This is Chris Young, co-author of Modernist Cuisine, and co-founder of Chef Steps.com. We've just launched a free course on spherification that's quick and to the point. It teaches the fundamentals and then reveals the details the best chefs use to create amazing dishes that border on culinary alchemy. Sign up now at ChefSteps.com. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues.
This is Dave Ron, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live from Roberta's Pizzeria every Tuesday from roughly 12 to 1245 or 1, depending. On the Heritage Radio Network, joined as usual with Nastasha the Hammer Lopez, also Joe and Jack in the engineering booth, and Eddie, who's soon to be like one of the regulars in the engineering booth. And once again we have on the show our good buddy Ariel from UC Davis, RGC Mass Spec Expert. How are you doing, Ariel? Pretty good.
Thanks. How are you doing? Good, good. Uh oh, by the way, calling your questions to 7184972128. That's 7184972128.
Stas, how are you doing? I'm good, thank you. Yeah? Anything interesting to report? Nope.
Really? Nothing? No. I saw you pretty late last night. Yeah, but I mean, uh, other people did not see us.
Did we do anything? I can't remember. I don't think we did anything. We went to edible little schoolyard. We went to the edible schoolyard, thank you.
Well, it was a thank you for an event that we didn't actually go to, but where we're auctioned off as doing some sort of the cocktail party at someone's house, true? Right. Like 30 people or something. We're gonna do whatever, liquid nitrogen, all sorts of crazy things. Yes.
Nice, nice. And uh we're uh I'm going to inspect our puffing gun, the museum's puffing gun today after the program. I'm gonna see if I can okay, so I'm gonna let the cat out of the bag. It's gonna it's gonna tick off uh Peter, our uh museum president or whatever and the heck director, whatever the hell his title is. But look, we're looking to get this puffing gun.
Uh we're looking to get this puffing gun ready for end of summer. And so uh what we're gonna do is uh we're probably gonna kickstart this thing to try and get some money in so that we can get this stuff to build it out, right? Which means that in the next couple of weeks I have to make it run, Stas. I have to go there and make it run. And uh report back.
And I know that we said on the air before that I was gonna do a Kickstarter for the torch. And we still are for reasons no bad reasons really, no bad reasons. It's because we're also working on another product at the same time that we haven't revealed yet. And we have a little bit of question of which one we want to launch first. So we're holding off for a little while on the Sears all kickstart, but it's not that we it's not that we've missed our deadline.
No. It's we're ready actually to do it. It's just a question of strategy in the Booker and Dax team as to what's gonna go up first, right, Stas? Is that pretty much true? All right.
So uh let me go right into the uh qu oh by the way how you guys doing over there in the engineering booth. Yeah, I was wondering. Uh we're doing well. Yeah? Nice.
All right. My sister works for edible schoolyard. Maybe you saw her. Oh yeah? What's her name?
Cecilia? Hmm, do we see her? I don't no. No. We might have.
Maybe she's not that important. I don't know. Whoa! We did record Alice Waters um, what is it, two weeks ago? We're doing an evolutionaries recording with her, so her kind of whole life story.
Uh I just got finished editing that. So how was that? How was she? Very good, very interesting. Uh you know, she she uh really doesn't want that edible schoolyard idea to be proprietary at all.
She wants as many people to take it as can. So anyone out there, if you want to go eat a schoolyard, steal that crap. Because she doesn't care. Exactly. Yeah.
Ryan? All right. So uh Pauline from Alaska. I'm finally gonna get to your question because I'm not as bad a person as people uh make me out to be. Uh and maybe Ariel, if you uh how good how uh how good are you on your uh food safety stuff?
You still up on that? Marginally? I know a little bit. I mean you had to study that crap when you were doing stuff, right? Uh here and there, maybe.
Yeah, a little touch of a little touch of food safety. Tiny bit. Uh yeah, Ariel's kind of like me, I guess. Is it as long as it tastes good, who cares whether you die? We do have a caller if you want to grab that first.
All right, I will I will take the caller first, but Pauline, you're up first. All right. Caller, you're on the air. Howdy, Dave. How are you doing?
Hi. Uh first. Hey, first of all, thanks for answering my uh uh mocha question a couple weeks back. Have a quick question about juicing and a Vitamix. Vitamix we love, thanks to you, by the way.
Oh, nice. Well, I love that the Vitamix good good good blending product. Yes. Well, we've been making smoothies, soups, you know, all bunch of good stuff. And my question is when it comes to doing more of a juice product without having to get a you know uh nut milk bag and squeeze it and all that sort of messiness.
What would you recommend for straining? Hmm. So what kind of juices are you looking to do? I don't know. We've done like, you know, shard from the garden with greens and apple and ginger, you know, typical you know, overpriced juices from the juice bar at home.
Right, right. I mean that so the problem I mean the main problem if you're doing things like ginger, it's not such a problem because uh there's not I mean there are there's there are things in ginger, but uh you're usually not using enough ginger to have it um completely uh you know, fill your juice with with with uh with a bunch of blended pectin. It's the b it's the blended pectin in things that are gonna make things very, very difficult for you to um for you to strain out. Uh because they just yeah, they increase the they increase the thickness of it to an extent where it just it just doesn't want to strain very very much. Um now what I will say is that if you do get one of the of the I like the word nut milk bag that's my new favorite word nut milk bag but um uh I try not to go to a dirty place with that right right yeah you can try but it's gonna be difficult not to get to that place.
Now the the uh if you get a uh any one of these uh straining bags or super bags that let you tie them off such that no product can get out of it one really fast way to get uh liquids out like that uh through straining is to put them into a bag like that tie them off throw them in a salad spinner and just start spitting them out and that little bit of extra centrifugal force in the uh on the bag speeds your drainage by you know by I wouldn't say an order of magnitude but probably like a factor of five something on that range and it's also going to increase your yield. So then what you do is you throw the bag in there you give her you give her a couple spins with the thing you spin and then you pull it out then you you grab the bag and you like massage the contents around to free up the pores and you spin it another couple of times. And it's a technique I don't think I ever put it on the blog but it's a technique I developed to help people when they're doing quick agar clarification because most people when they're doing quick agar clarification they squeeze the uh they squeeze the bag too hard and they extrude agar through the bag and they also have a difficult time getting their yield up and so that was something I developed uh to help with that. Uh second thing you know if you have if you're not gonna consume the juice right away is you might want to go to modernistpantry.com buy a little bit of uh pectinx uh uh ultra spl enzyme and blend that in with the product and that, you know, over if you blend it till it's warm, then you know, it's almost good to go right away. But uh, you know, if you let it wait a little while, it really helps thin out your product and makes it uh a lot easier to just get more product through, for instance, a regular chinois.
Um the other thing you can do, uh see what is another thing you could do. I mean the i i if if you're having trouble if if if you're having trouble like a a dual a dual part strainer uh makes things a lot faster. So if you're going through first something coarse to pick up anything that's left over now that there's a lot of coarse stuff after the vita prep, and then going through your finer uh straining, like a for instance a bag or something like that, uh then you're gonna get a much faster drain through on uh on the secondary uh strain through if you've gotten some of the bigger stuff out uh right away because it prevents kind of uh instant clogging. You're still gonna get fines clogging, which is like the small things are gonna clog up all the pores very quickly. But again, just like a spoon that you're scraping along the edge of your strainer on the inside to re-clear the pores as you're going is gonna make it drain faster.
And of course the good old fashioned hitting the side of the strainer with your uh with your fist as it's going to kind of pop the stuff off the pores and help it drain faster. Is it is any of this helpful or no? Yeah, so basically, I mean there's not you're basically saying a strainer and a nut milk bag. There's not there's not like a china a really super fine china cap or something like that type of thing. Yeah, I mean so like you know, I th there's two basic ones we use that I call them both kind of chinois or china cap.
One is a piece of sheet metal with holes drilled in it, right? That's the coarse one. And the fine one is literally a piece of cloth, like a a piece of uh of a wire cloth. And it's very can be very, very fine wire cloth. And those things are great.
So like with those, you put it in and initially you you pour your product in there and you hit it with the you you hold the handle and you hit it with you hit the right by the handle with your with your fist uh and it and it can rattle through or you just take a uh ladle or a spoon and constantly scrape the sides of the cloth to re f uh you know re-free up the pores. Okay. Yeah. And if you they can be pricey, but or another alternative is uh go through an old school Tammy, which is a kind of a wide mouth thing, and then you just take a pastry scraper and scrape back and forth across the Tammy, and you can get very, very fine tamis. You can actually buy them industrially as uh as uh bolting sieves or or as uh uh you know mesh mesh grades.
You can pick what mesh grade you get because people use it to sort out particles like in the real life. Uh and you scrape your pastry scraper across it and you can get uh a lot of uh you know, a lot of product through that way, but I would recommend a chinois if you can get it because uh it kind of funnels the liquid down into a much smaller area, easier to catch into a pyrex or uh or a pitcher or whatever. And the the sort of smashing motion is a little easier than the scraping you'd get with uh with a to me. Yeah, I mean, yes, that's true. I like this.
The smashing motion I like, but you know, you just you'll get a feel for it. The uh issue when you're smashing it, a lot of chefs I know they like to take the spoon and jam it instead of the smashing. The one issue when you're smashing, you'll get like like a bloop that'll fly up and blot back down into your into your chinois. Just make sure you don't shoot the bloop into the stuff that you've already strained. That's depressing.
Right. Right, and I can use the damper as well for that. Got it. Thank you guys. They're really helpful.
Hey, no problem, let's know how it works. Okay, cheers. Hi, bye. Um okay, so back to Pauline's question. So for those of you that do not remember, I will read uh uh what she is.
Okay. Uh I live, this is Pauline, not me. I do not live in the interior of Alaska. I live here in New York. Okay.
Uh I live in the interior of Alaska and make annual pilgrimage to dip net the yearly quota of various salmon species, which sounds awesome. Like it's like a good I meat. Well, and then she goes on to say. This is one of the greatest things about living in Alaska. That and obviously the giant cabbage.
Are we ever going to get that giant cabbage, thus? I don't think he's really interested in that. So what happened? Like, so uh I'm sorry, Pauline, I'm gonna digress again. But you're on this dog, we're talking about this right now.
But like Steve Hubachek, the world's largest cabbage grower, right, in Alaska. Because for those of you that don't remember, cabbage basically respond uh to number of hours of daylight, and they're gonna keep growing as long as the number of hours of daylight are high enough and it's not freezing, those cabbage are gonna keep growing, right? So they get cabbages that are you know well, well over a hundred pounds. What were they weighing? Do you remember?
It was a lot. It was well over a hundred pounds, though, right? And so we were gonna we were gonna you know buy you know, at they have a state fair in uh in Alaska, I forget what town it's in, but uh they have an Alaska State Fair, and they have a giant vegetables competition, but they also have a you know a giant uh like like the the kind of the queen or king, depending on what you look at. Nastasha likes to think of vegetables as men, and I like to think of vegetables as women's. You think of everything as women's that's not true, not you.
Boom! Boom! Anyway, so uh the uh so the cabbage is kind of the queen of the uh uh the bell of the ball, let's say. And so because it's like the most famous one, and we wanted to get one of Steve Ubachek's, he's a dentist, by the way, right, Stas? Yeah.
We wanted to get one of his prize uh cabbages after the fair and bring it here and then make like the like the world's largest single head uh uh serving of coleslaw with like a chainsaw and a wood chipper. But somehow like when push actually came to shipping, he like Steve was like, man, I don't know. I'm not really that nice. Not that not that that means that someday you and I stars are gonna have to take an airplane to Alaska. Sound a seaplane to Alaska.
Oh my god, like my dad used to fly seaplanes. That's rad. Yeah. Uh but uh, you know what the most you know what the most dangerous kind of seaplane is? It's the amphibious ones with the wheels that come out of the pontoons.
Because it like all the pilots say, it's not a question of if you're eventually going to land and forget to pull the landing gear up and land with the landing gear down in water, which instantly flips the plane, by the way. Like you land with the landing gear on an amphibian sucker in the water. But more of a question of when is that going to happen? Kind of like crashing a motorcycle. Jesus.
Yeah. Anyway. I don't think it kills you, but it's just it's embarrassing in the planes ruined. Okay. Uh so back to uh back to back to Pauline.
Okay. Um the fishing is one of the greatest things about living in Alaska. I fillet some, cut some into stakes for near immediate consumption, and leave a few holes for extravagant harvest parties. I would like to go to those extravagant harvest parties. Uh what?
As would I? Yeah, nice. Uh and smoke dry the rest. Not like that palette pasty shave stuff they sell in our store in the store. Our smoked salmon should be almost jerky like and full of a smoky, slightly salty, slightly sweet flavor.
I love smoked salmon and want to do it better, learn more, etc. Thus, I'd like to hear what you might suggest, including ways you'd like to use this fish candy. And like I I believe I mentioned this even when I didn't answer your question. There is a huge difference between the the stuff that they sell in the store and properly really beautiful, awesome um, you know, Nova style uh smoked uh uh cured uh salmon and and locks. Uh I mean the stuff that you can get in a supermarket is indeed pallid and pasty.
But you know, the hand slice stuff is freaking awesome. But it's not what you're it's not what you're looking for. And I don't even know like I like I would think that uh most of the stuff that they make, the really high quality stuff, if it's since it apparently that's not the style that's appreciated by the actual Alaska natives, they're probably getting something that was uh shipped back from uh the lower 48 up to Alaska and then served to them, and that would be an insult. It would be an insult to get for her to get this crappy salmon like cured in the lower 48 in a substandard way, pre-sliced with some sort of preservative vacuum packed and shipped up to her, right? Like it'd be like a smack in the face.
Well, is cold smoked or hot smoked more of the paper in Alaskan style. Well, that's interesting. So traditionally, right? Uh traditionally, I think if you were gonna smoke, you'd be smoking in a relatively large area, like a shed or something, with a relatively small fire, which would mean cold smoking. Right?
But that's that's kind of that's kind of that's kind of the thing. So let's let's talk about the kind of trials and tribulations of of uh of curing and smoking fish. By the way, uh, you know, that the back in the day when people cured fish because uh, you know, they were gonna die otherwise, there was a because they needed the protein and whatnot. There are various different things have uh occurred and some have stayed around because they're more or less safe. But not all traditional smoking curing techniques can actually are not a guarantee of safety, let's put it that way.
So the first um, you know, the the first thing is is uh you're probably not doing uh traditional like certain areas where they cured fish, uh they didn't have a lot of salt lying around because uh it took a lot of energy to produce salt, especially in uh colder climates or climates without a lot of sun where you didn't get a lot of drying effect, or places where there's high humidity, they didn't necessarily have a large supply of salt. So they would kind of do low salt things with just wind drying and um and also uh perhaps smoke. Presumably you don't have that problem, and you're doing what has become the more traditional uh smoking technique. It might have been all along in Alaska for all I know, which is you're gonna salt it for a while, uh, or salt and sugar it for a while to get the salt content up. The that's going to A, that's gonna be good for flavor up to a certain point, at which point it becomes too salty.
And especially if you're doing the jerky candy-style stuff, there's probably a good bit of sugar in there, which probably goes similar to gravadlocks cures, which can be anywhere from like uh two to one sugar salt to one to one, depending on how you're how you're looking at it, right? So you cure it to get a certain amount of salt into the meat. You're then gonna hang it wet for a little while to let the salt level equilibrate. It's called equalization, right, so that it actually seeps into the whole thing. That initial salt load is and hopefully do this part under refrigeration so listeria is not growing too much because the salt levels involved aren't necessarily, and in fact, not only aren't necessarily, but shown to not uh prevent the growth of listeria, uh you know, unless you super salt it, but then it's gonna be unpalatable for straight eating.
So equilibrate at fridge temperature, and then you're gonna hang them up to dry with uh smoke, right? So that's that's the technique we're talking about. Uh and so uh I went around and and uh looked about it. And and by the way, you know, just look up on online and that with the relative uh actual brine strengths. The problem with most recipes is they just give a brine strength, which isn't really a hundred percent useful because it's gonna depend upon the ratio of brine to fish and the soaking times and all that.
Other people actually just put salt on it. Uh the so I'm not gonna try and get into this. I would just I would just go to um any one of the uh any university, any state university, for instance, uh smoking fish at home from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks has like a website on this, and follow one of their recipes for salt levels. Um anyway, so uh the first thing you gotta get rid of in uh salmon is uh parasites, right? So uh like different kinds of uh worms that are growing in them, some of which can uh be zoonotic, i.e.
they can jump from salmon and infest you. Awesome, right? Uh I think the one I I read the study on was Diphylo Bothriasis associated with eating raw Pacific salmon. Now, here's the bad news salting doesn't necessarily kill the larva. Uh cold smoking does not necessarily kill the larva.
Hot smoking kills the larva, and freezing kills the larva. Now, there are uh some websites uh that have said, for instance, smoking fish at home from the University of Alaska Fairbanks says uh these parasites, when you're talking about any sort of like uh wormy parasite, can be destroyed by freezing the raw product at a temperature of zero degrees Fahrenheit for two weeks or longer before salting and smoking. When freezing the product at a home freezer, it may take several days to reach zero Fahrenheit throughout the entire fish. Now, I thought it was very interesting that they wrote before that you had to freeze it before you salted and smoked it. Uh I read on the USDA where they didn't seem to care whether you froze it before or after.
Uh if if you can uh and you feel comfortable doing it, I highly recommend freezing it afterwards, and here's why. The more water that's present in uh in the food, right, when you're going to freeze it, um, the uh more crystal growth you're gonna get and the more texture damage you're gonna get. And I would think it would alter the appearance and you get a higher drip loss, which isn't necessarily a good way to get rid of moisture in this in the fillets uh before they're smoked and dried out. Do you see any reason why you can't freeze it afterwards, Ariel? I don't think so.
I mean, unless there's some like unfrozen brine that the uh parasites could live in, but that doesn't sound likely to me. It's interesting, I hadn't thought of that. But the USDA seems to think you can freeze it before or after. Yeah, well they mean that's in it's interesting. I hadn't thought about that because you're increasing the brine concentration.
Anytime you have like an ion dissolved right but if you're increasing the brine concentration that much you would think that that would kill that's true. I mean I I don't know. I it would seem to me that you could uh that you could do it. Now then the question is whether you're going to uh s hot smoke it or you're gonna cold smoke it. I would read just for your own edification fish smoking procedures for forced convection smoke houses which is written in uh in uh 2001 by uh Kenneth S.
Hilderbrand uh junior seafood processing specialist at Oregon State University. And they go through a lot of the parameters of um smoking. Now is that a book or a paper? Paper online. You can read it online.
Uh and I would also go to the FDA uh FDA's fish and fishery products hazards and control guidance uh specifically uh processing parameters needed to control pathogens in cold smoked fish for cold smoked uh situations and all like these are both online uh and you know there's a there's a uh you know there's a lot a lot of a lot of of data so there's three things that you're there's there's three main things that you're that you're looking at uh the thing that people are most worried about uh in um cold smoking I mean some if you're gonna store something okay okay let's go so if you're hot smoking then uh you can be in an anaerobic environment back up back up when you're we we already talked about parasites, right? The smoking, unless you hot smoke to to kill it, is not gonna kill uh the parasites, right? Another problem with um another problem with uh microbo microbes is listerio monocytogenies. Listeria can grow in cold environments, is not killed by cold smoking, is not killed by salting, right? Uh so what you want to do is you either want to have to not worry about listeria, which means if you are actually cold smoking, you'd think that cold smoking would would increase the listeria by a lot, but actually the range of cold smoking isn't fridge temperature, the it's more like room temperature up to 80, 90 degrees Fahrenheit.
In that range, you will preferentially grow lactic acid bacteria, and the lactic acid bacteria are um are good competitive inhibitors of listerio monocytogenies. If you heat high enough to hot smoke it, you're killing the listeria, wiping it out. The dangerous part in smoking is if you fluctuate in temperatures that kill and prevent lactic acid bacteria from growing, but don't kill listeria. So in that weird range of like 102, 103, in that kind of like that range, you have a possibility of wiping out your lactic culture, depending on the temperature. I have to go look up the specific numbers, but not wiping out uh listeria.
So you want to make sure that your zone is either hot enough to kill listeria or cold enough to not inhibit your lactic acid bacteria. That makes sense. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Okay. So then the uh other thing you want to worry about is you don't want to culture anaerobic bacteria while you're doing this.
In very closely confined uh situations, you are uh producing relatively anaerobic environments. However, in cold smoking, the only way to really do cold smoking is to introduce a lot of air along with the combusting products, and so it's almost always an aerobic process and almost always, therefore, will not be growing uh uh Closturidium, uh any kind of like Closturidium in there, right? So though and this is all that don't take my word for it. Please do not take my word for it. Go read uh the USDA and the FDA's website on it and you know some of the other safety sites out there.
But those are the main uh those are the main issues. Now, if you're actually curing down to a jerky situation, then you're probably getting a low enough water activity that it's not really uh it's not going to be uh too much of an issue. And if you are worried about uh food safety on this kind of stuff, a little bit, and they don't add it much commercially, but a little bit of uh pink salt, prague salt, uh nitrites uh on the fish will also uh prevent any sort of uh clostridium thing from from from growing. And if you make sure you dry out the uh the outside not so fast that it's like totally dry and the inside's still wet. Right.
So most of us when we smoke are taught to uh produce a pellicle on the outside, which is a dry thing on the outside. However, from a food safety standpoint, you're much better having the outside still be at least tacky when you start hitting hard smoke on it because then the inherent antimicrobial products uh you know properties of the smoke uh can have effects, whereas they can be blunted if you have a full pellicle on the outside. Yeah, that's also in the in the in the literature. Any good ideas, you guys, for you? I I just eat that stuff raw.
It's so expensive here, to that what they call salmon jerky and salmon candy, that like I just eat it by itself. I never use it for anything. However, it would be fantastic grated over pasta. Yeah. I mean, obviously.
Totally. It'd be delicious grated over pasta. And Nastasha likes almost anything grated over pasta. Right? It's true.
Yeah? Although you don't like batarga, right? I do. Yeah? Yeah.
Someone I know doesn't like botarki. It's ridiculously expensive. That's the problem with petarga. And sometimes it's over cured and can have that weird flavor. You know what I'm talking about?
Yeah. It's hard for you to understand over the air what's the kind of things you have to deal with, sort of like white truffles. It's like so extravagantly expensive. You just shave it on stuff. Yeah, yeah, right, right.
And so someone yelled at me, I forget what it was. Was it Chris Young? Maybe. Someone was like, well, just because something's expensive doesn't mean that you can't do all kind of wacky crazy stuff to it. I don't know.
For me, it's like it's like the time that someone gave us like a little block of tea that costs four hundred dollars and they didn't tell us that it costs four hundred dollars and we made a drink with it. You know what I mean? Like a bourbon drink. Bourbon drink was delicious, though. Remember that styles?
Puar tea? That was some delicious stuff. Yeah, yeah. Well, it was the kind of thing where it's if it's expensive and then all about flavor, you just showcase the flavor. And not only that, it's like if it's really expensive, unless you're rich, right?
Yeah, you don't get to have it very often. So it's like any sort of nuance that's in the thing. I mean, your product, maybe your product that you make, like our bourbon drink, maybe it was better than the tea by itself, right? But that's not the point. The point is you can't have this tea very often and you want to absorb all the nuances.
Even if something's the best thing in the world, if it's, you know, dripping off of every rafter, then you can eat some of it by itself, enjoy its nuances, and then you can dork with it because it's not prohibitively expensive to get more of it if you've messed up. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. I don't know, it's just my two cents. All right.
Uh Brian writes in about sulfites. So a lot on the to food safety analogy stuff today, looks like. We always go in in uh in uh what's it called? In um you know, in whatever. Uh hey, Nastasha, Joe, Dave, and whoever is in the booth right now.
I like that one. Sweet. Uh and Ariel, someone in this in the actual studio. I'm trying to dehydrate some apricots. Good call.
I like dehydrated apricots. Yeah, your favorite? Your favorite? Blenum. Mine, blend them.
Blenhem's are good. Yeah, yours. Do you have any other favorites? Uh not by variety. No, yeah, Blenheim's awesome.
Yeah, those are California Blenheims. What do you what are your thoughts on those Australian sugary ones that they dip in the honey and then do no? Not your thing. She's making a not my thing face. I mean I live in the Central Valley, so get some crap on apricots.
Alright, alright, fair. Uh that would be the Central Valley of California. Uh Stas, but you have any apricot thoughts? No, I like mangoes. Uh uh, you know what, Stas?
This is one of the reasons actually, like people think I'm gonna bust on around. That's one of the reasons I I I like Stas is like just like the straight up non-sequitur. No, no, I like to hydrated mangoes. I mean, but like they can both be good products, right? Yeah.
But in other words, you're saying that if you could push a button and wipe out every apricot tree and have dried mango instead, you would do that. I'm with you, Nastasia. Wow. Thanks, very strong, Jack. Yeah, Jack, pulling it.
Okay. I'll take like a good dried apricot over a mediocre fresh apricot. Oh, I will take any good dried apricot over mediocre dried apricot. And you know what I hate hard to get good fresh apricots. Yeah, they s they're mostly suck.
Once they make it to the store, they suck. And uh here's something I don't like is like, no offense, California, but like the little, or it's actually I think a lot of these are made uh foreign, but the little ones that are done whole, they're good, but they're not like baller, they're not awesome. Like the big flat, split, brightly orange blendums that you get from California high-grade California producers. Like, I would take those over many things in life. What I think of Oh, uh, Brian, we'll get back to your sulfite question in a minute.
Caller, you're on the air. Uh, is this me? Yeah, how you doing? Okay, I'm good, I'm good. Uh two things.
Um, hey, I called you two or three weeks ago about the pizza seal. Yeah, how'd it work? Beautifully. Nice. I haven't even used it for pizza yet, but like tortillas or shearing steaks, you put that fucker on the grill and get it on high for a few minutes.
I mean, it's it it cooks things. And you got you got it from that guy who's associated with modernist cuisine that's up here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's exactly the guy you sent me to. Nice, nice.
So it's I mean it's I give that one a hundred percent stamp of approval. Sweet. Sweet. Hey, my actual question, and it's actually my single biggest cooking problem, is actually about washing dishes. On the West Coast, they have taken quote unquote the detergent out of the detergent for water quality issues.
And it doesn't matter. Can it work? Does somebody sell on the internet like a f a five-pound bucket of that that I can add back a tablespoon at a time so my dishwasher will actually do something? Uh Ariel, are you up with uh what's going on with uh West Coast detergents? I did not know that.
Huh? It sounds like the kind of thing that California would pass legislation on first, but so it's uh so what what are they getting rid of it? I see I need to research this. It's like they're getting rid of phosphates, right? Yeah, they're getting rid of the phosphorus, yeah.
And so they and and I don't have those because I'm here in New York, so they they don't work, they don't work where spit. Well, I mean, you know, if if there's a spec speck on your dish when it goes in the dishwasher, there'll be a speck on your dish when it comes out, except it's baked on nicely now. Oh man. All right, so I'll tell you what I'm gonna do. Stas, write that down, email it to us as part of next week's stuff to research, and I'm gonna research uh anything, because I haven't looked into it yet, anything that there is to know about this uh problem, and maybe even uh I'll try to put in a call to the manufacturer and see whether they can give me some whether they're willing to say that the stuff doesn't work as well.
It's like in the old days uh with the model cement, right? Tester, if any of you ever made plastic models. Testers, they had the blue tube cement that was safe, and the red tube cement that contained a bunch of toluene. And we all knew that the toluene worked nine times better. So we never bought the blue tube stuff.
And I think testers pretty much agreed, they're like, yeah, the toluene stuff works better. That's why we still make it even though it's not cool. But anyway, so I'll I'll I'll tell you what I'll do. Uh I'll uh I'll look I'll look into it. And if you want to also just shoot us like a uh a tweet to make sure we don't forget, I'll do some research for next time around.
Alright, it'll be it'll be an email. I don't I don't tweet to speak of. Alright, very good. Thank you very much. Alright, uh talk to you next week.
Or talk about it next week. Alright, cool. Uh so back to Brian and his uh sulfites. Okay. So uh I'm trying to deh uh dehydrate some apricots.
I have an awesome do you like apricot or apricot? Apricot. Apricot styles? Apricot. Apricot.
I like ape because it sounds like like a monkey. Apricot. Okay. And because you remember in uh Wizard of Oz, who put the ape and apricot? No.
That's uh the cowardly lion song. What are they got that I ain't got? Courage. You remember this? Oh my god, it can't.
It's been a while. Um, you know, like it's this is the thing, like this generation just below mine or a couple things below mine. Like, look, every Thanksgiving you watch the Wizard of Oz. Doesn't matter. You watch Wizard of Oz every Thanksgiving.
And after like 10, 11, 12 times of doing this, you just know the whole movie. You don't need to think about it. Anyway. Uh I have an awesome X-caliber dehydrator. Good call.
I like Excalibur, like square format X-calibur. Uh yeah, they actually make a white one. I don't know why you'd get the white one, but yeah, they make a white one. But it's the black plastic one. It's very good.
Uh it has the biggest, it's the most even of the small, normal, easy to get ones uh in terms of dehydrating, and it also works in a square format, which is much better for uh for anyone that thinks is straight. Okay. Uh some recipes I have found say that the cut fruit should be dipped in either ascorbic acid, uh an ascorbic acid bath or a sulfite bath in order to prevent browning. Which bath is most effective for preventing browning and for how long should I keep the fruit in? I have uh both ascorbic acid and some potassium metabisulfite purchased from my local homebrew shop.
I'm concerned about the health risk of sulfites, especially since my wife has asthma, and it seems like the sulfites can impact asthmatics. Thanks so much, Brian. Okay. Uh yeah, so in order in terms of actually making fresh uh fruits not turn brown, uh the sulfites, including uh bisulfites and metabisulfites, are by far the best, uh just in terms of that. Uh and then uh just below them is uh ascorbic acid, uh right underneath that is uh a blanch, an enzyme killing blanch in uh or steam in steaming them to kill them, uh kill it to wipe out the enzymes.
Uh and then well, well, well below that is uh not doing anything. So uh if you go to the uh like the in quotes natural food stores and you get the natural brown, gross-looking uh dried fruits, you will find that not only do they look bad compared to their uh more processed, shall we say, brethren, right? They're these ones are boys' anastasia, happy? Yeah. Uh but uh also they don't taste as good because they've uh they you know the oxidation isn't just a color issue, it's also a taste issue.
So, uh, what you're gonna want to do is uh now, by the way, you you don't want to over if you add too much sulfites. If you were to just taste, if you're not uh um what's the word I'm looking for? Sensitive to sulfites, taste that powder, it tastes nasty. I don't like it. A lot of people say they can't detect the sulfites in things.
I can taste sulfite and I can taste sulfite bath. Uh the salt, the sulfites, this the sulfur is actually getting consumed by the process of what it's doing, so you're not you're not getting all of the flavor on the fruit when it's done that you're getting if you dip and taste the bath by itself, and so uh, and I've never used it as a dehydration aid. But according to the literature, when they're doing it commercially, they're using extremely powerful solutions of uh of bisulfites, like on the order of two to five percent, which is well higher than uh what you'd be using. The folks at Excalibur recommend uh dissolving uh between one and two teaspoons of bisulfite or a little over two teaspoons of uh regular sodium sulfite, which you don't have, into each quart of water, which looks to me, did some back of the envelope math, is about a half of a percent or in that range. You know what I mean?
A half to a little over half, you know, up to three quarters of a percent uh or a little more, and let it soak in that for about five minutes for a slice, they say, or 15 minutes for larger halved fruits. Okay? So that's what they're looking for in in sulfites. You're gonna need uh probably a lot more than that of uh ascorbic acid. Um you're probably gonna have to use um you can just sprinkle ascorbic acid on, but I don't do that, or make a uh and toss it or make a bath.
But I would probably do uh a percent uh or two of uh ascorbic acid. And I wouldn't b bother buying the the the fresh fruit stuff like what ball makes, because that's just a mixture of citric acid and ascorbic acid. The citric acid isn't really an antioxidant, it's just lowering the pH, which makes it more difficult for the enzymes to do their dirty work, right? Now, the if you're gonna blanch as opposed to using sulfites, the problem is is that that wipes out the enzymes, but it isn't actually an antioxidant. And so even without the polyphenol oxidase enzymes that are in the fruit, uh eventually over time you'll get uh non-enzymatic browning of the product.
So it's not a long, long-term solution. Uh another thing you're gonna want to do with apricots is to push the like when you take the halves, push the halves to break their backs. That's gonna open up more of the fruit of the apricot to speed your dehydrating, and the faster you get it down without case hardening it, the better you're gonna be from a quality standpoint. On sulfites and asthmatics, uh I went to Fadia.com, which is now owned by Sir uh Thermoscientific, uh, and they're the people that make the rapid uh immunoassays for different uh allergens. Uh and so they have a very good website, uh fadia.com, ph a d ia.com.
Uh now their their gig, what they make their money off of is protein-based um uh uh, you know, IgE uh antibody tests assays, which are protein reactions. So they don't really do sulfites, but they had something on it. And their website, which is pretty good, says that roughly two little under two percent of the general population has some sort of sensitivity to sulfite at some level. Now the the issue is everyone who's everyone who says that no one has a problem with sulfites, especially in wine, just go like, well, there's natural sulfites in wine. And that's true, it's true, but uh, you know, the the fact of the matter is that um sulfite is not like an all or nothing situation, it is very dose dependent on what kind of reaction you're gonna get.
So real 2%, less than two percent of the general population, less than, we don't know what the number is, less than two, is sensitive to some reasonable amount of sulfite in food. Now, uh on the flip side, if you are uh asthmatic, and probably according to the data I've read, if you uh if you have asthma that responds to steroid therapy, right, in the form of steroid inhalers and things like that, uh, four to eight percent of asthmatics in that category are uh sensitive to to sulfite. So you're looking at probably four times greater than the average population, which is a lot, but it doesn't mean that your wife is necessarily um you know allergic to it. Now, it's not one of those things that is uh where it's like, well, people are you know they're just hysterical about it. Uh there's been uh double blind uh placebo studies with sulfites in sealed capsules, so that there was no possibility of tasting the sulfur.
But now that's the gold standard for uh allergy testing, and it's how it was proven, Nastasha, that MSG is not something that causes reactions. Uh double blind placebo uh uh capsule-based studies. Uh and so people who reacted positive to that were given uh different levels of sulfites in wines and uh a good bit of blind and a good bit of them had uh very severe asthmatic reactions to it. So um don't fool around with it. You're gonna want to if you think that she might be uh you know, if she doesn't, if she has like you know, wines that are known high in sulfites all the time, and she eats dried fruits and she has no problem, yeah.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Yeah, she probably she has no problem. If she's had problems in the past, I would go to a doctor and they do what's called a challenge study, where in a controlled environment, in case you go into in case you have a very severe asthma attack, they uh they can fix you right away. But following the rules uh that the X caliber people, you're probably gonna have a lower level of sulfites than you would in a highly doped out commercial thing, anyway. And if she has no problem with that, she probably won't have any problem with yours.
Yeah? Yeah, yeah, I would tend to agree. We have do we have a caller? Oh, he was motioning it. Break time.
Oh, we're gonna go to commercial break. We'll be back with more cooking issues. This is Chris Young, co-author of Modernist Cuisine and co-founder of Chef Steps.com. We've just launched our free short course on spherification, a modernist technique that can imbue a flavorful liquid with the appearance of being solid, a culinary illusion that's broken when the spheres burst with flavor as they're eaten. Our free course offers helpful step-by-step demonstrations of reverse, frozen reverse, and direct spherification.
We also explore the science behind spherification so that you can go beyond our recipes and create your own to surprise and delight your family and friends. And as always at Chef Steps, you get the support of a friendly community of experienced cooks and world-class chefs who will answer your questions. If you're interested in learning modernist cooking techniques, 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 you'll find a lot you'll like. Sign up now at Chefsteps.com. And even if you're not a fan of us, you can go there.
You might like them anyway. Even if you hate us, you might like them, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay.
Uh we had uh oh Stas, I might as well get this with you going. You know, uh anyone who's a regular listener of the show knows that uh Nastasha does not enjoy uh the hipsters. Or really I mean, I like Brooklyn fine, but Nastasha also doesn't enjoy the Brooklyn so much, mainly because of the hipsters and the really bad roads. Yes, right? Yeah.
But you hate the I also hate the bad roads. I hate the bad roads. I don't hate I don't hate hipsters, but the roads are a joke. I especially don't like having to pay tickets to use them. But uh it's okay.
When's your court date? Uh you're supposed to write it on my calendar. I handed you the slip so that we wouldn't forget. Oh. We'll look it up when we get back to the land.
Uh next week I might be in jail. Who knows? Uh anyway, so Tony Brudori wrote in uh from the website, uh sending us from the website K uh XKCD, which is like a I love that website. Yeah, so why don't you tell us something about it since this is the first time I've seen it. XKCD, it's uh fantastic minimalist webcomic about uh science and math and things like that.
Love too. Yeah, so so uh we we like those things. Did you uh did you look at the comic? Yeah. Yeah.
So it's a comic uh with uh so it's a graph of uh time on the on the x-axis, and on the y axis is uh prevalence, right? Or as it's put here, how often I see, dot dot dot. Uh and it starts out, and it time is over the course of years. So this this is a this is a uh a plot over the course of years. And what's interesting is is that uh the first part, the first line in the graph is uh hipsters, how often I see them.
And uh it it follows um basically a logistic equation uh for uh growth, where uh it starts out in basically a log phase growth. That's it, you know, it goes into a log phase growth, and then after the log phase growth, uh it kind of plateaus out to a certain kind of uh stable population number with the carrying capacity of hipsters, presumably in in Brooklyn or wherever it is, right? For those of you that don't know what I'm talking about, logistics, well go to Wikipedia that uh uh then a similar, slightly lower, right, below the maximum number of uh hipsters, right? Uh is complaints about hipsters. So what's interesting is the carrying capacity for the complaints about hipsters, it's uh like a like you're you have a like a lag of uh of about a year while you're incubating the beginning of the of the complaints about hipsters, and then they go into their log phase of growth.
And they plateau out slightly below the actual number of hipsters. So there are always being more hipsters than there are complainers about hipsters, which is depressing from Nastash's point of view, because it means you can't win. Right, right. Then a slightly smaller and much lower carrying capacity with a much longer lag phase is complaints about the constant use and discussion of the word hipster. Yeah, right.
And then and then even it's still in the log phase, so we don't know what the final carrying capacity is, but presumably lower is complaints that every level of meta opinion on hipsters represents the same tedious navel gazing by insecure people, right? And then just starting, but with an extremely extremely high uh thing, plateaued out right away, like after a unit of one, is graphs making it all worse, which includes itself. It's a self-referential. So thank you for that. Thanks.
Uh and uh, you know, Randall Monroe draws that comment. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Is he is he a good fellow? Yeah, no, I've well I've been reading it for like eight years.
Oh, big fan. Nice. All right. Now, a couple of quickies. Aaron Morin writes it.
Morin or Moran? What do you think? Moran. Moran? Okay.
Writes in about the VAC master. Hammering the boys. I like that. Hammering the boys. Hammer Ariel and the boys today.
Okay. Uh I'd love to hear Dave follow up on the VAC master VP112 question he got about a month back in regards to uh why why did I why did I uh monster trucks that I don't know. Anyway. By the way, when I do that voice, what that voice is is the monster trucks. Yonker's raceway, no!
Uh question he got about uh a month back in regards to this particular model being c uh comparable to the Mini Pack or other uh you know commercial uh vacuum chamber vacuum machine. If you could go a little into detail as to where the VP model doesn't measure up uh even better. In my case, the machine would be used in residential uh applications and would never be used in a commercial setting. Thanks in advance, uh, Aaron um Moran from Edmonton, Alberta. Okay.
So again, I have never used it myself, and uh the issue with it is is that it doesn't have uh the same kind of uh very strong vacuum pump, and it also it has a much smaller chamber size than um is in any of the kind of commercial machines that I'm used to. Uh Hervé uh Maliber from the French Culinary Institute, the international what are they called themselves now? International Culinary Center. Culinary center, who uh has taken over my role there as being the tech guy, and he's more legit in Frenchiness. He's like a serious actual Frenchie.
Anyway, uh the Vacmaster people sent him a free one at the school to test. You know what we got? Cardopolis, cardopolis. Anyway, so like we got that's that's that's some language for Ninda for nothing. Anyway, so uh goose eggs.
So like I've never used one, so I can't make any real comments on it. Ervais seems to like it. My guess is that it won't handle uh he said he did some vacu infusion. Uh my guess is that it won't handle liquids very well. Uh it's gonna be difficult to clean because it's a uh you know uh uh diaphragm pump, so you're gonna have to I think, or maybe it's pissed in.
So you're gonna have to run it a long time to get any vapor that's trapped in it out. Um maybe possibly put a desiccant in near it. I don't know, to get rid of the stuff when it's sitting around. But it's just not going to be as fast or as baller or have as big of a thing. At home, Herva seems to think it's gonna work well.
I'm hesitant to recommend anything I've never used myself. That's fair. Yeah. Um Tom Fisher writes in about Coon Recon. Uh Dave, Nastasha, Jack, Joe, and now Eddie, although it's not in there, but I'm sure he would have called them out.
And if you knew Ariel was here, I'm sure you would have called her out too. Uh I've finally got a Coon Recon pressure cooker. During the first use, I noticed that after the valve began to rise, I was getting a quiet hissing sound with occasional wisps of steam. I like that word wisps of steam. Uh once the unit got up to pressure, the wisps of steam steam stopped, but the top valve continued to make a quiet hissing noise.
Twisting the valve cap slightly reduced the sound for a moment, but shortly it returned. Is this normal? Thanks, Tom. Okay. So for those of you uh and uh my my Coon Recon is at the lab.
I actually don't have a pressure cooker anymore. My electric one finally died. Yeah, so I have to take my pressure cooker back. Wow, poor me. Was it the the Kitchen Aid one that we uh Queas Nart that I hacked?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I I don't know what I did. It's like but it's like dead. Like it's not like it's just dead.
So I have to look at it. I could probably fix it. Whatever. We're not we're not talking about queas right now. Okay.
So uh Coon Recon uh has, or the old ones that I have have a like a silver face plate and then a uh a knob that pulls up and down. The knob that pulls up and down is a spring loaded valve that has two red lines on it that indicate the pressure that's in it. It's an actual pressure gauge. And it's hooked up to a uh a spring on the underside of the thing. As the steam pushes up, uh it pushes uh that valve up, and that what is what registers pressure.
If you were to lift the uh little kind of kind of plate, the guide plate out, the stainless one that surrounds that. There's also a second button on the Coon Recon that is a little metal piece and rubber that is a secondary safety. That guy is going to continue to hiss until it comes up to pressure, and then it should self-seal, right? Especially if you have a relatively new one. So what I typically do, because mine's old and I haven't replaced the rubber is I sit there and with the back end of an offset spatula, I just whack that thing until I seat it and it just stops hissing altogether.
That's the little that's the little button on the right. The actual pressure knob that moves up and down should not leak unless you over pressure it. Once you take it past the second ring and another about three eighths of an inch beyond the second ring or somewhere in that range, it's going to vent violently up through that pressure knot. And that's one of the safety features is that it starts venting steam through that. It should not vent steam through that prior to that happening.
If it is, uh it is simple underneath the red part when you have it disassembled, unassemble unscrew it, clean everything. I've done it once, you don't want to put like oil on it to make it smooth because what happens is the oil will tend to polymerize and gum up, and then you know you have other issues with it gumming up. Uh but just make sure that it's screwed down tightly and that all the parts are in order. But no, that should not leak. I mean, maybe make a make a tiny, but you shouldn't get steam.
That was a noise. They shouldn't make like a uh, it shouldn't make a lot of hissing. You definitely shouldn't see any steam, and you should be able to stop that button on the side that you is not visible normally when you're doing from hissing. Let me know if you're still having problems because um you know you having problems is interesting to me. Uh especially on a Kun Recon.
Uh Nicole Craig writes in about pasta uh from the restaurant Root in in uh in Nola, which I'm assuming means New Orleans, Louisiana. And not, you know, north of north of Louston. I'm kidding. Yeah, yeah. Uh I'm thinking of trying to reconstitute some house-made granola into a sort of pasta or possibly even a cracker.
The granola has some currants and raisins in it, not a lot. So I'm thinking of steeping this product in milk and then spreading it onto a sill pat and putting it into a dehydrator. Uh and I can't use a machine to make the pasta because of the oil in the oats. That's probably true, plus the sugar. Like, don't ever.
I've put sugared things into pasta. Whoa, whoa. And oily things, oh. No, no. That's a never do again.
What was the dough we fed into the pasta thing at the school and it just got sucked into the pasta thing and like wrapped around it like eight times. Oh no. And we couldn't get it out. Oh, I'm sorry. We couldn't get it out.
Remember that? We threw it out. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh yeah, yeah, it was a nightmare. And like you can't put water on the pasta machines to clean them.
Yeah, Stas is having memories. Memories. Yeah, yeah. Uh okay. So, yeah, so don't do that.
Uh so I'm also thinking of making gnocchi. Any suggestions on a good way to do that? Thanks, uh Nicole Craig. Uh, did you look up the restaurant there? Yeah, it's in New Orleans.
I'm gonna go there when I go down there. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh okay.
Here's my thoughts on that. Uh, one, most of the time, if you're gonna make a cracker or something with uh granola, you do it by cooking off the oats dry, then adding the granola-y crap to it. The honey, the sugar, the butter, uh anything like that. And those products are used as the binder to bind the product into uh a granola barish or cracker if you go really thin shape, right? So if you're dealing with uh product that's already been cooked and you want to make a cracker out of it, I think if you well, first of all, if you soak it in milk, you're gonna be taking away a lot of those products that are in it, and you need to add them back because that's all that's binding it, really.
I mean, you might get some kind of starch out from the from the oats that help bind it, but I'm not sure. But what you could do, you could probably blend it, uh, blend it, milk it, blend it, spread it thick on a silpat, dehydrate it, the sucker will probably hold together on the basis of what's already in there. Or you could do what uh Anna Ginsberg from Daily Cookie on the Cookie Madness website does, uh, and just add more butter, brown sugar, honey, uh, and syrup to the to the granola, which you can then powder, spread out, and then uh she does that no bake, so she lets it sit in a dehydrator, or you could do it like twil style in a dehydrator and dry the stuff out and make it thin. If you don't want to add extra sugar, you could probably also uh melt yourself uh, you know, some other you know, non s non-hyper sweet product like isomalt or something like that, melt it and tweel it out that way and make something really crunchy. Now, on the gnocchi, I was trying to find anyone that had a recipe for a uh gnocchi that contained pre-cooked um dry starch-based stuff.
And we all know that you know, like potatoes are put in, they're cooked in, but but I wasn't able to find anything that used a dry soaked cooked thing on uh on a gnocchi specifically, and I looked actually I'd look for my copy of my old Buggiali books, Giuliano Buggiali, because if anyone had one, he would have a crazy recipe for something like that. But but it's entirely possible, obviously, to soak uh to soak bready things and then add them back to new things. I'm gonna tell you this might work for a sweet style uh uh gnocchi. I I don't know how to do it, but a recipe that I used to make a lot, uh I when I I when my mom my mom had all her cookbooks in the basement back in the day. And I would uh go down and uh read them, including like the uh the was it Woman's Day Cooking Encyclopedia, which I read the hell out of.
Right? Read the hell out of that thing. And then uh my mom, like like right at the right when I was finishing high school, and I would come back from college and read recipes, including things to make uh while I was wooing my wife, uh, was uh gourmet's best desserts circa 1987. And on page 328 of that book, uh there's a recipe for steamed cranberry pudding with Grand Marnier sauce. And I used to make that thing all the time because I was obsessed for a little while with steamed puddings, but I wanted to do an American steamed pudding, not some sort of British thing.
And plus, I had even less patience then than I do now. So the idea of making like you know, a Christmas pudding and aging it for a year, I was like, the hell with that. Okay, age a pudding for a year. What the hell do I look like? You know, that's like a big chunk of your life when you're you know 19.
Uh so anyway, so uh the recipe for that, which I will uh which well I'll tell you so basically with the steamed pudding, the the upshot is is they use dried bread crumbs, they mix it back in with some flour, uh eggs and butter and a little bit of leavener and then steam it together and it holds together its shape. And it's classic to make it with a pre-cooked uh farinaceous product like breadcrumbs. But I'm sure granola would also work. So I'll give you their recipe real quick. Uh three and three quarters cup of cranberries and uh a half cup of blanched almonds, pulse those things to break them up.
Add a little more than uh uh one and three quarters cup of sugar, uh cinnamon, uh like three quarters teaspoon cinnamon, quarter teaspoon allspice, quarter teaspoon ground ginger, uh, and then uh mix that stuff all together. Now take your three crus of breadcrumbs, or in your case, pulsed out granola, uh maybe lighten it with a little bit of breadcrumbs, uh, three-quarters of a cup of butter, two thirds a cup of milk, and uh three whisked eggs, uh, and a tablespoon of baking powder, a little bit of salt if you need it, depending on what kind of butter you use. Uh mix those things together, combine the two things, fold them together, put them. Now you have something that would normally be a steamed pudding, but it would seem to me that you could probably poach that stuff out. If you had like a nice flavorful thing, or if you added some methyl cell or something to hold it together, you could probably poach them like a gnocchi dumpling, right?
Yeah. If you made it a little more, if you added a little more binder to it, you could probably figure out some way to poach those out, or to like like steam them or something. Yeah, or steam just little. Yeah, steam little pudding things. And then the glaze that they added, which is awesome, which you would just take uh you would take uh cranberries and a little more sugar, cook them down to make a cranberry sauce glaze, which you pour over the top, and then a grand marnier sauce, which is butter and grammarnier, like a like a Bourbon with Gram Marnier, which is ball, it's a ball or dish.
If you're actually gonna make the full pudding, you're gonna steam it for a couple of hours in a pudding thing. Make sure you let it cool sufficiently before you unmold it, or it'll just explode uh under its own weight when it comes out. But that's it's a good it's a good product. What? We gotta go.
Uh, they're cutting me off. Oh well, next time I'll talk about uh Rachel Dutton, who we met, who's like the microbiologist uh at Harvard, who has some interesting things to say about uh clush uh clostridium uh and cultures and salt rate uh raised bread and reading of cassava and the uh question we got in right before the show that James had about um agar clarified gins. So we'll get to that next week. Cooking issues. Thanks for listening to this program on Heritage Radio Network dot org.
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