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If you like this program, visit Heritage Radio Network.org for thousands more. Cooking issues! Cooking issues! Hello, and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold your host of Cookie Issues coming to you live on the Heritage Radio Network in the back of Roberta's Peter here in Bushwick Brooklyn.
How are you doing, Nastasha? Great. Yeah, doing well. Jack and Joe over there. I actually punched myself in the head during the intro.
Yes, I'm a little stunned. Wow. Yeah. I was just gonna say, after two cups of coffee, that intro song is even crazier. Oh, you only you're only a two-cup in the morning, man?
I'm only two, yeah. Jesus And you call yourself a New York. See, that's what's laid-back life here in uh in Brooklyn only requires two cups of coffee. You know, Nastasha and I, you know, being residents of the island of Manhattan, we require three. Uh uh.
So uh by by the way, speaking of uh of Joel, is uh is he coming in next week or what? Yeah, man, uh he is. It's gonna be a blast. So next week we're gonna have live performance of the cooking issues song. Is that true or false?
That is true. You know, why don't I re why don't I read the email he sent us? Alright, do that. Let's see. So greetings, Joe and everyone else.
I would like to formally commit to appear live on your program entitled Issues with Cooking on Tuesday, March 5th as a guest musician. My assistant will submit my rider to you soon. It includes a variety of single malt scotches and dried figs. As a plus, you'll be graced with the presence of my wife. I think her and Nastasia will get along nicely due to their joint hatred of most things in existence and obsession with shopping for shoes online.
Oh yeah! And much like Nastasia's admitted during last week's episode, my wife also dislikes my thrashabout ways of the long running musical introduction, cooking intro, cooking issues intro, and she would much prefer if I either shut up or play something nice. I look forward to seeing the inside walls of your famous shipping container. Good day to you and enjoy the meats of Heritage Breed. Nice.
Nice exciting, huh? Yes. Speaking of the meats of Heritage Breeds, we also have uh we have a lot of non cooking related stuff they have beginning this time, huh? Yeah, yeah. Uh we have a contest, contest contest.
Become a household member of Heritage Radio Network for $120 to get a free t shirt and the chance to have lunch with Dave and the Cooking Issues team. Visit Heritage Radio Network dot org and click donate. Contest ends March 1st. Is that true? That is true.
Yeah. That's Friday. That's all true. So it's not a long time. No, this is like a a last minute rush to to close out February.
Hell, you know, I might I might I might enter the contest to get a chance to eat lunch with myself. It's a pretty good spot to be in. Yeah, and I was like, I would be there. Oh, but speaking of which, we have uh is this your cookbook here, uh Jack? The Foothills Cuisine of Blackberry Farm?
Uh it's not mine, but it's the stations. Because there's a there's a hint on the cover, which is it's almost ramp season, people. It's almost ramp season. Everyone knows Nastashia loves ramps. I hate them.
You know why she hates ramps? It's not because they're not delicious, because they are. It's just because everyone else likes them. That's why she hates them. It's true.
Yeah. Nice. All right. A little bit I like to have a little bit of Anastasia lore in each uh in each episode. You know what I mean?
Lore. Lore. Lore. Okay. Uh calling questions to 7184972128.
That's 7184972128. Have this question in from Mark Barter about wondra flower. Big hi to Nastasha, Jack, Joe, and Dave. 116 episodes and still going strong. That's true.
Well, kind of. Uh okay, Dave. Uh, you managed to shed some light on the enigmatic oil solidifying Katamaro Tenpuro. Not enough light. I mean, I wish I could actually get the product here in the United States of America.
Anyway, now I've got a new mystery for you. Can you enlighten the dear listeners uh on the secrets of Wondra? Uh, you know, but okay, well, I'll read the whole question. I'll try to uh maybe I should try to not have tangents while I'm while the thing's going on. You think so?
I don't know. I can't. I just can't, I can't. Too uh I can't do it. Anyway.
Uh I understand why Wonder is great for making gravies, but why is it supposed to be so good as a fry coating or for making pie pastry? If it's described as a pre-gelatinized or instant wheat flour, does that mean that it is simply a retrograded starch? Or is it the very opposite a prograded starch? I like pro, not pro-grade, but like pro professionally graded. Anyway, uh because it is a mechanically modified starch rather than a chemically modified starch, could I realistically make my own wondra by taking a low protein cake flour and hydrating, uh heating it, uh to which temp uh to what temperature, uh, Shirley, you have a uh, you know, he's basically saying I have a uh visal I can never pronounce it, visco amilligraph, and I don't have one.
Anyway, uh uh drying it after you cook it and pulverizing it, uh is diastatic malt flour critical component. And finally, I haven't been able to find a retail equivalent to wondra here in Australia. Should I look instead for an Asian African Middle Eastern equivalent? Until next time, Mark Butter. Okay.
So for those of you that uh aren't hip to the wondra, uh what wondra is is a it's a wheat flour, so you gluten folks can't can't mean anti-gluten folks can't use it like Piper. Uh that's so weird. Anyway, uh what it is is it's it's two things. It's pre-gelatinized, meaning it's already been cooked, right? But it hasn't just been milled down to a powder.
So you can't just use a pre-milled uh uh powder, it's also agglomerated, right? So the two key things about wondra is that it is pre-gelatinized and agglomerated. Now I want you to keep that in your head because we have a caller and I'm gonna take the college question and then come back to Wondra. Collar, you're on the air. Hey, I've got a question about country hams.
Oh, I love questions about country hams. Excellent. So I know you're a big fan of country hams uncooked. Yep. And I was lucky enough to be in Louville a week or two ago and picked up a ham at Finchville Farms on my way back.
Uh first of all, great place. Uh visited uh them uh great, great place, good ham. I'm hoping. Yeah. It's hanging in my basement and with just two people in the house, a big ham is gonna last a long time.
Yes. So there's a lot of stuff I want to do with it. I want to cook some of it, I want to make broth with some of it, I want to eat some of it raw. My question is, how do I go about taking this large ham and using the different pieces, making different pieces and using them for different things? Right.
Okay. So with a with a country ham, and by by the way, uh, even though a Kentucky ham is a Kentucky ham, they're extensions of the culture from Virginia ham. And in fact, a lot of the people who uh whose families um are very old ham curers in places like Kentucky and Tennessee are actually direct uh transplants from um from Virginia. So the the culture of Virginia ham uh stretches uh across and is you know country hams as as we know them which means that this current phrase I'm about to give to you applies to Kentucky hams as well as to Virginia hams. But the old joke goes that uh the definition of forever is two people and a country ham because it lasts so long and you can use it for such a long time that it almost never never goes away.
I haven't found that to be the case because uh because I eat so much of it whenever I have one in the house. The first thing you want to make sure is um that you're keeping it properly so uh in the old days um Morris Berger who's uh from Burgers uh smokehouse in Missouri uh you know what they used to do back in but in the days before refrigeration was they would cut uh slices of the uh of the ham out and then wipe lard over the cut surfaces so they wouldn't lose too much moisture uh and they would hang them from thin um from thin like wires in their in their uh in their shed uh to stop uh vermin from being able to get down the uh like a thick rope to get it so that's how they used to do it in the old days um but I mean typically what people do when they have a country ham nowadays is they'll cut the um they'll cut the cushion which is the so if you look at a country ham, right? If you look at the face, the face of it's the the the part that was actually attached to the pig that's not skin. That part is typically very, very dry. Uh and so, unlike a prosciutto uh, which is designed to have a fairly even um salt and dryness level throughout the entire thing of the meat.
In American country ham, typically the face is going to be very dry. On the reverse side of the face, you'll have the cushion, and the cushion is the kind of thick muscly part. And because of the way country hams are hung in the U.S., uh they tend to be a lot um thicker and therefore a lot less dry uh than uh the rest. So, what a lot of people will do is remove the cushion, right, uh off of the off of the ham and then slice that one separately for more of your presentation pieces you're eating, uh you're eating it uh as a crude o situation, uh, and then you will take the um the face section and use it for uh stocks and whatnot. I tend to do very, very little uh cooking of it because I mean it just gets so s it gets so tough and salty when you cook it, but it's amazing, like sliced and put over over eggs, you know, and then just letting a little bit of heat hit it, or as a substitute for things on pizza thrown in at the end of the of the cook time, usually on the pizza to just sizzle it up a little bit.
Um I what I used to do, I had a meat slicer, so what I would do is I would bone the thing out whole and then just slice it and enjoy all the all the different portions. But at home, it's very difficult to bone out uh a country ham. So but the way to do it is to take it and to locate where the kind of uh the the joint is in there, right? Saw through that with a hacksaw, if you have a meatsaw, that's good. Saw through it with the hacksaw.
The back side of it has some meat that can be sliced once you get that little uh piece out, but there's less and less meat as you get towards the edge of that bone. I would trim off uh some of the very outside fat. You want to keep the majority of the fat there, but the skin itself sometimes can have a little bit of a funky flavor, and sometimes you can have little areas of taint and uncured stuff running down the bone sections of it. So you want to remove any parts that you don't like, and then um the parts in the tail you can use for trim, they can be added to ground hamburger meat, anything like that, or stocks and soups. The face also, because it's so dry, stock soups, or like grated sometimes if you really dry it out, and then the cushion for your more uh you know fancy applications.
Once you saw through the ham at that joint, then you can um then you can either cut the cushion off whole or take a knife and and debone it. It just takes a while. And be careful not to the only time I've ever broken a knife in my entire life of cooking is on an American country ham. Okay, you you so you don't uh you say you don't uh cook them, but they recommend if you're going to soaking it. Yeah, that's true.
I mean, it's just if you're gonna cook it, the salt level is too high. So you need to get some of the salt out of it and equalize the salt content, especially in the face. So, you know, my grand what my grandma used to do in Virginia was uh she would throw it in a in a pot of water, let it get all you know, they she would soak it in a couple of changes of water, almost like you would do like uh bacalau, you know, or or or baccala, depending on where you're from. Uh, it's not necessary if you're going to if if you're not going to cook it. If like the issue with the cooking also is the the recommendations on an American country ham because of USDA guidelines.
Here's what's perverse. American country hams are a ready-to-eat product. You do not need to cook them. Uh, however, in terms of safety. Uh however, like our traditions come from uh um England on this, and in England, hams are traditionally uh cooked, even though our hams are more akin to the hams that you would get in in terms of you know, in terms of Spain and and uh parts of France and Italy, uh in terms of their actual dryness and their uh their usefulness in that way.
And so we tend to cook them even though they don't need to be cooked, and in the old days, the way you would cook them is you might soak it for a little while in water, and then you'd stick it in a giant lard can with water, bring the temperature up, and then just let it ride overnight. You wouldn't be and so the actual inside of the ham wouldn't be cooked to that high of a temperature because it doesn't actually need cooking. They're just softening it and cooking it a little bit. You see what I'm saying? So the recommendations that are on the uh packages for country ham, because they're based on USDA cooking of meats are absurdly high.
It is not possible to make a country ham that tastes good following the recommendations that are on the package. Uh the other problem is is that we're used to eating ham in general sliced extremely thickly, and you don't want a piece of country ham sliced that thick. So if you are going to cook a ham, and it and cooked hams are good on things like biscuits or fried and put on eggs, you want to slice it extremely, extremely thinly. And and and country ham is not meant to be you know your main source of calories at a meal. Country ham is meant to almost be a seasoning, it's a seasoning meat.
Do you see what I'm saying? Yep. Good. All right, good. Well, thanks so much for calling in, and I always love any sort of country ham questions.
Thanks for your answer. Thank you. We have another caller, caller, you're on the air. Hey, we are here. Nice.
What's up? So uh hi, we're we're Tom and Tonek in Chicago. Uh thanks for taking the call. Um so we have a whole pig head split lengthwise that we want to serve whole. And I have two questions.
First of all, we want to do it in the circulator. I want to know the best way to uh have a whole pig's head in the circulator. And second of all, I want to smoke half of it, and I want to know how the smoker and the circulator play together. Okay, so how big is the pig's head? Um, it's like an adult pig head.
Wow, so so big. Can you can't do you have a vacuum machine capable of uh bagging it? I have access to one. Okay. Yeah, so I mean, uh the two schools of of thought about this.
If you want it to taste if you bag it and cook it in a circulator, the meat's gonna hold together nicer, which is going to make it easier to do uh like a whole a whole prep. The problem is when you cook it in a circulator that way and you pull it out, uh usually the skin is gonna get a little bit damaged, and so you're gonna have assuming you're gonna crisp up one or both sides of it and have the the skin side be crispy, right? Or no? Yeah, yeah. That is our plan.
Yeah, so the the the issue on a lot of things like pig skin is it gets extremely delicate during the cook process. And so what you're gonna be doing is a two-part cook, right? Where you're gonna be uh cooking and gelatinizing the skin and the meat in a low temp cook, and then you're gonna be doing a crisp off process. And you just have to be careful that you don't damage the surface of the skin in the in the in the process. I mean, it's why you might want to think of doing uh instead of a circulator, if you have access to a combi, you might want to think about doing a combi.
Uh or but you know, circulator will work fine. You just have to be careful, careful with the skin. As long as you can bag it, you should be alright. The vacuum level is not gonna hurt uh meat like in in a p in a in a pig head. I've never done a pig, I've never done a head with the bones in it, so I'm not sure you're gonna draw some of the stuff out of the of the bones, uh, and I don't know how much void space there is, i.e.
how much bag problems you're gonna have around things like the teeth, which means you're gonna have to put oil into it to take up any spaces that are in the teeth section. Is this making sense or no? This is making perfect sense. Yeah. Uh the only other thing that you have to think about now is whether you want it to be more of a traditional low temp cook or whether you want it to taste more poached, a la what you would get in a head cheese, right?
And so if you want it to taste more poached, then you're gonna have to put some stock in with it instead of oil. It's a this is a totally uh a question if you do it that way, it won't hold together as well as if you do it in uh oil, which is essentially what I would think of as a as a dry cooking technique, even though it's in a bag underwater, right? I feel like the poached head cheese thing is the opposite of what I'm going for here. Okay, so then no liquid in the bag, just oil, and then you'll get more of a dry cook thing. I would unbag the pig's head when it's when it's hot.
Uh and uh although remember when it's hot, the skin's most delicate, right? Because when you take a pig skin and you cook it, it's extremely delicate because it renders out the gelatin. Then when it gets cold, then it's it's it's fine again. You can work with it because the gelatin resets. So if you the reason to unbag it hot is to flash off some of the liquid off off the surface of it so that it's gonna be able to pick up a smoke better, right?
But if if you're gonna have a long time between when you're gonna cook it and and uh and when you're gonna finish it, then you could cool the whole thing down gently, unbag it, uh, and then I would I would like kind of bring it up to temp blow the excess moisture off the surface if you can, in like a in like a low convection uh, you know, with the door open so that the moisture leaves the the the skin section, and then you're gonna need to do either a roast off or the after you blow the moisture off of it, uh put it in the in your smoker, smoke it up. It should take a smoke fine after after it's been cooked, so long as it's not wet on the surface. Okay, so in general, this is like one of my big questions listening to you for years is so if I'm gonna do it, if I'm gonna do a cut of meat in the circulator and in the smoker, I want to circulate first, dry it off, and then put it in the smoker. Huh. I mean, that's just the way I would approach it, but now that you say it, I see no reason why you can't smoke it and then throw it into the bag.
I mean, it seems like it would work either way. I mean, uh the the issue is I mean, I presumably you have a cold smoker, right? Yep. Yeah, I mean the only advantage I can see of smoking it afterwards is you have no uh there's no safety issues involved because you've already done the cook the kill step. Um and if you were gonna smoke it hot, then I mean it depends on how long you're gonna smoke it.
If you're gonna smoke it only for a little while, pick up a little bit of flavor, you're not gonna get like a huge cook through on it, it's not gonna be a problem. But you know, on the other hand, if you're looking for the opposite of a poached flavor, you're gonna want to evacuate some of that moisture off of the surface of the meat anyway, in which case I think it might be advantageous to do the the drying after it's been a little bit of drying after it's been cooked along with a smoke process. You know what I mean? And then and so you're gonna smoke it then crisp it? Oh, we lost him.
No, you didn't. We're still here. Oh, okay. You're gonna smoke it and then crisp it or no? Yeah, I think that's the plan.
Yeah, I mean, uh you look, you could do it either way, and I'm also assuming that you're gonna do a pig's head at a relatively elevated temperature compared to normal low temperature cooking. Uh yeah. Yeah. Well, now how high would you do a pig set at? Well, it depends.
I mean, so like for instance, uh, it depends on how traditional you want it to taste. Do you know what I'm saying? So if you want it to taste more like uh like a confie, uh, I would do it at traditional confit temperature. When I do duck, for instance, uh, I do duck legs at traditional temperatures just in a bag so that I won't require an uh a lot of extra fat and it won't overcook and it won't dry out. Um so you know, I do duck legs all the way up at, you know, eighty, eighty-two in that range.
You know what I mean? Like uh a traditional range, simmering ranges. Uh whereas if you want it to taste uh a lot if you want an entirely different result, then you're gonna go in the much lower range in the mid-sixties, let's say, but it's gonna be a different result from what people would normally expect from a pig's head. And it's gonna take a long time for the skin to totally render to gelatin at those uh low, low temperatures. Do you know what I'm saying?
I know exactly what you're saying. That's really helpful. Thank you. Hey, no problem. Thank you.
Hey, it uh send us a Twitter or give a call and tell us how it worked out. I will try to do that. Thank you very much. Well, thank you. Oh, we have another colour.
You know what I eat before I take a call? You know what we used to eat all the time? Uh splits lamb's head. Like roasted in the oven. Good stuff.
Yeah. Capuzzle. Anyway, caller, you're on the air. Hey, Daniel from uh Austin, Texas. I recently bought a uh rotovap, uh Beauti, I think R110.
Yep. And uh I got a dry vacuum uh that's coming via eBay, but I don't have a controller, and uh I want to kind of keep my costs down and I don't know. I recently got modernist cuisine, but they don't really give any guidance as where to get a vacuum controller or what to look for. I I know I want something digital, but I really just don't know where to start. Okay, so the vacuum controller that you're I mean the vacuum pump you're getting is it is an Edwards BOC dry vac or just like a a Welsh dry vac?
Is it piston? What what kind of pump is it? It's a piston. Okay. So uh how good are you at electronics?
Uh I'm I'm okay at it. Um I mean I I have a BS in chemistry. I took some electronics courses. I kind of mess around with stuff. All right, because they the oh yeah, there's there's some good news and some bad news here.
So by by the way, for people we're talking about is a rotary evaporator is a vacuum distillation uh, you know, uh piece of equipment. It's used in chemistry labs uh and increasingly in kitchens, and the premise is is that by uh doing your distillation at uh under a vacuum you can reduce the temperature and also reduce any possibility of oxidation of the product. So it allows you to do very gentle uh distillations with very clean flavors of things like herbs. Okay. Uh now the the good news is well, is this for a restaurant or for your for home?
It's for home. Okay. So the good news is is that you can allow it to be a little bit fidgety, right, if you're doing it at home, especially at the get-go. Uh bad news is vacuum controller, so you you we can get this done. That's not a problem.
The bad news is actual built vacuum controllers are ridiculously expensive. That's from my experience, yeah, I'm looking them on a UBS. Yeah, they're they're crazy. The the piston pump that you're getting is what, like the Welch, like the Wobble trip? Wait a second.
I uh it's uh I'm gonna have it in front of me. It's a Pfeiffer vacuum MVP uh dry pump. Uh and I don't really know much more about it since it hasn't come in the mail yet, frankly. Right, okay. So here is it the the easiest, cheapest way to get started is so so any leak in a vacuum system in a rotary evaporator that happens prior to uh leaving the condenser unit is completely detrimental to flavor, kills your flavor.
But uh a bleed in the vacuum system in between the condenser and the vacuum pump is a fine way to regulate your vacuum pressure at the get-go. And for years, before I had a vacuum controller, I just used a needle valve, like a very small, you know, eighth-inch NPT, which is national pipe taper, uh needle valve that I put onto a uh T off of my vacuum line, and I just had my vacuum pump going great guns the entire time, and I would bleed a small amount of air into the system to regulate the pressure, right? And so as a first approximation, the first test, right, then that'll get you off the ground running and figuring out distillation and your rotor vap and all of that stuff for you know under 20 bucks, right? Now the next level above and you should be constantly searching vacuum controllers on eBay, right? Yeah.
That's what I've been doing. The next level above that is you can get yourself a uh vacuum gauge. And if you get a vacuum gauge, uh then you can at least tell where your a digital vacuum gauge, you can at least tell where your system is sitting at any one point in time. Okay. The next level above that is you could build your own controller, uh, you know, use the if you go to Aubur instruments, they have a lot of the parts to do this for reading vacuum, and they can be tweaked out in um because that was that was something I was wondering about.
Is it just uh gonna be a gauge plus a feedback loop essentially? Yeah. Well, there's there's a couple different ways to do this, right? If you need to if you're gonna buy, so you have a dry pump, which means it doesn't have any oil. If you have an oil-based pump, the the control logic is a little more difficult because you have to worry about switching an oil-based pump off and on, because if you switch an oil-based pump off and on without uh you know, just keep doing it, you have possibility of backstreaming oil into your system.
But because you have a dry pump, that's not an issue. So you you can put a uh you can just put a valve, like you know, like a solenoid valve there that's rated for vacuum, uh, and then uh, you know, a um uh a vacuum sensor and just put it on a loop and just ha have it go. The problem is is that the really expensive nice vacuum pumps uh and controllers, they have uh the the motors are controlled like pulse by pulse, they're pulse controlled. And so they can actually slow the motor down towards the end of the vacuum cycle rather than just you know going on and off with a set number of millibars of hysteresis, right? Um you know, so that's you know, so that's what the nicer vacuum control gets gets you.
The really nice vacuum control bases it on uh the um the really that no one has because it's only in the bigger systems is you here's the secret is that you want to know what the vacuum level is because it's telling you what the actual boiling point is. The the boiling point of your water the the sorry, the set point of your water bath and a roto vap really has only a marginal amount to do with what the temperature of your product is. In the same way that when you put uh a flame underneath a pot of water, the flame doesn't have a direct uh impact, the flame temperature doesn't have a direct impact on what the water temperature is because it's not going to go above a hundred, right? Celsius. So uh your water bath temperature is not an adequate uh indicator.
Uh the only thing that's adequate is the vapor temperature, right? And so you could develop a control. I would put a vacuum gauge on it, but if you really want to be uh you know, kind of you know ahead of the curve for most people, is I would uh put a uh thermocouple gauge in your in your uh condenser and measure the the measure when the temperature knee happens between the condensing and non-condensing condensing section and run your vacuum that way. Oh, so that instead of looking at the vapor line on the condenser, have something that detects it automatically and turn and slows the vacuum down to reduce the vapor line? Is that so when you yeah, so so I would definitely start with a needle valve to get a handle on the how uh distillation works, and then uh but if you if you know if if you're used to rotor vaps at all, when you put your hand again your back of the your hand against the condenser and you go up and down the condenser, you can feel where it goes from warm to cold, right?
And that's where you're and and you can visually see it on as a condensation line. But you could just measure the temperature between uh the the vapor above the condensation line and below it, and you'll see a sharp break. And so if you just control the vacuum to put that break exactly where you want it on the condenser, you can keep it at saturation for all day long, and you don't really care what the vacuum pressure is, so long as it's not wildly high or wildly low. So I would also have a gauge so that you know where you are. Yeah, that's genius.
Uh does the thermocouple have to be it can be outside the condenser, I would assume. Uh maybe the condenser without breaking it is what I'm worried about. Yeah. I mean, try try it, because it's very simple to try it that way. So try it external to it and see whether you can get an accurate enough result, and if not, then try to figure out a way to put it on the inside.
Okay. Is it is it worth buying a vacuum controller then? Do you think? Do you think I should vamp up with these solutions? I mean, look, I love having a vacuum controller, but it's also made me lazy so that I haven't built it the way I want it, which is temperature control the way I'm telling you.
So yeah. Oh, one last thing. Uh, if you don't have plastic coated glass, uh then I would recommend always wearing safety goggles on that thing because it can be uh it could be an eye hazard if it implodes or wrapping it in electrical tape. Okay. I I had one other question.
I'm having some problems with the bath that they sent me. Uh it occurred to me that I could just use my sous vide as the water bath. Do you think there's gonna be any problem with that? It's not a problem, it's just messier. You know what I mean?
Like it's just like using uh a regular uh a regular circulator. I mean, I've done it in a pinch, it's just really messy, and the circulator head doesn't really fit nicely with with the thing. So the water bath ends up being a convenient way to do it. You know what I'm saying? Uh because it's built for it.
But if you're having problems with the water bath, there's nothing to stop you from starting by using a circulator. I have done it. Okay. All right. Well, that was very helpful.
I appreciate it. All right, let's know how it works. Alright, and let's go to our first commercial break. 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.
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What up, Dark? Boom! Boom. Okay, so listen, I have not forgotten you. I have not forgotten you, um, Mark.
We're talking about wonder wondra flower. Okay, so uh if you go back to the uh beginning section of the show, so wondra uh is two main things. It is both pre-gelatinized, meaning it's been cooked, and and then wondra is cooked in a moist environment because trying to cook out a flour uh in a non-uh moist environment doesn't work the same way. It doesn't do the same stuff. So it's cooked in a moist environment to gelatinize or functionalize whatever you want to call it.
Uh gelatinize the starch. And then it is milled and then agglomerated. And what agglomeration is it means that if you look at Wondra, you can see it. It looks porous. It looks like I'm trying to think of what it looks like.
It looks like it looks like little like mini pumice stone tiny rocks. And what are the benefits of agglomeration? Okay. Well, so the benefits of uh pre-gelatinizing is it will go it will go into solution in a cold liquid, right? So because it goes into solution in a cold liquid, uh, it doesn't require uh a lot of heat and moisture together to become functional, which is why in low moisture things like uh pie crusts or like in cakes, it um it can functionalize very quickly.
In fact, if you look at if you look at a pie crust uh uh under uh a scanning electron microscope, most of the starch granules haven't actually been cooked out, they're mostly still intact because there's not enough moisture in that recipe to uh get them to do their thighing. So you can um, which is good because you actually don't want a lot of structure, but sometimes you want to like you know, sometimes you I don't and I haven't used wondra in it, but the theory being that because you're adding a pre-gelatinized uh thing, you'll get some extra uh starch functionality out of it. And I guess it's also low protein, so I guess that's helpful. I don't know. Uh in that.
In a cake, I read about its use in in uh in in cakes, and the idea there is that you don't need to do a lot of mixing to get the starch to perform its functional equivalency, so you don't have to overbeat the the dough because the stuff's already pre-hydrated, right? Uh obviously, it's you know the main uh use that everyone uses it for is uh making gravies without lumps. And the reason it makes gravy without lumps and also can be added cold, right? Uh, is the agglomeration. And it in normal particles, fine particles have a couple of problems with them.
They're dusty, right? There's a lot of dust involved, and that's one of the early reasons that people wanted to use the wonder was to have stuff around that wasn't dusty. Two, uh, when you agglomerate the particles together, uh, it's very easy for water to infiltrate the particles and break off uh small, small pieces of this uh flour and then hydrate. Uh and that is not possible if you just add uh flour and fine particles because those particles tend to clump uh as they're trying to uh go into solution, and as they clump, they form a layer of gummy crap around them, and that layer of gummy crap actually prevents the stuff on the inside from getting wet at all, and because it doesn't get wet, it doesn't dissolve. So the agglomeration helps with dissolution, right?
And the pre-gelatination pre-gelatinized thing means it's already cooked out, so it will thicken stuff when it's cold. That's awesome. But also, uh normally when you use flour, you have to what's called cook it out to get rid of that raw flour taste, and there is no raw flour taste in wondra because it's already been cooked. All right. So that's what's going on with the wonder.
The question is how are you gonna do that uh at home? You can't really make wondra at home. You can't. But there are a couple things you can do uh that you can buy outside of the US of A. One thing is national starch, national starch makes uh a product called ultra spurse uh three, and it's a pre-gelatinized waxy maize starch, right, that is agglomerated.
So uh you see if you like, and there's a big thing, like a lot of uh I've talked about on the show a couple of times. Some chefs used to recommend Ultra-tex, but I always recommend using Ultra spurse because Ultra-tex is a pre-gelatinized starch uh that is not agglomerated, and so it can form lumps, and ultra spurse is a uh pre-gelatinized starch that um is agglomerated and so will not clump up on you. The only reason to use uh to not use spurse is spurse is a little more expensive than tech's, but for most home cooks that's not really an issue. And the other good news is Ultra Spurse is available on modernistpantry.com and they will ship all over the world, and I don't mind saying that even though they're no longer a supporter of our ship. No, I like them.
Yeah. All right. Yeah, good people. Uh so yeah, so they will ship that all over the world. Now, uh if you don't want to um do that for some reason, right?
You're gonna have a tough time making your own pre uh gelatinized agglomerated starch. But instead of agglomerating, if you don't mind cooking the product out, and you're gonna use it in something like gravy, uh, you can separate flour particles using some old school methods. And the one that I'm gonna tell you now is Bermani. Bermani is where you take butter, uh, which will not uh you know, it does not solubilize the flour, right? And you mold butter and flour together into little balls, and then you can stir those balls into your gravy, and because you separated the flour particles with fat, they no longer stick together, and as the butter melts, it releases small flour particles into your solution and it tends not to lump up as much.
So there you go. Either buy Ultra Spurse 3, which is uh a very good uh substitute for things like thickening and can be used in baking applications, or go to uh something like a bermani if you just want a quick way to thicken a gravy and you can't get your wonder. What do you think, Stas? Good job. Good.
Oh, thank you. Okay. Uh Ben from San Francisco writes in uh this is about his uh Thanksgiving uh thing of the jig. Uh Hello Heritage Radio. Valentine's Day, no?
Yeah, Valentine's Day. What'd I say? Thanksgiving. Oh, geez. My brain fried.
Okay. Hey Joe and the rest. You like that one too? Wow, look at Joe. Yeah.
So much love today. I know it, right? It's Ben from San Francisco again. Dave, my apologies for not reporting back on the Valentine's dinner I made for Anjali. Your advice was excellent.
Oh, thank you. Anjali has forgiven me for listening to your podcast during our vacation. Well, I'm glad. I'm glad. This is what Ben said he did on the Valentine's Day, not on Thanksgiving correction.
I ended up cooking a rack of lamb at 55C for two hours, uh bringing it down to 50 C before deep frying. I salted after unbagging from Sous vide as you and others have suggested, and I got better results than normal. Deep fried lamb fat is a bit funky, but with a side of a ratatouille and harissa yogurt sauce, everything came out really well. I also did biscuits. Biscuit stars.
I also did biscuits with apricot preserves. Mmm, biscuits, and thinly sliced smoked pork jowl. Sorry about the biscuits and stuff. Finally, I had to do uh finally I tried to do a jackfruit custard sous vide at 83C, but it didn't set up in the fridge. Turned it into a jackfruit jackfruit creme en glaze.
Nice save, Ben. Uh uh poured it over lemon vanilla cake, and no one was the wiser. Just a quick note. Jackfruit is awesome. Tastes like juicy fruit gum and looks like a face hugger pod from aliens.
Yeah, yeah, dude. And there's two kinds, there's a several main kinds of jackfruit. Remember, Styles when we cut the jackfruit off the trees in Florida, and no one told us that like you're supposed to like cut it and then let it sit on the ground for a while. And I got the latex all over my shirt and I ruined the shirt and I ruined my knife, and I was screaming and cursing because I couldn't get the latex from the jackfruit off of my knife, and it was a huge nightmare. Uh we have uh I guess what's his name?
Campbell, Richard Campbell, and Norris Leedsma is their name. We have their book on jackfruit back in my in my library on jackfruit. Uh jackfruit, if you've never had it, is delicious. Uh I don't like the I mean the canned version's whatever, okay, but really good first introduction to jackfruit for you people. Go to an Asian market and get the jackfruit chips, not the crappy ones, but the nice ones that are all puffy and delicious.
And they uh do have a juicy fruit note. They're awesome. Anyway, so uh Ben's question is my question. I'm planning to barbecue pork shoulder and brisket. I understand that to avoid the stall caused by evaporative cooling.
I need to wrap the meat with foil when it stops rising in temp at roughly 155 Fahrenheit. Uh barbecue joints don't seem to ever wrap their meat uh, though. What if anything am I losing when I wrap the meat? Are all these famous Southern barbecue joints just doing it wrong? Thanks again, Ben.
Okay. Uh well, let me put it. The the the proof of the pudding of the Southern barbecue joints is, as they say, in the eating. And having eaten in kind of in Texas style uh barbecue with actually Chris Young from Modernist Cuisine, while in fact discussing uh the stall that you're referring to during to evaporative cooling, right? Uh we we learned one thing.
And we learned that that meat is delicious, it's delicious. You can't argue with delicious. You know what I'm saying? Like, so the barbecue joints are not doing it uh wrong. Uh similarly in North Carolina, uh uh, you know, the meats that they're making there are delicious, and so it's not that they're doing it wrong.
Uh in modernist cuisine, they're advocates of stopping the stall by wrapping because they're advocates of doing sous vide cooking in general. However, I do not find that sous vide cooking is better or worse. It is different. If you like uh so the meats done in a traditional way are gonna be drier in general and gonna have a different outside uh surface texture than you would if you did it sous vide. It'll also have a different internal texture because they're gonna go to a much higher temperature than they normally would sous vide, and the meat tends to actually have a different structure.
Uh so to me, it's not a matter of better, it's not a matter of worse, it's just a matter of uh different and what you prefer. Yeah? Yes. Yes. Caller, you're on the air.
Hi, it's Brian in San Francisco. How are you guys? Doing well. How you doing? I'm doing swell, thanks.
Um it is citrus season over here, and so I am making gonna try and try my hand at lemon curd and orange curd and grapefruit curd. Um I have seen some recipes which you know use the traditional eggs, and some add agar to them, and I've seen some that add gelatin to them. And I'm wondering, do I need all those extras and and uh what do they do, or could I do it with just uh eggs or egg yolk? What do you think? And best technique.
Huh. Well, uh you know, um let me see. I haven't made one in in a long time. Presumably you're adding the gelatin, uh I mean the the I you don't need to add gelatin, right? Or agar.
Or agar. No. Me, look, the reason to add agar is so that you um don't have to use gelatin, right? And agar has the agar has a second benefit uh over gelatin in other than just it's vegetarian. Uh it has uh the benefit that if you're going to have this thing sitting around in a hot climate, right, then uh agar won't melt out on you.
Agar is not as good uh uh a texture for things like this because it breaks in more of a brittle way, which isn't necessarily which isn't curdie. Do you know what I mean? So if you were gonna do a curd that was going to be uh you know stirred and then spread, then I would say agar is a very poor choice. But it would it would do so, or you know, you could make a fluid gel for that matter out of it, and then you wouldn't set it with however much egg yolk you want. Um so I mean the agar I've never I've never done, but seems seems like it it would it would work.
I don't I don't think they're necessary. There's a more like insurance, right? Wouldn't you think so? Hello? Yeah, like just it just just in just in case.
Like for instance, the one from Modernist Cuisine doesn't use anything but egg yolk. Right. That seems to me to make sense. That sucker will work. Okay.
Uh so you think skip the skip the gelatin, skip the agar, just go with the egg yolk. I mean modernist cuisine, like the great thing about modernist cuisine, uh and I haven't looked at their custard section uh in in a million years because uh, you know, I I haven't actually shelled out the money for the book yet, so I only looked at it when I'm hanging out with uh Chris or with another. Oh, at home, yeah. And so like they have like these parametric things. They've done a lot of tests on the number of egg yolks required and the temperature required to set various various things.
Uh and so I think their their research on things like that in particular is probably extremely reliable. Okay, one question is, you know, most of these recipes are for lemon curd, um, but if I want to go with other kinds of citrus, well that and I do choose to go with agar when or or gelatin, will any of the acidity be uh be an issue? No, the acidity level for something like agar, uh I mean I've done plenty of uh sets of things like l lemony things with agar and uh similarly I've never things with agar that have a problem are things like cassis, things with high tannin levels, or things that are extremely acidic, but you're not likely to eat something that is so acid that the agar is not gonna set as a result. So I think you're gonna be um you're gonna be okay. Um, you know, the only issue is is that you might add less sugar to something that's not as tart, and so then your texture is gonna get changed by the fact that your sugar ratio has changed.
Does that make sense? So if you're gonna do it from a different citrus, I mean I think the main thing is gonna be your acid sugar balance has to come in, and then your sugar level has to be the same uh or the texture won't be the same. Uh so the sugar level impacts the agar? Sure. No, the sugar sugar level well, sugar level will impact uh agar because you're impacting how much water there is available to the agar to set, but sugar level will also affect uh egg yolk proteins if you're setting it that way.
So I don't know whether the w whether the modernist cuisine has that meaning a specific sugar ratio for the egg yolk that they talk about, but I know that different sugar ratios affect the setting uh temperature and the finish uh strength of um egg protein gels. Yeah, they say here uh when they scale it, it's 30% yolks, 75% sugar. Right. Sounds about right. Yeah.
Yeah. So you want to stay in similar ranges. Okay, wonderful. Thank you so much. Um I think I'll try it uh the old-fashioned way first.
Nice. Well, tweet us out and tell us what happened. Okay, great. Thanks. Have a good day.
All right, thanks. Uh oh, by the way, Ben also at the end said, P.S. still waiting for the Kickstarter project to be announced. Listen, here's what's going on, Ben, and anyone else who cares. Uh a Kickstarter project.
The reason we can't talk about it is our lawyer, our patent lawyer, is not allowing us to say a darn thing about what we're doing until he files the patent. But it's supposed to be filed this week, so if all goes well, I should be able to say what it is next week, right? Right. That looks really good. Uh Nastasha now talking about something you can't see.
That's typical Nastasha style. Somebody is eating some sort of what looks like a low temperature cooked piece of beef uh out in i i in in the audience. Okay. Uh I'm gonna have to blast through this. Colin Arneson writes in about ice cream.
Uh Nastasha Jack and Joe, due to health reasons, my mother cannot have dairy. This wouldn't be that much of a problem for her if it weren't for ice cream. She's been buying tofu ice cream for a while, but is getting tired of it, partly because it only comes in one flavor. Oh, there used to be a whole bunch of different flavors of uh tofu ice cream. You ever had that stuff?
Nastasha's like, why would I do that? I eat dairy. Okay. Uh uh partly because it only comes in one flavor. Any ideas for creating a dairy-free ice cream base?
I've heard of people subbing out coconut milk for dairy milk, but she doesn't care for coconut that much. And I'd be worried about the texture since coconut milk has less fat, 4.25%, compared to most ice cream bases, 10 to 20%. I've been thinking about making a fake milk with emulsified oil and water. Any input? What oil should I use?
Need to have uh similar fatty acid makeup to milk fat. I don't have any emulsifiers or hydrocolloids at the moment, but I'm planning on getting some stuff from Modernist Pantry anyway. Although also I have no vita prep, though I do have a blender, so that's out of the question for the time being. Thanks, uh, Colin Arneson. Okay, look, one thing.
Uh okay, so I I know that your mom doesn't like coconut, but I'm just gonna talk about coconut for a minute anyway. First of all, uh the numbers on the coconut milk that you have for the coconut milk that I use are are not the same. Coconut the coconut milk, I and this morning I took a uh uh can of coconut milk, Goya coconut milk, out of the back of my uh out of my pantry and looked at it. Um and the stuff that I have is running at like 16% fat. So the coconut milk that I have runs between like 15 and 17 in that range percent fat.
And so it is actually useful for uh doing um ice creams. What I typically do when I'm doing ice creams is mixture of coconut uh milk and coconut cream or cream of coconut, aka Coco Lopez, no relation to Nastasha. Uh and then uh, but I know your m I know your mom doesn't like it. But anyway, so let's break down an ice cream. Let's break down an ice cream uh recipe real quick.
Alright. So my rest my ice cream recipe is 500 mils of uh cream uh uh with roughly 36% fat, 36.6, uh 10 egg yolks, uh also at roughly like 26% fat, uh, and 500 mils of milk at like you know uh three and a half or f you know four percent fat, 170 grams of sugar. And what that recipe makes out to by weight is uh 18%, 18.5% fat by weight, and about 12.5% sugar by weight. Alright. So what you need to do when you want to come up with a recipe is just balance out uh those numbers.
Now, the reason why everyone uses coconut milk and coconut fats for uh ice cream recipes is because coconut milk and coconut the fat from coconuts has a very similar melting profile to butter fat. So it's a solid when it's cold and it melts by the time it's at body temperature. And that profile is very good for ice creams, right? And that's why they do it. You might want to consider looking at a little article uh done by um uh the American Palmoil dot com.
They have an article on uh using palm palm oil uh and uh you know, not not the liquid stuff, but the the more solid stuff. And you could go get that uh article or just get palm oil uh that and just use that maybe in emulsified and the other advantage with using it in uh it's already in coconut cream or creamed coconut is uh that it's already uh done for you. Uh in fact, if you buy Coco Lopez, it's got all kinds of stabilizers in it already. Uh so that you can I just like saying Coco Lopez. Uh but you can uh buy all kinds of stabilizers.
So just out of you know for your for your information. Coconut cream, which is the Asian stuff that not a lot of people buy here, is 26% fat with no sugar on average. I looked at some labels on the internet. Egg yolks are 26% fat. Cream of coconut, which is Coca Lopez, is 13% fat and also 56 bricks, meaning very high in sugar.
Coconut milk is 15 to 17% fat. So something that and what I did is I just entered all the stuff into an Excel spreadsheet and then came up with some numbers. So if you did uh if you did uh 11 egg yolks, 280 grams of coconut cream, the Coca Lopez, uh, and 730 uh you know grams of um coconut milk, you'd come out with very similar numbers to regular ice cream in terms of fat and sugar. But if you don't want to use coconut, you could try using um I mean it's hard. I mean, coconut milk is really good.
I've used peanut butter in ice creams as a partial substitution for some of it. But remember, when you move away from using any sort of dairy, you're also gonna have to not just replace the fat, you're gonna have to replace the dairy proteins because they're also functional. So you're gonna have to move to something like a soy protein or soap protein isolate or something that's uh high in protein that can provide some of the effect of the non-fat milk solids. Um sorry I couldn't be more help on that, but uh, I'll try to think of some formulations, have someone else uh send some stuff back. Um the other advantage of using coconut milk and coconut cream is that you don't have to use a blender because the stuff's already been made into a nice uh texture for you.
But I gotta think of some non coconut because I make coconut stuff all the time uh actually for ice cream at home because I have some people who don't want to eat the dairy sometimes. So I always have in my freezer some base that's made from uh coconut milk and coconut cream. And it doesn't really taste coconut y if you put a whole boatload of chocolate into it. Uh I found. Uh okay.
So listen, I'm gonna get kicked off the air in a second. But uh Alvin Schultz, you got a question about savory pop rocks. Uh I don't have time to talk about it this this week, but you can buy savory pop rocks, uh just blank pop rocks online. I believe at Chef Rubber. We'll look it up for next time.
Uh Jason Mulnari wrote in about cooked meats. He says you always mention your oven gets up to 800 degrees plus. What residential oven does that? Or did you hack it? I hacked it.
I put uh I I put two separate extra heating elements into my oven uh that are controlled with an external PID controller uh and embedded in a refractory cement. So I uh I hacked like everything else, I hacked it. Um residential oven does that except for on the self-crean clean. Some people out there have hacked their self-clean cycle, but I'm not gonna recommend you do that because I don't want you to burn your house down, but it's definitely hacked, and it wasn't a residential oven to begin with, it was uh it was a uh garland with a and it's it was it's a gas electric hybrid that I've uh tweaked out to do pizza. Okay, uh also Joseph W.
wrote in Dear Jack, Joe, uh, and the rest, Nastasha, question about broth. Uh thinking ramen in particular, would it be possible to make a broth with unrendered lard instead of or in place of some of the bones, then cooling the broth and removing the fat layer. In this scenario, all I care about is flavor. Don't care about the clarity or any other issues. Thank you.
Okay, if you like the flavor of lard, you can include it. I do not think you're gonna get enough uh enough collagen out of just the lard without the skin uh to have the effect you want in the broth to get the mouthfeel right, right? So if you happen to like the flavor of just like rendered lard, then you can put it in there. I'll tell you this though, having done like pork skin cook-offs for doing uh chicharones, the smell of just pork skins cooking alone in water is not pleasant. Right?
Yeah. Or beaver skin. Or be no beaver skin, much less pleasant. Although I kind of like it. It's very woodsy.
But anyway, so just be careful of that. If you include skins, then you're gonna have enough uh stuff in there, but you're not gonna get any meaty flavor from it. You're just gonna get that fat lard and skin flavor. Yeah, that gelatin flavor. Okay.
Uh Philip Watson, uh dinner party menu crisis, making reverse verified mint jewel at the start, but what apt to follow? Some form of pig, help. Do uh pork belly, do pork belly, do cook it low temp, press it after it's done. Uh let the air dry a little bit, slow render the skin till it's crispy, cut it in low slices, make some sort of nice sauce, cut into cubes. Everyone likes that.
Uh all right. So they're gonna kick me, they're really gonna kick me off the air in two seconds. But listen, I read this article in the New York Times magazine called The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Drunk Food by Michael Moss. I was extremely disappointed at the way the article presented things. Uh, and we're gonna have to talk more about it in general.
It's this guy won a Pulitzer Prize, but this is not, I don't think, Pulitzer Prize winning uh uh work that's being done here. Um I think it's very one-sided, very biased, uh, and also miss misrepresents a lot of the actual science that's going on and cherry picks the science about what's going on with uh with uh salt and with sugar and with fat. Uh I think misrepresents uh kind of um not necessarily the cause of why we're having so many health issues here, but definitely provides a no solutions and b puts all the blame on marketing strategies of companies instead of on the larger issues that are going on. And I'm gonna talk more about it hopefully next time. I'd like to get some comments in from people.
I also hope that the Museum of Food and Drink, uh, and we haven't talked about it before, details to follow. I want to do a show uh where at you know, with the museum, where we're moderating, and I want to get hardcore real scientists and food policy experts on the air in real reason debate, not one sided junk that's all either from an industry perspective or all either from an anti industry perspective. I'm sick of the way this stuff is portrayed in the media. I'm sick of the way this stuff is portrayed uh in general, and what we need is something like hardball, uh the you know, a political hardball. We need like Chris Matthews, we need something like that for what's going on in the in the food uh in food.
And it doesn't exist yet. Hopefully, we can do something uh like that here on this network. Details to follow. Cooking issues. Thanks for listening to this program on Heritage Radio Network dot org.
You can find all of our archived programs on our website or as podcasts in the iTunes store by searching Heritage Radio Network. You can like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at heritage underscore radio. You can email us questions at any time at info at heritage radio network.org.
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