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Alright! Tuesday, Tuesday, Tuesday, live at Cooking Issues on the Heritage Radio Network in the back of Roberta's Pizza Ryan Bushwick, Brooklyn! Calling all your questions live to 718497-2128. That's 718497 2128. Hey Jack, what do you think about that intro?
Sorry, it really got you jazzed up, huh? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We gotta what's awesome is how different the two songs are. We gotta like swap them back and forth. Well, see, I'm thinking the first one, the kind of interpolation, we can use that on the break.
It's kind of a jazzier, calmer break song. Think so? Yes. Yeah, I think so. Do you think I blasted out the view meter over there?
Am I okay with the intro? You did. We went red. Went red. That's my next band.
That was Joel Gargano, right? Yes, it was. Yeah, alright. I probably mispronounced his name, like I mispronounced everyone's name. If I didn't have my own name, I'd mispronounce my name, right, Stas?
You have two first names. I do have two first names, although I tend to forget it since my last name's been my last name since as long as I can remember. Joined as usual with Nastasha the Hammer Lopez, but also today her sister, the Mini Hammer. She she's who uh just recently started attending uh the Yale University, my old alma mater. She didn't take a mic, she said, I don't know, she's like takes so it's a it's a sister thing.
They're both sitting here on computers, crazy, crazy. And Jack and Joe in the engineering room. Hey. How do you do? Call your questions live to 7184972128.
That's 718497 2128. It is the Thanksgiving edition of uh Cooking Issues. And uh Stas, what are you doing for the Thanksgiving? Uh bunch of people coming over. Yeah, I don't think how many.
I don't know, six, seven. And uh what kind of wine are they gonna bring? No, that those people aren't coming. That's Saturday. That's the second time.
All right, so who's coming for who's coming for the for the real Thanksgiving? A bunch of people that don't have families. Okay, here's the thing. If you want to get invited to uh Nastasha's uh apartment for the Thanksgiving or for any event, just uh guarantee that you will A be late uh and B, uh if you were going to bring something, make sure that you get Nastasha to buy all the ingredients and you cook it by messing up her kitchen, and or bring any one point five liter five dollar bottle of wine. Right?
Isn't that what it what it takes to qualify to be one of your friends? They've started bringing water. No way. Like I don't think Poland Spring? They're like, I don't feel like drinking tonight, so I brought water, and then they drink.
Who cares what they feel like doing? Yeah, exactly. I want to drink. People, people. I assume that anyone listening to this program uh is a cook or likes to cook anyway, and has some sense of what it means to be a a a proper host.
Like for me, uh the worst thing that could ever happen to me, much worse than like uh accidentally like having the building uh fall down and me being naked in front of a bunch of people. Which is horrible, but like like much worse than that, or or worse even than I don't know, I can't I'm trying to imagine something worse. Uh but like running out of food at a dinner party. I would rather die than run out of food. I mean it's like the worst thing.
You know what I mean? I was raised at like then that just means that you're low quality as a person. You know what I mean? It's not that they ate too much, it's that you're puny and weak. Right?
Uh so, anyways, and as a guest, showing up empty-handed, the only thing worse than showing up empty-handed would be showing up with a bottle of water. Right. Like, if you don't want to drink, and you're going to someone's house, if you're not a drinker, fine, bring a dessert. Bring a cake. Yeah.
Cheese. Cheese. Yeah, if you're gluten intolerant, bring cheese. If you're lactose intolerant, bring a cake. If you're both, I have to think harder.
You know what I mean? But but bring something for Christ's sakes. Bring a gift. Bring jewelry, bring bring a book, bring anything. Show up empty-handed, show up with water.
Just say I don't want to come. If you don't want to go to the person's house, right? If it's too much of an investment to spend, you know, 15, 20 bucks a wall uh bottle, you know, on a bottle of good wine, then just don't go. Just say no. Oh, I enjoy your company, but I want to just bring some water.
Hey, crap on you. Then stay and clean the whole god dang thing. People. Where do people come from? I don't know.
What the hell is wrong with people? Happy Thanksgiving. Uh okay. We got this question in from uh Alex in Florida about bitters. Uh dear Jack, Dave and Nastasha 2.
Uh I've been uh curious recently about making my own bitters. At the bar, do you use a traditional Angostura slash Paisho's, or do you have a recipe of your own? I want something that would make a brandy old fashioned really pop and maybe another interesting flavor while I'm concocting. What's the ideal proof to start with? And how long do you age for ideal flavor extraction?
Extraction, and would an ISI whipper be able to speed up the process or just throw the flavors off balance? Thanks and help for your show, Alex from Florida. Alright, well, look, uh, no, we do not make our own uh bitters uh at at the bar. Uh we use Angostures and Paisho's just a little note to you. I detest Pesho's bitters.
I think they taste like cough syrup. I will tolerate them in traditional drinks like Sazerac, but uh I just I'm not I'm not a fan. In fact, uh at the bar, we didn't serve it to customers because it's uh it's uh illegal, but I prefer to use actual Robotussin uh to mix with uh so we were doing like we were doing Sazerak Sesurp uh drinks that we were calling uh we call we call them RoboSack, actually was the thing. And then when we flamed it with the red hot poker uh in an homage to the Simpsons, we were calling it uh the flaming Mozarak. But uh anyways, uh so not a huge Pesho's fan.
Uh but if you want to make your own bitters, first of all, I uh I recommend that to get a ballpark of what you're doing, go out and purchase uh bitters, a spirited history of a classic cure all with cocktails, recipes, uh, and formulas uh by Brad Thomas Parsons. Um go ahead and read that. That's the book on uh bitters. Uh he actually comes to the bar, he's a nice guy. Uh good book.
And uh, you know, don't I I couldn't look at my copy because I have it at the bar for our bartenders to use as a reference. I couldn't look at my copy this morning, but uh go take a look at that one. Most of his recipes uh are a little bit low on proof. Uh Angostura, when it's finished, uh starts at 45. Uh I mean, is it 45 uh percent alcohol by volume if that gives you kind of a uh a ballpark?
Um the higher alcohol you anything that you do when you're making a bitters is gonna change it. It's not gonna make it necessarily better or worse, but it's gonna change it. So um Brad usually does a two-part extraction, right? Where he'll do an initial extraction into pure ethanol uh and then not pure, sorry, sorry, into like liquor, like a hundred, hundred, hundred and 100-101 some of the some medium-proof bourbon or spirit. Then he will take the solids out of it, then re-steep those solids in water uh at a high temperature boiling.
So if he'll do a room temperature uh uh infusion into liquor for a week, two weeks, a couple days, whatever it depends on the product. Then take the solids out, boil them with water, reduce that, add that back to the alcohols to do a two-part infusion. If you do ISI, it's gonna change it. Some people on the internet use very high proof alcohol and extract for less amount of time, and none of these things is gonna make anything better or worse. If you're using an ISI bottle, which is a technique I developed a little while ago for infusing very rapidly, that's going to change the infusion.
What it's going to do is uh anytime you do a rapid infusion technique at low temperature like ISI or any form of pressure, it's gonna typically extract volatile notes more than it's gonna extract the deeper, baser, uh more bitter notes. So if you're gonna do a coffee infusion with ISI rapidly, it's gonna extract more of the coffee aroma and less of the inherent bitterness. Uh very long-term extractions in high proof ethanol are gonna extract a lot of the stuff, including all of the bitters. So it all depends on how you want to extract it, which flavors you want uh to pull out. You know, if you extract at a lower proof, the flavor balance will be different if you extract for the same amount of length uh time at a higher proof or longer, uh shorter at a higher proof.
So the short answer is there's no answer. Uh one thing I will say is a lot of people where they really mess up is they change the amount of liquor uh to that they use to the product, or they use low quality or impotent uh product. So if you're gonna sourcing a really crappy uh gentian uh, for example, or really crappy or old spice, you're never gonna get the same amount of flavor, even if you ramp up the quantity, uh than you would if you did uh if you got a higher quality product or a fresher product. Similarly, if you were to just say, listen, I want to do it faster, so I'm gonna add twice as much gention, let's say, to something. Uh or if you're at doing, I don't know, gin or something, or a root or something.
If you're gonna add twice as much, right? Uh that doesn't make it twice as strong or the same amount of strength in half the time, it changes the flavor. But again, it doesn't make it any better or any worse. But as a ballpark for a more traditional bitters kind of a flavor, go look at uh go look at that book, uh bitters, and then if you want to try something that's uh maybe less on the deep notes but has a lot of more of the aromatic notes, and you want to do something quickly, try doing the ISI infusion. When you're starting, do individual infusions of the flavors to see how they mix so that you can mix them, then see whether or not if you combine them at the same time, you get the same extraction, a similar extraction.
Because you probably won't. Adding different spices is going to change the overall concentration relative to the uh liquid and the alcohol present, might change the flavors of the way they melt. It's a very complicated uh kind of a thing, and so you have to practice. But once, but make sure when you're doing it that you keep extremely accurate, copious records of exactly what you did so that you can reproduce it. The worst thing in the world is to come up with something that's delicious and then you can't reproduce it.
I hate that. Hate it. Absolutely hate it. Um I had one more note, but I forget what it is. I don't know.
Couldn't have been I mean, it probably was extremely important. It was probably the most important thing that I was gonna say. Like the rest of it's just fluff compared to the one thing I was about to say, but it's it's gone. It's out of my head. It's it's it's history.
Sorry about that. Anyway, uh okay. Um moving on. Red writes in cooking low temperature pork shakes have been giving me some issues. I've done them twice now with the same results.
Funk, not funk in a good way. See, funk, like a long, long time ago, funk just meant kind of like smelly, like behind smelly, smelly stuff like funk. That's a nasty funk. And then funk became kind of a good thing, kind of like James Brown funk, and now I think funk is bad to be back to being a bad thing. At least when it's cooking, funk is bad, right?
You pro funk or anti funk? Anti? Anti, yeah, okay. Uh funk. Uh the first time, although there's a town in Nebraska called funk.
Did you know that? Funk, Nebraska. There's a university, the university of Funk. Can you imagine? Yeah, I mean, like, I don't understand why everyone in the world, if I had known about it when I was applying to school, I was saying crap on Yale, I'd be going to the University of Funk.
But anyway, uh the first time uh my funky, my funky funky shanks were cooked with an Asian style marinade. No dip at 85 degrees, uh, no dip at 85 degrees Celsius, meaning dipping them first at 85 degrees Celsius to kill the bacteria on the outside. So there's no dip, and they went into a water bath at 60 degrees Celsius for approximately 48 hours. The second time was with no marinade and a three-minute dip at 85 degrees Celsius into a bath at 60 degrees Celsius for about 48 hours. All the pork shanks were cooked with uh the full skin on.
Uh note interesting though, uh change red changed two different variables, right? Changed the marinade and the dip. So we don't what we don't have is we don't have marinade plus dip, whether or not that equals funk, right? Okay. Anyway, uh all the pork shanks, and we also, I don't know for, for instance, whether or not both had the exact same kind of funk, because there's there's various kinds of funk.
There's kind of bacterial funk, which usually gives kind of a cheesy, almost sauerkrauty or blue cheese or definite off note that's usually caused by uh lactobacillus that are growing in your bag, either due to uh not heating it up fast enough, having some contamination. Well, that's what it's due to having some contamination, not heating it up fast enough to kill them before they can produce their nasty aromas. Uh but secondly, certain meats can have a certain kind of funk. So for instance, dry age meats have a certain kind of funk. And also, if you've ever made, if any of you ever out there have ever made a pure pork stock, Stas, you ever made a pure pork stock, like without a lot of browning flavors in it, without a lot of everything.
If you just like cooks like straight like pork with like no skimming of the stock beforehand, all the bones, sometimes you get like that weird kind of I don't know how to describe it, porky aroma. Anyone in the studio know what the heck I'm talking about? Yeah, I've had enough pork. Yeah, but you know what I'm talking about? Like that pork uncovered by any sort of Mayard flavor and also kind of without any flashing off of the volatiles and kind of nowhere moving, can have this kind of like porky, skinny, kind of like you know when you when you make a very strong gelatin solution, you get some of that kind of like weird that aroma.
So I don't know whether that's what you're describing as funk, in which case that one that's a separate issue. But we're gonna assume on bacteria is what we're dealing with. Anyway, all the pork shanks were cooked with the full skin on. My question is what is causing the funk? I would have thought that the 85 degrees C, uh, which is very high in Fahrenheit, land-free Fahrenheit folk, uh, dip for three minutes would have taken care of any surface issues.
Do I need to skin them? And is the temperature just too low? Uh, I've also cooked some at 85 degrees Celsius for 12 hours with no issues except being overcooked for my taste. Think of trying 75 degrees C for approximately 12 hours the next time. I've had great success with lamb shanks at 62 degrees for 48 hours.
So I'd appreciate any insights you might have on this. Uh P.S., my wife and I will be taking uh trek trekking off to the European Union a week after Thanksgiving, and we'll be in New York on the 28th and 29th before we leave. Our plans are to stop by and have lunch at Sombar and then at Booker and Dax for uh lunch and cocktails. We also have reservations for WD-50 that evening. Red.
Listen, Red. Um Booker and Dax does not open till six. Does not open till six. I'm sure Wiley will let you come get a cocktail at Booker and Dax at six before you go off to WD-50, or after you go to WD-50, uh come by Booker and Dax and have some cocktails. Uh, but we don't open uh the bar until six.
I will also say this, not to like shortchange your ability to come to my bar and have drinks, but WD-50 also has an extremely interesting bar program, and I really am a big fan of their cocktails. And it is my feeling that in general, restaurants don't get enough play for their uh bar programs. For some reason, uh cocktail writers tend to overlook restaurants when they uh look at their cocktails, when they look at interesting cocktails, they tend to focus solely on standalone bars. And uh it's stupid, it's dumb because restaurants uh have uh what's interesting about restaurants is they typically have a large uh back of house system, and often in really good restaurants, chefs and bartenders will uh talk to each other and communicate, and uh the bartender will have access to some interesting ingredients from the back of the house that they wouldn't ordinarily have at a normal bar. So check out the uh cocktails when you're at the WD-50.
Okay, back to your funky question. Um I don't know, uh it'll be interesting to see if you did the marinade because as you'll see later if I get to it, uh uh some marinades have uh antibacterial effects. I'm assuming that's what's causing it is not just kind of the natural inherent porkiness that that you're talking about. I'm assuming what's causing it is a bacteria, and the only explanation I could have is that your bags got crowded, and that even with the C with the high C dip, you may be it's a high C, you know what I mean? High high temperature dip, uh, that there were parts of the bag that got bacterially contaminated, whether it was from getting stabbed with a knife, whether it was from bags being packed closely together, or if you had multiple portions with sauce in them inside of a single bag, and then that part couldn't be penetrated by the by the hot water when you were doing your dip.
Um, one of those things must be the cause, because that's the only time I've ever had uh funkiness happen. And at 60 degrees Celsius, you should not have any sort of uh funkiness. Now, definitely 75 degrees C, if there's a bacterial problem, the penetration is going to be fast enough to kill anything and stop the uh stop it from going going south on you. But I would think that 60 degrees Celsius is also hot enough to have that happen, unless they were really tightly packed. In which case I would really make sure that your packs are very, very far separated in your bath to make sure that you're getting adequate uh circulation around it, because usually it's lack of circulation in the bath that's the problem, or a very large uh large, large thing that's the problem.
On this, by the way, I have to say a little bit how I'm gonna cook my uh my turkey this year. How are you cooking your turkey styles? I don't know yet. It's like your what does your mom do? Just throws it in an oven at like one degree.
What's your what's the technique from your at your house? She wakes up at six and puts the turkey in for eight hours. Yeah? Turkey jerky? How is it?
How's your mom's turkey? How's the turkey nutty? Don't worry, she's not gonna listen. How is it? It's alright.
It's alright. That's the that's the thing, alright? Yeah? Yeah. You slather that sucker in gravy if it happens, right?
Right? Is that what goes on? Jack, Jack and Joe, how about you guys still over there? What what are your turkeys like? Uh my mom's process is pretty similar to Nastasia's.
Yeah? So good for sandwiches, but not so good on day one. Yeah. Lots of gravy is necessary. Yeah?
Yeah. Alright, well, listen. Normally, for the past several years, I think what are three years we've been doing this, Doz. I've been doing my like uh bionic turkey, where you completely bone a turkey inside out. Uh then you make a like an aluminum uh hollow uh uh pseudoskeleton, and then you pump hot oil and butter through the pseudoskeleton after you've brined it, that you puff the turkey up with uh an artificial uh aluminum foil kind of carcass, and then you pump hot butter through it to cook it from the inside out and then finish it in butter and then do a flash fry on the outside to crisp up the skin.
And if I do say so myself, it's a delicious, uh delicious turkey. It's a good it's a delicious bird. Hey, oh but uh so here's the thing though. Like uh my stepfather, uh, although the only things he likes are wine and fishing and cigars, and I guess third, like my family. Uh the uh like the or fourth, whatever it is.
I think we're I think we make it to fourth. Like there. And the dogs are maybe just below or just above us or below me. Anyway, uh, so he hates anything that's uh a big uh a big mishigash. You know what I mean?
He's like or a big Gembota, as he says. So uh, you know, I fried my first turkey at my mom's house, and like a little oil spilled on the lawn and killed a patch of grass, which no one has walked on in 22 years. And yet I heard about it. Dave, you destroyed the lawn. Oh, he went to his bedroom and fell asleep.
I ruined it all of Thanksgiving. All of it, totally ruined. And then next year, my mom's like, hey Dave, or two years because I alternate with my in-laws, right? And they hey Dave, fry the turkey again. But didn't tell Gerard, my stepfather.
I was like, have you told Gerard that we're gonna fry the turkey again? She's like, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No problem, no problem. So she doesn't talk like that. She's uh she's a world-renowned doctor.
Anyway, uh so we um we uh I bring it. Gerard doesn't know we're gonna fry the turkey, also a world-renowned doctor, doesn't know we're gonna fry the uh the turkey again, immediately, even before we start cooking, goes upstairs and falls asleep. I didn't want to kill the grass, so I did it on the flagstone, and I got oil on the flagstone, and so he went out and it was one of those sub-freezing Thanksgivings, you know, back before global warming. And he starts uh and he starts hosing down the deck, which starts freezing over to try and get the thing off. So it did two Thanksgiving's ruined.
So I am not bringing the robo turkey. Last year I brought the robo turkey, I cooked it at my house and brought a pre-cooked robo turkey to the to the house. But you know what? This one I'm just gonna say crap on it. I'm not gonna do it.
But here's my technique that I'm gonna try to do that you guys can maybe do for the fast turkey. Ready for this? Ready for this? It's a variant on what I used to do back in the old days. The way I would cook a turkey is I would bone the whole turkey out, completely bone it, like you would a chicken.
You can look at Jackie, Jackie Peeps, that's French for Jacques Popin. Jackie Peeps has a recipe for it in chicken. So I would roll the whole um, you know, bone it, stuff it with uh stuffing, tie it back together as a roll, and cook it really quickly. It cooks very, very quickly, right? Now remember, you don't want to start store stuffing in a turkey because you can get all sorts of bacterial contamination that then isn't destroyed by heat, and you know, you can make your family sick, all this, blah, blah, blah.
Go look it up if you don't believe me. Anyway, it's a bad idea. But here's what I'm gonna do this year. Uh I don't want to break the turkey. In other words, I'm not going to, I'm not gonna bone it by cutting down the skin on the back and totally unfolding it like I normally would.
I'm gonna inside out, I haven't told my mom this yet. I'm gonna inside out boning it, bone it like I would for a robo turkey, right? Now here's the ball or move. I'm gonna, my mom's stuffing is great. I don't even care what you think.
Your mom, you think your mom's stuffing is good? Crap on your mom's stuffing. My mom and my good stuff. Everyone likes their own mom's stuffing. You like your mom's stuffing styles?
Yeah. Yeah. No matter what, no matter how overcooked your normal bird is, everyone loves their their parents' stuffing, right? Jack Joe? Yes.
Yes. Okay. So I'm gonna take my mom's stuffing. I'm not even gonna touch it. I'm gonna let her make it.
I'm not gonna sit there and be like, hey, ma, I have more sage. But by the way, parents don't use sage, they use poultry seasoning because they grew up in like the 50s and 60s, so they use that stuff just called poultry seasoning. Anyway, so uh we're gonna make the stuffing mix. I'm gonna heat that sucker up in the oven until it's done, mix it with a little bit of gravy. Done, right?
Hot, hot like hell. Now remember, I cook a lot, so my hand's completely impervious to heat. I was teaching at the French culinary the other day, and I was had someone infusing something in a bottle in a stove, and I was like, take it out of the, take it out of the pan, and then I can't, it's too hot. So I just reach over, picked it up, and held it for a couple minutes while I was talking to prove that they was a chump. Anyway, so like uh it's just because I have no feeling.
It's really a stupid trick. Because you have no feeling in your hand. Anyway, so it Nastasia says I have no feelings in general. She says I'm a monster. And not in a good way.
Not like when I say someone's a monster, it means they're good at something. Like when she says it's a monster, she means like they should be relegated to a pit with wailing and gnashing of teeth if you read the Bible. Uh so um, anywho, uh, so I'm gonna take this hot stuffing and I'm gonna I'm gonna take my inside out burnt bird, and instead of using aluminum foil, I'm gonna shove like boiling hot stuffing into the bird so it starts cooking from the inside out, so the stuffing's already above the cook temp. So the stuffing's actually gonna act like a heater and then throw it into a hot oven. And that turkey's gonna be done lickety freaking split, and it's also gonna be brine beforehand, so it's not gonna be able to cook.
So that's gonna be my turkey this year. What do you think? Good. Take pictures. Uh take pictures.
You know I won't. I'll try. I'll try. But anyway, so that's what I'm gonna do uh for for this year's bird. Oh, by the way, guys, Nastasha, did you Okay?
So we had the CNN in for a while before the uh about before the hurricane. Uh and they're doing a a half in a half-hour uh thing. Expose Expose. Wow. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, hopefully, no, don't worry, folks. There's no exposing of of me, thank Christ. And so anyway, so like the uh uh it's it's a show called The Next List, The Next List. What am I so someday I'll be the now list, but like anyway, but like we're the next list. And uh yeah, so anyway, so it's gonna be on uh on the what's it called?
CNN. CNN on Sun, no, but on Sunday at 2 p.m. Yeah, Eastern Standard Time. Well, it's when the show is aired. What do you want out of me?
So apparently they're airing promos, but please watch it and tell and somehow I don't know what it did. Please watch it. Email, let us know what you think. Yeah, email let us know let us know what you think. Uh I'm super happy.
Uh I'm excited that uh they decided to do the uh see what Jack looks like. Yeah, oh Jack's on it? Nastasha managed somehow to be sick or cooking a chicken every time that they were like uh by the way, the little quotes mark in my thing. Are you on camera? No.
Because literally, like you think Nastacha's face is buried in her computer normally. She like took and built like a cardboard. Do you know what dogs wear when they when they're when they bite themselves and you put the cone on their head to stop them from biting themselves? You guys know what I'm talking about? She like put one of those around her head and then like taped that to her computer monitor so that no one would ask her any questions.
I think even though they were with us for hours and hours and hours, like not once did Nastasha peep on the dang thing, just so she could uh maintain the uh the fiction amongst people that like somehow I'm always yelling at her and she never gives back Sass. Does Nastasha not give back Sass? Oh, yeah, okay. Oh at least she has her sister in mortal mortal terror, not saying anything. Okay.
Joel uh Gargano wrote in uh who you know from the famous uh song you just heard before. He says, I know I write in often, I know, but this is for good reason. This is regarding the song. A while back, Dave asked people to create an intro song for the show. Uh this is my original song that I allow you to play without threatening you with legal action.
I recorded it all in my basement next to the furnace. Punks. Enjoy. It's a hardcore punk version that is certainly a hoot. Hope to hear it next week or soon.
It's only forty seconds. The ending is a good lead in for Dave's calling your questions to cooking issues. Uh and that's why how I used it. I thought I used it uh well. I will say though, no, you should have said 71849.
Yeah, Mr. Gargano did not remember the number. No, but Dave was supposed to say it. I did say it afterwards, but you didn't say it in front of you. I thought it would be better to get the monster truck rally voice in.
I don't know. You think I was wrong? Should I should I not give Monster Truck? No, I think you should have done Monster Truck phone number. Monster Truck 718, 497 21, 28.
That's 718 497, 21, 28. Like that? Yeah. All right. Uh if this wins some sort of contest, the grand prize must be a personal phone call from Harold McGee, reading verses of my choice from on food and cooking.
Preferably the section on my yard reactions. That one gets me all jazzed up. I'm not kidding. But I'm gonna tell Harold that. I I wish I'd heard that before, because I just spoke to him a couple days ago.
He's gonna be in town, but not for a Tuesday. Someday we'll get a bad thing. I'm gonna send it to Harold and see whether he'll agree to the case. Harold can call us anytime and we'll record that for him. And he can yeah, but he wants a personal phone.
We gotta get them both on the phone reading sections on MyRad reaction from on. I want I want to hear some tweets in on my tweet if you guys want to hear Harold McGee call in and just do an oral reading of sections of On Food and Cooking regarding Myrod reactions as a favor to Joel. I vote yes. I do too. I vote no.
Uh Francois writes in regarding the ongoing question of what the hell is in Katamaro Tempura, which is the stuff that they make in uh Japan to solidify your fry oil, and he writes in, gives sends us a picture of it that says, Look at the label, the same as your beloved Ziploc bag. And it's true, Francois, that uh uh the Katamaro Tempu, the or uh tempura, the oil hardening crap from Japan, which supposedly is in quotes seaweed, whatever the hell that means. I I could build like a weapon of mass destruction out of seaweed if you broke it apart enough and did it well. Anyway, whatever, that's not my point. My point is that it is made by SC Johnson Wax, a family company.
But, Francois, unfortunately, if you go to SC J Johnson Wax, a family company, and you look up their list of ingredients, they only give you ingredients for their American stuff, and then they send you for any other ingredients to the Japanese website, which is guess what, not in English. And then I tried to do Google Translate, and nowhere could I find any information regarding the ingredient list on Katamara tempura. So it is still a mystery. If anyone's listening in Japan, please purchase a box of this or look at the ingredients and tell me exactly what the hell's in it. Get someone from the SC Johnsonwax.jp corporation to tell you what the hell this is so we can figure out what kind of reaction it is.
Should we take a break? Yeah, but uh Coffee Mike just wrote us in and says the best turkey he ever made was in three parts. Break down the bird, made stock from the carcass, braise the legs in stock, and then roast the breast on top of the legs. Alright, listen, coffee Mike, before we go to a break, there are a couple things I think that are correct. First of all, there's what's the best tasting bird, and then there is the necessity, as an American, to present a full freaking bird at the table.
Sometimes I've even had like people break it apart, cook a bird for taste, and then cook a bird for looks, which I think is kind of weird because it's a waste of bird. But one thing I will say is boning out the turkey, which I'm gonna do, does give you the opportunity to make a delicious stock to add to gravy beforehand. So coffee Mike, good call, and I got a question answer for you after the break! Like what you hear so far? Support the network and become a member.
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360 Cookware invites you to learn more about how this process works on their website.com. And we're back. Hey Jack. Today's program. Jesus.
Sorry, guys. Well, today's brought to me by what? What's the second one? We're gonna talk about it. No, we'll just keep going, right?
We're gonna talk about the wine? Yeah. Well, the wine was just a that's just a leftover gift. Leftover gift? Yeah.
A bonus sponsor gift. Is that our sponsor gift? Is what Passetti Pecorino? What is peccarina? How does Pecorino?
The goat grape, the goats specifically like this grape. They used to feed the sheep and goats on the grape. For real? Yeah, before they started making wine with it. And then they fertilize it, so.
Have you visited this region? Yeah, I have. Nice. Well, it's an enjoyable wine. Who makes this thing?
This is a barter house wine. Oh, I thought they dropped out of sponsoring. They're still friends. Oh, listen. Okay.
Chuck S. writes in. Okay, we're gonna talk about Jersey in a minute. In a minute? I'm gonna get a question.
Because I don't want to run, I don't want to actually miss the clip. I want to try to get through all my questions for once. Alright. Chuck S writes in. Uh oh, uh sorry, so loud.
Uh, I'm looking at buying a pressure cooker. From listening to your show, it seems like Coon Recon is a good brand to get, although they have never given us a damn thing. Right? They're Swiss, right? Yeah, they're Swiss.
They don't give anything away. It's like the Paco Jet people. They don't give anything. They take, they don't give. Nastasha loves the Swiss.
What? Yes. Yeah, she loves the Swiss. Anyway, uh it seems like Coon Recon is a good brand to get. I'd like to know a bit about the trade-offs with the various sizes they make.
It seems like you can get a pressure cooker with anywhere from a five-liter to an eight-liter capacity for similar amounts of money. I'm interested in using the pressure cooker to make stocks, beans, etc. Normally I cook for two to poor people. Two to four to poor people. Two to four people.
For instance, are there issues with buying the one uh one of the larger pressure cookers and using it to cook small batches of food? Similarly, do you have to cook uh leave a lot of headspace when using the pressure cooker so that the smaller, e.g. five-liter cookers, are effectively too small to make any practical amount of stock. Thanks a lot, and I really enjoy listening to the show. Okay, look.
I'll tell first of all, I'll tell you the one I own. I own uh they have two different main three main lines. The two main ones, they have things called pressure cookers, and the pressure cookers have handles on them typically. So do the fry pans. Uh, and then they have ones that they call stock pots.
And the stock pots don't have uh kind of pant handles, long handles that you can hold. They have the little like like dumbo ear handles like a pot has. Is that make sense, Daz? You know what I'm talking about? Okay.
So what I own is the um seven quart or a seven liter or whatever it is, uh pressure cooker with the long handle. And I've had it for a long time, probably 12 years or something like that. And I've beaten it doesn't have any handles on it anymore. I've broken them all off. There's there's nothing left on it.
I've lost the vapor lid. It's all it's all history. Um, and I use it uh constantly. And uh that's the one that I would recommend uh you get for uh any size, uh any size, unless you're cooking extremely large amounts, that's what I'd get. If you're cooking beans, beans tend to have a lot of uh uh uh things that trap air and gas.
That's what makes you toot when you have the beans, is the fact that they have compounds in them that you don't break down that can trap gas, hence the gas. Anyway, uh so uh toot. So, like um it so therefore you want a taller pressure cooker to allow that stuff when you're doing a release. If you do a release, I typically don't like fast release on a pressure cooker. I let natural release happen.
But if you're gonna do a fast release, you're gonna want a taller head on it. Anyways, uh the seven uh the seven liter or seven quart, I guess it's seven liter. The seven-liter uh pressure cooker that I have has uh a bottom of uh eight point seven five inches, which is nice for my stove top so it doesn't scorch, it doesn't have a lot of hot spots, and it's got a really high quality bottom. All right. Now I'm gonna run through all the sizes so that I'll give you an idea because the prices are fairly similar.
You want to get one that is gonna function all around for you best. I know you normally cook for two to four, but if you're ever gonna do six to eight or you're gonna make a large quantity of stock to freeze, you're gonna want uh higher quantity, all right? The 3.5 quart has a smaller bottom, eight inches, it's too small. I don't know why the hell you would ever buy that. Because frankly, it doesn't take that long.
What I usually do when I'm working is I'll get the pressure cooker up to temperature with the lid off, and that way I can keep stirring it while the lid is off before I can get it up to boiling, uh, and that prevents it from scorching. I know some people like just throw the ingredients in, cap the lid, and let it come up. I think that's a mistake that's gonna cause uh scorching because you're not moving the stuff around once the lid is on. If that's your style, if for some reason like that's your level of personal laziness, then maybe you need to get a smaller one so that it builds up a pressure head faster, right? But if you're not gonna do that, then once it's boiling, it builds up ahead of steam fairly quickly.
So it's not that much longer to build up pressure in a large pressure cooker within reason than it is in a small pressure cooker. Now, if you all of a sudden get a pressure cooker that's so large that your stove has trouble getting all of that material up to temperature fast enough, then pressure cookers that are too large are a huge problem. And I have an American pressure canner that's huge. How big is that when we have stas? It's huge.
Yeah, it's huge. I can fit your sister in that thing. And that thing takes a long time to get up to temperature, right? So that is obviously a problem. But something like a seven-liter uh, or you know, it does not take a long time to get up to temperature, especially because it has a very uh thick aluminum sandwich in the bottom of the base that conducts very well.
So it's uh it's a good, it's that's a good all-around size. That's what I get. So 3.5 quart, forget about it. The five uh liter, six-liter, uh the five-liter uh pressure cooker, the six-liter stock pot, the seven-liter uh pressure cooker, and the eight-liter family stock pot all have the same eight point seven five uh inch bottom. They're just taller.
And I like the taller ones because if you're actually gonna do stock, I like taller, thinner things. The only disadvantage being that it's hard to brown a lot of things at one time. And if you want to do single layer braises, it's not as good, although I don't really think that's that big of a deal, right? So with that one, I'd probably still go with the one I have, this seven-liter uh pressure cooker. Maybe the eight-liter stock pot, because I have cooked sometimes things that are too large for mine.
Anywho, um now you go to wider to 9.5 inches on the bottom, and they make a fry pan or uh and a brazer. Uh, I would go for the the brazer of those two, then because you're not gonna need the fry pan handle for that, and the brazer's a little bit taller. And if you like to do traditional braises, it's a little bit wider, so you could get your asebuco going and you can brown it. When I'm browning in mine with the smaller uh bottom, I have to do it in batches. I have to brown all my meat in batches, which is a little bit of a pain in the butt.
Right? Also, you're not gonna be able to serve a braise out of it that way, and your braids is gonna get all jumbled up, right? So if you want to do a lot of braising traditional style, you're gonna want to get one of the braising pans and 9.5 inches across. But you could get um one of the 11-inch across guys, like they make an eight-quart called stock, which is I don't know why the hell they call it a stock pot. Because it's short like a brazer, but it holds eight quarts.
And that might be a good all-around thing if you're not worried about a hot spot because it's a little bit bigger than most of your burners are gonna be able to handle, but it handles a full eight quartz, so it's it's or eight quarts or eight liters. It's the same size as mine, in terms of it's or a little bigger than the one I have, but it's a lot wider if you tend to do braises. Anyway, and what they didn't used to make that I wish I had now is Coon Recon makes a 12-quart stock pot. That's baller with an 11-inch bottom. That's sick.
Anyway, uh, they have a new type called uh a top model. I don't know what the hell that is. I've never used it. It looks like it's still non-venting, but I can't recommend it. Is that enough?
You think I got it? That's good. That's good. All right, I hope that helps. Okay.
Mike Trem. What was I gonna talk about now? Jersey or jersey in a minute. Jersey in a minute. Let me get my questions done.
Mike Tremolet writes in about pausing. Uh and this is all Twitter. It's mashed together from Twitter, so you have to apologize that it's all Twitter mash. Uh techniques for par cooking food and finishing together. Roast turkey, starchy pureees, roast vegetables, steamed vegetables.
Uh would like to do mashed potatoes, roast cauliflower, etc. ahead of time and finish it while the turkey rests. But how to do this without losing quality? Soggy roast veg, dry mashed potatoes. Lots of books, lots of books tell me how to cook food.
None of them tell me when to pause cooking and how to restart. That's an excellent question, right? Yes. Here's what I would say. Mashed potatoes, what you're gonna want to do.
Cook the mashed potatoes ahead of time. Uh add enough cream or butter. By the way, a lot of chefs they don't like adding cream because it adds uh water to it instead of using butter. But I actually prefer the flavor of cream in my mashed potatoes to butter. I don't know why.
It's does you a cream or a butter person? Butter. Butter. Anyway, whatever. Wiley agrees with you.
I agree with me, but that's whatever. But take your mashed potatoes, uh, and don't, you know, just make sure you do something pleasant. Like use a food mill or a ricer. At home, ricer is the easiest way to do it. You can go to any kitchen shop and get yourself a ricer and you just smash the potatoes through a ricer and it comes out like then it's beautiful.
You don't need to do a lot of post things, and you're not going to get gloopy, nasty mashed potatoes. So rice it, mix it carefully with whatever you're going to add, butter, cream, whatever. And then pack them into Ziploc bags, going back to Francois, my beloved Ziploc bags. Pack them into Ziploc bags, exclude the air, and make sure they are thin on the order of like uh less than half an inch. I would say like three eighths, something like that.
Like smash them flat, do them in a couple bags. Then do whatever with them. I don't care what you do with them. It doesn't matter to me. It's your mashed potato, right?
Then about 20, 30 minutes before, just uh heat up some water. You don't even need to be that accurate. Just get a pot of water friggin' hot, right? And uh pull it off the stove so you don't blast it out. Then throw throw the bags in to heat up.
Because you've made them thin, they'll heat up very quickly and you can serve them out. Roast vegetables are a little more difficult because it's about an interior exterior difference of uh things. I would par cook like anglaise, like I would par cook them so that they're actually done in a s in a kind of a steam situation, and then I would hit them very high in an oven for a couple of minutes to finish off if you want that kind of roast butter, but it's not the same. What I'd really, it's not the same, so I don't even know why I'm telling you that, because it's not the same. If you do a sous-vide, if you do a low temperature cook uh in a bag of vegetables, you won't have any added water to them, and you'll get some of that roast flavor because you're not losing any volatiles and stuff.
But it's really hard to get roast vegetables to come back to be exactly the same, right? I need more time to think about that rather than just Twitter at it, because I haven't I haven't successfully done that. I usually build around a non-roast. Or what you do is is I just throw the I throw the roast vegetables in with the turkey for the last little bit, pull it out, let the roast vegetables finish while the turkey is coming. The main problem is uh finishing the mashed potatoes and getting those to finish, right?
Yes. I I'm I wish I had a better answer for your roast veg, but you know, I only have so many answers in life, I guess. I guess I'm a low quality person. What do you think? That's not true.
Yeah, well, I try. I do my best. Oh, thanks, Jack. Anyway. Uh okay.
Now listen, I gave a sort of a half uh what's what's the what word I can use? By the way, I told my son Dax that jackass is not a curse because it's an animal, but he won't believe me. Every time I say the word jackass, he's like, ooh, I'm like, Jackass is an animal. I was like, it's rude to call a person a jackass because no one wants to be likened to a jackass. Right.
But jackass is not a curse. How do you explain to him that jackass is not a curse? Whereas using it to refer to your behind is a curse. It's very complicated for a seven-year-old. Yeah.
Right? Yeah. Anyway, uh what the hell brought me to that? You said you didn't want to answer this half. Half, yeah, half jackassed.
Okay. So, and how what does half ass mean anyway? How do you use half of your behind for something? Where does that come from? Okay.
All right, Rob Trapause, uh, and I kind of gave a semi-answer to it. He wrote in saying I didn't hear your answer, which is very polite way of saying you gave a crappy answer. Uh the question was when I cook low temperature sous-vide at home, I typically serve all that I make, uh, I typically serve all that I make, or chill sealed bags to rethirm them for a separate meal. Typically, I follow the 72 hour rule uh at five degrees, 41 degrees Fahrenheit storage, FDA time and temp standards for sous-vide in my domestic refrigerator or freeze for longer storage. If I follow the storage FDA storage guidelines, then sear re thermic.
Can I safely hold the leftovers for the next day or two under refrigeration? Do this FDA sous vide standards only pertain, and if you look on page 186 of Modernist Cuisine, Volume 1, I like that we now quote it like it's the Bible, 1-186 modernist cuisine. Only pertain to time spent uh in the anaerobic environment, i.e. until the bag is opened. Do these restrictions go away if I use ziplocks instead of vacuum bags?
Uh okay, so let me specifically just talk about that rather than the because I'm sure you already made your ducriettes, so I'm gonna answer that specifically. Listen, when you're doing um low temperature work in a bag, the FDA uh guidelines are built around um pasteurization times for bacteria, active bacteria. Uh and beyond pasteurization times for uh active bacteria, the storage is then assuming that you have destroyed the story, the storage guidelines are assuming that you've destroyed an adequate amount of the uh vegetative bacteria that's present, right? So you've destroyed uh the listeria, you destroyed the Acharia coli if you pasteurize it properly. What you're not able to destroy uh in in uh regular cookings are the bacteria that form spores.
So these bacteria are basically uh uh bot botulism, uh clostridium botulinum, uh perfringens, clostridium perfyngens, and I swear to God, be serious. Be serious. You believe that? That's the one that's on rice that forms spores that if you leave rice at room temperature, you can get really sick. Yo, be serious.
I love that. It's like the best name for it, it's the best name for it for a uh for a pathogen of all time. Anyway, uh so they're worried about spore forming things like this, because you're not destroying those spores. So a lot of the the holding time is worried about spore germination. Now, if you're holding food raw, it's different.
Now you're worried about bacterial growth about stuff that's already present. But assuming you've done a pasteurization step, the question is spores. Now, most of those, uh, you know, the the or the two that are most common in meats anyway, uh, are uh anaerobic. Meaning um as soon as you expose those things to air and reheat them again, uh, you have prevented um you've prevented those bacteria from uh growing because they require a lack of oxygen to grow. And so what you're doing is uh taking away that and presumably you've killed the vast, vast, vast majority.
You've done a D-level, meaning 10 to the sixth uh reduction, six log reduction of the other pathogens that are present in there. So the other, like you know, the ones that might have been there that uh are aerobic. So the point being that yes, I would assume that you are okay to reheat store for a normal period of time in your fridge and then go again. However, as modernist cuisine uh points out, or as we call it, the new food bible, um uh, you know, do not take my word as legal advice on how to properly preserve your health and safety and welfare, right? Does that make sense?
Now, on the way out, before before I go on the way out, because you know I always leave before I forget, we wish before you close out. Yeah, the term half ass, I've I've got it for you. Give it to me. Evolved from half ads. And ads is an axe-like tool with a curved blade that's shaped wood.
If you were wealthy, you paid top dollar for a new fireplace, the mantle would be shaped using the ads in the front as well as the back side, which is not visible. But if you weren't that rich and you saved money, you only had the front visible portion shaped. Cheaper job being called a half ads job. Wow. That is crazy.
And by the way, I don't just call that uh cheap, I call that smart because you could have spent some time doing something else rather than finishing the back. Although I have to say, when I disassemble things and someone is taking the care to do something on the inside that no one's ever going to see, I give a little secret baller. You know what I mean? Don't you? Anyway, I like that, Jack.
See, we gotta get that more out of that I like that. That's that's that's awesome. I appreciate that. Okay. So uh Nastasha and Piper of last week's just not talking to us fame, right?
Uh uh I love Piper. Piper's good business. Poor Piper. I love Piper. Piper's great.
Anyway, we went down to David Michael Flavor House in New Jersey and uh saw because you know we're working. Well, yeah, Philadelphia, which is kind of like, you know, okay, yeah, okay, it's Philadelphia, it's Pennsylvania. Anyway, a lot of people who work there live in Jersey. Yeah. Anyways.
So uh we're working on some sodas at Booker and Dax Equipment Company. So we went down there to test out some flavors and whatnot, and an amazing place, right? Really cool. I have never been in a flavor house before to see how kind of it's done professionally, and it is bananas. I hope everyone someday gets a chance to visit a flavor house.
It is an eye-opening thing. Let me tell you one thing that's gonna make you sit before Happy Thanksgiving, first of all. I wish you all good turkey, except for Michael Natkin, who I wish good whatever you're making. Michael, tell us what you're making. I'm interested.
I want to know what like the most festive vegetarian Thanksgiving dishes are. Like, like what's the giant baller vegetarian Thanksgiving turkey, not a substitute, because I know Michael, that you're not substituting. I know you don't fall into that trap of making some cruddy thing that acts like a turkey that's not. I want to know something that takes the place of a turkey in a vegetarian Thanksgiving that just kicks some serious behind. So if you hear this before Thanksgiving, please let me know on the Twitter what it is that you do.
But anyway, happy Thanksgiving, one and all. And what were we talking about? Flavorhouse. No, but but after that, I was gonna say and I'm gonna tell you about this really cool thing at the Flavor House. Oh my god, you're okay.
Listen to this. So, David Michaels is the largest behind McCormick's producer of vanilla in the world. And they have like eight bazillion different vanillas, and when I went and talked to the vanilla exp one one of their many vanilla experts there, uh they have like I met in like in like a period of like an hour and a half to three, four hours, whatever, I met like a good three or four percent of all of the flavor flavorists on on you know in the United States, because they have like a bunch of them there, it's only three or four hundred. It's a really weird, dark art of like craziness. Anyways, so uh like we met like their vanilla guru, and uh and you know, I thought I knew something about vanilla.
I mean, I've read a book or two on it, and I was like, I don't know anything about vanilla. You know what I mean, right? You're gonna say it was like amazing. Anywho, so we went we visited uh their vanilla processing place. So listen to this.
So they take all of this vanilla and they have barrels of vanilla, and back there there was a crisis in uh Madagascar, when in 2004 or something like that, they said. And uh it got up so expensive that like the drum of uh vanilla that we looked at in 2004 would have been worth like 50 grand to the one bucket, and they have bucket after bucket after bucket, don't break in, they have weapons anyway. So listen. So we're looking at this bucket of chummed vanilla because they chum it all up before they do their uh that means chop, uh and they before they put it in the alcohol, do the extraction. And then after they do the extraction, which is all proprietary, hoo-ha-hoo-ha, they put it in a centrifuge, and what's left is spent vanilla, and we tasted it, and it tastes not like vanilla, it tastes vaguely brown, almost like an olive tapanade, right?
Almost like a black olive topony. It was crazy. I was very surprised. Get this. Then are you allowed to say this?
Yeah. Anyway, so then check this. So if you buy the vanilla ice cream that has the little dots in it, and you're like, eyo, it's got dots, he's got the real vanilla. So listen, you buy it with the dots. Here's what they do.
They take inherently flavorless, flavorless, actual vanilla seeds, the little seeds, and then they take that and they mix it back into the extract that they just made to make it look real. But they're actually theoretically, they're not adding that much, so don't worry about it. But they're accident they're actually dumbing down the flavor a little bit to give you the aesthetic appearance that that somehow it's real when in fact it was already real and they added some extra BS to it to make it look more real. Cooking issues.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 heritage radio 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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