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Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Users coming to you live from Alberta's Pizzeria in Bushwig Brooklyn. Joining you in the studio with, as always, Mustafa the Hammer Lopez, Jack and Joe in the engineering booth, and special guests. First, of course, Piper. Piper from Booker and Dags Lab High Piper.
Hi. How are you doing? And Mark Ladner from Del Fosto! Good afternoon, Dave. How are you doing?
I'm doing great. How are you? Alright, I'm gonna make you actually say stuff on air. Dave, you want to get close to the mic there? Who?
Dave. Well, I was told not to yell into the mic by one of our listeners. You gotta get closer. I was told not to yell into the I was told not to yell into the mic by one of our listeners. Alright.
So, uh So first and foremost, I'm gonna make uh Mark. Oh, by the way. Call in your questions to any of us, including Mark, for all of your Mark Ladner style questions. Two 27184972128. That's 7184972128.
Mark, uh, you're ostensibly here to uh to uh give plugs for your uh barbecue thing you're doing here, right? Why don't you talk about it for a second? Yeah, I came to uh review with Erin and Patrick some of the logistics for this uh small get-together we're having on Saturday morning at uh the Heritage Warehouse, which is on this same block. So uh yeah, I'm gonna head over there afterwards and check on my grill, make sure everything's are there stu uh are there stuff that's gonna come, you're gonna bring your kids, Dave? Uh what when is it?
Uh Saturday evening. This Saturday evening? I would I would love to. I would love to, but someone's gonna have to come take my place because I will be flying to Senegal. Okay.
Oh wow. Yeah. Um I'm taking a uh trip uh that uh is being organized by uh our good buddy from uh you know the Grand Descartes restaurant, Pierre Tiam, who has an excellent Senegalese cookbook called Yolele. Uh and you might have seen him on the Iron Chief. He was on the Iron Chief at one point.
Yeah. Yeah, I know. Yeah. Have you uh you're expecting a pretty exotic experience out there? Well, I mean, uh the whole point of these trips, it's supposed to be a series of trips uh that chefs are taking, you know, American chefs are taking to Africa with a two with a two-part, a two-pronged kind of goal.
One, we get to steal ideas and ingredients and bring th bring them back here, right? Uh and two, uh people over there, uh the the hope is is that locally they'll say, Oh, when people come visit our country, what they really want to see is authentic real deal stuff. They don't want to see uh some sort of BS fake French or some sort of you know Western garbage that there's that there's inherent value in doing um you know very good presentations of uh local ingredients. Indigenous cultures. Yeah, because you know, and it's the same thing in you know most places when you know when I know you're the same way.
When you travel, you you know, what do you got good here? Like what is yeah, because uh, you know, you know, you know you know you've been to the you know, you've been to Italy, you've been to France, you know what's good there. So if you're going to um you know, if you're going to Senegal, you don't want some interpretation McDonald's. Yeah. Well, uh it's interesting.
I spoke to a good f a good friend of all of us actually, uh, who's like whenever he travels, he won he goes to local McDonald's to see how they're different from American McDonald's. Interesting. Yeah, it's kinda strange though. Pretty strange. Yeah, pretty strange.
Uh so anyway, so that's the that's the goal of that. And so someone will have to take my place at the barbecue, but can they still purchase the tickets at the Eventbrite? Absolutely. Does anyone know the uh the this the site to go to? Jack does.
Jack? The site is Italian Barbecue.eventbrite.com. I'm not gonna say that if you don't go, you're worthless and stupid, but I wouldn't be possible. Oh, I'll say that. It's it's yeah.
Yeah. What are you gonna be making there? Uh some sticks. We're making some spiadini. Yeah?
Made from uh heritage uh USA's very own red wattle pork shoulder. Red wattle, huh? It's gonna be delish. Has the price of red wattle come down at all or is it still absurdly? I don't believe so.
Uh it's pretty absurdly expensive. Not as expensive as the uh uh you know what's my favorite word is a pig related word is mangallista. That stuff's I've I've never cooked with it. You ever cooked with the mangalista? Yeah, it's pretty strange.
Is it worthwhile? Yeah, it is, it's good. Worth the money? Um if you like pork. Do you like pork, Dave?
Uh I do. I do. I do enjoy I do enjoy the pork every night. Speaking of pork, who's who's our who's our sponsor today's someone like that's underground meats. From Mad Town?
Madison, Wisconsin. Have you had their product? I have yet to have their product. I would like to try their product to see whether it is as delicious as I hope it is. I believe there'll be uh something sent out.
Beautiful show. You know what I have friend of cooking issues, listener of cooking issues. So nice. I well well I uh I am excited to try it. You know what I had last night from pork, pork, pork related.
You know the Salamaria Belesi guys? They're excellent uh, you know, Salumi curing uh outfit here in uh New York and New Jersey. Good people. And have taught a lot of people a lot of uh you know, a lot of people who uh are known for their curing now in this area spent a lot of time with the guys at Salamaria Belacy um kind of learning their techniques. And what they did that was very interesting way back in the day was instead of changing their procedures to meet um to meet food code, they hired and paid for people to prove that their techniques were safe from a uh food from a food, you know, soup food safety standpoint.
It's true and absolutely fascinating. I think they're the only people that have actually gotten away with that. Yeah, I mean they spent I think a lot of money, you know. Uh but they you know the their point uh and I was hanging out with Paul from there yesterday, and the point that they made years ago when I first met them was well I you know I don't I if I'm not gonna do it the way I want to do it, I just I don't want to do it. So, you know, let's see whether we can.
And they did. Yeah, and I don't know anyone else who I don't know anyone else who does that, but they had they had the most delicious wild boar supersata that I had yesterday. Of course, I'm from the East, so I call it super sot. But anyway, but like it was ridiculously good. And they apparently they have these wild herds in Texas that they let roam free and then right before slaughter they herd them together and like you know, sh uh slaughter them, I guess shoot them in the head.
So they it's all wild fed, but USDA. Really good. Do you have that product yet? I have not. I have not.
Sounds good to look out for it. You want that, right? Okay. Love board. All right, now uh to uh two some questions we have.
Okay. Uh Mark writes, not this mark, not Mark Ladner, the mark from the noodle questions uh last week. Writes in, thanks for discussing my rice noodle predicament. I've tried adding more water because I told him maybe add more water. He if you remember or if you listened or whatever, he was trying to make uh a rice noodle.
It's made from uh partially um cooked out hydrated rice starch mixed with uh more rice starch and water and uh pressed through uh you know through uh a potato ricer uh into boiling water to make noodles. And the reason you pre-boil part of the starch is because otherwise, you know, rice starch doesn't really hold together very well if it's just rice starch and water, and it'll fly apart on you. So uh so anyway, so uh that I told them more water is what I told him. Uh or uh more ball or press. Those are the two choices I gave.
More water, more baller. Okay. Uh I've tried adding more water, but the texture of the final noodles compromised. I'm definitely going to try the Indian noodle press thing you mentioned. I can't see how that wouldn't work because the they they in India they make these noodles uh from cooked out starch and that they're really stiff, and so they need really hardcore presses to press the stuff out.
Uh hey, have you ever tried Mark the uh that uh KitchenAid, the the new powered extruder that fits on the kitchen aid? I have not. I haven't seen it. Yeah, I haven't I hadn't I I read about it last for last week, but I've never never seen it. You have one of the really nice new pasta, the not the arcobolino, you have the other one or you have the arcobolino?
No. The other one? Uh I'm not sure of the name right now. I think it's uh italgy. Yep, and you enjoy it, correct?
Um yeah, it's good. We don't do a lot of extrusion. Most of our stuff is handmade, but uh I've seen Wiley use a pretty interesting extruder that's sort of like a cocking gun. Yeah, the one he used to use for the shrimp noodles. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah. That one's pretty cool. Yeah. Um takes a lot of torque, though. I mean, I don't know how you would do it with a racer.
Yeah, I mean, like the ricers I have I have a a good stainless steel ricer, but I also had a plastic ricer, and I know that I would break it. I know I would break it. You would. I mean, I know me. I would break it.
Uh okay, back to the question. Um concerning the methods of hand pulling noodles that I was talking about, uh, that me, Dave was talking about, in my limit because uh good basically when you would look on the hand pulled noodles, the question is is that there's some guys, and it's usually the people who are attempting to mimic uh you know Asian recipes from an American standpoint, their pulling style on the hand pulled noodles is uh it shows that the dough is so slack that if they pulled overly hard at all, it would just fly apart into nothingness. And then occasionally you will see those guys pull the stuff and the noodle strands will break and fall into nothingness. Whereas if you look at at the actual guys doing it in Asia, they're thwap adap a lap adaping the stuff around, and it looks like it has a lot more resilience to it. And then from my perspective, uh a dough that has more resilience in it, if it could be pulled, is gonna have better tooth.
I mean, it's just obvious to me that it's gonna have more tooth if it's got more structure. When you guess, yeah, I don't know how where is the introduction of that alkali water stuff that they use. Is that the real secret ingredient? Well, so the lot of people are using they use alkali water in uh or they well, they use baking soda. Most American guys use baking soda and uh when they're doing it, and they add some, and that should so when you add it to a regular noodle, not one of the kind of overprocessed hand pulled noodles, but a regular noodle, it's gonna strengthen the gluten and also uh and depending on the cultivar uh uh wheat, you use uh you increase the yellowness.
So you get the yellow alkaline noodles that have the snap to it, right? But a hand pulled noodle is never gonna have that kind of bite to it because in order to pull it, if it had that kind of bite to it, it wouldn't pull right. You know what I mean? So it's you know, uh when you're making the hand pulled noodles, you have to get to a point where the uh you know where um you know it's not so uh elastic it's gonna break short, but that it pulls. You want the extensibility, but not necessarily the above the pull back elasticity.
Have you ever uh successfully attempted this yourself? No. No. I mean I've I've never even known anyone that's tried. No, I mean I've tried it.
I've gotten stuff that like I was like, oh, I can see where this might work, but I've never been like, oh, I'm good at this. Or oh, I would serve this to my friends or family. You know, and that uh you know, uh and so uh but you know, the guy Chef Tom, anyway, so let me finish the what it said. So uh concerning the methods of hand pulling noodles that you were talking about, in my limited experience, the thwacking method is really helpful if your noodle dough has been sitting, which makes sense because the gluten strands would probably rejoin together a little bit, uh form more of a network. I've only used the recipe from Chef Tom, which is the one available on the internet, and I found that if you pull the noodles right out of the mixer bowl like he does in the video, they are easy, but they can tighten up after resting, so a few quick thwacks can help get them back to being pullable.
Maybe the resting can help add chew. Thanks again, uh, Mark. I think you're right. I think the resting adds shoe. But you know, the thing is I think like anything else, there's so much more to know.
Like the one thing I almost got good at was doing the dragon's beard candy. And even then I sucked compared to the you know, the you know, the the million-year-old dude who's been doing nothing but dragon's beard candy because I don't know, because that's all he does. I don't know. You know, like anything else, like there's the techniques, the more you learn about them, the more you know that you don't that you're not really good at what you're doing and that you're a farce. You know, what do you say?
I agree. Uh but on the Ublek noodles I was talking about, if you remember this this guy who saw this video, this insane video where the person with ooblek is something that like acts like a solid, uh, but then when you're hitting it, but then when you're not hitting it, you know, it drains through a uh it it turns to a liquid. And so there's videos of guys, cornstarch and water is the most famous one you can make, just mix cornstarch and water, but and these guys running across a pool of cornstarch and water and then stopping and sinking all the way up to their chest in this pool of cornstarch and water. Uh and then we say, Well, how the hell do you make these ubleck noodles? And uh Eating Asia said it's uh they're actually not rice, which is what we thought last week, they're sweet potato, and Paul Adams has made a proper ooblek noodle.
And so you go on my uh my my Twitter there, cooking issues, he made it with five percent pre-cooked sweet potato starch, uh, balance uncooked with water and alum. I still don't know what the alum does. But anyway, so enough with the enough with the updates on the noodles, right? Good? Okay.
Uh Ben writes in on miso and beans. Uh Ben says, big fan of the show. Uh, actually became a heritage uh radio member at the low cost of about 50 cents per cooking issues episode. Thanks, Ben. Amortized over all of our episodes?
That's that's changed, dude. Yeah. And we've done a lot of these dang things. Anyway, two unr unrelated questions. I saw Dave Chang on Mind of a Chef.
This have you ever seen Mind of a Chef? I have not. I have not. Have you seen it? I don't really, I don't I don't get I get PBS now, but I well I and I went to go look at it online, but uh PBS took it off because they're publicly funded and so they wouldn't have it streaming.
I don't understand that. Does that make any damn sense? No. Makes no damn sense. Okay.
I saw Dave Chang on Mind of a Chef discussing the pitiful quality of American miso. Is there any way to make miso in a home environment? And could you achieve the superior quality to what's available in the store that way? Granting it may take a year. Failing that, any New York City or mail order sources of quality miso.
Now look, you know, uh Dave is uh occasionally um you know liable to make some hyperbolic statements. In fact, there is you know, you can get some delicious miso here in the in the US, and you can get some crap miso here in the US. Most Americans, when they go buy miso, uh I mean, actually, Nastasha, Mark, and I were all in Japan about a year ago. We had some pre- I had some pretty good meat. Did you have any good miso when you were over there?
I had some amazing miso. I had uh the guy who is the head of uh purchasing from Park Hyatt bought uh bought me some Hacho Miso, which it is very hard to get really good hacho miso here. You mean I don't never seen it available. I've seen really bad versions of Hacho Miso here that I guess weren't treated well. And uh Hachomiso is one that's aged for an extremely long time.
It's made uh exclusively of soy beans and it's uh very dark and kind of brooding flavors like salt and coffee and all sorts of really awesome stuff, and the real the real good stuff is just light years beyond the you know the crappy version that is uh that I've had here in the US. However, uh there are extremely high quality misos that are brought in. Most misos, most people like the lighter misos, or they they they get hooked on the lighter misos, like the Shiro Misos and things like that. And most of those are done with very short fermentation times, and then they have to dope them up with things to stop them, the stop them from growing in the package and blowing off. And so those can taste not so great, right?
But any major city that has a decent uh Japanese population, in New York being one of them, I'm sure San Francisco or any any, you know, is this go to any one of those Japanese places and they have on hand 20 20 different misos, some of which are gonna suck, and some of which are gonna be good. And now not being able to read anything in Japanese and not being able to communicate with a lot of people that are selling me the stuff, you know, even though they actually all speak they all speak English in the stores here and but I still for some reason can't communicate with them at Sunshine Mart. Can you you have this problem, Mark? Everybody else. I don't know shit about miso dave.
Anyway, so but but you've been to Sunshine Mart. I have. Yeah. Uh see you know what I'm talking about. Like they speak English fine, but still they don't communicate with me.
I don't understand it. Anyway, uh Piper, you ever done this? Nah, you don't care. Okay. So anyway, so because you're trying to when I walk into a store, here's what I want to know.
You have 30 different things. I don't want to fool around. I don't have the time. I can't even type this stuff into a search engine. Just tell me what the good stuff is.
Just point out the good stuff, right? And even though I know it's a very nuanced question, like still, like if someone walked in and they and and you know, I had a bunch of different price ranges of things, and I said, why is this thing cost more? They would have some sort of explanation. Anyway, so I end up just buying like, you know, a couple of the higher priced ones and and maybe one of the crappier ones to see what the difference is taken home. But there are some very, very good misos available here.
But you can make your own. If you want to, but uh this said, Miso is there's a lot of steps in Miso, and anything when there's a lot of steps, uh, even though you can do it yourself, there's a lot of room for not being as good as the people who are actually very, very good at it. Uh it's the same way that you can bake bread at home, but most of us, unless we don't, unless we devote a lot of time to it, aren't going to make bread as good as the best bread makers that we can go visit. But if you want to make your own, you should well, first of all, you should probably own at any rate uh Sandor Katz's book, The Art of Fermentation. He has a small section on Miso, and then he he actually directs you to the kind of still, you know, I think almost two decades or more later, like Grand Tome on Miso by uh William Shirtliff and uh Kiko uh Oyagi, which is the book of Miso.
The same people that brought you the book of Tofu. I've talked about these guys on the air a bunch of times. The tofu book, I think I told you I called him and he was like, he took called me a bad person for trying to make tofu out of vetamame. He said I was like a he actually said I think that I was a bad human being. Uh and um anyway.
Uh he uh, you know, his book on tofu, I think has been superseded with more modern books, but I think his Miso book is still the uh his and her miso book is still the the one to get. Uh beware that they have abridged small paperback versions of the book of tofu and the book of miso and they've been hacked up and then re glued into a paperback form and to me that was almost unreadable. Get the big version like the larger version whether in paperback or in uh hardcover. And uh you can go to his website it's funny thing it's like both of them it's always him and her but then whenever someone's writing it's always him writing something so I never know you know what I mean anyway. Soy InfoCenter.com and uh good source good source for uh Koji you need Koji to make miso uh and a good source for that is gem cultures www.gemcultures dot com.
What do you think? Good enough on Miso? Yeah you know what my favorite misos are? I like barley misos. Barley miso muta misos.
You like barley miso piper? Never had it. What the hell is you guys don't like miso? I just don't use it a lot. Why?
What what's your hate down on Miso? Nothing. No hate down? I just don't use it. Don't cook with it.
It's just delicious. I agree. Yeah. I actually like, you know, a lot of people like Chang hates this, but I like putting miso in things that it doesn't belong in. Like I really like uh I like I like milk based miso soups.
I like cream of miso soups. I like I like I mean it's just such an awesome rich flavor but uh you know apparently I'm a bad person. Honestly here's another one. Like okay you ready for like a bunch of people I'm gonna lose a bunch of listeners now. Ready?
I like I like with I know that I'm a bad I know it's bad. I know it's stupid and I know that like and and I guess you have to be a certain generation for this to be really offensive to you, but wasabi mashed potatoes taste good. I'm sorry. They do. Like wasabi mashed potatoes, taste freaking good.
Now, you know, okay I I said it. I'm a bad bad man and it's like incredibly trite and uh, you know, I shouldn't like them, but they don't taste Christmas heretic. Yeah, right? But they don't taste bad. Do they taste bad?
I'm not gonna make Mark comment because you know he's professional and this is they don't taste bad. How about this? What about mustard and mashed potatoes? You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Oh my god.
Got a caller. I got I got you uh caller, you're on the air. Hopefully it's not about the wasabi. It's not about wasabi. Hi guys.
Um I'm calling because I have a bunch of delicious leftover duck fat from uh duck roast that I did. Um and I'm interested in a sweet application for it. So I was just wondering if I could substitute it one for one for butter. And whether you have any um awesome recommendations of something that would be as particularly delicious in a sweet duck fat pastry kind of a thing. Hmm.
Mark, what do you think? You got anything? Yeah, I think it's I think it's awesome. Make a pie. Yeah, uh pie was the first thing that came into my head.
Lampanata or some penzotti or something like that. Yeah, I mean uh Pensaroti. It's gonna be uh it's gonna be flaky. A little softer than it's gonna be a little softer than uh lard, right? But any any sweet that you would add lard?
I mean, like there's no I've never made a better pie crust than a lard based crust, right, Mark? Never. Crisco. Well that's illegal though. Yeah, but I like uh the flavor of lard better than the flavor of Crisco though.
That's true. Yeah, I mean I'm not I'm not so I like I don't really care whether it's the flakiest thing in the world as long as the taste is good. Are you like a huge flake man? No, not necessarily. But flavor all the way.
Have you done a uh a pie crust with with duck fat or ever? I'm just assuming it would be good. I have not. I assume it would be good. But here's the thing.
You're making fun with mass. That's all right. I wouldn't want the sweet mashed potatoes. But here, check this out. Uh, one thing I'd be aware of is when you're making pie crust, you know how everyone says your butter has to be uh like exactly the right temperature?
I find that that's kind of like crap that you can kind of make pie crust with any form of butter and any form of crisco. And in fact, Steingarden in uh in his first book, you know, has a whole thing where he and Marion Cunningham make pie crust uh and they don't worry about how the temperature of their water or anything like that. But once you move to highly plastic fats that tend to grease out on you, lard being one, and I'm presumably duck fat being another, especially after it's rendered. Duck fat, you're like, oh, it takes forever to render out of the skin, so it must be really resilient. No.
Like once it's there, like it softens up quick in your hands when you're working with it. Now chilling your water and making sure that the that the that the fat's exactly in the right plastic range is going to be a lot more critical because when you're making those kinds of things, I guess empanadas not as much, but when you're making like a pie crust, you really don't want to uh melt out too much of the fat into the into the flour because it's just gonna change the consistency. It won't necessarily be bad, but it won't be the same consistency. That's my feeling. Would a uh like a buttercream crossing be out of the question?
Oh, I don't know. Sounds good, actually. See, this is good. This is why I like piper around. But like a duck butter cream, uh ducker cream, ducky, ducky cream.
I would try doing a I would try maybe s subbing half out to see whether it works. That's what I'm thinking. And then so, like, you know, replace half of the butter with the duck fat. Because Piper, this is why we keep Piper around. Piper has some awesome ideas.
He also is the master of puns. If you need a pun, Piper. Yeah, you need to come to Piper for the punch. All over it. I've witnessed this.
Do any of these ideas help out at all or no? Absolutely. That was really helpful. I think the half and half is probably the way to go. All right.
And freezing it in in thin sheets for laminating. Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, there you go. Colder the better. There you go.
Bang. All right. Great. And uh, so we're gonna call that one Piper Piper. What are we gonna call that?
Just remember Piper. When you make it and you tweet back tweet back to cooking issues saying that it was delicious, just you know, don't forget Piper. Okay, I promise I will. Cool. Thanks a lot.
Uh okay, the second question Ben had was what's the deal with kidney beans, red kidney bean toxicity. Uh my understanding is that soaking followed by boiling can deactivate the toxin in kidney beans, which is uh phytohemagglutinin. Uh, but that temperatures below boiling could exacerbate it. I've seen uh Texas, obviously non Texas style, because Texas style chili has no beans in it, right? Although I like beans in the chili.
Is my also a bad man because I like beans in my chili? I like beans and chili, Dave. Piper? Beans and chili? Always.
Yeah, yeah. So, you know, people who are meat only just need to need to get over. You know, purism of any sort. Like sometimes purism is fun, like at dinner parties to have like uh and we could talk about Colonel Sanders being a purist later because you know he was like kind of the purest of all time, uh insulting his own restaurants. It's stuff's amazing.
Anyway, but uh there's no reason to be a uh purist, and beans and meat uh they love each other so much, especially in a in chili. So, yeah. Although I like a meat only chili. Uh I've seen obviously non Texas style chili recipes, they call for beans to be soaked and salted overnight, then simmered on a gentle heat for a couple of hours in a Dutch oven on a stovetop. Is that safe?
Kenji Alt's recipe on serious eats is one such example. Okay. So here's the deal. Uh, kidney beans, uh, and uh a lot of other uh beans, uh similar beans, contain in them pH, phytoahemogglutinin, along with other uh what's called anti nutritional factors, right? Some of them are, you know, in undigestible things, some of them are are uh protein uh absorption inhibitors, and some of them are just uh, you know, uh sugars that you can't uh digest, and so they make you uh tootis.
Toot. Yeah, flatus. Oh, the piper busting out the flatus. Yeah. Uh it's what makes them the musical fruit.
Let's just put it that way. And you know, Booker, my son Booker, has stopped eating beans because Dax told him that they make him fart. He's never had a problem with it. Like Booker's never been running around the house tooting out with beans, and yet the idea that it might happen now is turn them off of beans until he says, Daddy, you need to you need to have a way to guarantee that they won't make me toot. And I was like, I can't, I can't, I can't do that.
I can't guarantee. Well, he yeah, he's not a subway tutor. I h I hate the subway tutor. Not as bad as the airplane tutor. The airplane tutor is the worst.
What? Elevator tutor. You want the worst? The crowded bar tutor. Like because you're trying to like enjoy something and like someone like just toots out at the bar.
Anyway, uh, okay. So uh if you go on the FDA's uh website and their bad bug book, right, uh they in fact uh uh put out this notion, and if you go on the Wikipedia, of course, like you can trust the Wikipedia necessary, uh, if you go on the Wikipedia, they both uh mention uh the fact that incorrect cooking, and they and they both mention I think uh 85C, cooking it at these kind of simmering temperatures, can increase by some you know order of like five fold the toxicity of of the of pH. And what it is, is it's a form of a lectin, which is a a protein that bonds to uh to polysaccharides. And uh another another style of thing like that is ricin, which you know just got mailed out to some of our politicians, unfortunately, that comes from the castor bean, but that's deadly. PA the PHA is not gonna be deadly, but if you eat too much PHA uh in in the form of a raw or undercooked kidney bean, it's not fun.
Like, you know, you got yourself some diarrhoea and some some sickness and some but you're you're not gonna die, I don't think. I don't think so. Probably not. Although don't take my word, don't go out and eat raw rock kitty beans. But uh and and you know, you like I say you can read about it in the clinical complications, but as you say, what's the deal with that?
Why would cooking it at a lower temperature make it much more um much more toxic? And then when I went to try and read all the scholarly articles I could get on the subject of deactivating, because it's a big it's a big deal making getting rid of the anti-nutritional factors and things like kidney beans. Uh in fact, I did not see that that was the case. I did not see any situations where uh soaking and low uh simmering actually made it much worse. I think here's my feeling on it, and uh please someone who's a doctor come and tell me why I'm wrong that uh if you were to cook a bean at a temperature that wasn't going to deactivate a lot of the pH A, uh it wouldn't taste cooked.
So if the bean doesn't taste cooked, then the bean's not cooked and you probably shouldn't need it. If the bean tastes cooked, it's probably been activated at 85, you know, it's probably been activated uh cooked above a temperature to deactivate to denature the protein to an extent that it's okay. My guess is that uh the person who that whatever study, which I was not able to find, uh, even though the US government puts it out there as a fact that you can make it worse by undercooking it, it's gotta be that uh partially breaking up the bean and then masticating it makes more of the bad stuff that you haven't deactivated yet available to your system. It's gotta be it, right? I mean, I can't think of any other mechanism.
Anyone? Anyone? Just cook your kidney beans for Christ's sake. What? A lot of people put beans in the crock pot.
You think you'd hear about people getting sick from it? Yeah, you'd think. Well, so another study I read uh called, let's see if I can find the name of the study here. Uh I can't, but it's called like clinical presentation of uh of kidney bean toxicity. And it just came out this year.
Uh oh, here it is. Clinical complications of kidney bean, phaseolis vulgaris consumption by uh Sandy Kumar, February 2013, made the interesting point that these toxicity things come up more often in the UK than they come up in the US. Different cultivar, perhaps, that we consume. Another possibility is that aside from actual toxicity due to PHA, there's uh it could be another factor in allergic reactions to uh leguminous things. And maybe there's some other complicating factor, the ones in the UK.
I don't know, but the study specifically said there's a higher incidence of problems in the UK. Because in the US, you're never like, man, my cousin, man, in the hospital after that kidney bean. You know what I mean? Does that ever you ever heard of that? No.
Never dave. No, it doesn't happen. Okay. I think we should go to a break. Oh, commercial break, come back with cooking issues.
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Try their award-winning cured pork shoulder and goat salami. To learn more and purchase products, visit shop.undergroundfoodcollective.org, or stop by their butcher shop in Madison, Wisconsin. Oh, great. Welcome back to Cooking Issues. Alright, so we have a question in from Mike in Orlando.
Says, Dear Dave and Hammer, and little did Mike know that Mark Ladner would be in the studio today to answer this question so that I wouldn't have to give my uh kind of useless information on it, Mark A Gig. Don't assume that's gonna be helpful. Uh I think this one's gonna be good. Uh Dave and Hammer, every weekend at our house, we also have family dinner with my in-laws. I have family dinner, although not usually with my in-laws, although they're always welcome when they're in town.
Uh, my wife really loves carbonara. Who doesn't? Love it. It's a good product. Good stuff.
Yeah. Uh I'm trying to figure out the best recipe for it. I've heard you and Hammer argue about bacon versus panchetta. I live in Florida. We don't have very good panchetta down here.
What do you recommend? Love the show. Thanks for everything. Mike in Orlando. First of all, before I let you recommend, do you believe in the old school where people uh soak and soak and like simmer their American bacon to get rid of the smoke, or is that just ruining the flavor of the pork all over the all over the map?
I like the smoke, Dave. Yes! Yes! Yes! Mark Ladner.
We're in America, damn it. Oh sweet. Sweet. Sweet. Alright.
Well, you know, I really nothing much more I can say about that. Because the fact of the matter is bacon is delicious. But if someone actually wanted to have more of a panchetta experience, do you is there any good mail order source of panchetta or anything? Anything you like here? Perhaps Bilase.
Do they mail order? I imagine they would. Right. I mean, uh they they make a top they make top-notch stuff across the board. Um poorly made uh industrial panchetta is absolute garbage.
I I wouldn't I wouldn't recommend using it. It's just really salty and smell and smells and tastes of chemicals and stick with some bacon. Yeah. Yeah. Well, especially in something like that, if it doesn't have this smoke in it, the the poor quality of the poor pork's gonna shine through, right?
You don't want the poor quality. Well, one of one of the alleged uh stories about um the uh the history of uh uh Cabinara is based off World War II American GI C rations and being powdered egg and some sort of bacon product. Have you ever made it with powdered eggs? I never have. I bet you it's no good.
Um powdered eggs? Depend depends on how desperate you are. Well, yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, as Colonel Sanders said about the egg McMuffin, I would eat it in an emergency. But uh well, in case I I put some of it up on uh on my Twitter feed last week, but uh we've been reading around here this 1979 interview with the 89-year-old Colonel Sanders, where it's a genius interview.
It's in a m in a book, a humor book called Junk Food, and this guy goes to the Colonel Sanders and he brings an egg McMuffin, a filet of fish, a uh Big Mac, a Krispy Kreme uh donut, and then a bunch of, you know, some other some other you know, fast food stuff to him, milkshake and all this, and gets this colonel the colonel's opinion on it, as well as the colonel's opinion on Kentucky Fried Chicken's uh own products, and it is an amazing, an amazing interview. The guy had they had him a crispy cream donut, and the the colonel pulls a gold spoon out of his pocket and just starts nudging all the different foods. And when the guy says, What do you think of the crispy cream? He just sighs and stares at the ceiling. It's like I do not like yeast raised donuts.
They turn into balls of dough, don't you know? Anyway, like it's like an amazing, amazing interview. Someday we had to just put the whole of it up on the on the cooking issues website, see what Reb gets sued. Uh anyway, uh okay, so I think we got the we got the panchetta, we got the panchetta nailed down. Okay.
You can get bacon that has less smoke in it also if you wanted to, uh, although again, smoke is delicious. Now, here we're on to the tasting portion of the cooking issue show. We've never done this before. We're doing a live taste on the air. What?
Pop it over. What? Pop pop. Uh she's saying pop it open piper. Uh so uh John Riper writes in uh Deer Cooking Issues peeps.
A few years back, Harold McGee showed that holding olive oil at deep fat frying temperature for five minutes drives off pretty much all its distinctive flavor compounds. Some Italian cookbook authors harumphed at that by some uh Italian cookbook authors uh authors, it's Marcella Hazan. Uh some uh Italian cookbook authors harumphed uh at that and said that the olive oil will indeed impart its flavor when cooking an egg under conditions much milder than Harold tested. Most of us cooking at home use olive oil in the huge gap between those applications. In the initial minute or three, but when the oil is hotter than you'd want it for an egg.
Can you give any useful guidelines? Whoa, whoa, shit. I mean, shoot. I saved the cast. Oh, I love you, Piper.
Alright, I didn't mean to curse on air. I apologize. We'll get Jack and Joe to bleep that out. I gotta hand it to you. Yeah, but uh what I thought was happening was these like all of these containers that I had like labeled, that the labels were getting mixed about, and none of us would know which containers were which, and then uh the entire thing would be ruined.
So I apologize out there in listening land for the for the curse. Um does your oil smell like eggs, Steve. Because there's eggs in it. Oh, okay. Yeah.
Oh, good nose though. Uh see, I love that. Um I'm the same way when someone cracks something and they think I'm like, what is that? Blah blah blah. Anyway, okay.
Uh okay. Can you give any useful guidelines about how fast olive oil loses its flavor as it heats up and whether those flavors are transferred and retained in the cooked product as the oil loses them? Well, I can't give any hardened fast rules, but I did read Harold McGee's article that you forward to us, which was a New York Times from uh November of 2010. And let me just say something about Harold McGee is that when Harold McGee does something, he usually does it right. You know what I mean?
He doesn't mess around. So he sits there and he doesn't make off the cuff statements ever. I mean, never. You know what I mean? Uh and so you should go read his article.
He tests a bunch of different seed oils, a bunch of different uh nut oils, and a bunch of different olive oils of varying qualities uh under two different heat regimes, uh, and then takes those oils also to um takes those oils to specialist olive oil tasters and has them taste it to see kind of what happened. And the result is is that in his opinion, most of the actual quality of the olive oil is lost uh fairly quickly during the during during the cooking time. There was a rebuttal uh on Zester Daily by uh Nancy Harlan Jenkins, and you can read it uh on there, it's Fried Egg Rebuttal. Uh and I'll give you a quote, and I have a lot of respect for Martel Hazan, because who doesn't have a lot of respect, but she says something here that really ticks me off. Uh Hazan, who has degrees in natural sciences and biology, immediately rose to the challenge, Perald McGee's challenge.
Uh she seemed to have a great uh she seemed to heave a great sigh in her Facebook page. It was discouraging once again to see a scientist writing about cooking as a scientist, she wrote. You can only make sense about cooking if you write as a cook. Now I absolutely hate when people say, especially about McGee, that he is just a scientist in a lab thinking about McGee is a lover of all food eating, gussetory experiences, and he doesn't sit around like I hate the majority also of food science where things are reduced to meaningless uh you know quantities, and you don't really get a feel for what actual cooking is like by reading it or or or the studies that people do don't actually have a lot of uh implications for real-world cooking. McGee is not like that.
McGee is not a scientist in a laboratory doing stuff. McGee is someone who, and if you read his original book, The Curious Cook, it fantastically shows you, like if you want to know what's in McGee's mind and how McGee works, uh, read a curious cook. It's out of print, but it's easy to get. And what he does is is he notices something in a kitchen or someone tells him something and sparks an idea in his brain, and he runs it into the ground and he runs tests using his mind and his mouth. He's not, he i like I know what it's like to talk to scientists who uh poo-poo the real world and and actual experience.
McGee is not that. So I uh I bristle at any implication that that is what McGee is doing in the article, because that's just wrong. Now, what she does say is that anyone that's cooked and and quotes someone that McGee knows but that wasn't in the olive oil tasting, that everybody knows that if you cook an egg in uh a good olive oil, it's better than if you cook it in not good olive oil. So what I have for these guys to test here, I have uh the same oil under three different procedures, and I want you to smell them and you know tell me about the different oils. And then I have one egg cooked in uh in an olive oil and one egg cooked in a uh well I didn't have I didn't have any non-olive oil in my house actually.
So the only thing I had was Pam. So I put an extra amount of gross kind of Pam in the because I use it for my waffle maker. Uh a Pam in the and fried an egg and Pam. Yeah. So why don't you guys first let's go for the oils.
So why don't you pass pass these around here? Which one is I give let me read the little lid because it doesn't. That one says S L O O. All right. So what are your what are your thoughts on the S L O O?
Mark. It smells very vegetable. Yeah. Yeah? It smells like shit, Dave.
Stuff. Smells like stuff. Smells like uh fish, actually. Yeah, that was. Which one which one is that one?
That uh that's E V. That's that labeled E V O Oright. And then uh the last one. Pass this around. Here, here you go.
Mark smelling the the last one. Labeled a rufo, R-U-F-O. This smells like pure olive oil. Yeah. Yeah.
Uh so you taste them, and so there's a so what would you say about the the that like uh give give Mark the middle one again? Piper, you taste it. This is the strongest one. Yeah. This feels just tastes raw.
Yeah. And I'm not, yeah, well, no, taste the other one, the middle one. Sorry that you can't see what we're tasting here, but it it'll become apparent when we talk about it in a minute. This is the SL S L O O. No, not that one he said smelled like fish.
Alright, so while he's tasting that, uh I did three different regimes. One of the one of the oils is a you know, an actual one that I would use uh that I actually use to eat on things raw. Uh it's a it's you know, it's an unfiltered olive oil from Sicily, and it's a combination of three of my favorite olives, Nochelara, Debellici, Cherisola, and Biancolilla. Uh comes from a guy named Golufo in the south of uh Sicily, and I've been buying his oil for years, and I enjoy it. Uh and that one was labeled uh Rufo, raw unfiltered uh oil, right?
Uh the one labeled E V O O that uh Mark said smelled like fish stands for uh extra violent overcooked oil. And that's deep frying conditions. So I took it up to just about the smoke point and and then fried a couple cubes of bread in it, uh, and then uh strained it out through a coffee filter, and uh uh to me, all of its all of its olive oilness is pretty much been wiped away. It just tastes, it smells like like oil that's been slightly abused. Yeah, right.
Uh there's no debris at all though, which is surprising. And then and then the the middle one, I sauteed some lettuce in very quickly just to get just to give uh an idea. And that one to me, uh, I mean, it it's not great, but it does maintain some oliveness to it. It does. It does.
It's about half. Yeah. Yeah, and that was that you know, that's if you're doing a very quick kind of a saute and it maintains it. And then I have two eggs here. See whether you can see whether you get any olive oilness out of the eggs.
We have a fork here. By eating them. That's why there's a fork present. So anyway, so we r ran the test here, and I think you know, McGee is pretty much right. Two things are happening when you overheat an oil.
You're damaging the oil and you're giving the off smells, which is where the fish stuff is coming from, and you are driving off a lot of the a lot of the volatils. You get any much of a difference between specifically she she said fry an egg. So I fried an egg, and uh, I used what I always did is I heat up a cast iron skillet till that till it's you know, till when I slap the till when I slap the surface of the skillet with my palm, it feels like it's the right temperature to cook an egg. I then added uh small quantity of oil, crack the egg into it, and then but you know, before it fully sets, I turn the pan off and let the heat carry through the pan. That's my typical fry egg uh uh technique.
If I was to guess, I would say this one had the oil. Is that the one that had the pre-broken egg uh yolk? Yeah. That's the one that had pan. So is it just because the pan was bad or because the olive oil was good?
It just had more flavor in general. Yeah. I I don't think that there was um any uh noticeable advantage one way or the other. Yeah. Yeah.
All right. Well, there you have it. Our first on air test of a listener question on the cooking issues. Here's a here's a related question regarding that. So when I make my tomato sauce, I leave a lot of the oil that I cook the garlic in.
Would it be better to fry garlic separately and then add cold oil and heat it up just to two twelve? I don't know. I usually when I'm doing garlic I do two step. I do garlic and then I always add fresh oil back to it. And so do I.
Yeah. I think it's actually better to start with a neutral oil and finish with a like save your money for a good extravagant olive oil. Use that to finish and then just do the initial cook in like a grapeseed or a canola. Yeah I mean look at my house what I have is I have two three liter containers of olive oil. One that is roughly three times the cost of the other one and they're I buy the tins because I use a lot of olive oil and because they have no there they have zero light transmission so they don't go bad very quickly in the tins.
And um I don't stock a lot of different um cooking oils because if I'm gonna fry I deep fry and my deep fryer has you know 30 you know 30 or 40 pounds of oil in it so I'm not gonna buy olive oil for that because that's crazy. What do you use? I I use I usually use like a neutral vegetable. I've tried a bunch of different ones. I I I like you know I I used to use a lot of corn but corn has such a corn flavor that I got so sick of it I don't like using corn oil anymore unless I'm frying tortillas in which case it doesn't matter.
Um but the um but I don't use excessive amounts and so I'd rather the my cheaper olive oil is one that I'm willing to eat. I'm willing to eat it raw if I had to uh but it's you know it's not breaking the bank and I use little amounts of it when I'm cooking so it's easier for me to keep it around. If I was going to do that professionally, I would have a bunch of neutral oils around because it would be a big cost saver if I was doing it all the time. But at home, you know, the space is more important to me for the amount that I, you know, amount that I'm using. It doesn't break my bank.
So that's you know, that's why I don't have anything but olive oil around. You know? Anyway. Uh uh, who is who that writes in? Zach in Pittsburgh writes in.
I'm considering getting a big boy blender for my apartment kitchen. I know you guys like the Vitamix, but the price makes me kind of gun shy. Blend Tech looks like they make comparable blenders at a lower price. I know you've talked about blenders a ton, but would like to hear some more. The show continues to be great.
I just wish Dave wouldn't yell into the mic so much and blast the levels. Keep up the good work, Zap and Zach in Pittsburgh. Stas loves any time someone uh uh insults. In fact, she's she's doing the she's doing the yeah yeah pound in the air with it with a I'm not though. You gotta get close to that mic.
Well, you know keep the levels good. All right, all right, all right. I'm getting conflicting information. Apparently Well screaming and staying close to the mic are two separate things. Which is better, screaming or staying close to the mic.
Staying close to the mic. Alright. So uh here's my feeling. Uh I've have never seen an inexpensively plu priced blend tech blender. I've used their expensive one, the one that goes in jamba j jamba jamba, jamba juice.
And uh and of course I've used the Vitaprep, and it's the power of the blenders is both good. Uh, but Vitaprep is just a far better blender in terms of the controls and how I like to use them. Um I mean I've talked before in the air that Vitapep, I have some issues with their old pitcher style. I think their newer pitchers are probably better. Uh but uh, you know, I don't see chefs using a lot of any other kind of blender, which leads me to believe that no one's had that good a luck with any other kind of blender.
Now Stas and Piper here have said that they've heard good things about the ninja, but I've never seen a ninja in a professional kitchen. Mean blender, ninja blender in a professional kitchen. Ninjas I've seen. You never see a ninja. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, I've seen the ninja. Have I ever told that have I told that story on air about uh what when I was at uh when I was at Kinikanuya? No. All right. Well, they're they're gonna get me off this, they're gonna get me off the air in in uh in a in a in a minute.
So like Mark, is anything else you want to say about? No, no, I'm fine. Thank you. Uh and we'll meet some sticks on Saturday. Please do.
Uh and you'll be you actually be there, so you get to you get to talk to uh to Mark, you know. Uh fascinating, I assure you. Mark, one of our beta testers for the Sears All unit, by the way. You still having any good luck with that or no good luck? Yeah, yeah, I love it.
Yeah, nice. All right. Uh thanks, Piper, for coming on. But I'll tell you a little story that I may or may not get in trouble for about ninjas. Uh so I was going to Kina Kenuya, which is like the awesome bookstore in New York City for Japanese uh books.
Incredibly expensive because I think that even if it's an American book, they must ship it from Japan over here in China. Because it's really expensive over there. And my son Booker, who, you know, who uh is awesome, but you know, sometimes will say things he shouldn't, like screams in Kinekanuya, why is it so expensive here? These deals are not good. I'm like, shut up, shut up.
Uh so anyway, so we're in Kinakanuya because they have a Zaya upstairs, and Zaya is like a kind of like uh a Japanese cafe we have here in New York, and they make actually I love their onigiri, the little rice squares with the nori, because their nori is hermetically wrapped and placed around the rice square, so you pull the plastic off at the last minute, and the nori is always really, really crunchy. And so Booker is obsessed with uh with Zaya's Onigiri. So we're there, and Dax is well, my the other son Dax, like little her best friend's little little sister. We're sitting in Zaya, and uh some um some women walk in, uh, you know, wearing uh not Burka, but the other, the other, the other kind of Islamic dress that where it's just the eyes are just the eyes are visible, and you know they're wearing full face cover. And Dax's uh Dax's friend Amaya looks over, whispers in her mom's ear, look, mom, ninjas.
Cooking issues. Thanks for listening to this program on Heritage Radio Network dot org. You can find all of our archived programs on our website or as podcasts in the iTunes store by searching Heritage Radio Network. You can like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at Heritage underscore radio. You can email us questions at any time at info at heritage radio network or heritage Radio Network is a nonprofit organization.
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