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Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live in the back of Robertus Pizzeria in Book Reap Brooklyn, joined with is Joe still on tour? Yeah. How's it going, the tour? Pretty good.
We just checked in with him. He's uh he was on the road driving to Austin, doing a million shows in between, screaming his brains out. Nice, screaming his brains out. Good call. Uh okay, so not with Joe, but with Jack and of course always Nastasha the Hammer Lopez.
How are you doing, Mastada? Good, thank you. Yeah? Two and one? Good.
Call your closures to 7184972128. That's 718497-2128. Gonna get right into it today. Morton Madsen from Denmark writes in. Hi Dave et al.
Question on quail eggs. I've been making a quail egg recipe based on the NOMA cookbook called Hey Smoked Quail Eggs. I'm not gonna pronounce it like he writes it in Danish, like I can pronounce that thing. Herberged vi vagtaleg to leg. What do you think?
That's pretty good. Yeah? Alright, okay. Uh in the recipe of the eggs, although you know what? I was in Denmark for a day, and like it's so weird, it s doesn't sound like uh whatever, anyway.
Okay. In the recipe, uh the eggs are blanched for one minute, 30 seconds, then cooled, then blanched for 50 seconds, and then cooled again to set the white. So the idea being to double blanch, I would presume. I don't own the cookbook, I haven't read the recipe, but the double blanch, I assume, is to hit the whites as hard as possible without overcooking the yolk. I mean, it seems to me that's why.
That's why. That's the guess. Okay, after this step, the eggs are peeled. The recipe then goes on to smoke the eggs for 20 minutes with hay and then pickle the eggs before they're served with smoke from a smoking gun. For my recipe, I skipped the hay smoking step and instead put the eggs in a water bath at 64 C for 45 minutes to slightly set the egg yolk.
By the way, six uh 45 minutes way more than you need for quail eggs. Quail eggs cook through in like under 15. There's the they're so fast. Remember, uh the the speed at which like you double the size of something and the amount of time it takes to cook through to the center for a given set of uh variables is multiplied by four, not by two, and the same thing goes in the other direction. You reduce something by one half, and it's a quarter of the time it takes to cook.
So it quail eggs cook incredibly quickly. Anyway, which is why presumably they're only blanched for 30 seconds and then 50 seconds. Okay, okay. Uh my question is the following Is there any easy way to peel the eggs? He stumbled upon one of our favorite things to make other people do, which is peel quail eggs.
Rice? I used to love doing that to interns. Peel these quail eggs, and then we sit there and yell at them when they ruin them all. Okay. Is there an easy way to peel the eggs?
As of now, it is a pain. I've used a pair of tweezers and carefully peeled them. That sucks. The time spent per egg is long, and even still I end up destroying half the eggs, true. I do seem to struggle with the fact that the membrane of the quail eggs seems to be extremely tough.
You're correct. Uh I do prick a small hole to puncture the air cell in the bottom of the egg. Without this, the egg white above the air cell does not set as much, presumably due to the insulating effect of the air cell. So far, I've tried to use older eggs. Uh uh as uh at least for chicken eggs, older eggs are easier to peel.
And you're wondering why this is the case, which I'll explain in a minute. I've tried modernist cuisine trick of blowtorching the eggs to make them easier to peel. However, this result uh resulted in either exploding eggs because of excess heating or too little to no effect on the peeling. Do you know what the desired effect of the blowtorch is? Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's to uh uh dry and expand the shell at that one point to help it pull away from the membrane.
The whole point well, we'll get we'll get into it. By the way, Paul Adams, our our buddy and popular science writer who is testing our our blowtorch thing on a jiggy right now. He says that uh the torch thing is good for peeling the eggs because you don't get the scorch marks on it. Anyway, nice. Um however this results in exploded eggs or blah blah blah.
Do you know what the desired effect of the blowtorch is? Is it a question of generating steam beneath the membrane to detach it, or is it to dry out the shell or something else? At least some combination of all those things. I've read that pressure cooking is sometimes employed on commercial scale to cook eggs, since this could make peeling easier. I, however, see no way of doing this on the s uh on the small quail eggs.
I do, however, make sure to have a rolling boil when I blanch the eggs. Maybe I can steam my eggs from the vent uh on the pressure cooker. I've also seen examples of people removing the shell with an acid but expect the egg to become inedible after this treatment. Another consideration will be using the technique seen on this video, and I'll tell you what the video is. Um the video is this guy, and you can get there's this one, there's also a crazier, crazier one of a guy with like a hardcore Scottish accent and no teeth.
I think it was Scottish. Anyway, so you hard-boil the egg, you break the egg on the t-on uh like a little bit on two sides, and then you put your mouth over it. Here's where Nastasha starts cringing, and you literally blow the egg out of the shell. You keep the you keep the shell uh intact on the sides, you create air pressure behind it and blow the egg out. And I've seen it on the YouTube a couple of times.
Let me just say this is not recommended procedure if you're going to serve people uh food. No. No. I mean Nastasha would do it and serve it to you, but she wouldn't want you to do it and serve it to her. Mm-mm I wouldn't do it.
You wouldn't? For your own egg you'd do it. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway.
Okay. But uh that technique brings an interesting question. If you are going to do soft so I'm gonna start with something you didn't ask because it's my nature. It's in my nature to do that. We uh used to have a thing where we would try to circulate uh soft quail eggs at 62 and 63 Celsius, right?
So the egg the white's still kind of really gloopy. And then the question is how do you crack them out of the shell the same way that you crack chicken eggs out of the shell that are at 62 and 63 because it's almost impossible to do it you know normally by just cracking it and opening because as you rightly point out the membrane of the quail eggs is incredibly tough. So here's the way to do that we uh the little quail egg toppers the little quail egg cutters they look like cigar cutters you uh you take the egg and you clip both the fat and the thin end of the egg so that you have air hitting both sides and then you can shake out the uh the egg gently onto you know whatever you want toast or whatever and I found that we get almost zero breakage when you're getting when you're taking quail eggs out that way. So we went from almost entire breakage where we'd have to you know get twice as many quail eggs as we needed to almost no breakage when we're doing quail eggs that way. So it's just clip both sides and shake it out.
And what reminded me of that is that is head freak Show blowing the egg out with his uh hard-boiled egg out with his mouth. Okay. Um the the the article you should first of all the article you should read in general, and it's available on uh the internet for free is the effects of cooking methods on peelability and peer and appearance of eggs by Kenneth N. Hall and Hong Wan Li out of 1997 in Good Old Stores, Connecticut, up there at Yukon where they did the study, right? If you have a copy of uh Stedelman's uh Egg Science and Technology, that's an okay reference too, but really just for a succinct um you know description of what's going on, that that 77 uh article is great.
So here's the deal. Uh old eggs are better for two reasons, and it depending on who you go to, even on the egg uh dairy council, egg board or whatever it is, incredible level egg, they they will only talk about one or the other of the reasons why older eggs are good, but not both at the same time. Here's what happens. As eggs age, CO2 leaves. As CO2 leaves, the uh egg whites become more alkaline, right?
Uh and simultaneously the air sac between the two membranes and in the fat part of the egg becomes larger. As that membrane becomes larger, there's more air in there, and air between those two membranes facilitates peeling, and so that uh facilitates peeling. However, the increased uh alkaline nature of the egg white also debonds the protein or makes the protein bond less strongly from the white to the membrane and therefore also facilitates peeling. So it's a dual effect of increased air in that egg in the in the thing and of um and of increased alkalinity over storage, which is why very fresh eggs can be difficult to peel. In the 1977 study, they uh they they found that piercing the the fat end of the egg where the air sac is does not necessarily help in peelability.
The bad news is is that the the actual data for all this stuff is all over the map. Pressure cooking, right? It turns out that the majority of the benefit, first of all, also you're gonna get better peelability if the eggs go into hot water. All the studies show that putting in cold water and bringing it up, it causes the eggs to be less peelable. Although there will be more cracking of the eggs if you put them into hot water initially.
But the eggs that don't crack and get destroyed that way will be easier to peel if they go into uh simmering or boiling water as opposed to being brought slowly up from cold. All right. So though that those are two things that affect it. Also, the way you crack it affects it. So the the way that they uh they if you if you go on the internet and you want a fascinating thing, look up egg peeling machines, and you can sit there and watch these machines various ways peeling eggs, but they all do some variant of the uh crack and roll to break the shell up into a bunch of pieces but leave the membrane intact so that you then can peel it off without it shatter without it um without it ripping the egg.
So there's that. But this the pressure cooking is very interesting, and um I've never done this technique, but I looked into it and it's it's mentioned in the article from 1977, and a lot of uh stuff was done on it, I think by Hit Hip Pressure Cook, who you know we've spoken to on the uh on the Twitter a couple of times, and she she might have written in here once, I don't know. But uh she was doing uh pressure cooking of peeling eggs, and and the here's the deal. Uh it turns out that it's not, and it's written in the 77 article, it's not the high temperature of the pressure cooker that is in fact making the eggs easier to peel. What it is is is you do a quick release of the pressure uh after they're cooked, and the quick release of the pressure causes uh the shells to like pu puff out a little bit from the egg and rupture and therefore make it easier to get the eggs off uh to get the shell off of the egg.
So the question is how can you do that in a quail egg because quail egg uh cooks so fast? Well, you have to be quick on your toes which means if you have to be able to get your pressure cooker up to pressure extremely quickly like extremely quickly and by that I mean very fast so uh you know like you want as much water as you can in there like a small load of eggs uh close it or if you have an autoclave or like a Frankie commercial pressure cooker that can get up and down like in a matter of seconds you might be able to get the eggs out fast enough to not overcook them. I don't know. But it's it's definitely the pressure uh going you could also probably literally just uh put the eggs under pressure in like an ISI or something like that uh and then just vent the pressure real quick and have the eggs pop open but I'm just thinking of that as we're saying I I haven't really thought of it. I haven't I mean I've thought of it because I just told you about it but I I haven't tested it because I just thought about it.
Uh one I had one last thing to say on egg egg peelability but it's out of my head. I guess uh it doesn't exist anymore. It couldn't have been that important. I feel like it was very important but you know who knows? I'll never remember because I don't remember what I've already said and what I haven't said.
Anyway I hope that's somewhat helpful uh on eggs and their relative peelability. Okay. Uh Ivan writes in on Vermouth. Hey Nastasha Dave, Jack, and Joe Although Joe, no shouts to you because you're shouting your head off out there in Austin right? Yeah.
Yeah. Exactly. Yeah if you're not here no shouts if you're not here. You know what I mean? No love unless you're in the studio.
That's how that's how it works. Uh there is an Aaron Fairbanks in the studio. Oh Aaron uh Aaron Aaron from Heritage Radio Network you want to come in and make a pitch for the radio for the radio network Aaron while you're in take a short break from talking about Ivan's Vermouth question to do a pitch for the uh for the Heritage Radio Network and all the good things that uh they do. Welcome, Aaron. How are you doing?
I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. Yeah, nice. Nice. I like it.
I like a little pop in. Anyone feel free to pop in as a uh you know, guest. So uh so what's going on? What's going on with the Heritage Radio these days? Now what's not going on?
Things are blowing up. We've got tons of great people coming through the studio to do interviews. We're reaching out to college campuses across the nation, trying to get the most radical progressive thinkers and food coming to the network, sharing what's going on in their communities and just building on the existing stuff, like the great work you guys do on cooking issues. Yeah, man, we wanna we wanna be giving space for all voices. Yeah, yeah.
That's why that's why we have Musta Nastash and I are together because you know, we uh never agree almost, right? I mean, she won't talk about it on the air, but you all know how she feels because I'll go off on it. So that's what you need. Speaking of uh people disagreeing on air, how are we doing with the uh Museum of Food and Drinks series? We're gonna it's gonna happen, right?
It's totally gonna happen. I'm super excited. We get some amazing people in here. What we wanna do is have strong conversations where people are maybe yelling, but not yelling necessarily over each other or particularly at each other. Um but I think yeah, moving forward, looking to hear from your guy Peter, and then we're gonna rock and roll.
Yeah, sounds good. Yeah, we are we're already uh talking about some topics that we're gonna bring up. And uh I mean I think the format is gonna be probably that I'm just gonna ask questions of people, moderate them, and hopefully, you know, at the end of it, we'll have to break out the Crisco for the big wrestling match, right? You know, I'm more of a fan of jello pudding, but if Chris goes away to go, you are the expert. Well, we can we can go either way.
I mean, I was thinking more of like kind of you know, uh trying to pick up a greased pig. I'm more of a gr I never went to a jello wrestling thing, but I have seen people try to pick up greased pigs, and it's hilarious. I'm thinking more again at the college campus outreach, you know, it's just a thing that students relate to. The jello thing, yeah. Yeah, I see.
I'm too old. I don't know, you know, it's to me. I'm like, you're wasting all that jello, all that knocks. Could have been used for something good. Anyway.
Anyway, I do want to I do want to make a little pitch for membership. I mean, the cooking issues, uh, team cooking issues listeners are definitely uh one of our primary sources for membership, and that's really the one of the main funding streams that keeps the station going, allows us to build out new programs to bring you more Dave, to bring you more Nastasha. And to buy us more, and pizza. Yeah, thank you to Robertas. Thank you to everyone who sponsors and everyone who supports, and we hope that you know, you out there listening, will want to be part of that too.
Yeah, nice. Cooking issues. Earth ranch grass-fed beef. Oh yeah! Pasture raised on 150,000 acres in Central California.
Whoa. Hearst Ranch, grass-fed beef, free range, sustainably produced. Humane. Hearst ranch, grass-fed beef. The authentic flavor of the American West.
Woo. Damn Skippy. Damn Skippy. Love that thing. Okay, new new competition.
Submit your cover version of the Hearst Ranch grass-fed beef song. Oh yeah. Right? Oh, yeah. Yeah.
What do they get? Hearst wrench beef. Grass-fed beef. That's fair. That's what they get.
That's fair. That's fair. That's fair business right here. I'll make that happen. Alright.
I like that. Alrighty. Uh, okay. Oh, uh, speaking of which, Jack, we have a question later. I'm gonna give you some heads up right now.
They want recommendations in Brooklyn. I have a couple of. Oh, we connected with John, yeah. Yeah, but you know that I have uh like an aversion to crossing water unless I have to. Not really.
I mean, I'm not afraid of water or bridges, but I'm just joking about it. But like, you know, Nastasha and I, I don't never eat out. Nastasha eats out all the time because I got the kids. I'm I'm home with the kids. But um Nastasha eats out quite a bit, but prefers to eat out in Manhattan.
But we have some recommendations for Brooklyn. But think about it. Think about it for a minute. I was thinking Nastasia would handle that one because she's Miss Brooklyn, you know. I heard she was opening a restaurant in Brooklyn, actually.
Yeah, right? A uh craft beer bar, actually, Jack. Well you know, we could really use a craft beer bar out here in Brooklyn. I know, there's nothing out here. You can't, you know.
Anyway, there's no there's no Brooklyn pride or love of beer out here. None. None. Cocktails, forget it. No, it's just nothing.
Nothing. Nothing. It's all McDonald's out here. Okay. Uh Ivan writes in.
Hi, uh, Anastasia, Dave, Jack, and Joe. First, love the show. Discovered a few months ago. I've been making my way through the back catalog. I'm around episode number sixty.
Ouch, you got a long way to go. Uh, right. Just skip it all. It's all useless, no, I'm kidding. Uh, you've made my commute much more fun and helped uh quite a bit with my cooking knowledge.
I've recently got my hands on some wormwood, and I'm thinking about making my own vermouth. I live in Toronto, and the iron fist of the provincial alcohol monopoly only gives us a very limited number of choices. Martini and Rossi, Cenzano, Noy Pratt and Stock. And not only oh, uh not only that, they charge you way too much. The tax in Canada, I was shocked.
Shocked. I went to Vancouver a year and a half ago with Don Lee, the master of all, like kind of back of the like the Don Lee, master, anyway. So um, it turns out that uh bottles of Hendrix there are like little gold nuggets, and we were able to carry them around and trade them for large amounts of delicious sandwiches uh from the street trucks because your alcohol laws are so nutty in terms of the uh uh the taxes there. Anyway, I I digress. More to the point, they're all sold in largest bottles, which sit for month months in my fridge, eventually going flat.
Uh flat meaning I guess oxidized, not flat, because they're not carbonated anyway. I'm a home consumer and my wife is not particularly fond of vermouth cocktails. You gotta work on that. You gotta work on your wife there, Ivan. Gotta get, you know what?
If you got the higher quality vermo is it, if she likes cocktails at all, right? Unless she's only a citrus cocktail person. If you get the right vermouse, you can probably get her on the on the Vermouth Vermouth cocktails. Um okay, uh first of all, before we even go any further with the rest of this question, hold on a second. Uh like I'm gonna say this.
What you should do is get a bunch of smaller bottles, get your vermouth, bottle it in the smaller bottles with almost zero head space, cap them and keep them in the fridge, and they'll last almost indefinitely that way because they won't further oxidize, right? Once once the once you've gotten all of the air out of them. All right. But uh so I would say that uh and then you have a question in a second about like how to make your own. I'm gonna get to that, but first caller, you're on the air.
Hey Dave, it's Mike from Fort Collins, Colorado. How you doing? Good. How are you? All right.
Uh I got a question about using a circulator for making cheese. I'm wondering if you've ever done that and you know how I'd go about doing that. No, I mean, uh so presumably the for those of you that never made cheese before, one of the critical um one of the critical aspects of uh the production is exactly the temperature to which the uh curd is heated during the renting thing because it determines a lot of things about the final pay structure. Presumably that's why you want to do it, right? Yeah, exactly, because it's easy to scorch and stuff.
Sure. Uh so the problem with uh I mean uh the the main problem with it is is that I mean you can't directly circulate it or you'll completely gum up the works, and you know, you don't want to have that much movement in the thing. So, you know, you could you could do um bath in bath in bath, you know what I mean, where you where you stick a uh like a stainless steel like half hotel pan into a like a lexan, fill it, you know, put it up with water, clamp the clamp the hotel pan down to the lexan with uh with spring clamps so that it doesn't pop around because I'll tell you what that's irritating, having had it happen to me many times. Uh and then circulate it. The problem is is that your heat transfer is going to be quite limited.
So it I mean not limited, but in other words, uh when you're heating with a uh a a a flame or something like that, right? You know, you're using a large delta T and a hue and a large thermal input in there to get the temperature up relatively quickly. Now you'll get a relatively large thermal input but your your delta T between what you want in the curd and what you're heating with is going to be uh you know minuscule. Now you can set the water bath like ten degrees Celsius higher than you want to go and then just monitor very carefully and you won't scorch but you still have the problem that you might overheat it. And then at the end you can turn it turn it down so that it it gets up.
But that that's an easy way to do it. Now if you for some reason wanted massive circulation once you once the stuff breaks and you and you have we and reasonable size particles you can wrap a um you can wrap a circulator in cheesecloth. I don't know that I'd recommend it though because I've never seen a recipe that requires that much agitation like a circulator would provide. I don't know what it would do to the to the the structure of it to have it like literally pumping through like that. Do you know what I'm saying?
Yeah I feel like all recipes want it to be pretty stagnant. Yeah. I mean or like you know the such stirring to the extent that they want to you know accomplish certain things or if you're cutting the uh or if you're cutting the curd apart like in a cheddaring process or any one of those things or you're breaking it but not like constant pumping around. I've never seen a recipe that advocates constant pumping around. You know what I mean?
Yeah I haven't either. Yeah. But try the bath and bath and give yourself like a like a like a delta T of like maybe 10 C and then when it starts getting close you can turn it down and then you can like soak it at whatever temperature you want for you know however long you want. I mean the circulator is fantastic for that. Cool.
I'll give it a try and let you guys know how it goes. Alright, yeah, good luck. Uh tweet us over on someone tell me what happened. Cool. Thanks.
Alright, cool. Back to Ivan. Okay, so uh now where I last left you, Ivan, uh, I was trying to help you keep your vermouth lasting longer. And by the way, when you come to the United States, buy yourself some, because we have an amazing selection of vermouths nowadays down here that are a ma delicious, and buy some and bring bring them home and then you know, trade them on the street for sandwiches. Uh, but you uh you continue.
I've looked at recipes online, and they all suggest boiling the botanicals in a bit of the wine for about 10 minutes and then mixing it with the rest of the wine, sugar, and fortifying with brandy. The problem is this would also yield a full bottle size, which would end up going equally stale. Although I told you you could solve that problem by putting them in like micro bottles and then only using what you need. Also, uh a vacu van on the top of the bottle in between uses in the fridge uh is uh is is also helpful with that. Um I thought a possible solution would be to infuse the botanicals in the brandy at room temperature, filter them, and then have the vermouth base that would last much longer.
In this way, if I uh have a glass of white wine left over, I could just mix in an adequate uh proportion of vermouth base and sugar and have a truly small batch of homemade vermouth. As a side benefit, I could use the same base for sweet or dry vermouth just by altering the amount of sugar uh and whether it gets caramelized or not. Do you think this procedure makes sense? Are there any issues I should take into consideration? And as a side note, the spice herb ingredients change a lot from recipe to recipe, but other than wormwood, which you know, you don't actually technically need wormwood, but wormwood is the source of the word.
Vermouth, wormwood, you know, vermouth. Anyway, uh I don't even know what language I'm imitating, some sort of Germanic thing. Okay. Uh, do you think there uh are any can't miss botanicals in a vermouth? Looking forward to having vermouth forward cocktail with my own product, uh, because you are partial to the martinez.
Uh well, I mean, I like uh I like uh verm vermouths and um you know that kind of aperitif thing with uh I like some with quinine in it, you know, like quinato with quinine. And you can get the uh the bark uh conchona bark or you can buy, I mean, I would do that. That's probably easier to do work with, but you know, the classic things. Uh people put things like uh oregano and rosemary and stuff, but Nastasha's making a vegan face over there. Uh but you can also put in sweeter things like uh vanilla or uh citrus peels are very popular.
I like classic other things like gentian. I like oris, but I don't think that's classic. I don't think people would normally put oris in, but I like oris, but you gotta be careful with it. I like things like fenigree, but you could add almost anything. The you know the issue is you don't if you add like a million different things, you get that kind of spice door smell.
Also, bear in mind that when you are using these botanicals, the quality of the botanical varies widely depending on the source and therefore the strength of it. So it's very difficult to follow a recipe written in grams that's made with a dried spice because the actual uh potency of that dried spice can vary over, you know, I wouldn't say in order of magnitude, but at least a factor of two or three times, right? Uh and and they can be very different. So like when I I like coriander a lot. Uh and so there are various different kinds of coriander.
Some have more of a citrusy note and some some don't. So you just gotta be uh careful of that. Now back to your regular question is can you steep it in the high proof? So the reason that they ask you to do it in the low proof and then for the fortification is to make it last longer, okay? And to bolster it.
The reason they have you infuse it in the uh in the wine first and then add the other stuff is so that you don't boil away too much alcohol, right? That's the reason. Um sugar is also gonna add to the preservative. So you could uh you know, you could seal a seal a bag or seal a uh a uh flame-proof bottle with a cork. Don't seal it so that it can build pressure and explode because that would be dumb.
And you can heat it there without evaporating alcohol, and that's the way I do hot infusion of liquors all the time. Just be very careful that you're not hard sealing a container that can explode when you put because the liquor is gonna boil uh at a much lower temperature than the water. And you can infuse things that way, and you could have an herbed base. Uh, you know, so you know there are like very bittered herbed uh drinks like Swedish Baska Droppar, which is like this incredibly bitter like uh wormwood uh thing. And presumably you could add it to wine.
I don't think the result's gonna be exactly the same because infusing at a lower proof is gonna provide a different result from infusing at a higher proof. However, it might be delicious. You never know. Uh I would, you know, I would I would assume that the results are going to be different. Every time you change how you're infusing something, what the alcohol level is, the temperature level, the length of infusion, all things change.
So you might be able to get a delicious um product, but I don't know that you'd get the same product uh you know as a classic classic made vermouth. And also these vermouths are gonna want to sit together and marry a little bit before they get totally integrated. So I'm gonna think that you're not gonna get a hundred percent uh the same result, but you might get uh a delicious ones. I mean, it sounds sounds what you're doing is more akin to uh making more akin to making a bitters and then adding the bitters to the um to the wine, although uh a dilute bitters because you're gonna be adding more than you would for a bitters of a couple shakes. Does it make sense to us?
Uh anyway, I hope that helps. I don't think that was very helpful, but there you have it. That's what I got. It's what I got. Um Ryan Bone.
I'm gonna, you know what? Ryan Bone wants uh questions about cookbooks, but I'm gonna do that last because I'm probably gonna spool off into into Never Never Land, right? Right. That's because that's what I do. Yeah, okay.
So well, Ryan, we're gonna get you last. Uh Bob writes in, thinks that we should name the torch thing Torch Trap. Right. Torch Trap. Yeah.
But it sounds like I'm being trapped though. Right. Sounds like it also positive thing. Right. Although I mean it is descriptive, but like, you know, people are like, why would I want to be trapped?
I don't want to be trapped. I want to be set free, right? This is what like Bob, this is what what happens when you're dealing with people, like you'll think you have something really good, and they'll be like, then like one idiot is like no, no. This is why any of you out there are in the i i in the like think you're gonna have kids in the near future. Don't tell anyone outside of your partner what the heck names you're thinking of.
Because you know what? You don't want to hear it. And by the time you name the kid, no one's gonna be like, that name sucks. Because they can't. They can't.
So, like, like we have the classic problem here of too many outside uh people. You know what I mean? And then, like, so I'll give you a classic example of that. Remember the uh the I forget they're were the Ernst and Young, they used to be whatever they used to be. And no, Anderson or whatever it was, uh, the accounting like firm, the consulting firm, right?
They're now called Accenture, and that's what happens when you have a name by committee, Accenture. I don't like that name. Do you like that name, Stuzz? Accenture. No, that's bad.
That's bad. I mean, no offense if any of the listeners, I'm not saying the company is bad, and the person who uh won that won a huge amount of money, I think, for getting the name right, so they're laughing all the way to the bank. But it, you know, I just I just don't think it's a I you know, accenture. Accenture. Accenture.
So it's so it's so name by committee, am I right? Yeah, named by committee. Sounds like maybe it could be a car. Maybe. Although I know the clamp that we're making to uh sell with the torch thing, ain't no one gonna change the name of that.
That thing's a jed clamp. It's a jed clamp so that I can say to someone, go jet clamp it. Yes, you know what I'm saying? And I don't care. I don't care.
People are like, but I don't I don't get that joke. I don't care if you get it or not. It doesn't matter to me. It's a jet clamp. You see how easy it is when you have a conviction about something?
Yes. Makes life so much easier. Uh Sam writes in about Sam KB, in fact. Writes in about Chicha. This one uh got uh Stasza a little queasy because she never thought about it.
But uh here we go. Cooking issues crew. I'm five months into a year-long research project in the Ecuadorian Amazon. That kicks some serious butt. Right?
Yeah. The Amazon. I've never sp I've never been to the Amazon. I gotta go. Uh uh, you know, I'm fascinated by that.
You know, I've been to Columbia a bunch of times, but never down to the Amazon reason or to the Choco. Although apparently, if I go to the Choco, uh I won't come back alive. Like, I might come ship back as a food product, but I'm not gonna like Choco is like completely, you know, unlike it's like everyone everyone from Colombia, and I know you're talking Ecuador, not Colombia, but everyone in Colombia is like, well, what do you think about Choco? Oh, amazingly beautiful. Can I go?
No. You know what I mean? It's like not controlled by anyone. It's crazy. Uh because it's whatever, we're not gonna get into it.
Okay, um, I've had the opportunity to eat some pretty amazing foods, including fried grubs, smoked cured monkey. You know, that's the one thing I can't co-sign, although you explain later, but I can't co-sign them the I can't do it. I can't do much. Crocodile, uh, arapaima, which is uh the largest freshwater fish in the world, and damned ugly. So ugly.
Yeah, Google that thing, Stas. I'm like, you know, go for all uh A R A P A I M A. A big ugly freshwater fish. Uh and a number of four legged animals I cannot identify. Uh I like that you stay away from the two legged animals, just in case.
Um uh okay, uh, can't identify. While some of these animals are threatened with extinction extinction, I'm only consuming them while living in indigenous communities whose hunting practices may actually support conservation efforts. In addition to these animals, I've been consuming copious amounts of chicha. Not corn chicha, but boiled a yucca, cassava root, uh, which women and only the women chew spit into clay pots, add water to it, and let ferment for up to four days. The chicha is slightly sour, mildly alcoholic, and has a thick, whey-like texture, uh, not way like, you know, the like kind of, you know, Mexican word for like, you know, ombre.
Like whey like whey in milk and whey. Uh fish. Yeah, the fish is ugly. Uh with a noticeable saliva undertone. It's uh actually quite good.
My question is, how would you mimic this and reproduce the saliva undertone in the United States? As my assumption is serving human saliva would neither be well received nor legal. Uh not sure the legality of using animal saliva either, probably not gonna be okay. Uh, but if we can eat tongue or blood sausage or horse tartar, uh well, remember the horse tartar thing was a mistake. People weren't supposed to be eating that.
That was uh, you know, uh uh what's called fraud in in the Europe. Uh I don't really see why we although you know it's illegal. You could you could have it. Anyway, I don't really see why we couldn't eat fermented llama saliva. I'm interested in experimenting with chicha and other cooking applications besides just using it as a drink.
Let me know what you think. Love the show, Sam KB. Okay, first of all, before I get into your question, uh uh hoo-ha recently over the a lion. Someone was trying to uh uh outlaw eating of lion, and so we got a bunch of calls yesterday because uh wrote a post uh a long time ago where one of the things we ate was lion, and so everyone called me to expect me to be some rabid defender of eating lion meat. And in fact, we no longer buy meat from the butcher that we got that from Zymer's because it found it turns out that uh, you know, went to jail for for unsavory kind of sourcing and practice.
So we don't use it anymore. But it's an interesting idea. Everything's coming around, everything's like weird. Everything's coming up weird, like lion meat and weird meats these last couple of days, right, stuff? Yeah, it's a good thing.
Very strange. Very strange. Okay, back to Chicha. The book that you want to look at is unfortunately extraordinarily expensive. Uh it's like $375 on Amazon, and you know, not that I advocate you downloading illegal PDF copies.
I was not able to find an illegal PDF copy. However, you can get all the relevant information by going between Google Books and Amazon, and they both preview different pages. So you can paste together the and that's by the way, that's the classic trick is you look it up on the Google Books, and their previews uh are different from the ones on Amazon. And then I've also looked in international Amazon sites to get previews in between those two to try and piece together like pieces of information I need. But here's what you need.
Uh the handbook of indigenous fermented foods, second edition, revised and expanded by Steinkraus. All right. And Steinkraus devoted a career to like really like this is a really kind of amazing book. Uh so they have a section on uh on Chicha. Uh, and it's mainly about maize uh chicha, but it goes into the whole um production.
Now, here's the thing. So with maize chicha, there's two ways to do this. So the reason the saliva is working here is that you your mouth has amylase enzymes. Uh, amylase enzymes are enzymes that break down uh starch, well they break down starch into sugar. And your mouth has them.
Um so what they do is they chew on starch containing items that usually have been ground and cooked, right, so that your mouth can act on them, right? Not dry. Uh or sometimes just I guess if I guess the flower I think is cooked beforehand, I have to go read it again. Uh you chew on it and then uh you let it dry while the amylase stuff is working. You then grind that and mash it like you would uh typical mash thing.
The the end the enzymes from your uh mouth will uh you know uh degrade the starch uh during that process to sugar. The product is boiled to concentrate the sugars and then fermented. Okay. The other way to do it with that'll work with um corn, but not with cassava, is to actually germinate the corn the same way that you would germinate barley malt. When you germinate, you activate the amylase enzymes in the corn itself, and you can then make uh chicha that way.
So um what you're gonna have to do is you're not I don't think you're gonna get to use the saliva. Um and this is by the way, not just in South America. This is traditional in all places that had starches and wanted to convert them to uh um alcoholic beverages, especially places that did not have grains that would germinate and provide other forms of amylase enzymes. So this is traditional in many cultures to chew on starch things. Uh and for some reason it's usually the women.
Isn't that weird? Yeah. Is it because the women are normally cooking, or is it just because men are gross? I don't know. It's weird.
It's usually women. Uh in South America, apparently it's usually the older women. In some cultures, it's the younger women. Weird. Weird.
Anyway. Uh so uh here's the bad news uh for you. And uh uh this guy, Escobar, in 1977 did his PhD thesis at Cornell University on chicha fermentation. All right, and this is on page 405 of that book I was telling you about on indigenous fermented foods. Uh and he produced both germinated, this is now remember this is maize, but so it's not directly related to cassava, but produced both germinated chicha and salivated chicha up there in uh at Cornell.
Both products were sun-dried and ground uh in a powder mill. The flowers produced were then extracted with water in the proportion of one uh uh one kilo water to 250 grams of flour at 75 Celsius with constant stirring. The extracts were then filtered through a muslin cloth, uh, and they were duplicated, blah, blah, blah, and they were then fermented for six days. Now here's the bad news for you. Chicha prepared by the salivation procedure was clear yellow in color, and it had an alcoholic flavor resembling apple cider.
Chicha prepared from germinated maize was darker in color, more turbid, and had a slightly acid taste. Both the chichas were suitable for cont uh consumption after only two days of fermentation. The salivated chicha was judged superior in flavor. So I don't know what to do about that. We could probably find, look, you can just buy the enzymes now.
So maybe germination does other things to the flavor, but you can just go buy the enzymes now. So you could probably get some of the amylase enzymes that are used uh by people like uh vodka makers who are taking potatoes and turning them into into vodka and use one of those amylase enzymes. And we tried to order one once, but we never got one in. They are not the same as the brewer's uh diastatic amylase things because they have kind of a more broad spectrum functionality and they work better. There's two there's two main amylases there's beta amylase and alpha amylase, and you can't be sure which one you're getting when you get at a homebrew shop.
So we're trying to source the really good deal. Maybe that would make a good spit like chicha. I don't know. Good question. Love those kind of questions.
Speaking of, uh last week we had a question on avocados uh about circulating them to get rid of the uh polyphenol oxidases, and uh JM writes in and said, just want to share that at my restaurant we routinely circulate avocados in their skins for 50 Celsius for an hour, and they are then indefinitely free of all browning problems. Regards JM. That's good to know. I would have thought you had to go much higher because in some other things, polyphenol oxidase is not um uh degraded for uh until much higher temperatures are reached. So it's good to hear that that works.
Uh someone else give it a test, give me a call back. Blake writes in, why is my stock so sweet? Uh he says, why does my I think, man, I don't know, maybe one. Blake? Uh why does my reduced chicken stock taste sweet?
It is white chicken stock reduced to a sauce uh and thickened uh made uh to a sauce to thicken made with conventional chicken wings, carrot, celery, and onion. The stock is not sweet before reduction. Okay, here's what's going on. Uh oh, it is late, but thank you for previous self with Zabayon. Here's what's going on.
Carrots have a lot of sugar in them, and onions have a lot of sugar in them, and especially as you reduce it, the the kind of natural pungent flavors of the onion are gonna die back, and the only thing that's gonna be uh remaining is the sweetness. So, what I would do is drastically and carrots, same way. I would drastically reduce, well though not the same way, it's not the same, but the sugar is gonna taste more concentrated as it goes. Uh, in the same way that if you add salt to something and then reduce it, it tastes too salty. If you add sugar to something and reduce it, it can taste too sweet.
So I would dial back your uh your vegetables, specifically your uh your onions and your carrots. That's what's going on. I mean, that's the only thing I can think of. You're not adding extra sugar to it, so it's a question of concentration. But give that a try to see what happens.
Rolf Wynne writes in, Dear Miss Hammer. I like that. Dear Miss Hammer. Uh thought of a name for the kick uh for the project, torch tamer. What do you think?
Like lion tamer? Torch tamer? Yeah. Any thoughts? Uh that was the least enthusiastic sound I've ever heard in my life.
She's like, yep. Yeah, you can't hear it. I don't know. I don't like I don't I'm I I'm just reading. I'm just a conduit here.
Keep up the great work. The show is one of the best out there. Thank you so much. Tim Haliber writes in uh about rice cookers. Would love to have one device for rice cooking and pressure cooking.
Thumbs up or thumbs down on the Fagor Stainless Steel 6 Quart Multi Cooker. That's an electric uh pressure cooker, rice cooker. Uh look. If it works, then I think like why not have it? Although it has happened that I've wanted to pressure cook and cook rice at the same time in my house.
That happens actually more often than you'd think, because a lot of times you want rice and you want a braised thing to go with it and the fast brace thing. So a lot of times having a pressure cooker and a rice cooker can be useful. I happen to think that the Zoji Rushi fuzzy uh neuro fuzzy like logic induction rice cooker that I own that's like you know, eight years or nine, ten, no, I don't know, it's old. I happen to think that that's one of the greatest pieces of kitchen equipment I own, and like I would not trade my Zoji Rushi for almost like any one of my pieces of kitchen equipment because it's so awesome and can hold rice for so long without any scorching or bad effects. I love it so much.
The other thing is on it, I i I've read on the internets that the Fagor pressure cooker, electric pressure cooker, doesn't get up to a full 15 PSI, which means you are going to be limited. Uh your recipes will not cook. Some recipes want that 15 PSI, uh, and the flavor is going to be different, and recipes won't necessarily be the same because it won't reach the same pressure. So bear that in mind. But I'm not giving that a thumbs up or thumbs down.
If you're handy, you might be able to modify it like I did to my Cuisanard to get higher pressures. And you can see how I don't recommend that you do that on uh the blog, which is back up. Okay. Uh at Huggernaut writes in on ice at cooking issues a while back. You mentioned you were discussing the ice program at BDX if people are interested.
I'm interested. Oh, I don't have enough time to talk about the ice program, but I promise you, at Hug or Not, Nastasha is now writing down that she's just punching her keyboard with like all five fingers at once, like it's a child keyboard, which I guess it is. But uh the uh the that we'll we'll get that next week. Um okay. Uh Pear Nielsen writes in on kombucha, pronounced like the fruit pear, but with a Scottish accent.
I can't do Scottish, uh off the cuff. Jersey I can do. Uh Scottish, come on. I can, but not like off the cuff. It's Norwegian.
Hello, Jack, Nastasha and Joe, and the guy who answers the question, which would be me. After buying the art of fermentation, my kitchen has been filling up with various yeast and bacteria experiments. I've been doing some kombucha concoctions, and I'm pretty happy with the results so far. I've made a lemon vervena version after reading the Nordic food lab post about kombucha. Uh I now have two scobies and I'm keen on expanding my experimentation.
Do you have any suggestions for other things I can try to ferment using it? I'm gonna try coffee, although apparently I need to throw away the scoby afterwards. Love the show, keep up the work. Uh oh, by the way, so I looked up the Nordic food labs, they're awesome. I looked up, they were doing kombucha on a bunch of different things.
Kombucha, what a scoby is is is a uh is a uh symbiotic uh what is it, community of yeast and bacteria. I don't know, bacteria and yeast. It's basically uh acetobacter. Uh it's a uh of there's a form of acetobacter that forms a cellulose uh kind of pad to make this kind of like like scoby thing, and then in it are other acetobacter living, which create uh you know acetic acid, and also um yeasts and other bacteria that generate other flavors and things. The idea is you take black tea or green tea or whatever, uh you sweeten it so that the yeast has something to eat.
Uh they produce then uh they ferment it, they make uh flavors plus ethanol, which is converted to vinegar by the acetobacter, bang, kombucha. And people think it has health benefits, blah blah blah. I haven't done a lot of experiments on it because, and this is the one case where I'm like Nastasha. Nastasha hates anything other people like. This is one of those things where like all of a sudden all these people were like, I love this, I love that.
And so I was like, I'm not gonna research it, crap on it. But I feel that like maybe that's against like it's against my better nature, so I'm gonna go research. I read a bunch of stuff uh on uh on the internet about it. Um, I would try, I mean, uh, here's what I haven't seen people try yet. I would try uh cocoa.
The problem is is that cocoa butter, like you get defatted stuff because fats can go rancid uh over long storage, but I don't think you're gonna have a problem because cocoa butter is very uh resistant to uh rancidity. Uh yeah, and but uh like defatted cocoa might be interesting because it has a lot of the same uh polyphenols that tea has, which is one of the things that, you know, I guess uh I don't know, there's interactions there, uh, which is you know also I guess why coffee is interesting. So I I would try things like that, but I'm gonna try to think more about it. Maybe over the next couple of days, uh I will I will think about it. And I'll talk to Dan Felder from uh Momofuku's uh food lab there because he he's been capped in fermentation and I'm sure he's kombuchified everything in the world.
There's an interesting article there on performing kombucha uh on the internet is what I mean. Not from Dan on performing uh kombucha uh fermentation on get this milk. Whoa, milk. Apparently got some interesting uh interesting results. Okay, uh Elliot Pavano, you're right about uh Caramai's tomato.
I'm gonna have to get you next time because we're about to get stabbed out here uh with time. Uh John uh John Riper from uh wait, oh, from Seattle. My thing says Seattle, Brooklyn. I'm like, there's a Brooklyn in Seattle? That's crazy.
No. Uh is coming to Brooklyn and uh wants to know, right? So this spring, I'd like to spend three to four days exploring Brooklyn, hitting spots that epitomize that part of the world and seeing people in places that would be uh memorable, even if they were somewhere else on the planet. Finding a great bagel or barista would be time well spent. Artisans at the top of their craft, historic spots with a story to tell, and artworks off the beaten path would all be good.
Anything food related is especially interesting. If you want a visitor to stay of Brooklyn for the rest of his life, I've seen the best of what it has to offer. Where would you take him? All right. I congrats to Robertus for the Bonapetite shout-out.
Well, come to Roberta's. If you got the cash to drop, go to go to Blanca, right? Uh we're gonna meet with John. We invited him to Roberta's uh Aaron and I, and then maybe you guys will all sit down with him, hang out, have a pizza, and uh, you know, give him a good list when he gets here. Uh all right but if he's looking for a barista that'll change his life, I've got two words.
Indie Jesus. Indie Jesus pulls a good shot of espresso? Yeah, he's he started as a barista and then he became a server. And he's good? Well, you know.
He's Jesus. Yeah. In indie format. Yeah. Okay, so uh oh my god, we're gonna we're gonna get hit by this.
Okay, so the uh also, like obviously Andy Ricker Pac Pac is a place you should go. Um there's a lot of places. Uh we'll look, we'll give you a list when you when you when you when you come because we're gonna, I guess we'll talk more about it. But I always say fetsaw too. That's always a fun time.
Yeah, all right. I mean, I don't enjoy fun times. I'm just kidding. Uh okay, so uh on the way out, because uh Jack's gonna pull my cord uh in a second. Ryan Bone writes in I'm a computer science and engineering student.
When I found out about modernist cuisine, I was blown away with the applications of technology and the scientific method on in cooking. This got me really interested in cooking, so I started playing around with stuff, convinced my parents to get me the at-home version of modernist cuisine. Good job, parents, and have generally had a fun time. But I feel like I'm missing a lot of foundations in cooking. I got Michael Ruhlman's book Ratio, and I've learned a fair amount about baking from that, but I know there's uh more I'm missing.
Do you have any recommendations on books or resources that cover the foundations and fundamentals of cooking in a more scientific way rather than a sort of prescriptive recipe type way? Thanks, Ryan. Okay, listen, I mean, on food and cooking by Harold McGee. Just get that. But here's what I'm saying.
There aren't that many books out there that treat things from a completely scientific perspective. Uh and uh in addition, you know, it's like people who do present things, chefs who present things from a scientific perspective often get it wrong. No offense, chefs. And so one of the interesting things to do is to read old encyclopedic cookbooks and see how crazy, for instance, their nutritional advice is, or how crazy their explanations for why X, Y, and Z cooking technique works. Instead, I would read McGee for the science.
I would read Modernist Cuisine for New Techniques. I would go on all the blogs on the internet. But for the fundamentals, I still recommend going and getting books by people who are just freaking awesome cooks. And what you want to look for, then there's clearly books out there that are, as you say, just prescriptive recipes. But you don't necessarily need the science when you're learning.
What you need is someone who has a lot of experience cooking and explaining to you why they do things. You need to learn ways of thinking. So any of the old people that you that you respect, right? So Peter Peterson writes a bunch of amazing cookbooks. For instance, on he has one on sauces, it's great.
A lot of times he has explanations in science that I don't agree with, but you're learning the the exp the experience of how to think like a cook through their eyes. Like the old uh two-volume color version of Jacques Papin's way to cook knop from the 80s. Amazing. Um in terms of like how to think like uh see how he thinks. Uh the if you want like high-end stuff, the original French laundry cookbook was amazing because it was showed how Keller approached thinking at the French laundry.
Um, you know, like uh these are the kind of books that uh I I would look at now. I'm gonna try to think of a more exhaustive list of ones that have been really helpful to me. I mean, I started cooking a long time ago, so the ones that are helpful to me might be dated. I got Julia Child's uh whatever it's called, the the Wait, the way to cook or whatever, that the big one she had, which you know kind of was one of my first great cookbooks, Giuliano Buggiali's uh one of you know what his larger Italian books I've always had had with me. Uh and so you know you get one or two tomes like this, and they're not teaching you the science, but they teach you, they teach you a mental framework for cooking.
And that's what you should look for in uh a chef's cookbook, in chef's cookbook. So get a couple chefs cookbooks, like real chefs, get a couple of teachers' cookbooks. So, like Julia Child was a teacher, uh, you know, great teacher, and Chak Papin, great teacher, you know, from those days, Peterson, great teacher. Uh so get some of those teaching styles to learn, uh, you know, teaching books to learn that kind of way of thinking. And um don't worry so much about the science back.
In fact, you whenever you read anyone's stuff, you should be questioning the science behind it. And the only, you know, the only then when you need information like that, go to go to McGee and look and see what he says, right? Yeah. All right, cooking issues. Thanks for listening to this program on Heritage Radio Network.org.
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