Today's program has been brought to you by Hearst Ranch, the nation's largest single source supplier of free range, all natural, grass-fed and grass finished beef. For more information, visit Hearst Ranch.com. You are listening to Heritage Radio Network, broadcasting live from Bushwig Brooklyn. If you like this program, visit Heritage Radio Network.org for thousands more. Cooking issues!
Hello, and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live from Roberta's Pizzeria in Bushwick, Brooklyn on the Heritage Radio Network! Join with the entire crew today. Nastasha the Hammer Lopez, Jack and Joe in the engineering booth, how are you guys doing? Hey!
Whoa! Nice! Nice, nice. And speaking of, uh uh, oh, calling your questions to 7184972128. That's 7184972128.
Okay. Uh by the way, cooking or other, you know, anything, spring-related questions, whatever you got. By the way, uh, I noticed that we had a little bit of a sponsorship vlog that we were almost brought to you by beer, and then it turns out we were brought to you by Hurst Ranch. Uh greatest greatest uh grass-fed beef song as as we all know, greatest grass-fed beef song probably ever. Well, guess what?
Somebody covered it. Uh so we're gonna hear that later today. So we're gonna hear a cover version of it. I think we're gonna play the original first, and then we'll rock with the cover a little later. And I think we should also at some point find out what the Reverend Horton Heat is doing these days and see if we can't like get permission from the Reverend Horton Heat for the Hearst Ranch people to have him play his fabulous song Eat Steak.
You remember that song? Let's do it. Yeah, it's a good song, good song. Well, kind of kind of good song. Anyway, uh but uh initially brought by beer and beer and beef, good combo.
We should do uh like a sponsorship beer and beef one day. I could do a beer and beef dish. Right? Everyone likes everyone likes a you know, a Guinness braised uh cut of beef every now and well, not everyone. Michael Natkin for one.
Yeah. Oh, congratulations to him. What happened? He is nominated for a beer board. Sweet, I knew that, but I had to draw you into it.
See that? See how I had to pretend see how that works? See how you like you know, people out there don't know what's anyway, whatever. So, yes, congratulations to Michael Nakin on being nominated for James Beer. Which uh which category was it?
Vegetarian cookbook. Uh he better win. Yeah. Who's against? Do we know?
There's some good ones. I don't know, you can look it up. We want him to win. We want Michael Knacken to answer. I bought three books of his for friends.
Yeah. With your own money. With my own money. Off Amazon. Michael, Michael, you can't possibly know what an endorsement that is from Queen Cheapula, Nastasha Lopez.
I am King Cheapula. I am a cheap, cheap, cheap. But it's weird. I'm cheap about some things, not about other things. Right?
Anyway. So uh that that all of that is useless information for you out there. Sorry. Uh really interesting news. Uh we have a question later uh having to do with uh acrylamide in Denmark, which we'll get to later.
But I was searching, you know, Denmark and food and problems, and I found something that Nastasha is going to particularly enjoy. I don't know why I think that, but I think she will. And uh it goes back to the recent spate of scandals whereby everything and its brother has been contaminated somehow, right? And so everyone's now like in a complete testing frenzy that uh the meats that you're getting are not authentic, etc. etc.
Like perhaps your perhaps your lasagna is actually a horse lasagna. Could be, or at least in Europe. So the latest one, which is like super bonx, is uh new meat scandal, pork in swarma. What? Yeah, yeah.
So it's like more so there's a uh so shawarma, you know, for those who don't know what swarma is, uh if you know what a Jiro is, it's kinda like their hero. If you're if you know what a uh donor kebab is, it's kinda like that. But uh the last thing you want to be doing is uh being uh Muslim and have uh pork in your swarma. That's the last thing you want. And so um uh the uh Imran Shah, spokesperson for the Islamic Society in Denmark, told the online daily Politicin DK that this is by no means a minor infraction.
This is a huge scandal that will cause an outcry among Danish Muslims. Our religion prohibits us from eating pork. Now Muslims will think twice before eating swarma for fear that uh that they're not adhering to the rules of their faith, said Shah. Sold as b this is all from this website. Sold as beef.
More than 200,000 Muslims currently live in Denmark, and shawarma is particularly popul popular because it does not traditionally contain pork, which is considered unclean by Muslims. Uh however, the Danish veterinary food uh uh veterinarian food administration, who the heck does veterinary science and food in the same day? It's kind of crazy, right? I mean, I want that stuff separate. Anyway, found maybe that's the problem.
Yeah, anyway. Found traces of the forbidden pork in a fried beef kebab uh product manufactured by Andalukud, the largest supplier of Schwarma meat in Copenhagen. Uh quotes, uh Mustafa Shaheen, the CEO and owner of Andalukud, sorry. Oh. Anyway, I thought you'd like that, right?
Sorry. Uh it's not, well, it's not allowed. Obviously, it's not a laughing matter. Food contamination is not a laughing matter, but uh what's interesting is that as soon as people start testing, uh the you know, the the poor kids the fan. Anyway, uh Rick writes in uh regarding uh chicha that we discussed, I think last week or maybe the week before.
Uh Dave Nastasia, Jack and Joe. I was listening to episode 118. I can't believe we've had 118 episodes, nuts. Uh in particular segment about chicha. And for those of you that don't know, uh chicha is uh they're traditional fermented uh grain, uh traditionally corn corn, I guess.
Uh although other things, you can use roots, uh not necessarily grain, starch. Starch fermentations uh from South America. Uh and you know, one of the traditional ones is with corn, and in order to get the starch in corn or any starch really, uh roots, whatever, cassava, whatever, to uh turn into sugar so that you can ferment them into ethanol, you need to introduce uh amylase enzymes. One way to do that is to germinate uh product uh by you know letting it grow a little bit and then killing the killing the germ so that you um so that you then don't you know don't actually convert like use up all the sugar that you need, and then you use the enzymes from the germination to convert the starch to sugar. Mashing in beer to parlance.
Anyway, so um point is is that if you don't mash something out or you don't have something that you can germinate, you have amylase where stuff's saliva. In your spit, yeah. So you can chew stuff up, and it's traditional in a lot of uh communities that didn't have the ability or products that could germinate properly, traditionally things would be chewed up, uh, and then uh the saliva would be allowed to work on the product such that you could get the same effect as you did from germinating. Okay, that's what we're that's what we're talking about. Just so you don't have to go back and listen to 118, God help you if you have to do that.
Okay. Uh I recalled an episode of a show called Brewmasters, uh, where uh Sam uh Collagione, is that how you pronounce it? Collagene. What do you think? You're the Italian.
Yeah. Uh although he's from like Delaware, so he probably pronounces it differently. At Dogfish Head, great brewery, you know, they make some crazy products, but they also make some incredibly delicious products. Uh at Dogfish Head made a chicho beer where he and his staff uh chewed the corn, spat it out, then added it to the wort, and the beer was then served at the Dogfish Head Pub. In the show, they even tested employees to find those people whose saliva had more of the right enzymes needed to break down the corn, referred to by Sam as super chewers.
Uh that in from Rick. So I read one article about uh them doing this. Here's the thing. So they here's the argument of why it's okay to uh chew up uh your stuff and spit it out. The argument is that you're gonna boil uh no matter what, you're gonna boil the wort anyway, right?
So you're gonna kill any any bacteria or any stuff that's in there, um it's gonna be rendered harmless by the boiling procedure. Now, I don't really know, because I haven't had the time to look up whether or not that's legal or not. Like in other words, like whether or not people would actually be okay if you actually listed the steps, like I am literally gonna put it in my mouth, chew it up and spit it out, and then I don't know. I mean, like I I'm not saying they didn't serve it, because clearly they did. Um and I, you know, I read that it was more difficult than they let on.
They thought they were gonna chew through a bunch of pounds of this stuff and nothing flat, and it took them forever to chew it. Turns out hard work. Uh but the the the point is is that regardless of whether or not it's legal, then the question is is it a good idea to do in your bar or uh brew pub or establishment? And for Dogfish Head, clearly, because they spend a lot of their time experimenting with old techniques uh and you know, ancient brews and ancient beverages, for them it's clearly a necessary step they need to make. Now, step aside, and let's say that you're not Dogfish Head.
Like, is it a wise idea? The look on Nastasha's face, the horrified look on Nastasha's face, seems to tell me that no, it's probably not a good idea. Let me give you I'm gonna get gross here for a sec. You alright with this, Doug? Yeah.
I'm gonna get gross here, right? Mm-hmm. Okay. So you're literally spitting into something you're gonna serve to somebody, right? Mm-hmm.
Okay. And if you weren't gonna boil it, that wouldn't be okay, right? Right. Right. Now.
Ready for the gross? Mm-hmm. Like, what if the analog, what if there was an enzyme in poop that did something, right? For instance, Copi Luwak, right? When you eat Copi Lua coffee beans, they have passed through the gut of a civet cat and been pooped out of the civet cat.
The civic cats poop in particular areas. They eat only the choicest coffee beans, and the enzymes in the digestive system do something to the coffee bean to make it particularly delicious. I've never tasted it, but it's extremely expensive, right? Okay. So there you go, pooping the coffee.
Now, that's washed and cleaned and sterilized and roasted, so right, nonsense. So if a person was to eat coffee beans and poop them out, would that be okay to brew coffee from? Would that be okay? No. Right.
So it's that's the question, right? I mean, like, I don't know. I don't know. Interesting question. Kind of interesting question.
I don't know. I don't really know. Someone tell me. Anyway. Uh, more stuff on the torch name.
So, as uh those who know that we're working on a new kind of torch attachment that uh you attach it to the torch and it gets rid of the taste that I associate that I call torch taste, which I used to think came from the fuel, but in fact turns out it comes from just the incredible high heat of a torch. We diffuse it, turn it into radiant heat, and we're trying to find a name for this gizmo. You can look on the cooking issues blog to get an idea of what the hell we're talking about. A couple people have written in by the way, asking where they can find the Kickstarter. The reason you can't find it is we haven't put it up yet.
We're still um we have it out what's called beta testing. So I have, you know, we've given it to a group of about uh five or six chefs, or you know, six, ten chefs, and we're having them test it now to see kind of what they what they think, what they think the problems are, what solutions are to the problems, we're making it safer, etc. etc. Right? Right.
It's a fun process. Oh, it's so fun. It's so it's so fun that Nastasha wants to stab me in the eye every morning. Okay. Uh we're we're all, you know, whatever.
I'm I could be difficult. Okay, so uh here's some of the names. Because we had a contest on the names, and uh I think we're gonna probably call like we should probably call the contest after this because we've gotten a lot of really good names in, and we're pretty sure we're gonna go with some combination of Sally plus plus something else, and we're just focusing on it. So we'll we'll go through and we'll see whether anyone actually earned the free whatever, but we really super appreciate all the names that have been sent in. And I'm gonna read the last list of the names of names.
All right, so read them right now. I have the new T abbreviation of New Torch and a nod to the salamander and eye of newt with T as a capital at the end. I like Eye of Newt because of the witch thing. But you remember, I actually have to sell this product. Like this is so like it's all funny.
Like it's all funny. Like these are things that I would come up with as well that I appreciate that I would I you know so there's Pipe Piper that works with us, he's the pun master. He should quit working with us and go just do puns for a living. For daily news, or yeah, or something, yeah. But anyway, uh or for the yeah, whatever, like the weatherman, whatever, like meteorologists.
Like he could come up with their puns left and right, it'd be awesome at it. Uh but my my point is that these are all Piper worthy puns. They're great, but uh, you know, they they don't want to necessarily have a product that's supposed to be around for years. But anyway, here's the last list. Uh Cooking Issues team.
This is from JD. I tweeted a torch name, but decided to email it just to make sure. So that was also JD. Oh, Myard Reactor. That's a good name.
Myard Reactor. But you know, again, I don't wait away. My it uh I re this is him. I realize it doesn't cover all the functionality, but I think it would be cool to pay homage, homage, pay homage, to the technical term and chemist Louis Camille Maillard. Yeah, famous, famous man, not famous in his own life, the poor SOB.
Uh also, what chef wouldn't want a serious kitchen tool that has reactor in the name? That's actually kind of true. I like reactor. I like reactor. And if you look up uh chemistry reactors online, they're pretty awesome.
It's right for all sorts of nameplay in the back of the house. My are that puppy. Give it some more Maya. Like Maya, actually. Uh love the uh love yard it up, etc.
Or Myard Reaction Torch MR Torch, you can call it Mr. Torch or Mr. T for an extremely marketable name. Uh sure you could easily get Mr. T to endorse it.
And of course the tagline would be I pity the fool. Should I do it? I can't really do Mr. T. I pity the fool who doesn't use my Siri 2.
Uh cheers, JD. That wasn't bad. Yeah. Uh it's been a long, long time, and I do love Mr. T.
Who does if you don't like Mr. T, something wrong with you. Anyway. Hey, we got a caller. Oh, yeah?
All right, we'll get well sh okay, okay. I'll go back to the names in a second. Caller, you're on the air. Hi, uh Dave. Howdy.
How's it going? Do well. I have a question of um two questions. First is uh I want to get an ISI whip. I was wondering what's your recommendation as far as uh the best ISI whip to get.
Okay, so is this for home or commercial? Um home, but uh hopefully commercial use. So kind of both, yeah. Okay, so I mean, I like the ones that first of all, you know, I I have worked with the with the company in the past, so just you know, bias there. Uh but I've you I've used the off-brand ones before, and they've been given to me and all this stuff, and I have to admit, as much as I hate shilling out for ISI here, uh the off-brand ones tend to leak and the seals are cruddy, and they just tend not to work as well.
So I stick with the name brand ones. I'm sure there's another high quality one out there, but I don't know. Then uh I prefer I've I've had the home ones that um, you know, are plastic on top and stainless elsewhere, and I think the ones that are kind of all stainless with the um with the silicone grips are are better, right? So then now the next question is what size do you want to go with? And now for all purpose uses uh I think like either get the half liter or the liter depending on what kind of volumes you're going to use.
Like unless you have a very specific application for the very small one I wouldn't say it's necessarily that useful. I tend to use liter ones and half liter ones. The you know the the thing is if you're going to do small amounts in the full liter ones you might need to dump an extra cartridge in versus if you were using the half liter one. So it but if you're not going to do it all the time it's not that big of a loss and your capacity is now all of a sudden greater right so you bear that in mind when you're when you're buying one and um the other thing is is that in general unless you have a very specific application where you need to keep something hot or cold for a long time the thermal whips which are which are insulated so they they look like they hold a liter but they only hold a half liter because they're insulated they're great if you need to keep something hot for a long time and you don't have access to like a circulator or a Bain Marie where you can just keep it in hot water but uh those applications are fairly they're fairly specific and the upcharge for the thermal whip is very large right so I mean and remember anything you can do in a thermo whip you can do slightly less conveniently in a regular ISI by either sticking it into a hot water bath or by putting it in the fridge one of the two. And if you do if you do buy a thermal whip you still you need to pre chill it or preheat it with a fluid before you dump your initial before you dump your product in or it doesn't doesn't work right.
You know if you do get the leader, you're gonna have to contend with the fact uh that you you guys gotta remember to keep your recipe or anything really any one of them you have to make sure that your recipes are the same uh volumes every time when you're doing things like infusions. For things like whipped creams and foams it doesn't matter as much. Okay. Great. And uh my second question is um I'm trying to uh mess around with making egg egg yolk batarga.
Okay. I was wondering if you have any advice on uh how to go about doing that because I've seen recipes and seen uh previous chefs I work with make batarga from uh you know uh row uh so I'm wondering if you have any advice for making egg yolk batarga. Mean regular chicken egg yolk? Egg chicken egg yolk kind of curing them so they have the same texture so you can grate them like you would batarga. Well I mean huh so how would you do that?
I guess it depends on what you what you want right so uh I mean I would look into kind of miso curing uh of egg yolks and see kind of a miso cured egg yolk and then get the initial cure. The issue is you have to get enough water out of the egg yolk so that it's stable before you undergo the normal kind of dehydration uh process. Yeah. And I know you you probably don't want the flavor I've never tried it. This is why I'm just thinking off the top of my head is I've never done it.
So like you know I'm just I I would look into seeing how the miso cured egg yolks work. Uh I mean the the bonehead easiest way to do it would be probably to cook the egg yolks out at like 64, mold them into a block and then and then with salt and then let them dry like batarga style. I don't I mean that's the bonehead easy way to do it, but it's not as elegant. I mean, if you want to keep the egg yolk whole and then grate it later, then you're gonna have to do some form of very slow uh dehydration and salting and then later expose it to air and let it dry out. You know what I'm saying?
Yeah. Um because I found a recipe for sea urchin retargo where they mix tucky with search. Oh, yeah, to bind it. And then folded it into um I mean molded it, and then from there they did the some work. I'm wondering if that is an optional technical search with egg yolks.
Um, sure. I mean the question is how how much I mean, you know, a uni is ex like the eggs, the eggs, uh the actual eggs are extremely, extremely fine in uni, right? Yeah, super fine, like much finer than they are in the fish rows that they make uh you know botarga from. So presumably some of them are still whole, and then some of them are beat up by the uh pureeing, and then and then the tapioca just glues the whole thing together, and then uh how much they add salt to it? Uh presumably?
Um presumably, yeah. Yeah. Uh yeah, they they bury they buried in kosher salt, but I don't think they added any salt to it. Right, so they they buried it in kosher salt. Right, okay.
So yeah, so then the salt is is going through biosmothy. Yeah, I mean, so if it works for that, the problem with you know, the problem with regular egg yolks is you know if you puree an egg yolk and you puree uni, pure uni is gonna have more structure pureeed. So I guess that's why they're adding the tapioca. I mean, like I don't know whether it's gonna uh super adversely affect the flavor, but just taking the egg yolk up to like 64 uh or 63 C is gonna give you enough structure to have it sit around while it's doing its thing, but I don't know if it changes the structure. And then like I say, if you you can just crack uh egg yolks into uh and do do miso curing of them because uh you know, I've I've never done it, but I've s I've seen it done.
Okay. Alrighty? Okay. I hope they have uh please tweet the uh at cooking issues and tell me what happens when you test this stuff out because uh it'll give me an idea for future people who ask me. Great.
Thank you so much. Thank you. Have a great day. You too. All right.
Uh okay, back to some torch names. What was the last one we had? Oh yeah, Celsius Chef writes in. You got like Celsius Chef. Yeah, Celsius Chef.
Although remember, I still fry in Fahrenheit and I bake in Fahrenheit, but I do all my low temperature work in Celsius. Uh Hey there, Dave and Gang. Uh the perfect name for your new tool, the Bluzuka. I totally yell that. I totally yell down the line for that, just because it's fun to say.
Keep up the great work, guys. And how do I find the project on Kickstarter if I'd like to support Celsius Chef? We'll let you know when we actually have it up. I mean, look, I gotta be honest, I love the name Blowzuka. I can't actually call it that, but blow zuka!
That was my vote, by the way. Really? I mean, how could it not be? That's an awesome name. I know.
Blozuka? Awesome. Like Bluzuka Joe. What do you think? Whoa, can we rename Joe Blozuka Joe?
Hell yeah. Can you write a song? Blozuka Joe, Joe? Yeah, Jack and I will collaborate on this. We'll have it by next week, I think.
Uh, sweet, sweet, blowzuka Joe. Okay. Uh Ole writes in, hi, here are a few names for your torch gizmo. First of all, I love the word gizmo. Yeah, yeah.
Love the word gizmo. I like the blog Gizmodo just because it's called Gizmo Doe. Anyway. Uh Torch Tamer, the seer, especially if it can also predict the future. This, by the way, was the vote of Dax, my son.
I called it Daddy's Sear for a long time, not knowing what sear, like searing. Anyway, so he calls it the seer, which is I kind of like that, but it's uh sounds like kind of like really like a cult. Yeah. The seer. Although it'd be anyway.
The humane torch. The humane torch. Like the human torch. Oh, like human torch. Yeah, human torch.
Good c good uh comic book of reference there. I think Nastasha always surprises me. I'm always surprise me. I love that. Uh Cooking Torch without Issues.
Did I get it? Yeah. Yeah. And the eye torch. Like could be I or I, because it looks like an eye.
Honestly, if you're looking to sell more than a few of these, uh find a clever name. Sous vide Torch. Uh, sell the whole deal, Torchhead included, and Sous V Torch would be the top Google search results. Gotta like a Google search result. Mm-hmm.
Yeah, gotta like that. Uh, no matter what you decide, I was standing in line, Apple store style to get one. I'm relatively relatively new to your podcast, but I'm burning through one to three a day. Many thanks. Ole.
Oh, hey you gotta mellow out on listening to this. You're you're gonna burn out. Like we're we you can't listen to three of us a day. It's not possible. Yeah.
Right? Yeah. Okay, no more submissions now. Well, the stash is so you're so harsh. I got more in this list.
Okay. What the hell's wrong with you? You're crazy. Uh Dean Wynne writes in. Hey Nastasha, Dave Jack and Joe.
I'm not sure where you guys are with the gadget names, but I ha I like gadget too, good word. Uh, but I had to throw my hat in. I also like the term throw hat in. Initially I thought about broiling and searing, but what you really are doing is applying heat by hand with the precision of an artist. So that led to the idea of a brush, fire brush, flash brush, and torch brush.
Brushes, brush. Uh, thanks for the show. I love uh um thanks. I love the show and listen to all the podcasts, hoping to hear my name on the next show. Dean Nguyen, here's your name again, Dean.
Dean Nguyen. Thank you for your uh submission, right? Yeah, yeah. Uh okay. Is that it?
For the names. Okay. So no more. All right, so should we take a commercial break? Yeah.
All right, first commercial break. Pasture raised on a hundred and fifty thousand acres in central California. Sustainably produced, humane. Oh yeah. And you're back.
Hey, welcome back to King. I thought we're doing the cover. No, we're gonna close the show with the cover. Okay, we have a cover of my favorite grass, uh, grass uh fed beef song. Coming to you from Joe Gargano.
Okay. This question in from Buddha regarding bacon substitution. Hi, Nastasha, Dave, Jack, Joe, et al. Are there any good substitutes for bacon or pork in recipes for soups or other dishes where they are used mainly as a flavoring and not as a focus? I'm a lifelong vegetarian and I've never intentionally eaten meat, let alone bacon.
Uh, although you know, you know, uh everyone knows this. Everyone knows bacon's delicious, so you don't eat it, but I mean, obviously, you know that it's delicious, even though you haven't eaten it because it's just straight up is, right? Right. Yeah. Uh, I'm a lifelong okay, never intentionally eaten meat, let alone bacon.
Normally when I come across a recipe that calls for bacon, hammer pork, I will just leave it out. Obviously, I avoid recipes in which the meat is the bulk or main item. Recently, I've come to realize that this is leaving me with bland recipes that are clearly missing something. Most likely strong flavor components from the meat. Navy bean soup has this.
I'm assuming a much uh navy bean soup has, I'm assuming, a much different flavor profile with and without ham. Uh this most recently came to a head when trying to adapt a cheddar ale recipe I found on the Sirius Eats blog. What can I do to overcome this issue? I am an ovo lacto vegetarian, so solutions involving dairy or eggs are fine with me. When I've asked for solutions to this among my friends, who may be foodies but not necessarily chefs, the general answer is it can't be done, or to add some salt, fat, and liquid smoke.
Thanks for your thoughts, and I hope cooking issues continu uh continues to entertain and enlighten Buddha. Okay, this is a great question. Uh and the issue is is that uh a lot of chefs who don't have uh, you know, certain constraints, you know, whether you want to call them constraints or not, but you know, certain ingredients that they won't use, uh, they tend to uh ignore the the problem and say things like, Oh, I just can't do it, or just add something that's you know relatively not so good. Like uh and by the way, there are good liquid smokes. Uh, and obviously smoke is one of the components in bacon and something that you're gonna be missing if you don't have smoking this.
But there are there are better ways than using uh a low-quality liquid smoke. High quality liquid smoke is good stuff, but it's also hard to dose liquid smoke. You add a little too much liquid smoke and all of a sudden there's there's problems. Anyway, back to that. Uh so uh the the the question, and people, like I say, they they ignore it.
Me, on the other hand, even though I eat bacon, you know, quite often, uh, and I use it a lot as a seasoning meat. I think you know, bacon and country ham are two of my most favorite seasoning meats where you don't actually have to use that much of it to get a good result. But uh saying what can you do uh to get around it is to me is an interesting problem and something to solve. So here here here are my thoughts. What is it that bacon uh is is adding?
So it's adding salt, right? So you need to add salt. It's also adding um it's also adding smoke if you're using American bacon, which is why I like American bacon, even in recipes where I shouldn't like American bacon, like Italian recipes where Nastashi's like, you have to use pancetta because it's not authentic. And I really I don't care if it's authentic because I like the smoke, right? Stash, you you hate it, right?
Really? Yeah. Since when? You've been yelling at me for years, for years. You should use pancetta, but usually they the ones that they sell in the store is really bad.
Yeah, well, you heard it here first. Yeah, you heard it here first. It turns out that we're American and we like smoky bacon even when we should. But in Italy, the pancetta is smoky. It's just not, you can't find it here.
Whatever. Okay. Did you ever you ever buy that panchetta, the like packaged panchetta at the store? It's so bad. I've never purchased that.
Oh man. I've never good look. So Buddha, we're not answering your question. Here, back to your question. So uh smokiness is definitely something you need to replace when you're replacing a smoked ham product or a bacon product.
Now, liquid smoke isn't the way to go. So, like if you were doing a do a pizza and you wanted it to have a little bit of that uh component, right? Then uh, for instance, I I have to always when I make pizzas, I have to make them vegetarian, completely vegetarian because my cousin who comes over and eats at my house is vegetarian and won't eat uh you know, won't eat meat. So I can't put anchovies into my sauce, which is a normal one of my techniques that I put in, and no one's ever complained because it tastes delicious and it adds a lot of umami and so. No, he won't.
Anyway, so uh smoked mozzarella, right, is a good way to add smoke uh in that form. Uh or if you're doing a cheddar uh ale thing, use a smoked cheese, but high quality, not a crappy one where they spray fake smoke on it. Umly, smoked paprika uh or pimentone, a fantastic way to add uh smokiness to um a dish. So, right, so th you know, those are the how else do I add smoke? There's a lot of anything that you add that is smoked naturally can add some of those smoky flavors and probably does it in a way that you're gonna like better than just adding uh straight up uh liquid smoke, which like I say is hard to dose and it can it can go from being too little to all of a sudden being too much, and also a low quality liquid smoke is very monotonic.
It has one very characteristic kind of note to it, in part because of the way it's produced, and in part because you can't buy a high quality one usually. Anyway, okay. So the other things, I mean, salt is obvious, you can add salty things, but I usually like to add salty foods that aren't just adding pure salt, but to also add the umami products that you get, the meaty umami uh things that you get out of um out of things like bacon. So, how do you get that? Any food that contains uh amino acids that have been broken down somewhat into smaller uh tasty uh you know uh polypeptides and like breakdown, like protein breakdown products, especially if they've been cooked to give them some of that cooked flavor that you would get out of uh cooking bacon in a pan before you uh add the soup stuff to it, right?
Anything that's gonna add those flavors is going to make your product better. So that's when you start pulling out like uh parmesan cheese being great uh as something that adds umami because it's been aged for a long, long time and the proteins have broken down, and you get a much richer, more umami feel out of it, right? Tomato products, clearly very high in umami. Ground up cured olives, right? Are excellent uh uh umami carrying um thingamajigs.
Uh also uh liquid aminos, right? So uh fermented sauces. Now that when you think of something to add umami to soups, uh the your mind probably first goes directly to soy. The problem is if you add soy to a product, all of a sudden it uh it starts tasting Asian, right? So you can go to different products like coconut liquid aminos or any sort of fermented, broken down uh product where you're getting some of those meaty notes that you would otherwise get from a uh from adding straight meat.
Oh, and obviously mushrooms. Uh it was is it any good? Am I missing anything? No, you're good. Yeah, I mean, like, and so some combination of all of those things, but even just like making sure that you stock items that allow you to do quick uh substitutions, like a really high quality smoked pimentone, like smoked paprika, and you know, always always, you know, maybe try the coconut liquid aminos, see what you think.
Uh and just you know, work that way. I think you probably have good luck. Yeah? Mm-hmm. Okay.
Uh Ruben writes in about his home kitchen. Uh Hammerjack, Joe, and Dave. I'm an avid fan of the show. Thanks so much for all your contributions and work and for the chartreuse, which is the drink we do at the bar. It's it's really just uh chartreuse, uh, green chartreuse and uh water chilled carbonated with uh a little bit of uh clarified lime juice in it, like really carbonated.
Anyway, uh Ruben says that's one tasty beverage. I'm sure the Carthusians would agree. You know, we met the we met the president, Nastasha and Piper and I met the president of Chartreuse uh the other day, and uh he was kind of hilarious. Like, I would like to go visit those monks someday. Apparently, you know they can't talk to Carthusians when they're doing their when they're in the monastery, but if you get them outside the monastery, they uh they they they can talk.
Loved it, I loved it. I mean, that movie that they did looked incredibly boring, but I'd love to go visit them, right? Anyway, uh whatever. Okay, question. Uh I'm in the conceptual stages of renovating the kitchen in my apartment.
As a home cook and devotee of many contemporary techniques discussed here and elsewhere, I'd like to create a work area that is functional for the current state of the art, yet flexible enough to incorporate future innovations. I have a small space, don't we all, right? Uh limited budget, I'm familiar with this problem, uh and one shot at this. Much as I'd like, I don't have the luxury of putting in a completely restaurant-style work area that would render my apartment unsaleable. This is a huge problem, by the way.
So, like my kitchen at home is ridiculous, and you know, it probably would be an impediment to selling it because I have the huge deep fryer, the huge six-burner range, all this other stuff. Um, as wonderful as it is to have new ways to approach cooking, it's frustrating that uh design thinking and ergonomics have seemingly not kept pace. Hearing your recent offhand thoughts about the outdated state of technologies like home refrigeration makes me further concerned that any specialized approach uh I take might be limiting in the future. Would you share any tips, must-do's, cautionary tales, uh, or overarching philosophies or nominally related tangents, uh, familiar with us, I guess. Uh you or uh have uh faced or anyone you know is faced with similar quandaries.
Thanks much. Ruben, okay. Uh here's the thing. So uh look, at home, you know, I it's very hard. You have to choose whether you're either going to have uh convenient, like convenient, easy home stuff, or you have in the past, had to choose between easy, convenient home stuff and uh like hardcore restaurant stuff.
And the hardcore restaurant stuff has a lot of problems for homes. For instance, regular restaurant uh kitchen stoves throw off a boatload of heat. They're not as well insulated. Uh they typically have standing pilots, it means they're running all the time. So in the summertime they really heat up your house.
Uh in fact, in the summertime, I turn the pilot off in my oven and I just leave my oven off and I do all my cooking in the salamander and and on my uh on my crepe maker for most of the time because uh no one wants to have that oven raging during the during the summertime. It's crazy. Right. So for some reason, there is a there's a real disconnect. So, you know, the most that most people at home, and and I wouldn't recommend getting that, even if you could resell your house with it.
And by the way, the professional stove, like a lar a lot of people get freaked out by it. Like they don't, especially mine, because it's all PID controlled and like electronic and you have to plug it in in five different places. My mine, mine in particular is a nightmare. But people get weirded out by it. They love the idea of these uh you can't see the quote, you know, quote marks that my fingers are making, but professional style home ones.
Most of the ones I've used that are professional style home ones are fairly lacking in terms of their output power. However, um if you can find uh like one that's like one of these kind of home professional jobs in a stainless uh that has a fairly high output burner, and I don't have any recommendations because I haven't used one at home. I I use uh an old garland that you know I bought at a restaurant auction for almost nothing. But by the way, another tack you can take uh with a limited budget is to go to restaurant auctions if you live in a place where there's a restaurant auction, get the commercial oven that you actually want, install it, and and when it comes time to uh sell your apartment, throw it away and buy a normal uh oven to put into your into your kitchen. That's what I plan on doing, like when I sell my apartment.
I'm just gonna rip out my oven that it's put in like many, many years of good service to me that I bought for $500 including the salamander at an auction right uh I'm just gonna hurl it you know into the abyss or give it to someone who wants it to be someone you should option please my it will be unsafe I can't actually give it to anyone because so many modifications that I wouldn't want anyone else to have to give them it with the what's it called I don't know what that means it says I don't know that yeah whatever anyway yeah sure so I can get so I can get my butt handed to me. Anyway the um point being that you can put that in for very little money if you're willing to put up with the inconvenience and then later put in uh a new unit but I wouldn't necessarily go there but you definitely need uh good high output burners uh if you have a lot of electricity and you don't have a lot of ventilation induction might be the way to go if your cookware it can stand it although I have to say having grown up I mean I honestly believe that induction is the wave of the future uh but you know I'm an old school like you know gas flame fiend and I don't know that the in the induction I I use induction at work exclusively because we don't have gas burners at work and I still I still would feel very sad if I didn't have my gas burners at my house. You know what about you stuzz? Yeah definitely although an electric oven might be the way to go I mean it depends on how much modification you're willing to do and how handy you are I mean I I recommend having a uh a deep fryer only for me most people wouldn't do that and that would destroy the resale value of your kitchen so I wouldn't do that although I highly recommend owning one if you if if you want to become a monk of the fry then you need to have a real fryer. I think that's just the case.
Anyway, but but you're not gonna do that, so it doesn't matter. Well, I would just maximize your counter space. Uh from a I would get, you know, six burners that can do a really good job that also throttle down to a low enough setting that that uh you know they're still useful. Make sure your oven uh has a full sheet pan capacity. If you have a full sheet pan capacity oven and six burners, and then you you give yourself enough space to have a um enough space to have all the ancillary equipment like your circulators uh or you know, counter space for the vacuum, things like this, then I think you're gonna be in good shape.
Problem uh also I would throw away here's the big thing I think everyone mistake everyone makes. They have all these different kinds of bowls and all these different kinds of gotzis in their kitchen, and then they they never know how to use them and never find them. If like uh I'll give you the quick example. You have to plan to have space in your kitchen to have the stuff out. My old uh loft, the uh my pasta machine, my the roller, you know, the Atlas pasta machine roller was bolted to my countertop.
So consequently, I made pasta uh about uh once a week. Once or twice a week, depending. I would make pasta because everything was out, and the amount of time it took me to make the pasta was roughly equivalent to the amount of time it would take me to cook dry pasta because I was so fast because I did it all the time. Uh in my new kitchen, I don't have space, it's not bolted to the counter. I've lived there for ten years, and in ten years I've made pasta ten times because the stuff's not out.
You need to have so like I think the main problem people make when they're when they're trying to, if they want to use something all the time at home, you have to make it convenient. And I would have uh a mixture of open and closed storage so that your uh open storage is very fast, you don't have to worry about it. I would throw away all your odd-size bowls, I would go to a kitchen supply store and buy inexpensive stainless steel bowls uh in four sizes. I would buy six of each size: large, uh a very small for Mise en plus stuff, and then uh uh a next size up, a next size up, and a large. I would have stacks of those.
Do not stack them inside of each other, put them next to each other. Get two, like two or three different sizes of stackable uh like Pyrexes or measuring cups in two different sizes and have those things out so that they work and get like, you know, easy to use things for like uh bulk storage of flour that seal properly so that you don't get vermin problems. And like though that's like the biggest, that's like the biggest thing. You know what I mean? Like keeping those stuff uh in and out and being able to grab those things very quickly.
Then make like I say, make sure you have enough room for your circulator and make sure you have enough power. The problem with a lot of these new techniques is that uh you're plugging stuff in and then all of a sudden you don't have enough power and you're blowing circuits. So you're running your nuke at the same time that you're running your rice cooker, and if you have an electric uh pressure cooker and you're starting blowing circuits everywhere. So think about trying to run a few extra circuits in and just make sure you have enough burner work. And the last thing I will say is please try to get uh good ventilation into your kitchen.
I have done I shouldn't see this, but like illegally vented my kitchen. Uh I put a uh um like a what's the word? You know, dryer ducts? Yeah, dryer duct. So it looks like I have a dryer duct, but I've been venting my whole kitchen uh out of it.
And you have to be really careful and know what you're doing to make sure that you're not causing a fire hazard when you're venting from uh you know, like a kitchen. But even if it means just putting a good fan in your window and trying to get the stuff out, please make sure you ventilate properly because when you're doing uh finishing of low temperature meats that you've cooked, you generate a lot of smoke and it can be problematic if you don't vent. Does this make any sense? Alright. So let's take one more commercial break and come back with cooking issues.
Whoa. This is a very dark cover of the Hearst Ranch grass-fed beef song. Yeah, it's like cows going to slaughter. You see, he says whenever she says something like that, she leans back. I hope you folks at the home heard that.
Yeah, she's like, yeah, he's you think you think uh Joel's focusing on the slaughter aspect? It's like imagine like playing that, like I can imagine like the helicopters flying in and like you know, strafing the cows. Yeah. So, you know, slaughter of slaughter via minigun. Hurst ranch, grass fed beef.
Crazy. Alright. Uh Tom Flash and writes in uh at drink a drink away time, which is uh I guess his Twitter handle, uh for stabilizing frozen drinks like margaritas, is gum type important. Xanthan, Arabic, guar, etc. Okay, look.
I have not done a lot of testing uh trying to stabilize frozen drinks, but here's the problem. Uh so if you're talking about a frozen drink in a blender, right? The issue with stabilizing it is that ice floats. And when you're blending, you're making little ice crystals. So you what you have in general is a nice uh kind of mixture of ice crystals and drink.
Then slowly the ice crystals s uh float up to the top and and it breaks. Now, I guess what you're suggesting is to add enough of a thickener to the product such that those ice crystals remain suspended. Now I guess it's possible to do it, and if it was very slushy, it wouldn't be a problem. Uh you wouldn't want to use so your choices were Xanthan, Arabic, guar. Okay.
So Arabic is not so much a uh gonna be good for um keeping keeping the ice particle stationary. Assuming we're even talking about the same thing. I think we are, right? Uh Arabic is gonna be more good at uh stabilizing air bubbles and foams, right? So for adding like a good, you know, foamy head, or for emulsifying oils into something.
So it's very good uh at emulsifying and it's good at kind of uh at adding body, but you have to add a whole boatload of Arabic for you to get like great viscosity out of it because uh Arabic is one of the very few hydrocolloids that is ping pong ball shaped instead of spaghetti shaped. And ping pong ball shaped things are m imagine trying to punch through uh a bunch of ping pong balls a lot easier than trying to punch through a mat of spaghetti or felt, right? So think about it. So uh um gum arabic, ping pong ball shaped can, and that's why you can have extremely high concentrations of gum arabic and still have things be liquid. So I wouldn't necessarily use uh Arabic if if the application you're talking about is what I think you're talking about.
Now, uh guar, uh problem with guar, uh aside from the fact that nine tenths of guar uh is not good. It tastes beanie because it hasn't been refined enough. Uh but you can get really good refined guar called flavor-free guar. A couple people make it, but the one I use is from T I C gums called flavor-free guar. Plus also, you know guar very expensive now due to fracking, fracking, fracking.
Uh we talked about that a million times, right? Okay, so I don't need to talk about it again. Although it makes me angry. Anyway, uh not the fracking, the guar. And uh, I mean, I mean maybe the fracking makes me angry.
I just don't know enough about it. Anyway, uh, that's not what I'm talking about. The problem with guar is that uh guar is literally just a thickening agent. So it'll slow down uh how fast ice crystals are moving through the liquid, but it's not going to stop them, right? Because guar solutions have no what's called yield point.
They they flow slowly, but they always flow, right? So uh I mean uh just imagine this. They just they always it's just a matter of how fast they flow. Xanthan, on the other hand, which is the first one that you uh mentioned, Xanthan gum has what's called a yield point, which means that uh even in fairly low concentrations, uh unless a product is moving, the um it Xanthan acts like a gel. There's no movement at all.
It's stationary. And then once you apply any force, it undergoes what's called shear thinning, and it turns to a liquid very, very quickly, right? Very quickly. And this is a uh this is a like a well-known uh property of Xanthan, and it's why you can use Xanthan in combinations with other things to um do things like uh stop uh pepper and other salad parts, you know, salad dressing particles from floating to the top. You can keep them suspended.
Uh you know, fluid gels are also very good at this. So you can use so orbits, the old orbits uh drink that had those little balls floating in them was a fluid gel that was made out of gel-an gum that was blended, and then with xanthan added. Right. Also, if you thicken somewhat with something like guar, you can add less xanthan. Here are the problems, right?
Uh over xanthan products uh have a snotty, slimy texture to them. So you can add some, but you can't add too much. If you add like a quarter percent, if that's enough to suspend it, then you're okay. But if you have to add much more than a quarter percent of xanthan, uh you want to want to start adding other things to help uh you know help hold with the xanthan, or you get these kind of snotty, slimy textures. The other thing is is that the ability of a fluid gel or a hydrocolloid like xanthan with a yield point to suspend particles like ice is very dependent on the density difference between uh the products you're suspending and the size of the particles.
So the bigger the density difference, the harder it is to suspend. And the larger the particle with a given density difference, the harder it is to suspend. Ice is quite a bit less dense than uh than the drink that it's in. Quite a bit less. And so it can be fairly hard to keep suspended.
But that said, you could try some Xanthan, and maybe anyone else out there has tried this, they can give it a shot. Uh the only problem is if the drink sits around for a long time and you've suspended it, once it melts, it'll have that weird uh Xanthan look to it, right? Right. So if someone's gonna pound it right away, I guess it's not a big problem. But anyway, I I could think more about it, but those are just my current thoughts.
Yeah? Good. Yeah, yeah, stuff is like. I need her there. She's like, she's like, Dave, shut up about the Xanthan, shut up.
Okay. Uh Morton Mattson writes in again, uh, which we appreciate. Uh dear Dave, thanks once again for your input on my quail egg conundrum. Because we were talking about the ISI with the quail egg, and I think that's great. I want uh, you know, someone to we like if I whatever.
I think it's a good idea. I'm very happy that I'm very happy about that. Anyway, uh I have a comment and a question for you. Firstly, I've been thinking about the question you had in last week about the use of nanoparticles in food. And so uh just to recap, uh, you know, there's these particles, nanoparticles, and uh particle size is not regulated uh by um the FDA, and therefore uh, you know, something that could be safe in normal size uh might possibly be rendered unsafe by turning it into tiny, tiny, tiny particles.
So um right, so that is what we're talking about. Um the first thing that popped into my head was the appearance of nanoparticle solutions. A solution of even-sized nanoparticles will appear as a clear colored liquid. The uh color of liquid is determined directly by the size of the nanoparticles. The reason uh a clear, by the way, clear colored, you know, a lot of people when they when they think about clear, they they the right thing to think about is clear versus cloudy, and then color versus uh, you know, non colored, right?
So a cloudy, colorless solution is white, and a you know, a clear colored solution, it has a color to it. Now a lot of people have this issue when they when we talk about clarification, they expect clarification to take the color out. Clarification clarification doesn't take the color out. Clarification all it does is take out the cloudiness. Um the color of the liquid is determined directly by the size of the nanoparticles.
The reason that the solution does not appear opaque as milk is that the scattering regime changes when the particle size gets comparable with the wavelength of visible light. And by the way, emulsions are cloudy because um this is me talking now. Uh emulsions are cloudy because um the particles scatter light. Once you have what's called a microemulsion and the actual thing, you know, the the emulsified product in it, uh all of a sudden the particles get smaller than the wavelength of light, then the emulsion goes clear. Anyway, um this random.
Um in this regime, the behavior is determined by me scattering. Uh I think it's pronounced me, although I don't know. I think so. Anyway, uh one application of this could be coloring drinks uh as almost any desired color could be achieved. Secondly, one could imagine changing the solution such that the nanoparticles flocculate together and change the appearance of the solution completely.
Could we could have used this kind of concept when we were dealing with uh with that uh drink you had to make in Florida that time, remember, Stas? Yes, I know. Yeah, yeah. Coloidal gold solutions are one candidate for this purpose. I've seen colloidal gold solutions approved for medical applications, so I would imagine they could be consumed.
Uh generally on the issue of safety, I would agree with you that it is an issue that is riddled with biased thinking. It is of course also a very complicated issue since the properties of the materials uh change when the particles become nano-sized. This is of course also why we generally find them so interesting. Uh I felt that one cannot make any general statements on the safety of nanoparticles. Rather, one should consider each one individually.
And before I go on to the question, is that's the comment, uh, before I go on to the question, let me just say I went and looked on the internet at the uh at the at pictures of uh different size gold nanoparticle solutions. And you know what really struck me is that the color difference based on the size of it very, very closely looks like the exact color shift that happens to anthocyanin pigments when the pH is changed. So they go from red to uh blue to well, red to violet, to blue to green, to colorless. So uh you know I and I'm I never actually thought about it before. What the heck is going on when you're changing the pH uh with anthocyanins?
I mean it's gotta be something where you're changing the conformation or something of the anthocyanin and therefore um you know changing its reaction to the way it scatters light, but I never really thought about it. It's interesting that the gold the gold solutions look almost exactly like anthocyanin solutions at different pHs. Well I mean it's interesting to me, probably to no one else. Definitely not to nostalgia. Nastash is like, please can I buy some shoes on Zappos?
Please asked me, he got the wrong size the other day. So what? Are you for real? You and Piper ordering shoes for twice. I think we single-handedly support Zappos.
I've never ordered shoes on Zappos. You've never ordered shoes on Zappos. Never. What shoe site do you shop on? Zero.
I go to pay less shoe source. You go to payless on Delancey. They have a website. Payless? No.
I go there by myself. Whatever. Whatever. She's not wearing pay less shoes right now. Yes, I am.
These are payless. Well, whatever. That then whatever. I'm not gonna get it. Okay.
So uh the actual question deals with acrylamide. Within the last couple of days here in Denmark, all the news have been dominated by scares of acrylamide in food. The reason for this is the Technical University of Denmark has published a new study uh where they connected acrylamide to cancer. And I couldn't get that study. Did you get email that study, Nastash?
I couldn't get the study. Maybe it's only in Danish. I was looking for it, I couldn't find it. Anyway, uh the Technical University of Denmark has published a new study where they have connected acrylamide to cancer, presumably connected again because it's been connected a bunch of times and then debunked and then connected and then debunked. This, of course, is nothing new in general, but their study includes statistics for humans as well as rats and mice.
In general, for these studies, I've always felt it's not fair to compare studies made on animals to humans. Humans are unique in having cooked and eaten foods for thousands of years and therefore having been exposed to these products of cooking. I would like it if you could say a few wise words, well I don't know about that. A few wise words about acrylamide. The problem here in Denmark is that the scare has reached a level where politicians are talking about making regulations towards acrylamide.
Since this means not being able to buy bread with a crust or even crunchy french fries, I'm naturally opposed to the idea. It seems that scientists making the studies have been victims of oversimplifications in the media, but still their results remain. I've seen a couple of papers where enzymes, specifically uh asparagonase, have been used to reduce acrylamide in potato chips. Does one need to worry about acrylamide, or is this another minor extra risk that we should be willing to take for the sake of good food? And also, can we find reasonable means of reducing acrylamide without compromising the food we all love?
Best wishes, Morton Madsen. Interesting question. So for those of you that are fresh to the acrylamide problem, here it is. In 2002, Swedish scientists uh found that what was known is known or has been known as both a uh human um like mu like me like uh reproductive harm, like mutagen, right, and also possible carcinogen, acrylamide, uh at least it was found to cause cancer or have been found to cause cancer in uh laboratory animals with very high dosages, by the way. Uh turns out that it's occurring in foods, and it's not an additive.
Uh, it just happens when products get cooked at high temperatures, right? And so uh, and you know anything that is browned or and contains starch uh has been found to have uh acrylamide in it, just naturally occurring. And so when this first came out in 2002, it was a big hoopla of you know, of what was going to go on, and then of course there was the people, oh my god, they're adding the stuff to food. No, there's not adding, and it's not new. It's not some sort of new environmental problem.
It's always been there. Acrylamide has always been in our food supply. When I say always, at least since we've been cooking things. Anytime we've cooked things, uh, especially starchy things, and we've cooked them to the point where they get brown and delicious, uh, acrylamide was formed. I haven't read the uh article you were talking about uh that was talking about asparagonase, but according to the FDA, and I haven't read you know all the hard hardcore studies, uh, FDA's site says acrylamides formed from sugars and amino and an amino acid aspergine during certain types of high temperature cooking, such as frying, roasting, and baking.
So there might be some way to reduce it there. Um it becomes a really sticky thing because now all of a sudden people are saying, well, uh you ha you know, you have this product, acrylamide, and it's in all uh all of the food that we eat, right? Basically, anything that's cooked, it's brown. I mean, if you're a raw foodist, you're safe. Safe, safe.
Uh, well, from that. Uh I mean, your bowels may be a different problem. But like, you know, you're safe from acrylamide. Uh, so you know, and and even if you don't eat bread or start coffee, right, because it's roasted, cocoa, because it's roasted, anything that's roasted with its high temperature. So, what are you gonna do?
Uh, and it we have a thing in California, uh, well, I mean, I don't live in California, Stas has a thing in California called uh Prop 65. You familiar with that? No. No, no, no. You know the problem?
Like Prop 65? So in California, if you if you have a if you're on a list uh of if you if you have any product that you're selling that contains a known carcinogen, you have to write on it uh that this product contains uh something known to the state of California to cause cancer, right? And you're you're obliged to warn that it's in there. So there's a huge lawsuit because McDonald's makes like a zillion dollars selling French fries every year. And so a bunch of lawyers went and filed lawsuits in California saying that they had to warn their customers that the French fries might cause cancer because of acrylamide because it contains acrylamide.
And that was a big to-do. And you know, I mean it's foolishness, obviously, it's foolishness. You know what I mean? Uh, you know, a friend of mine was involved with it, and I told him I was like, this is foolishness because it's it's always been there, it's been there. I actually went on the internet to look it up, and there was a Starbucks that had the warning sign about acrylamide and coffee.
I don't know whether that's actually Drigueur in California or whether someone just put it up as a joke, but anyway, people are taking that uh seriously. However, uh, you know, the and here's the other problem with it. The numbers are all over the map. So I, you know, FDA has a very interesting site, and because they don't really know what's going on uh with acrylamide, they're still trying to figure out what the heck the deal is. I'll tell you, I'll tell here's what they say.
In 2013, the FDA, this is straight off their website, F FDA.gov. Uh in 2013, FDA intends to issue guidance for industry concerning acrylamide in food. Since 2002, the FDA has initiated a broad range of activities related to acrylamide. FDA's accomplishments include the following developing developing an action plan outlining the FDA's goals and planned activities, convening meetings, developing methods for measuring acrylamide, analyzing the acrylamide results, which they did. They analyzed 2,600 samples of food and acrylamide, including like they'll go to like eight different Popeyes.
I think it was more like three, but like three different Popeyes, like five different RBs, like two different Burger Kings, and they'll measure the French fries and all of them. And here's what sucks, right? So, like different establishments or even the same establishment on different days, or like one Lay's product and then a different Lay's product have vastly different, vastly different acrylamide levels. So it's not even something that's like standard that they can tell. They don't really even know.
I mean, uh, you know, they're working on ways to get rid of it. But here's here's I haven't read, I can't read the Denmark thing uh because I can't I can't get to it. I couldn't find it. But uh there is a study out that I will read the uh beginning of for you uh that came out last year. Okay?
It's called Review of the Epidemiological I'm gonna get it for you so I can get it for you exactly right. The review of the uh epit epidemiologic studies of dietary acrylamide intake and the risk of cancer. And I will read to you by Lauren Lipworth. I'll read to you the uh abstract. Conjectured associations between dietary acrylamide intake and cancer have been evaluated in more than 15 epidemiologic studies examining almost every major cancer site.
We have critically reviewed uh the epidemiologic studies of estimated dietary acrylamide exposure and cancer. As substantially greater acrylamide exposure occurs through tobacco smoke than dietary exposure, we present the results separately for never smokers or adjusted statistically for smoking status where possible. After an extensive examination of the published literature, we found no consistent or credible evidence that dietary acrylamide increases the risk of any type of cancer in humans, either overall or among non-smokers. In particular, this is the important part. The collective evidence suggests that a high level of dietary acrylamide is not a risk factor for breast endometrial or ovarian cancers, which have generated particular interest because of a conjectured hormonal hormonal mechanism for acrylamide.
Moreover, the absence of a positive association between smoking and ovarian and endometrial cancers cancers suggests that any association of these cancers with the much lower, more sporadic dietary acrylamide intake is unlikely. In conclusion, epidemiologic studies of dietary acrylamide have uh intake have failed to demonstrate an increased risk of cancer, and here's my favorite part. In fact, the sporadically and slightly increased and decreased risk of ratios reported in more than two dozen papers uh strongly suggest the pattern one would expect to find for a true null association over the course of a series of trials. There. Therefore, uh continued epidemiologic investigation of acrylamide and cancer risk appears to be a misguided research primary pri uh priority.
In a reaction to that, uh there was a reaction to that, uh, and not uh not unsurprisingly, it was called Reaction on the Acrylamide and Cancer Review by Lipworth and colleagues by uh Janekie uh Hogeworst out of um uh where is this from? They're from the Netherlands, and they they basically they disagree with some of the things, but their conclusion is some weak sauce. They're can the actual criticism in this article that is we believe that the author's statement that continued epidemiologic research into the possible link between dietary acrylamide exposure and cancer appears to be a misguided priority, is itself misguided and based on flawed reasoning. We should be working towards better classification of dietary acrylamide exposure and establishing the possible mode of action rather than giving up on it entirely. So they're like, well, you know, we should give up, just not entirely.
You know? That's like a weak way to end your paper, right? Weak weak, weak. We'll give up, but just not entirely. But uh, I can't find the Denmark study.
Uh but I'm gonna say this. If I have a slightly increased cancer rate, and this is a horrible thing to say flippy, but it like if there is a slight, slight uptick, and it means that I can't ever have delicious French fries again, to hell with it. I'm having the French fries, cooking issues. Hey Dave. Yeah.
We've got one more write in. Uh somebody wants to suggest inflamo. For the uh Inflammo. Inflammo. Oh, wait, and Jack, uh, I know we're late.
We have a contest here. We do. We have one final contest. So the Just Food Conference, and if you don't know who Just Food is, they're a nonprofit organization that connects communities with local farms. Really cool people.
We love them. We'll be doing a presentation on how to make your own podcast. The conference is this weekend, and we're giving away two tickets to the listener who can tell me the original theme song for cooking issues. So tweet us, email us, info at heritage radio network dot org, and uh hopefully you win. What are they what are they what are they gonna get again?
Two tickets to the Just Food Conference, which is this weekend. Okay, so hurry up. Hurry up. 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. Heritage Radio Network is a nonprofit organization. To donate and become a member, visit our website today.
Thanks for listening.
Timestamps may be off due to dynamic ad insertion.