been seriously impacted by Superstorm Sandy, and our hearts go out to them. At HRN, we've been covering these stories since the storm hit. To learn more, visit our website at www.heritage radio network.org. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues.
This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues, coming to you live in the back of Robert's Pizzeria on the Heritage Radio Network every Tuesday from roughly 12 to roughly 1245. Joined as usual in the studio with Nastasha the Hammer Lopez, Jack and Joe in the engineering room, and today we have a special guest, Piper from Booker and Dax Research Lab downtown. Hey Pipes, how you doing? Good? Yeah, it's called a microphone.
You gotta talk into it. Uh so I have another person I can brutalize on air, right? It's good business, no? It's good. Anyway, calling all your questions to 7184972128.
That's 718497-2128. Uh all right, so let's get to some of the email questions that we uh we have already. Uh we oh no, again with the not getting the right uh thing on my iPad. Okay. Uh this is from Paul K.
Hi all. Thanks for your work on the great show, and thanks for answering all my past questions. My latest question is about baking. In general, I'm happy with the results of my once per month attempt at baking bread. However, I'm always a little disappointed by the small or perhaps non-existent oven spring that I get.
I haven't had any real life training. My only knowledge is from books, but my impression from those books is that oven spring is to be expected and should be noticeable. Although my bread does rise nicely before putting it in the oven, i.e. I guess when he's proofing, uh, as I say, I'm always a little disappointed with the amount it springs during those first few minutes of baking. Perhaps I simply shouldn't expect to see anything dramatic.
Any help would be most appreciated, all the best. Paul. Okay. Uh all right. Here's a the the problem it first of all, I am by no means a uh uh a bread expert.
There are people who all they do all day, all night is uh think about uh bread. And so you know you always hesitate when there's people like that out there to make any kind of statement at all. But that said, I feel confident that I don't know enough information right now to answer um your question. So, what we need for a real troubleshooting of uh of your bread recipe. First of all, what style of bread are you making?
Like what what are you looking to get? Like, do you want a dense crumb structure, a very open cut crumb structure, what kind of crust? Crumb structure is a gross word, huh? Yeah. Nastasha just made her crumb structure face, which is very similar to vegan face, like slight difference, only I can tell.
Uh but the it's so there's that, right? And then uh in general, uh I need to know kind of what hydration level you're using, so like what what kind of uh you know what's what style of flour, first of all, what you're how much water you're adding to the flour, and then how you're raising it and forming it uh and proofing it and whatnot. In general, um, oven spring is uh generated first of all, most of the stuff that I that I read on the on the on the inner line, what do you call it? Internet. On the internet about uh about oven spring.
A lot of it is kind of BS. Uh specifically, I don't think that uh some people say this because you're increasing the the rate of yeast reaction at the last minute as the bread is baking, uh, and that's what's doing it. I think that's almost almost probably certainly not the case because the oven spring happens very, very quickly, and probably not enough time for yeast to start reacting and all of a sudden producing uh CO2 in overdrive. I think what what's going on uh is you need a high initial heat, uh high initial burst of heat in the oven to rapidly expand the gases in the cell of the dough structure and then set the dough structure before the dough structure breaks. Uh and so what what you're looking at to get a good oven spring is one, there has to be a good gluten network in there that's going to allow it to hold the gas as it expands.
Uh it's gonna have to be uh kind of formed properly, and it's gonna have to have enough air bubbles in it already that can expand. Right? So it's formation of the of the you know right number of and you know amount size of air bubbles, getting them kind of big enough, but keeping the structure of the dough intact so that it can raise up and uh and spring, getting up very high heat both from the bottom and from the uh top, so with a baking stone at the bottom with a very initial uh high preheat, and then with steam injection or some form of steam to get a rapid uh rapid heat transfer into the loaf on the on the and uh forget I'm not even talking about the actual development of what the crust is like, which is not a thing that steam can do, but I'm just saying rapid heat into the into the dough. A third thing is uh proper slashing pattern in the dough uh will allow uh heat to get in and allow it to expand more, uh like physically allow it to r uh expand more. So there's the slashing patterns that you make on it.
There's uh proper formation of the dough, proper proofing of it, like like uh, and making sure that the dough has the proper structure to get it to to work properly. But very difficult to uh figure out exactly which one of those problems you have. Most likely your oven's not tricked out enough for it. I mean, I don't know. I don't know what kind of what kind of oven that you're using.
There's an interesting book that uh I haven't read before, but that uh gets very high recommendations, and I want to read it called Bread Science, the Chemistry and Craft of Breadmaking, which uh came out fairly recently. And there's uh a bunch of chunks on the uh you know on the internet that you can read of that on their on their website. Uh and then I would look at um, you know, a fresh loaf and those other kind of like large kind of uh conglomeration of uh bloggers who get together and talk about this stuff. I mean, it i if you're if you're just baking occasionally, sometimes it can be difficult to wade through all the information uh that they they provide, and of course, a lot of it's red herrings because everyone, you know, like all of us are just experimenting all the time. But anyway, I hope that helps.
That doesn't seem like it made any sense at all. Yes. No? Yeah. Uh all right.
Hello and good morning team cooking issues. I like that team cooking issues, not cooking issues team, team cooking issues. You appreciate that? Okay. Can you describe the pros and cons of open and closed baths for low temperature cooking?
A friend is tempted to purchase a sous-vide supreme rather than poly science immersion circulator for home use because the salesperson suggested that an open bath will cause the temperature to fluctuate and cause a loss of control. The guy was a schmuck. Thank you, Matthew in Chicago. Well, I don't know the man that you're discussing uh personally. I didn't see him, but based on the one statement we have of his, which is that an open uh bath circulator is gonna have uh large temperature fluctuations, yes, he is a schmuck.
So if the rest of his thinking is in line with the thinking he he uh gave you right there, then yes, uh a schmuck call is in order. The dip the main difference between the sous-vive supreme and the uh and and a real immersion circulator isn't necessarily whether it's covered or not, because it's very easy to cover a uh you know a bath when you when you use an immersion circulator. Uh the main difference is in the circulation itself. Now, to go back for a second, in case, I don't know, in case like someone scrapped you down to a chair and uh this your torture is to listen to this radio show and you haven't listened to it before, what we're talking about are pieces of equipment that allow you to do low temperature cooking. Cooking at very precise temperatures that are very close to the actual temperature you want to cook to.
All right, so that's low temperature cooking. And the main piece of equipment that most of us use to do that is the immersion circulator. And what that does is it keeps water at a very, very, or anything really, uh any liquid, at a very accurate temperature and allows you to do all these new effects that you have for low temperature cooking. Now, there's uh you notice the word immersion circulator. So there's circulation of water, and the circulation is what allows you to get uh very um even temperatures over the entire bath, you know, with to within like a couple tenths of a degree.
Now, if you don't cover that circulating bath, uh what's gonna happen is you will get evaporation off of the surface of the uh of the of the bath, right? And so you'll be losing a lot of heat. And if you didn't have adequate circulation, you will get a temperature stratification in the bath, right? I mean, no, no duh, obviously, you'll get temperature stratification. But um adequate circulation is gonna prevent any real stratification of temperature uh once you get any reasonable depth below the bottom of the above below the surface of the water.
Now, if you have an unstirred bath, right, uh the sir the situation is horrible. What happens if you do not cover an unstirred bath, you will get constant evaporation uh off of the surface, and you will get uh, in essence, over time a temperature gradient established as uh wal as water evaporates off of the top of the bath, and by evaporating cools it because it's evaporative cooling, and so you'll get a uh you'll get a temperature gradient set up that probably is fairly static over a long cook once it settles out, I would guess. Um assuming that humidity of your room remains constant. Now, uh aside from the fact uh what I just said that you must at all times cover a uh non-circulating bath uh and that you don't need to necessarily cover a circulating bath to uh to get an accurate temperature, it is always good practice to cover a circulating bath. Always good practice because uh you lose so much energy through the top of the um to the top of the bath uh you know as things evaporate that A, uh sometimes in larger bath situations your circulator might not have enough power to get it up to the temperature that you want because they only typically have between 750 and a thousand watts of heating power.
Uh two, you are going to take a lot longer to come up to temperature than you otherwise would. And three, you're going to be evaporating off uh stuff like uh like a mother. And and so even over relatively short cooking times, you're gonna lose water. Over long cooking times, like overnight, you could potentially boil uh or not boil, but evaporate all the water out of your bath and your product can be ruined. And fourth, in a in a circulated bath, if you've done a bad job and not put a uh uh a rack or some sort of weight uh on top of your food such that it's like definitively sunk under the surface of the liquid, uh, you know, if you cover it, even if a little bit pokes up, you'll still get a fairly close temperature as long as the thing's totally sealed and covered up to what you want.
It's just not as effective a heat transfer mechanism. So always a good idea to cover a bath, the only exception being if you're uh have a reheat bath at a relatively low temperature during service and you're going in and out of it all the time. But uh under other circumstances, I always, always, always recommend uh covering the bath. Yeah? Yeah.
Yeah. How are you doing, Nastasha? Yeah? Anything anything good happening? Nope.
We got some uh good news on the on the Booker and Dax front. Tristan Willie, uh, you know, the opening uh or you know, the guy who opened it with us, you know, the manager of Booker Dax, one best bartender in the country, according to Eater. You've been asking. Wow. You guys are quick on the uh quick on the on the clap a ton there, right?
So that was good news, right? Yeah, that's great, man. It's good business. Love myself some Tristan Williams. A little too tall for my taste, but other than that, good man, right?
Yeah, yeah. Uh okay. Uh we have a question in from uh Matt Mincer on brines. Hello, cooking issues, folks. I've got a question or three about brines.
When I barbecue pork or chicken, I make a brine with a heavy dose of my dry rub in it. The theory being that the water is being drawn into the meat uh and will carry some of that flavor uh from the spice with it. But I was listening to one of your podcasts where Harold McGee said that the flavor molecules from spices are probably too large to penetrate the cells of the meat. The question I uh I have is am I wasting my time and my spices by adding them to the brine? Has anybody studied which flavor molecules will penetrate the meat, if any?
And finally, how much brining is too much? It seems at some point the osmosis would reach equilibrium and anything more would give diminishing returns. Uh, I'm sure it depends on the cut of meat, but is there any rule of thumb? Thanks, Matt. And a PS I wrote in a few weeks ago about using mason jars in my centrifuge, and for the record, they work about 75% of the time.
The other twenty five, not so much. I'm assuming what that means is like awful things happened, right? And when you assume Piper that what he means is awful things have happened. Yes. Yeah.
Yeah, that's my guess. So uh yeah, it's Piper's first time on the radio. He, you know, he's not so much with the with the radio thing. He's he's a he's from Vermont. They don't have radios there yet.
Right? Is that true, Piper? Very true. Yeah. So here's the deal.
I think uh you're pretty much right and uh Harold's pretty much right in that most brines don't really penetrate the meat uh to a very large distance and so you're probably wasting a good bit of your spices. However, like brining something uh we're getting some sort of feedback action. You get in the hearing that Jack? Some sort of feedback action it's Piper's phone. It's Piper's phone?
Nice. Uh Vermont. So the uh the the the thing is is that um I think you could probably get pretty much the same uh reaction by doing your brine and then rubbing your spices on after it comes out of the brine. I mean that that's what I would do. Salt obviously gets carried into the meat um because it's an extremely small molecule.
You know I don't really know what the penetration effects of something like sugar is nitrates penetrate in obviously otherwise curing wouldn't work but larger molecules tend I think not to make it into into the meat. I think that's uh that's accurate fact acids tend to do certain work but they tend not to penetrate far which is why you get kind of a different texture on the surface of a meat or any place where there's a cleft in the meat where things can get into it you can get effect from acids and intermuscular connections and stuff but you're not going to get uh an effect from uh something like that in the dead center of a piece of meat in any reasonable amount uh amount of time uh I think you're right. I think that you know there is a diminishing uh diminishing return time, but that diminishing return time is going to depend uh almost primarily on the thickness of the piece of meat you use and the brine strength that you use. Uh so there's no real no real rule of thumb on brining the same way there would be on, let's say kind of curing, where everything's been written down uh by uh you know the the USDA and the various curing authorities on it. I mean Piper, you know any rule of thumb?
Any you disagree with anything I've said? No. No? Yeah, nice, nice. I need some of your pipe.
You need to like you do disagree with me. Are you gonna be like Nastasha where you don't disagree with me on air and then later you're gonna tell me I'm a douche? No, he'll tell me. He'll tell you that I'm a douche? Yeah.
And then you'll tell me and I'll yell at you. Is that is that how this is gonna work? Change of command. Oh jeez. Oh, jeez.
Alright, listen. Hey Jack, let's go to our first commercial break. Come back with more cooking issues. You're listening to Kill Me in the Summertime by Dead Stars on the Heritage Radio Network. Nothing left to hide.
Let this what they say. Sun erases again everything I move in for a need to in the summer time. The International Culinary Center is a proud sponsor of the Heritage Radio Network.org. The ICC with locations in New York and California provide cutting edge education to future chefs, restaurateurs, and wine professionals. We're proud to claim Dan Barber, Bobby Clay, and David Chang among our honored alumni.
This is Dorothy Can Hamilton from Chef's Story. Check out our ICC website at international culinarycenter.com. Did you guys steal that music from like uh the Hayden Planetariums like universe movie that they play right when you show up? It sounds like it. Maybe like Wizard of Oz on the loop or something too, I'm not sure.
Yes, it's crazy. I think that's what it is, though. It's like you know, you go and they're like, They're billions of stars, and it's like wheely deedly deeply. Can you can you play me a little bit of that wheedly deeply music? I want some of that some of that like universe.
You know what I'm saying? Like the spinning stars and stuff. Maybe we can like fade that in with uh fish is fish is vodka. Uh don't mess don't mess with the fish is fish song. Alright, I don't know.
Don't be messing don't be messing with the fish is fish song. Uh the uh the you know the Oh, by the way, we have we we haven't talked about that, right? You want to talk about the song that got sent in, the Fish is Fishes vodka? Yes, it's uh you know, uh because we couldn't play vicious, vicious vodka. We have a we have a sound-alike song, and so does the title.
And it was composed by uh someone on Twitter, Jack. Do you remember the name of the person? Jack doesn't remember. You guys are bad people. Yeah, we but no credit.
But uh next. Yes, yes. Uh we'll get we'll we'll get to we'll get we'll get we'll do another commercial break, come back with a full thank you. Anyway, uh so we got one in from at Clef's cooking issues. Any ideas on time and temperature for cooking cod sperm sacks low temp.
You gotta love a question like that. Cod sperm sacks at low temp. Any way to prevent coagulation of dairy. Also, second question, any way to prevent coagulation of dairy in a high acid system. So here's uh the thing.
Cod sperm, I would never say cod sperm when you're actually gonna serve it to someone. I mean, the term that we would use in food circles would be milt, like uncle milty, uh milt, cod milt. Uh I have not myself cooked cod milk. I've seen it many times. I think I've had it.
You've had the cod milk, right, Saz? Did you enjoy the cod milk? Yeah. Yeah. You had it, you had it where it uh Japanese style?
That yeah. And then with you at um what's that place in San Francisco? Where? Your friend. Which friend?
He does a lot of um over. Chris Cosantino? Yeah. We had milk there? Mm-hmm.
Uh, all right. So I guess yeah. Anyway, it's got like a texture similar to uh like a brains or something like that. But I have no idea how to cook it, uh how to cook at low temp. I mean, it's got such a delicate structure that I would worry about vacuuming it.
I would guess that it coagulates somewhere in the range of where uh an egg white would coagulate, so you'd probably want to cook it at like I don't know, 62, something like that Celsius. But I don't know. Because it you're supposed to steam it or fry it or something like that. It's supposed to be a delicate kind of puffy, uh puffy texture. What do you think, Pipes?
You think that's a good uh what did you do? You ever cooked the cod milk? No. I actually wasn't listening. No, it's like what the what the hell?
Well, well, Piper, it's because Piper's not uh trying to buy shoes on Zappos. Like somebody else we know Facebook who shall remain he's not on Facebook. He just clicked up. He's not on Facebook, Nestal. He's looking up oil prolimerization for me.
Anyway. So no, I do not have uh a good uh time or temperature on it, but I would assume uh it would be somewhere in that range, like 62. I don't never cooked uh I've never really done even low temp on my favorite kind of uh, you know, fish fish gonad part, which is uh roe. I've never done any really low temperature cooking on that, although I should, because I love shad row. Shad row is one of my favorite things to cook.
Uh you don't like the shadow, dude. Why do you not like the shadow? Something about isn't it gr like really grainy? Well, if you well, if you overcook it, it's grainy. Yeah, I had it when it was really grainy.
Who cooked it for? You're gonna you're gonna call it. No, I'm not gonna call. No? No.
All right, anyway. Uh but the second one, it just so happens uh at Cliffs that we have here Piper who uh his family is involved with uh uh CP Kelco, right? We have the man to tell you how to prevent uh the coagulation of high acid dairy systems. Piper with uh with some pectin, give me some pectin stabilization knowledge. Drop it on me.
Uh let's see. Um protein protection uh through what pectin Piper. What do you want by it? I'm still not listening. Alright, look.
The question was, Piper. Snap back. Okay. Finally. The question was uh how to do high acid dairy systems without coagulation.
And the answer I gave it to you just described which pectins is you like pectin to preserve high acid dairy systems. Pectin and uh CMC. That's carbo carboxy methyl cellulose for all of you who don't know what the hell CMC is and think it's a a a brand of truck. So he's using carboxymeth corite, is that true? Right?
Karboski muscle cellulose and where who b who makes that stuff? Actually CP Calco makes it. Yeah. Alright, can you buy that from Modernist Pantry? Uh I think you can.
From a Piper puts CMC in every freaking thing. Like he first of all, he's he's uh his body doesn't do so well with the gluten. So he he you know, use it for film forming and gluten-free bread. And also uh viscosity without having to deal with yield point like Xanthan. Yeah, yield point for those of you that have no idea what the hell we're talking about.
Yield point. So if you take Xanthan gum, it acts a little bit like a fluid gel. You sit it on a surface, you tilt it, and it acts like a gel until you put a certain amount of shear on it, at which point it automatically thins and turns to a liquid. That's called a yield point. So something with a yield point acts like that as opposed to something that is merely thick but will flow under all circumstances.
So two easy real-world examples uh that don't involve hydrocolloids that you can think of are like maple syrup, no matter how cold it is, it just flows but slowly. It doesn't have a yield point. Whereas uh ketchup, right? Ketchup does not flow until stuff uh until uh shear is applied to it and has a yield point and then it breaks. So that's that's what a yield point is.
So Piper's looking to uh strengthen something in a system without having a yield point, and he's using uh CMC and pectin, but you use a specific uh pectin, don't you? Uh there are a couple different types of pectin you can use. I like um let's see. Uh beta pectin, which is from beets. Right.
And what's the beta, what's the beta refer to for those of you that are out there in the in the pectin land? Yeah, kind of. I don't even know that. You know what? Like Piper worked at CP Kilco's like what were you, the research?
What are we? In the research labs? Yeah. Like busting stuff out? Yeah.
And so Piper will put pectin in just about any damn thing, and and CMC in just about any damn thing. So give him just give him a recipe, since you're not gonna tell them, just give them a freaking recipe. It's complicated. All right. Uh uh high concentration solution of beta pectin, like um like maybe five percent uh is mixed with you know uh the solution you want to acidify, and then it's continually mixed for like an hour or so, and then you slowly add your acid.
Um it depends. I mean, there's so many specifics. So you're saying it's incredibly difficult. It's incredibly without an accurate pH meter. I mean, you're gonna you're gonna just try and pour juice and like lemon juice into it?
Yeah. What's what's he trying to make? Well, I'm assuming he wants to do like you know, calpico water or something like that, or like some sort of like acidified dairy beverage. I'm assuming that's what he's trying to do. I would say make one high concentration solution of beta pectin or an HM pectin, and uh, and then add it in increments of like one percent total weight with uh with the dairy, and then slowly acidify, and you'll see that the flocculation point is going to it's gonna decrease pH wise.
All right. So Cles, there you have it. I wouldn't uh that's not so much a recipe you can take to the bank, but uh Piper will work on it, he'll get it out to you. By the way, I was looking up while Piper was talking, I was looking up Aaron's last name who who made the song. His last name is Robertson.
So Aaron Robertson, thank you for the fish is fish uh is vodka song. Uh really. Whoa. Wow. Abrupt end on the clap, guys.
Jesus. Killing me. Okay. Now, uh another interesting thing was brought up a couple weeks ago I didn't answer was uh a an oil polymerization technique uh that's made in Japan, another thing from Japan, called katameru tempuru, which I guess tempuru means like something like kind of like tempura, right? Tempura tempuru, I don't know how to speak Japanese.
Anyway, Karuna tempuru is a powder that you uh and I saw the video of it on on the on the internet. Amazing that what they want to do is you ever have like a liquid fat and you want to dispose of it and throw it in your trash, you can't because it's a liquid. So what you do is you add this powder to it and it instantly polymerizes, turns to a solid, which you then scrape out of the pan and you can throw in your regular waste trash. Now, um that's crazy. They I don't know how the hell it works.
It says it's some sort of algal thing, some sort of algal seaweed uh like nonsense. But I was like, nowhere was I able to find what's actually in it, what is actually doing it. And it's clearly some sort of I mean it's probably clearly, not clearly, I guess, some sort of polymerization where the oil is being uh linked. I doubt they're they're like instantly hydrogenating it because I don't know of any way to do that, because it's not a system where they're adding heat. They're literally just adding a powder to the oil and it's turning to a solid, which is nutty.
I don't know how the hell it works. Someone out there, please, if you know what this reaction is uh and what's causing it. Because remember, there's ways to do it in like that I found that are very, very non-food grade. But the question is how do you do it in a in a in a food grade way such that you're not doing something crazy to your pen? Like, are they somehow some sort of instance of ponification reaction where they're turning into a soap?
I have no idea. Someone please tell me. The only way I know how to solidify a fat like that, hardcore solidify it, is to add large amounts, like upwards of 10% by weight of mono and diglycerides. When that like so you could take a liquid fat, add 10% uh mono and diglycerides to it, uh, and you know, heat it a little bit, and then when it cools, it will thicken and turn to a pay, you know, a solid, and you can scrape it out. Um, and that's that's the only way that I, you know, that I've done it uh, you know, in the kitchen before, but I don't I don't really I don't know.
Anyway, so we're looking that up. Uh and we'll take a second break and we'll come right back with cooking issues. You're listening to weaving by Dead Stars on Heritage Radio Network.org. Have we lost our control? I don't know what I should do.
Waiting up when you know, I hope that we get this. Like what you hear so far? Support the network and become a member. Membership helps us bring you the best food radio in the world and gives you access to thousands of dollars in discounts at the sustainably minded businesses that support us. To become a member, visit Heritage Radio Network.org today.
And we're back. Okay, back on the bread. I was thinking about this for a second. Uh I read an interesting uh a couple of interesting articles. They don't actually relate to the question about oven spring, but uh I thought they were kind of interesting.
One is that uh these nut jobs are trying to figure out a way to uh determine how their bread is going to react uh to baking, and instead of doing the obvious thing for us, which would be to bake it, uh they uh put it in a vacuum chamber. And these guys uh by putting in a vacuum chamber, they expand all the air cells that are uh the air bubbles that are already in the dough, and they claim that at any point in the bread making process after the initial uh kind of mixing and the air air incorporation has happened, that they can get good correlations to the final bake volume just by putting the sucker in a vacuum and seeing how high it can uh it can raise up. There's another interesting picture on vacuum mixing in the in the bread science book that I told you about that's available in the checklist online, where she reproduces a picture of a bread that was mixed under a vacuum. It had the craziest pore structure. It was considered a bad pore structure, but I thought very interesting.
Like now I'm spending all morning thinking about uh like you know various uh, you know, ways to put vacuums on on bread. But the other really interesting thing is uh is an article I read about the temperatures at which the uh temperatures at which the the bread and this relates back to oven spring is setting and so the the point is is that the protein structure in a good bread uh in a in a good well-made dough the protein structure is going to hold the gas bubble integrity up to a point of about 60 degrees Celsius where a crappy bread dough is going to hold its structure up to a point of about 50 degrees Celsius. And so and the the key difference there is that that's right around the temperature that the starch gelatinization is taking place. So the protein is really only there to hold the structure of the bread uh while you're waiting for the starch to gelatinize and set. And that's why and you know and I think we've discussed about it a couple times uh in the past you know when you're working on a gluten-free bread like a lot like a lot of the problem is just getting it to react properly to the initial bakeout.
So it's the initial bakeout uh uh of it that's hard because you're getting the proteins they have to hold there until the interior of the bread uh gets up to you know 50 or or 60. And that's you know that's why when we're doing experiments we'll experiment with you know uh things that have weird kind of pre-gelling characteristics like like you'll add something to hold structure like a xanthan or like a CMC and then you'll add something to uh actually gel in that mid-range temperature where there's other things are going to start to fail like a uh methyl cellulose uh or some other sort of heat gelling uh uh property. Because the idea is is that it's not that the protein is important, I don't think it's important, but it's not you know majorly important to the final texture of the bread. I think the major, the major impact from the final temperature on the bread is going to be the starches and how they gelatinize. However, the major impact to the formation of that final structure is going to be how the protein works.
And so that's the really dig diggity dig that you get when you're trying to formulate a uh a bread without protein, wouldn't without without gluten proteins. Wouldn't you say that's yeah. Yeah. Now now Piper's learned to do the nostalgia and just say just say yes. Okay.
Uh Joshua wrote in last week, we didn't get to get to it, um, on beer. I hope this uh is still the correct email, and it is, even though we didn't answer it last week. Obviously, Nastasha got the email. Um a few questions. I'm an all-grain brewer, because I didn't answer this last week, did I, Sas?
Uh I'm an all-grain brewer and I have access to grains, hops, good brewing equipment, uh, wort, exact, etc. Which I like for some reason I don't know. They wort, I call it wort, but I was told that brewers call it wort. Okay. No, you don't care, you don't do a crap.
Okay. Uh are there some interesting things I can do with these base ingredients beyond beer or uh or the equipment used for it beyond low temperature cooking. Um that's interesting. I know I I love uh I've been trying to use mashing techniques and uh use the the amylase that so you what when you're when you're doing mashing, when you're doing an all-grain mash, what what you're you're using barley, uh you malt typically malted barley. When you're malting the barley, you're uh just uh allowing a little bit of the uh grain to grow, you're allowing it to germinate a little bit, and then you're stopping that uh while the enzymes are in there that will convert the starch uh in the barley, eventually convert the starch into sugars so that the growing embryo can um can use them.
You kill that such that the enzymes haven't been destroyed, but that the embryo isn't using all of that stuff, it isn't wasting any of the starch because you want to convert all that starch using the enzymes to sugar. So uh I've been uh not with much success, but trying to experiment using um using the enzymes in that to add other starches to do cooking related uh things. So uh to break down um potatoes, for instance, or break down even further sweet potatoes using a mixture of uh amylases from from grains. But I haven't had any sort of luck uh, you know, that I haven't had any sort of luck that makes me want to think that uh that's what I want to do for the next you know you know ten years. I'm having much more luck with um not with grain-based uh ferments doing interesting things, but uh Harold McGee has been turning me on to some really interesting uh rice-based fermentations, not Japanese, not koji-based, but you know, other weird uh symbiotic uh like mixtures of bacteria and uh fungal and uh yeast elements.
And uh I forget the name of it is, but these have these weird little they're called yeast balls that are from China that McGee kind of turned me on to that make this amazing fermented uh rice gruel that tastes unlike anything uh ever. So I've had more luck using that in culinary uh in culinary applications, but I haven't really had done much with beer. Now, malt is delicious, and malt, I think, uh, especially even the even the dried stuff that you can uh buy or the extract is an underused ingredient from a culinary standpoint. It's delicious. Uh, you know, malted mashed potatoes, you know, not malt like you know, baker's malt or like malt, like you make milkshakes with, but like large amounts of you know, uh brewer's malt, but uh malt powder, um, you know, DME dry malt extract, which you don't use because you're all grain, um, is a awesome uh addition, uh flavoring addition to to to many things that I use.
Two. I have a fair bit of beer. What are some interesting things I can do to play with beer for sweet or savory applications? I've been thinking about foams with methacyl F50 and I've used it in cheese preparations with sodium citrate. Um look, Methacel F50 beer applications are kind of one of the classic applications uh of Methell F50.
I mean, I think one of the first the in fact the first application I saw, Methell F50 is a hydrocolloid derived from cellulose uh that has very good whipping properties. And it's used uh mainly by chefs to make very dense, like kind of shaving creamy uh consistency foams because it makes a very fine celled foam as opposed to something almost uh akin to an egg white, uh as opposed to kind of the light airy foams that are produced by uh things like um uh by things like less than um you know VersaWhip is another foaming agent, but I I tend to think that Methacel F50 makes kind of a finer, kind of more egg-whitey uh foam than Versawhip usually does, although VersaWhip is also good for certain applications. Anyway, uh Methacel F50 also does something VersawWhip can't do, which is if you make a uh if you make a m like a like a whipped egg white texture thing with methylcel F50, a foam, you can pipe it uh onto a uh tray, throw it in a dehydrate or at 135 Fahrenheit for a couple of hours, then turn it down to hold it, and it'll make a crunchy, like uh crunchy meringue uh crispy thing with no protein in it. That's amazing. Now, the first application I saw of it was methacyl F50 was in fact beer, it was Sam Mason, uh who I don't know when his ice cream company is starting up again.
You know, did anyone know? Anyone, anyone? Uh it's gonna be delicious, I'm sure. Anyway, uh, was he was doing uh back at WD50 when he was a pastry chef at WD50, was making uh Guinness foam with Methylcel F50. And as I remember, I tasted it and my feelings was it will it was delicious.
Um obviously cooking with beer, uh is good. I've been using it a lot in in cocktail preparations, of course, that's nothing new. So I guess I don't have anything really new. I like this cheese application with sodium citrate, so I'm assuming you're making like processed cheese with beer. You think that would I mean or you'd have to add some sort of case you'd have to add some sort of like uh uh casein, extra casein to it.
You buy I did some work with um a product called rennet casein, and rennet casein is uh is casein that's been produced f from the process uh like where you actually rented it, and then you break it down, powder it, and you can reuse that to make cheese analogs. Uh and so I've done some initial experiments with uh rennet casein, but I'm sure that as long as you get the pH right with the with the beer that you can make a pretty interesting kind of beer cheese. In other words, it I I would be most interested in something not that had the flavor of cheese, but had the meltability of cheese, but tasted like beer. And I think that would be eminently possible with uh beer, rennet casein, and the right emulsifying salts. So I wouldn't just use citrate, you'd use a uh Dave, you have a call.
And let's keep it to one question. It's not a personal stuff. Wait, you're telling me it's not a personal friend call, the lady who's buying shoes on the internet. All right, caller, you're on the air. And caller, you have one.
Hi, uh Dave and Nastasha and friends. Uh this is Brian in San Francisco. Excuse me, I have a cold. Um but uh two questions. First is um lecithin.
Uh what's I I found in my natural food store the soy lecithin, which looks kind of like bee pollen. It's uh kind of crumbles. Right. And then but I've seen some recipes that want liquids, so what's the difference? Yeah, and I guess the first they call soy left lecithin.
Yeah, almost all the lecithin that you buy in uh in is from soy, and it's not that that's the only lecithin that's out there, it's just a byproduct of manufacturing all the other soy products. They have soy lecithin. I've never used liquid lecithithin. Do you ever use liquid piper? Yeah.
Did you like it? I mean it's like I hate the granules. Well, the granules are better. Look, granules are obviously the worst. The powder is pretty good.
You can buy a powdered one, and uh the the problem with the granules is first of all, I think they they tend to accentuate the off flavor that you can get from lecithin if you use it too much, and also they're hard to get what'd you say? You still there? They they they they're hard to get into the uh they're hard to get into solution sometimes, the granules, and uh the whereas the powder is like you know, easier. But the liquid, I mean, assuming if you can buy the liquid, if you can tolerate having uh extra extra, you know, liquid, I'm sure it's not sure it's oil based, right? Uh but if you could have it uh, you know, because lecithin would rather be in oil than in water.
You whenever you're talking about an emulsifier, you have to look at what's called the the hydrophobic uh lipo lip uh the hydrophilic lipophilic balance where you're looking at is it an oil loving emulsifier, is it a water loving emulsifier? And the big mistake most people make with uh lecithin is although it's kind of somewhere near the middle, it's not extreme on either side, lecithin is an oil loving uh emulsifier. So if it's coming as a liquid, it's almost certainly coming in an oil based uh liquid. Now I if I've never used liquid lecithin, but I would guess it's a lot easier to use because the the the pain in the butt about lecithin is gonna make it sure it's uh in the liquid properly. Right?
Wouldn't you agree? Yes. Yeah. I don't know. We I think we lost a caller because that we have some sort of like weird feedback loop going on here.
But back to cheese for one second. Uh the book that you guys want to get, and I think I've mentioned it on the on the uh show here before is Processed Cheese and Analogs by Adnan Tamimi. And uh that's gonna have all the recipes you need, and you can you can look at a good bunch of it on Google Books and see uh see what's going on. Finally, on the way out, we have a question. Well, okay, one more thing on cheese.
Uh, can sodium hexametophosphate be used as a replacement for sodium citrates and recipes as well as for sequestering calcium? If yes, is there a standard scaling amount for the amount used? I'm thinking specifically about a modernist mac and cheese recipe. Sodium hexametophosphate is not a single thing, it's a group of polyphosphate salts, uh, and it's a monster uh at sequestering calcium. Uh it's not a straight replacement for sodium citrate because they they have kind of different functions uh in a mac and cheese.
They they they function uh they function differently. Usually when you're making a cheese based uh thing, you need to add uh not just one uh emulsifying salt, but two or three. You're you and uh the function you need depends a lot on the pH of your system. So certain of the salts uh are more basic than others, and so you need to add them to get your pH in in the right level, and also they tend to have different textures depending on which one you use. And unfortunately, it's not a straightforward thing, it's kind of a little bit of a dark art, and so it requires a lot of experimentation.
A lot of it is still just people like testing recipes and keeping logbooks of what they do, but uh sodium hexametaphosphate and sodium citrate together, uh you should be able to get a lot of things under your belt having those two uh ingredients on hand when you're doing cheeses. Finally, can I explain my home seltzer system? Yes, here's what you do to make the if if you have the money and the time and uh and but now, but you don't want to spend money or time later. What you do is you get an under-the-counter ice machine, and then you drill a hole in the side of the undercounter ice machine. This is not this is what I kind of have at home.
What I have at home is a slightly more ghetto version of this. But you you take an ice machine, you drill holes in it, right? You buy a cold plate. Go to uh go to Mark Powers, they're in Guntersville, Alabama, cheapest. Get a cold plate, two circuits.
One circuit of a cold plate is not enough to get your seltzer cold enough for what you want to do here, right? So, what a cold plate is is it's a big stainless steel coil that's embedded in an aluminum block, and you keep that underneath uh ice, right? Now, one chain of a cold chain is not going to drop the temperature enough. So, what you do is you put the in you oh oh I forgot. You have to buy a carbonator.
A carbonator is a giant tank that holds water at room temperature with a pump, the same kind of pump, it's a rotary vein pump made by ProCon usually, and it's the same pump that you use in an espresso machine, and that's hooked up to your water supply. So you get you put your water supply straight out of your sink in through a filter. You put that uh goes through a filter, once it goes through the filter, it gets hooked onto the pump on your carbonator, right? You then get a 20-pound CO2 tank, you want to run it about 95, 96, 98 PSI, somewhere in there, into the tank. Now, your water mains are don't have enough pressure to inject water into a system that has that high of uh that high of a pressure.
So the pro-con pump overcomes that pressure and shoots the water, sprays it into the uh tank. That spraying makes such a fine surface area that the water is instantly carbonated. Now, uh you need to have it at 98 to uh 90 90 to 100 psi because you're doing it at room temperature, so that's under extreme pressure. It comes out of that, goes through two circuits of your cold plate, right? Two circuits of it, and it's underneath your ice machine.
So now you have constant ice supply and you have constant cold seltzer. When it comes out, the next biggest mistake people make is they use a crappy picnic tap like you would use for beer. They're worthless, useless. You need to get what's called a Becker squeeze valve. You can also get Becker, B-E-K, B E C B E C K E R.
Becker makes the best seltzer valves, no question, because it has a giant compensator in the back of it that allows you to make the transition from the high pressure region uh where the seltzer is to the low pressure atmospheric region, and they're and they're just they're they're free, it's freaking awesome. That's the system. So that's the system I have at 54 Eldritch. At home, the problem was I couldn't fit an undercounter ice machine uh in where I wanted to put it because uh it would have required too much uh ventilation problem. I just couldn't do it.
Plus, with all the tubes coming down from my espresso machine, because my espresso and my seltzer rig are together right where all my filtered water crap is. So I have to go through the awful, well, it's not awful. I built an insulated uh box like out of wood and uh spray foam and blue and blue foam uh with a condensation pump, right? You need a condensation pump with a condensation pump, and so now uh my freezer, which is across the aisle in my kitchen, I pull the ice out of it every day from the ice maker, dump it into my insulated box into the cold plate, and then that's how I get my cold seltzer. Uh and so that's my cold seltzer rig at home.
It's awesome. The one with the automatic ice machine is even better. Now that I have a seven-year-old that I can boss around, he actually does the ice, so it's just like having a manual ice machine, you know, a regular ice machine for me. But that's how I recommend doing it. It's the balls.
I never run out of seltzer. Cooking issues. 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 heritage radio network.org.
Heritage Radio Network is a nonprofit organization. To donate and become a member, visit our website today. Thanks for listening.
Timestamps may be off due to dynamic ad insertion.