Today's program has been brought to you by Fairway Market, like no other market, a New York City institution that sells the best local, national, and international artisan foods for prices that can't be beat. For more information, visit fairway market.com. You are listening to Heritage Radio Network, broadcasting live from Bushwick Brooklyn. If you like this program, visit HeritageRadion Network.org for thousands more. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues.
This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live from Bubba Bubba Ba Bub Bushwick! Yes, we're bubba back. Hey Stas, how are you doing? Okay. Yeah?
Uh-huh. Good to have us all here. At the air conditioning, they must have fixed it, huh? Yeah, for you. Oh, nice, just for me.
Stas like for me, they just let me sweat my took a salt. Hey, hey, and the engineering guys, we're all here today. How you guys doing? We're good. I'm speaking for everybody.
We're good. Oh, nice. I like to speak for everyone over there. Listen, so since we last spoke on the air, Mofad made its uh goal on the Kickstarter. Yay!
Uh yeah, in fact, we made it through it. And if you go to the Kickstarter page, you can see uh what we did, and our numbers were actually slightly better than that because a couple of um people donated from foundations, uh, you know, personal foundations that can only give checks. So I think it's there too. I'm super excited. And what that means is that in late August, uh we are actually gonna wheel this sucker out and uh gonna blow some stuff up on the streets, you know, in front of the kids.
Kids love the blowing up stuff, right? Mm-hmm. And uh we're gonna have when's the puffing party. Do you remember Stas? Yes, August 13th.
Yeah, and there's uh I believe that there's still space available. I don't know how we're gonna sell it. Go to MoFad.org. That's MoFed.org for more information. But it should be fun.
We got a whole bunch of Andy Rickers gonna be there. A lot of good people. Is Why are they coming? Uh yeah. I think so.
Anyway, a lot of good people are coming. I don't want to meet if I start mentioning people, then uh you mention me, man, me, so I'm not gonna mention anyone, right? Okay. Corner question two, seven one eight, four nine seven two one two eight. That's seven one eight four nine seven two one two eight.
By the way, uh, we made good enough numbers on it that I have to do that lemonade cleanse. We now yeah, anyone what's the exact deal on the lemonade cleanse? It's uh two tablespoons fresh squeezed lemon juice. Yeah. Two tablespoons of maple syrup.
Yeah, uh one tenth teaspoon cayenne pepper, and ten ounces filtered water. You have to drink it six or more servings daily. The only other options are a salt water flush of two teaspoons salt mixed in a quart of water in the morning, and herbal laxative tea at night if needed. Where do you where do you flush that? Is that go in the in the front end or in the back end of the salt water flush?
After this, you should slowly ease back into eating solid food, starting with items such as vegetable soup, followed by fruits and vegetables. Oh my gracious. How long do they say to do it? Four to fourteen days. Ah, so I'm right in the sweet spot there.
Seven days in the sweet spot. That's gonna suck. So uh uh Stas and I have to figure out uh kind of a week where I don't have to do any cocktail development and where I have no demos. I think it's next week because everybody at MoFad's starting theirs next week. And you don't have anything next week.
I have no I have no demos, no nothing, so I'll do all my cocktail development and all that this week. Make sure I don't have any uh dinner engagements to go to. You still have to do the radio show though. Yeah. Oh yeah, I'll be in the middle of uh of a uh maybe I'll start Monday.
That you're starting paleo next week. No, no, I can't start paleo in a week because I have to do a lot of research. Back to this, I'm taking paleo much more seriously than most idiots are gonna take paleo. So, like I already dusted off my old book on flint mapping, which is the technique of making stone tools. And I'm trying to figure out exactly what kind of paleo you want to go.
It's kind of absurd to just say something is paleo because paleolithic people ate a wide variety of things depending on where they lived, what the climate was, etc. So, for instance, if you're gonna take the Neanderthal culture, Neanderthal culture, primarily meat eating culture, although they did have a wide range of plants that they used. I was reading all the recent literature on um studies of the dental calculus of Neanderthals, uh plus isotopic studies of their bone structure to figure out the relative uh kind of different things that they ate. Uh also huge chunks of Neanderthal ate the meat kind of raw, which is straight up nasty. Like, imagine giant chunks of kind of raw like deer, not like thin carpaccio stuff.
Anyway, so uh I might tr choose a culture to emulate like uh like there's the uh airtaburla culture, which is like a Swedish culture that was one of the last um, you know, pre-agricultural communities in Europe. They had a fairly high fish-based diet, uh, and their tools look relatively easy to manufacture. Anyway, I dusted off the flint napping. Flintnapping, I gotta learn how to I'm gonna learn how to make my own uh tools. I meant to do it with Dax a while ago, but it just looks too damn complicated.
Now I guess I have a reason to do it. So I have to do a bunch of research before I can do the actual paleo one. We're gonna have to same with the raw food. Remember, I did raw food? Uh for like like very short, almost had to do the raw food again.
I'm glad I didn't have that one added to it. So I'm gonna do the lemonade cleanse first because I don't have to do any research for that one. Right? Mm-hmm. So more anyone has any suggestions on uh on the paleo.
Uh I kind of want to make my own fire as well as my own tools, but my wife said that uh I couldn't do that, so I don't know whether I'm either gonna have to convince her in slow drips and drabs to let me do it or not. Um but anyway, so uh more more word on exactly kind of which Paleolithic uh diet. Uh luckily, these air these uh air tabola guys, a lot looked up the list of plant stuff that's been found in their kitchen mid insights. They ate a lot of shellfish, easy for me to get, but also a lot of plants that I can wild forage in uh the Lower East Side. Like uh they ate a variant of Lamb's Quarters, which I can easily get in the Lower East Side as a as a non-domesticated product.
Well, we'll see. We'll figure I'll figure out exactly what the structure is. Um so yeah, so I can't do paleo next week. Okay. That's the that's the the previous was the long explanation of why I can't do paleo next week.
Because I want to do it right. If I do it right, it's useful information for us to have for the museum anyway. So there you go. Okay. So real quick from the station too.
Yeah we've got our huge fundraiser on August 11th, so I hope that the Cooking Issues fans in New York can make it. But for those that can't, and I know this is a very nationwide show, we're offering a really, really cool raffle. Ten dollar tickets, and you can win a dream foodie trip to Seattle. All expenses paid uh from Tom Douglas, friend of the station. He's got some great restaurants out there.
So uh visit our website or HRN Hawaii BBQ.eventbrite.com and get some raffle tickets. Get all over the place. Hawaii barbecue and trip to Seattle. Yeah, well, you know. It's the Hawaii like the West.
No, they're on the way, kind of. I I guess it's on the way. Can you go direct? Can you go direct if they if they want to? Probably.
Probably. Anyway. All right, quote your question is two. 718497, 2128, that's 784972128. Aaron Morin, it's looks like it's pronounced Morant, but they said more and from Ed uh Edmonton, uh, Alberta, uh, writes in, Dear Zappo's lover and rap hater.
So I would be rap hater and Stas would be Zappa's lover. Although I have to say, for the record, like I tease her about Zappos, but she is a firmly committed to the Payless Shoe Corporation. She purchases all of her shoes from the pay. You know why? She loves that uncured glue smell that they have inside of the pay list.
I mean, like you any anytime you walk into it, you could blindfold someone and and like throw them in the middle of a payless store and they'd be like, payless. Because, you know, part of the part of the thing, you know, that part of the way you pay less is they don't wait for the glue to dry before they ship the shoes out. You know what I'm saying? And Style just grooves on that, you know. She doesn't she doesn't, you know, she doesn't like the other toxic uh kind of female things like nail polish and all that stuff.
I never smell that stuff in the office. But payless, boom. Okay. Uh anyway. Uh I'd love to hear Dave talk about micron sizes and how they affect texture on the tongue.
I seem to remember hearing that we can detect as little as 50 microns, uh, but that could be way off. What's the difference between a 400 micron super bag and a 100 one? Why wouldn't you just use a 100 bag for everything? What's cheese uh straining usually at as far as microns are concerned? Thanks in advance, Aaron uh Morin.
Okay. First of all, uh so m micron is a unit of measure. Uh a micron is one thousandth of a millimeter, also called uh a mic uh micrometer, micro, you know, anyway. So uh but microns are typically how you measure things like very small sieves, uh, you know, sieves, sieves. What do you like?
Civ or sieve? Civ. Sieve? Yeah, okay. Uh and uh also like particle size and things like ice cream or chocolate.
Now, I have always kind of used as my benchmark for ultimate smoothness on the tongue, uh, this size range that's used in chocolate manufacturer. In chocolate manufacturer, you typically want to get below uh twenty microns, right? So twenty-one thousandths of a millimeter is about the ultimate large size particle that you want in your chocolate bar before your chocolate bar starts having textural problems on the tongue, right? This stuff being kind of ultra smooth. And so that's kind of the the the number I always use for kind of below which your tongue can't taste anything anymore.
Now, in ice cream, a lot of people point to larger numbers like 40 microns as being the maximum ice crystal size that they want in a smooth textured ice cream. I haven't done a lot of studying on that because I've always just accepted that the 20 micron as being the number. Now, Vitaprep, which is the blender that we use, can get particle sizes down between 20 and 40 microns, so in the smooth-ish range, but not in the like I doubt if you can actually get to 20. But it's a it's above 20, but it's quite small. I doubt it can get it can't get below 20 to get into the much much smoother range of stuff.
So for that you need um for that you need uh like a high shear, super high shear mixer. But the other thing about it uh with a Vitapep is you still need to use a sieve or like a super bag, as you say, because not all of the particles uh get you know blended down to the same thing, especially fibers tend to orient as they go, and so you have longer and larger particles that you can taste on the tongue. Now, uh so clearly if if if 40 microns is the cutoff for ice crystals and uh and your smallest super bag is 100 microns, uh you're not gonna get all of the particles out of something that's finely blended with a hundred micron super bag. The other problem is is that uh when you put a slurry or a slop or something into into a filter, it tends to clog up the filter. Um, and and that is kind of one of the main problems in filtration.
Just for your edification as well, just so you can get an idea of micron size. Uh, coffee filters in general are about 20 microns, the opening, and they let through particles uh, you know, are in the roughly 10 to 15 uh micron range. So that's kind of what what coffee is. So you're talking about chocolate 20 microns, ice cream crystals, 40 microns, coffee filter, 20 microns, and super bag like the finest one at 100. Now, just because it's a hundred microns, which is large relative to some of these things, doesn't mean it can't strain out a lot of finer things.
Because in general, when you're cooking something, you uh things tend to aggregate, particles tend to aggregate together, and also larger particles tend to start clogging up the holes, and when that happens, finer particles get filtered out by the larger things. It's called forming a filter bed. So you want to use in general the coarsest uh thing that makes your product as smooth as you want it. Is that make sense to us? Uh-huh.
Right. And so one of the reasons to use multiple filters in a situation, right, is if you were to try and shove a liquid through a coffee filter, which is at 20 microns, right, uh, and it's all full of gloppy stuff. Let me just tell you, good luck. Because you're gonna be there all freaking day, right? Trying to get that stuff out of there.
So one valid way to do it would be to take a and by the way, one of the advantages of super bags is that you the super bags are kind of shaped like pots and they can withstand heat. So you just stick the super bag into the pot, cook the stuff in without ever agitating it, so you're not knocking little particles all around your product, and then you can just lift the whole sucker out and not have a problem. Now, why you might want to use multiple ones is you would put the coarse one inside of the fine one, right? And then as you lifted it, right, larger particles would be held by back by the faster draining coarse guy, and then smaller particles will be held up in the uh finer guy, and you would be able to filter stuff much more quickly. So it often when I'm filtering something, I'll take two different levels of filtration and stack them coarse first, then fine, because it just rapidly increases the rate at which you can filter things, and that's a huge deal when you're doing large quantities of product that take a long time to filter.
Um anyway, like uh actually it's interesting. I just wrote the section of the cocktail book on kind of clarification and I went through filtration, which I really hate. I really hate filtering things. Um I also tend and you know, I've never actually used, and this is a little, you know, whatever disclaimer, I've never used the actual expensive super bags. I always use paint straining bags, which are also micron rated, because as anyone that's met me knows, I'm a cheap bastard, right?
That's very true. Super cheap. Well, of course, no one's cheaper than Nastasha. That's not true. Uh you are.
Uh I'm not cheaper than you. You are so much cheaper than that. When was the last time I returned a piece of clothing? Yeah, that's a not that's not cheapness, that's something else. I don't know what I'm talking about.
All right, right. Fair enough. Okay. Uh Matthew writes in regarding pork rinds. Hey, Nastasha and crew.
I had a drink of booker in Dax for the first time recently. Tried the hatchback and it was killer, strong and delicious. Uh I wouldn't be mad if I had a stockpile of those and the uh bottle of Manhattan's up in my refrigerator. I was uh and then here's the question. Well, thank you.
Uh I was wondering if it is possible to make a puffed chicharron from bacon skin. My company goes through boatloads of slab bacon every week, and besides making stock with the skin, I'd be thrilled to find another use. Thanks, Matthew. I don't see why you can't uh do it. I mean, what I would do is uh cut off the skins, right?
The only issue you're gonna have is if you have a cure that has a lot of sugar in it. Sugar is the enemy of uh pork rinds. And many, many times I've uh made pork rinds. A couple of times I've tried to add sugar to the boil water when you when you make it, and it's just a freaking nightmare. It's just a it's just a real giant nightmare.
So if you want to make uh kind of American snack food style pork rinds, here's what you're gonna want to do. Uh cut the um, you know, take the bacon uh skins off. You're gonna want to boil them in water. I don't know how much salt you're gonna have to add, depends on the residual salt level of your bacon, but you want uh you know enough salt in there so that when you puff them, you don't have to add a lot of extra salt and the flavor's already in the skin. Uh you might want to add a couple cubes of bacon or whatever to keep the smoky flavor, or else keep the water level down so you're not diluting the smoke uh that's in the in the skins too much.
Uh you want to cook them for a long time, uh like 45 minutes or something like that. Simmer them till you because the what the goal here is to convert all of the collagen or roughly all of the collagen to gelatin. Now, here comes the part that I hate doing. You gotta gently drain them off because they're right now because they're hot gelatin with a little bit of pro other stuff mixed in uh and fat, they're extremely fragile at this point. So you want to let drain them off and then uh put them on uh cooling racks and cool them down until they are fridge temperature.
Let them cool. They will reset and become a lot less fragile. Now, the super unpleasant part, you flip them fat side up and you scrape down the excess fat on the back side of the uh of the pork rind of the pork skin. Now, if you don't scrape the less scrape uh fat you scrape off, the denser your chicharron will be. And the more you scrape off down to the skin, don't scrape the skin, but the fat layer, the the uh more you scrape off, the puffier and more like snack bag pork rinds your pork rinds are gonna be.
After you uh do that, after you scrape it down, now you want to chop them into the size. Everyone makes them a little bit larger, but they don't realize quite how much they're gonna puff when they puff up. Uh so you know, make a couple different sizes the first time you do it, so you can kind of see what's going to go on. Now you're gonna want to dehydrate them. The real trick here is not to over dehydrate.
You want to dehydrate them until they're down to like a shrinky dink or like pasta and and no more. So what you do is you throw them in a dehydrator. I throw them in, usually I start them kind of high, like at 135 degrees Fahrenheit, run the dehydrator for a while, and I look at it. When it starts losing the white rawhide look and starts starts going translucent, I usually turn the temperature down, and then um I never let them run when I'm gone from the kitchen. I'd rather just do the initial dehydration and kind of turn it off overnight or turn it down to like a hundred or ninety overnight or something like that, and just let it run with the fan on it and not extra heating, and it should carry it the rest of the way.
Do a test fry. Uh, and once you do a test fry on one or two, uh if it if when you fry it, it doesn't puff at all and just browns without puffing. What's happened is is you've over dehydrated it and you need to get some moisture back into it, which is very difficult. If you if it puffs somewhat but the inside has a hard kernel in it, then it's not dehydrated enough yet, and you have to do more. So you gotta you gotta you know just run that test.
Once you do it once or twice, you'll get the exact feel of what the pork rind should feel like when they're done. Uh, and then you just store them in a quart container or airtight, and they're good for a long time until they until they go rancid, they last for a long time, they last for a long time, a long, long time. Uh but uh what I would do is do it once or twice yourself and then get someone else to do it because uh it sucks. Yeah? Remember how like our hand I mean, maybe it's better with bacon, but you remember how like we would all stink stas like like pork skin?
Yes, like a freaking glue factory? Yes. It's nasty. Anyway, let's take a commercial break, coming back with cooking issues. Hi, I'm Steve Jenkins from Fairway Markets.
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EO Jack, did he say idiot career? Um yes, he did. This is Joe, but he uh yeah, I think he's got a little self-deprecating streak in there, right? Yeah, no, newfound respect. I love someone who calls their actually quite influential.
I mean the man has a hugely influential uh has had a hugely huge influence on the cheese on the cheese movement here in the US. I mean giant influence. Yeah, I would I mean I personally would not say it's an idiot career, but um, you know, I'm not him. I mean I'm I'm kind of glad he had that that career. I mean people people nowadays because like you know, er like you know, y it's not easy, but you can go out and get, you know, decent cheese in many, many places across the country now.
Forget that when he first wrote his cheese primer, you know, Fairway. There was a number of places you could buy high quality cheese in in New York, but even a lot of the places that had large selections weren't keeping the stuff as well as they were keeping it at Fairway. They weren't providing uh a product kind of a as the same quality level Fairway was providing. This is like decades ago. And so he you know, he wrote the cheese primers kind of a game changer, big deal.
Anyway, my feeling. Uh Brandon Hodgins writes in about Bratwurst. You like some bratwurst, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah, Bratwurst good stuff.
When you uh were at uh where'd you go when you went to Germany? You went to Germany. October is you had a lot of Wurst? Mm-hmm. God, I love German Wurst.
Something about German Wurst, they they can get the you know, the skins on them, they pop when you pipe into them, and then that explosion of juice and fat from a delicious Wurst. Oh my god. So good. Anyone that hates on uh kind of Teutonic cuisine, German cuisine, like, okay, if you're not a sausage lover, or if you don't like cartoon poofers or like potato pancakes, or you don't like a bit, but stuff is straight up delicious. I'm sorry.
I'm sorry. Uh okay. Hello, cooking issues team. I had a few brats questions. How many brats per zippy?
In other words, if you're going to cook bratwurst uh low temperature and you're gonna pre-cook them in a Ziploc bag, which is something I very highly recommend, right? How many can you fit in? Well, I guess it depends on exactly how what size the brats uh are, but I would guess uh and also depends on how you're gonna serve. If you plan on doing mass service out, then I usually put like uh I want to say five probably. I use gallon size bags, like five or six.
I can't try to imagine how many brats would fit you. You can only fit one in in a direction, you know what I'm saying, Stas? Like you can't fit two. So you probably five or six, maybe, then a little bit of uh oil or fat, and then do the water seal on the brats, cook them off at like uh sixty, I usually do sixty uh Celsius, which is like 140 Fahrenheit, which is still like you know, pinkish and a little underdone, but remember you're going to grill them off when you're done. You know what I'm saying?
Um so I would say about that. And how long can I hold them in a bath before the texture goes off? Long time on bratwurst. You can hold those suckers a long time. I mean, I've never h held them longer than uh a whole service, which is like you know, uh six hours or something like that.
But I'm sh uh but they at the end they were just as good as they were at the beginning. So, in other words, uh uh for those of you that don't know, when you're doing low temperature cooking and you're holding meat for a long time, it doesn't overcook in a traditional sense, it doesn't get tough or dry. What happens is the texture gets a little bit mushy. Uh and I haven't had that happen in like the length of a service when I'm cooking something like uh like brats, you know. And they also initially think about brats, they cook through rather quickly because they're not that thick.
Do you know what I'm saying? Uh so that it it's a fantastic thing to do, just get a grill like a billion freaking degrees, and then uh and then have your your brats and zippies and and and go. Okay. Uh, but I will also say this if you want to do more traditional, or in other words, if you don't want to use zippies for whatever reason, you can actually cook brats off in a circulator in an open bath style, but even if you're gonna do beer brats, right? What I recommend doing is uh pre-make uh kind of a beer stock out of it, so just get some like uh like sacrifice a couple of the bratwurst bratwurst, break them up and cook them off in the beer so that the beer soaks up brat flavor, and then uh eventually the broth gets to the point where it's not adding or subtracting bratness from the bratwurst because I remember once uh I forget who it was.
Do you remember? Were you with me at the time, Stas, when I had to do the hot dog water thing for some magazine? What magazine was that? Some magazine was like, hey, is the hot dog water in uh in a in a New York City dirty dog? Is that safe?
Is it safe? So I went and um, you know, we gave the guy like two bucks or something like that, and I was like, I don't want a hot dog, just give me a cup of your hot dog water, please. And the guy was like, two bucks is two bucks. So he hands us a cup of the hot dog water. First thing we did is shove the thermometer in it to determine that in fact it is at a safe holding temperature, right?
Uh and then I drank it to see kind of what I thought the flavor uh stuff was, you know, the flavor profile was gonna change with a hot dog based on holding it in the water. And the good news from a flavor standpoint is that because the guy was cooking hot dogs all day, the broth tasted more like a hot dog than a straight hot dog did. It was crazy. It was like it was like the liquid essence of hot dog, much better than when the interns made that hot dog vodka, which sucked. Okay.
But the um so anyway, so uh that's another uh thing you can circulate, just put like a wrap some cheesecloth around your circulator in case something breaks, you don't want to get it sucked in, uh, and circulate uh circulate beer or you know, brat stock, and then you can keep it in that. And the good news with that is you don't need to bust open these bags all the time, and you can just take, you know, you load brats in one side, load them out the other, and that's the way I would do it if you're gonna do, let's say 400. You know what I mean? In in a day or something like that. Because then you just have your trough running, you load in the front, just keep pushing FIFO.
By the time you pull the ones out of the front, the ones in the back are cooked out and you're good to go. Yeah? Make sense? Okay. What is my favorite sauerkraut?
Well, uh, I mean, my favorite purchased sauerkraut is that you can get in any kind of supermarket, well, any supermarket, in like Whole Foods is uh Bubbies. I think Bubby's is delicious sauerkraut. You guys like Bubbies out there? Yeah, I'm getting some nods, getting some nods. Bubby's delicious sauerkraut.
Uh the pickle guys, there's a couple, there's I live in the lower east side of New York, so there's a bunch of uh, you know, there's a couple pickle places, and the pickle guys, which are on Essex Street and uh just south of Grand, also have a delicious sauerkraut, which they sell by the court. I love that stuff. Sauerkraut, also extremely easy to make yourself. Um, anyone who's ever tasted an actual straight fermented, non-pasteurized, i.e., never heated, with no preservatives added, uh, sauerkraut, hasn't tasted uh sauerkraut the way I like it. Now I like traditional, like kind of like chakrote where they cook the stuff off with pork and all that crap, but just like a super fresh, and this is the one raw food thing that I was actually happy to eat when I was on my raw food diet, was like pounds and pounds of uh kind of unpasteurized, uncooked uh new kraut they call it's pretty fresh.
You don't need to soak it before it doesn't have a lot of salt in it. Uh it has enough salt to you know make it sauerkraut, but anyway, so uh look for Bubbies, and if you taste Bubbies, you know what I like, and then you know, find other ones or make ones uh like yourself. You know what's strange, Sas? I actually like uh, you know, I've made red cabbage sauerkraut and uh white cabbage sauerkraut. I think I I prefer I prefer the white.
Do you prefer white cabbage to red cabbage? Yeah, I do. I think it tastes better. That's my feeling. Anyway, okay.
Uh Tom Fisher writes in regarding ice cream. Uh dear Dave, Nastasha, Jack Joe. Uh first, congratulations on funding the Mofad Kickstarter. Can't wait to get my puff pack this fall. Me neither.
Jen's like, my my wife, she kicked in money aside from me. She's like, I want my t-shirt and tote bag. You wait you're gonna Stas is just gonna Staz is gonna like just stockpile those things like a like a like a chipmunk. She's gonna like stuff them in her cheeks like a chipmunk. Oh, speaking of uh Booker's hamster died.
Yeah, I know. That's sad, right? Yeah, yeah, kid's first pet dead. Okay. Uh how do I get into that?
It's nothing to do with cooking. Okay. I'm a big fan of ice creams and have been making much more since I've got my centerfuge and can make much fresher tasting juices for ice cream without chunks of fruit. Does anyone really like chunky ice cream, Stas, do you? No.
You know what's uh disappointing is like, do you like here's the thing like I want to like things that have like chunks of fruit in, but texturally they're irritating. You know what I mean? Those chunks because they're always kind of stringy. And then they that little gummy thing separates off from the fruit where the fruit and the ice cream mix. And Nastash is making her her chunky ice cream face very closely related to her vegan face.
Extremely closely related. Only a real conycente of of Stas's uh nasty faces uh can tell the difference between the chunky ice cream face and the vegan face. Uh anyway, I'm curious about flavoring ice cream with fruit juices. I assume the citrus ice creams won't work due to high acid content. Is there a way around this?
Is there any technical reason there aren't more diversity in ice cream flavors? I never see watermelon, pomegranate, grape, apple, cherry, blackberry, or blueberry ice creams. Is this just for historical cultural reasons, or is there any reason these fruits won't work? Thanks, Tom Fisher. Well, uh, I mean, so if you want to look, don't look to ice cream, right, for what you're talking about.
Look to uh Sherbet. You like Sherbet, Stas? Yeah. Yeah, it's good, right? And I think one of the reasons is a lot of the flavors that you're talking about, if you're gonna make uh a highly flavored item, you're gonna have to add so much of that juice that there's not enough room left in the liquid base of your ice cream to man to make it uh ice cream anymore, right?
So I mean, you know, if a traditional ice cream texture, you know, is for me, uh, you know, half, you know, ha like 500 mils milk, five hundred mil uh mils cream, uh, 10 egg yolks, and 170 grams of sugar plus flavor, right? So if you were how are you gonna do that when you're adding a lot of fruit juice to it, unless you're using uh concentrates. And if you're using concentrates, you can get away with it, and I've done that quite a bit. Like you can, I mean, okay, whatever. I know this is gonna sound like you know, real kind of lowbrow, but if you go buy Welch's uh grape concentrate in the store, it's an extremely high bricks, like 66.
You can c you can formulate a fairly good straight ice cream out of that uh by uh upping the cream content. It has a little bit lower milk solids, but whatever. So but traditionally the milk based product that you make um with high fruit contents are sherbets, and they have all of those different flavors in them, and they have milk. The trick is adding your acidic products right uh right before you freeze. Because uh you what you don't want to have happen is you don't want the uh the milk might curdle, whatever, but you don't want it to curdle and form large particles uh in it before you uh churn it, right?
The other alternative uh you could do, which tastes delicious, but please don't freaking call it ice cream, is like a froyo thing where the whole thing's already set. Don't you hate it when people try their like they're like this stuff tastes like ice cream? No, it doesn't, it tastes like frozen yogurt, which is delicious, but it's not ice cream. Freaking hate that stuff? No tangents.
I like ice cream. I like your I like froyo though. Yes. Do you like froy? Yes, I do.
No? Okay. Uh so anyway, so yes, you can uh acidify it, and there's plenty of uh recipes out there for things like lemon ice cream. The reason is lemon uh you can add in small enough quantities if you add zest and uh and or you know, extract and juice, uh it'll succoral curdle, but you can um you can add enough of it to not throw off your ice cream balance uh and still get the the flavor. So look at Sherbet recipes for these kinds of things.
I think you're gonna find what you want. They typically, because they have less fat in them and lower milk solids content, lower solids content in general compared to ice cream, they tend to have a higher sugar content in them than uh than most ice creams. Another thing you can formulate that's really, really, really freaking good is uh coconut milk uh based uh sorbet with fruit juices. And I do that all the time. Like, you know, get a can of uh coconut cream actually, and for instance, passion fruit juice, bang.
Ice cream, you know, sorbet. Good. Um so anyway, so I would do that. If you want, if you're worried about it, you can also stabilize your ice cream. Remember, uh stabilize your base.
So make your base uh your your milk-based base, milk or cream-based base. And by the way, most people make uh sherbits with uh milk uh just because I think it's cheaper and it's supposed to be kind of a lighter product, but you could just make it with cream instead of with milk, and so basically cream and fruit juice and sugar and get it done. So I was like, I don't care about ice cream. Anyway, uh so give that a try and tell me uh tell me uh kind of uh what happens. Right?
Yeah. Okay. Uh now we got a call in from Shinderhannis, one of our earliest readers on the cooking issues blog. Did he expect us to answer this on the air, or is this just uh in general? I don't think he listens to the show.
I think he's just a blog reader. Anyway, uh this goes out to Schinderhannis. Uh he says, Hey Nastasha, you are the only person whose email address I have found from the orbit of Dave Arnold. Like that? Okay.
I posted a comment on the Bangkok daiquiri posting cooking issues, but I fear it might be overlooked since the blog is hibernating a bit. I know, I know. Here's a wild idea of mine. Uh have you ever tried degassing your spirits? Now, for those, before we get into this, Bangkok daiquiri uh is um the kind of the first thing I put on the uh menu at Booker InDAX.
They use a technique called uh nitrile muddling. And nitro muddling is where you you take an herb, and in the case of the Bangkok Dacri, it's Thai basil, which I love, uh, you add liquid nitrogen to it, and you crush it to a fine powder, and then you add liquor to it. And the reason uh you do that is because uh you what you want to do is get all the alcohol into the leaf before it thaws out. If you don't, uh the polyphenol oxidase enzymes in the in the leaf will instantly turn the Thai basil kind of a black color. It'll taste oxidized and crappy and swampy.
And the same thing happens with a lot of other uh, you know, leaves like mints, other kinds, but any kind of herb like that that blackens when you crush it, uh, you know, instead of muddling it, we nitromuddle it. Nitrumuddling also makes the particle size extremely small, which means that you get a very, very fast infusion of flavor and you get these brilliant, brilliant colors out of nitro muddling. So if you do purple basil, you get these incredibly purple drinks. Thai basil is like a bright, bright green. Uh, and so it's a really good technique for that.
Now, uh one of the things is is if you take spirits, right, regular spirits, and you just blend them in a blender with uh basil, you can get a similar result, but there's a lot of oxygen that's whipped into it before the alcohol can uh before the alcohol can take uh nuke the polyphenol oxidase enzymes. And um, and so you it's a slightly more oxidized flavor than you would get if you make it with nitro muddling. Anyway, so that's the background on what we're talking about with Bangkok Dakaris. Okay. Schinderhanis writes Have you ever tried degassing your spirits?
All common solvents contain dissolved oxygen. In many sensitive chemical reactions, it is a major problem. Schinderhannis is a k is a Shinderhannis is a chemist, by the way. Uh okay. Uh what you need to do is degas the solvents.
The simplest way to do this is to bubble argon gas through it for like 10 minutes with a thin tube or syringe needle. It rips out all the other gases and saturates the liquid with inert argon. If you want to speed it up, you can do it in a sonicator, which is an ultrasonic bath cleaner. Okay. This eliminates the molecular oxygen that many enzymes need to do their dirty work.
Okay. Also, argon is a lot heavier than air, so a layer of argon is formed in the bottle of degas solvent that nicely protects it. After pouring some liquor, simply exchange the air in the bottle with new argon, and the remaining stuff in the bottle stays degassed. This might further improve the quality of sensitive cocktails. You might even want to fill the headspace of sensitive cocktails in high glasses with argon.
Unfortunately, I do not have time to try this. Maybe it is a bummer and schnaps without oxygen tastes awfully lame. That's a good point. How much oxygen does it affect the flavor? But maybe it is the next big thing, and you will find bottles of argon can be bought for TIG welding or for scuba diving.
It is real cheap. We'll be in every pub, starting with Booker and Daxon. No time. Thanks a bunch. Shinderhannes.
Okay. I have not tried that. I mean, there's um there's an there's uh that new product that uses argon to purge the head spaces of uh wine bottles so that they don't go bad. I've I've tried that. I've tried nitrogen bubbling as a distillation technique because you if you bubble long enough the gas out, you keep uh making a new head space above it, and so you can strip flavor.
My only thing is I'd be wonder I'd wonder like uh how much flavor stripping you get out of the product through the initial 10 minutes of debobbling. I would think not much, because in my in my testing when I was trying to see whether I could do uh flavor distillation with nitrogen as opposed to using um normal like rotary evaporation, it was very, very inefficient from a time standpoint to get the stuff. So I would assume that you wouldn't lose that much through the initial bubbling. I don't know. It'd be interesting because then what you could do is like uh you could actually do probably a long-term infusion of something like uh herbs.
I don't know. I'd have to test it. What do you think, Stas? Yep. She's like, I don't care.
I don't care. All right. Uh all right. So uh good call in from uh Shinderhanis. And uh I'm looking for Stas is tapping on her arm.
Again, Stas, people out there don't give a rat's behind about what we have to do. Your time is valuable, so I wish I wish I wish other people thought my time was valuable. You give a lot to your listeners, they have to. Yeah, alright, alright, yeah, whatever. Okay, listen.
So uh maybe next week I'm gonna be on the lemonade cleanse. So maybe next week I'm gonna sound like a lunatic when I'm talking because I'll be high on maple syrup and lemons. You're not doing anything, right, Stas. You don't play those kind of games. What's Peter gonna be doing?
Uh special K, I think. Which not the drug, not ketamine. It's uh replace two meals with special K. That's a wussy. Anyone can do that.
Stas and I were looking at each other, we're like, I could just eat one meal a day. We basically eat yeah, that's crazy. Whatever. And what what what is Emma doing? A cowboy diet, I don't know.
Is that all beans? I'm not sure. I don't know. Whatever. Anyway, so I'll do the lemonade cleanse first because that's the easiest one for me to just wrap my mind around.
In fact, I already have everything at the house to do it. Yeah. Is there any are you allowed to do anything fun with it? Like can I carbonate it? No.
No, nothing. Can I drink water? No, I don't think so. Holy crap. I can't drink water.
I don't think so. I can only drink this crap. I read you the rules. You could do salt water. Oh, great, thanks.
Can I add salt to the lemon maple syrup crap? No. Hey, you know what? As much as you relish me messing myself up, you have to deal with me all next week. Oh, I'm not looking forward to it.
Alright, well, anyway, we're back to you next week, probably with a wild-eyed crazy lemonade fueled Dave on cooking issues. Thanks for listening to this program on Heritage Radio Network.org. You can find all of our archived programs on our website or as podcasts in the iTunes store by searching Heritage Radio Network. You can like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at Heritage underscore radio. You can email us questions at any time at info at heritage radio network.org.
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