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If you like this program, visit Heritage Radio Network.org for thousands more. Cooking issues! Hello, happy new year! Welcome to Cooking Issues! We're back with Nastasha Lopez here sitting next to me on the computer as always.
We don't have any uh Jack today because he's still recovering from the New Year's festivities. He's sick. Well, what do you think made him sick? He has a cold. Oh, I see.
Thank goodness we have Joe in the studio. How you doing, Joe? I'm doing great. How are you guys? Doing well.
How was your new year? It was wonderful in uh warm sunny Los Angeles, California. Los Angeles? Are you in Los Angeles? No, I was just out visiting.
V visiting like friends or what? Yep, my girlfriend lives out there or is from there. That's where Nestot. Nastasha Hill's from near uh Los Angeles. Makes me think it's full of bad people.
I'm just messing with you. Call your questions live to 718497-2128. That's 718497-2128. Nastasha, what do you do for the new year? I was here.
Nothing, yeah. Nothing special. Well, we were avoiding each other. We didn't see each other over the entire entire thing. I was just hanging out with my family and then went to the uh Booker Index.
I wasn't avoiding you. I didn't know. I know you were avoiding me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Anyway, we have uh we have some questions. Uh Michael Knacken writes in Happy New Year, Michael. Uh it's uh he's our would you say he's our favorite vegetarian cookbook writer? Yeah at this point. I I bought his cookbooks for two friends for Christmas.
Yeah? Mm-hmm. Nice. With your own with your own catch. With my own money.
Nice. I like that a lot. I like that. She she used the Booker Index card. No, I didn't.
I swear. Alright, alright, alright. Uh Michael writes in Chris Young, Chris Young of Modernist Cuisine Fame, who's now teaching uh, I guess, uh, at a rival of ours, like uh Johnston Wales, I think in Rhode Island. I think he's doing it, uh not wherever it is, yeah. Rhode Island on the campus anyway.
Chris Young, friend of ours, like him a lot, was telling some entertaining stories about fluffing. And Michael wants to know, can we say that on the air? I think we can, if we don't describe where f the word fluffing comes from, we can say it. Right, Joe? Yeah, just uh yeah.
Uh walk at the thin line. Yeah, well, well, okay, so I think fluffing, like it's such a good word. It needs to just be redefined as just keeping people pumped for their job. Let's put it that way. Yeah, exactly.
Right. Great. All right, a fluffer is someone who keeps the more important person pumped and primed, let's say. Let's say say pumped in prime. Okay.
Uh anyway, so uh about fluffing uh with uh uh me and Tony the Tiger in Miami. Uh can we hear Day's version of the events? Uh yeah, sure. Uh so what happened was is that uh a number of years ago, um we were asked, uh Chris Chris and I were asked to literally fluff for food network talent at some event at South Beach. It's the only Did I go twice or did I go once to South Beach?
I think once. Once, yeah. I I don't really, whatever, I'm not gonna say anything about it. But anyway, the point is that Kellogg's the people like who make you know who make good products like uh the Kellogg's Frosted Flakes and other and other well-known cereal brands, they have they they rent this amphitheater thing inside of this place called uh the parrot jungle. I think that's the name of it, Parrot Jungle in Miami.
Like right uh right there, like near the causeway. And uh the place is nutty, like the place is full of of like crazy parrots and crazy trees, and all sorts of like you know, like they have a they have a um a cockatoo there that literally used to they have a picture of the cockatoo sitting on Winston Churchill's shoulder, and this some some gun cockatoo is still alive because apparently as long as they don't get sick, these things they just don't die. They live to be like a hundred, these freaking things. Anyway, so there's parrots everywhere. And Kellogg uh is like renting the place out for this South Beach Food and Wine Festival thing.
And Chris and I are there because they have some sort of science-friendly kids thing. I don't even really know, but what it really was an excuse for was to get like Jada and uh you know, the Ace of Cakes, Sky and Guy Fieri and uh, you know, all these people up there. And so literally Chris and I would stand there and take science questions from the local Miami crowd and their kids, just like cooking issues, just like this, but it was all questions that I hate. Like, you know, all like nutrition-based stuff. Anyway, we fielded the questions, and everyone no one could wait for us to get the hell off the stage so that Giada or or Guy Fieri could get on stage or Tony even Tony the Tiger was a much bigger hit than and than we were.
I mean, frankly, I mean I think we did a good job, but you know, they weren't there to see, you know, Chris Young and and myself uh you know answer their questions about uh uh you know differ different kinds of sugars. But uh my my memory is is that this the the one question that the person was excited to ask, this little girl was like, eh, I raised her hand, I guess, and she says, uh, can you give this necklace to Jada? And she made this like pasta necklace, and I was like, oh my god. And I I hope to God that Giada was good about it and like took it and wore it. I was like, well, I was like, kid, I don't know Jada.
Like if I went up and like tripped her and she fell over, she wouldn't know who to call the cops and blame. She has no idea who the hell I am. I didn't say hell. I didn't say any of this. But I was like, but I will try to see, I'll put this necklace right here where her workstation is, and hopefully she will put it on.
But I don't even know what happened because as soon as it was time for the real people to come on stage, they like you know, brought out the cane, like swiped us off the stage, and that was it, gone. Right? Nastasha, but let me tell you how how how ghetto this was. Nastasha was flown out there to quote unquote assist in this project, and she didn't even show up to the event. True or false.
I wasn't flown out, and I paid my own way in my hotel. No, you your own hotel. Yeah, I think that's a good idea. Because because you wouldn't work with it to get the hotel, your flight was paid, excuse me. I can look through my go through and look.
Your flight was paid. Uh you could have had a paid hotel, but you can't Nasta here's Nastasha. Nastasha, even when we're going on business, so cheap, she's like, Can I just stay in your hotel? No. I'm a grown man.
We didn't have a business card. This is like whatever here in Northern. But the the the really good reason to go, and the reason why it was an extremely worthwhile trip was A, I got to see the the uh the uh cockatoo that was on uh Winston Churchill's shoulder, but B, it was the first time I went to the uh Miami uh fruit and spice park, which is I think one of the greatest places on earth, and I've talked about it on the air a bunch, and it's uh a place everyone should go. And we went with Chris, and I think he was pretty impressed by as well. Yeah.
Yeah. Okay. Uh Grant from Indianapolis writes in about pork belly and espuma. Okay, uh I'll I'm gonna go, I'll go Looney on the word espuma in a minute. But uh hey uh Dave Nastashia and gang.
I'm working on a new dish and have a couple of questions I would love to have you weigh in on. First, I want to do a pine infused espuma. Uh I want pine flavor to come through so it's recognizable but not overpowering. My question is on method. I'm wondering if I could I should simmer the pine in uh my liquid on the stove, throw it in a bag in my sous vive supreme, or use a pressure, uh use pressure in an ISI whipper.
What do you think? All right. Um, Grant, first thing, here's what I think. I hate the word espuma. Okay, okay, I'll tell you why.
I I posted about this, you can't read it right now because the blog is still down. We're working on it, people. I don't want to hear it, I'm working on it. Uh actually, I'm not working on it. Uh a friend of ours named Paul's working on it.
But um espuma is I I believe it's just kind of like the Spanish word for foam, right? I mean, do you sp you don't speak Spanish anymore? Nastasha forgot all of her Spanish because she had an Italian boyfriend once. I don't want to talk about it. And uh but the point is is that is that in English, a spuma to me sounds like something you hawked up and spat out.
Right? Nastash, you with me on this? Yes, it's it's disgusting. Yeah, yeah. So for me, I'm gonna say that if you're doing it, like I would just call it a foam.
I would just call it a foam. I mean, if you have to say the word espuma, say the word espuma. But I just I'm I'm I'm anti the word espuma on an English language menu. If the entire menu's in Spanish, then go ahead and write espuma, right? Right.
Right. But it'll be like it would be like writing, I'm gonna have poached oofs. You don't write that. You know what I mean? You write I have poached eggs, right?
Yes. Right. And by the way, I like like I hope you're not getting bent over me going on this diatribe. I just happen to not like the word. That's all, right?
It's a gross word. It's gross. I mean, look, no effect. I'm not saying like Grant, we're pro you, just anti-the word is pluma, right? Okay.
Uh on pine. The interesting thing about pine is is that I I love pine. Uh my favorite way to work with pine is actually to uh distill it. Uh we we, you know, several many years actually, we've taken Christmas trees, purchased Christmas trees, ripped the Christmas trees apart and then distilled them. Remember last year's stuff?
Yeah, we did a party for uh MTV, MTV music, and uh we did we did pine pine gin and tonics where we were doing uh Douglas furs and we were buying Douglas furs and stripping them down and and um and distilling them in the rotive app, and that's delicious. So the two things you want to make sure when you do it is one, you don't oversteep if you're using something like alcohol, which it sounds like you're not, but if you're using alcohol, there's a real danger that you're gonna get kind of that detergent-y um pine sally kind of uh uh thing out of it because you extract so so much of the resin. It probably won't be as big of a deal if you do it in water. I would do traditional uh, for instance, like a spruce tea or fir or pine tea is typically done either with the new buds if you can get them, it's not the time of year, or uh with the needles uh brewed for a fairly long time in hot water because it won't extract uh as much of the resin, but you'll get a uh a nice brew out of it. B I like I say, I've done it almost exclusively in alcohol, I've never really done any water-based uh pine stuff.
You want to be careful to choose, well, aside from choosing ones that don't have weird pesticides on it, you want to be careful to choose a pine that's not too redolent of uh bathroom cleaner. And I have the same problem with lavender. A lot of times when you're working with lavender in a drink, and I warn people because a lot of people want to work with lavender and they want to work with pine. Me, I'm I have a huge soft spot for pine. I remember Sam Mason used to work with pine a lot at WD-50 back when he was there.
Uh you know, I've worked with pine a lot, Nils works with pine a lot. We we all love it, but there's a good chunk of people out there that even when you do a really, really good job with it, are going to have um bat bathroom memories or cleaner memories. And and and like I say, the same thing is true with um with lavender. And so you have to be very careful to try it out on a bunch of people to see whether or not they're gonna have the same response. It's very difficult as a cook to know what everyone's reaction is gonna be to something just because you love it.
I've I've learned this the hard way, believe me, many, many times. The same thing happened is true uh you know a number of years ago with super low temperature fish that you know uh a lot of people were playing around with like a lot of the chefs really loved it, but there's a good chunk of customers that even when it was done really, really well, they just didn't like it. And so just be aware when you're using a polarizing flavor that you are using a polarizing flavor and try to try to take it such that it's on the non-detergenty side. That's all. That's what I'm gonna say.
Uh that said, distillation is sick. Also, on dosing, dosing is extremely important. So even if you have one that you really like the aroma of, and you don't think it's gonna go too pine salt, too detergent. Like we've done, I've done, we've done Fraser's, we've done Doug Fur's, we've done, I think we've done balsam. Uh, you know, I've never had a really good source of spruce myself.
And I used to chew on the needles all the time growing up because I've I loved it. Um but you want to um you want to test it all the time as you're making it to make sure that you're not gonna go extract too much stuff and go over bitter, over piney, over resin on it. There's a very, very fine line, you want to be careful. And the same thing's true. Remember when we did this distillation styles, we had a very, very strong distillate.
We had to water it quite a bit to get it to work exactly the way the way we want it to. But that said, it's a very good flavor. Okay. That's good? Yes.
Okay. Uh, second, this is uh from Grant Still. I'm doing a low temperature pork belly. Unfortunately, I don't have a circulator, just a Sous-Vide Supreme, so I'll have to do smaller pieces of the belly at a time. My first thought is to do a brine rinse, uh, cook sous vide uh low uh and then sear it.
But I benefit from doing a pre-sear before cooking low temp, or am I best off leaving it till the end. My goal is to have a nice crispy layer of skin on top. Also, since I'm planning on cooking the belly a day ahead, would it be best to reheat it in the bag the day of service and do my sear right before it goes out to the table. Okay. On the pork belly, like I would cook it way more than a day if you're gonna go low.
I mean, Wiley used to do his, I think for 72 hours, and I still remember that dish. That was on I think his opening menu, his his uh he was uh Wiley's at WD50 when he opened was I think the first time I'd had the the low temperature long cooked pork belly, and um that was actually one of the revelations for uh low temperature cooking for me was how much I I like that. And he he brined I think he his took up forever to do. He brined it, I think with uh some n nitrites in it if my memory is right, for uh three days or two or a day. But one between one and three days he would brine it, uh wet brine, I believe, and then he would uh vacuum package it, d let it dry a little bit, then he would vacuum package it, and I think here's the key to why his thing was so good.
Uh he wouldn't pre-sear, he would press it. And he pressed it for a long time and let it cool down to get the skin nice and flat, I think, and to get all the meat together. Then he would cook it for like 72 hours at a pretty low temperature. I don't know what he did, probably sixty or something like that. Uh and then or sixty-two, somewhere in there.
And then uh he pulled it out, and then he would crisp it like a duck breast. And so I think he would. This is what I would have done. This is my memory of it. Uh he he he he you know and he would crisp it uh on the skin side and I think just like let the heat carry carry it over.
Uh I've done it a bunch, I've never done uh all the I've never taken all the care that Wiley did to do it. We've done much more kind of off the cuff long cooked ones, because we weren't doing it for restaurant service, but the key in this thing is crisping the skin. And what you're if you pre-sear it, my fear is that you're not going to have a very flat piece of skin, and it's gonna be hard for you to get a really good sear on it. So when you when you have a piece of meat and you don't do the pressing, especially on pork, and you really need that sear to get it crunchy. If you have a lot of undulations in the skin when it's against the pan and it's and it's rendering out, you'll get these blonde spots on the bottom that aren't crunchy and they're just not as satisfying as the rest of it where it's like all hyper crunchy and delicious.
Yeah? Yes. Yeah. Okay. Uh we got a we got a uh a write-in from our one of our earliest cooking issues readers back when the blog was working, Schinderhannis.
And uh and Schinderhannis, very good to hear from you. Happy New Year. This is your loyal uh loyal follower, uh Shinderhannis. It seems that the world has to accept the fact that you don't have the time and resources on hand to keep the world's best food blog cooking issues alive and well fed on new entries. But now your blog is completely unavailable.
I used it as an important online resource and I'm missing it badly. Are you planning to publish it as an online blog archive? Please do so. That would be great news. Otherwise, I'll promise to buy any book you're working on.
Uh and then he says as a third alternative, he'll uh leave in a huff and turn to Campbell's soup for the rest of his useless life. Wow. Schinderhannis. And he ends it, yeah, he's he's a good man. We he ends it in uh Freundlichrusa, which is I guess you know, best regards, friendly greetings uh off Deutsche.
Uh Dr. Johannes Kerbering. Okay, well, Shinderhannis, I I've said this a million times, but like honestly, people need to know out there, like we're literally waiting for people to flip the right switches. It seems preposterous, but we don't have control of the blog yet, and we're working on it in a hardcore way. Not really.
I'm not working on it at all. But we have other people who are theoretically working on it. Is that true? Yeah. So do we have like a We have a Paul working on it.
Paul doesn't have a date. Paul's still figuring it out. Oh my, you know, it's like it's like if we just went into selling Cialis, none of this would have happened. We could have just split it with whoever hacked us wherever they are, you know what I mean? And just like, you know, kept on running, but you know, it's it wasn't to be we're going to get the information.
I I can promise this, the information will be back online. Uh I have hopes that you're right, I don't have time to do what I was doing back then. Uh maybe we can find some people. The the real problem is is that it's hard to find people who want to write things uh kind of the way that I want them written. But this kind of ties into another question uh not a question, a comment.
Steve Crandall wrote in and he said he he he's giving us a point out to another blogger uh and his name is Greg Blonder, the blogger. I don't know him. Do you know him? No. No.
Greg Blonder is a friend and colleague, a physicist who's playing with food a bit. You may enjoy some of his online articles. And I read these articles on diffusion uh and brining and it's some of the best writing on brining that I've ever seen on the internet. And uh you want to g you guys everyone who listened to this I think would enjoy it. Uh www dot genuine ideas dot com.
Uh and so uh he does lots of really awesome things. Like he's testing brining and he uh it he in order to test nitrite um nitrite penetration into uh into meats during uh during like brining with uh curing salts he bought uh nitrite um he went to an aquarium shop and bought a nitrite test paper for aquariums to test the nitrite level because uh of like what fish make nitrites when they're in there. And he was using it as blonder paper and testing the diffusion of nitrates into uh into meats, which was I thought like that is a freaking fantastic idea. And then he was using some sort of uh some sort of salt assay to literally paint the surface of meats after different uh brining things to see how far salt had penetrated in, which I thought was fascinating. And then uh something years ago that uh you know I tried to do uh unsuccessfully was to use uh dyes to try and look at br b brine penetration.
And that's when I bought a bunch of FNDC blue one, which if you put into gel caps and give people they will uh they won't know it necessarily, but they'll poop green. I'm not recommending you do that. I didn't do that, but I know that it works, but I didn't do it, right? Right. But uh Nastasha opened up the bottle of FNDC blue.
I was like, I told her, I was like, I it came in the mail. I was like, Nastasha, do not open this, do not touch this. And just so you know, her nature, it's not in her nature to not fool around with stuff and like put fingernail marks and everything and everything and like mangle and mutilate. I knew she'd mess with this one because when I came back, her face was entirely blue. Entirely blue.
Remember that? Yeah. And I was like, I didn't touch it. I hear I didn't touch it. I was like, and I showed her the mirror, she's like, oh, anyway, so uh but the problem with FNDC blue is that FNDC blue is uh rather large compared to things like salt, and so it and it also it it's not you know it doesn't work the same way.
But uh this guy that I don't know, but probably like to meet, Greg, is um showed a really interesting result, which was that if you brine with acid, it actually uh kind of forces the meat fibers apart and then allows larger things like the blue dye to penetrate further into the surface of the meat, but not very far. Fascinating stuff. And then even more fascinating on this uh on the subject of brining, and this is something that I hadn't heard before. Uh this was new to me and opened up a whole world is that you know you get X amount of brine penetration, salt penetration over time during a brine, but then the actual cooking process pushes the brine further into the meat, and he shows it with these tests that are relatively conclusive and like really cool images. So uh Steve, thanks for pointing that out.
And uh break. Well, I'll start. These Steve, thanks for pointing that out, and uh, and uh, I'm sure I'm gonna go read a whole bunch of other people go uh read that stuff too. So, with that, we're gonna take a birth commercial break. The International Culinary Center is a proud sponsor of the Heritage Radio Network dot org.
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Caller, you're on the air. Hi David, this is Johnny Cart from Memphis, Tennessee. How are you doing? Doing alright yourself? I'm doing good.
I had a question about uh uh cookery and surveyed the yolks. Okay. Uh rigged up some PVC pipe. You know, of course cleaned it out real good, and put some acetate um, you know, inside of there. Right.
And put saran wrap around the bottom. Um put egg yolks in there. And I thought I had secured it. Um with the other side with saran wrap all around. Right.
And I cooked it at what is it uh uh sixty four degrees for about an hour right and it came out running right so though here's the thing the c a couple things the one of the weird things about egg yolks is that uh they don't cook at the same temperature when you crack them out as they do when um as they do when you um um cook them in the shell and I don't really know why uh I've tried to like wonder whether or not it's like there's a the the slight the basic nature of uh egg white I don't really understand why you'd think that being surrounded by the egg white would actually raise the temperature at which it coagulates because the base there is uh is going to weaken the protein but uh for some reason egg yolks um are they they set at a different temperature outside of the um outside of the the shell uh the other thing is is that if you add salt or sugar then you drastically change the temperature at which the egg yolks uh set now I've never done a full set of experiments to figure out but like before I would um go through all the trouble that you're doing I would I would just like uh take some egg yolks almost uh in ramekins at different temperatures and see at what temperature you can get them to set uh fully outside of the shell but I'll tell you it is different it might also be different a whole egg yolk out of the shell in other words a separated egg yolk that's not broken versus one that's been mixed with a fork. I don't know whether or not it's gonna be different or not because I I never run the full set of tests. This is one of the original years ago things that Wiley was asking uh Harold McGee when we were doing the original Harold McGee class at the French culinary. And I never really said I never really got a satisfactory answer for what was going on. I just know that the temperature is different.
The other thing I'll add is that uh I wouldn't uh I wouldn't trust uh the PVC even with the cleaning you know at this point nobody really knows uh what the plasticizers do uh to us or to people that we're serving but you know everyone knows the PVC does have plasticizer in it and then no matter how well you wash it it will leach out over time especially into fatty things like like an egg yolk. So if you're getting direct con I mean I know you have acetate in there and so there's probably not a lot of direct contact but you know I I at this point try to shy away from PVC when um when I can. Even though you know what though for tests you know it there's nothing beats it 'cause it's so cheap and so easy to work with. You know what I mean? Um but I would definitely say you're gonna want to jack the temperature higher did you add salt or sugar to it?
I did not I did one I did about three tests. I did add salt to the second one. I didn't add salt to the uh first one what what would be the I guess the best conduct is it conduction to the PVC pipe? Well it's in other words like stops it's not that it's not that the PVC I mean the PVC is a bad conductor that's true right but it's not that the it's not that the PVC was a bad conductor I think it literally is that you need to jack the temperature higher. Uh I would try I'm trying to remember what Wiley used to do.
Wiley used to do um he would make uh egg tubes in uh in um vac bags. He would make tubes out of vacuum bags and then seal them off and cook the egg yolks that way. And I'm gonna wanna say he had to put it as high as seventy Celsius to get it to work exactly the way he wanted to. So I think you're gonna need to it's uh although P V C is a bad conductor, I think you're gonna want to go higher, like up almost up to about seventy degrees C and then if that sets too hard for you, then you might want to pull it back. But I believe that in his old um I forget which dish it was where you had the egg tubes like that, but uh I think that they were done up at seventy when they were done out of things.
I don't know. Um okay so yeah how how would he go about setting them in a in a uh bag where it's circular. Yeah well he they were I think what he would doing was he was uh like uh putting them in a in like he he was sealing the bag almost like flavor ice pops and then like you know injecting them full and then cutting off the ends where they were pillow shaped. But I mean like there's a bunch of things you could do. You could get test tubes.
The question is how would you get them out of the out of the other sides. Uh you know, if you I think the technique that you're using as a test w would be fine. I mean you might want to move to like uh like an acetate line stainless steel pipe or something like that. You know what I'm saying? Something that's a little more that is a better conductor and also it's definitely food grade.
So if you go to like McMastercar dot com you could I don't know what size you're using, but I'm guessing you're probably using like half inch or three quarter P V C something like that. Uh and if you yeah and if you're if you're doing that you can get something with the same internal diameter made out of like three oh four stainless that's you know uh seamless on the inside, smooth bore and thin and you can buy like a one foot length of it. You can cut it with a hacksaw into two six inch lengths. And you know, you can probably get that for in the range of fifteen bucks or something, something on that order, especially uh you know, and it's gonna be completely non-reactive and if you line that with acetate you should be able to pull it out fine, you know? And then uh you know and then if you don't have to make too many of them and then and the good thing about those things is you you can use them an infinite number of times they're a hundred percent food grade and you know they won't break and you you know you'll have them forever.
What was the website you said? Oh McMaster.com which is McMaster Car. And it's one of the they charge a little more than other people do like a lot more like 30% more but the great thing is they have something like four or five warehouses all over the country and so they're never more than uh one day uh you know usually I mean at least you know most places I've been they're never more than one ground day away so if you order by six PM whatever your local time is then it usually it shows up UPS ground the next day. I'm also I'm also getting some air in there because they're floating um I don't know whether I need to come straight out of the fridge or or freeze them and then put them in the car in the PVC or the um you know the correct uh vessel right well if you if you have if you freeze them they'll be almost solid. If you freeze and thaw an egg the uh egg yolk they'll be almost solid the problem is you'll get a little bit of greening on them the color's never quite right after you freeze the egg yolk at on on the membrane on the outside and if you mix it that'll probably be uh ameliorated somewhat but if you're using something like a stainless steel tube uh you what's f you should if you have your vacuum machine this is always a fun experiment to run put uh put a bottle in there with a cap on it real loose so that if you if you if the caps on it, it's uh it you know the stuff will spill out of it, and then put uh put liquid into the bag with the bottle, and when the air comes back in, all the liquid will be shot into the bottle, which is it's a hilarious experiment to watch because literally the liquid liquid's forced in.
So if you were to if you were to put stainless steel tubes with a little bit of extra egg yolk into uh into a uh vacuum bag, then the egg yolks will shoot themselves into the tube. Okay. So you're cutting out of me a little bit. I can go back and listen to what you said. But uh, so it won't float.
What's the best uh thing to do to not float? Oh well, uh Hervé at the French culinary, his technique whenever he was doing a hand wrap of something that wasn't in a vacuum machine is he would just take a couple of stainless steel like uh butter knives or spoons and do a couple of wraps of cellophane with the uh with the butter knives or spoons and those suckers will sink right to the bottom. Alright. Um other advice you can give me on this or anything else? No, I think that should work.
Like uh try it up at 70, and if it's too hard for you, start scaling back. But I would do your next test at 70 degrees Celsius. Uh, and I would, like I say, vac bag it and you go back and listen to it. Hopefully you can hear if you vac bag it, you the vacuum machine should push the eggs literally into the tube for you. Uh you know, and uh and that should that should work, that should work for you.
But shoot shoot us uh uh Twitter at uh shoot us a tweet rather at uh at cooking issues if you're having more problems and we'll uh we'll give you some pointers. Alrighty. Okay. Thanks, Dave. All right, good luck.
All right, you too. Uh okay. So uh we had a question in from uh Barry Munkasey. Uh happy New Year's cooking issues team. I bought an immersion circulator about six months ago, but I have not uh but I have not done a multiple hourslash days recipe.
The circulator came with a free camware professional container, but no top. I'm concerned about excessive heat loss and evaporation when it is unattended for a significant number of hours. Which would be better? Polypropylene balls, like the ping pong balls, uh or the custom cut lid that the website sells or something else. Uh I'll hit this one first.
So uh I use uh at home, I have the lid that's cut uh and that thing works great. If you don't have it, you should just wrap saran uh over, you know, uh plastic wrap over the top of it. Anything to prevent uh evaporation. And when I'm doing a long cook, you know, like long, long cook, I'll even wrap around the gap in my pre-cut uh top with saran to it and you get almost zero evaporation then. You can run a three-day cook without ever having to add water.
I would keep checking it, obviously, because duh, right? But um, you know, but it's not a problem. And I've never used the ping pong balls. I've never seen anyone use the ping pong balls in the real life. I've heard of people buying the ping pong balls, and I've spoken to people who used to use the ping pong balls and no longer use the ping pong balls, but uh I've never known anyone who actually uses them.
The ping pong balls are really good for uh electroplating businesses, right? Whereas or anyone who has a lot of a highly volatile chemical and you need to go in and out of the bath a lot, and so they prevent evaporation. When you're doing a long cook, you're not going in and out of the bath a lot. So the easiest thing to do is to just cover the whole thing with saran wrap or with it with a tight fitting lid, right? The only time you really need to be able to have those things is like I say, in when you're service going in and out.
And during service, you don't need to necessarily have such a good uh lid on it, right? Because usually your reheat temperatures aren't as important as your cooking temperatures. So if you get like a like one degree cooler at the top, it's not such a big deal. And you can just go in with tongs and pull the stuff out and not have to worry about these ping pong balls getting all over your kitchen, going to your dishwasher, getting lost, you know, I don't know, your dog swallowing it or whatever. You know what I mean?
So I don't know anyone who bought the ping pong balls and loved them enough to keep uh working with them. You can buy, I don't know how much they charge. I've never purchased in my life a pre-cut lid. You know, I always buy a lid and I use a hacksaw. Uh I think that they've changed it back in the day when they used to pre-cut the lids, they would cut the lid in the center of the thing, which is a waste of space in your cambro.
So I would always cut the lid on the on in the corner. Here's another tip for you. If you buy an extra lid, and this is gonna be uh, you know, I don't know whether you're using this at home or or whatever, but if you're if you what I used to do, still do around New Year's or Christmas, whenever I have a big party, I would take my my lid and I would saw with a hacksaw uh holes to fit round bane marie's in it, and then I would uh drill holes so that I could uh put a spring and pull them down, and I would put stainless steel bane maries. So I would literally have parties where I had sliders staying hot in the circulator that I could reach in through a little, you know, gap I'd cut in the lid, and then I would have like queso dip in one and chocolate fondue in the other, all running out of the same circulator, all kept hot. So you know, you know, have cambro lid and some ingenuity and a saw, and you can get a whole bunch done.
Uh okay, second, my department. I don't know what department, you didn't say what department. Department in what? I don't know, like what? We'll say it's purchasing.
I have no idea, right? Anyway. Uh second, my department annually has a why is it always like purchasing as a department you think about? Because they do they get to do the cool stuff, right? They get to buy all the stuff, yeah.
Purchasing. Yeah. Yeah. Purchasing. Okay.
Uh, second, my department annually has a soup contest for the governed uh coveted golden ladle. I have made chicken gumbo, shrimp bisque, matzo ball soup. I love matzo ball soup. Do you like matzo ball soup? I've never had it.
Never? Never. Do you know that that uh that's crazy? We should like someone out there has to invite uh Nastasha along with her Mutra friends and maybe Mark over for like matzo ball soup, right? Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. Because I think you would like it a lot. What's not to like? Do you like you've had you had matzo balls, but only only the mutant sweet one I made. Yeah.
I made a mutant sweet matzo ball because I was working on a matzo ball. I was working on a matzaball uh uh drink. It didn't work. We didn't end up using it, but it was all based on uh it was all based on this uh we use this kind of like nice uh Japanese whiskey called Yamazaki. And so the joke was we were gonna make a drink called Yamakazaki that was Yamazaki with a sweet maple syrup malt matza ball in it.
And I made uh the matzo balls were actually quite good. I'd never had a kind of sweet matzo ball before. Uh but they they were good, but the drink was just awful. Did you have that one? Yeah.
It's terrible, right? Who are we doing that for? We're just we're seeing if we can do it. Really? Mm-hmm.
Anyway, it didn't work. We didn't so for those of you out there like uh know that we were unsuccessful in our matzo ball uh cocktail. But you might be more successful, but anyway, uh uh be that as it uh matzo ball soup, corn chowder. I like corn chowder. Do you like a corn chowder?
I like a corn chowder, corn chowder, good part, amongst others, and I finished second so many times that they felt bad for me two years ago, and they gave me the golden spork as a consolation prize. What's the name of that person from all my children? Suzanne Lucci? Susan Lucci. Susan Lucci.
So he's like the Susan Lucci of of soup in the purchasing department. Uh this year, uh, with what I thought was a delicious Asian chicken and corn soup, I finished completely out of the running, and so now have even lost a golden spork. I have eight months to tinker and experiment to come up with this year's winning entry and would like to take a modernist cuisine approach. Could you provide me with a syllabus for success? Uh and finally I hope that one of your new year's resolutions is that you will uh that you accomplish will be fixing and updating the blog, Barry McCasey.
Okay. Here's the thing. I think your problem is is if the first thing first thing you should do is never enter contests. I've learned this because it's only heartbreak. Barry, it's only heartbreak.
Uh the other thing is that if you look at it, right, you had discouraged him. I'm not discouraging him. I'm just saying I don't enter contests. I don't like them. I don't enjoy them.
Except for eating contests, which I always win. But the the uh but here's the thing, right? So let's let's look at this. So the Asian chicken and corn soup, I don't know your audience. Like you have to know your audience, right?
So, you know, you can have the best tasting, most nuanced thing in the world, and if you show up and your audience wants, you know, you you should you show up with I'll I'll give you an example. I did an event once and uh with Nils, and uh Nils and I had spent like a a lot of time making fresh clarified, uh really good apple juice. I think we were using, I think we were using Ashmeat's kernel, which is uh my favorite apple, and um fennel, and we had you know clarified these things uh and then balanced it with gin and uh we had a little clarified uh you know lime juice in it, we carbonated it, we'd done all this work, and uh and it was frankly, it was a good drink. You know what I mean? Uh you know, one of our best, I think, that we did.
And we went to an event and it was uh it was a Chardonnay crowd. You know what I mean? And so we showed up. It's like it's like bringing uh you know, you bring in the wrong tool to the job, you know what I mean? So like here we are, and and you know what that is?
Depressing. And that's actually the event that caused me to learn that what you the most important thing to do is to know your audience and to create a slam dunk for that audience. That said, you also have to make it interesting for yourself. So otherwise you're not gonna be you're not gonna be interested. You know, if you're just cranking out, you know, if what they want is Chef Boy RD, it's still not going to be interesting if you're just cranking open cans of Chef Boy RD and pouring it into a into a bucket, which reminds me of my Uncle Ralph.
What am I? I asked my my uncle Ralph asked said something to me once, and I was like, Well, you know, I don't know why. He goes, he goes, What do I look like? Chef Boy R D. I was like, kind of Uncle Ralph.
You look kind of like freaking Chef Boy RD. He doesn't really, because if Chef Boy RG was D was from Jersey, my Uncle Ralph would look like Chef Boy R D. I love Uncle Ralph. Anyway, so uh uh and he talks kind of like that. I love Uncle Ralph.
Anyways, uh so know your audience. Secondly, the question is what are you gonna do, uh modernist? I think now Nastasha doesn't like these because she doesn't like a lot of the flavors that we did when we did it, but the concept is sound. And I think uh nut milks are make a very, very good base for a soup. So you can take a traditional soup that is really good and switch it out for a uh like a nut a nut milk base, so a pistachio milk, a cashew milk, or a uh, you know, an almond milk, any one of these kind of like and and and you don't have to have uh really expensive equipment to do it.
I do it in a centrifuge because I have one, but you can um you can just blend it, you know, in in a blender with hot, you know, super hot water and then strain it through uh you know muslin to get the milk out of that makes a really good base, but it sounds like you know, if they didn't like the Asian thing, I mean yeah, I don't know what they want, you know what I mean? Um, you know, you can use uh you know, make your own stocks, obviously, with like you know, uh with a pressure cooker as long as you have a non-venting one. I would look up um everything in modernist cuisine on on stock making um on soups, but really like you need to get back with me on what style of soup you think is going to be the one that they're gonna go for because that's the first choice. You know, then make making it making it kick butt is the next thing. There's no sort of all like catch-all like b best soup idea.
It's more like you know, what's your goal? And then we can brainstorm towards getting there, right? Yep. Okay. Uh okay.
Jeff on uh baking steel and Indian cookbooks. First time caller, longtime listener, love the show. You've made the process of cooking and learning about food extremely enjoyable and exposed me to people, equipment, and techniques I would likely never otherwise have known. That's nice. She actually had a smile.
It was her I'm going to kill everyone's smile, but it was still a smile. You know, that I call that that's uh that's improvement. That's your new you know, by the way, our New Year's resolution. I think uh, you know, Jack was here uh and he did not like it was to uh yell at each other less. I think we've so far it's been like a day, but no, it's been a week.
Yeah? Yeah. Yeah? Yeah. What do you think?
Good job, guys. Yeah, yeah, nice. Uh okay. You've inspired you've been he's like, Jack's like, why the hell would you not want to yell at each other? Yeah that's all the fun.
Yeah, for 45 minutes. Yeah, yeah. You've inspired me to do a lot more cooking at home and more importantly, to really love it. That's really nice. I like that.
A couple of questions. I just obtained a baking steel and love the results I'm getting with the modernist cuisine at home Neapolitan pizza dough recipe. What procedure and or recipe do you recommend for sauce on a standard Neapolitan pie? And two, do you have a quick Indian cookbook recommendation? I'm looking for something reliable but extremely basic.
I'd like to read about ingredients uh technique and have some solid recipes for the basics you see in almost every Indian restaurant. Uh okay. Let me hit uh and then there's a third question I'm also gonna hit, but uh let me hit the Indian one first. I actually only own uh one Indian cookbook, and uh I bought it when I was in my early twenties, right after I graduated from college. Uh and it's called and it's really it's old, it's from the 80s.
It's called uh uh by Yamuna Devi. It's called The Art of Uh Indian Vegetarian Cooking. And at the time it was this huge encyclopedic uh book, which is why I bought it. Uh and it's not gonna be it's not like simple by any means, but uh, and so I was like, wow, and I read it and it made a huge impression on me. Uh you know, but I thought maybe it's gonna be really, really dated.
So I went to Amazon.com and I looked up uh and I looked it up and it was been it's been re-released and it still gets really good ratings. So in other words, people it's not as dated as I thought. I didn't have time to go back and reread it. But it focuses mainly on uh Indian vegetarian. Now, over the past ten years or so, I find that I very rarely buy um, I very rarely buy cookbooks on whole genres like that unless I already know nothing about them and I'm just trying to get a flavor for it, right?
So in general, I would buy cookbooks that are on very specific regions or by a specific author that I want to uh work with. When I'm researching ingredients, uh like black salt, for instance, which is a really interesting uh Indian ingredient, or when I'm researching acetate, a hing or any of these things, I tend to r do a lot of internet research and not buy books, or if I buy books, they're technical books or um, you know, technical papers or historical papers. So I don't have very current knowledge. That said, obviously Matter Jaffery is very well known uh cookbook writer, uh, and I think she has some uh shorter books that might be good places to start, but I'd love someone to tweet in what their recommendations are uh on this on this subject. Um anyway, so I'm sorry I couldn't be more more of help with that, but just to give you an idea of how how I work usually, it's uh I'll I won't buy unless I know a writer is someone I really want to read, or unless it's entirely new to me, I tend not to buy that kind of cookbook.
Also, but anyway, whatever. Uh on the baking steel, I know I've never used uh I spoke to Chris when they they were uh going into some sort of uh manufacturing when Monero's cuisine was going into some sort of manufacturing deal. I think it was with Chris. I think Chris was still with him at the time. With some guy in uh in uh New England who's making the steels for them.
But the theory is that instead of using a baking stone, uh, what you can do is use this steel, and the steel has this same sort of heat wallop into your uh pizza dough that you and more at lower temperature and faster heating than a stone, and so use a steel instead of a stone. Uh I've never used it, so I don't really know about it. And as I like I'm all I'm all about not answering your questions today. I apologize. Uh apologize, Jeff.
But the uh the uh I don't you do standard Neapolitan at home. My oven goes up between uh 840 and like 875, 880 Fahrenheit. Uh and I have two independent st independently heated stones, one in the bottom of my oven and one in the top of my oven plus gas. So when I'm making a pizza, I'll typically do a fairly I don't do as high hydration dough as like Jeffrey Steingarden recommends. I spoke to Jeffrey like what, two weeks ago, a few weeks ago, we saw him.
And uh and I asked Jeffrey at that time, I was like, Jeffrey, do you still stand by your very high hydration pizza dough recipe for his his style of pizza? And he does. So if you go back, and you know, all of Jeffrey's stuff, even if you disagree with even if you disagree with him, uh, his writing is great. So go back and read his like high hydration dough. But I typically don't do a high hydrate super high hydration dough for my pizzas.
I'm typically like, I don't know, 65% hydration, i.e. 65 uh 65 uh grams of water per 100 grams of flour in that ratio and a fairly high salt load, like uh like uh two 2% or something like that. Uh salt, I do very low yeast and I let it rise for a long time. So my typical thing is is that the evening before I'm gonna make pizza, I'll uh blend uh the you know, I'll do initially like a hundred percent hydration to get everything hydrated and then maybe let it sit for a little while with a very small amount of yeast. So if I'm making like four kilos of dough, I'll use one yeast packet, something like that.
Uh and then uh and then I'll I'll put the rest of the flour in with the salt, and then I'll break them into individual dough things, put them in quart containers, uh, you know, like a quarter full, and then and then let them sit for a couple of minutes to start and then throw them in my fridge and retard them overnight, pull them out like two, three hours, three hours before I'm gonna use them, and that's my typical dough, and it works pretty well. For sauce, I don't do anything that is uh traditional at all. I usually do uh I cook tomato paste and then uh blend in uh garlic and sometimes caper, and if I don't have vegetarians over anchovies uh and olive oil, and that's my usual uh style saucepase for red, or I'll pressure cook a whole bunch of garlic and uh blend it with uh uh in milk and then blend it along with the curd from the milk, olive oil, and basil. Um I usually put some onions in that too. Uh blend that for my for my green.
Uh I have a bunch of different ones, but I don't have any traditional kind of sauce. But the the one key thing is just don't add too much sauce. You know, small amount of sauce goes. You want a small amount of a very flavorful sauce so you don't waterlog your dough. I think that's the that's the key, and as high heat as you possibly can.
And that and someone's gonna be like, that guy knows nothing about pizzas. But I do make a whole boatload of pizzas. And the people seem to eat them. They seem to eat them. Just don't load it down.
The trick is not to load it down. Focus on the bread and don't load down. Focus on the quality of the crust and don't load it down with too much sauce. What do you think? Yeah.
Oh, if you're gonna use uh fresh, uh super fresh mozzarella, I get sp I I go to when I get it, I get from DiPalos and I ask them for the the it's still fresh, but uh fairly dense. It has a lot of the water squeezed out, so it doesn't make too much uh water. Be very careful with adding too much high water mozzarella to uh a cheese uh to a pizza because it can really water water log it out. So I mean people who use it, I think they use it sparingly, right? And they're doing it very quickly in an oven.
Whatever, but just be careful. Uh I mean not gonna hurt anyone. Okay, third, I'd like to start experimenting with adding salt to cocktails. If I keep salt solutions in a small dropper bottle, is there any downside to keeping those for a long period of time? Is there any degradation or food safety issue?
Also, what concentrations do you recommend starting with for cocktails? And can you recommend a specific drink where adding a bit of salt has a profound effect? We use 200 grams of salt per liter of water. Uh so uh, and that solution ain't nothing happening to it. We store it on the bar unrefrigerated for infinity, and there's no problem.
And we usually add one or two drops of that uh per cocktail, and um and that's about it. We add that that. Okay. No, that's it. What?
Alright, Daniel from Illinois. I will go into depth in my fried chicken technique next time. And if I have time, I'll tell you guys how I do my new lobster technique, which I think is really good. Uh, till next time, happy new year. Cooking Issues.
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