Today's program has been brought to you by Fairway Market, like no other market, a New York City institution that sells the best local, national, and international artisan foods for prices that can't be beat. For more information, visit fairway market.com. You are listening to Heritage Radio Network, broadcasting live from Bushwick 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 Cookie. Woo! Nice. Nice.
Come to you live! Are we uh are we in Bushwick or Bushwick Brooklyn? What sh is it? Uh the second one. And you know it's Bushwick because someone's jackhammering on our roof.
Don't worry, it's just a radio station. How you doing, Stas? Okay. That's crazy. You hear that?
I feel like this might be like, you know, Yosemite Sam's gonna come falling through the ceiling. Yeah. Yeah? Joined as usual with Jack and Joe in the uh engineering booth. How you guys doing?
Hello. Yeah? Doing pretty good. Yeah, nice. Alright.
Going to questions to 7184972128. That's 7184972128. We might even be able to hear you over the jackhammering. Maybe. Maybe.
So I was reminded by something. Uh I biked here, and uh again being out of shape and old. It's my I'm 42 now. Woo! Just had my birthday.
Yeah. Uh besides being out of shape and old and having someone jackhammer above my head, uh, I was uh thinking about biking. Uh we saw I saw someone last week. Uh and uh biking through the streets in New York, and they were on the ground in a bloody pile, holding their head, rolling and writhing in pain, surrounded by a group of people waiting for the ambulance to show up. And what's the moral of this?
Wear a freaking helmet, people! If you're out there biking, wear a freaking helmet. I don't care how important your hair is to you. You know who I'm talking to, Brooklyn hipsters. Put on a helmet.
What do you guys think of the engineering booth about helmets? I wholeheartedly agree. Yeah. I mean, I it You know it's a bad look, uh like uh bleeding out of your head. That's a pretty bad look.
Yeah, it's a terrible, and I'll tell you what, like everyone they move here from wherever they came from, right? Like they go to college or they do whatever they're gonna do, they move to New York, and they think that biking here is just like biking when they were kids back in like east wherever they come from. You know what I'm saying? And here you will get hit by a car, you will get doored, something awful will happen to you. You'll get your head cracked open, and you might even die.
Wear a freaking helmet. That's see, I drive, so I know exactly how crazy people are in cars. Yeah. That's good point. Uh well, you know, I'm that kind of guy.
Like when I'm a pedestrian, I hate bikers in cars. When I drive a car, I hate pedestrians and but I just I hate whoever I'm not at the time. But I try to be polite on the road. Anywho. Okay.
Uh Michael Barfis writes in with two questions. One hilarious and the other one kind of normal. Right. I I have to say, I really shouldn't bring it up because you guys at home can't do anything about it, but this hammering over my head's really driving me banana. It's like being at the dentist.
This is what it's like for you at the dentist? Yeah. Nastasha, by the way, I hope that I mean, obviously, her dentist is not a listener to the show. No. But uh, you know, Nastasha's dentist is, I swear to God, a used car salesperson.
She will sell Nastasha any line of dental work. Anything, anything. Like, she's like, Oh, you know what? You need to have all your teeth ripped out and then the exact same ones put back in. You're gonna be under.
Trust me, I did that work. You owe me a lot of money. And Saz is like, hey, it's no problem. I got dental insurance. Doesn't matter that like only one tenth of all this crap that's happening is covered, and that you're paying for this lady's uh kids' college.
She just had a new baby. Oh, well, nothing she needs more than Nastasha's money. And Stash's like, but she's so nice. She's so nice. She has small hands.
She's Japanese. What does that have to do with anything? I like you don't want big meat hooks in your mouth. Okay, whatever gets the job done, Stas. You know, if someone's gonna take my teeth out and drill holes in me, I'm not worried about the thickness of their digits, if you know what I'm saying.
Anyway, uh Michael Barthes writes in. Um, first, I live in Ohio and have pretty hard well water drawn straight from limestone bedrock. I don't know its exact composition, but it's probably mostly calcium carbonate with enough iron to make it taste kind of bad until the iron oxidizes, precipitates out, and stains everything, at which point the water tastes fine. Iron in the water is a kind of a pain in the butt. How is your water in California?
Awful. Awful. Like sulfury awful or like hard awful? Like did it lather when you were in the shower or no? No.
No, no lather? And that's about as much information I want about that as possible. Okay, uh after reading your post on nictimalization, nixtimalization, by the way, is uh the process whereby you take uh calcium uh hydroxide uh and uh called cal, and you uh cook corn with it, and it breaks down the the outside the uh endosperm of the corn, as well as uh doing a bunch of awesome other things like making it taste awesome and making the hydrocolloids out of the endosperm that make masa such an amazing thing. Anyway, uh, and freeing up niacin, a whole bunch of great stuff. Anyway, uh after reading your post on nixamalization, I put two and two together and realized that it was not my excellent timing that made my broccoli so firm and green, but the hard water I was boiling it in.
Uh and the the reason why, for those of you that don't know, and this is going to come up later, is uh calcium uh cross-links with pectin. Uh and and when that happens, the pectin becomes much more uh stable towards uh being broken down at uh in high temperatures. So when the calcium cross-links with the pectin and forms the the you know the uh crossing pectin, then the like even boiling it for what would normally make a mushy product, right? Uh because pectin is the main thing causing the kind of crunchiness and the hardness of vegetables. If you stabilize the pectin, it keeps stuff crunchy longer, right?
Anyway, and uh the other interesting thing about it is that uh so if you're using calcium hydroxide, two things are working against each other, right? You're supposed to add a pinch of baking soda to water. If you're having problems with uh your vegetables turning um your vegetables turning uh what's the word I'm looking for? Brown, right? Because the chlorophyll is getting ruined.
Um so what happens is is uh that's accentuated by acidic things. So you add a pinch of baking soda to your water. Uh the water uh becomes slightly basic and that preserves the green, so you get bright green vegetables. The problem is that basic conditions also destabilize pectin, make it break down much faster. So the problem is you get mushy products, so mushy broccoli if you add baking soda to your water.
Uh if you use calcium hydroxide instead of baking soda, the calcium by crosslinking with the pectin uh cancels out the problem that you have with uh the basicity of the baking of of like normal basic things like baking soda because calcium hydroxide is basic, and therefore you could have green things that aren't mushy by cooking them with a pinch of calcium hydroxide in the water. Anywho, anywho. So uh the calcium in uh in Michael's water is causing his broccoli to not go crappy. Uh that was a long way of saying that. Just to explain what the hell we're talking about here.
Okay. Uh this made me wonder if I've effectively got less basic lime water on tap. Well, you have water high in calcium, anyway. Uh what sort of benefits for being prepared in or with hard water, and uh what other sorts of stuff benefits from being prepared in or with hard water, and what should I do about the iron in it? I know I'll definitely only make pickles with hard water in the future.
Uh okay. Well, I mean, we all know uh hard water, it depends on how hard your water is, right? So, I mean, the obvious thing about uh additional, and it also depends, I mean, in your specific case, your hardness is coming from calcium. So, one of the benefits you're gonna get from it is uh is um uh increased firmness in vegetables that are boiled in it, okay? Even though as you're boiling it, so the calcium is kind of precipitating out, and so you have those probably I'm guessing those nasty rings around the outside of uh of your pan.
I actually forgot to look up how to get rid of the iron in a normal way because I was focused mainly on the calcium. You have me with calcium, and then my my brain went on fritz, and I didn't look up the iron. But um the obvious problem, right? So, I mean you probably know what the problems are, but the obvious problem is things that you want to get really soft, things like beans, right? So uh beans have the problem that uh you know you're trying to get them soft, and if you add anything that contains calcium to the water or too much calcium to the water, the beans might never ever go soft.
And the same thing happens if you at if you accidentally add if you let's say you're making baked beans, and like me, you like uh a little bit of vinegar in your baked beans to have that acidity, and you make the mistake, as I only ever made once, of adding the acidity early in the cook process, and then you realize your beans never go hard. You ever have anyone try to make baked beans for you? You don't like baked beans, right? Because you got brain problems? Oh, you like them.
You ever have anyone give you one that was like hard? It's because they added the acidity early in the cook process, or they cooked with really hard water, or even worse, both. Uh so I mean that's obviously a detriment. But the other place where I see you have a really, really large advantage with hard, hard water, uh, and if it's basic, basic water, is in uh noodles uh and in some bread formulations. So uh making something more basic and increasing the uh calcium and other minerals in water uh tends to increase the uh increase the uh tenacity of gluten structures, right?
So you get firmer dough. Now, this is especially true when you're looking at noodles, specifically Chinese noodles. So if you if you do the research on consui, which is a mixture of I think potassium uh uh carbonate and sodium bicarbonate, or some mixture of those things, basic things, uh often with calcium, uh these are added to noodles to enhance the gluten structure of the noodles, and that which makes them more elastic and stretchy, and also in certain cases makes them kind of a bright yellow. So if you see those kind of they're called yellow alkaline noodles, and they're made by adding consui. However, the speculation is that this technique derived from uh trying to mimic uh the product that was made from people who had wells with exceedingly hard and alkaline water.
So you could see a significant benefit in uh certain types of noodles and also certain types of uh bread doughs. Now, if your water is too hard, obviously you can you know go too far over that edge and it's no longer an advantage anymore. But I would guess your your main points of uh diversion in terms of it of being lucky with your with your calcium water is uh things like vegetables, also preserving fruits and preserving tomatoes. I would suspect that if you use a canned tomato, if you have enough calcium in your water, you might not need to add as much calcium chloride or other form of calcium to the to the mix to get the um tomatoes to stay hard. And this is gonna dovetail nicely with another question we have later in the show.
Uh but you might also uh you know be able to uh do things like have berries stay together better if you're making preserves out of them, assuming that you have extra water added to it, which you typically wouldn't, but but there you have it anyway. In fact, uh well anyway, I'll do your second question and then I'll go to the other question based on on berries, which I was gonna handle handle later. What do you think? Is that good? Yeah.
I have to have I have to always I never know like whether I've been talking for one minute or or 15 minutes, so I have to look over at this is what I'm doing why I always ask Nastasha whether that's okay or not, is because I have no idea what I've just said. So I have to ask her whether it's okay. So what are you shopping for today? I'm not shopping. Okay.
Uh if anyone out there, which I doubt works for the Zappos Corporation. Oh my gosh, I've never bought cheese from that. This is what I want someone to confirm. I want someone to break whatever sort of customer confidentiality you have and just send us an email that says yes, we've received the orders. Yes, my name is not on file.
Payless. I told you. Ah, payless. Okay, Michael, second question. Second, how safe is it to use transglutaminase in first aid?
This is a hilarious one, right? So transglutaminase, I'll just finish the question first. I'm gonna try to not go tangential until I finish the question. It's it's my uh my uh 42-year old resolution to try to not go hyper tangential before finishing the question. Oh, 42.
Uh on the one hand, it seems like it could be good. Uh quickly closing cuts and preventing them from easily being pulled back open. On the other hand, it seems like it could be extremely bad, potentially sealing in anaerobic bacteria or else short circuiting the natural healing process and causing terrible or awesome scars. I guess it depends on uh you know your view of terrible or awesome. You know, there's people who make scars on purpose, like a form of you know, body uh art there.
I don't expect it to be uh replacement for stitches if they're needed, but ordinary wince and slap a bandit on it cuts heal well enough without professional attention. So can it be done safely? And if so, is it worth the effort? Thanks, I love the show. It'd been tearing through the archives.
Uh okay, so uh for those of you we haven't talked about it in a while, so I'll I'll mention what it is in case you don't know what it is. Transglutaminase is a an enzyme that cross-links uh proteins. Okay? So uh it it it literally takes uh two amino acids from two different protein chains and covalently bonds them together to form a kind of protein aggregate uh polymer, right? It's a covalent bond, it's not an ionic thing.
Once it's made, it can only be broken uh physically. Even cooking it, right, doesn't denature or what denatures the protein, but it doesn't break that bond. So um what uh you know what two things were joined by transglutaminase, let no one put asunder. You know what I'm saying? Anyway, so uh our bodies have transglutaminase in them.
This is a natural uh part of your body. In fact, blood clotting to go back to wound stuff, uh blood clotting it what happens is is there's an initial thing uh that you form uh thrombin, right? Uh it well how's it work? You have five you have fibers, right? Thrombinacs on it, it forms these aggregates of fibers.
Then those aggregates of fibers are glued together into big clots by transglutaminase in your uh in your blood system in your body in the presence of calcium. So going back to calcium again, transglutaminase in your body is dependent on calcium for uh proper activation. Okay? Now, microbial transglutaminase, which is meat glue, which is the stuff that we use to bond different pieces of meat together. One of the amazing things about it, other than the fact that it's not derived from an animal, is that it uh in fact it's kind of unusual, right?
To have something that's derived from uh a microbe that actually bonds things together instead of breaking them apart. I haven't thought about it, but most of the stuff that I get actually breaks stuff apart. Huh. Anyway, uh, and what? I said tangentials.
Oh, tangentials. Uh I thought you said something far more inappropriate. Uh anyway, so uh microbial transglutaminase can bond stuff together without calcium. So uh the theory is then can you use this thing to bond your skin together? And um well, the idea, I mean, uh, you're not gonna have a problem with anaerobic stuff.
Um, but the idea, uh I mean, people have asked me before, and it's it's hilarious, but also kind of like horrifying that you would take this powder uh for cooking and like kind of glue yourself together with it, because everyone always asks when we're teaching uh meat glue, like whether or not it will glue your skin together. And the joke we always make uh is that well, if you sand your forehead until it's bloody, and then sand your hand until it's bloody, and then bandage your your hand to your forehead uh and let it sit there without moving for four hours, then yes, you could probably bond it. But then you could always rip it off, you know, because the bond that you make with transglutaminase is usually only as strong as the bond between two adjacent pieces of muscle. Right? It doesn't bond it usually as strong as uh, you know, the whole muscle, unless it's in the presence of a lot of salt, etc.
Whatever. Uh so, and also in microbial transglutaminase the stuff that you buy, Activa, especially if you get the RM, there's milk protein in it, which you don't want to like have in your wound, all this other stuff. Although you can get one with straight gelatin. But uh, I mean, it makes a lot of sense. So I went and looked it up.
And there's a company that in uh I believe, you know, sometime in the in the early mid-2000s, called Life Bond, L-I-F-E-B-O-N D, um, is making some goop, some uh some transglutaminase gelatin goop. And they say that it's almost completely biomimetic, i.e., well, the word is self-evident, biomimetic, and it's an awesome word. Even Stas is sitting there going, biomimetic, biomemetic in her head. I can see her saying it. Uh so like uh that's I don't know what kind of robot voice it is, anyway.
Uh they're making this goop that you can put into your wounds and um and actually it speeds healing. One of the things they're looking at is in battlefield situations where you need to like stop big wounds quickly uh and put things together in a way that can stop like high pressure arterial bleeds, uh, they're they're working on it. So uh it's very interesting. You know, and I'll read you from uh from their patent. Most high pressure hemostatic devices currently on the market, and high pressure hemostatic devices mainly means can stop blood in a high pressure, like an arterial situation.
That's that's translated right down uh or sideways, uh, currently on the market are nominally uh nominally, if at all adhesive. And their point is that transglutaminase plus gelatin is adhesive to your tissue. Uh Nasash making a nasty face here. Good examples of such devices are quick clot ACS uh and hemecon Bandage. The two hemostatic devices currently supplied to members of the U.S.
Armed Forces. The mineral zeolite crystals and quick clot uh sponge cause adsorb um cause uh adsorption of the water molecules in the blood that's concentrated in the clotting clotting factors and accelerating blood clotting. So they're literally putting like an absorptive powder on you that just like pfft like strokes it up and causes quick clotting, hence the name quick clot. Uh the chitosan mixture that makes up heme con has a positive charge that attracts red blood red blood cells, which have a negative charge. The red blood cells are drawn into the dressing, forming a seal over the wound and stabilizing the wound surface.
So these guys at Life Bond uh have anticipated your question and are now making transglutaminase-based wound dressings, and we'll see how that goes in the future. But do not put Activa RM in your cut before you slap a band-aid on it, or if you do it, do not say that I recommended that you do so. Let's go to our first commercial break. And I've strived to make these wonderful things available to New Yorkers for 37 years, so it's a feta complet for us to support Heritage Radio Network. And I hope you will too, and I hope you'll keep tuning in.
For more information, please visit Fairway Market.com. Are we back? We're back. And welcome back. I never know because the Jack will always throw in like I'll sit there and I'll gear into it.
Welcome back! And then like it's like oh. Maybe I should bring it back every time that I'd say, and we're back. And then you can come in, you know? No, that's true.
Hey, I want to give a quick shout out to Ben Lambert, though, who just became a member mere seconds ago. Cooking issues listener. So thanks, Ben. Thanks. And you know what I was looking up?
Probably no relation. In fact, I'm sure no relation. Lamp l uh Lambert uh radiating bodies. No relation, I'm sure. You were just looking that up?
Well, yeah, in fact, I can talk about it a little bit now. Nice. Uh so um as those of you that listen to the show might be aware we're working on a new product uh that it's gonna have the name some form of sally something probably. And it forms as a little handheld salamander, right? And um and what it does is it diffuses and uh converts the uh flame from a torch into a into uh mostly IR uh you know infrared heat.
It makes it very, very even and the advantage of this unit is that it's on almost instantly because the screens that make up the unit uh have a very, very low thermal mass, so it it turns you know cherry red almost instantly, like a couple seconds, right, Stas? Anyway. Um but when I had the initial people testing it, uh they were having some sort they were having problems um using it because they weren't thinking about and um we're gonna do a video about this. Uh maybe I'll be even post it on the blog eventually. Uh we're shooting some tomorrow.
The problem with it is is that people are holding the unit as far away from the food as they would hold a normal salamander, right? And the fact of the matter is is that you have to hold it much closer than you would a normal salamander. And the reason go the reason for it, you know, is that most people aren't thinking about how heat from something like a salamander actually works. So for those of you that don't have a salamander or don't even know what the heck I'm talking about, a salamander is uh a form of a commercial uh broiler, right? And the way that most commercial salamanders work is they have a series of bricks that have a bunch of holes in them.
Gas comes out of the bricks and uh it through the little holes, ignites, and forms uh an infrared like an infrared uh kind of plane of heat uh right there uh where the bricks are. And the thing is very long, usually like on the order of three feet is typical for a salamander. And I'd say the bricks are maybe six and a half, seven inches across, okay? So you have a strip of bricks that's uh about three feet long and seven inches across. Um now um the difference in now, so take that, right?
And so a long time ago, back in the days when uh Michael Batterberry was still with us, and I was writing a lot for food arts that you know, for those of you that don't know who Michael Batterberry is, go and look them up right away. He and Arianne were like you know, huge influences on my life in terms of my uh career and a lot of other people who are in the food business, you know, they they've done a lot of good that they don't bother taking the credit for. Anyway, so back when I was writing for food arts, I had to write an article on what's called deck broilers. And uh deck broilers are things that actually most even restaurants don't have, but if you have a steakhouse or a large hotel, you're apt to have a deck broiler. And what a deck broiler is is imagine a bunch of salamanders like where the where the bricks are stacked next to each other to form instead of just a strip of these bricks, a square, okay?
And uh it always amazed me that uh even though each individual brick in a deck broiler has the same amount of energy that's leaving it per square centimeter, deck broilers are fantastically more powerful than salamanders in normal uh operations, and also very, very even. And that's why they're really good for things like steaks, right? Um why? The question is why. And the answer, and also one of the problems with salamanders is that salamanders have what is called a sweet spot, and it's a line that runs all the way um uh you know across the center of the long axis of the salamander.
And the issue is is that a deck broiler is acting pretty much like an infinite plane of heat. That's right. This is where we're going back to Lambert. I'm not gonna get into the nitty-gritty of it. But uh, in an infinite plane uh of radiating heat, right, of IR of IR radiation, right?
If you have an infinite plane or something that's a pro approximating it such that such that basically the food can't see that literally see the edge of the of the heater, then the amount of energy that the food is receiving from the heater is roughly independent of how far away it is. So everything heats evenly, and the amount of heating is just do is just uh uh a function of the output per square centimeter of the heater. Does this make any sense at all? Yes. Okay, good.
So uh deck broilers act like an infinite plane, and then anything within it is gonna get heated evenly, and it doesn't matter within a couple you know, centimeters how far away it is, right? And this goes back to you know, you my son Dax is obsessed with this archer named Byron Ferguson, who you know, Byron Ferguson, his motto is if I can see it, I can hit it. And Byron Ferguson can take an arrow, pull it off of his back, and he can shoot an aspirin out of the sky. Literally, his wife throws aspirin into the air, and Byron Ferguson pulls an arrow off of his back and shoots it uh like as it's leaving his wife's hand practically, and his wife is so used to this that she doesn't even flinch. Imagine, like, imagine what Jen would do if I was going to try to shoot an aspirin out of him.
She should rightfully run for the hills. You know what I mean? Like this is not some sort of William Burroughs situation with his wife with the apple on his head. Like this guy's real deal. So check him out, Byron Fergus.
Anyway, if I if I can see it, I can hit it. And the same thing goes true with uh heaters. If you can see it, you can hit it. So under a salamander, when a piece of meat is sitting there, it can see the heater and the heater can see the food all the way along the long line of it. So that section's working like an infinite plane, right?
But the sides on the edge that are relatively narrow, it doesn't act like it. And the more the further you get away from something, and the less it looks like an infinite uh plate, the more it acts like a point source. And a point source, the amount of energy you receive, uh like goes down as the square of the distance from it. So anyway, long story short, the small salamander only acts like an infinite plane when you're very, very close to the object, right? Uh and in so the long story short, you have to hold this object extremely close to the food when you're cooking it.
So that's why I was thinking about it. And that's a kind of a long digression based on uh Lambert. But you should also think about this when you're when you're cooking in general, and think about how large the heat source is compared to the food you're cooking. And the larger the heat source is compared to the food you're cooking, and the closer your uh food is to it, the more uh even you'll be if you can withstand that level of heating. Does that make any sense at all?
Yes. He's like, I don't care. I really just I really don't care. Right? Okay.
Uh so let's go to that second question on calcium. Uh we have uh this is a nice one. Uh Chris writes in, hey Dave, Nastasa, Jack Joe, and Indy Jesus. I apparent we have an awesome picture from uh Indie Jesus' Facebook, but we but apparently Jack says that he wouldn't enjoy being referred to as Indy Jesus. I I don't think so.
Even though it's with like honestly with all love. I I you know I don't know. I'll have to ask him. Like to tell him it's with love. It is with love.
And in this picture we have from Facebook, it's like Indy Cowboy Jesus. He said he doesn't even like being called a hippie, so I can't really imagine how Indy Jesus would affect him. You calling Jesus a hippie? Anyway. Yeah, no one no one in the no one in the studio wants to go there.
Okay. Uh I have a pectin related question. My goal is to firm up small fruits like blueberries so they won't rupture and bleed out in cakes, muffins, pancakes, etc. I know you've mentioned this technique in the past, but couldn't find it in the backlog and would love uh the appropriate ratio to use in the future. Um thanks so much for the great show.
Definitely uh highlight of the week and backlog is great for Sunday morning of kitchen cleaning. Without question, my food has made a jump in quality thanks to the radio show and blog. And I now regularly use enzymes, gums, and prehydrated starches in addition to my circulator regularly with delicious and consistent results. Chris, uh I like that. That's what I like to hear.
I like to hear that. Okay. So uh the enzyme in question is uh pectin methylesterase. Uh and it's the opposite of of you know kind of the SPL, which breaks things down. It uh cross links pectins in the presence of calcium.
Now, most fruits have um naturally occurring pectin methylesterase uh and will crosslink somewhat if you have calcium, especially in um in the presence of heat. When the cells start to break a little bit, it'll release some of the pectin methylesterase. And if there's calcium present, you'll uh increasingly crosslink uh your product. That's why just a little bit of calcium in canned tomatoes, uh, you they usually use calcium chloride, unfortunately, causes those canned tomatoes to be really stiff, and that's why those tanned tomatoes, when you use them in sauce, never fully break down, right? You've noticed that, right, Stas?
Yes. Yes. So um Novozymes, uh, who makes the um who makes the uh you know, pectanex ultra SPL that we use and everything, also makes something called Novo Shape. Uh and you can use it uh with calcium, and I forget what the calcium ratios is, but you can use it the same way you use um um um pectinex ultra spl in the sense you can use about a uh you know one or two grams per liter of liquid uh that you're treating with. I would add a couple percent of calcium to the water and then let it soak.
Uh and I've done that to raspberries, I've vacuum injected uh and then boiled them, and the raspberry stayed whole in boiling liquid. Now you want to make sure that uh you know that the liquid's roughly isotonic with the raspberries, so you gotta add some sugar, otherwise it'll just blast apart uh, you know, because of osmotic pressure. But um they I was astounded how well those suckers held together. Were you there for that, Testas? Remember that?
It's crazy, right? Uh and I wanted to do that with brandied cherries, but uh, you know, there's a problem with the cherry harvest, or there was a problem with people ordering cherries for me this and I can't taste them anyway, so my I wasn't really that juiced up because I, you know, I couldn't I can't taste cherries because I'm allergic to them. Anyway, uh so that would work. You might try, and I don't know whether or not uh Modernist Pantry ever started carrying uh Novo shape, but they could. Oh, the only thing that's uh you know between them and that is uh the investment in a 25 liter pail that they can then break up and uh we never had enough application to buy our own 25 liter pail.
We buy twenty-five liter pails of uh SPL all the time. Like we're we're actually basically an industrial user of SPL now. That's what I'm saying, Mono's pantry. Oh, yeah. Yeah, Chris Modern's pantry.
Uh he could probably buy a pail of it um if he wanted to. Uh, and then you just add calcium, add uh Novo shape, and let it soak, and you're good. So uh I would do that. I would also just try adding straight calcium and letting it soak for a while on the calcium, and then uh you can bring the heat up and see whether or not it um has preserved them or not. But anyway, that's what I would that's what I would do.
Yeah? Yeah. No? You know how they make the fake blueberries in the real life? I think I said this before, yeah.
Yeah, alginate. They actually what they do is they take blueberry juice and they make uh they in they uh put a uh sphere of blueberry juice inside of an alginate shell of blueberry juice, and that sucker uh lasts forever. It's not real, but it lasts forever, and that's in fact that was one of the like that was one of the original things well before anyone, like you know, Ferron was using alginate balls. Alginate balls were being used in industrial applications for things like flake fake blueberries, things like fake onion rings, uh things like that. Uh anyw, so uh there you have it.
Um is it good? Uh-huh. Yeah, she's like, I don't care. I really don't care. I just want the pizza.
I just want the pizza. Stas like, why do we do this show? Free pizza. You know how much easier it would be for me to just buy you a pizza every week? No?
Yeah. I mean, whatever, I can afford the pizza. I'll say. Okay. Pete writes in, dear Dave et al.
Over the years, my family and I have typically procured our hams from local country growers who let their pigs forage in the woods. I've often read that there's not been a case of trichonosis uh in the U.S. from pork since the 1950s, but given the source of meat, I've always cooked my country hams to an internal temperature of 137 degrees Fahrenheit. I know from talking to growers and hunters that forest-fed and feral pigs. That's a great word, feral pig.
Right? Yeah. Feral pig. Nastas actually that's like I'm surprised. She likes that word.
I could tell. I can tell by a look on her face. Uh fearal pig, do you know why? Do you know why people? Because she loves cats, and as like as soon as you say the word fearal, the word cat pops into her head, and she doesn't even think about the word pig.
The pig just leaves and it's a fearal cat, which is like inherent love. My favorite animal. Feral cats or just cats in general? Fear old cats. Nastasha goes to me the other day.
She goes, Can we get a cat at the lab? I'm like, we already you we already have you. You sit around and like, you know, bat things around and whatever, anyway. Attack your ankles. God, I hope not.
That would be that'll be an all-time low. Uh where were we? Feral pigs. Oh, yes. Uh okay.
I know from talking to growers and hunters that forest-fed and fural pigs will consume any carrion they come across. This is true. In fact, uh, I read an article in the 1800s in West Virginia where they imported a bunch of pigs to a particular area of West Virginia that was infested with snakes, and the snakes just I mean, uh, and the pigs just wiped the snakes out. Just wiped them out, ate every snake that was there. And uh reports of the hams made from those uh snake-fed pigs was that they were quite good.
Whoa. Yeah, yeah. You can go you can go look it up. I did I looked that up you know many, many years ago uh when I was researching country hams for the uh first uh museum of food uh pig versus snake. You wouldn't guess, huh?
Well, pigs are some harsh suckers, man. This is why, like, you know, like if you ever watch Robert Mitchram's last movie when he's like a boar hunter. I mean, like wild pigs are not animals that you trifle with. You know what I mean? Don't go messing with the wild pigs.
Anyway. Uh we'll consume any carrion they come across. Uh, years ago, I read a study that indicated salt curing and at least nine weeks of hanging was sufficient to store uh destroy any uh Triconella larvae. Your uh recent suggestion that one does not have to cook your country hams got me wondering about this again. Is this still the thinking?
Have there been any recent revelations about the resiliency of trichonella cysts? Love the show, Landon. P.S. I have been freezing my pork for Italian style curing of whole muscles to ensure that I end up with trichonella free meat. I would love to not have to do that.
Okay. Uh here's the deal. Uh I look go to you want to go to Aphis, which is the animal plant health inspection services uh section on uh pork. And by the way, for those of you that don't know what trichinosis is, uh these little worms that uh you can get from consuming um undercooked meats. Um, you know, pig used to be the big one you got from pig, but also bear, uh any th any kind of wild meat, right?
And you get them in, and then it's the disease is measured in number of worms per cubic centimeter muscle mass, and it causes huge havoc because it they they invade your muscles, and it's just it's a nightmare. And plus, it's just it's gross, right? Yeah. Does anything gross you out more than that? Is that one of the grosser ones for you?
Where your muscles are just invaded by these worms. Awesome, right? Anyway, uh, so uh that's the problem with pork, and so for a long time that's why they had uh you had you cook the hell out of your meat. Okay. Here is what uh we have to say.
Uh here's what the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Services has to say on their website about uh trichinella and pork. Um trichinosis has a long-standing association with pork products, not only in the US but around the world. The concept which many people have uh about the need to cook pork thoroughly is based on the risk of becoming infected with this parasite. This concern is well founded in history. At the beginning of the 20th century, conservative estimates showed a 2.5 infection uh percent infection rate in U.S.
pigs. Even more alarming were the postmortem surveys conducted in the 1930s. A National Institute of Health report published in nineteen forty-three found that sixteen point two per cent of the US population of pigs was infected. One out of every six. Uh, this type of information led us to considerable publicities about the danger of eating pork.
The historical problem of trick of uh uh trichinite infection in pigs is responsible for strict federal controls of methods used to prepare ready to eat pork products in the US and expensive carcass inspection requirements in Europe. These regulations are still in effect in uh uh the Code of Federal Regulations for Processed Products and then the directives of the European Union. Wait, wait actually, hold on a second. It didn't say out of every pigs, it says sixteen point two per cent of the US population of people had some form of trichinose uh trickinella in their in their system. That's gross.
Yes. It's gross. I don't even believe that. I don't believe that. I don't believe that.
Nine for man. Okay, okay. Despite the historical problems of uh trichonine and its association with the pork industry, major changes have occurred in the last fifty years. Human cases of uh instead of saying trichinosis, they write trichinellosos tri trichinellosis. Trick I'm just gonna call it trichinosis, crap on these guys.
Reported through the centers for disease control, declined from about five hundred a year in the nineteen forties to fewer than fifty a year over the last decade. Further, many of these cases result from non pork sources such as bear and other game meats. A major decline has also occurred in the prevalence of this parasite in pigs. While prevalence has declined considerably in the US pigs, the lowest prevalence rates in domestic pigs are found in c uh countries where meat inspection programs have been in place for many years, including the EU, notably Denmark and Netherlands. These countries consider themselves essentially free of uh trichinosis.
The dramatic declines in trichonine and pigs reflect changes in the industry. Historically, uh infection in pigs was associated with feeding of raw garbage. Major trends were uh major inroads were made into uh trichinosis infection with the advent of garbage cooking laws passed uh between nineteen fifty three and 1954 and the hog cholera eradication program of 1962. Of equal importance has been the movement to high levels of biosecurity and hygienes under which most pigs are now raised. Still, opportunities for exposure to pigs exist, and some precautions should be implemented.
Uh so anyway, so uh that's the thing on pigs and what it's dealing with. But your stuff uh does not uh adhere to this because it's from uh wild pigs. So for a long time they were considering getting uh rid of it. Now, uh the good news is is as you say, you can kill pigs at uh kill pigs, you can kill pigs. You can kill trichinosis by cooking meat uh for uh a mere 47 minutes at the core at only 52 degrees uh Celsius, or six minutes at 55.
Also, as you note, deep freezing uh causes the trichinosis um uh uh worms to be killed and the cyst to be killed, but you don't want to have to do that. Now, unfortunately, uh there is no single set of uh, you know, you do this salt, do that, that can guarantee that they will safely admit guarantees trichinosis. However, all you need to do for curing your own stuff to figure out whether it's safe to eat without cooking is go to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Code of Federal Regulations. Search on this one, ready?
Title IX, Chapter 3, Paragraph 318.10. And that one, that paragraph, I read it this morning, but it's too complicated to go to, lists all the specific curing mechanisms that you can use to uh destroy uh trichinosis in pork without having to go through a freeze step or a cook step. And they all are combinations of salt levels per pound of meat, a specific contact time of uh salt on meat in days per, I think days per whatever, I forget what it is, and then holding in the drying room for a certain number of days with a certain amount of equalization to assure trichinosis death. So if you follow those rules precisely, or or greater, those rules are greater. In other words, that amount of salt or more, that amount of time drying or more, that amount of water loss or more, then you're guaranteed uh a safe product from a trichinosis standpoint.
But I if I were you, if you're dealing with feral hogs, don't fool around with this one. Make sure that you conform to uh the specifications that are laid out in Title IX, Chapter 3, uh subpart 3, 1810. But uh is my impression that you when you're doing country hand specifically, you do not need to uh freeze as long as you follow their rules. But please don't just take my word for it, read that chapter in its uh entirety. I want some wild pig meat.
You know, the only time I've ever had uh uh you know so interesting thing about pigs, and you say that they were uh eating, I think there's you said they were I can't go back and find it, but eating stuff that they eat off the forest. Only one time have I had a USDA slaughtered pig that was eating uh fallen nut meat. It's called mast, right? So when stuff falls off the trees, which happens in the fall, uh pigs eat eat it, right? And so if you happen to be in a place where you get a lot of nuts, like hickory nuts and things like that, the pigs take in a lot of um a lot of these kind of nut fats, and their uh fat composition after a number of weeks of eating this tends to conform more to uh these um these nut fat ratios, and the fat gets softer, right?
Which is bad actually for certain sausages where you want the back fat to be very hard, but amazing for things like ham. And the closest American ham that I've had to the ibirico fed, uh the the ibirico, the biota fed uh ibirico, which they feed off of uh you know chestnuts falling from the trees in the Dehesa in uh Spain. Uh and and so the the amazing thing about that isn't just that those guys in Spain are good at curing about curing their meats, is that the actual composition of the fats is altered by the by the chestnuts that they're eating, and it just has this amazing acorns rather. Chestnuts. What the heck's rolling my brain today?
I don't know. What the hell is wrong with me? 42 what? Years old. Oh yeah.
Did I say chestnuts? What the hell? I meant acorns. Hell's wrong with me. Actually, I need to have my head examined.
Anyway, uh, although chestnuts would be delicious. And chestnut fed hogs are also delicious. Uh but uh anyway, if they're eating nuts, uh they get this kind of soft and amazing uh fat. And I had one from Pennsylvania, uh Pennsylvania, Tennessee. What the hell's wrong with me?
Where the pigs have been feeding, they were Tamworth hogs, and they've been feeding on uh these hickory nuts that were falling off the trees, and it was from a fat composition standpoint, probably the most amazing um American country ham I've ever had. So I don't know, take that for what it is. I'm sure that your hams are delicious if you're making it that way. Pierre? Okay.
Uh Dalip Rao writes in. His uh his Twitter handle is at Leapers 500. There's 499 other leapers out there. What is a leaper? I don't know.
Do you know what a leaper is? I don't know. I don't know. Okay. Uh okay, he's going to Coachella, which is a three-day concert, and he's camping with a gas stove for three days and trying to find a uh trying to figure out food and drinks.
Here's what I would do. Uh so the issue is if you were to use normal ice cubes, right, you'd get a huge amount of if to preserve your food. So I'm assuming you have big coolers and you don't want to have to plug anything in. Get giant ice cubes. When I'm saying giant, I don't mean small.
I mean giant. I'm talking big. I'm saying like get a c a bunch of coolers and get ice cubes that are like a foot by a foot blocks. The larger the ice cube, the larger the mass, right, per surface area. And your melt rate is going to be determined in part by how good your igloo cooler is, but also by how much surface area is available for the uh melt water to occur.
If you have a giant block like that, it should have no problem lasting three days uh in an adequate cooler, and then you could put your food next to it, and then you could chip off pieces of it for making your drinks, right? Especially if you just practice a little bit because it'll be tempered because it'll be at zero the whole time. So you'll be able to like chip amazing pieces off of it. So you could do shaking drinks, but you could also make amazing stir drinks uh with it because your ice is because you're gonna have to buy this ice from someone, right? So you go you go to uh uh whoever is like your local ice sculpture person, you buy a 200 pound block or and you have them saw it into larger into small enough blocks that will fit into the coolers that you have, and then pack again, pack uh the you know, put it on a grate so that it's sitting off the bottom so it's not sitting its own water, so you can drain off the extra water when you need it, and then have the food sitting next to it.
By the way, there's also that that's the way that uh that's the way that in Japan the hardcore sushi chefs store their fish. They they buy big coolers, big fridges, they unplug them because they don't want the air circulating on the inside, and then they put giant blocks of ice in to keep their fish exactly where they want them. So you should be able to keep your food uh good. Unfortunately for you, we don't have my you know, you don't have my uh my torch attachment yet because that would be sick. That would be sick out there because you could you could steak cook that way.
It's a little bit of a pain in the butt to cook a steak from zero to zero to a hundred that way, but it's uh it's pretty damn good. Um but you say you have uh I think did you say he had a circulator beforehand? Uh you could pre-bag the meats, and as long as you can ensure that your ice stays good, you could do a pre-cook on a lot of your stuff, and then flash grill all of your stuff, not use that much charcoal if you're allowed to have charcoal. You're allowed to have you been to Colachella? I don't think so.
Is that where they had the two-pack Shakur? They had the they had the holographic two-pack. Yes, that was it. That was how how Holly Ram Tupac was there last year. Yeah.
So who are they gonna hologram this year? Huh, I don't know. I mean, it would be kind of poor form to do biggie, right? But well, I don't know. I mean, you know, it'd be a nice holograph hologram rather.
Okay. So yeah, but it says you have a gas stove, so you should be go. If you have a circulator, I would circ a bunch of stuff in bags, put it in bags so they don't get contaminated by the fact that they're all sitting together with your giant ice, and then just bring straight booze, do a lot of delicious stir drinks, and then occasionally some shaking drinks. Limes are fine sitting on their own, so you don't even need to refrigerate those suckers. Bring as much stuff as you can that doesn't need to be refrigerated and then go from there.
Your melt water is also good, so you can use your melt water for cooking things like pasta, because if Nastasha goes with you, she needs to have pasta. She thinks must. Must. Must. Right?
Yeah. Okay. Uh Michael Natkin. Uh what's it called? James Beard Award nominated Michael Natkin, friend of the show.
Right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And and uh, as everyone knows, Nastasha loves your book. Anyway, uh at cooking issues, have you ever written down your carbonation rig?
I need to build one for at Chef Steps. Uh no. So um have I ever written it down? I've described a couple times, but I've never written it down. Okay.
Mark Powers. I buy all of my carbonation stuff from an outfit called Mark Powers in uh Guntersville, Alabama. And uh I love those guys because they're the cheapest people anywhere. Like they're so cheap that it's like they're they they define cheap. So what you do is is you call those guys up, you order a 25 a 20 pound it, or if you don't want to order a 20 pound, if you want a smaller rig, a five-pound CO2 tank.
It will arrive empty, okay? Uh they ship the kind of nice aluminum ones. You need to get along with that a um what's called a uh the their high pressure regulator. Now I don't really like those regulators for commercial use. The ones that they sell, they sell tapright brand.
Uh and the tapright brand regulators that they sell tend to get broken very easily in service if people are rough with them or knock them about uh and then they start having problems. Not safety problems, but they start having problems. Uh so if you can afford a nicer regulator, you could go with like a Smith or something like that, or Victor or nicer regulator. The taprights work fine, and they are by far and away the cheapest ones you can get. I don't think that uh Mark Powers sells them, but you can buy cages for the tapright regulators, and the cages prevent uh you from damaging the the um the gauges and the regulator by banging it about.
I would definitely invest in those if you can get them from them. Then all you need are the hose barbs uh and the hose, and you go directly into um what's called a ball lock or universal uh either universal Pepsi or ball lock fittings, and they're different from Coke or pin lock fittings. And the ball lock fittings from Pepsi, you want the the uh the ones that are gray, right? They're either gray or black, and one's for uh product and one's for gas. I think the gray is gas, although I can never remember, but the this system uses the gray.
And uh, and they became kind of the de facto thing that home brewers have used when they're using the old five-gallon Cornelius kegs, which is how they used to make soda for brewing, and I used to do it back in the day. Everyone does it. So it's the de facto homebrew technology of these ball locks, and they're almost free. They're like $2 for a connection. So you buy uh you buy those, you buy the hose.
I usually use quarter or three eighths ID uh reinforced hose. I forget the name of the brand that they stock at at uh in uh those guys' stock, but it's like called like ho like hose master or something like that. Uh and they'll ship you all the stuff by far and away the cheapest possible way to do it. Then you go on any homebrew site and you get the liquid bread carbonator caps, uh, and then you're ready to rock and roll. You just need some soda bottles, and that's how we carbonate at the bar.
At home, I have an actual McCann carbonator, which you can also get at pretty good rates from uh those guys, and I use I use an addition to what's called a primary regulator, which which takes the tank pressure on the CO2, which is like you know, upwards of 800 pounds or whatever, depends on the temperature, uh, and converts it to first a high pressure, which I take off at usually about a hundred psi, and then I go into a secondary regulator, which I take it off at cocktail carbonation pressure, which is generally about 40 to 42 psi. Advantage here is I can take the high pressure from my hundred pounder, I can drop it into a commercial carbonator. And the reason you need to run those at a hundred uh psi is because those things are carbonating water at room temperature, so you need a much higher gas pressure, but they're awesome. And then I have a water filter so that the water goes in, gets injected in under high pressure, carbonated water, it goes through two circuits of a cold plate, not one, two circuits of a cold plate to chill it down. The only problem with my rig at home is that uh I wasn't able to put an ice maker underneath my counter.
So my what instead of uh having an automatic ice maker, I have an eight-year old in the house named Dax, and he takes the ice out of my freezer and daily dumps it into the ice bucket to keep the seltzer cold. Back at the lab at 54 uh in Chinatown, we we have an ice maker that dumps directly on the cold plate, and so there we have our ability to carbonate cocktails and sodas and our ability to have seltzer on tap. Uh a day without seltzer on tap is a day without sunshine. Right? And I think that's it for today, right?
Yeah. 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.
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