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 Bushwig Brooklyn. If you like this program, visit heritageradionetwork.org for thousands more. Cooking issues!
Hello, and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Kicking Us coming to you live! Live. The back of Roberta's Pizzeria in where is it, Jack? Uh it's this place called Bushwick.
Bushwick that Nastasia hates. Uh yeah, who won that? That was Elliot Papanow, right? That was Elliot Papanow. Shirt went out in the mail yesterday, man.
That's awesome. Nice. Thanks, buddy. Nice, nice. Uh well, joined as usual with uh Nastasha the Hammer Lopez, uh, Jack and Joe in the engineering booth.
Hey guys. It's a beautiful day out. Yeah, uh, which Nastasha hates. Uh that's another It's not that she hates the weather. I hate the way people like the weather.
Yeah. Yeah. Nah. I you guys are getting a little bit of an insight here. A little bit of an insight.
And special guest in the studio today with us, Ariel Johnson, who is a uh now what what's your you're at UC Davis, you're in the Enology department, but you s you studying right now bitters, correct? Yeah, that's one of the things I'm studying. I do analytical chemistry and flavor chemistry on bitters and other things. Right, and you are a uh a not a professional or semi professional. I mean, uh it dovetails with your profession, but you also privately are a uh a flavor chemical collector, true or false.
Very true. Yeah. And so uh like how big's your collection now at this point? A flavor chemicals? Yeah.
Like in the lab? Uh organs that you have around, you have access to? Probably a thousand. Yeah, nice. We uh Stas and I visited uh a place called David Michaels, which is a flavor house down uh in uh outside of Philadelphia.
And what's what factory was it right near? It was right near some factory. It was making some Nabisco? Whole dang place smell like Oreos. True or false until you get in.
Anyway. And they make some amazing vanilla. They're the like I thought I knew something about vanilla and I talked to other vanilla guy, and then I realized that you know I had not yet been born. In other words, like I had less I had less knowledge about vanilla than an infant has about uh the world uh as they're born. Uh so anyway, so that we saw their flavor uh stuff.
It's pretty amazing. Amazing stuff. Any any personal favorites right now, Ariel? Favorite aroma compounds? Yeah, they're like unusual ones.
Like don't give me any, don't give me some hexanal or any crap like that. Give me some hexanazaline. Yeah, yeah, okay. Um I quite like rotundone. That's uh the impact compound for black pepper.
Wait, w what's the name of it? Rotundone. Ret rotundone, like rotund. Yeah. Yeah, it's uh it's a 15 carbon sesquiterpine.
It's also in uh Syrah wines. Yeah. Yeah. I like you know, I love the word well first of all everyone knows terpene is a great word, but sesqui. Yeah.
Add sesqui to anything. One and a half. Yeah, it's a great, you know, it's like we need to we need to have like sesqui centennials more often. Right? Totally.
Sesque centennials are are the are the bomb. Back when I was a kid, they actually were having sesqui centennials for things like uh well, when is it yeah, civil war? No, that's right now, actually, Sesque Centennial, right? Hundred and fifty. What's 150 plus?
2011? Yeah, that was right. Sesque Centennial coming up, was coming came up on the thing. When I was a kid, it must have been some other war. Nah, whatever.
And a big thank you out to Co. Miles, who's not only a supporter of our radio network. Is this true or false, Jack? Oh, yeah, he is. Not only an incredibly uh like interesting guy I met at the Sous Vide class, uh, Sous vide low temperature class.
I will not reveal his history for fear. But also now an incredibly generous, uh, incredibly generous giver of the five-volume modernist cuisine uh set. Yeah, I'm gonna give him one of these. I mean it was awesome. And and now I never ever again will be able to make the excuse.
I don't own the books, so I can't tell you what they said, right? I vow. Yeah, I guess you gotta read them all now. I vow never to say that again. Uh very, very actual and real heartfelt thanks.
Thank you very much. Uh I believe he lives in the Houston area, right? Houston? Anyway, I think so. Um by the way, again, he's involved in NASA a little bit.
I'm so excited. This uh summer, we're uh or you know, semi-related NASA. Anyway, this summer uh stash, are you going down with us when we do the uh the mango tasting? We're gonna do the mango tasting again this year. Harold McGee and I and maybe Andy Ricker, the chef from PacPak, uh good friend of ours.
And we're gonna go last year, Harold McGee, two years ago, Harold McGee and I went to the Fairchild, which is the world's biggest collection of mangoes, at least the United States' uh biggest collection of mangoes. And unlike a lot of other mango collections throughout the world, like for instance, famous mango collections in in uh India uh or mango collections in uh Southeast Asia, the Florida one is very interesting because South Date, it's like south of Miami, where it's like the very tip where you can actually grow almost anything. You can almost grow mango seams, not quite. I mean you can, but not out in the open. Anyways.
They specialize in having everything, so like all varieties of mango. And uh the people out there, who are their names? Norris Leedman and Richard Campbell, I believe, are the two lead people out there. Uh and they are mango nuts and jackfruit nuts. Last time we were uh rained out kind of and also uh or it just was a big uh it was a big mess.
It was a big mess, the visit. But we're gonna go again. Uh and when I go down there, I'm taking the kids to Cape Canaveral. You like that? Because you know, Dak's obsessed with rockets now.
Yeah, he won't yeah, he's like, I want to become some sort of a scientist astronaut. But we'll see. We'll see. You can do it if you want. We'll see.
Okay. Uh another oh, by the way, Ariel, tell them about the special uh the special uh chromatograph thing you have. The special chromatograph thing? Yeah. The the Franken G C?
Yeah. Okay, so we have a uh a gas chromatograph mass spectrometer, which you use for analyzing the volatiles responsible for aroma in a mixture or a sample. But uh we have one with a switch and a cold trap that lets us basically remix all the volatiles from a sample or take a few out and have uh like an omission mixture and then see how that changes the aroma. Yeah, it's pretty badass, right? Yeah, yeah, it's the only one in the world.
Yeah, and so built it. Who who paid for it? Like in other words, what research, what research had money for it? Um I think honestly, we built it from spare parts. Really?
Yeah. So this is one of the rare instances where you get to do something cool in a scientific context and don't need to get big industry to pay for it. Yeah, we might have had a little bit of National Science Foundation or um Jastro Shields, which is like a UC Davis-based environmental chemistry grant, but Jastro Shields? Yeah, it's like some endowed thing. Is that like a like a space robot?
What is that? No, I think it's a person. Um sorry, Jasper. But uh, but yeah, I mean basically it's an old, an older GC that we were replaced with a newer model, so we um maybe spent like a thousand, two thousand dollars on parts and then put it together. Nice.
And uh and uh you weren't using that piece of equipment, I don't think, but Ariel is the person who's doing the uh the GC work um on the Searsol, showing that the torch taste that we all had thought was uh you know a product of incomplete combustion was act is actually more likely caused by um secondary combustion products from the high temperature of the torch, true or false. Yeah, that's what it looks like. That's what it looks like. And uh also did some uh some uh you know work for us on what happens to lime juice over time as it ages, correct? Yeah.
And you want to give us the quick the quick spin down on the findings there? Uh it's looking like rather than finding any specific oxidation products over the course of like four to twenty hours, we're actually seeing like an overall reduction in volatiles. Right. So you think it's and then Harold McGee, uh, you know, it's always been uh saying that it thing changes like this could uh often just be the reduction of stuff that's covering other stuff up rather than the creation of new crap. Yeah?
Yeah, definitely. That's totally possible. Yeah, you like can you imagine like paraphrasing McGee with the words crap interspersed every other word? Like for those of you that know him, like he doesn't talk that way. Yeah, yeah, he doesn't, he's not like crap on this crap unless unless he's imitating me, in which case in which case he does.
He does a pretty good imitation of me, I think. I don't hear him do you. You never heard him do it? He does my jer my jersey sometimes. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Anyways. Uh okay, let's do some questions before we get into some other craziness. Like, how to uh one more craziness. I had a really bad dream about mashed potatoes last night. Horrible.
Yeah, it was horrible. Like, well, so it was one of these situations where you're cooking dinner, right? And you let somebody else do something at your house for dinner, you know? It's a dream. Don't worry, people, this didn't happen.
And uh somehow they they were mashing the purpose potatoes. I don't know how the hell that happened in my house because you know, usually they don't they're not they don't mash so well. But anyway, whatever. So like whatever. They're mashing the potatoes.
And then I looked at the mashed potatoes right before they were gonna go out because I was seeing whether they were gonna add butter and or cream, and you know, I have my thoughts about both. And uh it was simultaneously lumpy and gloppy. And I was like, what the what the what have you done to the mashed potatoes? And they're like, Man, I put it in the food processor. It's like, what?
I was like, uh, you know I own both a ricer and a food meal. I own both. I own several of each. I was like, oh my god, I woke up in a sweat. I was like, oh I woke up and the mashed potatoes hadn't been destroyed that way.
That's but isn't that horrible? That's awful. It's horrible. Uh but it reminds me of a very interesting recipe that uh Nils, Noran used to make where he used to actually put potatoes with a little excess liquid in a vita prep and blend them until every single starch granule is completely ruptured and it formed kind of a gluey like potato gloop. And it was actually good, which is a classic example.
Another thing McGee uh harps on and I do as well, of taking something that is normally a flaw and pushing it so hard it becomes a benefit again. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, enough enough of my crazy.
Maybe listeners should send us their food nightmares too, if they have any. Yeah? Yeah. Listeners, if you have any food nightmares, I don't mean actual food nightmares like you know, you incinerated the chicken, although I also appreciate those stories, Jack. You answer those questions.
I answer uh I try to prevent you from incinerating them and then tell you why they were incinerated. But uh yeah, if you have any actual like food like nightmares like that, it's like similar to the one where like you're trying to run away from someone and your feet turn to rubber. You know what that is? It's your feet are asleep. In the real life, you're in bed, your legs have gone asleep, and then so your legs actually can't move properly when you're asleep, and your body somehow senses this and turns your legs to rubber.
Yeah. Yeah. That's my theory. But born born by the fact that I've woken up, I have horrible circulation. What the heck?
This is not about this. Okay, okay, sorry. Okay. Uh we have a question in. Uh we have a late name for the uh we have a late name for the uh Searsol.
They wanted to name it Salah Hammer after you, after you stuff. Because it, you know, looks like a hammer, functional salamander, and would be your favorite weapon of choice. So Nastasha appreciates it, but as you know, we've already chosen the name. Okay. Ryan Santos writes in, here's a here's a clear here's a typical cooking issues question.
Uh I wrote in last week about whether it was worth spending $400 to get all uh to get a 200 milliliter centrifuge. Uh and I I said no. I said I don't think so. You know, no, I wouldn't say so. Uh you mentioned the cheaper uh champion model, but uh mentioned I could get into the three-liter range for about a thousand bucks.
So far, internet digging hasn't found me a model uh with three liters for that price. Can you follow up on that comment with some suggestions for that price quantity? Thanks, Ryan Santos. Well, uh I don't know whether these guys are all tapped out or not, but look, the the trick is this. Um the company that I buy my centrifuges, uh the manufacturer of my centrifuges is out of business.
Because it's out of business, you can get fairly good prices on ones that are of semi-recent origin, uh less than a decade old, right? And some of them haven't seen a lot of use. And the advantage is because they were somewhat common back in the day, there are lots of parts available. The company I use is Juan, which is a French company. Uh Juan was bought by Thermo, right, which is a large manufacturer of all kinds of scientific equipment.
Which is, I guess it's a division of Thermo Fisher, right? Or Thermo Fisher. Yeah. And so anyway, so Thermo bought those guys and then discontinued the Zhuan brand, right? So most people, when they're buying new centrifuges, most of the chefs I know, they're going, they're buying headaches, is what they're buying.
I don't know why. I guess they have a good price point, or they know, or like, you know, one buys one and then the other buys one. But I know Tony Canoyaro has a headache and Wiley both have headaches. Uh fairly small footprint. And but but for a non-refrigerated one, I think you're looking at like seven grand.
And for you know, uh fully tricked out one, you're probably looking closer to eight to ten grand with buckets and everything like that. Swinging bucket, you want to go swinging bucket. Um we can get into that much later about why you would choose a swinging bucket or a fixed uh angle centrifuge. If anyone actually cares about it, I could talk for a long time about which one you'd prefer. But anyway, uh in the kitchen, most likely you want a uh swinging bucket just because the fixed angle rotors, unless you have like a very special fixed angle rotor, have very narrow throats on the on the uh on the containers that are in them, and it's very hard to get the product out, even though technically they pellet a lot faster than a uh than uh swinging bucket does.
Okay, whatever. Again, um I don't buy uh the used ones from Zhuan can be very cheap. Uh now I used to buy them for a couple hundred bucks. I've talked about them enough. There's not that many out there, so you know, if ten people listen to me, then all of a sudden the price jumps and the availabilities go go down.
That said, there's a company called Ozark Biomedical, and they're somewhere in the Ozarks, God help me. I think they're in Arkansas somewhere. I think so, yeah. And uh Ozark Biomedical specializes in uh used and uh like fixing centrifuges, and one of the ones they carry is Zhuan. They often have reconditioned units, and they can run between 1,200 and 2500 or 3,000 bucks in that range with buckets and like a 90-day warranty, which is probably good enough.
Most stuff's gonna break within that period if it's gonna break. They'll also make sure that your uh buckets are sterilized for you, so you don't have to go on like bleachrabies.com and get rid of everything out of it. And uh they make sure that your buckets aren't dinged up so that you're not gonna have any like immediate fatigue fractures and a poorly handled bucket, and they make sure that the rotors are good. I mean the hazards these these centrifuges that rotate at these speeds aren't uh they're not like ultrafuges or super speeds where you actually have a possibility of of um what would you call it breaching the wall of the centrifuge should there be a rotor failure, right? So you know, once you get into the much larger, um much faster models, the the the energy contained is so great that you can throw even a large piece of equipment across and through a lab, you know.
And there are plenty of pictures on the internet's uh uh internets of uh rotor failures uh in ultra centrifuges. Now these units, as long as you get a newer unit that has the safety interlock, so you can't run it. Well, you can, but I'm not gonna talk about it, run it with the lid open, um, you know, you're probably not in a life or limb death situation. That said, you don't want to have a rotor failure. And when you buy used, you don't know whether some knucklehead like threw the buckets around, you don't know whether or not they cracked it, you don't know whether they cleaned it with a uh a detergent that is uh deleterious to aluminum, which is what these buckets are made out of.
You don't know whether it's sustained an impact, you don't know anything like this. So you sometimes I'll take a chance and I'll look at it and you know I'll make a judgment. But I've been using centrifuges for a bunch of years, and I had a bunch of people who had been using centrifuges for years look at my centrifuges before I started running them when I knew nothing about centrifuges. If you go with Ozark biomedical you won't be paying that much compared you'll be paying like probably a third to less of what you would buy for the equivalent new model and it's kind of guaranteed to work out of the box and they're also very friendly and we'll walk you through the parts of it if you have problems with it and they carry motors and boards and buckets and all the replacement parts. Hope that is that helpful yes okay because new ones are expensive.
I mean look oh look I just had someone yesterday hey Dave where can I buy a new centrifuge? I'm like you pass why is it that we've been doing this for so long and we're still buying scrippity scrappities off the internet. Do you remember that like our new what's our New Year's resolution styles you remember? No duct tape right no no duct tape on the box. I'm still a fan of duct tape the product but our our box of crap that we show up with will not be duct taped together anymore.
We're making the move to new bankers' boxes whenever we're moving stuff around by ourselves for no reason. And having other people move it well I mean I wouldn't go that far another wrist I told you it's like it's Joe are you over there? Yeah I'm here I'm here you know how like you know when you're a musician and you say every year you're like man next year someone else is going to carry my base rig. You know what I'm saying? Yeah get a van driver and all that.
Yeah people are going to carry our crap in and out of the gigs that ever happen? No. Of course not yeah no it never happens. You always end up carrying your own crap. You know what?
42 still carrying my own crap I kind of like I kind of like being able to do it. Kind of keeps you not being a uh uh whatever anyway whatever. Uh so I have like a lot of years of carrying my own crap to go. That's what I just got from that. That's awesome.
Yeah, you know, you know what? Like plenty of people, I don't know, or just you know, don't follow the route where you, you know, make it a priority to have people carry carry your crap for you. Like uh, you know, we always dreamed but never made it a priority. Look where we are. Anyway.
Uh Chad Drazen writes in uh about this thing. What the heck is this thing? Uh and he uh points to a link on uh smokerama.com. Awesome website name, right? That is a pretty epic website name.
Yeah, yeah. You know you know what they make? Styles, any idea what they make? Aerial, anything? Is it is it food or marijuana?
Wow, uh good idea. They should get into that business, but uh they are pressure smoker manufacturers, pressure smoker, which I've never used a pressure smoker, but they're like you can make you can make a barbecue um barbecue ribs. They're not from around here, so they don't sound like that. You can make a barbecue rib in like an hour, like an hour flat. I don't really know that that's the case.
You can make a soft rib with a smoked flavor in an hour. Oh, is this the thing where it cooks the hamburger in like 12 seconds? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Is it like a pressure fryer? No, well, I mean, I'm presumably they they generate the smoke under pre like the entire system is sealed under pressure, and then I guess they must use a compressor to evacuate evacuate the excess smoke.
I have no idea. I didn't have a chance to look that up because it just came to me this morning. But uh, we but rest assured we will check it out. People are interested in smoking in every dang environment. People are like, can I smoke in my vacuum machine?
Can I smoke in my can I smoke in my clothes dryer? Can I smoke, you know, everyone wants to smoke in everything. True or false? Very true. Yeah, smoke.
Uh anyway, by smokerama, the folks who make large pressure smokers, and then in parents, are pressure smokers any good. Again, uh, Chad, I have no idea. I have no idea. Anyway, um the thing, the the the title of it, you ready for this? Instant burger.
Wow. You like that? Yeah. I wish we had invented something with that name. Seriously.
Instant burger. Okay. So uh it cooks uh precisely measured burgers, and by that they mean you're supposed to scoop it in like with a with a scooper delicious. Yeah, uh, and you're not allowed to put salt on the burger beforehand for reasons that will become apparent. But you can put in onions and bell peppers, but if you do that, you're not making a hamburger.
Listen to me, people. Do not put onions and bell peppers in raw inside of your hamburger. I think it's a horrible idea. What do you think, Sas? I think onions are raw?
I like a big thing of raw onion on top of my burger. But if you put it inside the burger, it'll just get like boiled. Yeah. Right? Yeah, that's not tasty.
There you go. See, take it from the scientist. Uh no offense if that's the way you make your burgers. No offense. Stas is like, you offend everyone, then say no offense.
It doesn't help. But it does. It does. People rarely get offended. Uh okay.
So uh it cooks uh precisely measured burgers in 25 seconds without getting hot. Now that's not strictly speaking true. It the the burgers get hot. What they mean is there's no a lot of not a lot of excess heat pumped into the kitchen. Okay.
Uh it draws an awful lot of current. I think their manual says 30 amps. Although I th uh 30, maybe it's like 20. I don't know, I gotta look it up. It runs off a regular 110 line.
So it does I don't know of any 110 appliances that take 30, so it's probably more like 15 or 20. Anyway, is this just an electric chair for burgers? Yes, it is. Uh it claims to cook the hamburgers simultaneously inside and out and only cooks them to well done by design. There's a microprocessor that determines when it's done, I suppose, by measuring the current load.
How does this work? Love the show. More questions for me to follow. Chad Drazen from 50 Licks LLC. Another good name, 50 Licks.
Although, oh no, we're not gonna get into the Tootsie Roll Center of a Tootsie Pop. We already talked about that on the air. You make a plane. You make a plane with licks? Yeah.
Was it any good? Yeah, it was really good. Oh good, yeah. Good shut up. Okay.
So uh yes, this is in fact an electric chair for hamburgers, and it works on a uh so there's direct resistance heating, right? So there's there's different ways you can heat things, okay? So one is by heating the air near something. This is how, you know, uh ovens work. Uh radiant heating by generating large amounts of uh IR.
That's how uh you know, infrared broilers work, French fry lamps work, the searchone uh by uh conduction, what we uh those things are all conduction in one way. Well, radiation's not, but the other one, the regular air oven actually is conduction mixed with convection. Well, I'm not gonna get into it. But one way you can generate oh the microwaves, right, where you're actually uh causing friction by vibrating the molecules on the inside of a uh on the inside of the food. That's an internal cooking technique.
Another way you can do it is to strap electrodes to something and pass a large amount of current through it, use the object itself as a resistor, and then uh use the resistance of the food itself to heat the food, right? And that's the that's the principle of uh ohmic, direct ohmic, you know, ohm, the unit of resistance, heating, resistance heating. Now, uh a lot of this has been tried in f and actually uh did I ever talk on the air stops about the electric chair for lobsters? Maybe. Well, there's this company in England that tried to make it uh uh an electric chair for lobsters to shock lobsters to instantly kind of stun slash kill them before you boil them, and it's two wet plates, and you pull the wet plates down and it's conductive and it and it like fries the lobster, but you need a very doesn't fry it it, it it it zorches its uh its uh nervous system.
But you have to use a pretty I mean I was using I tested it with kind of bad results because the carapace got bent in a weird way. I used regular uh you know uh sixty hertz um wall socket uh one twelve one ten voltage. Uh with mixed results. Uh I yeah, I didn't think it was any more humane and didn't make the lobster any more delicious than just cooking it and left scorch marks on the carapace. But um anyway, so this is a technique that was it was touted as a humane way to dispatch lobsters, and I I didn't have good luck.
But uh that said, Electro-stunning is a huge field uh in both large value fish like tuna, uh things like this, and waveform and uh the way the current is applied is extremely important in terms of how uh effective it is. But that that that aside, uh, yeah, this is an electric chair. So what they do is is you you you have two conductive plates, you you set the thickness of the plate with a spacer on the inside, you smash the thing down, it squishes the burger flat, right? And uh, and this is why you don't use salt, because presumably it changes the uh conductivity of the meat. And they like a specific fat content.
They say it's for uh juiciness, but I'm sure it's also to get a specific conductivity through the meat. You push it down, and from what I can gather on their pat on the kind of literature around it and some of the patents around it, it just passes a large electric current through it. I don't know, it's probably measuring yeah, how much uh load the burger is providing uh at the beginning versus the end, therefore judging doneness based, I guess on I don't know whether they're measuring denaturation or water loss or whatever, but it's like and done, and it literally heats the burger by zapping it with the electric current. That's an interesting idea. Yeah.
And the old models used to have a rare and a well-done knob, and they've removed it because it turns out that the they don't want you to actually mess with it, and it's it's in other words, the people who wanted rare burgers weren't buying the instant burger. It's the people that you know didn't want to think about things that were buying the instant burger to the extent that here's what the here's their bullet points of how awesome they are. Ready? No cooking oils needed, but you do need uh a hamburger that's uh you know 30% fat. Yeah, whatever.
Anyway, whatever. It's like one of those things. No extra cooking oil is the guess what they what they mean. I mean, I prefer a burger with more fat. Like that's one thing I don't like about the Whole Foods hamburger meat, is that they're like, it's 93% lean.
Yeah, definitely. And horrible. Yeah. Yeah. No offense, Whole Foods.
Uh normally no hood or venting needed because it's not on very all very long, right? Here's my favorite. No cooking skills needed. Sweet. Don't you want your hamburger styles made by someone with no cooking skills?
Don't worry. We make it in a way that it doesn't matter whether they give a crap or not. Really, it could be a machine pushing the button here and joy. Uh and cooks out calorie laden fat, but retains the delicious natural juices. That's just hocum.
That's just crap. Yeah, I don't buy that. I don't yeah, I don't buy that. Cooks out the calorie laden fat. Anyway, so I thought that was really uh an interesting an interesting thing.
Uh resistive hamburger cooker. Apparently it will also cook uh chicken breasts. As long as you anything you can squ squish flat between the two plates and get good conduction all the way through, you can cook and it cooks it very, very quickly. I'm anxious to try one uh at some point to see whether I like although if you smash a burger flat and cook the bejesus out of it, I don't really think it matters that much how you cook it. What does it do to the outside, do you know?
It looked brown on the website, but it's you know, it's hard to say, and I don't really know how much this thing costs. I mean, like I I like I I'm a fan of a bunch of different burgers. If you're gonna have a thin smash burger, it needs to have plenty of mocho grease, and then basically what you're saying is I like the flavor of a beef crust wallowing in grease with hamburger fixings on it, and maybe like a little bit of meat in the middle that's you know, still like kind of meat. Right? Is this true or false?
Am I wrong? Yeah. And if you like a thicker burger, it means you actually want some sort of like, you know, the the texture of like a lot of yeah, whatever. Uh I mean I see both I see both sides, but uh Nick Solaris, you know, hamburger guru, he likes a smash burger, I think, as as well does uh Josh Azersky, I think, believes. I think so, yeah.
Smash burger fan. Modernist cuisine, not so much. They like the they like the big poofy open like parallel string of meat. Parallel string of meat burger, yeah. Okay.
Okay, wait, should we take a break, Jack? I can't see the I can't see the clock behind the giant modernist cuisine volume. Okay, we're gonna take a break. Come back cooking issues. Hi, I'm Steve Jenkins from Fairway Markets.
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By the way, uh Mark Ladner, good friend of ours, Mark Ladner, is doing for the Heritage Radio Network on April 27th. When is that? That's like a week and a half? Week and a half. Is doing an Abruzzi style Italian barbecue on Saturday, April 27th, between 6 and 9.
Where's it gonna be, Stas? You know? Is it gonna be here? Not sure. Not sure.
Anyway, Joe, you know where it is? I uh I'm gonna have to do some research, but I'll get back to you. But the beer's by Harpoon uh and the music is by Herbert Spiffling spliffling. Splifflington. I wonder whether he enjoys uh some of the herbal medicine.
No comment on that one. Uh and you can go to uh Italian BBQ.eventbrite.com to buy your tickets for $65. And you know what's worth the ticket price alone, people? Is uh if you go look at the image they have for it, it's it's this it's not Mark's whole face. It's just the special Ladner glasses.
The special Ladner glasses. Stas, what are your thoughts on the special Ladner glasses? You got getting a shake of the head. Uh getting a shake off. Pitcher is shaking off the Ladner glasses comment.
Yeah. Anyway. Okay. Uh by the way, you still time to call in your questions. 2718 4972128.
That's 714972128. Got a question in on soda bottles. Uh, Jeff Kanoff at Jeff2486 on the Twitter says, Any safety issue with reusing old soda bottles multiple times for the carbonation system that you outlined. What we're talking about is when I carbonate things, I use uh soda bottles. Usually I use 20 ounces for test batches.
I use one liters at the bar, one and a half and two liters for events where you know you're gonna pour a lot out. Uh soda bottles are made of uh P-E-T. Uh, right? P-E-T-E-P-A-B. What are those things?
One of those uh one of those things. And uh, you know, I use them multiple, multiple, multiple, multiple, multiple, multiple, multiple, multiple times. Uh and is there a safety issue? Uh, not that I'm aware. I mean, I don't believe that they have similar issues to uh PVC where you get uh not PVC, um Lexan related things where you get you cook it in the dishwasher and you get uh deter like detergents plus it plus heat equals the release of nasty chemicals.
I don't think that's the case. I think they're fairly neutral. I never put them in the dishwasher, I just do uh hot water soap rinses and let them dry out. Uh and I've I'm not aware of any safety issue. The reason I think a lot of times people don't want you to reuse it is kind of bacterial reasons, but you know, we're putting carbonated stuff in them and alcoholic stuff, and we're washing them very thoroughly in between, and all the time in between they're they're you know, they're either dry or they're in a fridge with alcoholic beverage that are carbonated, which are very bacteriostatic in terms of you could get yeast, but they're not pathogenes, so they're not gonna cause problems.
Uh not health problems anyway. And so, yeah, I'd say from that standpoint, it's safe. You want to make sure that you use uh I mean you could tell when they start to kind of go south on you, and certain newer bottles have uh like outer layers, I think that are laminated on for you know um gas barrier properties. Uh, but I'm not aware of any safety issues. If you use bottles that are not intended for carbonation, they can explode.
So for instance, if you uh use Fiji water with the goofy square bottles that you know, that made the millions of dollars, that goofy square bottle. But if you use the Fiji water with the with the goofy square bottle and you carbonate uh it can explode. I remember once, so I'm this kind of guy where um where I ask once, I ask twice, and then I just scream around and break and like break crap. This is true or false, does? Three times a lady though.
Three times a lady. Well, that's why it's why I only ever once got the lady. I only ever asked three times, you know, found my wife, got married, done. Right? No, but normally it's like I'm like, where's the bottle?
No response. Where's the bottle? No response. And then just grab the Fiji bottle, which is there, and I filled it full of coarse coffee, and I was carbonating it with nitrous to get the nitrous feet, you know, the n the nitrous oxide, which gives a creamy feel and brings body back to coffee without giving the that kind of uh uh that prickly sensation that you get out of carbon dioxide, and boom, it blows up and sprees coffee in like in you know, like poof, all around the room. So like I had a line painted across me of coffee, and there was a line all around the room, uh, in this tiny is before we were in the trash room styles.
For a while I was housed in a closet uh in the amphitheater. And uh so the entire closet in the amphitheater had uh this is back at the French culinary, had like a line of coffee around it that lasted years. They could never get that thing off. Maybe they repainted over it eventually. So the answer is is that they also if you heat uh bottles with very hot stuff, like if you're trying to do um like a gel, let's say you were trying to do a gel-an fluid gel, you need to carbonate it when it's very hot.
Aside from the problem that it's hard to get carbonation in things when they're hot because uh the hotter it is, the less the CO2 wants to go in there. Uh those bottles start loser losing their structural integrity somewhere, probably in the 70s or 80s Celsius, 80s, 90s in that range, they lose their structural integrity and they can start to balloon out on you, which could could be a safety issue because if it explodes when it's hot, it's spraying hot crap everywhere. It's doing more than ruining your jacket. But other than that, I mean like chemical safe. You heard anything, Ariel on saying?
I haven't heard any mishaps. Yeah, yeah. I don't think so. Yeah. But uh you want to make sure they're not very good gas barriers over the long haul.
So you don't want to uh store a carbonated beverage in it and think that it's gonna remain carbonated in perpetuity, right? Another problem uh with plastics in general, now uh these plastic bottles are designed not to do it too much. I mean they're they're chosen not to do this, but like the plastics can um do what's called scalp flavors. So especially if you have oil based flavors that are in there or anything that has kind of a hydrophobic component on it, that can absorb into the plastic, then the plastic can take on a smell, which then gets transferred to your next batch, and also it can it can remove enough flavor from things. It's called scalping, flavor scalping, that you uh alter the flavor of your product by the absorption on it.
And like you get this especially in sodas, you'll notice when like low quality sodas with high levels of s suspended oils in them, grape uh um orange, you'll see the bottles are actually discolored, which is why and also things like root beers tend to leave aromas in the bottle that are hard to get out, which is why when I'm carbonating, I prefer to buy seltzer bottles because they come neutral. Yeah, just for what it's worth, which is probably nothing. Uh okay. Uh next question in. From Winehacker on liquid nitrogen from Mooth.
Hello, Dave. Nastasha, Jack, and Joe. They he didn't know you you were gonna be here. That's okay. Yeah, okay.
Uh love the show almost through all the back episodes. Now that uh I have that out of the way, I have a couple of questions. I sent Nastasha an email a couple of weeks ago with some questions about the general use of LN in a bar time environment. She seems to have ignored it, which is fine. Well well, wine hacker.
Your name is Wine Hacker. So my email recognizes you as spam. Wow. Because you decided to name yourself wine hacker. So I found it buried in nine hundred other spam emails.
Wow. Wow. See, this is why we call her the hammer. Like now, you know, wine wine hacker, you're getting you're getting a little taste. He just got schooled.
Well this is very instructive. I want people to get a little taste of what it's like uh when she's not on the air. Like that's like a little little like peer like peek through the veil of what it can be like. Anyway, uh WineHacker moderated the comments with she seems to have ignored it, which is fine. I often ignore myself too.
Which is very good. Like self-deprecation. Since we are closer to the date of our event I also have some questions about vermouth. Sorry to have so many questions at once. I hope you can uh feel free to to uh break the answer into parts so I don't dominate the show whatever I'm just gonna do it.
Ready? Go do it. The winery where I work is a union wine company in the Willemette Valley, Oregon. You know familiar with those people, Ariel? I've heard of them.
Yeah? Good things? Uh yeah, yeah. I've I've never tried their stuff, but I've heard of them. Alright.
Uh we'll be having an event in a couple of weeks. The theme is uh speakeasy. Go ahead and make fun of us for uh being so original i.e. not original the energy uh I only have a certain amount of energy. Do you have energy to make fun of speakeasies?
She's all tapped out she's still tapped out with the anger for being called out on air that she has no more you know anger to make fun of what? You should be happy that I'm tapped out with you for the whole day? Well I don't I don't know about that. You'll be you'll you know you'll get a diet Dr. Pepper no Dr.
Pepper I drink the whatever don't get me started. Okay. Uh once she gets some caffeine after the show she'll get her anger back. Don't worry. Um we're gonna move things around in the cellar set up a bar rent some furniture and other era appropriate props to fit the theme.
Uh when I began to think about drinks we might serve in addition to our wines I immediately thought about a podcast a couple of weeks ago and decided to make our own vermouth. We will probably try to keep things fairly simple and offer two drinks. Manhattan and martini are probably front runners, they're delicious. Uh partially since uh they both use vermouth, uh though I will need to make a red and a white vermouth. Uh anyway, one thing I'm thinking about using is liquid nitrogen.
Uh so like what like let's do the um let's do the vermouth section first because he's about to go into liquid nitrogen, but then we go back to vermouth. In terms of vermouth, we started looking uh at commercial examples, trying to find a couple of benchmarks. We looked at four examples Carpano Antica, Dolan Rosso, Dolan Blanc, Blanc Blank, blank, uh Dolan Blanc and uh in Bue, an Oregon-made product. The Carpano stood out above everything else, though we like some of the herbal aromatics of the Dolan Rosso. The Dolan Blanc was very nice, though seemingly relic uh relatively simple compared to the other three.
The Imbu had very interesting aromatics, probably using pine fur or something similar. Are there any other commercial examples you suggest we look at? Uh currently I think we will try to make a sweeter red and a drier white. Uh well before I get into the other things that you write, uh yeah. Uh I would look at um martelletti.
So martelletti is uh, you know, I had it first maybe three three years ago, three, four years ago, I started coming into New York as far as I can tell. And uh it's very, very good, uh completely different um mouthfeel, thinner mouthfeel, and different kind of aromatic setup from uh carpano, uh and not played out yet, which is good. You know what I mean? Like it's it's like people know about it, but not a ton of people know about it, so you can still be kind of the first kid on your block to have it, as far as I know. It's good.
Uh you know, you uh uh made by the Carpano people, uh Punta Mes is you know, try that out. Uh and then on the white side, I guess classic, you know, you should try Noy Pratt, but you know, I I don't use it much. I actually use Dolan quite a lot for my for my white. I like the Dolan uh Blanc and the there's Dolan Dry. I actually and I like the their sweeter one better, the Blanc.
I tend to tend to use it more than I do the dry, but not from Martinis. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Uh although bear in mind that uh the sweet vermouth that you usually put in Manhattan's is made from white wine. Oh, yeah, he mentions it.
Well, no, it's red and white only because of the coloring the ad, not because it's red and white wine. Burr is the only one I think that I know of that's made is the only aperitif wine that actually starts from a red. Well the Dull and Rosso might actually be from a red wine. Really? But there's a dull and sweet that I think is just dull and sweet white or the dull and sweet.
There's as far as I know, there's the rosso, the sweet white, and the the dry. But I think the sweet white's closer to a regular sweet vermouth. Yeah, I like it actually. I like that product. But anyway, um other thing I would look, I would go beyond strictly speaking, vermousse, and I would go into other uh aperitif wines like uh for instance cookie americano.
That's a good one. Uh or if you want something a little on the kind of more mainstream, I guess Lila, or like Bonal Quinquina. Yeah, all that stuff's good. So, like, you know, go and and by the way, good websites for the uh well, I'll go into what you say. So here's a s here's a summary.
This is wine hacker. Here's a summary of what I think I know about the manufacturing of vermouth. Base wine is nearly always white, sometimes very neutral, sometimes an aromatic variety. Muscat for example. Sometimes it is purpose purposefully aged and oxidized, sometimes not.
I'll add also that they often use a wine where they purposely stop fermentation by redoping it, uh by doping with alcohol before they right? Yeah, yeah, like port. Yeah, so not the same as port, but like a mistel, right? Yeah, yeah. Okay.
Uh wormwood, uh chinchona bark, and gentian are the major sources of bittering. Can be. Yeah. Uh right, true. Uh botanicals are extracted in alcohol, dilute alcohol, wine or fortified wine, sometimes uh times vary from hours to months.
True. Or cooking, too. Yeah, cooking, yeah. Well, yeah, it's right. Yeah.
Like heat. Right, heat, right, sure. Yeah. Uh sometimes extractions are distilled or steam distilled. Of course, that would just be adding a distilled stuff.
Is that true? Adding essential oils if you're distilling. Sure, that's fancy way of saying that. Sure. Yeah.
I mean, his the could be her, a wine hacker. Sounds like a guy, though. I think it's caramel. Yeah. Uh caramel can be added for coloring.
Uh, juice or sugar can also be used. It depends on the uh standard of identity, right? What kinds of juices can be added? I think so. Yeah, I think you have to add grape sugar and or cane sugar, right?
No other look at it. Um total sugar is around four percent for dry and between ten and fifteen for sweet. Uh final wine must be at least seventy five percent wine, the other twenty-five consisting of sugar, alcohol, and water. Anything else that anything else uh missing there? No, I mean that sounds about right.
Yeah. By the way, remember vermouth uh is an acidic ingredient. So a lot of times and sugar. So people add things that are like, Manhattan doesn't really have any sugar or um or acid. I'm like, you're wrong.
No, that's that's BS. Yeah, it's wrong. Yeah. Uh okay. Uh I'm looking at a wine range of herbs and flavors.
I'm having trouble with color right now. There are three herbs I've found for coloring. Red sandalwood, another seed, and rosebuds. However, I think I need something more. The color is not uh a dark enough red.
It's a bit too much like an orange colored rose. I don't want to use more sandalwood because it gives too much woody flavor. Hell yes, it does. Sandalwood. Hell yeah.
Uh Anados to orange. I may have to cheat in that a few percent red wine or perhaps uh find the sandwood extracts. Any suggestions are appreciated. Can you buy cochineal here? I'm not sure.
I mean, would you want something that red? That's hardcore red. Well, I mean I would focus on the flavor more than the color. Yeah, I mean, because the reds are usually actually more brown. Yeah, so burnt number.
Yeah. Right. So like, you know, caramel classic old school caramel color. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But if you can buy coachine eal, that's mean like it's pretty badass.
I don't know if is it is there an FDA against that? Are we okay? Is that grass here? I don't know. I don't know.
You know, cochineal, crushed up a K A, crushed up bugs. Uh yeah, oh you know, or you could also, I mean, if you wanted to, you could use an anthocyanin that's read at the at the at those pHs, but they're not stable. So unless you're not gonna use it right away, you know, they're not time stable, they're not heat stable, and they're not light stable. Um you know, that that's been my experience with them. Anyway, uh any suggestions are appreciated.
Okay. Also, how may one sponsor your radio show? Joe, any ideas on that one? That would be send an email to info at heritage radio network.org. And also um the Abruzie Barbecue is going to be at the Heritage Warehouse, which is right around the corner from uh Roberta's.
So that's my info. Yeah. But go ahead and get it get yourself a uh your hands on the uh Martelletti and try that and try those other ones. And try Coke Americano. We use a boatload of Coke Americano at the bar.
Delicious. Yeah, I love Coke. Yeah, Cokey is good stuff and an awesome name, Coke. Coke Americano. That and Corpse Revivor is a good idea.
Yeah, Coke. Fantastic. Um and go to these websites. Go to Vermouth 101, which is run by uh Martin Duderoff, uh you know, a good fellow. Uh uh interesting site that points you to a lot of things.
And I don't own it, but uh, you know, I know Jared Brown and uh Anastasia Miller, and they wrote a book called The Mixalini Guide to Vermouth and other uh Paratis. And uh I haven't read the book, but I know them personally, and so you should go take a look uh take a look at that. It's available on the Amazon and at Kindle, so you do not even have to wait for it to show up at your door. Uh in case because Amazon only had a couple copies as as of this morning. Um But anything else uh about uh Vermouth that you learned from your study of bitters, Ariel?
Well, not so much from the bitters, but um in the like V and E section of the UC Davis library, there's a bunch of copies of uh Maider and Amory's like wine production and technology, and that has a pretty good section on Vermouth. Is that when is that from? There's editions dating back to like the 50s and 60s, like through the 80s. It's not public rec you know, there's none of its public record. Can you Google book that thing?
I'd have to look into it. Give me the title one more time. Yeah, um well, Maynard Amory, I think it's wine technology and production, but um I could email you an actual like library entry. Sounds good. But I mean, like over uh there might be uh um I know there's a lot of like community colleges around there that teach winemaking, so they could have sure library stuff.
Well, I mean he's he's at a winery, I'm sure he's like yeah, yeah. Okay. So anyway, uh the other thing is uh I'm thinking about using liquid nitrogen to chill the glasses and maybe for nitro modeling. I've read your primer on liquid nitrogen, uh we have two uh large 250 liter deweries around the w uh doers around the winery. So uh doer is what you hold liquid nitrogen in.
Actually, anything you put that stuff's in to do her, but usually when we say doer, we mean the big doers. They store the nitrogen under pressure roughly, I think 20 pounds of uh PSI, depending on what size doer you have. The larger 240s, uh and I don't know, two fifties. We have two forties. They you know they store it at slightly higher pressure, but anyway, that's where it is.
So I will make a phase separator as you show by the way. So the phase separator is uh it's just a muffler. It's like a centered brass muffler that you put on the end of a tube and it lets you take stuff off of the liquid nitrogen tank, otherwise it sprays everywhere. Be aware that on the largers on the two forties that I've used, they don't come out as smoothly as they come out of the one eighties and the one sixties. Uh and you can get a little bit of a choo-choo train chugga chugga chug of resonance on some of those things, and I think it has to do with the pressure it comes out of.
Uh so you might be able to adjust the length of the uh extract tube to pull it out of to stop it, but we were having resonance issues on uh on a 240 when we had it, and it was like it was like chugging like a choo-choo train. We've still got the LN out, and it's not as violent as trying to take it out at pressure, but it wasn't uh as efficient as it was out of the 180s and the 160s, just a little no to benefit. Um I know okay, my c my questions are about uh safety in a bar type environment. I know how to work safely in a cellar, but not at a bar. Uh you still use do you still use air pods to hold the liquid nitrogen, or you do you suggest purchasing an insulated doer flask?
Uh do you remove the internal dip tube from the airpods, airPods are the coffee things. Uh or can this be used to dispense the uh LN? Seems like the AirPod is not really a closed system, but I'm unsure. If removed, how do you safely dispen uh dispense the LN? Uh does not seem like an AirPod pours very safely.
Any other tips? Okay, here's here's what I'm gonna say about this. We don't I don't I don't use AirPods anymore. I used to use AirPods, uh, the coffee ones with the lids on top. Uh and I used to try to use the little uh dispensing unit.
They aren't sealed. However, the plastic in them can seize up, you can get condensation, and then I've never had one get in a situation that's unsafe. You can always see that they're venting off, but I've gotten it where they no longer dispense properly. And it's true, those ones with the pour tops are very difficult to get to to close. At the bar, we use carafts, like thermal uh coffee crafts and camping thermoses.
We buy them from REI because they have a guarantee. And I walked up to the dude at the counter at REI, I'm like, this sucker's got a guarantee. He said, Yes. I was like, I'm putting liquid nitrogen in it. This thing has a guarantee.
Yes. I was like, so so when it breaks, I can bring it back to you? Yes. I was like, okay. So uh that's sweet, right?
So anyway, so I have the liquid nitrogen, and uh what we do is we own one at the bar five-liter uh five-liter doer, like legit doer. And then we empty uh, we we fill the five-liter doer for service, bring it back behind the bar, and then use that to fill the thermoses. You don't get that much loss out of a thermos, and in a bar situation, you're using it so fast and so much that it you don't get that much of an advantage out of capping it. Because remember, when it you're not using it, you get a layer of nitrogen vapor above it that provides some insulation, and so you're not getting a huge amount of loss because it's got a very thin uh, you know, it's got a very small, narrow opening at the top, and uh those things pour quite well as opposed to the airpods, which have all that weird nonsense in between the pore spout and you because you're not meant to pour out other than you're meant to push a button and have it dispense. So I would move away from the push-button dispensers and move towards coffee thermoses, things like this.
However, throw away anything that allows you to seal it. Let me speak to you again. Let me say this one more time. Throw away, don't just like unless you take it to your house or something like this, do not ever put yourself in a situation where anyone under any circumstances for any reason can make a mistake and screw a sealing lid onto a thermos. I need that I need you to I need you to listen to me on this one.
This is uh what caused uh the poor German uh cook in uh in one Germany uh to, you know, years ago to almost die and to lose, I believe he lost like one hand, all of one hand, almost all the rest of his hand, and I believe one of his legs, and he had to be put in a medical, medically induced coma because he brought to his girlfriend's house liquid nitrogen in a sealed thermos. Never, never make it even a remote possibility that that could ever happen, right? No, you're making a bum when you do that. Yeah, yeah. But you know, but the thing is that I've run into this too, and the older I get, the more I you know realize this, especially when I'm working with other people, is that uh there's a difference between knowing how to not make something unsafe yourself and guaranteeing that no one else can make it unsafe, right?
And you want to guarantee that nobody out there can seal up that uh that container. Um also I think you know, in light of what happened to the poor person in uh in England, I think whenever you're bringing liquid nitrogen into a bar, you need to do a lot of safety training. And that safety training is one, you know, telling people about the eyes, your eyes, keeping away from the customer, explaining ways in which it, you know, it's showing how it can be safe, showing how things that they think maybe are unsafe, like getting a little bit on your skin is not unsafe, uh at the same time reinforcing all the horrible things that can happen. So, you know, making sure they understand how vitally important it is that liquid nitrogen never, in no cryogen ever be served, including dry ice, ever be served to a customer in its native state. It's very easy to know that all your liquid nitrogen is gone out of your drink before you serve it.
If it's smoking, it's it's no good to serve to your to your customer. I mean, it's uh, you know, hammer that stuff home. Uh hammer home that keep keep the cryogens away from the customer, not just in service, but you know, throw the throw the extra extra liquid nitrogen down and behind you. You know, um be careful. Let people know that it's real.
Let people know that people have gotten hurt when rules haven't been followed. Let them know uh, you know, let them know read read to them the stories of that of that poor girl who had her stomach removed. Read to them the stories about the German who who you know almost killed himself. Um, you know, follow basic safety rules. Never let them pour it above their heads.
Never, you know, you know, make sure that they don't have a situation where they can pour it into their pockets or get it caught inside of their clothing. Just like, you know, reinforce um, you know, read the primer, read other people's primers, reinforce safety like that. The most important thing you can do when you're training new people is to engender in them a healthy respect for the bad things that can happen. Um I mean it just it just it bears repeating, and a lot of times people think, you know, uh it's a gimmick, you shouldn't bring in. Lots of things are dangerous.
We're just trained to know they're dangerous. We know knives are dangerous, we know deep fryers are dangerous. You don't necessarily understand how or why liquid nitrogen is uh is dangerous. Um, also if you're dealing in small quantities in a bar, you don't need to get that much into asphyxiation, but you need to make sure a lot of people still they'll bring large amounts of liquid nitrogen into elevators. They'll they'll carry them up stairwells, they'll do all sorts of like awful, awful things with liquid nitrogen that most of the time won't get you killed, but then there's that time when it will.
You know? Uh so just look into it. Is that is that what do you think? Is that good? Good?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh okay. So uh interesting question in. Got a really interesting one. What time is it?
Ah, all right, I'm holding. So I got a I got a good question here, and hopefully I can finish it. Mark writes in he was wrote about nanoparticles before. Uh do you know anything about nanoparticles, by the way? I don't know anything about it.
It was brought to my attention the safety of nanoparticles by by Mark recently. I mean, there are some concerns because they can like breach certain barriers, but are they like too large to be dealt with the way that like regular sized particles are by the immune system. Yeah, but it's like but the the messed up thing is is that our ability to produce different ones is outstripped our our our testing of them. Oh, yeah. Oh yeah.
Well, crazy. We've got a few great shows on nanoparticles if you search our archives. Uh Katie Kiefer on straight no chaser has done quite a few episodes. Does she enjoy the nanoparticle? I don't know.
Yeah, fan or faux. Fan or faux. I think you're a fan of the potential. All right. So anyway, thanks for fueling my question.
This is Mark Reddingham. Thanks for fielding my question on nanoparticles. I now have a question that's a bit more technical. I like that it's more technical than nanoparticles. Uh I've been working on making Vietnamese rice noodles using the basic recipe in Charles Fan's book, also available on Epicurious.com.
Charles Fan, the uh the chef at slanted uh slanted door in uh right, that's the name of his restaurant, right? In uh D. Yeah, in the ferry building in San Francisco. Yeah, San Francisco. Um I've made some delicious batches for snacking and staff meal, but they are too short and stick to each other too much to actually serve.
After experimenting for a few days, I think that the dough is fine, but the potato rice that I'm using back to potato ricers, and by the way, this like after I had the nightmare I read about this. How awful is that? Uh, isn't strong enough tool for a harder dough like this and uh doesn't make it look pretty. Do you have any suggestions about hacking a potato ricer to get more force or a different kind of tool that could do the same thing or any general advice about making this kind of noodle? Thanks, Mark.
Okay. So, first of all, to get an idea of what this looks like, uh I went to uh Andrea and Wynn's website, uh Vietworld Kitchen.com uh to look, she reviewed uh fans' recipe and also had a video of doing it. She also has what looks like a really cool cookbook that I don't have called Asian Tofu that I now think I need to buy because you know I all of my tofu stuff comes from like the million years old shirtleaf uh you know book on tofu and miso. I told you I called that guy one day, right? Really?
Yeah, he picked up the phone. I was like, Can you make can you make tofu from Edam? He's like, that's a horrible waste of human resources in life. I'm like, oh my god, sorry. But uh anyway, so I'm I'm anxious to uh eventually what I'm gonna when I'm allowed to buy books again.
When I move my apartment, I'm gonna be allowed to buy books again, and I'm gonna I'll buy that book. Okay. Um anyway, she has a video of it, and the dough is indeed stiff. Uh look, I think all of these noodles and many noodle tricks in general, and also dragon's beard uh and all this are really just exercises in uh in in water control, right? So like adding a little bit more water can make a huge change in the reality of your dough.
And so I would say that you could probably look the way that these doughs are made is that the way this dough is made, for those of you who don't know what the heck we're talking about, is you take rice, uh ground rice in this case, uh, and you and you soak it sometimes up to four days to let it ferment a little bit. And on the blog, they let you they show you different things. You then pour off some of the soaking water and then uh add fresh water, cook it, right? Now you're cooking out a good portion of the starch, right? That's providing the structure for the dough.
So when you're using when you have uh a dough that doesn't have its own natural glutens, right, like rice, one of the ways to get structure into it is to cook a portion of the starch before you make the noodles, and that gives you some structure so that it's not just breaking apart and turning into nothing. That's allowing you to form noodles, right? Um another way to do it that you see on if you look on the on the web to make rice noodles is people will pour a thin layer crepe style into a steamer uh with a lot of oil. In fact, I saw a really cool video on it. Um, and see if I can find uh the name of the person that I looked it up, uh, on on uh eat now, cry later, how to make fresh rice noodles.
Uh and she paints, she paints oil and builds them up layer by layer in a steamer and then and then peels them apart afterwards so that you don't have to peel off each one individually. And that's pretty cool. So that's one way. But this other technique is the way also you make dunk dumpling wrappers a lot, is you pre-cook some, and also shoe pastry. You pre-cook some of it to give structure, although shoe pastry is different because, well, you're retarding the gluten because you have a lot of fat and uh egg in it, but then you pre-cook it to give it structure.
Whatever. So back to where I was. So the the point is is that then you're pre-cooking it, and then you're adding uh he adds tapioca back, but some people don't, they add more rice, but tapioca's gonna give it a springier texture. You control the water level of it, then you extrude it into boiling water and you form the noodle. Uh so you want to be very careful to have enough water.
I would add more water so you can get out of a potato ricer, or I would move to a higher tech uh higher force style situation. So KitchenAid now makes a pasta extruding attachment that actually apparently works. It's $150. I used to have their pasta making attachment for the meat grinder, and it was a little bit less than useless. I don't know if you've ever used that one.
Yeah, it's useless. I mean, like the reason it's useless, it's it's worse than nothing because it makes you think you can do something, and it's just horrible. But apparently the new one, new one works. But there is a style of noodle in the south of India that they make with rice, and they actually use a really bizarre method where they fully cook dumpling dough. They make the dough, they do the soaking, they grind it wet, make a dough, cook it in a pan, then form it, then boil the dumplings, then take the hot dumplings and extrude them through an extruder, through a noodle extruder.
But uh they make uh noodle presses for that that you can get at um Indian stores, um call it Savai, Savai Press. I don't know how you pronounce it, but I think Savai Press. But really interesting stuff there, and I I hadn't known about that. But one thing I did know about is they make something and I'm gonna mispronounce it called a chocolate press. Those are the fried uh Indian fried like doll uh noodles, doll and flour rice, I think rice or whatever, flour noodles that you extrude through an extruder and fry, and they look like uh like a screw, like a cookie press, but like brass and long.
And those things would work for this because they have screw pressure in it, so you can screw the sucker down and extrude it out. So I would do that. I would A, try to make uh a looser dough, and I would B try to use one of these screw things that you can get at a at an Indian uh like an Indian shop. Now, that said, uh reading about this, I went ape loony, right? And started doing, and I my entire morning was shot because I was I was looking looking stuff up, and uh I'll give you a couple things.
There's a guy, and this is how you find it. You look up my notes are holy crap. What you look up is making rice noodles chonking China, okay? And there's a Google, there's a YouTube, and here's what this guy does. You guys familiar with Oblek?
Oblek? Yeah, the like cornstarch water. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So like a non-Newtonian fluid is a fluid that doesn't act where where the where you know the the um the viscosity of it changes markedly depending on whether or not it's being agitated, right?
Non-Newtonian fluid. So you know a lot of things are what's called shear thinning. So the harder you stir them the uh and the more force you apply to them the more liquid they get which makes sense because you know the things that form a mat you hit them hard enough and the the strands align and all of a sudden it becomes easier to shear through them sheer thinning. Well there are things that the harder you work them the more uh difficult they are an ooblek is one of them and ublek is made out of cornstarch and water and you can go online and see these guys uh there's a that there's a video called uh you know people running on a pool of ooblek and it's yeah it's awesome people running across like literally running across it like walking on water and then stopping and sinking into it and it's like chest deep it's strong it's like quicksand yeah it's strong yeah it's good um but this guy this guy in uh chonking China and I've no idea he made some form of ooblek noodle noodle thing so he has what amounts to just a strainer that he's holding in in his hand right and he scoops out of a bucket handfuls of dough that appear to be a solid scoops them up throws them into the strainer, and then at the bottom, where there's no force on them, they're straining out like a liquid. And he does that a bunch of times until it looks like it's what he wants it, and then he holds the oblek over the water into boiling water and makes noodles that he then cooks for a couple of seconds, scoops out, and then throws them into the thing.
I was like, oh my god, hence my notes. No leak holy crap. Holy crap. Uh and you know, further on this, I kept and then I was like, I got back on the noodle thing and I was looking at it. You know, Chef Tom out in California, who's uh with the what currently is the the International Culinary Center out there in uh near San Jose.
Uh, you know, he did a video on hand pulled noodles, and I went to go look because I got I don't know, I somehow I got back in a hand pulled noodles. Every once in a while I get back, I've never gotten good at it, by the way. But I've noticed there's two varieties of the hand pulled noodles. So most of the times like when it's attempted in English speaking uh posts on the internet, the hand pulled noodle style is one where the first step is to completely destroy, completely obliterate the gluten structure by overneating the hell out of it, right? And if you want to know about this, by the way, it's another thing I do yourself a favor.
If you're at all interested in how uh wheat scientists measure doughs, and you don't have access to like the expensive books, and you don't want to go like you know, try to like go on Google Books and read all of Hosney's stuff by like pasting and cutting between all of uh the different books, like you know, serial science and all that. Go go look at HTTP W.org. And wheatflowerbook.org has all of the things of how wheat is rated by uh cereal chemists when it comes in and how things are done. And for instance, they say a sample of wheat is considered infested if it contains, and this is this is strikes me as very odd, right? A sample of wheat is infested if it contains one, two or more live weevils, right?
Two, one live weevil and one other live insect injuries injurious to stored grain, right? Or three, two or more live insects who are injurious to stored grain other than live weevils. That's dumb. Any two insects, they don't care. They don't care.
They're like, it can be two weevils or a weevil and another insect or two insects. What's the sample size for that? Like per kilo? I don't know. Is is a weevil, maybe maybe a weevil's not an insect.
Maybe it's technically something else. I don't know, maybe. It's not an insect. I mean, I know it's a it's a bug. Yeah, it's a bug.
Yeah, it's a bug, but maybe it's not actually like an insect from a technical standpoint. So that's why they have to. Eight legs or something. They should put one thing would have been sufficient. Any combination of two or more live insect or weeviloid things.
It it counts as infested. So here's another one. Definition of light smutty wheat. Wheat in a 250 gram portion that has an unmistakable odor of smut or which contains smut balls, portions of smut balls or spores of smut. In excess of a quantity equal to five smut balls, but not an excess of quantity equal to 30 smut balls of average size.
Is light smutty wheat. I think average size smut ball is going to be my next band name. Right? Right? Check this out.
Check this out. Here's one more for you from this awesome, awesome book. At the end of the book, there are standards from the American Association of Cereal Serial Chemists of recipes with which to test flowers. So like when they're like, they have like the standard sugar snap uh sugar snap cookie. They have ginger or whatever.
They have like the standard, and they also have something called the Asian noodle texture test. And it literally is like you line up cooked noodles and they have a plastic tooth that pushes down into it, right? And a sample of five noodle strands are randomly selected into cut into seven centimeter pieces. The five noodle pieces are laid side by side on the TX TA dot XT2 textured analyzer instrument platform. A two-bite compression test is performed using a special plastic tooth.
Compression is performed to 70% of noodle thickness and then released and then redone again. And it's like literally they have an Asian noodle texture test. This document is and and why it's important. Noodle texture is an important quality characteristic. Oh really?
I I had no concept. This book is available for free people. This is free. Like this is like this is what um I'm being told that I have to leave. Hold on a second.
Before I before I before I uh leave, so go check out the wheat uh wheat flower book.org. Uh and I found that because I had to look up, you know, they have like one of the one of the tests they use is they make uh they make a disc of dough and they inflate a bubble into it to see how it extends, right? It's called an alveolograph. Like alveolar in your lungs. Yeah.
And so I read that in the uh in uh Paula Paula Figoni's book, How uh Baking Works, Exploring the Fundamentals of Baking Science, which I hear is really good, but I don't own a hard copy of. Another one that I need to go buy a copy of. Uh anywho, so the the the end of the story is uh that I was looking up uh I've as usual, it all ends up back in hand pulled noodles. And I was noticing that the because hand pulled noodles are are interesting because you have they have to pull, they have to have extraordinarily long extension, right, without snapping. So you would think very low, low gluten or you know, a weak gluten flour so that they won't snap back, right?
Right? Yeah, yeah. So it seems to me that there's two main uh ways that it's done. So if you look at like the ones that are done in English, they put things typically in a mixer and they just destroy the gluten, obliterate it, wipe it out, the same way that you do for beaten biscuits, which is something that I can make properly, right? Gluten is just obliterated by over mixing.
Then you have the ones and and those ones, when you're looking at them hand pulling the noodles, they pull slowly and but you know, quick, you know, not slowly, but like kind of evenly, and they just pull it across, and you can see that the noodles like almost want to pull themselves in into noodle shape, right? And then you look at the ones with no speaking that are done most of the time in Asia, uh, where it's just some guy on the street doing it. And those guys have an entirely different technique. Like the end section of their kneading, right? First they do the tearing and ripping and destroying it, and you can tell that they're they're putting water in, they're doing water control.
Same way as SOBA, let's like proper soba manufacture, all about water control. Well, back to water control. And you can see them when they get the texture right, but then their final kneading process is a stretching, aligning, and rolling, where they're actually looks like they're aligning. And after they start doing that, they never again go cross or rotate. They're always just you know, just torsion and stretch back, torsion stretch, and then cut off little pieces, and they're always going in the same thing.
And those guys, right? Those guys, when they're pulling the noodles, it's like slap a rap dapa, slap that, that and they're pulling hard, right? And they're slapping the noodle around, which means that that sucker must have more structure. Now, the ones that I've tried to learn from have always been the Western style ones, and those are premised on the fact that there's no internal structure, one way or the other. They just beat the crap out of them.
And I've always found that most of those noodles don't have a lot of bite. My question is to everyone out there who's tried it is there a fundamental and qualitative difference between the slap a wrap dap and the beat the hell out of hand pulled noodles? I have no idea. Cooking issues. Thanks for listening to this program on heritage radio network.org.
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