This is Chris Young, co-author of Modernist Cuisine. I'd like to invite you to check out Chefsteps.com. It's a free website we've created as a place to learn new cooking techniques and collaborate with curious cooks from around the world. Sign up now at Chefsteps.com. You're listening to Heritage Radio Network.org, a nonprofit, member supported radio station.
We're millions strong. With folks tuning in from over 200 countries. We are education. We are entertainment. We are the future of food.
May is our membership drive. Become a member and support us while receiving the newsletters, advanced invites, special discounts, and a membership card. We need your support. Visit our website and click the donate button to become a member today. Thank you for believing in us and enjoy the show.
Cooking issues. Cooking issues! Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live on the Heritage Radio Network in the back of Robertus P3 in Bushwick, Brooklyn. How are you guys doing?
Calling your questions to 7184972128. That's 718497-2128. Join in the studio. As usual with uh Nastash and the Hammer. How are you doing?
Good. Yeah? You alright? Yeah. Uh Jack and Joe in the engineering booth, plus uh uh a host of new people that are coming uh on board.
We have uh Eddie, right? Correct. Yeah, you're you're uh gonna be uh another associate producer over here at the Hurst Ray number. Yes, the associopath producer, yes, that's me. Yeah, we're coming up with a new uh a new thing, the uh sociopath producer.
Uh stay tuned for that. And uh DeRick in the engineering booth, correct? What's up? Yes, right. How you doing?
Thanks, guys. Yeah, so we got a full studio today, which I like. Uh and uh so uh what happened this week. I just got back from my 20th year reunion at uh at the Yale College over there. And uh you know what, Sas?
But the people, I was expecting like a bunch of really terrible looking people. Like I expected like just like a real like poop fest of like awful looking folk, like you know, totally decrepit, bloated out, nasty, like droopy, like just all bad. Yeah, you know what? They looked great. Really?
Yeah, they look great. Did they like your talk? Oh, yeah, I gave a talk, uh it's called uh turbo talk, which is like uh a variant of uh this kind of like 20 slides, 20 seconds, which I can't pronounce like petcha kuchka, petcha ku pet, you know, something like that. Uh yeah, it went well, I think. I mean, uh I did my normal strategy, which was fit a 30-minute talk into six minutes.
Yeah. So I just spoke as fast as I could, and I didn't have any water. I went completely dry. My wife was in the audience. Jen, she said that I was turning red in the face, and that you know, you could see that like little bit of dry mouth spittle forming on the edges of my lips as I was like, you know, belting out, you know, at eight billion words a minute, what was going on.
But I think it went all right. I think it was fine. But anyway, the interesting fact to me is the fact that uh everyone looked uh really good, and uh it just kind of drove home to me one of the issues I think we're gonna be looking into the museum, and I need to do my own uh research on, is that um the the problem with nutrition in this country is uh is kind of exacerbated, I think, by the fact that the people who are making the rules in general are people that aren't living the problems. So you have like a group of extremely educated, uh rather probably well-to-do, fairly liberal uh Ivy uh league types, and these are like the policymakers uh of for this sort of thing. And uh they all look great because they have the time, energy, and knowledge to spend on this problem, and then you have the the rest of the people that are getting legislated uh at and and preached at by this group of people who are the ones having the real problems.
So I you know I really think uh you know we're gonna be spending a lot of time kind of delving into the stats and kind of breaking this problem uh down uh more thoroughly. But it was really uh, I mean, I know it's anecdotal, one college reunion, but really kind of stark uh slap in the face. In a good way, f in in a in some sense, because I was you know surprised at how good everyone looked, but there's a darker side to the looking good. Uh okay. Uh had a comment in uh from Mike Mallory.
Can you forward this to Dave Nastasha? Uh long time listener, love the show. You answered a question about gluten intolerance that was a bit misinformed on the William McGee episode. I love it's called the William McGee episode. Not Harold, William listener, uh uh Harold doesn't listen.
Although Harold might be here next week. True or false? He is gonna be here in Brooklyn? Or on the phone. Uh well, he's gonna be in New York City in the real life this next week because of this like science festival thing that's going World Science Festival that uh Mustache and I are doing some sort of uh cocktail for.
You didn't know you were going, but you are. Yeah. Uh uh so, anyways, so yeah, he's gonna be in town and uh if uh if he is going to be in town on the Tuesday, I said that I would handcuff him and bring him into the studio. Wow. Yeah.
I think he actually leaves Tuesday, so a lot depends on when he's leaving, but I don't even know that he's eaten in Roberta's before, so maybe we can woo him with like even maybe above the pizza level. If Harold McGee comes in, can he get above the pizza and salad level of uh of cooking issues remuneration for uh for service rendered? Certainly. I think I'll even pay for his card to JFK. Wow!
Nice job, Joe. Whoa. Wow. Joe's a baller now. Yeah, you like that?
That's crazy. All right. Uh okay. Uh sorry. Uh you answered a question about gluten intolerance that was a bit misinformed on the William McGee episode.
Gluten intolerance is not the same as celiac. Uh it's well known uh in the research that a good chunk of the population mounts an immune reaction to gluten, gliadin, uh, but is not uh specifically a celiac or have like uh you know a health uh what would you call it? This is paraphrasing a health endangering allergy or something. What would you call it anyway? Uh gluten intolerance is a gray area but still measurable via lab test uh below full-blown celiac, which is more severe and immediate and an immediate uh immunoglobulin uh response.
I say gray area because there's a huge spectrum of mucosal membrane-based immune immune response, IgA uh uh things that mount slow inflammatory reactions to gluten. It's often called subclinical gluten intolerance because the body has a measurable reaction, but not a true allergic reaction. It's a different type of immune response, but you should know the difference between an intolerance and an allergy. Not all folks avoid gluten because it's bad for celiacs. That's not to say most people who avoid gluten at restaurants aren't full of sugar honey iced tea.
Uh it would be nice if chefs knew that there isn't just a black and white celiac or not, and that there's a whole class of immune mediated reactions, aka gluten intolerance. Mike Mallory. Mike, point well taken. Uh point well taken. Too simplified in the last thing, but uh, I guess simplified for effect, which is there's a whole uh group of people there who are full of sugar honey iced tea.
But uh I think my point last week was also that I'm kind of glad. Like, I don't care. I'm glad. Look, people like me who have no problem with the gluten, like we're gonna pound as much gluten as we can. In fact, I was talking to someone at the at the reunion who's gluten in uh you know, gluten intolerant.
She's actually celiac, and so we were discussing this uh this issue with them, and she was like, Yeah, man, if I could eat gluten, I would be swimming through loaves of baguettes. You know, I'd be like chomping, swimming through loaves of baguettes and you know, inhaling pizzas as fast as I could eat them because stuff's delicious, but uh, but can't anyway. But you know, again, thank goodness for the people who don't uh consume it uh for no apparent reason because they create a huge industry that allows people like uh our good piper to be able to eat better products. Yeah? But anyway, point well taken.
Now, back to the mystical myth. Oh, Stas. So you went to uh the Rhode Island, correct? Yeah. And you went to go see now you can't re oh you can't, can't, don't.
You don't eat horseshoe crabs. But uh horseshoe crabs, uh, you think that they're kind of interesting when they're on the ground on the beach. They're actually horrifying. You know, that they're they're I mean, I know that they're interesting and fascinating and they're a throwback, a living fossil, so I don't want to get any comments about how I'm uh maligning them. They're horrifying, horrifying like little creatures.
So uh what'd you go see? We we went to the hotel where they were having a mating, a meeting event. Yeah. For these guys. And uh we were supposed to be in a boat, but they made us put on waiters.
I told you that was gonna happen. I know. But it wasn't covered, it was just a couple, a couple, like every couple feet. We said it was a crappy weekend, so it kind of worked out. The moon wasn't out, or there was pouring, they were yeah.
Yeah, so Stas did not, you have to do it again. I know. Oh yeah. Yeah, so here's what happened. So uh in the span of my young life, between eight years old and uh ten years old, I witnessed some of the most horrifying biblical proportion natural events in uh kind of the history of uh New Jersey and kind of the little eastern seaboard thing there, right?
So we like we didn't have that many hurt in 77 we got hit by uh my my name David. It was pretty bad, not bad by you know Sandy standards, but you know, I was like, okay, I was little, so it seemed like a big deal. Then uh uh when I was eight years old, we went to Cape I went to Cape Cod to a thing uh to a camp and witnessed one of these things by mistake, and it was I had to wade ashore and and the entire ground in the bay was was just coated with these monstrous, monstrous, monstrous, monstrous, monstrous horseshoe crabs. And you couldn't avoid them, and as an eight-year-old, you know, not being versed in horseshoe crabs, you're like, how much? Right.
And uh furthermore, I learned a couple of years later that that the horseshoe crab blood, uh which is copper-based and not uh not uh iron-based in terms of its oxygen carry ability, was incredibly valuable at the time uh in research, and so I thought I was gonna make a business of going back. I thought I was gonna become a millionaire, like destroying all these dreaded horseshoe crabs and milking their blood out of them for profit. It didn't happen. I don't know, it didn't happen. And then, like right after that, the cicadas, or right before that, it can my brother guys made me, the cicadas came out in Bergen County, New Jersey, and coated the ground and made a deafening, awful triffid-like din of horrible cicada, like it's just in crunching of stepping on cicada, the worst thing ever for a guy that hates bugs.
And it's supposedly happening now, but now is not it's not biblical. Is anyone called in and be like, oh my god, the cicadas? No, right? Have you heard it? Have you seen people running and screaming covered by cicadas?
School buses full of horrified children. No. And it's not like it was two cycles ago, 34 years ago when I witnessed it. And then the 1981 gypsy moth plague that hit the uh east coast and deforested a whole bunch of stuff. So, you know, what I'm looking for is a bunch of uh kind of biblically bad natural signs to come on.
I I don't really want that to happen. Anyway, so you you didn't get uh you didn't get that, huh, Stas? No, it was unfortunate. Yeah, well, you know, maybe maybe this stuff is best experienced when you're a kid. Yeah.
You think? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now all we got is you can't walk in the woods because of Lyme disease.
It's not as visual, you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, in old Lyme, by the way, uh, last week after the after the thing. The heart of Lyme disease, and apparently Lyme disease is still going strong there.
Like hardcore. I was hoping kind of to get it so I could get it in the official place. I got my Lyme disease in Brantford. No, man, I got my Lyme disease in Lyme. Bang!
Uh I'm just kidding, you don't want to get Lyme disease, it's horrible, it can cause uh permanent central nervous system problems if not treated properly. Yada yada. This do not take this as a making fun of the disease. It's horrible. Okay.
Lucas writes in all about ice cream. Hey, cooking issues, radio team. Big fan of the show, especially Dave's tirades against ever changing and contradictory health fads. Here's the question. I'm a big fan of Fiore da Latte ice cream.
Milk, cream, sugar, and nothing more. You like that style, Stas? Yeah. Yeah? Yeah.
Yeah. Where do you where do you where do you have it mostly? Not here. Well, when you go to Italy because you're an America hater, like, where do you normally get it? Oh, the small towns.
Small small towns, small towns Italy. Which I had when I was a kid and could never forget. Every time I see it at a restaurant or ice cream shop, I order it. The thing is the texture is always somewhat disappointing. Correct you are.
Correct you are. Wait, actually, this is not from is this one from Lucas? This is not from Lucas. This is from Jose. Man.
Lucas, your question's coming later on. Jose, I apologize. This is your question. Where are we? Okay, every time I see it at a restaurant or ice cream shop, I order it.
The thing is the texture is always somewhat disappointing. Either they pump it up with excessive uh quantity of hydrocolloids, making it pasty or gummy, or it is slightly granular, probably globules of fat clumping up and making butter, or ice crystals, frankly. You know, the the issue here is um yeah, is that uh the texture is a big problem with this style of ice. We'll get into it. Uh I've tried to make it at home multiple times.
I have a uh de longi with a built-in freezer, but I keep getting the slightly granular result, which is not surprising, since after refrigeration, the cream fat rises to the top. By the way, that's a right there, it's a classic sign, it's under frozen. The problem with uh the problem with the home ice cream freezers that have the uh built-in refrigeration units is that they just simply aren't very powerful. Like if you look at uh Carpajani colalite used to make a version that has a similar capacity to your deLongi, but the machine is a good three times bigger. And the reason is because they have a like a serious compressor built into it.
And the small compressors, like if the if it doesn't ice over like instantly as soon as you turn it on, it means that it just doesn't have the are you allowed to say cojones? Is that yeah, yeah, cojones? It doesn't have the cojones uh to freeze it down fast enough. And so if you look at the ratings on the Delonghi, people are talking 25, 35 minute batch times for uh a load of ice cream. And in the ice cream, you really want a batch time.
I mean, look, commercial people, they're doing batch times of seven, eight minutes on ice cream, longer on cerveys, but like seven, eight minutes on ice creams. Uh, and the reason is is a faster freezing uh means smaller crystal sizes. So you're a little bit hampered because you're dealing with uh larger crystal sizes to begin with, uh, because you're long freeze times. Then, secondly, if you turn it off too soon before it freezes uh, you know, a little more completely than what you have it now, you have a big liquid phase, and that liquid phase is going to cause some of these problems and also exacerbate your crystals because the rest of the stuff, as you put it in your freezer to harden, right, will quiescently freeze into much larger granules. So, under fro like so under frozen stuff tastes fine, kind of straight out of the machine because you just pound it and it's kind of like soft serve, and you're not noticing the crystals as much.
But on hardening, those under frozen ice creams are going to it's going to accentuate that crystal problem. Now, you have a third problem in that you're dealing with uh you're dealing with an ice cream that doesn't have any inherent added emulsifiers from egg yolks, right? Now, what you call uh what you call uh Fiore de Latte ice cream, which by the way is not made out of uh Fior del Latte uh uh cow's milk mozzarella, also a delicious product, right? Different product. Just means flour of the milk, right, Italian speaker?
Check this out. Stas Oh God, you just told this story grew up knowing Spanish. Why? Because she's half Mexican and grew up in LA, right? So it makes sense that she would speak Spanish.
If I was half Mexican and grew up in LA, I would speak Spanish. My kids speak Spanish because they grew up in New York. Me, I'm an idiot. I don't speak Spanish. Here's what she says.
I learned Italian in college and forgot the Spanish. The hell's that all day? I didn't learn it in college. I learned it from a boyfriend. Even worse.
I was trying to make it less embarrassing for you. My God. Wow. Yeah. Anyway.
Okay. So before I get into this, so what you're calling uh Fior de Latte ice cream is what we in the States call Philadelphia style. Philly style with no egg yolks, no nothing. It's just milk, uh, typically milk, cream, sugar, uh, vanilla with no stabilizers. Now, the classic examples of this stuff in the U.S.
used to be Briars. So Briars is a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania style ice cream, and they used to tout the fact that they were made with uh only those ingredients. And they had a very, very fast freeze time. Uh and so the results were good straight out of the box if you lived close to Philadelphia. If you tried to buy Briars and you live far away from Philadelphia or wherever their packing plants were, or if you made the mistake of buying that half gallon of Briar's ice cream and then not consuming the entire half gallon the instant it was open, it turned to crap.
And that's and the reason is is because there's no stabilizers or emulsifiers in it to prevent crystal growth in your freezer where it freezes and thawed freezer. So they got around the first problem, initial graininess, by um just having a very, very fast freeze time in commercial uh continuous freezers, but they couldn't get around the secondary problem of it turning to crap in your crappy home. I'm not saying your home freezer is crappy, but your crappy home freezer, because it because it is. Yeah, yeah. Uh they couldn't get around that problem without uh emulsifiers.
So what did they do? Uh very, very quietly, uh, I think like some sometime in the last decade, they started uh doping briars with uh stabilizers, like carrageenan and things like that. Carragean's a good one because you can use extremely small quantities of it. Okay, now to get back to your point. Uh usually on Philadelphia style uh ice creams or in Fior latte they're fairly high fat and that high fat is to get around the fact that you are now I don't know a lot about Fiordalate but I do know a lot about Philly because I used to make Philly style ice cream all the time uh you know my my family doesn't come from there now but I have a lot of them that come from outside the Philly area York and Pennsylvania that's why I love pretzels so much anyway uh the one of the tricks is it has a higher fat content than you would get out of a standard custard ice cream so you typically you know in instead of like from for my ice cream I typically use one to one milk to cream uh but for custard based ice cream and you know the gelato heads are going to use probably even less uh cream than that they're gonna use more milk but more egg yolks and more sugar for a gelato style and don't let anyone tell you that in gelato they don't dope that stuff with uh don't dope that stuff with stabilizer and by the way I'm gonna go out on another limb and get my get my head chopped off by people I like American ice cream every uh bit as much as I like Italian gelato.
In fact because I grew up with it I have a soft spot for a properly done American ice cream that can't be taken by anyone else's ice cream in gelato and I've eaten it in small towns in Italy in large towns in Italy in tourist traps in Italy and in the places like you might as well have their gelato in Italy. Right? And usually what it is is heavily loaded with stabilizers super doped with flavors right like that's why it has those intense punchy colors because they have so much it's just so much of muchness and it's good, but I wouldn't say that I would always want to have that over like a good old-fashioned scoop of and and and I like I like the quote unquote French but American style ice creams, and which means custard based, and I also like uh love a good Philly style ice cream. Okay. Now, so in a Philly-style ice cream, you're gonna go higher on the cream.
So you're gonna probably go two to one cream to milk in that range. Once you get in that range, you're running into a couple of big problems. One, uh, if you over churn that sucker, it'll get kind of very buttery tasting, and you'll and you'll notice that, which is why, by the way, the ice cream machine I recommend for use at home is standard old Rock Salt ice ice cream makers. They make an unbeatable style, they're a pain in the ass, but pain in the butt. But they make an unbelievable uh ice cream.
You know, just just saying. But uh with even with those, you have to be careful in very, very high cream rate uh recipes about over-turning. If you over-churn your ice cream, it has a very characteristic buttery flavor that's different uh uh from uh graininess caused by ice crystals, and you'll definitely get a kind of butter note uh on it, and I think sometimes the overturned stuff has a little bit of a chalkiness to it, but I don't know. I just made that up off the top of my head. It sounds right.
Yeah, yeah, it sounds right. Could be wrong, but sounds right. Uh okay, so that said, let's move to uh ways to fix this problem. So typically, if you're gonna add stabilizers, you want to add the smallest amount of stabilizer possible. Uh or if you're into a natural head, you might want to go not natural, because all the stuff's natural.
I hate that, I hate this so much. I why don't I even say that? The stuff's natural. What I mean is if you want to go into something that doesn't freak people out, is what I meant. Uh, you know, go into the carrageenans, although that kind of was caragina freak out?
I I don't think no, carrageans don's not freak out. No freak out, no, stuff, no. Okay, so uh the the good news about carrageen in it is it has a synergistic effect with milk, so you can use absurdly small amounts of it to get the effects you want. Uh right? So typically in ice cream, they'll have a two-part system.
They'll have uh a gelling system and a thickening system, one to prevent crystal formation and the other one to prevent the whey from separating from the uh whey. It's called way off wave from separating and you know preventing other problems. So typically you'll have a two-part system like a carrageenin, maybe locust bean gum or a carrageenan guar. And you can add very small amounts of that stuff and not make it gummy and do a really good job stabilizing. Or you could buy commercial stabilizer bases, uh uh, you know, things and add them.
And by and large, the you can get them that are all natural. You don't have to get the ones, and when I say all natural, I mean just like seaweed powders. You don't have to go to ones that have uh lots of like weird emulsifiers in them, things like that. Another thing you can do, I know this is going against what you're doing. The great thing about uh this kind of ice cream that I used to like is that I didn't cook it at all ever.
It was all cold. It had a real really, really fresh taste. A lot of people heat their Philly style ice cream so that they can get the sugar in, but I just waited a lot longer for the sugar to dissolve and never heated it. So it had a real fresh flavor. So that's that's I think what you're shooting at.
So I want to go for things that don't necessarily uh need uh uh a lot of heating. What you might want to do is take uh a portion of it, right? So so of the things that can't be heated that are good stabilizers, guar. Guar. It doesn't need to be heated.
You have to get the flavor free guar though. Uh another thing you might want to look at is um uh gel an. Now, gel an you do need to heat to a boil, but what you could do is just heat a small portion of the milk with the gel an to the boil, set it as the gel, and then blend it into a fluid gel, and that makes a very good flavor release, super creamy ice cream, right? Uh super creamy. Uh it's on a cooking issues blog.
Another thing you can look at just good old-fashioned gelatin. Unless you are uh uh vegetarian, uh gelatin makes a very good uh you know uh uh addition to ice creams to to decrease the amount of crystallization you get, and you can warm a portion of the milk up to hot with the jet with the gelatin and then temper the rest of your milk slash cream back into it and still have a relatively fresh taste. If you want to go Sam Mason style and all you want is the uncooked flavor, but you don't mind the uh uh adding things that aren't milk, he uses barely pasteurized egg yolks, and they're not cooked into a custard, and that's also interesting. It's not the same thing as you're looking at, but it's also interesting. For a last thing, on a milk-based only, you might want to look at, and there's a small subset.
You ever been to Sicily Styles? No. Me neither. Eddie ever been to Sisley? They make an ice cream over there, me neither.
They make an ice cream over there that uh where they thicken it with starch. It's a it's cornstarch-thickened ice cream. And I haven't had it, but there's a bunch of people on the internet who love it, and that stuff is so stabilized. It has relatively good flavor. Oh, by the way, back on gelatin.
The reason gelatin is good is because gelatin has a very good, good flavor release because it it melts. First of all, it's not free sauce stable, so it breaks up after it's frozen and thaws out, it goes away in the mouth anyway, has very little flavor impact. Gelatin is like flavor release par excellence, right? Gelan, which I said before, which is microbe derived, also, by the way, I'm talking uh low acyl gelatin, which is the hard one that you break up to fluid gels, also very good flavor release. Starch in low levels has fairly good flavor release, but it does mask, you know what I mean?
It does mass things up. But if you're dealing with straight look, some people like it. I've done some starch-based ice creams that I hated, but they were very high starch-based ice creams when I was trying to make snappy ice creams. Uh I mean, I like potato-based ice creams. I've done you know, many, many versions of potato ice cream that have like a snap, but I haven't done starch, but a lot of people swear by it.
Mark Bittman swears by it, uh, or swore by it in his uh minimalist article he wrote a number of years ago. But the interesting thing is is that they're so stabilized that you can make them with quiescent freezing and they still don't get big ice crystals, right? Which means that your machine, if it takes a long time to make ice cream, might benefit from that sort of ice cream base because it's going to turn out smooth anyway because the starch matrix is preventing large crystals from forming. So uh might want to give that uh give that a trial. Uh, there's a recipe for it on ice cream nation.com.
You go check it out. What do you think, Stuzz? Good. Yeah, you want to take a commercial break? Sure.
Nice timing. Oh, yeah. This is Chris Young, co-author of Modernist Cuisine. Together with photographer Ryan Matthew Smith and Chef Grant Krilly, we've created something exciting and new at ChefSteps.com. Each day in our kitchen at Seattle's Pike Place Market, we're working on new recipes, as well as updating classic ones that we love.
And we're always looking for new techniques that make the impossible possible. At ChefSteps.com, we publish it all online with detailed step-by-step demonstrations, as well as explanations of the science that answers the why behind the how in the kitchen. And through our forum, you can engage with our team as well as a friendly community of curious cooks from around the world. If you're interested in becoming a better cook, if you want more from the creative team behind modernist cuisine, and if, like us, you're a fan of Dave Arnold and cooking issues, then we think there's a lot you'll like. And the best part, ChefSteps.com is entirely free to learn.
Free to learn, that's crazy. That's crazy. Were you talking about an ice cream machine maker before? Is that what you call them? Yes, I was talking to an ice cream machine.
And so why don't we just do all let's do all the ice cream in one in one chunk? All right. So uh by the way, uh Chris assumes if you're listening to this that you want to learn. Nobody listens to this to learn. I'm just kidding, I'm just messing.
Love Chris. Uh were we gonna schedule to see him sometime? Or do we know he sent him a torch? Yeah. Yeah, we'll see how that goes.
Okay. Uh how do you pronounce what do you guys think? I A I N. Ian, huh? Ian?
Let's go with that. Ian? Okay. Ian in uh Herefordshire, UK writes in about batch freezers, ice cream freezers. Uh hey Dave and Nastasha, do you have any experience uh with ice cream batch freezers?
So by the way, folks, uh batch freezer for ice cream, it what that means is what it says, it does it in uh per batch. So you make a batch, you load it in, and uh you churn the ice cream for a specific amount of time and you get the ice cream out. So liquid nitrogen in a KitchenAid freezer, that's batch freezing. It's not a batch freezer, but that's batch freezing. Uh using the hand-turned ice cream machines that with the rocks and the ice salt, batch freezing.
Uh the opposite of batch freezing is continuous freezers. Continuous freezers, constant amount of product is pumped in all the time, and it's frozen very, very short, short periods of time. So continuous freezers are how the all the big folks do it, you know, commercially, uh, and produces can produce with if you use good ingredients and you change, you know, the amount of uh air that's in ice cream is called the overrun. And when you're using a continuous freezer, you adjust the overrun independently of the in a batch freezer, the dashers, the spinning things are what uh does the aeration and provides what's called the the overrun, how much air is in it. And so 100% 100% overrun means that there is for every uh for every milliliter of ice cream base, there is a milliliter of air.
That's 100% overrun. It's done based on how much ice cream base you started with. Uh and you know, anything over a hundred is absurdly, you know, absurdly light, and anything, you know, the the the more premium ice creams, the funny thing about ice cream, I don't know why I'm talking about this. The funny thing about ice cream, ice cream is sold volumetrically, right? It's sold by the pint by the quart.
Uh and yet the cost to produce the ice cream is based upon the weight of ingredients that goes in and the quality of those ingredients. So, anyone that knows anything about ice cream, if you go to like the corner truck, the ice cream truck, and they give you the soft serve. A lot of people associate soft serve with being inexpensive or having a lot of air in it, and that's really a function of temperature and and mixture, ingredient mixture, not a function of overrun. So if you go to Carvel, which when I was a kid was like the awesome soft serve, but it's East Coast only thing. They don't have Carvel on the West Coast, right?
Yeah. So if you go to Carvel, which is like Northeast, like you know, soft serve ice cream, those suckers are dense. Their ice cream cone weighs quite a bit, right? Uh but if you go to, I'm not calling you out, Mr. Softy, but some of the people have bastardized your miser.
It's a New York City ice cream truck company. But uh you they're in those soft serve machines, there's an orifice, and the orifice pumps the uh mix into the uh chamber uh freezing chamber, and the uh the size of the orifice determines how much air is pumped into it at the time when it goes. So some disreputable uh ice cream truck uh uh people will put an orifice in there that generates like 120% overrun, so you're buying more air than ice cream, and you can those cones, they're man, that cone looks big, and then you pick it up and it's like a balloon floating out of your hand, it's so light. Anyway, whatever. Why did I get into that?
Anyway, so a continuous freezer uh is usually only done by larger scale people. I don't consider soft serve machines which do continuously add product. I don't really consider them to be continuous freezers because that they don't work on the same principle as a continuous freezer. There's only one continuous freezer that's available, i.e., not a batch freezer that I know of that's available uh to uh small run people, and it used to be made by Ross, R-O-S-S, uh, which was bought by I don't know how you pronounce it, because it's got the umlaut, but it's not pronounced stirting, which is how you pronounce it if you're German stiltening. It's uh stolting, I think is how they pronounce it.
They bought Ross freezers, but uh that's a frozen custard machine, and it in essence is a continuous freezer. That's it, okay. Back to batch freezers and back to Ian's question. Uh do you have any experience with ice cream batch freezers? Yes.
Uh that's a he, right? Ian. Yeah. Uh I'm about to start up a small ice cream company selling quality ices made from local fruits and other ingredients from a bike with a freezer attached. I forgot that I I didn't really even re how you gonna how are you gonna power that sucker?
How you how are you gonna get power to that? Pedal power. On the ice cream machine? Well, you're riding around town, put a little generator on the back wheel, good to go. Huh.
All right. Okay. I was putting local fruits and other ingredients from a bike with a freezer attached. No, I think what he's gonna do, I think he means not a batch freezer. I think he means a dipping freezer.
I don't think he means that there's gonna be the actual equipment. Right. Uh yeah, okay, I got you. Tell me if I'm wrong here, but that'll be awesome if you actually had the machine on a bike. First of all, your legs must be jacked.
What's the name of that uh Scottish bike dude with the giant chain rings who had that movie made about him? You know anyone who I'm talking about? Uh anyway, this guy in Scotland, uh I think he's Scotland, amazing biker. He was Danny McCaskill. Is that the one who won like the championship very late in life and switched a style of biking he did?
Dun biker guy. No, no, no, no. This is a guy he has a movie about him. He like won a championship much later in life, and he's known for having incredibly huge chain rings on his track bikes, so that he he's like his anyway, whatever. Chain ring is the thing that you're David Millar?
Man, I can't remember his name. Nah, nah. A lot of Scottish bikers out there. Well, you know, they're they're uh they're a tough people. Okay.
Uh and I'm looking for a robust machine that can produce a reasonable output of ice cream in one hour. I'm looking at about nine liters per hour. I saw the Emery Thompson C B 200. Uh, and the other side, the larger size one they have is the uh C B three fifty. And it looks perfect, but unfortunately is not available in the UK until next year.
Do you know any others around the same size and price? Uh the other option I was thinking about was a Paco Jet, but I'm concerned that it might not be robust enough. Uh they look great for restaurants that might want to do one portion at a time, but I would need to uh uh Pacotize, which by the way, Ian is a word I detest. I would just say spin, because Paco I don't want to let those guys coin their own word. They're already charging you an arm and leg for the freaking machine and they're Swiss.
Everyone knows how I feel about them. Stas likes the Swiss. I do. Yeah, so that half of us love the Swiss. I have no I actually have nothing against the real Swiss in the real life.
It's just I like to make fun of them, right? You know, uh watches and chocolate are great, you know. Okay. Uh but the uh uh uh my point is is that uh don't don't let them have that word. Just say spin.
That's what we say spin. Uh can uh oh okay. But I would need to spin the whole tub and do about eight or nine tubs in an hour. Can the Paco Jet handle that? Uh my budget is between three and four thousand great British pounds.
I would appreciate it if you could answer my question on the 21st or 28th of May, as I need to make my purchase very soon. P.S. loving the show, just discovered a couple months ago and catching up on the old episodes. Well, here we are on the 28th to answer your question. I called uh the president, Mr.
Thompson of uh Emery Thompson and asked him, uh and he's like, I forget whether you said third or fourth generation ice cream machine manufacturers, and I watched his YouTube video on the uh CB uh 200. And unfortunately for you, Ian, uh that machine is kind of in a size slash price category of its own. I haven't seen anything else that's kind of that low. So they retail in the US for about fifty uh five thousand like retail for five thousand three hundred and change. Um that means I'm assuming you can get it for a little bit less if you, you know, if you wheel and deal.
But I what I asked him when I called him, I was like, well, can uh you know, can this person just fly over from the UK, you know, using you know your awesome great British money and making us look like idiots here in the US with our current state of our monopoly money, and uh purchase one from you that you outfit for the UK and take back. And unfortunately, Mr. Thompson said, no, the problem is that US 220, uh US 220 is a different wiring schema from UK 220, because I guess you're using single phase 220 over there, and that they need to get an entirely different condenser unit for it. Uh it's made special. They can't just, you know, kind of you know, re-jigger or hack one of their units here for you, although he seemed to feel for your problem.
And also laughed when I said, Is there anything else in that price? He's like, No, because I think that's going to be a category killer when it comes out. Your next best bet is that the 350, his version of the 350 is available. That's a six-quart, I think, or eight-quart unit. Uh, and the other ones, I don't have any experience with their machines, but I do have a lot of experience with the Carpegani uh LB 100s.
The problem with the LB100s or Lab 100s, depending on which vintage you get, is that now you're talking a $10,000 machine, US. I don't know what they cost in in the UK. They're great machines. They do have some known problems, like if you get one of the older ones with the clear plastic front, they break, they always break, and then you need to fix them. Uh, the other option in the US, I don't know if they sell them in the UK, is Taylor.
Uh Taylor machines are sl are cheaper than the LB100s, but I've having used them, I was never a huge fan of the Taylor versus the LB 100s. If you can have a good used market, they do make a smaller batch machine. Carpegani makes a very small batch machine, like I think maybe two quarts, even smaller than the one you were looking at, that's a vertical batch freezer and sits on the countertop. That sucker, I've never used one, but supposedly has a very, very high quality. Uh, but there's not that much in that size range that you were talking about of just a couple of quartz that performs on a professional level.
So uh sorry about that. Now on the Paco Jet, I the here's a problem with the Paco Jet, right? Your question is, can I get away with using a Paco Jet? Uh and the answer is yes. Here's the bad news.
You cannot get away with using one Paco jet because what will happen? It's not that you need two to run at any one time. Sucker is going to break. Let me let me just be very clear about your Paco Jet. Your Paco Jet will break.
And now they will fix it, right? But at least in the US, they don't do the following awesome thing. Oh, your Paco Jet's broken and it costs an obscene amount of money and you can't buy parts from a normal person, so you have to send it to me to fix it. Oh, here's a loaner that you can use while your Paco Jet is broken because we know it's gonna break. In the US, that doesn't happen.
So they just say, guess what? Eat it, Jerko. And so you have to not have your Paco Jet for a long time. Or have to have a friend that has a Paco Jet. So if you're gonna do this, you can do it, but you have to run two Paco Jets at once.
Also, uh, so like Pure Food and Wine, Pure Food and Wine is that what it's called? Summer Mel and Gaius' place. She she has an ice cream shop that runs exclusively off of Paco Jet, and she has two, maybe three, and she's been running for years that way, and it works, but she always has one when the other one goes down. Here's the other thing. Paco Jet loves to charge you a lot of money for the stainless steel bay-marie that you freeze the ice.
So Paco Jet, for those who don't know what I'm talking about, people always say it's like a blender. It's not like a blender, it's like the world's greatest shaved ice machine. It slowly feeds a blade into uh into the top of the uh you freeze your base solid like a rock, and then it feeds the blade in slowly spinning and advancing at such a slow rate that the crystals that are shaved off are the same crystal size that you would get using a commercial ice cream machine. They're fantastic. Uh they're loud, but they're fantastic.
You definitely can get the throughput, you're gonna be running it all the time, but you need two. What uh what a couple people have done with Paco Jets, including Mills used to do it at Aquavit and Pure Food and uh Wine does it, is uh they freeze their base in quart containers, which are almost free. Although I've been told, when when I say I've been told, when I ask people in other countries, hey, I need some quart containers, they look at me like I'm an idiot. I don't think a lot of other people use quart containers, so find whatever the UK equivalent of a quart container is, or buy some from the good old US of A, and freeze your base in the quart containers. Quart containers are a little bit tapered, so you can pop the stuff out of the cork, and you have to get the levels right.
You pop the base out of the uh quart container, and then you jam it into your Paco Jet container and spin like that. The problem is if it's crooked, right? If it's crooked, then when your blade hits it, it'll hit one side of the I uh of the base only, and you can shatter your Paco Jet blades. Won't kill the Paco Jet, but you'll shatter the blades. Blades are like $150.
However, in the long run, you are gonna save money by doing quart containers because you need a lot of them to do the kind of thing you're doing, and just buy yourself an extra blade. Do not attempt to run an ice cream business with the uh Neemox or Ninox, whatever it is, uh Frixair unit uh that was made sold as a competitive Paco Jet. It will not, it works fine for the tiny little cups that it that it does, but it will not work for what you want. What do you think, S good? Good job.
Did I do good coach? Okay. Uh all right. Should we take one more break and come back or should we power through? Power?
Yeah, power. Power. Okay. Uh got a question in this one, actually is from Lucas, right? If I can find it.
Uh where is it? Where is it? Where is it? Oh my goodness. I'll say in the meantime, if you want this episode named after you, you can still become a member.
A few minutes left. Yeah, is that true? That's true. It's still May. All right.
Okay. Uh well, I'll take a different question while I'm looking for Lucas's question. Uh John Stewart, not John Stewart from the Daily Show, a different John Stewart, which is his sign offline now, says, hello to the hammer, Jack, Joe, and Dave. My question is not very high-tech, but is food related. Uh, we host an outdoor family movie night, and I provide popcorn.
I've been making a bunch of batches in a cast-iron Dutch oven on the stovetop, which takes a lot of time I'd rather spend elsewhere. This past weekend I had the horror of actually running out of popcorn. Oh my oh my god. So clearly I need to step things up. It's taking too much time.
So I looked at popcorn machines, which turn out to be expensive. You are correct. So the question is if you wanted to make a large amount of popcorn, how would you do it? Or should I be looking at bar restaurant auctions for a used popcorn machine? Thanks, and keep up the good work, a different John Stewart.
Okay. So yeah, you're a little bit okay. So here's what I'm assuming. One, you detest air popped popcorn because it doesn't taste good. Is that right?
Anyone else with me on this? AirPod popcorn styles. Do you like airpod popcorn? No. Eddie, do you like airpod?
I'm not a big popcorn fan in general. In general? Too much effort, not enough reward. Yeah. It's all in your teeth.
You're 20 minutes later, you're still digging it out. Well, you know, a lot of that has to do, I think, with like the popcorn varieties that they're that they're making. I think they make ones that like so you get your mushroom and you got your butterfly. So your butterfly ones, your typical movie popcorn ones, and I think they have like a bigger surface area for capturing things. You're gonna like coat it with butter flavor.
But your mushroom types are better for ones that are going to be uh further manipulated, like cracker jack style or things like that, which is why you get it. Anyways, uh and certain uh varieties are gonna have more and less uh uh of the skin that's left on them, they're gonna get stuck in your teeth because that's unpreasent, uh unpleasant rather, and of course, better quality popcorns. You know what they call popcorn kernels that haven't popped? No. Widows.
Uh oh, that's sad. So now you're never gonna look at the bottom of the video, oh poor widows. No. So uh, anyways, yes, the manufacturer that makes the real ones is Creters. And Creters makes popcorn machines all the way from the minuscule to the gigundous continuous popcorn makers that can do like a ton an hour and more.
They're awesome. Uh amazing, but they are expensive. You're looking at probably for a small one, the kind that's like on the cart, right? Like a thousand bucks. Here's the other problem.
I think they're about a thousand bucks. The other problem is is that they take up a lot of space. Now, maybe you have a lot of space, in which case I would definitely just troll auctions for one that looks kind of beat because they're kind of bulletproof. I mean, they work for a long time, right? But uh, you know, they they are going to uh they they're gonna require a lot of cleaning if you get a crappy one at an auction, but that is the way to go.
Uh my mom actually bought me so the way I used to make the make it was uh with uh what's called a whirly pop. And it's it's still a pain, a huge pain in the butt. So whirly pop is the aluminum pan with the two flap doodle lids on top and the hand crank that you crank. So it makes fantastic popcorn a lot easier than your uh than your Dutch oven technique with the shaking and the shaking plus the shaking of the Dutch oven. Uh the Whirly Pop, the main disadvantage of the Whirly Pop is you still have to sit there and turn it while it while it's doing it.
Now, I also use the Whirly Pop for uh roasting coffee because I never got one of the newer generations of home coffee roasters. Uh and the Whirly Pop I like the Whirly Pop because it's you know it's less of an air pop, uh an air roasted coffee for like Sivits Roaster style coffee flavor, and more of like a probot style or like drum roast coffee flavor. So I like it. Uh and it like I say, it also makes fantastic popcorn. But here's a modification I was gonna do if you're handy.
What I was gonna do was uh put a motor, like cut the end of the thing off and bolt uh a small 110 motor, and then with a counterweight on the other side of the pot so it doesn't tilt, and then uh just run the whirly pop off of a motor. Now, you could have that whole sucker done whirly pop plus motor. You could have that whole sucker done for I want to say 50 bucks, 60 bucks, plus your time, right? And that's going to make fantastic popcorn. Plus, you can be proud of the fact that you've hacked, you know, you've done a DYI solution on this.
Downside is you're still going to have to listen for uh when the popping stops, or you're gonna scorch your popcorn. Now, the whirly pop does a fairly good job of not scorching as long as you pay attention to it, and then you could just bang out batch after batch, and you could be doing other things while it's popping, right? Uh second alternative that works similar to a whirly pop, but it's a lot cheaper. I think it's also around a hundred bucks. My mom bought me some.
I don't even I forgot to look at the thing on the way out. I don't know if it's wearing or what, but who someone makes a home, maybe Jack or you can find it, they make like a little red like home version of a movie popcorn popper that works with with the with a little handle on the side that does the dumping, and it works on the same principle as a movie style popcorn popper in that there's a little basket that holds the corn, you put the oil in, it starts popping as it pops, it pops out of that basket and into a holding container, and you can make batch after batch, and I've used it at kids' birthday parties, and it works fantastically. You still have to listen for the popcorn to stop so that you don't burn the stuff at the bottom. But the good news about this version is is if you don't pay attention and you let it keep going past the time and it actually burns the kernels, it's only burning those poor sorry widows that are left inside of the thing. It's not burning the actual popcorn that's popped out and put into the uh into the basket.
Now, it also keeps the popcorn fairly warm because it's inside of the tray. The down other downside of that machine is because it's covered with glass all the way around and it's slightly smaller than the ones that you would use uh in uh in a real movie theater, is that if you don't open the door pretty quick after it's done, it has a tendency to steam the popcorn that's on the inside. Steaming popcorn is a no-no. So what you want to do is drill holes in the in the in the side of that thing to allow the ski steam to escape, but not so much that the popcorn can fly out when it comes out. What do you think, Stuff?
Good job. Good. I like that. Hacking equipment here. Yeah, we're hacking.
And remember, if you hack it, you're avoiding the warranty and you may kill yourself, and I don't want to hear about it because it's not my fault. Uh maybe it's my fault. What do you think? Okay. Uh this is from Lucas.
Lucas says, uh, hey, uh Nastasha, Dave, Jack, and Joe. Uh I went to the new Fulton fish market on Monday with a couple of friends with the intention of sharing the fish. This is such a great place, but no two words about it. It is a wholesale market. Hence, I have a lot of fish.
I made some gravel locks with part of the salmon. My first question is simple. How long can I keep it in the fridge? Presumably you're not talking about the salmon itself, you're talking about the graveled locks when you're done, right? Uh I love the market, and it's quite a trip from the village uh at unhuman hours because remember, the market is uh really running uh when you know you should be asleep, uh, unless you're a bartender.
Uh but I am willing to make it every once in a while, the trip that is. Any other ideas how to use this market for a small household? Now listen, uh Lucas, uh most people oh, he also says, sorry about the bike ticket. My deepest sympathies for uh fragile and delicate Nastasha for having to keep up with you a lot. Oh brutal.
Brutal. Sincerest regards, Lucas. Oh man. Damn. Okay, so here's the thing.
If you live in the village, Lucas, you one of your main problems is going to be that you have no space unless you are fantastically wealthy. And if you are fantastically wealthy, then you can visit the market and then buy your fish locally at a retail price. So I'm assuming that you are not fantastically wealthy. Uh so I am therefore assuming that your village apartment is small, which means you also don't have a large freezer. If you had a vacuum machine and a freezer, there are some kinds of fish that do quite well if you put a hard vac on it uh for storage to freeze if you have a good freezer and a good vacuum machine.
You don't want to cook it uh in the vacuum bag like that under under a hard vacuum because uh the quality is degraded. But storage and freezing under hard vacuum is is fine. Um, I would say things like this are good for three things parties, parties, and more parties. When you're gonna have a big party, like let's say you have that friend, I don't know how old you are. Let's say you have that friend and they're having the engagement party, right?
And you want to blow 'em out, then go pick up a couple of salmon there, do like an awesome, like, you know, I used to that that was my standard thing. I would just poach up a bunch of salmons and like put them out with a bunch of different toppings and stuff. You know, I yeah, I think I did a good job. I think I did, you know, because you know this is what I do for a living. But you know, like that, and then like that's very uh very easy.
Or anything like that where you you know you're gonna be serving a lot of people, and it allows you to do a higher ticket item than you would if you were buying retail and to get high quality because you know you're getting it from the source. Problem is, is you never know quite what you're gonna get until you get to the wholesale market. So it's a little bit dicey for doing parties, but that's always what I when I I always use wholesale when I know that I have a wholesale quantity of people I'm gonna be feeding. Uh otherwise, it's all about uh storage or making things that are gonna last a long time. Like if you like Pa Pauline, who uh hopefully I'm gonna get to her question uh uh from last week, you know, she does she catches a uh a boatload of well, not a boatload because she's using a net whatever anyway, a lot of salmon, and she's making jerky and drying it, uh then you know that's another opportunity if you want to go there and you're gonna do products that are gonna take a long time.
Let's say you were gonna buy a bunch of row and make your own batarga. Well, do not buy that wholesale. Go to I mean, sorry, uh retail, go get that stuff wholesale. Anytime you're gonna mix something's gonna keep a long time. But I can't think of any other, like I can't think of any other like normal day-to-day stuff.
I think I'd rather buy my stuff, especially if you're buying stuff that's sushi grade because it's already been frozen once, you don't want to freeze it again. Uh so anyway, hopefully that's helpful. Now, back on the how to how long you can keep. I mean, fresh salmon actually keeps quite a long time. The problem is you don't know how long it's already been kept before you get it.
Uh so on fresh salmon, if you're gonna have a problem keeping it and you're worried about it, then I would vac it down and freeze it right away because uh the earlier you freeze a fresh product in its lifetime, the higher the quality is maintained over time. Because you don't get that quality back. Like if you vac down a piece of salmon, even vacing it if you're gonna keep it refrigeration uh in refrigeration alone, is gonna keep your quality a lot longer than if you just you know keep it in in the fridge. But quality on something like fresh salmon, right, is very, very influenced by how you keep it in the fridge. So you want to keep your fruit your fish like a professional would keep it.
And what that means is it like a skin side down resting on a bed of uh shaved ice in something that drains the shaved ice into a container underneath it, and then uh lightly light, like I don't actually cut if you have a place that doesn't have a lot of other smells and you're not worried about it, you can almost not cover it all, put a piece of paper that doesn't touch it, you know, like over the top. Uh but you know, a lot of how fish keeps depends on how much the temperature cycles and how much air is blowing over it. If you have a lot of air blowing over it, the surface dries out too much, and you can get off flavors from other things and you can transfer flavors. But if you have it really tightly wrapped over or things touching the the actual fish, then you can get slimy, nasty parts where the stuff touches. So you don't want anything touching it.
Uh you can wrap plastic wrap if you have to over it uh but not touching the fish on a bed of ice and then check the ice when the ice melts, put a fresh bed of ice down. Remember, skin side down and not stacking a bunch of them on top, and your fish will actually keep fairly well that way. But very few people here here's why salmon goes or fish goes so bad so quickly in your fridge is people are like you buy it from a fishmonger, they throw it into a freaking plastic bag like it's like like it's like dirty socks, and then you take it home in this dirty sock bag, and then you throw it in the fridge, and then some idiot comes and throws a bag of grapefruits on top of it, and then it's horrible. Horrible. Anyway, once you make Gravelox out of it, it's actually going to keep a lot longer.
I tried to find an actual uh piece of information about how long Gravelox would keep. Gravelox, by the way, is salmon typically salt, uh sugar, salt, and dill uh cured with or without weights. You cure it for a couple of days. Uh that it it should it does prevent some bacteria from growing, but it does not prevent things like listeria from growing, and there's other spoilage bacteria. I've seen people say you get an extra actu extra two, three days out of it from the curing after it's cured.
And I've seen people say it lasts a couple of weeks in there. I haven't found any hard data looking to see how long it lasts in the uh in the fridge. But uh from what I can see, the main thing from a pathology standpoint, from a from a pathogen standpoint, rather, it would be listeria, because listeria will continue to grow on it. But if you actually keep it under proper refrigeration, listeria should take a long time to grow. The other problems are going to be more spoilage and and less safety problems.
Uh, but I could not find any specific things, and nobody wants to come out and say, you can keep it for two weeks in the fridge, and it won't be a problem, because then if you get sick, you're going to go back to them and say, Man, you said I could keep it for two weeks in the fridge. And a lot depends on the initial bacterial loading of the fridge. If you were uh of the salmon, if you're buying really good salmon, whole fish, the whole fish salmon at wholesale market, filleting it yourself. You could see the gills, you could see the eyes, you you see the skin, the quality of it. You know, you'll probably get a good long time uh out of it, but I like those other fools hesitate to give you an exact amount of time.
Uh and speaking of exact amount of time, I have shafted Pauline again on talking about uh uh the bacterial safety of her uh smoked salmon in Alaska. And next time, Pauline, what I promise to address this very first uh on the show. Here we go, ready for next week. Cooking issues. Thanks for listening to this program on Heritage Radio Network.org.
You can find all of our archived programs on our website or as podcasts in the iTunes store by searching Heritage Radio Network. You can like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at heritage underscore radio. You can email us questions at any time at info at heritageradio network.org. Heritage Radio Network is a nonprofit organization. To donate and become a member, visit our website today.
Thanks for listening.
Timestamps may be off due to dynamic ad insertion.