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Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Aron, your host of Cookie Issues coming to you late and live in the back of Roberta's Pizzeria in Bushwick, Brooklyn, on the Heritage Radio Network, every Tuesday from roughly 12 to 1245. Joining the studio with Nastash the Hammer Lubbock. How are you doing? Good.
Good? I got Joe back from on tour. Joe, how you doing? I'm doing great. How's it going, guys?
Going well. We have no Jack today because Joe thought he'd just handle it all by himself now that he's coming back. Oh, Jack's having a beer. That's fine. So Joe, how was the tour?
It was really, really great. Yeah? Went to lots of awesome cities I've never been to before. Chicago, Memphis, Buffalo. Got to, you know, hang out and uh play some tunes.
So yeah, yeah. Did you have any of the uh did you have beef on wick when you were in Buffalo? No, I ate Buffalo Wings though. Yeah, alright. They're okay.
You know what the thing that didn't travel from uh Buffalo is beef on Wec, which is you take your roast beef and you you have the juice, the dipping sauce there, but they put it on a roll, and the roll is covered in salt and caraway, which is the wick part of beef on wet, and it's a local kind of buffalo thing, uh in you know that area of northern New York. And I don't know why the heck it hasn't spread because that stuff is delicious. Gotta try it, I guess. Yeah, next time you're in Buffalo, you know, look, Buffalo wings, whatever, I guess you have to have some because that's what that they're known for because they put the word buffalo in it. But if they had called it Buffalo Beef on Wec, maybe it would have sold more.
Yeah, the the marketing was off on that one. Yeah, no American like whack. I don't want that. Stas, do you want something called beef on Wec? No.
What about like like Buffalo roast beef sandwich? Yeah. That sounds good. Yeah, it sounds awesome. Yeah.
All right, so Buffalo, anyone from Buffalo out there, remarket your beef on Wec. So uh how many dates did you play? Um we it was six a ri it was six on the way down, then we went to South by Southwest and we played five shows in three days at South by Southwest and then drove back up in three days from I was in Arkansas like two days ago. It was crazy. Yeah, are you a crowd surfing sort of fellow or no?
Um generally yes, but uh I don't think that uh it just didn't happen this tour. Really? You weren't feeling it? It wasn't it wasn't necessarily me that wasn't feeling. I was trying to get everyone hyped.
It energized and sometimes it's a little hard. Some people just you know, they're sleepy or a lot of buffalo wings. You know what? Up north, so Piper who works with us at the BDXEQ, he was saying that uh he got mad at a really famous rapper who showed remained nameless, it was Buster Rhymes, who went to go play uh, you know, up near where he lives, and Buster Rhymes was mad because you know, all these kids were just sitting and listening to to, you know, him rap, and he's like Buster was like, What the hell? Get up.
You because I think, you know, and the the you know, the the the feeling up there from the Vermonters is that you know, if we don't want to get up and dance, doesn't mean we're not enjoying the music. I don't think they understand that give and take. It's hard for someone to give their best concert if there's not a lot of uh movement in the audience. You know what I'm saying? Exactly.
Yeah. Yeah, people don't get it. Hey, look, here's the thing, right? Yeah, sure. As a musician, it's your responsibility to kind of go off as hard as you can no matter what the audience is like.
But the fact of the matter is, if the audience is into it, they're gonna get a better performance, period. That's human beings. It's not a record, not a record. Right? You're not a record.
You're a person. Exactly. I I have feelings too. Yeah, right, bingo. So this in uh Ziploc bags, people.
SC Johnson, a family company. So uh Weep Soupy Pot. We pop bam soupy pot from the Nomaku, uh, sent someone who's one of his supporters on the Kickstarter, because uh Weepop's gotten a lot of flack over using the Ziploc bags. We're doing low temperature cooking, low temperature cooking. Most of you, I guess who listen to this know what I'm talking about.
It's cooking usually in a water bath at a very controlled temperature. Uh, and usually those temperatures are somewhere in the range of 54 to like 65 degrees Celsius, occasionally higher for certain things for vegetables and whatnot. But anyway, um so cooking uh low temperature with a controlled water bath uh with ziploc bags. And this is a technique I've advocated for uh a long time, and there's been a lot of kerfuffles over it, and I got word from SC Johnson Wax, but you're gonna have to stay tuned because I got a caller I gotta deal with. Caller, you're on the air.
Hi, Dave. How you doing? Hi, it's Alvin. How are you? Oh, hey, doing well.
Good. Um I just wanted to follow up. I put in a uh question of a little while ago about um pop rocks. Oh, yeah, sure. And um, so specifically, what I kind of want to do is make a savory pop rock.
I was thinking if I used something like ice mold, it'd be half as sweet, but I'd like to salt the heck out of it. And um, what I'm kind of after is like kind of like a mall-on large flake salt crystal, right? That pops. Is that possible? Uh okay, here's how pop rocks are made.
So uh when you take your when you what they do what they do is they take sugar and uh they heat it and turn it into uh you know to candy temperatures, letting rid of you know the um what's it called, the moisture, and they put it under extreme pressure with uh carbon dioxide at those temperatures. Uh then they let it set under extreme pressure. Then when the when they release the extreme pressure, bam, it explodes into pop rocks. And so kind of the crystal type you get is the crystal type you get. You can't grow Maulden style crystals in a pop rocks kind of a technology.
So if you're okay with the crystal structure of pop rocks, then you're you're okay. Now you can you or I should say, you could make, I think, there's nothing there's nothing that in the chemistry of isomalt that leads me to believe otherwise. You could make pop rocks from isomalt. Um so you could do the pop rocks uh with isomalt. Uh you might put the salt in before, you might put the salt in uh afterwards in the form of a powder, but uh there's nothing to lead me to believe that you can't do that.
The problem is is that I don't see any way that you as an individual, even I I can't, and I've tried I've tried, but believe me, I don't think that we can make pop rocks on our own. I think there are companies that sell neutral pop rocks, which are just sugar, that you're supposed to then mix your own flavors in afterwards. Chef Rubber, I think, sells them. Um I don't know what their batch size is. There's no reason why you couldn't call them and say, if I'm willing to buy whatever your minimum batch size is, could you just make it with isomalt once?
You know what I mean? It's not gonna ruin their equipment. You you know what I'm saying? So it's just convincing whatever curmudgeon it is to do it. And they might even be willing to put in some you'd see the flavors have to be heat stable, that's the thing.
So if you're going to put a flavor into it other than salt, which is clearly heat stable, uh, it has to be a heat stable uh flavor. But there's again there's nothing in unless you were going to put in something crazy that they think they're not gonna be able to clean out of their equipment, I don't see a reason why they wouldn't do it for you, assuming that you bought an entire batch from them. Yeah, 20 pounds or something. Yeah, whatever it is. I don't know, I don't know what their what their size is.
And obviously they'll charge you more for it, but I have not figured out a way to do it uh on your own in a safe manner. So I've that's so far I've never tried it. And that's just because of the pressure needed to uh set it under you need you need to have a a special vessel, I imagine, right? Oh, yeah, a lot. You need a lot of uh yes, yeah.
It's uh it's a special vessel vessel that can withstand heat at an elevated pressure. Now I've done like a hundred psi. No, I think it's I forget. It's been a long time since I've looked it up. I think it's higher.
The highest I've ever set something uh with CO2 is a hundred and twenty-five PSI when I was doing uh I was doing jello shots and I set them at 125 PSI, and that is a sharp bubble, but it's not but you remember when you're when you're doing candy, the temperatures of the candy are much, much higher. You could tr look, you could try it. You could the problem is you can't do it in a normal soda bottle because soda bottle can't withstand that kind of uh uh pressure, right? Right. Sorry, sorry, temperature.
Here's what you could do. You could melt if you have a Cornelius keg, the problem is Cornelius kegs only go up to about 125 Psi. So, what you would do is is you'd melt out your candy, and then um, you know, you'd keep it hot, then you'd throw it into your Cornelius keg, put it under as high a pressure as the Cornelius keg can take, and then shake it back and forth to agitate it and let it set. I think that's safe, right? Because it's all stainless, it's down at the bottom.
It's gonna be a nightmare to clean, but I don't think 125 PSI is gonna cut it. I mean, you can look it up and see, but I don't think 125 PSI is gonna cut it. Cool. Thanks. No, no, no problem.
But if you do try it, remember, check to make sure you think it's safe beforehand, because I'm just thinking of this off the top of my head. But if you do try it and you're successful, that's something that everyone would want to know, so please send it on in. I will, thanks. All right, Alvin, see you soon. Uh okay, back to S.
C. Johnson Wax. Uh a family company. Did you know that? Yes.
Yeah. Uh so anyway, what that means is they're not publicly owned, they're run by a family. So uh the problem is that uh S. C. Johnson got back to uh Grant Aikitz because of a video he was doing uh, you know, for millennia, uh using Ziploc bags and low temperature cooking, and said, don't do that.
At least that's what the word on the street is, and by word on the street meaning Grant told me that. Uh so then after that, there's a number of other chefs who were saying that uh, you know, their impression is that Ziplocks were unsafe to cook in, X, Y, and Z, and then because it became known that SC Johnson wasn't supporting it, a lot of other people were wondering why it wasn't supported. Uh long story short, I called up SC Johnson Wax, and SC Johnson Wax, the person who picks up the phone was like, you know, press that big giant, oh my god, someone's asking a question that I need to ask one of my superiors about. And they kept pushing that big red button. I went up the chain uh until I finally got in touch with um uh uh Michelle Johnson.
I think no relation. I don't know. I don't know whether she is a Johnson from the SC Johnson. It is a family company, but I don't know if she happens to be in the family. So here's what I said to her.
Uh she asked, you know, who who it who from S. C. Johnson told me not to use Ziplocks. Here's my exact email to her. Uh howdy Michelle, I was not contacted by S.
C. Johnson, a chef colleague named Grant Aikitz was. There are several other chefs who also warned against using Ziploc in low temperature cooking. And the word on the street is that uh SC Johnson does not support low temperature cooking in Ziplocks, probably because of the presumed uh contact with Grant. Here's what I know.
This is me writing. Ziplocks are made of polyethylene with no plasticizers added. Ziplocks have a minimum of residual solvents compared with other polyethylene food grade films I've used. Ziplocks are rated by SCJ for reheating foods, and Ziplocks are not rated for boiling, primarily because of structural integrity issues, not toxicity issues. Low temperature cooking uses thermostatically controlled water baths that are accurate within uh 0.2 degrees Celsius, and the applications using Ziploc Ziplocks are always done at temperatures below 65 C.
Because some low temperature recipes cook for as long as three days, 72 hours, uh up to 65 degrees C. Some people think the bags will somehow become toxic after that length of cooking. I disagree. Given these points, I would like it, I would like it if SC Johnson could put their official stamp of approval on the use of bags or explain why I shouldn't pee uh teach people this technique, best Dave. Uh and here's what I heard back.
Ready? This is from uh this is from Miss Johnson. Here is what they are. Uh Ziploc, this is directly from SC Johnson Wax, a family company. Ziploc brand bags are designed to withheld being held in high temperature water, including being used up to 82 degrees Celsius for up to seventy two hours.
Boiling uh so that's it. So I mean, I wouldn't boil them, but and and I gave her the the I gave her the number eighty two, so you know that's where she's it might go a little bit higher, but there it is, direct. They are okay with Ziploc brand bags designed with uh stand being held in high temperature water, including being used up to eighty two for up to seventy two hours. Bang, bibby bang, bang, there you go. Safe to use according to the company, uh safe to use as far as I know.
Uh the one thing that I'd caution on is that they are not good for uh long term preservation. I wouldn't count on them as being oxygen barriers in the way that you count on a another bag uh and especially 'cause you're not packing it using a vacuum, you're packing it using uh the water technique. But that's good news, right? It's great news. So someone please come back at me and tell me why I'm wrong.
Call me an idiot, I'm sure you will. Hey Dave, I think we have another caller. Oh yeah? Caller, you're on the air. Hey Dave and crew at Brian San Francisco, how are you?
Doing all right, how you doing? Good. Um so I'm looking on ideas in food and you can probably Google it at the same time as I am. Um and they have a recipe for Meyer lemon vinegar there. Okay.
And they say they take cut lemons, water, sugar, and yeast, and then throw 'em together for a few days, and the vat of liquid starts bubbling, then they strain out the solids and let the fermentation uh begin in the open air. And um my question is is this is a pretty unique way of making vinegar. I've never seen this this this before. Usually you know you have the vinegar mother and some old wine. So this is trying to create I guess a lemon wine first with sugar.
And so my questions are um what do you what do you think of this? And can I just use regular oiled yeast or do I need special um kind of yeast like champagne yeast or or something like that? Um then they take uh uh the all the solids and separately um ferment them with onions and salt and pepper flakes as a I guess some kind of condiment. Right. So um what do you think of this method for making like fruit vinegars?
Like this lemon and and and how much sugar should and yeast would I need to add? Right. Well, I mean, as to what yeast to use, I mean uh I haven't studied the effect of um different yeasts on um vinegar production. Be well for everyone who doesn't know how vinegar is made, here's what happens. You take uh some form of sugar, uh some form of fermentable, you ferment it into alcohol first, right?
Uh and then after that you uh acetobacter takes over, and acetobacter eats the alcohol that's produced and turns it into acetic acid, which is vinegar. That's why vinegar has a low alcohol content, and that's why when you leave wine open, it turns to vinegar. Now, the tricks with vinegar is that obviously if your alcohol level is too high, then uh acetobacter can't uh work, and if acetobacter can't work, then uh no vinegar, right? Uh similarly, if you use uh preservatives or uh agents in your fermentation that prevent it from turning that that prevent the growth of acetobacter, no vinegar. So uh so there's a couple of ways that you can go about it.
One is the more traditional two-step process where you take an alcoholic beverage and then ferment it with uh a vinegar mother, uh or you know, or let it go naturally and produce um vinegar. That's two-step process, or you could do a one-step process where you convert both at the same at the same time so for instance a a a kombucha is uh roughly a uh a two you know a one-step vinegar process where you have different strains of yeast and bacteria and different strains of acetobacter making stuff. Now they're very particular strains of acetobacter so they produce uh kombucha right and it's not very acidic kombucha compared to vinegar right so with their thing presumably they're adding enough sugar to it uh that they're getting uh the acidity level right now in a regular fermentation the yeast is vital to the the what particular yeast you use and the temperature at which you ferment is vital to the end result right now if you use a if you pitch a yeast with let's say like fleischmann's whatever you happen to have lying around and you like the result then the good thing is fleischmann's pretty consistent right but typically you wouldn't pitch beer with fleischmanns because who would do that you know what I mean you'd get you go to a homebrew shop and you would get you know why yeast like you know something that you like like you'd get like you know uh I don't know some uh like uh you know a yeast that's designed to do like a pale ale or whatever you're working on you know and you'd choose the temperature ratio you're working on and then they would write this one produces a lot of esters at between the temperatures of 60 and 70 you know Fahrenheit. And so you'd choose your yeast bake on based on that because it's fairly critical to the tape. Now the other thing is is that you're not ever typically dealing with a fermentation that starts with such a high level of acidity as a lemon maceration.
So I don't know whether that's affecting I don't mean I'm sure presumably everything's affecting sugar to it. Yeah, but I mean, like, yeah, I mean the yeast is gonna that means some yeast is gonna be you're gonna you're you're changing how the yeast is going to react by increasing the acidity level. Uh mean I'm not not saying you're gonna kill the yeast, but you're gonna change it uh based on how much acidity uh you're you're adding. Uh oh, and Elliot Elliot Papineau uh writes in that uh what is he saying? Stash just to speak.
Anyone interrupting it? Speak. Elliot Papineau asked ideas and food, what kind of yeast for the Meyer lemon vinegar? Oh, so they're they're asking, so we don't know. And ideas in food said mantra che is that mantrachet like and uh Elliot said things.
I don't know, but that must be a yeast strain that I'm not familiar with. Oh, I I think that's a kind of uh uh uh yeast that's just used for champagne, which might be able to deal with the acidity. Okay. So there, yeah, because champagne champagne must is high in high in acidity. There, so there you have it.
Uh so yeah, so they're doing that and they're doing a one-step fermentation, but that works, yes. Uh I whether or not it's gonna make you the best possible fruit vinegars, that I don't know. I mean, you know, you might want to do traditional ferment the fruit out first and then and then hit it with uh hit it with your acetobacter. They're clearly also using wild acetobacter strains because they're not adding a vinegar mother to it. Unless they added some live vinegar that they already have to kick off the uh fermentation.
Did they do that? Uh it doesn't say that they've done that at all here. Right. Um, so uh you know, maybe they need to let it get alcoholic enough first and then and then add the vinegar mother. Well, there's not gonna be a lot of uh there's not gonna be a lot of acetic uh fermentation at first because once you have a vigorous uh alcohol fermentation going, there's constantly producing carbon dioxide, and the layer of carbon dioxide that's forming on top of the um fermentation will prevent uh acetobacter from growing, because acetobacter needs oxygen.
That's why if you go to a distillery, they can have these giant vats of things that are fermenting in the open air uh without them turning to vinegar because there's a constant um production of carbon dioxide on the top. Mm-hmm. RT. Yeah. Okay.
Um this sounds like to be a fun experiment. Yeah, yeah. Uh let's tweet us, tweet us over and tell us how it works. Okay, cool. Thanks.
Oh, oh, one question. How much how much sugar do you think I would need to add in order to uh uh to get it going? That's a good question. I mean, just don't go too high. It's been a long time since I've looked up the bricks that you'd need to add to something.
Uh I mean, I would probably have somewhere in the area of like fruit juices, are usually somewhere at like 14, 15 bricks, something like that. So maybe somewhere in that range. Okay. Great. Sounds good.
Thanks. All right, cool. Uh thanks. All right. Elliot Pabanal wrote in before uh regarding caramelized tomatoes.
Uh I tried pressure cooking in uh my coon recon at full pressure, which is 15 psi, second ring, home canned tomatoes for 40 minutes over the weekend. I used three quarts uh of um product which yielded two uh two quarts of flesh and one quart of juice. I only added the flesh to the pot with one onion, one head of garlic, and three grams of baking soda. The result I was looking for was a caramelized tomato sauce. What I produced is more of a nicely flavored soup.
Will I be able to achieve the desired effect using the technique, but adding time or lowering the pH? Well, I mean I assume you mean uh rate raising the pH. So you're adding the baking soda to you're adding the baking soda to the tomato to raise the pH when you're pressure cooking. And the reason to raise the pH when you're pressure cooking, a la what they do in uh modernist cuisine for their butternut squash, whatever it is they do in that thing, uh, is to by raising the pH by making it more alkaline, you are uh shifting uh the temperature at which myard reactions happen to a lower temperature, such as those that happen inside of a pressure cooker, and and things do get appreciably browner in a pressure cooker due to my hard reactions uh over fairly short periods of time. However, tomatoes are an extremely uh extremely uh acidic product.
So a couple uh teaspoons of baking soda, I don't think is gonna cut it and make it more uh caramelized. Um in fact, it's interesting. Uh if you look at, I was looking at the Women's Christians Temperance Union cookbook from 1900 from Kansas City because of a separate thing I'm working on. Uh, and uh what was interesting to me is that I looked at a couple of their tomato soup recipes, and all the tomato soup recipes that use milk in them, they have baking soda added, and the reason they have baking soda added uh there is to uh decrease the acidity so that the milk won't curdle, presumably. It's really actually interesting.
You know, I don't have time anymore to read old cookbooks, but you know, I I I I used to read constantly read old cookbooks and try and steal ideas that have become lost over time. But anyway, so um I don't think that the baking soda is gonna help in that. Here's what I would do. Uh I would pre-caramelize your potatoes, tomato potatoes, dunce. I would pre-caramelize your tomatoes before you uh do anything.
I would just cut the tomatoes in half, roast them until you get rid of a lot of the liquid and they start turning uh kind of dark and caramelized, and then blend those in uh to make your to make your product because I think you're gonna need to just reduce the water enough to get it to get that caramelized stuff before you make the soup. Then pressure cook it, I think it'd be delicious. What do you think, says? I think it sounds good. All right.
Uh see if that works. Let me know. Uh now I got another question in. Uh this one uh is very interesting. I love questions like this because I had not thought about it before.
Unfortunately, because it turns out it's a huge issue and I haven't thought about it before, I'm not gonna be able to answer it today. But here it is. I want everyone to be thinking about this because it's very interesting. Mark Tinkelman writes in Hi Cooking Issues Crew. Mark from Philadelphia here.
My question is about nanoparticles. I've seen a few articles here and there and I gather they are food additives that are used in some industrial food to enhance flavor and texture and that they may be dangerous to health. I haven't seen anything that satisfactory explains what they are how they made. So my questions are what are they? One, could they be made or used in professional kitchen and what good would they be for thanks Mark Tinkleman.
Okay. I have to admit I got so entranced with the thinking about the safety aspects of it that I I haven't thought about how to make them yet or what they would be good for. But nanoparticle for those of you that don't know are just extremely small and usually very even sized particles. And they can be made a bunch of different ways. They can be made through like vapor deposition that so goes from a vapor to uh to you know to a solid at very you know at very controlled way such that the particles are small.
They can be made um uh by grinding if you happen to have a grinding thing that they can grind well enough although that's you know you don't I don't no one does that is normal they can be made uh but the easiest way I think that uh was we would ever be able to make them is by making emulsions uh that with very fine particle sizes in it then when something's in an emulsion form shifting it from a liquid to a solid so that the the the the droplets that are emulsified in all of a sudden become a solid again so it's sold gel uh change right then breaking the emulsion and you get the nanoparticles out and I think that's uh how the majority of the nanoparticles uh that you know except for I guess things like the titanium I don't know how they make the titanium dioxide nanoparticles which are the ones that are used in toothpaste to make things really bright and the and and that are used in sunscreen to uh shield you from the sun titanium dioxide nanoparticles anyway uh and I don't know how they do silver but uh the one that we'd be most likely to be able to make uh is ones that are based on sol gel uh transformations like that. Here's the issue that's interesting and I hadn't thought about it. I started researching uh kind of safety in nanoparticles because to be honest I'd never thought about it before and it what's interesting is is that you can take something that is safe to use that is a safe product uh and by decreasing its size sufficiently you change the way it's absorbed in the body so that it might no longer be safe right and the the problem with it is and the reason I don't have an answer is that I'm gonna have to spend a long time researching this because most of the articles that are anti them uh anti-nanoparticles in in food are written by um people that I think are biased and most articles that are saying that you shouldn't worry about nanoparticles in food uh also come from people that are biased so far that I've found and so I haven't been able to do enough research for my own uh my own feeling to be able to make any statement uh one way or the other but it definitely is something that I think needs to be looked at more than it is now like what are these things doing right anyway so uh thanks Mark and I will look more into it and expect to hear more blithering when I finally figure out what I think. Right? Uh Peter Hirschman writes in about a name couldn't uh stash you couldn't find the email address for saying the comments so I don't know who he sent it to but here it is.
The new torch tip appears to work by radiating infrared this talk about the torch that we're building. Uh by radiating infrared and near-infrared radiation, what makes it similar to an old-fashioned French salamander that was heated in a fire until red hot and then held over the food. The French name would be something like salamandre moderne, which wouldn't work with American audiences. Yeah, no crap, it wouldn't work with it. So how about Salamander 21, a 21st century salamander?
Well, everyone knows I like Sally, maybe Sally 21. I like Sally because it sounds friendly. Hey, Sally, sounds friendly. Salamander, by the way, I don't know, did I talk about this already? Salamander, uh uh I used I was taught when I was learning cooking that it was called a salamander because it used to have like a sh some of them had a shape that was similar to salamander, but uh I don't think it's that from my research.
Salamanders, because of the markings on them, uh I've had a link. Salamander, the you know, the newt-like amphibian, has had a uh link with fire since uh since recorded since recorded history, because I think because of the markings on it. So it's it used to be thought that um salamanders were impervious to flame, and in fact, uh there were fake uh people used to sell coats made out of salamander wool, and everyone who sees a salamander knows they don't have wool or hair, but you know, Europeans were some dumb back in the middle ages. So like they would import uh salamander wool coats from uh from East from the you know from what the time is called the Orient. Uh you know what it was made out of Stas?
No one. Asbestos! So people are having these like thebestist things, and then when they would get dirty, because Europeans are dirty back then, hey, no offense. They would like uh throw them into the fire and they would get clean that way. It's pretty pretty pretty cool, yeah?
Yeah. Anyway, Salaman Sally 21. Anyway, we'll think about it. Uh here's hoping that sales are good so it doesn't become an endangered species. Thanks, Peter.
Um Bob Berry out uh uh bariatua, which I got right last time, but probably not this time, writes back in uh in response to a couple things we had on our show before. In response to the recent cooking issues inquiry about food science textbooks, I have found that phenoma's food chemistry uh is helpful and accessible. If you have a chemistry background, that is. I have that book. It's pretty good.
I have an older version of it. And you can find it online uh pretty well if you want to look through it before you buy it. And Fenema's is available extremely cheaply on ABE Books or on Bookfinder.com if you're willing to get an older version of it. That's how I got mine. Uh I also own a PDF because that's how I roll.
Anyway, uh also I started with Modernist Cuisine at home, which I found impressive, but was blown away by the detail found in the five-volume version. It is well worth the investment for anyone with a serious interest in cooking science. Having spent nearly the same amount for a single volume medical textbooks, it's a bargain. This is also Mirvold's point. Uh that if you go out to a super expensive meal, you can afford to buy modernist cuisine and it's worth it.
That he actually said that to me, the kind of almost verbatim. Um second question, this is in response, a second comment, rather. This is in response to a podcast from a few months ago. The polycarbonate tub provided by William Sonoma with the Polyscience Circulator is not the same tub uh that the polyscience uh sends out on their website. The pre-cut polycarbonate lid sold on the polyscience website will not fit the William Sonoma tub.
Fortunately, any restaurant supply store that sells Cambro containers sells a lid for the William Sonoma tub, which is soft and not soft enough to cut a circulator a hole with a pair of heavy-duty scissors. I believe I paid seven dollars for it. So it's worth it, seven bucks. Although I tell you the ones that I get, it cannot be cut with oh, I don't know what the William Sonoma one is. If the William Sonoma has that little plasticky one that fits on top, the red kind, those can be cut with scissors.
If you have the um the tubs that uh we use that are also made by Cambro, those lids can't be cut with scissors. So I think it depends on which kind you have. But anyway, thanks for thanks for that tip, Bob. Uh, it's good to know. Uh also Steven Rhodes writes in on the name.
Big fan of the show. Uh name when I say name, I mean the name of the uh Kickstarter thing that we're working on, the uh you know the torch thing. Uh thought of a name for the Kickstarter project, Searite. What do you think? Sally Stone.
You like Sally? And then someone else wrote in on my on my Twitter, uh, I forget who it was because I don't have my Twitter up, but said we should you know what they suggested? Sears all, and then it was like, duh, it should be Sears all because you like Sawzall so much. And then he did a little pound hash thing saying, Did I miss anything? I love Sears All.
It's just that, you know, some of my partners believe that it sounds like Sears Robuck and therefore they don't like it. But I like Sears all because does it sear some things, Nastasha? No. What is it Sear? All things.
All things. Right. All things. All things. Uh okay, maybe we should take a quick break and then come back with some blistering finishing off.
Cooking issues. White Oak Pastures is the only farm in the United States that has its own USDA inspected red meat abattoir or slaughterhouse. And its own USDA inspected poultry abattoir or slaughterhouse. We partner with Whole Foods to deliver our high quality meat and poultry from Miami, Florida, all the way to Princeton, New Jersey. One family, one farm, five generations, 145 years.
A full circle return to sustainable land stewardship, you may and animal stockmanship. For more information, please visit our website, Whiteoapastures.com. I like the way that guy says poultry. Don't you? I like the way that man says poultry.
Uh poultry. I like that. Like it's like so anyway. I want to go buy some now. Hey, so for next week, it's Jack.
Dave. Uh, we got a submission for the Hearst Ranch commercial contest. Yeah? Contest, yeah. Sweet.
Yeah, I'm gonna play it next week. Can't wait as we know the alarming. As we know, my my favorite, my favorite grass-fed beef uh song. Yeah. By far.
It's tough to pick one, but uh true. Okay. Uh Marty writes in regarding his rice fermentation that we talked about on an earlier show. I wrote earlier about my homemade Chinese rice wine tasting like shwedyballs. And I've since rectified the problem by incubating my fermenter with a terrarium heater pad.
Huge difference. So the problem was he was doing it at too low a temperature too long, as we suspected. But the resulting brew is still cloudy. And I have the issue of Spritz, a slight effervescent carbonation. So my questions are as follows.
I am fermenting the wine in a water-sealed pickle fermenter. Is that better or worse than fermenting in an open pot? Open pot will have less pressure in it, but you're not sealing it probably enough to keep the um you're not probably sealing it enough to keep in the uh my brain fried, my brain fried. Keep in the CO2 and plus some air needs to get to it for that fermentation to work, I think. Although you know, maybe not.
So I uh it's been a long time since I've looked at it. Uh, but I don't think that's causing your spritziness. Is there a way to prevent the carbonation? It's annoying to me. No.
You can you can uh if you let it vent off enough, as long as you're making sure that no acetobacter is gonna grow in it to make it more acidic, then you can let the carbonation go off, or you could just uh apply a vacuum to it and zip the al zip the carp carbon dioxide right out of it, like I do, like we do with the with uh champagne when we're testing it. Um is the cloudiness a flaw? Can I clarify the wine? I tried filtering it through coffee filters, but nothing came out. I have no access to a centrifuge.
Whether or not you can clarify it depends on what the cloudiness is. Unfortunately, I suspect that what is causing the cloudiness in your case is starch, and starch uh isn't very well clarified by techniques like agar clarification, uh as well as th as well as other cloudy things are like proteins. But if it is starch, it will settle. If you let it sit for a you know, like a week or two, uh it should settle out, and then you could probably decant the clear stuff off the top, but it's not a flaw. If it's not starch, then you could just do an agar clarification, go on the cooking issues website, which is working again thanks to uh Paul Adams, our buddy.
Uh you can look up clarification techniques and get uh technique with agar that doesn't require a centrifuge. Now here's what I'm really cool. I like this a lot. Uh Morton Madsen uh wrote in last week about quail eggs. Do we speak them or do we write?
I think he wrote. He wrote. Uh and you know what I said was please someone run the experiment. The experiment was can you put uh the quail eggs in an ISI container, hit them with nitrous and vent them real quick to make them peel easier. Uh and he ran the experiment.
How awesome is that? So here it is. Uh he writes, thanks for your answer on my quail egg question. Hate to be rough on you, but your pronunciation was not entirely spot on. Mort Morton Morton Madsen, what do you think?
I don't know, I don't know. He's like, Well, Danish can be a tongue twister for non-danes, so no worries. At least you did not torture my name. I read through the article you suggested and found it quite informing. I told him an article about peeling eggs, right?
Uh back to the issue at hand. I took your suggestion on using the ISI to approximate the pressure change associated with the pressure cooking of eggs. When you mentioned that the critical aspect of the pressure cooking of eggs is the abrupt change in pressure and not the temperature, my thoughts immediately went to uh the ISI as yours did as well. Needless to say, when I got the chance, I went out and bought a new batch of quail eggs. I followed the recipes uh from the last time, blanched a bunch of eggs in boiling water, followed by a cooling step and a second blanching.
I then circulated the eggs at 63.5 degrees Celsius for a short period. From this point on, I split the eggs in three uh in three uh things. I first I tried to peel directly. These eggs were even harder to peel than I remembered, uh presumably due to the fact that they were fresh. The second batch I put directly into the ISI canister from the circulator and loaded it with N2O, followed by a violent venting right away.
This time, complete success! These eggs were much easier to peel. The membrane had loosened from the egg white, and I had no problem peeling these eggs. This solution is really what I was dreaming of. I think it will I will be able to peel every single egg with no breakage using this technique.
Lastly, I had one more batch of eggs. This one I cooled down. I wanted to test if the eggs would do just as fine when loaded cold. While the batch of hot eggs, I reasoned that no N2O would dissolve in the eggs. However, with the cold eggs, this would make a difference.
With my small batches of eggs, I think I leaned towards this last batch, the one that was cold as being the easiest to peel. However, I also realized that I got my peeling technique honed for each egg, so I would hesitate to make any conclusions on this final point. In the end, it seems that this technique works equally well with cold and warm eggs, so it seems that one does not need to worry about egg temperature before the ISI step. In summary, I can easily recommend this technique as a shortcut to peeling eggs. I will try the technique with chicken eggs at some time.
However, this would probably not be nearly as advantageous since the eggs are easier to peel to begin with, and since they would canister would only hold a small number of eggs. Thanks for your help, Morton Madsen. Awesome. I love this. Now here's a new technique that was uh that we developed with someone who was listening to the show over over the radio.
Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Okay.
Uh Sherry writes in from Vancouver about high temperature bags. Greeting Anastasia, Dave, and all. Yes, you do have at least one other dedicated female listener and one with a question at that. Busted, Stas. Busted.
I'm not busted. I'm happy. Dax just says busted whenever you're wrong. He just goes, You're busted. Even if he's busted, but you know, even whatever, anyway.
Uh Dave, a few weeks ago you mentioned the point of comfying uh in a vacpack is to reduce the amount of fat that's required that you cook at about the same temperature as the classic method to obtain the same results. Being a pork belly and pig ears kind of gal, me you know, if I was a gal, I'd be that kind of gal too. Uh intrigued me. My question is from an energy use and equipment wear and tear perspective, would I be better off running my circulator at 9 DC for several hours? Or should I put the vac bag meat in a hot water in an oven of the same temperature?
That's interesting. You could probably see the problem with uh ovens is that if the localized temperature of the bag gets above boiling, it can melt out. But so what we what you could do is put uh like a like a bane or water bath or a roaster on your stove top and then cook that one at a little, but I wouldn't do it in an oven because I think that the bat localized bag temperature might get too high and you might get some melting. Uh, but you could definitely do it on a stovetop, as that's what I typically do is I do it on a stove top. But I wouldn't try it in an oven just because I can't get it.
If you if you could guarantee that the bag would stay underneath the water the whole time and it wouldn't inflate with air, and then the bag would get above the surface of the water, then I think you could do it. You know what I mean? But uh I I wouldn't I wouldn't try it. I mean, that would and that would actually self-regulate because the water won't get above boiling because of evaporative cooling inside of the oven. So that would be great, but you'd have to make sure that the bag doesn't come up above the surface.
But it is a pain running circulators at that high temperature, especially with larger quantities of stuff. And who wants to comf you one thing? You know what I mean, Stas? Yes. Anyway, so uh good idea.
Okay. Uh David Wilkie wrote in also about the name. I tried tweeting you but got it wrong. I think you should call it Shimmera A S E for all searing eye and pronounce it ace, shimmera ace. What do you think, Sas?
No, I don't like it. Why? I just see. I don't know. I don't think I don't have likes and dislikes like you do.
I don't have likes and dislikes that you do. Anyway, whatever you call it, I can't wait to buy one. Thanks for asking my answering my egg question a couple weeks ago. Sincerely, Dave Wilkie. Okay, uh Dorothy, uh, I'm gonna rip through these like it's some gun.
Dorothy Stainbrook wrote in from Heath Glenn Farm and Kitchen. Hi, Jack, Dave, and Nastasia. First, you do have female listeners. Another one, double busted, Sas. I am a middle-aged female from Minnesota.
You know, I haven't been to Minnesota since I was a little kid. I need to go back. I like Minnesota. Minnesota's good. Well, I remember when I was a kid, I remember it being good.
We fished, I got a whole bunch of catfish, and no one wanted to eat them, so we had to bury them for fertilizer. But that's that was in the 70s. What do you want out of me? Uh I have even sent other likely female listeners to your podcast via my blog spot on top seven food podcasts. We females may not be many, but we are listening, Nastasha.
Nice. Nice, nice. Anyway, my question. I am making Harissa sauce and would like to make it shelf stable by uh water bathing it like a jam. I'm thinking this may not be safe as it does not have enough acid or sugar in it.
It is made uh from rehydrated chili peppers, garlic spices, lemon juice, and grapeseed oil. Do I have to use a pressure cooker or can I add a ton of acid to make it shelf stable? Can I get away with water uh bathing or is or bathing, or is there a better way? Thanks so much. I do love your show and never miss it.
Okay. Uh first of all, because you are at uh look, if you if you're working at a uh or if you're at a place you own or whatever, Heath Glen Farm and Kitchen. My assumption, and I could be wrong here, so right back if my assumption is wrong. My assumption is you don't want to heap a bunch of preservatives into it because clearly you can kill whatever is gonna grow in that with preservatives. But assuming that you don't want to add preservatives, um the problem okay, so let's take this take a look.
Harissa is usually like uh uh like a uh a like a like I don't know whether they're making the sauce or just the paste, but the paste is like you know, uh uh a mixture of oil and garlic and chilies with enough water to rehydrate the the chilies, right? And then other flavorings. You add you said you have um you said you have lemon juice in yours. Now, the issue is that, for instance, let's say you're making garlic oil. The issue is is there's nothing in the garlic to prevent things from like botulism like growing, and so when you add oil, by adding the oil, you're making it an anaerobic environment, an environment without oxygen because it's coating all the stuff, and then by doing that, you're increasing the likelihood something like botulism will grow.
So presumably that's what you're worried about, and rightly so. Uh now the problem is normal heating, if if your product is susceptible to spoilage by something like botulism, right? A spore-forming bacteria, then uh then wal doing a water bath is not sufficient to kill it, right? So that would not be sufficient. If you if the problem is something like botulism, then you have to uh seal it and pressure cook it.
Can it, right? Pressure can it. Not to pressure cook it, pressure can it. Then you have to follow the right uh advice to do that. Now, let's flip this back a little bit.
Let's say that your product uh has an like, let's say you added salt to it, right? And you can measure the water activity and you can measure the pH of it, and it's called the hurdles. So when you when you're whenever you're trying to stop microbes from growing, you have what's called hurdles where you put different things in the way of bacteria from growing. So for botulism and things like it, typically hurdles will be water activity, a small amount of water. Second hurdle will be salt, uh, you know, a high enough amount of salt, and a third uh will be uh pH, would be acidity.
And if the combination, if it's acid enough, salty enough, and has l uh not you know a low enough amount of water, then botulism cannot grow. So you can adjust those things, and by the way, interesting thing about your mouth, your mouth doesn't taste uh pH. Your mouth literally tastes the number of uh acid molecules that are present. That's how that's how you perceive something as more or less sour to a first order. I mean, uh don't don't yell at me.
To a first order, that's correct. Which means you can choose an acid that has a larger effect on the pH, right? That's gonna kill botulism more readily or prevent botulism from growing more readily, but doesn't taste as sour on your tongue. So you have to look up a list of acidifiers that have uh uh you know that can shift pH fairly quickly without it being too uh too much of an acid perception on the tongue. Now, let's go this way.
Let's say you add enough uh product, you add enough acid and salt, and uh also the water activity in the water portion of it. And you should uh you should have all those things mixed into the water portion before you make your oil emulsion. Uh let's say you have enough to stop botulism from growing. You haven't guaranteed, you've guaranteed that no one will die from botulism, but you haven't guaranteed that it's gonna be stable. So there are things that will grow in environments like that, like yeast, for instance, things like that, that can grow in those environments and microbes that can grow that are not pathogens, they won't kill you, but they can change the flavor and spoil it.
Luckily for you, most of those things can be killed with a simple water bath. So if you make your harissa stable enough to not have deadly spore-forming bacteria grow in it, like botulism, then uh a simple water bath is enough to kill the rest of the stuff in there that will simply cause bad taste and spoilage. What do you think? Good. All right.
Now, I do not have time, unfortunately, to ask answer the last question in from Winter Sender, who is wondering if I could help with a recipe for a homemade soda like sand bitter. This is from Enda in Beijing, and Nastasha will be interested. You know, sand bitter, you like sand bitter, right? I love sandbitter. So I'll tell you what, I don't have time to go in through the rigmarole because they're gonna kick me off the air in the minute, but uh I'm definitely gonna go over that next week.
In the la uh and the reason I'm not gonna go over that is because I've missed one for like three or four weeks in a row on the BDX ICE program. So here's what we do at uh at BDX, BDXEQ. So it is possible we we we in general use uh three main three or four main kinds of ice. We use crappy machine ice that we that's what we use for uh our stirring and for chilling things down and for normal culinary use and whenever we don't care, right? That's just normal ice machine ice.
Uh and my feeling is is that it has just the same chilling power pound for pound as any kind of ice. The problems are it doesn't look very good and it can have more surface water because it has a large surface area. So we we a lot of times we'll shake it off before we use it, but it's it's fine. Um second kind of ice we use is presentation ice. Presentation ice, we get our ice made by 100 weight ice corporation.
They freeze it in large machines called a Kleinbell. Uh we get them in slabs. That stuff is perfectly clear. There are ways to freeze perfectly clear ice uh at home or at a bar that don't involve it. We don't do it.
We just order it from 100 weight ice. We get them in slabs, we temper those uh slabs out, and then we cut them with bread knives. They cut it cuts, it's so easy to cut, you just put the bread knife, slide it across it, tap it, and you can make perfect square chunks that are beautiful looking. That's our presentation ice that we use for uh old fashions and um drinks that are built on the rocks. Uh lastly, we make shaking ice.
We have two by two uh two inch by two inch ice cube uh trays that we get from Cocktail Kingdom. Theirs are made from urethane and not from silicone. The polyurethane ones that they have don't have any aroma, whereas Evan Freeman noted years ago that the silicone molds that you can buy in some houseware stores uh make a taste to the ice that is otherwise unpleasant, presumably from the silicone, but the ones from Cocktail Kingdom, we did side-by-side taste tests, and we've not been able to note any uh flavor in them at all. Now, those ice cube, two by two ice cubes, uh have cloudiness in them, so they're not good presentation cubes. However, uh my feeling is is that they uh make ideal shaking ice cubes because the texture in a shake and drink with a large two by two ice cube is better as we've noted in side-by-side taste tests.
However, if you add just one two by two ice cube to a shaker, you're not going to get enough dilution because uh it's so large that you can't get efficient, uh efficient dilution that way. So typically our shake and drinks, we put a one large two by two ice cube that's frozen in the cocktail kingdom uh ice cube mold, and then we throw in a couple from the crappy ice machine to increase the dilution, and that's our sweet spot for shaking drinks. We do not make uh cobbler ice because we don't use highball glasses uh in our drink presentations yet, otherwise we would. So that's it. Slab ice that we cut into whatever shape we want, usually cubes on the order of two by two, frozen two by two cubes that we freeze in a freezer that we allow to be cloudy that we use for shaking, regular crap ice, and then also, of course, your boy dry uh liquid nitrogen, which is our other chilling technique, and that's it for this week.
Cooking issues. Thanks for listening to this program on heritage radio network.org. You can find all of our archived programs on our website or as podcasts in the iTunes store by searching Heritage Radio Network. You can like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at heritage underscore radio. You can email us questions at any time at info at heritage radio network.org.
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