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If you like this program, visit Heritage Radio Network.org for thousands more. Cooking issues! Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Aron, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live every Tuesday from twelve to twelve forty five. Actually, are we uh we we might be able to go to one today.
Yeah. Hello! Oh Extended Edition Cooking Issues here, live with Nastasha the Hammer Lopez and Jack and Joe in the engineering room. Hi guys. What's up?
Hi. Uh yeah, uh so uh I had something I I I actually headbanged my headphones off during the uh during the intro there. Maybe we should tighten up our headphones, huh? Yeah. Well, speaking of Joel, I kinda wanted to read this email he sent me.
He's uh he's thrilled we're playing the song. He wants to take us off maybe on that offer and do a live recording. Then he says he's got all these other tracks he wants to give us, including a Harold McGee tribute song and other stuff he's written about pigs. He says, I've been writing songs for a long time now. My wife hates them.
Let's hope you like it. I want to hear the Harold McGee. I I wanna d can we just like get a copy of the Harold McGee? How fast can we get a copy of the Harold McGee tribute song? Like right now, you can get a little bit more than a little bit.
Like right now, Joel, if you're listening. We need that right now. Joel, if you're out there, let me see you dance. For those of you that listened to the Princess Black album back in the day. So uh anyway, so and also apparently we had like uh some sort of a fire a firebrand uh performance going on on the show prior to this because the mic was totally loose.
Like the mic had been like blasted off of its like gimbals here and was like, you know, practically lying on the floor in the studio. It was the gun show. Yeah, apparently a you know, a a rattling time had uh at least by the microphone. Is it is this the microphone they use, this one? Uh yeah, one of them.
Yeah, yeah. That thing was that thing was all its hinges. Anyway. Uh so anything uh good going on, Sas? No, not really.
No? Really literally, nothing good is happening. Nothing good has happened. Well, uh, you know, wow, that makes that makes what we do sound very interesting. Uh a Christmas was a long time ago.
You're referring to the Mamufuku holiday party. Yeah, but I found I were talking. I found out how where the invitation was. Well, uh, you know how whenever they send you your fake paycheck that doesn't ha that says uh this is not a paycheck. I don't get that anymore.
You because you have someone else throw it away for you. No, really, I don't get it. They're gonna want it. Do you want it sent to you? What it was on.
Okay, well, it wasn't there. Because you don't get it. They literally have to they have to print it like by law. It's printed. Like, so someone throws it away for you because you probably said, keep it the hell away from me.
No, it's like that's where the holiday party invite was on the pay stuff. So you in fact were invited. I like uh well, Piper didn't want to see you. Piper saw you all day, he didn't want to see you at night. No, no, Piper was asking me where is it?
Yeah, whatever. I did not go because I was sick as a dog last night. I was like, I got all of a sudden. You ever have like an instant sore throat? Like a move.
I'm on like heavy meds now. I'm on a super heavy meds. Wow. Anyways. Speaking of uh heavy meds, uh we're on track for our Kickstarter.
I can't tell you people what it is yet, but I was testing out the the thing that we're using at uh the pizza party I had, because every every year of my kids' birthday, I have pizza party at my house where the kids make the pizza, and I was using it. It's not a pizza oven, don't you? But uh I was using it. We cranked out these freaking kids. We cranked out twenty freaking pizzas in in like in like two hours, and they ate every last one.
And it we only we didn't have that many people. I don't know where where the heck all that pizza went. It's crazy. Yeah. Also made uh some fake Twinkies.
Some fake twinkies. So like uh, you know how the Twinkie's uh hostess is out of business, right? Right. Right? And you know how it yeah, not only is she shopping for Zappos folks, she's playing the music from the website.
First of all, it was serious radio was on before. Trader awesome, listening to a competitor, yeah. Terrible. First of all, anyone out there who designs a website and puts music on it, have your head examined. Do not serious radio.
Whatever. Okay. Unless you are serious radio or Pandora or Heritage Radio Network. They have to click for artists to come on. We don't just, you know, auto-play things.
It's because we're not bad people. Exactly. We don't like we don't invade your home. It's but because you happen to come to our website, you know, perhaps an error, we hope not. We don't invade your home.
Anyway, so Twink host is out of business. I bought a box uh uh before Christmas, before holidays for my kids of Twinkies because they'd never had one, and I grew up with Twinkies. I was like, Oh, kids had Twinkies. My wife was like, What the hell are you doing buying my kids Twinkies? And so anyway, they loved it, and all of a sudden, because it's not available anymore, it became their became their favorite dessert on earth.
By Christmas time, they were up to $25 for a box of 10. I think the MSRP on that sucker was like $4.50 or something like that. So I bought two for Christmas, but then I decided I'm gonna buy the you can buy pans that make Twinkies, they're Twinkie shaped pans. Everyone on the line on the internet, they make the fake Twinkies by uh molding uh aluminum foil around spice bottles and then using that. But I was like, you know, if my kids want uh if my you know if my kids want Twinkies, I'll invest the money in the pants.
So I got the pants and I followed Todd Wilbur. You know Todd Wilbur, you're familiar with Todd Wilbur? Todd Wilbur, he has like a since I think the 90s or something, 80s, 90s, has had a bunch of books called like Top Secret Recipe. And a top secret recipe, it's like you know, he figures out like what's the real oibes and spices in he's not he's not from around here, he doesn't sound like that. He's from like New Mexico or some crap, but he's like, What are the herbs and spices in like Kentucky Fried Chicken and stuff like that?
So he posts, in fact, he has a recipe I haven't tested it for Heinz ketchup, fake like Heinz ketchup and you know, whatever it's buy go by Heinz, Heinz is delicious ketchup product. Anyway, uh uh, unless you don't like Heinz, but I think Heinz is a fine ketchup product. Is that your favorite ketchup, says? I really don't care. Are you a freak?
Are you a freak? I really don't know. How do you work in the cooking business and not care about the ketchup taste different? I don't care. I don't care.
You don't care? I really don't know. So I could serve you poop in a bottle and say it's ketchup, and as long as it says ketchup on the bottle, you don't care. I don't know. Whatever's on the table.
I don't care. Like, I really don't care about that kind of stuff. What the hell is wrong with you? How could you not care about it? It's ketchup.
It's not. It's not. They taste different. That's like, hey, look, it's a few. You know what you know, you know what?
You know what? You know what? You know what, Stas? I'll tell you what. I'll tell you what.
I owe Stas, I still owe her a bottle of good wine for a bet I've lost. I'm just gonna get her anything. Because what does it matter? It's wine. No, it's not a wine.
It's wine. What does it matter? It's wine. Doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what kind of grapes went into it.
Doesn't matter how it was made. On-air ketchup tasting. They're different. They're different. Hunt's ketchup and Heinz ketchup don't taste the same.
I like Sir Kensington's. Wow. They're friends of the network. No, honestly, I don't know. I I I mean, usually you get Heinz, right?
I mean, I know when I taste something that's not Heinz, and I'm usually kind of disappointed. Yeah, because Hunt's ketchup, no offense to the Hunts Corporation. They make fine canned tomato products, but Hunt's doesn't taste like Heinz does. It doesn't. I don't care.
The hell is that? You're supposed to care about every aspect of the what of the world. Maybe we can do a new show at one o'clock called I Don't Care with Nastasia. Well, it's just everything. Where Nastasha tackles the world because she doesn't care.
Man, god dang. So, anyways, uh making uh the twinkies, but the problem was that the the issue is is that is that the uh the kids don't want a good sponge cake filled with you know uh some sort of cream filling that dad can come up with. They want freaking twinkies. So I'm not trying to, yeah, it wasn't trying to work on that, so I had to use his fake recipe, which is boxed pound cake and whipped egg whites for the and it pretty is pretty dang close to a Twinkie, actually. You know, my it like Booker was like, real Twinkies, Dad, are slightly better.
They're slightly better. Well, I was like, that's perfect. You don't want it to be actually be better than the Twinkie, you want it to be just slightly less good so it tastes like you're actually shooting for the Twinkie. Anywho, but the filling was so freaking thick that I followed the recipe. The filling is marshmallow fluff, Crisco.
Trans fat free Crisco. A little bit of powder, sugar, and salt with a little bit of water in it. And I I guess the water level wasn't over whatever. I don't know. It was so freaking thick that it the both pastry bags that I used exploded.
The hostess brand, Twinkie like bags, no wonder they went out of business. The bags exploded and sprayed filling all over the table. It's freaking nightmare. Next next time I do it, I'm gonna make a a thinner, a thinner Twinkie mix. But now that I own two pans, I guess I'm gonna have to make Twinkie.
You know why? Yeah, I know, but it yeah. I mean, it's like anything. It's like it's like anything that's taken you don't care about Twinkies. I do care about Twinkies.
What the hell? You don't care about what do you care about? Tell me something you care about. I mean, I do name a thing you care about. Well, I never would have if my kids weren't now obsessed with it.
And they're obsessed with it because they can't have it. Mm-hmm. You know, it's the same thing that everyone cares about X, Y, or Z. As soon as it's gone or as soon as somebody's dead, they they care about it a lot more. That's true.
So, same with Twinkies, especially because my kids now, like they love any kind of dessert. So they they they get the Twinkies and then they they're like, oh my god, I love it, and I can't have it. I need it. You know what I mean? I don't personally care about Twinkies that much, except for I care about uh, you know, my kids.
Yes. And they care about the Twinkies. So you still have not named something you care about. So, further proof that Nastasha's next show that she's gonna do on her own is just like anything, anything in the world. Man, I don't really care.
Man, I don't really care. Uh our good friend, uh our good friend Vidyot Um wrote in saying he uh had a cookbook recommendation because we were talking about Indian cookbooks, but he took a very interesting tack. Instead of recommending a book about Indian cooking, he recommended a book that is printed by an Indian person in India about vegetarian cooking, but it's not strictly speaking an Indian cookbook. It's kind of interesting. He says, um, uh I'm behind on the schedule podcast, but regarding Indian cookbooks, the unique book of vegetarian uh cooking by Saraj Joshi is an impressive book.
And I don't know if it and then he added later, I don't know if it's published in the US, but her son's a friend, and the book is good. He uh she also did an all-spinach book called Palak Preparations. I like that pallock preparations. Anyway, no uh no uh Sam, it's not available in the US, but uh I did I did look it up. You can't get it in the U.S.
But an interesting, an interesting take. A non-Indian food necessarily food. It has like Mexican food, Chinese food, and Indian food anyway. But anyway, I said I would read it on the air, and there you have it. Uh at Clef's write in, what is a good way to keep uh tarot, uh potatoes and other starchy foods firm after cooking, or maybe just firm the surfaces.
Well, I mean, the classic way to keep things firm, and this goes back to uh the f the first instance I read about this uh was uh Jeffrey Steingarden in I think it was in his original book, uh The Man Who Ate Everything, which I think I totally said on the air I always keep confusing with the man who mistook his wife for his hat. So, like I all the titles of the Jeffrey. It's not well, it's not by him, it's by Oliver Sachs, but like somehow I always confuse the two titles and sounds like the man who mistook everything for his hat or ate everything with his hat. Anyway, I always get confused, but the man who ate everything, which was probably when I read it, one of the most, and you know, it still is, in other words, but you know, uh when I read it especially, was kind of one of the most important food books um uh that I ever read. Really.
I mean, really, you know, fantastic book. Uh you know, it's a compilation of all his of his article, his articles from Vogue, not all of them, but many of them, uh, in which he says that you should care about everything and you should try everything. Uh, and he's told you that personally himself. Anyways, so he has a section on uh on potatoes, mashed potatoes in particular, and I think also French fries and whatnot, but mainly mashed potatoes, and it was an extremely influential article on keeping them f uh firm and together by heating the preheating them uh at a temperature to activate the um pectin methylesterase enzymes that are in the potato uh and thereby provide uh structure to it later on in the cook process. Bang.
Okay. So uh so the that it's a long way of saying pectin methylesterase. So here's what's going on. In in I mean the problem with starch is that starch swells, it's gonna burst and leak out, right? But you can uh harden it somewhat and protect it somewhat um by uh by strengthening the the pectin that's holding the whole thing together, because even though there's a whole boatload of starch in a potato, it still has a lot of pectin there holding holding things together.
Now, pectin uh naturally uh what happens is uh you it what it's it cross-links with calcium to get to get stronger, right? So you need calcium present. So this is why, like, you know, uh we use uh calcium to firm up vegetables or calcium chloride is used to firm up tomatoes, right? So when if you if you're if you're making canned tomatoes, you add calcium chloride, even though calcium chloride tastes terrible, you add it, and that small amount of calcium allows the uh pectin to cross-link. When it cross links, it gets firmer and then doesn't break down when it's cooked.
However, you have to use um the not all the pectin uh has uh has the ability to cross-link that way. You've got to demethylate it, right? So you gotta use a pectin methylesterase, which is an enzyme, which makes the pectin more readily cross-linked by the calcium. So it's a two-part process. You need to activate the enzymes that are in the potato already, usually by heating, up uh, I think it's like somewhere near 60 Celsius or something like this.
Uh, and then uh maybe a little higher, 60, 65 Celsius, and you need to have calcium present. Now there's some calcium present there already, but you can use the enzyme, pectin methylestrates, which you can purchase from novozymes. I don't know if modernist uh pantry stocks it yet, but you can buy that and then add some calcium to it, or you can just use calcium and the natural enzymes that are in there uh to crosslink it. Yeah, good job. Yeah.
Uh I don't care. Okay. Uh Andrew Campbell writes in uh Robbie Burns night is fast approaching. Any tips on a more modern preparation of haggis or of cooking organs sous vide. Have we done haggis on this show?
I don't think so. Haggis. I have two cans. We should eat it soon. Do we you haven't eaten one yet?
Your sister had it when she was into Scotland though, right? Yeah. Yeah. And she loved it, right? I have a Scotch flavored haggis.
Did she like the haggis? She liked it a lot. Yeah, you know why? Because Haggis is uh delicious. Haggis, let me just say this.
Cooking issues, the show is going on record as saying that haggis is freaking delicious product. Yeah. And uh and you you don't actually you don't have very long left. I think uh Bobby Burns' day is what, the twenty fifth or something like that? So anyway.
That is not you know, you know, Bobby Burns, the famous poet from Scotland who wrote such Diddy's as old Langzyne. Oh. Yeah. Anyway, so like uh they celebrate his, I guess his birthday, uh, every year uh in Scotland, and you have Haggis and you drink scotch and you and you and you he has a poem about haggis that you're supposed to read before you eat the haggis. So for those of you that are haggis deficient in your knowledge, uh I'll give you the here's here's how they gross you out with it with haggis, right?
This is what they say. It's like the heart and the lungs and all of the goopy crappy stuff inside of a sheep and it's stuffed into a sheep's stomach and cooked and then you eat it, right? That doesn't sound so appetizing. No. Speak for yourself.
Right. But to a lot of people it doesn't sound appetizable. In reality, what it is is it's one of any number of dishes that's produced with uh the pluck. So when you when you're with the pluck is all the stuff in the center of an animal. So typically that would uh constitute hearts, lungs, liver, uh, kidney, all that stuff.
All of the the awful meat that's there. Well, not awful with an A with an O. And um and another famous uh dish like that i in the US is Scrapple, right? Uh a dish that I also think that everyone needs to eat uh uh much more often, assuming that they they eat meat. Now all of these awful dishes are meant to use the pluck in a way that uh you know, you use it, just use it.
But they what they do is you make the stock with it, and then you use the stock to cook a uh grain. So in the case of haggis, it's oatmeal mixed up with these with these cooked pieces of meat and the stock that it comes from, stuffed inside of the sheep's uh stomach, which is the lining like a pudding case, right? And then uh cooked, you know, more so the whole thing slices out like a big like oatmeal, like uh oatmeal meatloaf mushroom. It's freaking great. It's great.
Whereas, like, you know, scrapple is all of like the pig's parts, uh like the hard slums and all that well not not anymore but uh yeah liver chopped up and then m made a stock and then you take and chop up the pieces and you put it into cornmeal right which is like you know just a better version of polenta and then when you fry it it get the the gelatin from the stock melts this is a scrapple and it gets all gooey and delicious and and and you know it's great it's fantastic stuff. Now the trick is people are grossed out by some of these meats. And so uh first of all you can't serve lungs in the U.S. at all. So lungs is traditional part of Scott you ever had lungs?
No. They're good but they're spongy. Like I have to be honest they're spongy. So like a typical Italian dish that my uh fat uh stepfather uh used to love when he was growing up because his dad was a butcher and he would bring home the hearts and the lungs uh even though he wasn't allowed because he wasn't allowed to sell the lungs because he would slaughter his own sheep was a mixture of hearts and lungs like the from around the Naples version that was thinking of tomato sauce. And uh so he used to love it because the chewy parts of the heart and the and the spongy parts of the lung anyway cooking together but you can't have lung here in the US.
But the trick to making this thing modern is if someone doesn't necessarily see back then you you you're making it because uh you wanted to use all those meats if you don't necessarily want for instance the stronger taste of liver in your in your scrapple or in your haggis you can just omit it if you want to. You know what I mean? It's not going to be the same it's not going to be traditional. But this idea of a very flavorful stock made from gelatinous and uh you know flavorful like meat that you cook in a stock grind up and then mix with uh a grain like oatmeal and then cook in in a in a like a pudding way or a loaf is freaking valid even if you were to use high grade stuff. So we made a high grade haggis at the FCI a number of years ago where we used um meat that you would actually normally just uh eat and cooked it along with uh some offal that we could put in uh and do it.
Um so that you know so there you have it. Now in terms of cooking in general low temperature uh with with oh and if you want to know about scrapple you can buy William Moyce Weaver's book Country Scrapple which is tedious but exhaustive and like thoroughly researched on scrapple and its importance in uh America and then tracing it back to uh you know um tracing it back to uh Germany, Europe and all of its roots over there. Anyway, okay it's a Pennsylvania Dutch thing Dutch meaning Deutsch, not Dutch meaning Dutch from Holland. Anyway. So uh so the the trick with uh in general with modern uh cooking there is there you I so modern when I was saying modern I meant modern from a taste perspective.
If you want to go modern in terms of cooking low temperature sous vide you have to remember that you still have to cook the thing at a high enough temperature to cook the oatmeal out. So you're probably not going to do an extremely low temperature cook uh same with same with uh scrapple for polenta you you know you still need to cook out the polenta so you need to go to a higher temperature than you normally would but you could do it in a bag if you wanted to to keep all the flavors and the issue is is that a lot of times with uh awful and with um variet variety meats if you're using variety meats uh a lot of the old style preparation of these meats is to try to get rid of some of the inherent uh aromas let's say that they have or flavors and so you'll have recipes where things are soaked in milk beforehand to draw out uh stuff or they're uh parboiled first to draw things out and if you don't do those sorts of things I mean remember that low sous vide if you put something in a vacuum bag tends to concentrate aromas over time. So if the something has an aroma that you're trying to get rid of or a taste that you're trying to get rid of you don't want to put it in a bag right away because it's just going to seal the stuff in. The second thing the reason you'd want to do low temperature sous vide on one of these things is because you want to uh make it more tender than you otherwise would you have to look at how tenderness really works when you're doing uh low temperature cooking. So uh let's say you're going to cook a regular piece of muscle meat that has a lot of collagen right and you don't want to uh cook it to a high temperature because you want to not overcook the muscle that's within it to uh you know over medium rare or medium let's say so you do low temperature for a long time and long long time breaks down things like skin uh things like connective tissue uh it and this is why this is a good technique for things like pork tails that have a lot of uh a lot of collagen a lot that can break down into gelatin over long cooking right but and and it keeps them whole because it doesn't melt them out it just it just converts them to uh gelatin in their own place without actually melting it out the way you would in a traditional braise.
Uh so it's fantastic for things like that. Meats like uh heart are not tough because they have a lot of collagen. They're tough because the muscle fibers are extremely strong. So cooking it low temperature isn't going to soften it the same way it would soften let's say a short rib. What's going to happen with uh with heart is you're actually going to break the muscle fibers down by extreme long cooking but that's a different kind of tenderness.
Now back when Stas used to pay attention to the the Sous vide class that we would I sat through that like five times. Well, more like once and the rest typed your way through it. But the uh but one of the classic things I want people to taste when they're tasting low temperature cooked meats is the difference between tender and mushy because they often get confused. And um when I cook a piece of steak for too long, for instance, to me, it's no longer tender. When the muscle fibers themselves start breaking down, it becomes mushy.
And you've tasted that, right, Stas? Yes. Yeah. Do you care about that? No, of course.
All right. Well, well, so she's not mushy. So she's not talking about that on the show. But the uh, but the so the point is is that you can tenderize something like a heart, but I think a lot of the tender is tenderizing you have to be careful that it doesn't edge over into the mushy zone. Uh also certain things like liver, if they're cooked for a long time in a bag, accentuate the livery flavor.
And in fact, uh cuts of meat like Eye of Round that uh you know when they're cooked for a long time also tend to become livery. So I wouldn't cook something that's livery for a very long time in a bag because if you do, you're going to uh you're going to accentuate that that livery note. Anyway, uh hope that's helpful. That seems helpful at all. Yes.
Yeah. What time is it? I can't even see the clock. 1225. So should we go to our first commercial break?
Yes. We're going to our first commercial break. Call in the 7184972128 cooking issues. Today's theme song for cooking issues is by Joel Gargano. The break song is Fish Is Fish Is Vodka by the Meat Ballers.
You're listening to Heritage Radio Network.org. The International Culinary Center is a proud sponsor of the Heritage Radio Network.org. The ICC with locations in New York and California provide cutting edge education to future chefs, restaurateurs, and wine professionals. We're proud to claim Dan Barber, Bobby Flay, and David Chang among our honored alumni. This is Dorothy Cann Hamilton from Chef's Story.
Check out our ICC website at International Culinary Center.com. Oh yeah! Back with cooking issues. What's up, guys? Nothing like coming back with Dorothy.
Yeah, coming back with Dorothy. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. Shout out Dorothy.
Speaking about coming back, the blog's back on the air. What I don't even believe that. Is that true? It is. We don't get a clay don't get a clap for that.
Yeah, man. We didn't believe it. Although I just got tweeted out this way. So what happened is is that our good friend Paul Adams decided to take uh who you know writes for uh popular science. Uh decided to and he you know he tasted Surstroming with us.
Remember that? Mm-hmm. What oh my god, so well so Surstroming is this uh is this like horribly uh what's it's like horribly stinky. Uh even I had issues with it. Uh it's incredibly stinky fish that is not salted enough to totally kill everything, and then ferments inside it's from Sweden.
Ferments inside the can, and so like a bulging can is actually the sign of a good Surstraming. And uh you like keep it in this can for a year and uh you open it and um pungent, pungent. You were there for that, right? Yeah, yeah. Did you eat it?
Yeah. Did you like it? It's it's intensely freaking salty, and the smell is beyond what you would think is possible in something that you would put in your mouth. It's like it's it is like I've never seen flies attracted to something so fast. Remember that?
There was like no there was no flies anywhere, and all of a sudden, like we were swarming, we were like beating the flies away. And only I I ate it a couple of times. I you know, got it down, we had like the rye bread and we had Akavite and all this other stuff. But uh only Harold McGee, who was like, doesn't have the vomit note that the last one I had. Remember that?
Doesn't have the vomit note. That was what his complaint it was his complaint. Yes. That it didn't have the vomit note from the first time or the f other two times he had had it. The only other guy who was pounding Sir Stromming was Paul Adams.
So much so that he was like, You're not gonna throw that can away, are you? Also it doesn't talk like that. He's like, You're not gonna throw that can away. He's like, I'm gonna take that back to the office, took it in a cab with him. I am sure that this cabbie, like if this cabbie had been armed, Paul would have had a problem.
You know what I mean? Because this was the stinkiest thing that ever happened. Anyways, so uh our good buddy Paul. He uh got the cooking issues back uh back online. We finally got the passwords, we have control, but I unfortunately, Nastash, I don't know if you heard this this morning, but someone said that we are reinfected already.
What? And it's like, you know, you try and do something. Do you guys use WordPress? No. Yeah, I don't know.
I don't know. I don't know. But so so for those that tweeted that to us, we're getting that worked on, and we're going to uh we're uh Paul said he might actually write some stuff for the cooking issues. We're gonna become a viable blog again, people. That's it.
Tell me where you see it is infected. I didn't see it was infected, someone else did. You have to go to my Twitter account. She's like, I can't be bothered. I can't be bothered.
Uh I just have one thing for Joel Gargano. If he's gonna do a Harold McGee kind of tribute band that uh maybe he might want to call it Vomit Note. Whoa. You know? I don't know that Harold would.
I don't know. I don't know. I mean Well, yeah, I guess. Yeah, you never I mean I don't know it's hard to say. It's just such a cool band name.
Vomit Note. Vomit Note. Is that like uh is that like the Brown Note? Yeah. That note that you hit and you don't know whether you've you've been able to hold it in.
It's a good one. Anyway, uh that's why I played, that's why I learned to play bass, by the way, is because uh, you know, the notes, like a really good bass cab when you're playing uh live and you're in your amps really good and your bass cab's really good, like you really have to squeeze tight to make sure that you've maintained control because your body is vibrating so so much. And that is the that's the that's what's so awesome about playing the bass. No one with me on this? Okay.
Um what do you mean? You went to rock concerts all the time. You don't know what I'm talking about. I don't even watch the drummer. I only watch the drummer.
By the way, Nastasha, obsessed with uh There's a Feeling coming in the air tonight by Phil Collins. No, everyone go online, Google the video when he's live, and he sings the entire song walking on stage, and you're worried he's not gonna make it to the drum set before that important part. But he does. I guarantee I'm not worried about it. Finally, we found something that I'm not worried about that you are worried about.
Phil Collins making it to the drum set. Alright. Josh Krieger writes in on heating elements and cast iron. Nastash and Dave, two questions for you. What kind of heating element is used in the poly science immersion circulators?
Are they PTC heaters or something else? Well, for those of you not in the heating know a PTC heater is a positive temperature coefficient heater. And uh what a positive temperature coefficient heater is is it's um a heating element they're usually like chips. They're like you know little chips. And uh and they're they're arrayed.
You put a bunch of them in you heat them. But they the hotter they get the higher their resistance goes but it's not in a linear fashion. So over a normal kind of heat range where you might want to control a heater, uh it has a relatively low resistance. And then as soon as it heats up beyond a certain predetermined point that they uh that they determine by what they dope it with. I think they're usually made with um barium titanate and then they have a little doping crap in it to change the temperature at which the resistance really changed but you hit a certain temperature and all of a sudden bam the resistance goes way up which throttles the power down.
So they're called self-limiting because they can't burn themselves out. And that's an advantage. So by the way, no poly science does not use them. Poly science uses standard resistance uh heaters uh with stainless steel sheaths so they use a uh you know a a bendable tubular immersion heater with a stainless steel sheath in them and the way you could tell that they use it actually I don't know I haven't opened up his new one I haven't opened up the I haven't opened up the what's the new one called the inexpensive one? I don't remember the name of it.
Sue V Creative I think creative. I haven't opened up the Sous V Creative but none of the older ones uh use a PTC heater. The advantages of uh the advantage of a PTC heater is it doesn't require a secondary um uh uh it doesn't require secondary safety. So if you look at one of the old poly science circulators, or even I guess you know the the professional, which is you know the one we have, it there's a little uh what looks like a sauce a stainless steel sausage strapped to the heating element. And that is uh uh a safety thing, such that if the e the tank runs dry, or if anything like that happens, uh and the temperature of the heating element shoots up, then um the it shuts the system off, right?
So and the advantage, you know, that's standard way of doing it. The advantage of the PTC is it doesn't require that, and also if it goes over temp, it doesn't actually shut the s it doesn't shut the system down, it just throttles the power down uh to a point where it's not gonna harm anything. So that's the the theoretical advantage of the uh of them. They're they're super advantageous in situations where you know that you're not going to be able to stop crud from building up between your heating element and the temperature measurement that's gonna use it, right? Because then if inefficiencies can mean that your heating element can get so hot that they can burn themselves out.
Not really the case in an immersion circulator, but anyway, uh PTCs um have only recently been starting to, I think, really being used quite a lot in in new applications. So I don't know if Philip will use them eventually, but he's not using them right now as far as I know. Yeah? Yep. Whoa!
Whoa. Wow. Reverbed colour, you're on the air. Yeah, listen, uh David, how are you doing? Um this is massive a couple times before, but I have a two-part question about combu today.
Okay. Um is combu fat soluble, i.e., if put combo in oil, will it enhance the flavor of whatever I cook in the oil? Hmm. Okay, so the we're talking about combu, which is uh seaweed giant kelp that uh you know most famously used for making dashi in uh Japanese cuisine, also used for curing things like fish, uh where you wrap uh and also as Nils used to do, duck, where he'd wrap the duck in combu, let it sit, and you develop kind of a cured layer on the outside. Uh okay, so I mean obviously the salty stuff is not really oil soluble, right?
But I don't know. I don't know about the other flavors. Uh we've never to my best of my knowledge, we've never done an oil-based uh combu. I know that the skin of the duck, which has quite a lot of fat, picked up a lot of really good flavor from the combo, though. So I I I know that's the case.
Uh but you know, it's hard for me to say whether or not it's the water uh part of the skin that's picking up the combu or whether it was the oil part. It's a really fascinating question. Uh I you know, you tend to think mainly about um you know uh amino acids, uh you know, and you know glutamic acids in particular and other things getting liberated from combu by the um uh you know, by the cooking process in Dashi. And of course, you know it has all the polysaccharides in it 'cause it's a seaweed and that's what's providing the structure. But I've never thought about the uh never thought about oil.
Uh please give it a shot and send us a tweet and tell us what happens, uh, because uh you know it sound sounds interesting. I'd I'd like to hear what happened. All right. Uh let's be honest with you uh where the question comes from. I was watching uh the recent season of Top Chef, and in one of the episodes he had a fryer and he actually had combu in the fryer.
So I've been thinking about it for a couple of weeks now, about is it fat soluble? Would it really work? I don't know. I haven't tried it, but I did do a lot of research online, so I figured I'd call I'd call the person that might be the answer. Wait, so he was using it not to make a crispy fried combu but to flavor the oil?
Yeah. And and on the on research online did they say it worked or no? No, I couldn't find anything that said that combo was fat soluble or um glutaminic I'm gonna say it wrong, but whatever the acid or the amino acids were fat soluble. So here's what I here here's what I would do. I mean, although you know cross is a blood brain bear whatever.
But like here's what I here's what I uh or it doesn't no. I always get my brain confused. No, one does the other one doesn't. No it doesn't. Yeah it's uh it's not anyway.
So the uh what I would do is um I would just run a side by side uh test where you know uh and then serve it to someone to see if they can tell the difference. Even better yet, do it do a triangle test where you serve them three, two of them are the same and one is different and have them try and figure out which one's which and why fair enough it sounds great. I will just cool the second yeah yeah the second part of the question is I just recently read the article that was written by the food lab on Sirius Eats about um brining uh chicken and turkey and talks about how using a protein br uh brine like chicken stock doesn't flavor the meat per se because the particles in the chicken stock are too big to get into the protein even though the protein expands. Right. Um I question is if you were to put combu in the brine do you think that the glutaminic acid or the amino acids will get inside of the protein or is it does for sure?
Huh I don't know. I mean like a combu definitely flavors the surface of the meat and causes a curing because it has salt. There are the there are s very small water soluble molecules in combu that will do some penetration. I don't know, uh I mean, so you know, uh individual amino acids are not large, but I don't know what their diffusion characteristic through the surface of uh of a meat is. Others, you know, me like because salt is really small.
Do you know what I mean? Right, because the salt is well the salt helps open up the protein strands. Uh right. Well, it changes like it's it shifts it shifts the conformation of the protein, right? And uh uh so but the the I don't know.
I was gonna say I don't it's another thing I uh I don't know. My my my guess is that that you're not getting too much effect past the surface unless you inject it. Or or if you have you know holes in it, you know, but like this is why you usually if you're gonna in like with a broth or something, you inject you inject it in. I mean salts, small molecules, things diffuse through, but uh so I guess that means I'm in agreement with the uh with the serious seeds post, then, right? Okay, yes.
Uh so well, I'm working with your first. Cutting out understanding. Yep. I said uh I said I'm working with an old friend of yours here in Chicago. Oh, yeah?
Yeah, with Musa. Oh, yeah? How's he doing? Yep. He's doing great.
You're really good. Nice. All right. Well, say howdy for me. I I will for sure.
I will for sure. And uh he's uh teaching me a lot of great stuff. I'm learning everything I ever needed to know about hydrocolloids and so that's that's pretty much it. So uh great radio station or radio shells, thank you very much, and I'll keep listening. Oh, thank you.
Awesome. Thanks. Jack putting the reverb even on me. Like that? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
On the thing, thank you. You, you, you, you, you. All right. So uh Josh Krieger's second question in was I have a 14-inch cast iron skillet. I'm thinking about flipping it upside down and using it as a baking steel for pizza.
Is there a temperature where the seasoning on the skillet would start to degrade? I.e., can I use it at 550 degrees Fahrenheit without issues? Okay, before I get into that, so the pizza steel is this thing that uh, you know, the modernist cuisine uh guys uh were saying that they use a very thick piece of steel that they heat up and that develop uh delivers a wallop of heat to uh pizzas uh you know, they say in a more effective way than something like a stone uh wood, and is easier to load the heat into than a stone, right? Now my question is I don't know if a cast iron pan is enough has enough stored energy to do what uh what uh Josh wants here. But that's not the question, so I'm not gonna get into that question because that wasn't the question.
Uh now uh 550 Fahrenheit, you're getting you're getting very close. So let's go back to what a cast iron the cast iron seasoning is. So cast iron seasoning, uh seasoning a cast iron pan, you're you're doing a uh a coup a couple of things. And by the way, uh last night when I saw this question, I went and uh you know, did a re re research because occasionally people like change their, you know, write new things about you know what's going on, so I was just checking up. Uh and I found actually a really old uh thread on the garden web that written by this kind of like it's interesting dude from Louisiana, Dan A.
B. Uh Z9LA for Louisiana on the garden web and not Louisiana, not LA for Los Angeles, LA for Louisiana. Anyway, and he's like a retired chemist, and he has strangely on this garden web thing from like 2007, possibly the best explanation of what's going on in a in uh pancuring that I've read. Uh anyway, so in a pan in a pancury situation, you're taking uh an oil or fat, you're putting a thin layer on your pan, and then heating it till it's past the smoke point, it starts to turn black, break down. So he he says that there's two things that are going on.
One, you're polymerizing the oil, right, by breaking it, breaking it down at uh at wherever it has like a double bond, breaking it down and it's forming a polymer. The polymer is hard, right? But also breaking uh fat down in general uh into its smaller parts and leaving carbon residues. And uh, you know, I looked it up and carbon residues of oils is one of the things people measure, especially in the petroleum industry, because they need to know how much soot is going to be left over when oils are burned or when they're degraded, right? So he says you want that carbon because it the carbon is adding to uh the kind of the non-stick uh principle.
So it's a combination of polymerization of oil and the carbon that's put down. But if you heat it too high, you're gonna break down that those uh those polymers that you put on it. And the problem is that the temperature at which that happens is gonna depend partly on what oil was there to begin with, uh, along with a lot of other factors. I will say this. Um I have burnt the seasoning off of pans in my oven.
Now my oven gets hotter. Remember, I told you before I do pizza in my oven. My oven gets up to like 850, 875 degrees, and it will easily burn the seasoning off of a cast iron pan. Uh the um self-cleaning on an oven which runs a little bit hotter, a little over 900 Fahrenheit, is gonna burn the seasoning off of a cast iron pan. Uh just vaporize it.
Uh I've had pans on my stove overheat and lost uh some seasoning on them when I'm going super, super, super high heat on these little cast iron skillets that I have. So uh I you know, if you were saying 500, I'd say you're okay. If you were saying 650, I'd say not okay. I have a bunch of pan uh stone bowls that get seasoned uh with uh oil, um, you know, the hot stone bowls for Korean food, and I get them up to about 615, 620 all the time, and that wipes out the seasoning on the bottom. So uh, you know, it's it's tough to say.
Like if you can guarantee you're 550, you're probably gonna be okay, but if you go much higher than that, it's gonna be a problem, you know? But uh check out uh check out Dan A B Z9LA on the garden web so you can uh uh you check it out. Another interesting thing is that um uh there's another blog out there, I forg I forget her name is Cheryl Cantor, I forget the name of her blog, but she has an interesting post on cast iron where she actually because the whole the whole point of uh, you know, you're familiar with drying oil like linseed oil for painting. Yeah. So it's like she's like, why not, since what you're trying to do is form a polymer, why not use the oil that's actually good at that, even at room temperature, which is flaxseed oil, linseed oil.
And so she seasons now all of her pants with uh flaxseed oil, and she says she gets really good results because there's a lot of people on the internet that really care about what they what oil they use. And Dan, I'm gonna say it again because I can't. Dan A B Z9LA. You should do it in the army code so people know what they're you know. What Alpha Bravo Zeta.
But I don't know whether he was ever in the army or not. I know he's in Louisiana. People are writing it down, they're not writing down like C instead of Z. Here's why I've never met this guy, Dan, but here's why I like his posts. Because he it's like he just says something, and then like later on you find out that like he's only started dipping his finger in the kind of crap that he knows.
Cause he's like, he's like, I don't know. Because at one point someone asked him a question. He's like, I don't know. I got another good 1015 pots I got a season tomorrow, so I'll test. I'm like, Dan, what the hell is this guy do?
Like he's a retired chemist, and he's like, well, when here's what I do. Here's what I do when I'm re-seasoning my 30 gallon cast iron hog cooker. I'm like, what the hell? You know what I mean? So anyway, so my man, my man Dan, Dan, whatever it is.
Dan A B Z 9 in LA. Anyway, like to meet that guy someday. Uh okay. Uh, oh, and uh Josh Thanks us. He says, thanks as always, the show is fantastic.
Continues to improve the way I cook and the quality of food I produce, which I appreciate. Um Justin Thrasher writes in on barrel-aged uh cocktails in the Cornelius Keg. Hey, what time is it, Jack? 46. Ooh, let's take one more commercial break.
Come back. Cooking issues! All right. Every Wednesday at noon, Dorothy Ken Hamilton, founder and CEO of the International Culinary Center, interviews the top chefs in the world on Chef's Story. Here from chefs like Christina Tosi.
I'm gonna be the best pastry cook this restaurant's ever seen. Francis Malman, who with flyers it's very feminine, it's very fragile, and Jacques Pepin. That was invited to welcome the White House or uh John Kennedy. Learn how the greats become great. Every Wednesday at 12 p.m.
on Chef Story at Heritage Radio Network.org. It wasn't that John Kennedy, it was actually a different kid. John Kennedy's from Jersey. Yeah, it was John Kennedy from Jersey. He was working at the White House at the time.
No, no, yeah, no. I love I love my man Jacques Popin. He's done some, he's done some cool things. You know, he was like, I think he was Mitterrand's uh was it Mitterron Chef? Was he chef for Mitterrand, I think, for a while.
And like uh he's got an amazing story. You read his uh read his uh autobiography I have. He was one he's one of the reasons that I'm cooking today, in fact. Really? Oh yeah, hell yeah.
Jacques Papin, back in the day. I used to watch his show on PBS, and uh when like when I was young, uh, you know, I bought one of the one of the early cookbooks I bought was his kind of mid eighties two part book on uh on on cooking. It was all in color. It was re it was like expensive. I got it as a remainder because it was so far ahead of what Americans wanted to see.
He teaches you how to skin a baby lamb in this book. And so it's his two part series. I think it's called uh the the I forget what it's called. Anyway, but it's not not the large black and white one, which is a fantastic bargain, but two part by knop uh color series that uh Jacques Papin did. Anyway.
Sweet. Well, episode one of Chef's Story too. Cool interview with him. Yeah. Yeah, it's really interesting.
Yeah, yeah, good man. Uh okay. Justin Thrasher writes in. Uh hey Dave, love the show. Listen weekly, and I'm contemplating trying to get cocktails to force carbonate them later on.
Ultimately, I would be able to like to barrel age cocktails in a small two point five gallon Cornelius keg. Cornelius kegs are the uh kegs that are used for soda manufacture back in the day. It's called pre-mix, where you'd mix the soda water and the syrup together in a keg, carbonate the whole thing, and force it out. They look kind of like tall, skinny beer kegs. And the system went out of favor, but uh homebrewers have been using those kegs for years because they're fantastic for small five-gallon uh uh brew sizes for home brewers.
Um they also make a smaller 2.5 gallon cornelius keg, however, they're a lot more expensive than the five gallon. That's just for those of you that don't know what a Cornelius keg is. Okay. Ultimately, I would be able to like to barrel age cocktails in a small 2.5 gallon corneas keg and then later carbonate them to serve. Can you possibly add any of your expertise?
Nope. No, I'm just kidding. That's what Stas always wants me to say. Nope. Uh so here's the deal.
Um barrel aging is uh there's a couple of things going on. So in barrel aging, it typically means it's in a barrel, meaning there's wood. So if you're gonna add chips to this thing, because you're gonna age, because you're gonna you have to add chips, you have to pull the chips out before you're gonna carbonate. If by aging you just mean letting it mellow, so Tony C. Tony Corneliaro, or Canigliaro, as the baseball fans here in the US say, uh, you know, for many years he's aged cocktails in the bottle.
And the aging in the bottle is not the same thing as aging it in uh a barrel. He's doing it like the small amount, the the marrying of the spirits, uh, the reduction of the proof, although he doesn't dilute it beforehand, but the reduction of the proof because of things like added vermouth, plus the little bit of oxygen that's in the bottle and remixing it causes it to age over time in the bottle. Okay. Now, more recently, um people have been barrel aging, and in that case, you have the oxygen effects, the marrying effects, and the effects of wood. But for that you need wood, but they're two semi-related but different kinds of things.
So if you're gonna do it in a cornea keg, you're gonna have to add uh wood chips because corny kegs are stainless steel. Another thing is is you're gonna have to, like I say, remove the wood, but also you're not gonna want to age something in a Cornelius keg like that uh at when it's diluted. So you're gonna have to do it full strength, and then you have to dilute it before you carbonate it. You have to dilute it before you carbonate it. Another thing about carbonating in a cornelius keg and forcing it out with force carbonation is you're gonna need to get that sucker cold.
I like look th I like things that are very bubbly. If you want a very light bubble in it, then you don't need to get it as cold. Then ice water cold is good enough. But for the stuff that we carbonate at the bar, we're carbonating down at like 22, 23 Fahrenheit. I like minus what is that, eight, nine, ten Celsius.
Uh also you're gonna need to buy a cold plate uh because in order to get something out of the keg, cocktails foam a lot. You need to mellow it out. To mellow it out, you're gonna need to put the cocktail through a cold plate to allow it to go along a bunch of uh two like smooth tubing beforehand, and you're gonna need to get what's called a Becker squeeze valve, B-E-C-K-E-R squeeze valve. You can get it from um oh my gosh, I can't believe it. Mark Powers uh in uh Guntersville, Alabama.
They have it, and those valves have a compensator in the back and allow you to do it, and that's the only way everyone I know uh does it uses those valves. I've used those valves for many, many, many years, and the valve is gonna make a big difference. You're also still gonna get a lot of foaming. You're just gonna get a lot of foaming, right? You mean it's just gonna happen.
Okay. Matt Wilson writes in. I'm looking to buy a centrifuge. I'm searching eBay. I found a Hermley CK380.
Uh, and he gets a link. Is this a good candidate for home use? I'm close by and can go pick it up. It doesn't come with a rotor, and I'm not sure how much of an issue that is. Matt Wilson, Matt, that is a huge issue.
I would not, even though it's only like 150 bucks, I mean, unless you know you can buy a rotor from someone, I mean, without the rotor, the centrifuge might as well just be a big doorstop. You know what I mean? So, unless you know you can get the rotor and the buckets for that sucker, I would stay away from it. If you can get the buckets and rotor, look, let's say you can buy another one. The centrifuge looks fine for specs.
I mean, it's got a little small, it doesn't have that large a bucket. So I think it does one liter at a time. But let's say you found another ZK. This is what I would do. Let's say you found another ZK 380 on the internets and it has a good rotor, but maybe it's a little beat up and you're worried about the brushes not being good or whatever.
Buy this sucker for spare parts. For $150 is a spare parts machine. If you already have a good rotor and buckets, that's a good deal. But uh trying to find rotors and buckets uh is like needles and haystacks and buying them new. This is a very old machine.
I looked at the manual online, it's old. Like I would stay away from it. I would always go try to get one that had a good working rotor and buckets, and the rotors and buckets have to be good, not dinged, not like viciously old, not mutilated, and you're still taking a risk by using a used rotor because you don't know what the other person did. You don't know whether they used the bucket to, I don't know, like pry their car door open. You don't know what the hell they used it for.
You know what I mean? Yeah, okay. Uh Joseph W writes in uh at cooking issues. I work at a restaurant in Atlanta. We have a Paco Jet.
What are some good Paco Jet uses other than ice cream in Sorbet? Thanks. Uh that's mainly what we used it for when I, you know, when I used to have access to one at the French culinary, we almost always made ice cream with it uh because it was so good at it. Um, but you know, it well so the there's a new set of blades you can buy uh called the coop set that allows you to do a lot of work with it uh without freezing first. So you can do farces like you know, mousses and meat farces and grinding things with a Paco jet without first freezing everything.
Uh because one of the downsides of everything is that you have to freeze everything. So it comes with a whipping disc, although I don't know why you'd want to whip cream in a Paco jet because it makes no sense. But what it does do is the whipping disc, you can throw fresh fruit in with the cream and the sugar, and it'll whip the fruit directly into the cream without having to do a pre like a puree or something like that. So I guess that's theoretically an advantage. But typically what you would do on the savory side is like let's say you wanted to store a bunch of stuff like herb, and you wanted to uh put like a concentrate or an herb or a puree of that herb into something like a soup.
Um in a Paco Jet, what's awesome is you pack it into a Paco Jet container and you just use the portion that you want, you do it, and then you stir, it's frozen, so it stays good forever, frozen solid like a block. And then you just you know, you spin in the Paco jet whatever part you need and you add that part to whatever you're working on, soup, sauces, and it melts right in, right? Uh certain other things when you're doing farces or or or mousses rather, if they have enough structure, you can freeze them and then scoop them if they have enough structure to hold after they thaw out and s and serve them as is or if or if they're cold. But a lot of things they're what they're doing is when they're making mousses with a Paco Jet, they're using the Paco Jet to make a very, very fine texture. Because you gotta remember, Paco Jet, the texture on a Paco jet is smaller than the texture you can get out of a vitape.
The texture out of a vitape is not quite smooth enough for your tongue to uh not uh register it. The particles are over 20 micrometers in size. Whereas, uh just slightly, uh uh, I think at maximum efficiency for a vita prep. Whereas in a Paco jet, you're getting ice crystals that are crystals, shavings that are small enough for your tongue not to register them as individual grains, i.e., smaller than 20 micrometers, uh, you know, more on the order of ice cream crystals. And so you can make pureees of things that are extremely smooth by freezing them, spinning them in the Paco Jet, and then uh using that pure, thawing it, and then when they're making a mousse, they don't make the mousse directly in the Paco Jet.
Uh what they typically do is they'll freeze it like whatever, what like on Paco Jet's website, they use broccoli. I don't know why they do that, but whatever. Then they cook the broccoli, they put it in the Paco Jet, they freeze it solid, they spin it down, and then they make a mousse out of that with whipped cream and gelatin like a standard mousse. But uh, I don't know. Does that help at all?
Okay. Uh and last, on the way out, because I have uh looks like four minutes. There's uh I don't know, in the in in in I've been at you know how the people reference you well, you don't know because you hate social media, but they reference you in a Twitter thing. Yeah. Anyway, so I've been referencing this in this uh in this line of stuff about uh um Cooks Illustrated and uh and pressure cookers.
They're going on their radio show on Valentine's Day. Yeah? Yeah. All right. So anyway, so they rated cook they rated pressure cookers, and they didn't rate the Coon Recon one, which I like a lot so highly, and they rated the Fagor one uh uh, you know, f highly, it's like one one of their favorites.
And there's all this like twittering around uh on like well, what's good and what's bad and what's not. Um here here's my two, here's my two cents. Because we talked about pressure cookers uh uh recently. Go read Cooks Illustrated uh now has their ratings online. And this is one of those situations where I think their ratings are pretty off based.
Uh, you know, go look at uh Hip Pressure Cooker, uh, you know, the blog that blog. Go look at uh Miss Vicky's pressure cooker. But the the people at Cooks Illustrated dinged the Coon Recon one because they said that it was hard for them to adjust the temperature on it. Whereas for me, it's like Coon Recon, and they also, they said, for letting me read the Cooks Illustrated uh the the um what to call it reviews on this, they said that the Coon Recon evaporated the most water uh of all like many of the pressure cookers they took they took. And it's exactly the opposite of the truth.
The reason I like Coon Recon is twofold. One, it's extremely easy at all times to see exactly what the pressure is inside of the Coon Recon, because there's a spring that indicates exactly what the pressure is inside of the Kun Recon thing. The reason I don't like the Fagor model is because it does not indicate its pressure unless it's venting out uh uh material. And people get this confused all the time. Here's what's going on.
In a pressure cooker, there are two things happening in something like a phagor pressure cooker. There's an indicator that the unit is under pressure at all, and that's a little yellow dot that pops up. As soon as that yell little yellow dot pops up, you know that the unit is under some amount of pressure. However, you don't know what that pressure is. You just know it's under some amount of pressure, right?
Then you keep the thing going and you don't know what's going on because nothing happens until steam starts coming out of the vent, right? So the the Fagor one is a venting pressure cooker, which I don't like. I don't like it because it affects the flavor of things like stocks, at least it has in the tests that I've run with it. Now, the only way to keep it at pressure then is to make sure that you're keeping that little steam going all the time, which I don't I don't like. I've never liked it.
Another thing I don't like is because there's always steam going through that valve when you're working it, that and the valve is a mechanism that turns. That valve gets clogged very easily and gets burnt out very easily. Of the five Fagor pressure cookers that we had at the French Culinary Institute for the five years that I was working with Phagor pressure cookers there, we burnt out every one that we had. The mechanisms got burnt out because they got clogged and they wouldn't hold anymore because they're hard to clean for the students that are working with them, or they would melt out because someone had flames licking over the side and the pressure mechanism, which is very close to the side of the pin and the phagor, would get ruined, right? That's never happened to me in a Coon Recon.
I've had the handles broken off of my Coon recon. I've had the little plate on the top, the diverter plate get ripped off and thrown away, but the sucker still holds pressure and doesn't clog, and the valve is extremely easy to clean. Also, Coon Recon doesn't need the vent at all. If you venting in a coon recon, it means you put it over pressure and the safety is released where where the spring goes up and releases steam out of the same spring valve. So uh, you know, both those criticisms of the Kun Recon.
Coon Recon's also fairly easy for me to uh adjust. So go online, look it up. Coon Recon, still my favorite pressure cooker. Cooking issues. Thanks for listening to this program on Heritage Radio Network.org.
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