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 are listening to Heritage Radio Network, broadcasting live from Bushwick Brooklyn.
If you like this program, visit Heritage Radio Network.org for thousands more. Cooking issues. Cooking issues. Hello, and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave All and your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live from New Orleans, Louisiana.
But the rest of the cooking issues crew is coming to you live from Bushwick, Brooklyn, with uh sweating in their chonies right now without air conditioning. How are you guys doing? Fine. Uh yeah, yeah. Well, we have uh in the studio today.
We actually have a full crew over there. We have uh I think we have do we have Jack Angelo in the engineering booth or uh No, just me today. Oh, he made you suck up the heat. Thanks, Joe. Uh, but in the uh actual uh little place where we do the show, we have Nastasha the Hammer Lopez, as usual.
We also have Peter Kim from MoFad to talk more of Mofad goodness with us, and Piper decided to go and take a hit with us today. How are you doing, guys? Fine. Good. Yeah, yeah, good.
All right. So listen, a note on uh a note on uh Mofad, the Museum of Uh Food and Drinks. This is the last cooking issue show before our Kickstarter ends. Kickstarter ends on this Saturday. And uh right now we're still pushing towards our goal.
We super duper need everyone's help on this. I mean, it's very critical that we uh make and break through this goal to get the puffing gun in the museum kind of on track. Peter, you want to say uh a few words here? Yeah, we've got four days. We need to raise over 14,000 of, you know, it's not just about launching this puffing gun exhibit, but it's really about generating momentum for the museum as a whole.
And uh, you know, we can't really get into the details here, but there's a lot more at stake than just this exhibit. Uh, there are a lot of uh, let's just say important people watching, and if we have a strong showing here, we show that there's broad support for a food museum here in New York, which I think there should be, uh, then a lot of great things are gonna happen for the project. This is really gonna help us rocket forward to opening up New York's first brick and mortar food museum. It's something we really believe in. We need your help.
Please get on to Kickstarter at Boom.mofad.org right away. Boom.mofad.org. We really need your help. Thanks, guys. You've already backed it, right?
You can always go in, manage your pledge, kick in a few dollars more. It's not gonna hurt. You don't have to only pledge whatever you pledged to get your t shirt or whatever. Am I right, Peter? That's right.
And actually, real quick story. I was on the phone with my brother the other day, and uh, you know, lamenting to him how stressful this whole process is. Um, and I was talking to my eight year old nephew uh Oliver, and Oliver uh basically was telling me how amazing the puffing gun looks and how he's so excited about seeing it. And then he said, I'll try to do uh a little impression. Uncle Peter, uh, Uncle Peter, I I looked in my piggy bank.
I have ten dollars. I want to donate ten dollars to the MoFed Kickstarter campaign, because I want to see a puffing gun. Uh Wow. Are you gonna are you gonna are you guys out there gonna disappoint that kid? Seriously.
My eight-year-old nephew, he wants to donate ten dollars. I'm not taking the ten dollars, but that is like I mean, basically, I think he's that he just gave away his whole life savings right there to MoFed. And so if an eight-year-old can do that, uh, you know, we've got awesome stuff. $30 gets you a great t-shirt, $50 gets you a tote, $300, and you can see Dave, Harold McGee, uh Wiley Dufrein, a bunch of other steps uh puffing whatever they want in the puffing gun, and we'll be doing some really interesting stuff there. Yeah, no one should be disillusioned when they're eight.
Nine. Nine is the is the year of disillusionment. Yeah, there you go. Yeah. Yeah.
Uh all right, let's I figured it's like let's see whether we can sweeten this up a little bit. People who have listened to the show for a while, uh, may remember several years ago when I lost a bet. And the bet was uh the bet was to uh whether or not someone could produce uh a raw chocolate that I thought was even marginally uh halfway decent and worth eating as chocolate, right? And if I lost, uh I would have to eat uh raw vegan food for a week. And I did.
And you know, no offense to people who eat raw vegan every day, but it was horribly unpleasant and wreaked havoc with my uh GI track. Let's put it that way. So I was gonna put this to you guys there in the studio. Can we think of an equally unpleasant thing that I can do? And then let's say, okay, I bet that we don't get more than $10,000 more than uh than than what we want.
So in other words, that we won't make it to 90. If we make it to ninety, I'll go through with whatever unpleasant thing that uh that we think we should do. What do you think? Finish your book on time. It's too late, my book's already late.
Busted. Busted. I can't finish something on time. It's already late. I mean we can create a new deadline.
Yeah, yeah, right. You can always create a new deadline. My question is something that the reader that the listeners care about, right? Like, is there anything unpleasant that I can eat, some like horrible, stupid diet that I can undertake for a week or two? Well, here are things I we know that Dave hates.
What does Dave hate? Dave hates raps. Dave hates natto, Dave hates cherries. Well, I don't hate them, I love them. I just can't have them.
Piper, you probably know better. What what other stuff does Dave hate? Um you could do 40 hard boiled eggs like cool hand luke. Well, that's more of a physical challenge. I gave that sort of thing up.
I mean, like that gave that sort of thing up when I was in college. I mean, I was that guy in college who uh I was that guy in college who uh would eat you know anything for like uh like two bucks. I always like so cheap. I once ate a gallon of salsa for I think three bucks. I ate like a couple of those uh, you know, like whole tea bags for like a dollar.
That was like I was that guy. That was me in college. That guy. The bar's pay. That was me.
Yeah. Uh so a gallon of salsa for three bucks for ninety thousand. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I'm not that guy anymore. So once you have kids, my wife's like, really?
You can't you can't do things that dumb because it uh you know it makes it sends the wrong message to the kids. You know what I mean? What about the lemonade cleanse? Oh, that actually be quite good. What's the lemonade cleanse?
It's like uh maple syrup and lemonade and uh cayenne pepper, and that's all you get. All day long. I mean, I could do that, that. That's just unpleasant, but it doesn't have me learn anything. It doesn't have me like is there anything that I've derided horribly?
Let's think about it for a couple minutes. And uh uh by the way, call your questions to sub one eight four nine seven two one two eight. That's 7184972128. I'm gonna read something in from uh one of our listeners and supporter of Mofad. By the way, since I don't know them personally, do you think it's Jean Doe or Zon Do?
Zhondo would be the better Twitter Twitter handle, right? Zon Doe? It is Zon Doe. And I've I've spoken with him extensively. This this guy has been a superstar, really helping us with the outreach.
Yeah. So he wrote in and said, uh, I've learned a lot from your cooking issue show over the several months listening to your podcast. I'm pretty close to being caught up in all the back episodes. Thank you for freely sharing your in-depth knowledge as well as making uh the methods and techniques so accessible. Also, the Mofab Kickstarter is a food education game changer, and I wish you all the best of luck in getting it back.
I'm doing what I can do to spread the word. Here are a couple of my thoughts on boom, which is the name of the Kickstarter, by the way. Uh on Twitter uh post requesting puffing ideas. I recall Sean Brock suggested uh I'm gonna stush I pronounce it the way you hate Faro. Nastasha hates it when I say pharaoh instead of pharaoh.
Anyway, faro and uh at Mark S. mentioned sorghum. Uh ideas are good, but what about encouraging grain uh farmers, chefs, etc. to donate interesting ingredients? And that's we an outreach program that would get more people excited about boom, it would be analogous to the communal oven back in the day.
I was wondering if you could possibly create your own grain in quotes to puff. I understand that puffing has to do with grain moisture content and the hull containing the grain. The moisture part is easy. Is there a food technology one could easily leverage to create a pseudo hole? Well, interestingly, here uh that is not that is how normal popcorn style stuff works, but the puffing gun doesn't require the hull.
The science behind the puffing gun and puffing in general. So when you're puffing a popcorn, what happens is you have starch and moisture, and you heat up uh the starch and moisture, and the moisture is trapped not just because of the starch, but because of the uh skin, the hull around the outside of the popcorn. Until enough pressure can build up that it ruptures that skin and boom explodes into popcorn. In the puffing gun, you don't need that layer because you just seal it tight and the whole thing goes under pressure. So there's no way for it to expand.
There's no way for it to boil or expand when it's inside of the gun because s pressure just simply mounts up. Then when you pull the lever, everything instantly puffs uniformly. So if you put popcorn in a puffing gun, it comes out as spheres. Uh Peter's like totally jacked for that because he's been like dreaming of these popcorn spheres since since we got the gun. We haven't put fired popcorn in it yet.
Uh but that's also why you can put dough-based things in, and that's how they used to make Cheerios. In fact, this gun was originally designed by Kellogg's to make Cheerios. So yes, you can make your own sort of uh mix of grains and other starches and puff them in that no problem. Right, Peter? Yeah, that's right.
Oh, uh all right, before I take the collar, uh uh Jondot finished out. Here's what he would like to puff azuki beans, black sesame, and rice. If it works, we could uh make a tasty mochi-inspired marshmallow treat. Please tell your listeners that I back MoFat's kickstorder and so should they, right? That's a good idea.
Caller, you're on the air. Hey, how's it going, guys? Going all right. Quick one for you. So I've heard you're uh you got a certain affinity for game and I'm a dude from Minnesota.
We kill a lot of deer up here, about like eleven a year. And my experience all of our cooking has been with uh using beef based recipes to uh and applying them to venison, which the results your mileage may vary. I was wondering if you had any suggestions as far as uh better ways to make use of uh all that game meat and uh like any thoughts you have. Well, you have a circulator? Um I do, yeah.
Yeah. So how's this stuff been coming out? Uh in other words, like when you do do the beef subs, I'm assuming you're doing them uh you're doing them in in a circulator, are they still coming out um how how are they coming out? Like what like tell me what tell me how the how the texture and the flavor of the stuff is coming out when it when it works. Are you killing uh are these younger animals or older animals by and large?
Hello? Hello? Collar? Alright, I think we had it. Are we back?
Alright, I think we're gonna have to hang up on this colour. What what happened? Collar dropped out. Oh man. Because I had I had a lot of interesting questions to ask the questions I wonder is by and large is he getting younger animals or older animals?
Because one of the issues with treating game like uh beef is that the beef that we get is r I mean no offense to beef, but relatively neutral in flavor compared to uh you know much older animals just because it's it's younger. And so game meats, the older they are the kind of more flavorful the more different kind of flavors they're gonna have. And if you're doing uh low temper sous vide with them, which is a great idea because you don't have to overcook it and you know you can kind of you know cook it very gently without overcooking it. The problem is is that some of these things can get kind of overwhelming when you cook them for a long time because some of those gamey flavors uh that come out of what fat there is and other things in the animal tend to accentuate uh over time as they sit in the bag. Uh and also certain older meats aren't gonna get tender no matter what you do, just because the suckers are tough.
I mean, that's the problem we had when we cooked uh we cooked that bear uh and we cooked the lion, as opposed to the yak, which is freaking delicious. Stas, you remember the yak, right? Yeah. That was delicious. Um, you know, I don't know about any specific uh, you know, to focus specifically on deer, because I unfortunately don't get enough of it to cook myself.
But when I get back to New York, I'm gonna take a look uh I'm gonna take a look at you know, I have the um after the hunt, which is John Folse's book on cooking uh Louisiana game that he shoots down here, and I know he has a big section on deer, so I'm gonna I'll check out to see kind of what he thinks about um uh using deer to its best advantage and then try try to kind of tech those ideas up. Piper, you you uh you guys have a lot of deer up in Vermont that you eat or no? Yeah. You ever look you uh you uh what what have you because the low temp stuff I've done on deer, uh you know, I've done I've done more elk than I've done deer because people have brought me more elk than deer. I've done some deer.
What like what kind of luck have you had with it on uh low temping it or recipes for it? I've never done low temp with it, but uh sausage it works really well. Yeah, everything tastes good in sausage, man. Why haven't you low temped it yet? Because you haven't been back there during deer season or what?
Yeah, I just haven't been back there in uh in a while. So you're gonna rectify that this uh this fall? Yes. I'll get my license. Yeah, all right.
Hey, really? You invite me up? Can I come up? We'll go out together? Why not?
All right, cool. Uh all right, so then we'll uh we'll we'll we'll get back on that. Okay. Um you guys come up with any good uh good, bad ideas for me. Look, the lemonade cleanse, I'll do it.
It's fine. I mean, if we decide on that, maybe someone can call in with something horrific for me to do. You could eat in Brooklyn for a month. Oh my god. That's just like that.
The problem with that is I just won't see my kids. See, that's the that's the thing. Like I can't just move to Brooklyn for a month. You can bring them. And I'm not the one that hates Brooklyn, that's Nastasha that hates Brooklyn.
Remember? Then she can eat in Brooklyn for a month. Well, she'll never do that. She would rather die. She would rather see all of us die.
She would rather kill you than eat in Brooklyn every day for a month. Am I right, Stas? No. No, what? You wouldn't want to eat in Brooklyn?
Or you'd rather you would do it? You would do it to save Piper's life? Sure. Wow. Nastash, you are you are a good person.
Uh Rory Mearns writes in, pronounced like Burns with an M. Rory Mearns from New Zealand. Hello to the entire cooking issues team and Indie Jesus. Would Indie Jesus listen to cooking issues? Would any form of Jesus ever have any sort of cooking issues?
Well, Rory, I don't know if you're aware of this, but uh back in the 90s, I think it was, uh, the group King Missile answered this uh in a song they wrote called Jesus is Way Cool. And uh if you uh remember Jesus is Way Cool, he can bake a cake better than anyone. Remember that? You guys remember that song? No.
You guys don't know anything about King Missile. I know King Missile, but I know King Missile, but I don't know the song. They had that one uh Detachable Penis, yeah. Everyone listens to Detachable Penis and they don't listen to Jesus' way cool. You can't listen to Detachable Penis without you know going further and listening to the Jesus is way cool.
It's all about how Jesus, like, you know, would be awesome, like to hang around with. You know what I mean? Because he's way cool. Anyway, uh I assume that's what he was uh referring to. Anyway, uh he's traveling from New York, uh to New York from New Zealand around September, October this year, and I had a couple of questions.
One, I had some questions a while back about a red pepper sauce that you and your listeners helped me out with. Uh, this is uh product that is sold here commercially, that's New Zealand. So it's totally legit. I'd like to drop off a sample for the cooking issues team to taste and critique if they'd like. I'd love to hear your opinions on this stuff.
Where would I be able to drop it off? Roberta's Booker and Dax, somewhere else. Matt, just drop it at the bar, Booker and Dacks, right, Stas? Yeah. Yeah, make sure you put my name on it, or those those fools there will just eat it.
They'll just eat it and be like, oh, we ate this hot sauce. Don't know why I had your name on it. Am I right? Yes. Yeah.
Okay. Two jackets. While in New York I was hoping what does that mean? Yeah, yeah. Seriously, they're like vultures.
Vultures and jackals. Any sort of scavengers. Some fly, some crawl. Uh while in New York, I was hoping to pick up a katsubushi shaver, uh, shaver, and hopefully some quality katsubushi. The stuff is not available this far down under.
Can you tell me where I can go for this? I don't mind spending a bit if I know it will be quality and will last. Okay, so for those of you who uh who don't know uh kind of what we're talking about here, uh Katsobushi is the you know the name of the shaved uh bonito flakes, bonito flakes, which aren't really bonito, they're uh yellow skipjack, they're skipjack tuna. But uh so you know the the the flakes are the bonito flakes that you use to make dashi and innumerable other uh delicious things in Japanese cuisine. Uh so you you know you call that thing uh well various incarnations.
There are different words for it at every step in the process, katsobushi. So the way it's made is they catch the fish, uh, they uh cook the crap out of the fish, they get the bones out of the fish, they dry the fish, they smoke the fish, they they let it rest, they smoke it, they let it rest, they smoke it, they spray some uh mold stuff on the outside for the really high they can sell it just right away then, but then that's the lower end stuff and then the higher end stuff. They they put a mold on, they age it, and really, really good stuff. You pick it up and you clink it together, and it sounds like uh kind of like wood, like tink tink tink. Amazing stuff.
My wife bought me some uh from Japan when she went there maybe twelve years ago, and it's the first time I had the actual thing in my hand and not just the flakes. Uh thing was I needed a shaver, much as you do now. The only place I know you can walk into New York and in New York and buy a real uh it's called I believe it's called um a Kuriki so it'd be called like a Katsubushi uh sorry not uh Kizuri um uh Katsu Bushi uh Kazuri and so they the one that they have is at Corin. You should go to Corin anyway. It's a nice store down in Tribeca and it's like you know candy for it's like an amazing place.
You know, you guys have all been there, right? Yeah. Yeah. What are your thoughts? It's awesome.
Get your knife sharpening. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean it's an o do you say it's a knife store. See for see people who don't know Piper would be like it's a nice store meaning ah how good could it be?
It's a knife store. He's like it's a knife store. How bad can it be? who's by the stream. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Anyway, so uh go to go to Corin. Um I don't know how the exchange rate is. I mean Corin is, you know, it's more expensive than it was, you know, five years ago because um you know it's our exchange rate's horrible, but I don't know what the exchange rate is right now. The the prices there because they bring the stuff in from Japan are directly tied to whatever our exchange rate with Japan happens to be at that time. But they sell it and I looked online before I came over here and it's about eighty six dollars.
Now what it is now you can also go by the way they don't sell food. So you're out of luck actually buying that item and the sad news is I have never seen anywhere in New York uh good quality of the solid to purchase of uh the actual katsubushi thing. Um now there are chefs who say they can get it but I'm not really hooked into the sushi uh suppliers right and none of the people that kind of were you know that I worked with when I was learning a lot about um cutting techniques, Nikijime techniques or even when I was doing you know a lot of things with the Gohan Society, none of those people really shaved their own uh flakes at their restaurants that I know of and so and and then when you asked them for sources they were very secretive I guess because there's a limited supply so they never told me where to go get the good stuff. You can go to Sunrise Mart, which is kind of a local Japanese mart, there's a couple of them in New in New York and they a couple of years ago like four or five years ago started carrying um the actual solid ones but they weren't the super highest quality ones like we you know like we saw when we were in Tokyo which were amazing. Alright.
Second thing is there's extr oh by the way the the shaving block they also at at sunrise sell a really crappy little uh shaver made of plastic and metal stay away from it's useless you can don't don't don't get it. Now if you go on the internet and you look at people shaving it by the way what this shaver looks like is it looks like you took a wooden block plane, flipped it upside down and put it on a box and you shave on top of the box. Almost like a mandolin or a Ben Renner, right? Only it is really sturdy and solid and beautiful because it's you know one of those Japanese things that of course they're going to make it sturdy and beautiful and solid and it has to shave this thing which is incredibly hard this wood like uh piece of dried smoked fermented molded fish. Now I looked at some people who were uh you know doing their YouTube stuff YouTuber y in English and all of them were doing horrible horrible jobs.
And and by the way when I use mine I do a horrible horrible job. The issues are that the actual moisture content of the katsobushi is critical to getting the shaving right. Otherwise you get little scrum blings of nastiness or like kind of gummy peels. Needs to be just right. Also the technique you use in shaving has to be just right.
Also, you know, if you're looking at a katsubushi, and you guys all use it, so you know what I'm talking about. Well, if you look at katsuobushi, or if you look at the bonito flakes, we'll call them, you'll notice that a lot of the ones that you buy have kind of a darker stripe running through it. You guys notice that? Yeah. So that's the that's the um that's the chi ai line.
That's the uh the the blood line that's in the fish. And so you can buy uh two types, well many, but two main types of these bonito flakes other than the quality ratings, and that is you can get them chi aiari, which means there's a bloodline in it, or chianuki meaning there's no bloodline in it. And one thing I've never been able to figure out is whether or not they do some sort of procedure to the actual dried fish and pop out that bloodline or do they uh just shave it in a way that they're not shaving that part of it when they shave that other stuff and they charge more. I have no idea because no one in English has mentioned this stuff. Now the good news is uh once you once you get a hold of this stuff you can learn how to do it if you can watch a bunch of stuff.
There's an amazing set of videos but they're only in Japanese and I wish someone could translate some of the things. And they're on go to YouTube and search on Fushi taka F-U-S-H-I-T-A-K-A. They have a three-part series and you can see it. They're the ones that have dot M O V in the title. So even you know people like me who don't understand any sort of uh j you know Japanese characters at all you can find these and they're worth watching even if you can't speak a lick of Japanese because the visuals in it kind of show uh how it's done.
Most interestingly is no one in English that I can see publishes how to properly adjust this cutter once you get it. You need a wooden or leather mallet. And what they do is they set the blade in and then they whack on it with a mallet to get the adjustment just right. And in the video they show you exactly uh how to do it, how to adjust it right, and how to adjust it up or down if the shavings that are coming out of it uh aren't proper. So I highly recommend washing that.
And they also meant they also show in visual pictures, thank God, that you want to store uh that you want to store them at fifty percent humidity at about 20 degrees C or in a fridge that's wrapped uh in plastic and then in a zippy. Now, another thing is they I know that some people, Wiley told me, Dufrain told me once that they some people he'd seen who had them wrapped them in paper towels, I think moist paper towels, and nuked them for a second. And then in this video I saw them and they had a problem heated over a flame. So I don't know if there's a a trick there or not. Maybe someone who speaks Japanese could watch these videos and kind of tell us what's going on, but uh there you have it.
So I can give you some love on the actual shaver, but not on the high quality fish itself. We'll have to find someone else who can find us a good source of that. Maybe someone will write in. Okay. Three.
Well in New York, uh, where would I be able to pick up a dual probe thermometer gadget like those on the Chef Step store? You know the yellow looking things with replaceable probes that everyone seems to use for sous vide. Uh thanks uh for keeping up the good work. I'm looking forward to experiencing all the great food that America has to offer, including American country ham, something I never even heard of before listening to your show. Uh regards Rory Murns.
Now on the on the probe, the only place I really go uh to buy kitchen equipment like that in New York is uh JB Prince. Now, JB Prints i y again, that's another place everyone should go. You guys have all been to JB Prince, right? We have love for JB Prints. JB Prince, um they don't carry a dual probe thermometer.
And the other thing about JB Prince is you know, like they g they get a wrap from sometimes from people for being expensive, but the truth of the matter is they only carry kind of uh high end products, and so you can always get something cheaper. You're like you're not gonna be able to get something at JB Prince that's the same price as the one on the Chef Step uh website. Um but they do have a single probe uh thing. The other thing when you're buying a thermocouple probe, a lot of people on like Amazon, for instance, will will say that they have a hypodermic probe that works for Sous vide, and whoever wrote that must have never cooked a damn thing in their entire freaking lives because they they give you a probe that's way too wide and that when you puncture the bag doesn't reseal properly. Piper, you've seen that before, right?
Where someone says this is a hypodermic probe and it's it's more like a hammer. We used to put a little piece of rubber over the hole. Yeah, you have to put rubber over the hole anyway, no matter what kind of probe you use. But the ones that like that you had at WD were you know sub millimeter probes. They were thin and extremely fragile, by the way.
So you never want to use it to check deep fryer oil because it can melt out the uh the thermocouple connections, the actual place where it's bonded together and you the thing is ruined. And those things cost well over, those cost like a hundred bucks or over, uh, like almost anywhere you go. There are things called hypodermic probes that are only a little bit thinner than uh than you know, like a standard instant read, and that you know wouldn't would cause way too big a big of a hole. They're like well over twice as big as the actual hypodermic probes. So I recommend going to JB Prints and looking at the hypodermic probe they have.
But a secret trick if uh no one ships the product you want to New Zealand is uh you can use your New Zealand uh Amazon account, I think, to order on U.S. Amazon and have the stuff prime shipped to your hotel. And I've done that when I do events even within the United States. I've had stuff prime shipped to the hotel where I'm gonna stay because you know in advance where you're gonna be, and you can ship anything you want from the U.S. there, like that, and hotels will usually hold it, which is a good technique.
But you should definitely go by JB Prince, and you should definitely go by uh Corin. And if you want to see a really good bookstore, you should go by Kitchen Arts and Letters, right? Anywhere else good that I should think about? Guys, they don't care, they're too hot. They can't even think straight over there.
Okay. Uh Joshua writes in, I have ropey yogurt. Nastasha, is there anything more disgusting in your mind than ropey yogurt? Nope. Is that a new one?
I'm gonna start actually, Piper, you have to buy this. There's a yogurt I'll talk about in a minute called Caspian Sea yogurt, uh Matsoni Matsuni, depending on how you pronounce it, that is meant to be ropey, and we can get the culture and make it, and then just make Nastasha look at ropey yogurt all day long. Won't that be fun? I like different textures. I know you do.
That's like the McGee thing. The McGee thing, now this goes back to like something you know, McGee uh did a long time ago when we started doing the McGee cooking class. One of the things he said was, uh very early, he was interested in talking about is well, bad textures are only bad because we assume they're bad. What if you assume that that texture is good and then accentuated? And so that's when he really started pushing this idea of stretchy ice cream with Celep Danderma, right?
And you know, kind of you know, created a uh a whole thing around Celep becoming popular. He also said, Well, what if you really wanted ice cream to have giant crystals in it? Why does ice cream have to be smooth? And he, you know, showed the uh this French ice cream called like pin pin pin needle ice cream that I have to say I'll I'm with him in theory, but I didn't like the pin needle ice cream very much. You guys remember that one?
Not really. You don't remember it or you didn't like it? I don't remember it. Ah man, it's just looks like in one ear and out the other on people. Uh whatever.
So the whole point is is that if you push a texture in a certain way on purpose, it can be nice even though it's not what you're expecting. So there's this rope, uh, there's this yogurt that's ropey, that's meant to be ropey, uh, and and the other interesting thing about it is that it uses a melophysic uh sorry, mesophilic culture, meaning that the culture uh goes at low temperatures. You don't need a yogurt maker to do it. You can culture it at room temperatures and it gets this weird ropey uh yogurt. You can buy cultures for it online.
But anyway, back to the question uh that Josh had. Joshua had. Uh I've been making yogurt recently and have had several batches which turn out a bit ropey slash snot-like. They taste fine, but the texture is not what I would like. My typical procedure is to take milk with a bitter powdered milk added up to 180 degrees Fahrenheit, kills all the stuff that's in, right?
Cool to 110 degrees Fahrenheit, and add one tablespoon of starter yogurt per quart and incubate at 110 degrees Fahrenheit for six to eight hours. Any idea what causes this rope-like texture? Well, I've never had it happening before, but according to the by the way, ropey texture, well, I'll read you what it is. According to the sensory evaluation of dairy products, edited edited by Stephanie Clark, Michael Costello, and Floyd W. Bodyfeld.
How often is that guy's name? Floyd Bodyfeld. And uh Marianne Drake, uh, who's very well known. There's uh on page 208, it says there are five major causes for ropey yogurt. Improper gums, meaning improper thickening devices that you're added, but you're not adding a thickener, so that's not your problem.
Uh microbial contamination, uh, which is probably what's going on. Uh yogurt cultures containing polysaccharide-making bacteria. By the way, all these things add to the same thing. Improper setting temperatures and too much sugar. Now, too much sugar probably is not what you're doing.
All of the rest of the other ones basically uh add up to this. There's some hydrocolloid being formed in, you know, polysaccharide being formed in your yogurt that's causing the ropey-like texture, right? And either you added that polysaccharide because you're using a thickener or gum, in which case you probably misadded some pectin or something like that that's causing a ropiness in it. Have you ever had a pectango ropey in a yogurt application piper? No.
What about carragen and scopey? I never had a carrageenango ropey. No, the uh xanthine goes ropey. Yeah, xanthan goes ropey, but pectins when they go bad in certain acidic environments can go ropey if they're not fully set. But you've never had it happen in yogurt?
No, I never encountered it in yogurt. Okay. Uh so all of these things uh basically point to the fact that there's a polysaccharide happening. Now the question is, is it contamination like a contaminant, bacteria uh or whatever that's floating into your yogurt and causing the ropiness? Or is it the actual yogurt culture that you're using uh that's doing it?
Now it turns out that you know yogurt most typically is a combination of a um I I can't pronounce it, so like I'm gonna say it and it's gonna be wrong because I've only ever read it, I've never pronounced it. But it's a lactobacillus delbrucci, I think it's pronounced, uh bulgaricus, right? That's the one thing uh that does it. And then the other um uh the other one is uh Streptococtus uh thermo thermophilus. These are the two that are used in normal kind of higher temperature yogurts, like the one that you're doing.
Now, the lactobacilica, the lactobacillus can like that strain can be either be a kind that produces uh extracellular ropey polysaccharides or one that produces smaller unit polysaccharides that don't form a ropey texture. Surprisingly, you actually want a bit of that ropiness, but you don't want so much of the ropiness that it becomes ropey. So uh the the trick there is um you're probably uh maybe uh doing it at a temperature that's favoring the uh the ropiness, or you're letting it go too long before you chill it down to fridge temperature to kind of stop that acceleration, and you're favoring the balance of the ropey uh ones over the other one. So you could just try switching your starter culture. Uh you could try making sure, like covering it, make sure you're not contaminated, uh, or you could try uh maybe shifting your temperature up a degree or two and then chilling it faster when you're done.
I don't know if any of those are gonna work, but take a look into that. What do you guys think about that? Anything? Anything? You could try uh switching the milk source to the problem with milk source?
Well, I mean it could be uh contamination that is existing in the milk before he starts. Well, you heats it up to 180. Most most everything is gonna most everything that's gonna produce a polysacchar like that's gonna croak out before 180. Yeah. Just thinking about uh eliminating uh potential sources of contamination first.
True, true, true. Gotta eliminate contamination always. Uh okay. Um, second question. I'm also interested in making a lean bread, meaning, I guess, I guess by lean bread meaning only yeast, water, flour, uh salt.
Um, like a French bowl, with about 50% of the flour as milled brewer's malt, both base malt and specialty kiln malts in order to pair with beers of similar grain bill. Would I need to kill any enzymes in the malt to make this work? Are there any different concerns with working with barley flowers? Any help is much appreciated. Uh okay, well, so this is this is interesting because um because there's people out there who cook with nothing but sprouted grains, right?
And so presumably these have a lot of diastatic uh activity from the enzymes that they're converted when you sprout it. Uh you know, there's companies that produce a hundred percent sprouted things. Uh but then on the other hand, when you read recommendations for um for baking, if you're actually using diastatic malt powder, right, then they uh advise against not adding too much because then it's gonna convert too much of the starch to sugar and you'll get kind of gummy results in your bread. So I don't know where the balance lies. Because some people are using a hundred percent sprouted grains, and then some people are cautioning against using uh more than a small amount of uh of um you know uh diastatic malt powder.
I will tell you this, from experience, barley loaves in general are dense little suckers. Uh, you know, they're they're dense it like a hundred percent barley loaves are some dense. And especially the barley that you're using in brewing hasn't been pearled, it's got the husk still on it, and that's gonna be like th like the the the part of the brand there is gonna be like a paparama on your on your gas cells and your bread. And so like if you're doing whole grain kind of unpearled uh barley, I'm assuming that you're gonna be in the area of some dents. Uh and so you're gonna wanna soak the hell out of them, uh, maybe soak them overnight and then grind them that way instead of instead of or maybe pre grinding them like you would for mashing, then uh let them soak in some water and then grinding them further so that the so that the husks have uh you know enough time to hydrate properly.
Um so I you know, I I I'm kind of at a loss here. I've never done it, uh, but I'm assuming it'll work. Any of you guys have any thoughts? I mean Peter Reinhardt has a lot on sprouted uh sprouted wheat flour, um, but I don't have a lot, you know, the I don't have a lot on this. What do you guys have?
Is it gonna increase your yeast activity significantly during the uh the rising? Hugely. I mean that's why you add diastatic malt powder in the first place, is to convert in a in a long fermentation time uh you know situation like in a sourdough or something that's gonna be retarded in the fridge. You want to have a uh you know a continual supply of yeast for I mean sugar for the yeast to feed on while they're doing their stuff. And so adding the you know, adding the diastatic malt uh will continuously break down like some of the starch a as a food for the yeast.
You just don't want to overdo it. But then on the other hand, you have people baking bread that's a hundred percent with this stuff. So I'm gonna need some help from s from some some people out there. I don't know whether it's just a difference because there's so much more higher enzymatic activity in diastatic malt powder versus like your average sprouted grain. But you know, if you want the flavor, what I would do is I would kill off a section of the stuff and then have the like a section of your of your, you know, heat it, kill off a section of the end uh enzymatic activity, and then grind up some and leave it with the enzymatic activity.
Um, naturally flour, when you have it, some of the stuff was sprouted because it's very rare for you to have, you know, completely uh pure flour. When they're measuring the strength of flour, they use something called the falling number where they take up make a warm slurry of flour and they drop a rod through it and determine how fast it goes down. And what that's a measure of is how much residual enzymatic activity there is in the flour and therefore how much viscosity is broken down by uh the amylase is working on uh the flowers as they're there, but it's not a number that most of us have in it. I wish I had more information on this, but um go take a look at um go take a look at anything that Peter uh Reinhardt has written. He's written a lot of excellent books on bread and he's become over the past couple of years uh kind of a proponent of using sprouted grain uh flowers, so he might have more information.
And uh there's a good section on the technical uh uh aspects of flour on bread, a baker's book of techniques and recipes by Jeffrey Hamelman, and a lot of that one's available in Amazon search inside, so you can go to that. Uh lastly, uh Adam Milgram writes in on food safety. Hey Nastasha, Dave and the team, I was wondering if you could help me work out uh if there is a way to tell definitively if something lurking in the back of my fridge is okay to eat or to do something to make it safe. Two recent examples. I had some chicken stock in there for two plus weeks, and it looked and smelled fine, but the prevailing wisdom on the internet is that it only lasts for three to five days.
Three or five days seems kind of short, but two weeks plus, man. Okay. The other was stewed fruit. Again, smelled fine and no signs of mold or anything, but I have no idea how long it's been hanging around, maybe a month. Is there a process you can do to render anything safe?
Uh e.g. bring it to X temperature for Y minutes, so that all you need to worry about is taste, or are there other nasties that I need to worry about? Finally, is there any way to test things that you can't easily heat, e.g., mayo, cheese, hummus, etc. FYI, my wife is pregnant. So food safety is becoming an increasingly important issue recently.
Thank you for your help and your awesome podcast. Adam. Now listen, Adam, when your wife is pregnant, don't fool around. Forget the stewed fruit. Just pitch all that crap.
Go crazy. Go ape in your kitchen. You know what I mean? It's like, here's the thing. Like m m most likely nothing is gonna ever happen to you.
However, like now is not the time where you want an incautious food mistake to c you know, cause a problem when your wife is pregnant. You guys backing me up on this? I love how close to the edge this dude lives. Yeah, right? I mean, like he's like, Yeah, I got a pregnant wife, I got this like three-week old chicken stock.
Yeah. Get the new chicken stock. I'm just saying. Like, I went kind of over the topic because, you know, like the consequences of making a mistake at that point are like, you know, I bleached it, I bleached the hell out of everything whenever I was cooking the one good thing, by the way, uh, I would just say there's a pitch, and I've said this before on the show many times. If you don't already own a circulator, when uh when you or your or your wife uh are or you know, close family member are pregnant is the best time to get a circulator if you don't already have it, because then you can still have your rare steaks and you can still have your uh runny poached eggs even when you're pregnant because you can cook them to a hundred percent food safety.
Just a little pitch for getting a circulator, right? Anyway. I mean I used to do that whenever I didn't have a circulator. I think I had a circulator when my second son was born, so I made that stuff for my wife. But I made that stuff, you know, for anyway, I make that stuff for pregnant people because that's that's awesome.
It's an awesome awesome little trick uh to help pregnant people uh keep a little bit of uh food normalcy in their life. Okay. Uh now back to your question at hand. Here's the issue. Um most bacteria uh don't like to uh grow in the refrigerator.
And in fact, like that the temperature zone for the refrigerator is chosen such that uh you know things don't grow in it or they don't grow in it very rapidly. Now there are bacteria that do grow in the fridge uh that are known to grow in the fridge. Listeria is one of them. And listeria is one of the ones that you really, really, really, really, really don't want to expose your wife to when she's pregnant. Uh now the lucky thing about listeria is that if you take something out of your fridge that's in there, right, and it's had listeria growing on it, then you can uh kill it, wipe it out by just heating the crap out of it, right?
Because listeria doesn't produce any uh any anything that can survive heating. It doesn't produce a toxin uh that you know that that you know that stays in the food after it's been heated. So all you need to do is heat it sufficiently to destroy the listeria, and then that food is fine. The problem is going to be with things that produ there's so there are certain uh bacteria that produce enterotoxins, things that you take into your body that uh the that are an actual chemical that causes food poisoning that aren't just uh you know the effect of having uh uh you know the actual uh bacteria inside of you. And some of those are destroyed by heat and some aren't, right?
And the the the further complication is is that there are certain strains of some of these bacteria that normally don't grow in the fridge, but uh that there are certain strains that will grow, albeit very slowly, in a fridge. And so if you push something for a long time, right, you know, you can uh get into a situation where these things can grow to levels that are problematic for you. Now, um the the general term for bacteria that grow in the fridge at low temperatures is cycrophilic. I don't know why they call it cycrophilic and not cryophilic or something like that, but it's called cyclophilic because I guess that's the Greek for cold or something like that. Uh and psychophilic bacteria are the ones that ruin your milk, right?
Even though it's in the fridge, the milk goes bad, those are psychophilic. Those are spoilage bacteria. They're not gonna they're not gonna hurt you. The dangerous ones though are a subsection of the psychophilic bacteria that are called uh psychotrophic. And the thing with those is is that they are actually mesophilic bacteria, ones that grow in kind of normal temperature ranges, that can also retain some of their uh uh their their nasty growing habits in the fridge.
And those guys, there are strains of those from your common ones that we always get. For instance, um uh there's a uh uh there's a paper you should take a look at called The Incidence of Foodborne Pathogens in Domesticated Refrigerators. Uh domestic uh not domesticated, that'd be crazy. Like you have a wild refrigerator and a domesticated refrigerator. What am I a dunce?
Anyway, domestic refrigerators uh by V Jackson, 2007. Here's what it said. The interior services of household refrigerators are at risk of becoming contaminated with food-borne pathogens, increasing the risk of cross-contamination to other food items, including higher to r uh higher risk ready to eat foods. Um, so they they went and they looked at 342 uh domestic refrigerators, and uh here's what they had to say. Camphylobacter, salmonella, and achuria coli uh O157H7 were not recovered from any refrigerators.
But Staphylococcus aureus, which produces uh a, by the way, a uh non-heat labile um uh enterotoxin, was uh recovered from 6.4% of the refrigerators, the stereal monocytogenes uh and uh regular kind of E. coli uh from 1.2% of refrigerators, uh Yersinia and uh enteracolic uh and I can't pronounce it, your ursinia, right, from 0.6% of the uh uh refrigerators. Uh and as a result, uh and as recovered species can survive and grow in refrigerations or conditions of mild temperature abuse, such pathogens may transfer to and develop to clinically significant numbers uh in food in domestic fridges. So they can grow a little bit, so I wouldn't, but again, these are like ones that are sitting there and they can form kind of biofilms and get together with the you know the normal uh pseudomonas, which are like you know, the ones that ruin your milk. Uh and so I would just be wary of uh, you know, most these things aren't going to kill you, but you don't want to give them to your to your wife, you know.
Uh in addition, I did some more research and some of the like if you have like temperature abused rice, you can get uh B serious, Bacillus serious, which is one of my favorite words for a pathogen. Uh and that, apparently some strains of it can grow at low temperature. So you really just want to I I wouldn't mess around. What do you guys think? Don't mess around, right?
Get a chest freezer. Get a chest freezer, freeze the hell out of everything. But cooking the snot out of everything will get rid of anything that will actually kill you. I don't believe the enterotoxins do life-threatening stuff, but you don't want to, but don't take my word for it. I also everyone hesitates to make uh kind of like pronouncements on things like that where you know safety is a giant issue.
Oh, okay. Now back to before we leave, because we're about to leave here, cutting it short so that these guys don't sweat themselves to death. What is it that I'm gonna do? Like what like we gotta decide this right now. Like if we make if we make ninety thousand I got some ideas.
Yeah, I guess I I guess I could do the lemonade cleanse, but that's just that's just an absurdity. That's just a physical challenge. I don't have to learn any new cooking techniques or do anything kind of interesting. It's not like going raw vegan. I mean, that was kind of the be all end all, huh?
I mean, I can do that again. There's gotta be some fad diets, right? Like paleo, you know, I think online paleo. I've been looking at it. I don't know, man.
You tell me, brother. There's um there's also stuff like the baby food diet. Uh what the hell is that? Uh I guess you uh you replace two meals a day with jars of baby food. Um, but that's just absurd.
That's not like that's not like a challenge. It's just ridiculous. That's just like, you know, can I eat something that tastes bad? Well, it's also, I mean, you're you're doing some investigation into a diet that actually has some traction with some people in the US. Should we do paleo?
Is paleo difficult to s to stick to, though, or is it easy to stick to? Uh do you know what's in the paleo diet? It's like mostly raw meat, I think. All right, here's the thing. All right.
Uh if we hit 90,000, I'm gonna do paleo for a week. If we hit a hundred thousand, I'm gonna do paleo for a week, and then lemonade cleanse for a week. If we do a hundred and ten thousand dollars, I'm gonna do raw vegan again for a week, paleo for a week, and lemonade cleanse for a week. You got that, guys? Is that sound fair?
Yeah, you'll be at your ideal weight in no time. So the question is you have to do it in order. Like what the worst order would be to do lemonade cleanse, then raw vegan. No, the worst would be worse would be raw vegan, then uh paleo, then lemonade cleanse. Right?
That would just be like my body'd be like, what? What? Um, uh, or this is the first time you're tuning in, whatever. I never, never, never welch on a bet. Let me tell you something.
I take bets very seriously. If I say something like this, I'm not gonna I'm not that guy who's gonna sneak in some real people food in the middle of my like raw vegan week or the middle of my paleo week, right? Like that's not that's not my style. I'm gonna take it, I'm gonna go ape on it, I'm gonna report it back on cooking issues. So tell everyone that you want me to suffer for uh maximum three weeks straight on this.
And let's get some money in, let's get this thing kickstarted, let's get our stuff going. It's important for the museum, which hopefully is gonna be important to all of us in the years rolling forward. Uh thanks for stopping by, guys, and 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.
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