Today's program has been brought to you by the International Culinary Center. Offering courses that range from classic French techniques in culinary, pastry, and bread baking to Italian studies to management. From culinary technology to food writing, from cake making to wine tasting. For more information, visit International Culinary Center.com. You are listening to Heritage Radio Network, broadcasting live from Bushwig Brooklyn.
If you like this program, visit Heritage Radio Network.org for thousands more. Cooking issues! Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. Coming back at you live, and Jack is back today. Hey.
How you doing? Happy New Year, Jack. You too, man. Hey, I've got a standing offer out to the guy who made that theme song. Uh, you're welcome to come re-record it here anytime.
Really? Hang out? Yeah. Maybe during the show? Yeah, we just need a better recording of that song.
I mean, you're the audio guy. What's wrong with it? I don't know. A little garagey. It's it's great though.
What the hell? What the hell? I like it. Whatever. Anyway, alright, well, happy new year anyway.
Also. Uh Joe in the studio and as usual, Nastasha the Hammer Lopez. What's up? Nothing. Oh, you know.
Live Tuesday radio show. So I'm gonna make it announcement. This is this is for Nastasha out there, people, because I also have a question to one of our listeners. Alright, go first. Go first, go.
My mom sent me a text and said, I would really like it if you knew Billy Joel. So if he's listening. If Nastasha helped me out. If Billy Joel is listening, that's a safe bet that this is not gonna happen. That's like more like if anyone listening has ever seen Billy Joel.
I've actually seen him live. I saw him live in this. Did you talk to him? He was not talking to anyone. He was at a food event like a number of years ago, and he was with uh, you know, Katie Lee, and she was the she was the person in charge.
He was just kind of standing in the background looking kind of irritated. But you know, not as irritated as when he pushed that piano off the stage. What was that? Russia? Really?
Wasn't that Russia? Are you guys out Billy Joel fans? There was that time he drove a car into a house, though. I love that. You're ruining my chances by bringing up.
No, that's all good. Okay, well, like sorry, Billy, we love you. Come on, man. I mean, like, I grew up, like Glass Houses was like one of the most uh influential albums of my uh of my youth. And I'm from Long Island, so there's that.
You practically are Billy Joel. That's right. Oh man. So anyway, so uh so okay, Nastasha, that was good sharing. Good sharing.
So uh this is one so uh um Nastasha never believes that we're gonna actually do anything ever unless we force ourselves to have uh deadline. So here it is. We're forcing ourselves to have uh a deadline. My deadline is that in one month's time, uh Booker and Dax Equipment Corporation will be filming uh uh our first Kickstarter for our first project. And we'll have it out in a month and a half.
Now listen, I'm not saying that you listeners should uh contribute to the Kickstarter when it comes out. Contribute to the Kickstarter. But uh I am saying you should tell everyone about it because we need to get uh this sucker funded. We're gonna start with a very simple to make uh for us, easy um piece of small equipment that anyone can buy that's not gonna be outrageously expensive, and we're hopefully gonna use uh that Kickstarter money to build that and also to fund uh our ability to hire someone, help us get some of our more complicated stuff out there. Think rotovab.
But no, we're not doing the roto vap on the first one. That's extremely complicated, but I'm just saying, like that's what we're that's what we're looking to do. So uh our deadline, our deadline now, and you can call us on it and call us bad people like you haven't already, uh, if we don't make it in a month and a half, right? Yes. And what is a month and a half from now?
It's like it would be March first. March first? No, April. March, April. Yeah, March 1st.
Well yeah, man. Okay, March 1st. So my birthday month. Woohoo! Right?
Anyway, okay. Uh so you think it's gonna work? You think we're gonna if we have a deadline, I think it'll work. Yes. So you have a deadline.
Wow. If n you know, listen, let me tell you something. If uh if Nastasha is not overtly pessimistic, it means that uh it means that we're probably in a We always have open-ended deadlines. Always. Always.
Because you don't believe in them. In what? Deadlines. I know I know I do. I believe in uh certain deadlines are hard deadlines.
Like when I was in the art when I was in the art community like a billion and a half years ago, it's like, hey, look, uh a show is going up, and if the show isn't up, you're shafted. You know what I mean? Dinner is a good deadline. That's why I like cooking. Hey, you know what?
It's time for dinner. We have to have food on the table. Good deadline, right? These like I I like BS deadlines don't work for me because if I know something's BS, a BS deadline is someone saying X, Y, or Z has to happen when I know full well that not only will it not happen, this is what happened. Everyone makes fake deadlines in the in the world, right?
And it's like it here's the thing. So, so what? So people are like, I need X, Y, and Z by X, Y date, and you're like, okay, and if you don't have it, then what? And there is no then what? That's the problem.
There is no then what. You know? And that's the problem with most BS deadlines. And that ruins me sometimes, but sometimes it helps me because people have a tendency to make decisions and pull the triggers on things before they have all the data in hand. So I'd always rather uh, you know, get more data.
But that's that's why uh that's why probably I don't have a lot of money. Yes. Hey, speaking of deadlines, yeah, we've got great news for you. What's that? Starting next week, Greenhorn Radio will be moving to 4 p.m., which means cooking issues can go until one.
Oh yeah! We're gonna have a full hour of cooking issues for you people. That's right. Yeah. Happy New Year.
Happy New Year to all the people who have to listen to us. I don't know why I guess no one has to. No one's like, I hope no one's strapped down in a chair and forced to listen to us. By the way, how's the uh new hunting show going before us? Oh, it's awesome.
Yeah? Yeah, you gotta meet him. Next week he's doing a show on the second amendment. So it'll be pretty intense. Yeah?
Yeah. Well, you know, I'd like to talk to him at some point about uh low temperature cooking and hunting. Yeah, he talks a bit about uh cooking venison and all that stuff. So maybe we could do a double header one week. Yeah, all right, stick around.
Okay, listen, I'm gonna have to rip through this because I don't have an hour yet. Daniel from last week, I didn't get to you in Illinois. My fried chicken recipe. Dave has talked about making fried chicken using low temperature for insurance to cook the chicken through before breading and frying. Can you go into more detail about this method?
I've also heard him mention boneless fried chicken. Tell me more. All right, first of all, if you want my actual recipe, uh almost my recipe, almost exactly my recipe, uh, go to uh Food and Wine, uh, June 2003, and it's published on uh on the webs. Uh my Dave Arnold, that's my name. Uh, my buttermilk fried chicken recipe, and you can get the the recipe.
The only they make a couple of things, like in in that recipe, I don't think they tell you to completely bone out the uh chicken. Because but I you know I do that because my wife doesn't like to eat uh chicken off the bone. She hates it when I talk about that because she she thinks I'm making her sound puny, but I don't really care. It's not that I'm making her sound puny, she doesn't like to eat chicken off the bone, so why would I serve it to her that way? She's the most important customer I have.
If she doesn't like it that way, why would I make it that way? So uh what I do is I buy whole chickens, I uh cut off the breasts. Currently, now that I have small First, actually you cut off the leg and thigh in one piece uh on both sides. Then I separate the uh thigh from the uh drumstick at the knuckle with a knife, take the thigh, uh drag the thigh along the two sides of the bone, expose the bone, put the point of the knife underneath the bone, free it from both sides, uh, then cut off that little piece of like knuckle cartilage that sits on the thing. That's the thigh.
I then take the uh leg bone, take kitchen the drumstick, take kitchen shears, hold the fat part of the drumstick towards my face, put the shears into the into the knuckle area against the bone, and go snip, snip, snip, like four or five snips around the bone in a circular fashion. That cuts off a lot of the sinews. Then I take the shears, bam, and I cut off the uh the little nubbin at the end that you hold on to when you normally eat, and I reach into the other side, twist and pull out the bone along with some of the sinew and very little meat. The only trick there is making sure you don't uh flick bone fat fragments into the uh ball into the little leg ball when it's done. And the awesome thing about those is they fry up like little spheres, and you can eat straight through them.
You get no reddening of the meat around the bone because there ain't no bone. And you get a lot more because I hate looking at drumsticks. People are like, I love the drumstick, and then they pick up the drumstick and they only eat two or three bites off the meat because they don't want to gnaw on the bone. Nastasha. She's not even listening.
She's not even called. It's true though. It's true, right? Aren't you one of those people who like takes two or three bites off the drumstick, loves the drumstick meat but only takes two or three bites off of it? Yeah, sure.
Whatever. She's not a little bit of a big thing. I'm not gonna do that. Yeah, all right, right. Whatever.
Whatever, whatever. So then, so you have the boneless thigh and the boneless, uh, blah blah. And because I learned listening to Jackie Peeps, that's the Jacques Popin for all you folk out there. Uh, then I just like take out the uh wishbone really quickly with two slices and a yank, although Nils doesn't do that when he does it. I cut off the breast on both sides, leaving the um leaving the tender intact.
I don't bother. I used to take the sinew out. I don't bother anymore. I really don't. You know, that little sinew that runs along the tender, but some people still take it out, whatever.
And now that I have little kids, the breast is kind of too large, so I separate it in half because they some, you know, one likes the breast, the other one likes the dark meat. Dark meat's the best. Uh okay. So now you have the parts of the chicken boneless. Uh I used to do then a full marinade and milk with salt and sugar uh for four hours and then uh dry off on a rack and then uh fry at a fairly low temperature so that it cooks all the way through.
Now, instead of the brine procedure, uh I take the thighs, I find that they're too flat if they're uh let left flat, so I I fold them back into a full thigh shape so that they're a little meatier, uh, and tie them with one thing of uh string because I don't I don't take the time at home to meat glue it. You could meat glue it if you were doing it for a restaurant presentation. And then uh put them into ziplocks, uh ziploc bags with a small amount of salted sugared milk. Uh and then I cook them. I cook higher than I would like if a high-end people usually like their chick, super high-end people usually like their chicken a little bit lower temperature.
Most people like it a little bit higher, so if I was gonna cook for like some fancy low-temperature jockey, I would cook the thigh, the the wing, the thigh, and the uh drumstick meat to 65. At home, I honestly, that's Celsius. At home, I actually do 66 or 665 for about uh 45 minutes uh to an hour. I then drop the temperature down, I leave those guys in, I drop the temperature down to about 64 or 64 and a half. Uh you can do 63 or 64 on the on the dot, but again, I'll take it a little bit higher because like a lot of people like it, just that little bit more done.
Anyway, uh then I throw the breast the white meat in uh in zippies uh for another hour, pull it out of the bag, drain the milk, don't lose the milk, don't throw it away. That milk is awesome, like even though it's salty, if you combine that with another stock, it can make a good base for a sauce as long as the sauce doesn't have uh stock uh salt in it, right? So I save all those juices that come out of the zippy, and then I put the hot pieces of meat out on racks to let them flash off their extra moisture. That's the key to frying stuff out when you're gonna do low temp. Now the things are cooked uh all the way through, right?
Then I do uh flour, then a buttermilk egg uh along with baking soda, baking powder, and some spices. Uh salt you put the spices in the freaking buttermilk, not in the flour, because A, it's impossible to dose in the flour, and B, you're gonna throw a lot more of that flour away. Anyway, so uh flour into the buttermilk thing, uh back into the flour, and then fry at the higher temperature that you would normally use for french fries, potato chips, whatever else you're making that we wouldn't do potato chips that way, but anyway, French fries, onion rings, whatever else you're making that day. And that's what I do. And while that stuff is cooking off in the low temperature, I take the backs uh and uh all the other parts, hack them up into small pieces, sear them off, and then make a uh pressure cooked uh chicken stock.
So I usually, when I do fried chicken, I end up with a milk a salty milk stock that I can use uh in certain soup preparations, a regular stock, and then a boatload of fried chicken. Yeah? Yes. Okay. Uh Billy Rose writes in and says, oh, by the way, if you have questions, uh call in your questions to 7184972128.
That's 7184972128. All right, Billy Rose uh sent in a Twitter a little bit late for last week's show, but here we got it today. I said I'd get to it. Uh cooking issues, love the show. Uh the hammer is my hero.
She should be your hero. Yeah. Uh is this Billy Joel writing in? No, Billy Billy Rose, but uh close enough. Wow.
Nice. All right, strong. Uh the hammer is uh is my hero. Uh you meaning me. Uh you are a bubbles enthusiast.
Can you speak to the health benefits slash detriments of drinking them all the time? Uh I do drink them all the time. Uh and there are some people who I guess are concerned about people drinking only bubbles all the time. However, the good news is uh that I have not found any research to show that uh bubbly water hurts you. Uh in fact, uh there's a lot of studies that show that it can be that bubbly water, uh if it's a mineral water, can be somewhat beneficial.
I don't really believe those studies one way or the other. I don't believe and Nastasha's giving her giving her like someone just passed me a vegan dish head shake of of disdain, right? Right. Yeah. Uh but there is a st uh a couple of studies out there are interesting.
The one thing is to say it's let's separate for for a minute the stuff that's in a soda from uh carbonation. All right. So clearly, if if I I mean I'm pro, I'm not anti-soda, we've had this discussion about soda bands before. You shouldn't consume a boatload of uh of sugary soda. It should not be your primary form of hydration.
And I think the issue is when it becomes your primary form of hydration, right? Uh so the butt I drink mainly seltzer, which is, you know, and and a soda would be a treat. In fact, I tend to only drink well, whatever, I'm not gonna get into it. But the the issue, the only real health uh thing other than the whole discussion of sugar in a carbonated beverage is people who consume colas, whether they be sugared or not. Cola is uh one of the is is one of the things that's flavored with phosphoric acid.
And uh phosphoric acid is is characteristic, in fact, of colas, and it's that dry mineral uh acidity that you find in colas and all you like cola, right, Sas? Yeah. But you don't like phosphoric acid in most other things. Right. Yeah.
Um fair. Yeah. See, I didn't even go crazy on it. I think that's fair. Uh but if you make a cola without phosphoric acid, it doesn't taste like cola.
You're like, what is this BS cola rip both? Because it doesn't have that phosphoric acid mineral hit that you would normally get. Um phosphoric acid, I don't know whether the current data is is good or bad, but there's a lot of research that shows out there that uh women in particular who consume large quantities of phosphoric acid in the form of cola can have problems uh with uh bone density because there's a link between calcium depletion or at least uh absorption of calcium in the diet, and therefore uh you know, because you know that if you don't take in enough calcium that that your body removes calcium from your bones. Did you know that? And like for instance, if you're pregnant, if you don't take enough calcium, your baby wins and your body will remove calcium from your body and deposit it into the new baby's body.
Wow. Yeah, anyway. Uh so phosphoric acid can uh at least some of the research indicates that that they can have an effect. So, you know, you want to be sure that you have enough calcium if you're consuming boatloads of um phosphoric acid and you're a woman. And there are studies uh in 1994 that came out that showed that even I think girls can uh like when I say girls mean young girls, can get uh a higher incidence of fractures if they consume a lot of cola.
Um however, there was a carbonated soft drink uh test uh to see whether there's any risk of esophageal uh cancer, specifically adenocarcinoma. Came out in 2006 out of Sweden, and uh it was called uh carbonated soft drinks and risk of esophageal adenocarcinoma, a population-based control study. Uh, and it found no link. Uh in fact, it found a non-statistically significant uh decrease in the in uh esophageal cancer in the people who drank a lot of uh soda, uh a lot of carbonated drinks, but I'm not gonna report it because it's not statistically significant, right? Boom.
What do you think? Good? Good. And I'll tell you what, here's some health benefits. That stuff is delicious.
So I drink a lot of it. You have to force flat water down my throat. I love me some bubbly water. I think bubbly water is the most refreshing thing that has ever been created. And I drink a whole boatload of it, and I feel a lot better as a person.
So that's a good health effect. Yeah. Yeah. She's like, Yeah. You drink bubbly water.
Oh, yeah. We have seltzer on tap at the lab, I have seltzer on tap at home. You know, I I have my I don't know, it's a good product. Like uh, what's it called? The soda stream.
Although I don't use a soda stream. I think it's done a lot for bringing carbonated beverages to people's houses in a nice kind of easily deliverable package. They're everywhere now. I saw one in Best Buy. Yeah, they're everywhere.
That's crazy. You know, you go to people's houses now, and like you know, you hear the farting sound coming out of the kitchen, and you know they have the soda stream and they bust out the you know the farting sound? Mm-hmm. And uh and you're like, you know what? It's like I have my issues with it, like I don't think it's technically perfect, but it makes a good so sparkly water.
You know what the downside is? Most people don't filter the water that they put in the soda stream, so they put flawed, crappy chlorinated water into their soda stream, and it comes out flawed, crappy, chlorinated uh uh uh bubbly water. Anyway, whatever. Uh oh, interesting. Another should we take a break or should we keep going?
Let's take a break. All right, take a break, coming back with cooking issues! You're listening to Beyond Thunderdome by Diesel Boy on cooking issues on Heritage Radio Network.org. Today's program has been brought to you by the International Culinary Center, offering courses that range from classic French techniques and culinary pastry and bread baking to Italian studies to management, from culinary technology to food writing, from cake making to wine tasting. For more information, visit international culinarycenter.com.
Every Tuesday at 12 p.m. You can call food scientist Dave Arnold and ask any question you want. John from Chicago, you're on the air. Hey, hey, hey. Without glutamic acid, you die.
It is a matter of taste, but there's a lot more fat in sausage than you think. Get ahead of the curve. Tune into cooking issues every Tuesday at 12 p.m. on Heritage Radio Network.org. Holy crap, I sound like a nut.
Yes. I mean it doesn't make any sense to play that on your show, but that's we're running that on other shows, and I wanted to show it to you. Oh my god, it sounds like a lunatic. You are a lunatically. Here's the other thing, though.
Not really a food scientist. Have no degree in food scientists. What about no hammer? No hammer? No hammer?
For me to find a succinct clip of you on this show speaking from like more than a second would take a long time. No, she's this mistake. Right. Okay, that's how I'll end it. Nope.
This is a good time to address this, though. So no food scientists, what would you go with? I don't know. Well, you know. Like my my thoughts on myself aren't aren't publishable on the air.
I see. But uh I don't know. What uh Nastash will think of something. That's isn't that what you're isn't that part of your job? Figure out what we're called.
Um this is coming from the woman that hasn't thought of a title for herself in three years. Okay. That's her title in the uh in the uh in the Booker Dax Cooker cooking issues kind of pantheon. Air apparent. To what we don't know.
Listen, on the second commercial break, we've got to have one now because I gotta hear my fish is fish. I can't go a week without hearing my fish is fish. Right or wrong. Right or wrong. Alright.
Right. The answer to that is right. Right. Okay. Uh oh, I'm I met him in the bar.
Next next fellow. Uh Kyriako uhmoglue. I'm gonna pronounce that wrong. Someone write in and tell me how to pronounce that. Okay.
Um very interesting. Uh was talking to me uh about something on the Twitter. Um okay, so he can't consume grapefruit juice, right? Uh, because uh he has uh a problem with uh uh cytochrome uh P four fifty three A four, uh a K AKA C Y P three A four, which is an enzyme uh that is inhibited by grapefruit juice. And if uh that ha that's what that's the primary reason why grapefruit juice uh you can't take it if, for instance, you have uh are taking statins or certain other drugs.
Because this whole uh battery of enzymes, right, the um cytochrome P uh 450 series of enzymes uh does a lot to remove or to modify or to get rid of or to break down uh drugs that are taken into the system, right? A lot of them. And uh, like I say, grapefruit juice can affect it. And so that's why a lot of times if you're on certain medications, you can't have grapefruit juice. Uh interestingly, it's uh been uh the the compound in grapefruit juice um is uh bergamotin, along with some other things that are similar to bergamotin.
Bergamotin is the uh character one of the characteristic oils in bergamot, and we all know that bergamot's the main flavor in Grapefruit? Earl gray tea. Earl gray tea. Bergamot, the fruit is the main flavor in Earl Gray tea. It's what distinguishes Earl gray tea it's a flavored tea flavored with bergamot, peels.
Um so uh the question I always had, and I I'm not sure if it was ever addressed or not, is should you also abstain from Earl gray tea if you can't have grapefruit? Interesting question. I don't know if anyone knows the answer to it. Um however, I've also wondered whether or not uh clarification, specifically the clarification techniques that we use, whether or not they remove um whether or not they remove uh the bergamotin. I've never you know put it through a sample to test it to see whether it has, but um apparently um Kyriaco was able to uh uh to have this product you can't normally have, which would lead me to believe that we have removed whatever active principle it is, it shafts it, which means we probably have removed the bergamotin.
So that's uh seems to me to be an interesting uh finding. I don't have any uh equipment to uh further delve into it, but you know the the only issue is you could never use it as a technique to um you can never use it as a technique to make uh grapefruit juice that it drinks like regular grapefruit juice but is um free of the bergamoton because it doesn't taste this the clarified grapefruit juice doesn't taste the same as regular grapefruit juice. Now, you might be able to simulate it by taking, for instance, the pulp that comes out of great uh orange juice when they make pulp like pulpless uh orange juice and adding that pulp to a clarified grapefruit juice. I don't know. Interesting.
But anyway, uh I was super duper interested by that, so thanks for sharing that with me. Um Joseph W writes in uh on the Twitter at cooking issues, we'll listen to your show, and you mentioned duck milk, an emulsion of duck stock and fat. Seems cool, but what use would it be for? And you know what, Joseph? I just don't know.
I never thought of a good use for it. That's why I don't do it all the time. No, but you know what? Like to honestly, though, like you could make very thin uh soups, soups that have like a lot of mouthfeel without with very little fat. Like that's what it's good for.
The same way that milk adds a great mouthfeel and doesn't have a lot of fat, you could do the same thing with a duck milk, emulsify something in, make a uh a soup or a sauce that has really good mouthfeel without a lot of fat. But I, you know, I I it's the my homogenizer that I have is so horrible sounding that I very rarely uh do I uh dork with it, you know? Yeah. Um yeah, at this point I'm old enough, it doesn't bother me hardly at all, but seriously, I'm around enough people who are younger than me that they just run around. And I never had the little box shield that they sell now uh that you can put around it to um to make it a little more tolerable in the kitchen.
Okay. Uh Jonathan Hunter writes in. Uh hey David Nastasha, I have a question about how to get my smoker to get a little bit hotter. It is heated by electric elements at a max uh max temperature that I'm able to get in the box is around 210 degrees Fahrenheit. I have an external smoke chamber that doesn't give off much heat.
I use a Johnson control to regulate the temperature, but the elements inside are only able to push out so much heat. Um I'm trying to get the temperature up to about 250 Fahrenheit. The box is well insulated, so adding insulation won't help much. I'm thinking that some other kind of heat source is my solution. Just wondering if you have suggestions of how I can make this work.
Uh thanks, Jonathan Hunter. Okay, well, first thing you gotta do is you gotta look at the wattage of your uh heat element. Right. So I I'm assuming when you're the way you're talking about it, that you the way your setup works is you have an insulated box, maybe a fridge, I'm guessing, and then uh in the bottom of it you have a traditional smoker style hot plate setup, and then on the outside of it you have a smoke generator, and the smoke generator is generating its smoke, and then you have a thermocouple on the inside of the of the insulated box, the fridge unit that's attached to your uh hot plate, right? So in a system like this, assuming I have it right, what's going on is the smoke generator is generating smoke, and the smoke generator is relatively cool.
So you're ignoring it as a heating device, and you're doing all of your control via the hot plate that's on the inside of your uh insulated box slash fridge unit. Okay. If I'm not right, then my advice that I'm about to give you is not going to be accurate. Uh if I am right, right, then just get a bigger heating element, right? Just buy a bigger hot plate or add in um uh add parallel, not in series, add parallel another heating element to the control loop, assuming that the relays that are used to switch it off and on with your controller can handle the extra amperage that's going through it.
Also, like if you want to be strictly speaking, like pleasant about it, I would add a um I would add a plate over the top of the heating element so you're not getting any crazy radiant heat coming off of it to you know from the elements to kind of affect the the thing. You could add on the inside a very small fan to move the heat around, but I don't like adding, I don't want to add anything because it's gonna mess up probably the dampening and other things inside of your smoker. But if you need to, you can go something like that. But I'm not sure if I have your setup uh exactly right. But whatever, right?
Right. Okay. Uh Jesper writes in about tomato clarity. Hey Dave and Nastasha, my name is Jesper, and since I'm living in Sweden, it is more convenient to have my questions asked by email instead of calling into your show. Well, alright, fair.
Uh that said, my question is related to an application where I use a centrifuge but cannot fully achieve the result I'm looking for. Uh the background, the goal. I want to make a transparent tomato. Alright. We have a lot of people asking about tomatoes recently in the centerfuge, right?
Yeah, strange. Uh, my approach is to use fresh tomatoes that are first peeled. I've used canned whole peeled tomatoes uh with the juice uh remove, but that not to give the desired result, but this is of course related to the type of tomato, it's ripeness, etc. Also, you know, uh they add calcium to that, which strengthens the uh pectin and it's gonna make it harder for you to spin out. That's why they put calcium chloride into it, and that's why um that's why canned tomatoes are always firm no matter what, and why if you self-can a tomato and you don't add calcium chloride or some other form of pectin strengthening thing to it, uh they turn to mush.
Just you know, for your info. Two, puree the tomatoes in a vita prep. Good call. Uh I'm glad to see someone in Sweden's using vita preps because you know that a lot of people in the Europe they don't have the Vitaprep. They use uh they use a thermal mix.
Okay. Three, filter puree through a sieve. Unnecessary with a centrifuge. Do you want to keep I would keep all that puree in? In fact, sometimes I find that having extra solids can uh help uh kind of compact everything down into into a solid puck.
So I wouldn't put it through, and you're gonna really reduce your um your your yield that way. Four, remove the air uh from the blending of the filtered tomato puree by using a vacuum chamber. Uh here I wonder if this could be one issue since this method gives a much stronger color of the tomato puree, which in turns counteracts the desired transparency. No, it doesn't give the puree any more color, it just removes the lack of color that the air introduces, right? You're when you like no, yes, no, you you should de-aerate.
The reason why, if you don't de-aerate when you're centrifuging tomatoes, you'll get floaty air things on the top that are really going to cloud your stuff up. Already you've made one thing that you're missing. Like you say in the end, should I use Pectanex Ultra SPL? Yes. Like right before while you're pureeing the tomatoes in a Vitapep, you should be adding Pectanex Ultra SPL enzyme, which is available, I believe, even in Sweden because they have shopping to all parts of the world for reasonable amounts.
Isn't that what they used to say? What was the copy back in the day when modernist cuisine when you guys used to be friends with them and they used to sponsor the show? Uh anyway, they have moderate, moderate, modest shipping, cheap shipping to uh many parts of the world. Get some Pectanex Ultra SPL from them. Um blend it in the blender until it is warm.
You're never gonna get uh I mean, you have a higher G uh centrifuge than I do, but you're gonna get a much better, much better yield and a much uh more clear product by using Pectanex Ultra SPL to break down the pectin. Okay, back to where you were. Centerfuge for two hours at 5,250 uh G's, the highest setting of my centrifuge. You don't need to go anywhere near that long if you have a uh if you add the Pectanex Ultra SPL. You only need to go for like 15 minutes, and that's like, you know, that that's that's about it.
You can go a little bit longer, it might increase your yield marginally. That's all you need to do. Uh six, uh you jellify it with uh kapac carrageenin, um, because it's transparent, and then put it in a mold that gives the uh shape of the tomato. The result is okay, a yellowish color, but far from perfect. So I'm wondering if you give me some help to achieve full transparency of the tomato sphere.
Okay, now look at it's always gonna be a little bit yellow because uh transparency and colorlessness, right? You gotta always separate those things in your head. Centrifugation is never gonna spin the color out of something unless the color is only contained in the solids and not in the solution. So center like the actual color molecules in solution are never gonna come out. You're never gonna get it to be colorless, right?
Uh so there's always going to be a yellow, uh yellow color in the uh in this in the supernatant, in the in the juice, right? But it should be crystal clear, right? So you gotta figure out whether or not, and if you follow the instructions with Pectin X and you spin it for a long time and you de-aerate, your tomato juice will be crystal clear. If you let it sit for a day and a half, uh it will probably throw off a little more flock, and then you could spin it again, and it will be even more crystal clear. However, it will still be yellow, but you should be able to read a newspaper through it.
Uh, and that's what I mean by clarity. The only way to get it actually transparent, like when I'm sorry, see you and I make the mistake. The only way to get it clear with no color would be to do a distillation technique, but it's much more complicated, and you need to re add back the acids and the sugars. I've done it, uh, but it's a pain in the butt, it never tastes the same as the actual uh blah blah ha, you know, the actual tomato stuff. Yeah?
Alright. Let's should we take our second commercial break and come back and bang out uh like two more questions? Sure. Sick it break! And once again, this is Fish Is Fish is vodka by the meatballers on Heritage Radio Network.org.
Oh yeah. Right? That's like a totally different feel. That's our oh yeah. This has been a sloppily engineered show.
I'll just go ahead and say that. Oh, we see. Never, never misses an opportunity to agree with someone when they're putting themselves down. That's right. She's never missed one.
Ever. I did play the applause for you too. I know, as I said, I did. And there she's downhill from there. And there, and there she like, she like gets on the bus.
She's like the only person, she develops a catapult to throw you under the bus she's driving. Yeah. It's rough. Uh yeah, rough, really rough. Okay.
Uh Dave Kleiman writes in who has the Twitter handle. I am a fractal. Which I guess, you know, well, maybe not technically. Anyway, I'm a fractal. I I love fractals.
You know, I I grew up uh uh being like a fractal lover as soon as I learned about them. In fact, I almost got a job working for a summer in uh Mandelbras lab back when he was alive. Uh and I was a kid. But I like like I I didn't know Fortran or any of that stuff, and I didn't re whatever, anyway, whatever. Fortran.
My dad still writes programs in Fortran, if you can believe it. For all of you who know what the hell I'm talking about. Woo Fortran. Cooking issues. What about all those other cool things you can do with Pectin X Ultra SPL, which we just talked about, like French fries and peeling fruit.
First of all, uh all of the information on that stuff will be back up on the. I know I've said this a billion times, but the guy who now is in is going to take over, making the blog, reappear in the blogosphere is coming to the lab tomorrow to speak to us, and hopefully we can straighten all this crap out pretty soon, right? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Because you know what?
I'm sick of hearing about it. You know what I mean? I need to get it fixed. It's my fault. So I deserve all of the uh approbrium that's been heaped upon me, but still.
Um so SPL, uh, like anything else, SPL is uh it's a great tool. Now I use it every day uh for clarification and a centrifuge. And by far and away, that's the most um that's the the most use that I get out of it. However, even if you're not going to clarify something and you don't have a centrifuge, SPL is still really useful. For instance, let's say you're not going to clarify something, but you have a puree, and that puree is too thick for you to use in the application.
It's just making your products too thick. Well, you know why that fruit puree or that vegetable puree is too thick? It's the pectin. It's the pectin. So what you do is you add SPL to it, you uh incubate it at 40, and it'll break down the pectin and it will thin out your product considerably and allow you to use that product in more applications.
So uh I've done that from time to time. I've also even clarifying in places that don't have centrifuges. I've hit stuff with Pectinex before I uh set it with agar to do an agar clarification because my yield will be much higher if I use Pectinx beforehand. Pectinex also dissolves uh the white parts of citrus fruits, the albedo. And so you can make these amazingly beautiful, like you know, you don't i i it's not um like a complete miracle.
People think that you know you just dip something in this pectinex uh enzyme and all of a sudden you have mandarin orange slices. No, it's a little more work than that, right? It's a little more work. However, you can make supremes of citrus fruits. It doesn't really work on lime so well for some reason, but anyway, you can make supremes of citrus fruits that are gorgeous.
Now, you can make pretty good supremes of fruits anyway, but they have cuts uh in them, and the cuts kind of mar it when it's on a plate and it's supposed to look like like really you know, back in the day you would have liked a kind of a cut supreme because it would have been seen as kind of like the artistry of the cutting, but nowadays, like I think people are more keyed up on seeing like a perfect piece of fruit that looks almost like it grew that way, and so not cutting across any of the little vesicle things on the inside is really kind of baller. But the most baller one is uh you can get suprems of things like pomelos that have so much pith in them, they're very difficult to work with. Now, the trick about it is you have to take the peel off and then break the fruit in half and then typically into quarters to get all the pectinx into those areas uh where the white is. Otherwise, it's just gonna dissolve the stuff on the outside and not penetrate very far. Uh so you have to be careful with that.
If you're taking uh things like grapefruit peels and orange peels, you can add the pectinx uh to them, soak them, and then toothbrush off all of the white, all of the albedo, and you get these super thin, super gorgeous uh peels that you can then candy or use for other things. We used to do that quite a bit. Uh pectin's also the structure on the outside of things like uh potatoes. And so when you're trying to do disrupt this surface of it without disrupting the entire thing, we do a soak of it and it produces a much better crust on things like French fries. Um, we learned that you know years ago.
Uh I read a uh technical paper on it, and then we developed our French fry recipe uh based on using pectinx. Uh, you know, modernist cuisine disrupts the surface using ultrasounds, we disrupt it using pectinx, but it's it's good for that. I've heard other people have um other uses for pectinx, but any time that there is pectin and you want to make that pectin go away, pectinex is a good thing to use. Um, uh we had a message in from uh Anjali. I will not re read the message over the air, uh, but uh we'll give you a holler maybe next time we're in the Bay Area if uh if we have time.
Uh and uh say howdy to uh your boyfriend, and I apologize to you specifically that he made you spend your vacation together uh completing uh the back catalog of our uh podcast. And and you're right. Yikes. Ouch. I had someone else like send that and saying that they spent sp you know, had their vacation, they had a car trip and they like they listened to a bunch of these.
I was like, my God. Sounds like a stressful vacation. I know it, right? Yeah. And I believe my response to uh that gentleman on the Twitter was my wife like doesn't my well but you know what the good thing about it is?
Uh if you listen enough, you could probably tune it out. But it took my wife maybe three years to be able to completely tune me out. I mean, completely tune me out. Is that the mission of the show to train people to tune you out? Maybe.
Maybe that's maybe that's what we're doing here. Right? Right? 110 episodes. This is a lot of Dave Arnold.
Yeah. It's it's a quite a lot, uh, quite a lot of uh of uh Dave Marlon. Um okay. Uh did I talk about my my lobster technique in in or did I say I was gonna talk about it, never talked about it. You never talked about it.
Oh, I never talked about it. Very good. All right. So uh since I don't have a blog right now, what did it just go silent? Weird.
Anyway, uh since I don't have a blog right now, I'm gonna and uh for those of you that don't know it, I spend a lot of time worrying about uh anesthetizing fish and crustaceans uh prior to dispatching them uh and like and figuring out exact techniques to um kill fish and uh and other things like crustaceans to make them taste uh best. And the the short answer is is that the least amount of suffering or whatever that means, the least amount of stressful the stressful stimuli before uh you know slaughter. And so we won't go into whether or not it's actual pain or suck, because I'm like that's not the that's a very interesting argument, but it's not what we're talking about here. Okay. Uh the less stress from a physical standpoint that they go through uh prior to slaughter, the the better they taste.
And that's been true also with lobsters. Now that the it's a kind of a bit of a pain in the butt to um anesthetize lobsters. Not that hard. You can get all the stuff for the Whole Foods, use clove oil, anesthetize, and we've done it many, many times. We've done lots of side by side taste tests.
But the interesting test that Nils and I ran back in the day was uh, what about the old thing about shoving a knife through the lobster and cutting it in half at the head? And a lot of people shy away from this just because they're squeamish. That's not really a good reason to shy away from something because you're squeamish. You know, like in other words, it's kind of like, you know, you catch a mouse in a glue trap and then you just throw it away alive because you don't you'd rather do that than to see it squashed in a trap, right? But you're actually better if you just squash it in the trap and kill it right at the get go.
That's actually more humane, even though it's more difficult for you to deal with than throwing away the live mouse in the glue trap, which is not a good thing to do, right? Who feels that that's more difficult? What? Like the dead mouse in the trap. Anytime you see the blood or whatever.
Oh, but imagine the suffering in the trash on the glue trap alive. I had to throw out a rat somewhere, I won't mention where, and there were a bunch of maggots underneath it. That was really rough. But it was dead though, right? Yeah, it was dead.
Like let's say you use glue traps, right? It's far it's far more humane. It was under my chair. What? We'll use like I can't mention right found it.
Well, it's it's under your chair still. He couldn't deal with it, so it's still there. Uh that's why it smells so fruity in here. Uh no, but uh if you can't if let's say you use glue traps, which I'm not advocating, if you use glue traps, like uh let's more accurately, more people would throw it away than drown the drown the mouse. Or break step on it and break this back.
Right. Both of which are more humane. Anyways, that's not what I'm talking about. So that well it is, kind of. So like the knife, even though you feel worse shoving the knife through the lobster's head, is a quick way to dispatch it.
The trick with a lobster is lobster have ganglia running, uh, running all like different it's not a central nervous system the same way we have a central nervous system. So you can't just shove a knife through, like you shove a knife through our brain and we're pretty much done. But the lobster, you have to like bisect a bunch of ganglion that go uh around the esophagus up through the top and around, right? Uh all along. Uh so anyway, but you do that, and it turns out that they taste very clean, very akin to uh the ones that we've anesthetized, but they've lost a lot of their flavor because when you kill a lobster that way, it leaks uh its internal fluids, which are called hemolith, and that has flavor, and so you're losing the flavor.
Uh a while ago, uh one of my last blog posts, I said, well, what if we wrap the what if we wrap the lobster up so that it doesn't lose its uh stuff as you cook it? It's vital juices as you cook it, and the results were inconclusive. Here's what I did uh recently, the last time I did a lobster test, and it was entirely successful, and this is the way now I advocate cooking uh lobsters. Get a Pyrex baking dish or anything that's you know non-absorptive. Uh stick a small wooden block underneath the uh lobster's uh head area, put the lobster down on the wooden block.
The wooden block is so that your knife doesn't get ruined. Shove an uh put the knife uh on the back of the carapace, uh, you know, which is the you know body part, uh, you know, you know, behind and rear of the eyes, and shove the knife through and completely bisect the front of the animal. If you completely bisect the front of the animal, the hemolith is going to spill into the pyrex, right? So you're preserving all of those juices in the pyrex, right? Then what I do is you carefully take the knife, you run it around the tail, you remove the tail, you take a knife, you s you cut up the cartilage things on the underneath, you remove the tail in one piece, cut up the tail shell, throw it in a pot.
Then you um then you cut, take off the claws, I leave the knuckle meat inside of uh inside of the knuckle things by separate them and let all of the juices that are come out as you do this go into the pyrex. Take the claws, I uh cut around the claws to expose the meat, but leave them in the claws because they're very delicate. Right? There's a picture on my Twitter account you can go look at. So now you have exposed claw meat, knuckle meat.
Uh I I take all the small legs and cut them up in small pieces, throw them in the pot with the chopped up pieces of tail shells. I then take the body uh and I chop I remove the gills from it, and then I chop it into small pieces and I throw it in the pot with butter. I then take the take the whole thing, I bring it up in temperature, and I get the butter cooked out of it for about 15 minutes. You don't want to cook too long, you want to start pulling out calcium, all that stuff, 15 minutes in the butter, uh, and then throw in uh the juices from the Pyrex, reduce it down a little bit, uh, and then put strain that sucker so there's not shell pieces, right, into a Vitaprep, blend it in the Vitapep to like emulsify a little bit, and bag the meat from the lobster in a ziploc with that stuff in the butter, and I throw that into simmering water. Uh, you don't want to boil it, you gotta you gotta turn the pot off because Ziplocks can't take boiling water.
But as long as you're not in there that long and you never actually boil it, and the then then the pots are turned off so it can't boil afterward, it's fine, and that's a really good temperature for lobster. Let it cook for like depends on how you like it. I my we like it a little more done than most people, so we cook it like maybe 10 minutes that way. Uh eight, eight, ten, ten minutes. And then pull it out, and then this the sauce is still delicious in there, and it has a pure, clean, briny taste of the ocean.
It is delicious. That's the way I now cook lobster and cooking issues. Dave. Thanks for listening to this program on heritage radio network.org. You can find all of our archived programs on our website or as podcasts in the iTunes store by searching Heritage Radio Network.
You can like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at heritage underscore radio. You can email us questions at any time at info at heritageradio network.org. Heritage Radio Network is a nonprofit organization. To donate and become a member, visit our website today. Thanks for listening.
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